In July’s First Friday we were joined by Pooja Golechha, Account Based Marketing and Partner Marketing Lead at Pegasystems, and Sophie Kramhoft, Partner Marketing Lead at Nokia to discuss marketing data, and how it can be leveraged to enhance the partner ecosystem.
It was an insightful discussion with one common thread: data is fragmented. Pooja and Sophie both shared how they’re using data to guide their marketing and sales enablement activities, but also highlighted the challenges they face in bringing all available data together to paint a complete ecosystem picture.
How are you currently using data?
The first question we asked our panelists was to tell us about some of the ways they’re currently using data in their roles.
In summary they use data to:
- Develop data-informed GTM strategies
- Report on impact and performance
- Understand and enhance the partner experience
- understand who to engage with within partner teams
- Decide on where on invest time and budget
- Identify gaps and opportunities
The challenge of data consolidation
One of the key challenges raised by Pooja and Sophie, and echoed by community members, was the fragmented nature of marketing data. Different teams own different data sets and either collate, hold or report this data on different portals and platforms. “Stitching data together becomes a manual process” adds Pooja.
However, data consolidation is possible, providing you have the right tool. Sophie adds that in a previous role she worked for a SAS company who developed a product that was centred around data; “We were able to feed partner data into a platform and create whole partner dashboard which we were also able to share with the partners. They saw half of it, and we had the whole view.”
Without a single platform, Pooja, Sophie and many community members on the call championed Power BI as a viable alternative.
How have you used data to do something innovative?
Having data is one thing, but utilising it to inform strategies, drive growth and guide product development is when data bears fruit. Jo asked Sophie and Pooja to reflect on how they have recently used data in an innovative way.
Sophie discussed how she used partner survey data to connect partner marketing with the rest of the business. “We previously used a best-in-class survey tool called Medallia, to gain customer feedback during implementations. Rather than using a basic platform for our annual surveys, we utilised this tool. In addition to the results, we were able to access a visual dashboard and dive deeper into the data. We could easily capture who our partners are, their job roles and their feedback. I was able to present this information to the executives and connect partner marketing with the wider business.”
Echoing the need to connect partner marketing with the wider sales function, Pooja shared how Pegasystems has incorporated partner engagement into their CRM systems. She says, “Our CRM tool is our own product. It was easy to add features and give feedback to the product team to make that part of the platform.
“In our platform we have a dashboard for our client account which includes lots of elements of tracking contact engagement with the client. However, the partner marketing impact and engaging partners was separate. We have now added this into our system, so the account executives can now map client relationships, and how the partner has supported this. You can clearly see a correlation between partner engagement and an increase in clients.”
The role of qualitative data
Quantitative data can be collected from platforms and tools, but oftentimes qualitative data can be just as valuable, if not more so. Pooja discusses how qualitative data is used at Pegasystems, “we have something called partner origination workshops where we sit together with the partner’s account team full day. We step away from opportunities, look at the entire strategy and plan together. This is when you get a lot of brainstorming and information on client specific challenges.” She adds, “There is a lot of information within our reports. But when we sit down with our partners in those day long workshops, we discover deeper insights which adds colour to that high level picture. There’s so much that we don’t know about our partners. Though these sessions we can gather data to fill in the gaps and create a more informed sales and marketing strategy.”
Data informed GTM strategies
Data is fundamental in the development of GTM strategies, and as Sophie discusses, it’s imperative to continually review the data to fine tune your activity, “We get most of our leads through digital campaigns, so we have to be very targeted by reviewing who we are having an impact on, who’s looking at our content and constantly understanding the results so we can see where we need to fine tune. We look at key words. We review our campaigns to see if we are targeting the right people and using the best platforms. We use data to understand if we need to partner with a third party to get access to those decision makers? There’s a constant need to look at that data in terms of the impact of a campaign all the time.”
Data informed messaging frameworks
The language used to communicate a joint solution should also be informed by the data. Pooja says, “Our partner may call something decisioning, but we call it personalisation. What one partner may call hyper personalisation, others call 1 to 1, or a segment of 1. It all means the same. How do you write joint value proposition, and what terminologies you use and for us? “From an ABM perspective, the simple answer is to use the accounts language, and for that we start our programme with customer insight. That can be qualitative, it can be in depth if we are looking at only one big account, or it can be across the region. That is always the starting point for our messaging framework. This means there’s no conflict around whose terminology to use, because we are marketing ourselves in a different way. It is always the customer’s language.”
By using multiple data points, including quantitative data such as search and social listening data, in addition to qualitative data from these partner insights, you can create an engaging messaging framework that speaks their language, reflects their pain points and converts.
The biggest challenge facing all ecosystem professionals
Pooja concludes, “The good news is that there is data. The difficult part is that it is broken. It takes so much of your bandwidth to go to each of the teams who own the data to find what you need, and to stitch it up to tell a story.”
How are you managing ecosystem data within your role?
Almost everyone on our First Friday call echoed Pooja and Sophie in highlighting the challenge of consolidating data. We’d love to hear how you’re using tools, platforms and different approaches to gather and analyse data within your organisation. If you have any insight you would like to share, join us on WhatsApp and share your thoughts.