How to develop more effective alliance partner sales tools - B2B Marketing Online

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The final stage of the customer purchase decision may not occur simultaneously for you and your alliance partner. For example, a customer may select their production management software well before the platform and products to implement the solution on. At this stage, the joint sales effort can sometimes break down.

A partner that has closed their sale may lack motivation to stay involved over several more weeks to help the other partner complete their sale. Packaged pricing deals can motivate the customer to choose the combined solution, either immediately or within a limited time.

Beyond the sale

The customer journey does not end with the solution purchase. You likely don’t (and certainly shouldn’t) stop communicating with your customer once they become a customer. But often, much of the focus of the alliance is on jointly building new sales, not on addressing post-sales needs. There are two additional customer journey stages to be aware of:

6. Use

Communicating to new customers is vital to building strong customer relationships and loyalty. Sales tools developed for this stage typically help the customer get the maximum benefits from your product and recognise those benefits as a significant contributor to their total ROI.
Examples of joint sales tools used in the use stage include solution and product usage guides, customer success stories and videos, customer forums or user groups, customer workshops and events, solution application guides and showcases, and solution tuning guides.

7. Retain

Once a customer has become a mature user of your allied solutions, the right sales tools can encourage future purchases by promoting product upgrades, add-on products or other offerings. At this stage, use joint sales tools to keep customers loyal and engaged.

Joint sales tools here might include customer retention sales playbooks, upgrade program offers (guides or videos); customer loyalty programs and promotions; customer conferences; user groups, special interest groups, or other event promotion tools; or end-of-life migration promotional tools.

It all starts with a content strategy for your alliance partnership

Whilst today’s B2B marketers are committed to developing a content strategy, they often don’t exist or are poorly documented when it comes to their partner alliance relationships; a factor which makes it difficult to create a strategy for your joint sales tools. So, many alliance marketing teams scramble to develop sales tools and collateral in response to, for example, new product launches, upcoming joint trade shows or conferences, and new sales promotions.

How often do you create technical papers, articles or other joint sales tools simply to check them off a list? A jointly produced and documented content strategy will help ensure that your content is valuable to your mutual target audience and accelerates your customers along their journey. This will also help you set priorities, something that is even more important when your resources are constrained.

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