Encouraged by a specific marketing message or driven by the fantastic business of the e-mail campaign, people sometimes forward the email to new prospects. This is called the viral effect. It would be great if this viral effect could be measured – imagine how great it would be to know how many times your message was forwarded. Better still, to whom …

Yes … it is possible.
But only if the email is forwarded via a specially designed form on your website. By using this technique, you can store the email address of the sender and the receiver. This gives you a nice overview of who read and forwarded your email and how many times this was done. Note that you cannot start sending communications to the person who received the forwarded message. You will still have to comply with opt-in email regulations and get the consent from the viral prospect.

The viral marketing reporting myth.
Even though it is the most used form for tracking viral marketing, IP address tracing is not a very reliable technique. When we open html email messages, it is possible to trace how many times an email was opened from a particular IP address.

When an email is opened multiple times from multiple IP addresses you might conclude that this is the number of times the email was forwarded to different prospects, but this is not the case!

Most Internet Service Providers use a dynamic IP addresses for their Internet connections. This means that it is perfectly possible that the IP address you have been assigned today, will be used by your neighbor tomorrow. A similar issue occurs on company networks, even though they usually have a static IP address, this address can be used by all employees of the company, making it impossible to use IP tracing to measure how many times this e-mail was passed on within the company.

IP tracing and opened html measurements only give you an indication of the real impact of the viral e-mail marketing campaign. This reporting technique can not be regarded as accurate, but can only be used to indicate what the viral impact of the campaign was.

In these hard times where companies cut back on all non-essential costs for a seller there is only 1 thing to do: to ensure that whatever you are selling is absolutely necessary. Do not come up with terms such as faster and better… it is now survival time. Companies do not seek a solution, but a rescue from the collapse, and unless that is what you sell, you better not bother. This requires a new attitude towards selling: provocative based selling. The seller must bluff and hope the buyer falls for it. The intention is for the seller to be seen as the savior-in-distress, the wonder-doctor (note: no quack, trust is essential).

It starts with finding the issues that keep the CEO awake at night and threaten the survival of the company. There is always budget available for solving those kind of issues. This does mean that the issues are still elusive and indefinable to the customer. These are new problems from which in their MBA education they have never heard.

Step two is to formulate a provocation to attract attention. You must come up with a miracle product that you then should pitch with the right person… namely the budget holder.

This reminds me of an old management theory to get people moving; in times of great insecurity, one should offer a vision of security and when customers are very confident, show them a risk that makes them insecure. In these times of financial crisis the first situation applies. People are uncertain, do not know what to do and are open to solutions, but do not have the time for experimentation or comparing different solutions in an extensive vendor selection.

Hopefully this offers some inspiration for the salespeople and account manager in these difficult times. Cheer up, you do know that a sale always starts with ‘NO’ right?

Most partner portals offer little partner benefit over a vendor’s corporate website. They act as a repository for information but fail to perform what should be their primary function – to provide the tools and resources partners need to sell and market on the vendor’s behalf. Why is this? Well most vendors prioritise funding and resource for their corporate website. The partner portal, if it exists, is usually an afterthought.

Partner portals usually fail to attract and retain visitors because of:

• Generic content which has not been adapted for channel consumption or is not personalized for the intended audience
• Content which is not maintained, is out of date or lags the corporate website
• Content management and document management systems that perform poorly and/or are difficult to use
• Poor structure and navigation making information hard to find
• Too much information but a lack of tools to help partners make use of it
• Too many clicks required to access key tools or information
• Limited or no interactivity
• Inadequate or ineffective marketing and promotion
• Lack of investment
• Lack of resource.

Or else they are simply not interesting places to go – and that’s important when your audience is predominantly made up of sales people!

Using web 2.0 techniques it is now possible to make your partner portal two-dimensional; not only can you provide information to your channel (price lists, marketing materials etc.), but you can also receive information from your channel via your partner portal.

By offering customized content, sales dashboards and incentive programs you can drive more sales people to your portal and leverage your PRM investment.

What can make you enthusiastic about a partner portal?

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a service that allows to to post short messages on the internet, visible for anyone interested. Facebook users can compare it to their Facebook status updates on steroids.

What is so special about Twitter?

• Status updates can not only be made from an internet browser, but also via SMS (mobile phone text-messages), iPhones and other connected devices.
• To make Twitter work seamlessly with mobile phones, the length of the messages is limited to a 140 characters. This ensures to-the-point communication.
• Anyone can read your status updates, group-sms messages never really took off, but now Twitter is doing something similar in a nice web interface the advantages of pushing messages out to a large number of followers are becoming very obvious.

How can Twitter support your online marketing efforts?

Due to the popularity of Twitter and the large amount of messages being posted every second, it is very difficult to make your message stand out on Twitter. Because of this it is accepted to re-tweet some of your messages (do not do this too frequently, because it will put some followers off!).

It is much better to instead try to communicate directly with your followers. You can direct messages to one or more followers by adding their Twitter username with an ‘at’ sign in your message like this: @channelsales

Twitter search is becoming more and more important. Twitter search is a great way to filter out all the fluff and only get messages on the subjects you are interested in. This is where the real value for (oneline) marketers comes in. If you for example search on “channel sales” on Twitter you will find all messages relating to this query.

If you have not set up a bookmark to the Twitter search page with the results for your brand name, do it now! It is even better to subcribe to the RSS feed for this search so you can receive updates on your brand on Twitter in real time.

If anyone writes about your brand, take the time to reply. Not only when it is a positive message (thanks for your support, tell your friends!), but also when the message is less positive (I’m sorry you are having difficulties with … What’s your account name, I’ll check what’s going wrong.) By getting the account name you can contact the customer off-line to prevent too much negativity in public. When the issue has been resolved, you should of course twitter this to the customer!

How to get followers on Twitter?

Twitter is no fun when you are alone. Populating your follow list (and thereby getting more followers yourself) should be a top priority. First your can find contacts from your address book(s) who are already using Twitter. Then start following some of the big names in your field and then search for people who have discussed your product or service or that of your direct competitors. Finally you can search for certain keywords that relate to your product or service and add the people who are talking about this.

Note that you will have to be careful not to add too many people to your follow list at once or your account will be disabled by the Twitter admins. Generally you are safe if you do not add more than 75 Twitter accounts to your follow list per day.

If you find that a user is not following your updates and that their messages are not interesting enough, do not hesitate to stop following them!

Any other tips?

There are many sources of information on effective use of Twitter. These are the most important points to take into account:

• Upload a photo to appear in your profile. You can also upload a company logo, but since Twitter is all about personal communication it is better to have a friendly face than a logo (unless your logo is as well known as Nike or Coca Cola of course!)
• Add a link to your company website or blog in your profile. Before adding you to their ‘follow’ list, many users want to find out more about you and clicking through to your website is a great way of doing this.
• You can ‘tag’ an update using the # sign in your message to categorize your message. Twitter users can create a specific stream for the tag prm and using the # sign ensures that your message will be properly categorized. Eg: Forrester reports that #prm systems are the next big thing in channel sales.
• Do not only post notifications of new blog posts. This is what RSS is meant for and only strutting your stuff in your Twitter stream will turn potential followers away.
• Do not post messages too frequently. The power of Twitter is that messages are meant to be to-the-point. Don’t spam your followers with too much information.
• Messages should not exceed 140 characters. In the beginning it is very difficult to limit yourself to 140 characters, but soon you will get the hang of it. Never, ever split up your messages in more that one tweet as that is considered spamming.

Let me know how you get on with Twitter, and dont forget to follow the Channel Sales blog on Twitter!

PRM does not have nearly the same failure rates that CRM has seen. This is because the entry-level investment is low, as it has been frequently supplied through an ASP/hosted model. Also the implementation time is six-eight weeks not six-eight months.

Also with PRM, there is no need to reinvent the business before the solution is implemented. PRM compliments existing systems, adds on to what they are already doing. PRM starts small and grows; you can test it a little at a time.

Every time you post a new message, which must be less than 140 characters long, that message is relayed to all of the people in your friends list, published to your personal Twitter home page, and added to the public home page unless you tell it otherwise.

Over the last couple of months Twitter has become the next big thing on the internet and has gained a strong foothold in the online marketing community. The Channel Sales Blog can also be found on Twitter where we provide you with updates on the latest blog posts and other interesting Channel Sales related information.

Twitter has the potential to become a valuable tool for businesses, it can be used to broadcast your company’s latest news and blog posts, interact with your customers, or to enable easy internal collaboration and group communication.

There are lots of helpful sources of information on Twitter such as the recently launched Twitter for Beginners blog and Tweeternet.

“In a worst-case scenario, our research indicates an IT spending increase of 2.3 percent in 2009, down from our earlier projection of 5.8 percent,” Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s global head of research, said during this week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla.

According to Gartner, information technology execs are most suited for this upheaval because they have gone through difficult times in 2001 to 2003.

Sondergaard thinks that that IT has options. Sure, it would be silly to think that budgets written two weeks ago are going to stick. As for overall technology spending, financial services customers, the public sector, retail and manufacturing are all likely to curb spending.

However, Sondergaard said budgets aren’t likely to totally collapse. “IT is embedded in your business now. You can’t invoice somebody without IT,” he said. Sondergaard also noted that Western Europe has the worst IT spending outlook, but Asia Pacific will still grow at a healthy clip. IT Spending in North America will likely remain unchanged.

Be creative when specifying the Title! These are a couple of example titles that you can use:

RelayWare Channel Marketing
Partner Relationship Management
RelayWare PRM
Channel Sales Lead Management

Read more …