Gaining Mindshare

By Jed Alpert

Your retail partners sell your products, but they also sell hundreds of other products, as well. How can you cut through the noise and ensure that your brand and products are top-of-mind with partner sales associates? How can you equip your partners' sales teams to sell your products more effectively and efficiently? Gaining partner mindshare is critical to any business that sells online and offline through an extended retail partner network. There are two key factors affecting your ability to gain retailer partner mindshare: 1) how well you are able to educate members of the retailers' in-store sales and online customer-support teams about your brand and your products; and 2) how well you are able to equip sales associates with the tools they need to sell your products.

THE CHALLENGES OF TRAINING PARTNERS' ASSOCIATES
Offering training to your partners' sales teams is a very effective strategy for educating them about your company, your brand and your products--but it's also a very costly strategy that is hard to repeat on a regular basis. An alternative is to offer your partners' sales team members the opportunity to "self-train." A multitude of solutions have been tried in the past to accomplish this--with very mixed results. These include the distribution of educational content and sales materials to retail partners in various formats, such as hard-copy manuals or on CD. None consistently achieve the desired results, though.

These solutions face three major challenges. First, the information that gets distributed often becomes out-of-date only a short period of time after associates receive it. Constantly updating these materials to keep them current would be a very costly, time-consuming endeavor to manage. Second, they rely on a "pull" model. They place the information that sales associates need out there, and then rely on those associates to take the initiative to use it. Often, sales associates don't take this proactive step. Other times, associates use materials once or twice, but then cease to use them over time. This is partially due to the third challenge that these solutions face--specifically, that the information is distributed in formats that associates do not currently use on a daily basis in the course of their sales process.

THE SOLUTION? CONTENT SYNDICATION
An interesting solution to this problem of how to train retail partner sales teams, while equipping them to sell your products and thus gaining important mindshare, is emerging from an unlikely source: using retailers' websites via online marketing content syndication. A handful of companies now offer a syndication service that pulls your complete set of online product and brand marketing content from your website, customizes it for your partners, integrates it dynamically into their websites and then keeps it constantly updated.

The effect of this solution is to place complete, effective and up-to-date marketing information that your partners' sales associates can use to educate themselves in a place--their own website--that they are already using as a sales tool both in-store and online with customers. Instead of asking partner sales associates to go somewhere else to get information, learn and then sell, content syndication helps sales reps learn as they sell, using tools that they are already employing. It provides the ancillary benefits of delivering an improved experience at retail partner websites for the end customer and ensuring that they receive marketing messages that are consistent with your other online and offline campaigns. These are benefits that are becoming increasingly important as more customers head online to perform product research before purchasing, either on- or offline.

Gaining mindshare with your partners requires you to get complete, up-to-date product and brand messaging in front of your partners' sales associates. It then requires you to equip these associates with the materials and training they need to sell your products more effectively and efficiently. In doing this, you will demonstrate to your partners' sales organizations that you are willing to make an investment in them to drive joint success. Online content syndication solutions represent an intriguing method for accomplishing these goals and ensuring that you gain the partner mindshare that you're seeking.

Jed Alpert is vice president of marketing at WebCollage. He can be reached at (646) 827-2577, or via e-mail at jed.alpert@webcollage.com.