As social media continues to play havoc with the traditional IT sales process, resellers are discovering a hard truth. Their web sites, developed a decade ago with so much vendor enthusiasm, are now about as relevant as their fax machines in terms of meeting the needs of their customers. Today, most partner websites hurt the sales effort more than help it.
It’s time to schedule the funeral, invite the mourners, and send the flowers.
In the modern world, customers increasingly on-line, getting product information, educating themselves about vendors, and comparing prices before reseller sales people even know that an opportunity exists. Some end users even expect to purchase their products/services on-line without dealing with a salesperson at all! In other words, many consumers have moved beyond Web 1.0 into a social media world that makes most reseller sites irrelevant, annoying, and even deadly.
To keep their customers, resellers need to make a leap into the future.
Channel 1.0 websites are static and one-dimensional. They use “frames” to display documents and files that could (originally) be downloaded over dial-up lines. Visitors (customers) were expected to get the information and then leave the site. These kinds of websites are difficult to update quickly (where is the web guy when you need them?) and therefore unusually out of date when customers visit, so visitors move on quickly. Unfortunately, today there are more than 100 million of these Web 1.0 websites today, many of them used by channel partners.
Channel 2.0 websites allow visitors to do more than retrieve information, they are multidimensional, interactive, and interconnected. Their goal is to engage customers (stickiness) in a conversation: to give AND receive information through blogs, wikis, forums, RSS feeds, Twitter, videos, social networking and more. Many web 2.0 sites are evolving into full-blown end-user communities, which provide a number of benefits to vendors, resellers, and customers.
Channel 3.0 websites include vendor syndication of content. Already, some progressive vendors are providing syndicated web pages whereby they can load their product, service, or pricing information directly onto the websites or into the communities of their channel partners. When a new product is released, it only takes a few minutes for a marketing manager to load the new content into a “master page” that is automatically (and consistently) displayed on the designated pages of partner sites or communities – with every location being updated simultaneously.
Customers increasingly expect the social media experience that they have at home and that their IT vendors are starting to provide. They gravitate towards the communities maintained by IT vendors because these interactive sites meet their needs far better than the static Web 1.0 websites that partners are still maintaining. The result could be total marketing disintermediation, where resellers are increasingly absent from on-line sales, marketing, and support conversations. Predictably, the largest vendors (Cisco, IBM, VMWare, Microsoft, et al.) are already building strong connections with their customers through aggressive social media programs.
Reworking reseller websites is a channel marketing imperative. Audits of reseller on-line presence, followed by technical resources and training, backed by generous MDF reimbursement is today’s most important program. Smart resellers are already crying out for help from their vendors. (Is anyone listening?)
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Michael Dubrall is the Managing Director of Gilwell Group, a research and consulting company that specializes in describing “Channels of the Future.” He is a regular contributor to the Integrated mar.com Partner Manager Community, Channel Champions, and other industry blogs on the subject of next generation partnerships.
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