Channel and partner specialist receives £194,000 funding and launches first vendor-agnostic community to bring partner marketers together

Partner strategy and execution specialist, Coterie, has launched the Coterie Community, a dedicated forum for partner and channel marketers, after being awarded a £194,000 Knowledge Transfer Partnership from Innovate UK, to support its collaboration with the University of Huddersfield.

The Coterie Community will bring together partner marketers from vendors, ISVs, resellers, systems integrators and service providers, to share exclusive research, training, tools, templates and create safe, friendly discussion forums. The community will be vendor-agnostic and be run by and for its members.

Thanks to the Innovate UK funding, Coterie will work in conjunction with the University of Huddersfield providing business development to design and develop the framework for the community, as well as developing research and training for the industry.

The need for the Coterie Community was identified in the 2021 research report, Ecosystem 2.0, conducted by Coterie and the University of Huddersfield, which identified a lack of support for specialist partner marketers and B2B marketers and limited marketing innovation.

The grant from Innovate UK, which involved Coterie undergoing a rigorous multistage process and submitting a detailed two-year project plan, is part of a management Knowledge Transfer Partnership (mKTP) with The University of Huddersfield.  With the funding, Coterie has invested in a dedicated Business Development Manager, Dorin Cernat, as well as dedicated academic input from Professor Shona Bettany, from Huddersfield Business School, supported by experts in organisational change (Dr Nicola Stenberg) and project management (Dr Jim Bamford).

“We wanted to do something proactive about the lack of knowledge in B2B marketing and partner marketing and provide training and research to raise its profile and support this community,” said Helen Curtis, Founding Director at Coterie. “The Coterie Community will be a single place where partner marketers – from any organisation – can come together to develop new skills, network with peers, and learn. This isn’t about just another general B2B marketing community, this is about developing innovative ideas, underpinned by sound academic research that helps to take partner marketing to the next level and finally get it noticed.”

Having academic support throughout the community to help guide skills training and provide exclusive research will give the community some real purpose, explained Professor Shona Bettany, the author of the Ecosystem 2.0 research report. “This community will be an invaluable space where global B2B marketers can come together for credible, research-informed  support and feel confident that the industry and marketing knowledge they are receiving is academically rigorous as well as practical and useful.”

The community also aims to drive new thinking and help partner marketers with everything from how to devise the right strategy to drive leads, to business planning and developing marketing skills for new areas of the discipline.

“We look forward to expanding our relationship with Coterie into an area where we believe we can drive real innovation and change to help partner marketers thrive in this generation and the next,” said Laura Forester-Green, KTP Manager at the University.

For more information about Coterie, visit https://coterie.global/ or call 0113 292 0945.

For more information about Innovate UK, visit https://www.ukri.org/councils/innovate-uk/