Building stronger vendor partnerships

As a channel business, your vendors play a crucial role in your success. With a strong partnership approach, rather than a simple transactional relationship, you can work together to increase your market penetration, sales, and profits.  

At times it can be tricky to know how to build a strong relationship beyond the usual, superficial level. While you generally see your vendors representatives at quarterly business reviews and the occasional networking event, those aren’t likely to resume for some time yet in the current climate. Instead, you may be seeing them on Zoom more than you used to. You may be asking yourself whether it’s beneficial to invest more time into getting to know your vendor representatives personally so that you can create a stronger bond between your business and theirs. Or maybe providing weekly updates will benefit your vendor. 

Although both these options are certainly important, there’s one approach in particular that will prove to be beneficial to you both: utilising your vendor’s market development funds (MDFs) to create a mutually beneficial marketing campaign.  

A mutual partnership  

Vendors have MDF available to help partners create marketing programs for products and services; however, to access this funding, partners need to show how the program can benefit the vendor.    

This means that the program needs to meet the deliverable expectations and requirements outlined by the vendor, and you must be able to track the progress of these throughout the term of the campaign. By working with an experienced IT marketing agency, you can tailor your program to meet these specifications, as well market the product or service in a way that achieves your and your vendor’s business goals.  

This is a mutual effort in that both you and the vendor must invest in the campaign and both organisations will receive a return on that investment.  

For vendors, this means more brand exposure and a targeted campaign that they fund but don’t have to run.  

For partners, this means you can drive more sales or generate more leads using vendor funding, running a campaign that you don’t have to foot the entire bill for, and you can leave the campaign execution and monitoring to a marketing agency.  

Benefits for partners  

As a partner, you face a lot of pressure to achieve sales and commit or invest in more lead generation and marketing activities. The only problem is that your area of expertise is generally not marketing.   

A marketing agency can help you tailor the campaign to achieve your goals, whether you aim to achieve more sales, drive more top-of-funnel traffic to your website, or generate more leads. An agency can help you work with vendors to achieve those goals, as well as create content, run an omnichannel campaign, and monitor it to ensure the program is proceeding according to plan.  

The benefits of this are:  

• the vendor funds the marketing program, and you tailor it to suit your needs  

• by using a marketing agency, your marketing program can be run by experts in the field, making it more successful than if you tried to allocate your own resources to it  

• you deliver on the vendor’s requirements, creating a stronger relationship, building trust, and showing your commitment to the partnership  

• you can differentiate your company from competitors in the market.  

The end result  

Running a successful marketing campaign in partnership with your vendor will demonstrate your commitment to the vendor and your ability to deliver significant value. This will create a strong relationship built on trust and mutual benefit.  

With a stronger partnership with vendors, you’ll have an advantage that differentiates your business from your competitors.  

By using a marketing agency that specialises in business-to-business marketing, has decades of experience in supporting channel partners, and has expertise to help you access MDFs, you’ll be able to deliver a marketing campaign that meets your vendors’ needs, building a strong relationship based on success.  

Outsource helps channel partners maximise the MDF available to them and strengthen their partnerships with vendors. To find out more about how we can help your business, read about our ‘Fund My Growth’ solution here.