Partner Marketing: Working Toward Common Goals

By Symantec Guest Blog

In Symantec’s last guest post, we discussed the important role technical teams play in achieving the best customer solutions and mutual success. In this installment of Symantec’s series exploring takeaways from our recent Partner Engage event, we’ll examine how collaboration can support partner marketing to achieve common goals.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen

Collaboration means working together—whether with Symantec, partners or alliance partners—to share ideas, ask hard questions and listen to each other to reach a common goal. This goal could involve rewards or shared risk in sales, marketing or even training.

At Symantec, we think it’s better when we do things together. When Symantec and its partners collaborate to create integrated marketing plans that help address our customers’ needs at every phase of the customer journey—which includes awareness, acquisition, retention and expansion—we can generate demand, create pipeline and exceed revenue goals.

Paving the Way to Greater Collaboration

To better collaborate on things such as integrated marketing plans, companies and their partners must come to a mutual understanding. So, over the past year, Symantec has met with many of our partners face to face to talk about what we can do to support and propel our partners’ businesses forward. We’ve used these conversations to create and roll out a number of new processes and tools to help us better collaborate, including:

Further engagement with Symantec field sellers: We simplified our team alignment with an outside-in model so that partners and Symantec officials know exactly who they need to go to for marketing needs.

Increase partner access to market data: Symantec spends thousands of dollars on predictive and competitive market data, and we’ve compiled all this information and how it maps to the new Partner Program competencies into a tool called the Yellow Book. This book is a great tool that all partners should leverage and will validate markets that partners currently invest in, whether with Symantec or other alliance partners.

One-page road map: We created a one-page road map that outlines major releases by quarterly view. With this tool, partners can anticipate upcoming product milestones, key differentiators and value to the customer.

Sales playbooks: We rolled out new information management and information security sales playbooks to the Symantec field teams to help partners identify new opportunities, prepare their approach, cross-sell solutions and increase their deal size. We frequently update the versions on PartnerNet so partners have access to the latest information.

Branding campaigns: At the beginning of the fiscal year, Symantec leaders sat down with our partners to introduce our new branding campaigns and shared related materials on PartnerNet so our partners could leverage the campaign.

Marketing automation tool: We want to help connect you with leads, so Symantec is focused on rolling out a partner module for our marketing automation tool that, in the future, will provide partners with an integrated platform that includes lead management and opportunity registration.

At Symantec, we’re taking a market-led approach by helping partners position their value-add accordingly along the customer journey, and by offering a variety of marketing activities to help drive demand. We’re committed to finding new ways to collaborate together, because we always achieve more when we work together toward common goals.

May Mitchell is vice president, North America Marketing, and Tricia Atchison is senior director, North America RTM and Channel Marketing. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship.