Rolling Out Partner Innovation

Increasing marketing effectiveness and ultimately driving revenue is top of mind for many partners today. With the shift in the B-to-B, buyer-seller relationship, more prospect interaction is occurring online. This, in turn is shortening the actual time for sales engagement.

Wanting to further explore marketing effectiveness and its effect on the partner community, VMware set out to gain valuable insights and perspective through a diverse set of partners across the globe. Along with conducting our own in-house research, we also commissioned a third party to garner expertise with respect to changes in the industry, including the purchase process and our collective dependence on digital marketing.  What we discovered was more often than not, partners did not have the bandwidth to fully take on all aspects of ensuring they were enabling marketing effectiveness, thus truly setting their marketing up for success.

Thanks to this combined intelligence and the voice of the partner, we developed a new program, Partner Market Advantage. Partner Market Advantage was designed to bring thought leadership and innovative new marketing programs to our corporate reseller and solution provider partners. The program began rolling out in North America late Q1, and has also gained adoption in EMEA.  It is built on three key pillars:

Early feedback and adoption have been very positive. Partners have responded consistently, noting “no other partner is bringing something like this to the table,” and happy that VMware is looking holistically at their business and taking a more thoughtful and strategic approach to ensure they are set up for success. 

Partners are driving revenue from this program and we are seeing our new Custom Campaigns outperform other similar marketing campaigns. VMware’s approach is to optimize the program based on partner feedback and learning, and to continue to innovate and bring our partners high-value programs that help them drive accretive revenue.

To learn more about the program, watch the short video of Toni Adams, VMware’s vice president of Global Partner Marketing. You can also contact your VMware representative to see how you can take part in our Partner Market Advantage program.

Start driving revenue through increasing marketing effectiveness today.

Chandra DuFrene is director, Global Partner Marketing at VMware. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship.