Insight

5 reasons channel advocacy needs to become your mission

Advocacy - customer, employee…– yep, you get the gist. But ‘channel advocacy’ – what?

People who you’ve made happy are THE most trusted source of credibility, and carry a huge amount of influence over your success, growth and future revenue generation. Fact.

Channelling these happy vibes into positive word-of-mouth, online and written love-ins between those that ‘have’ and those that ‘might’ is – in essence – what advocacy is all about. Ultimately they are a far more trusted source than your corporate sales messages. Sorry.

We know that technology sales cycles are being reduced by up to 30% using (end-user) advocacy. So is your channel missing a trick? What if we channel marketing bods applied these advocacy principles to our channels?

Here’s 5 reasons why you should be using advocacy in the channel:

1. Advocacy differentiates
   CIOs make decisions 25% quicker when supplied with a reference. But referencing is a tricky beast to execute. So why not offer this as a value-add service as part of your Partner Programs? Help your partners to create next-gen multi-media joint customer references – to help them (and you) close more business.


2. Everyone is a customer with a voice
   Think about it, every single individual that interacts with your organisation throughout your channel has the power to share their experiences about you with others. This includes your own channel! This is powerful stuff. Get your best channel people, alongside your channel stalwarts and capture the love for everyone to see.


3. Advocacy has legs
   Every single proposition you create - be it internal or external – be it for a channel marketing campaign or an email to your boss asking for more resources – can be underpinned by evidence of success from the mouths of those who achieved it. Stop thinking advocacy is just a case study or an expensive video testimonial, start being creative. Proof is THE best way to de-risk decision making, and it can be used everywhere.


4. Best practice kicks butt for channel enablement
   You’d be surprised how many forward-thinking partners are actually trail blazing on behalf of their vendors. Where the rubber meets the road, go-to-market strategies are being formed that can be modelled and replicated. Capture your advanced partners talking about their successful strategies – online – on video – in blogs etc., share this tribal knowledge and shine a light on best practice.


5. Big up your channel operations internally
   If your channel strategy sits alongside a ‘direct’ strategy, sometimes ‘the channel’ needs to raise its profile internally to gain kudos and more resources. Use the power of advocacy internally – maybe create an internal Partner Win Program – to show the real difference partners are making in the grand scheme of things. Niche wins, large wins, collaborative wins… believe me, when shared internally on good old fashioned email, they go viral.

Mission understood?

Building advocacy into your channel strategy should be one of your top priorities for channel growth. Convince with the convinced – it works. FACT.

Your time starts now.

Contact the Pureadvocacy team at Purechannels for special tools and tactics to help you achieve your mission.