Partner marketing is now a critical part of marketing activity throughout the IT sector and continues to grow year on year with vendors providing an increasing level of support through sales and marketing tools to support sales initiatives.

Having a well-oiled partner programme or partner eco-system brings a wealth of benefits to your business; access to a much larger sales force and new markets mean you can accelerate growth and brand awareness and combining capabilities and experience helps you create disruption and differentiation in increasingly commoditised spaces.

However, even when a partner marketing approach is taken, the potential can be doomed by time wasted in endless meetings, unspent marketing development funds (MDFs), not using a defined process, and inadequate training.

So the big question is, how do you make sure your organisation has all the right things in place to optimise partner engagement, create compelling joint propositions and deliver the best lead generation results?

In conjunction with Smart Insights, a global publisher and online learning platform aimed at helping marketers plan, manage and optimise their marketing, we have published the Channel and Partner Marketing Improvement Guide.

This tool, available for download from the Smart Insights website here, helps you assess your current channel and partner marketing activities against seven key factors that our research identified as being key to partner success. We provide you with simple template to complete this assessment and some best practice recommendations on things you can do today to make improvements.

We hope you enjoy reading our guide as you take the first step to optimising your channel and partner marketing. Good luck!
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The guide was written by Helen Curtis, the founder of Coterie and a partnership and proposition marketing expert and trainer with over 25 years experience of marketing and sales in B2B and B2C IT and Telecoms.