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What’s changed?

As of August 1, Facebook removed permission for apps to publish content to personal Facebook Profile Pages. So, if you’re enrolled in an Automated Marketing Program that posts updates about your business, your products and your local marketing campaigns to your personal Facebook Profile Page, Facebook’s new rules no longer allow that to occur. The good news is that all of those updates can still occur seamlessly — on your Facebook Business Page. This change actually reinforces long-standing best practices on how to use Facebook to promote your business. Facebook users can have both a Personal Profile and a Business Page, but it’s important to understand the difference between the two:

Facebook Profile:  a personal account on Facebook designed for individuals. It’s a social space that more than 2 billion people use to connect with family and friends, share photos, videos, random thoughts, life updates, opinions and experiences.

Facebook Business Page:  a page on Facebook solely dedicated to promoting your business. The name of the page can be your business name, and the profile photo and cover photo can be images of your store or current marketing campaigns. Setting up a Facebook Business Page is free. To connect to a Business Page, people “like” the page. To calculate their reach, Business Pages tally “likes,” whereas Profile Pages count the number of “friends.”

Create Your Facebook Business Page

Whether you already have a Facebook Business Page or need to create one to ensure your Automated Marketing Program will post your business and local marketing updates, SproutLoud’s Local Marketing experts are ready to help guide you every step of the way: email customerservice@sproutloud.com or call 877-634-9260.

What to do next?

Social Media experts recommend the following best practices for using your Facebook Business Page:

• Invite your friends, family, customers and business contacts to like your Facebook Business Page. But don’t be offended if some choose not to accept. It’s not a reflection on you, it’s simply a matter of personal choice about their interests.
• Add a profile photo and a cover photo that illustrate your business. For example, the smaller square “profile image” can be your logo and the larger “cover image” can be your storefront, your products or your current marketing campaigns.
• Make all the content on your Facebook Business Page public, so you can reach the widest possible audience.
• Keep all your content professional. Engage your audience about trending topics about your industry. Ask a question or promote a sale or event. Consider it another way to keep in touch with your current and potential customers.
• Do not post personal information or personal photos and videos that are more appropriate to share with family and friends — reserve this for your personal Facebook Profile Page.
• Don’t post your political or religious views on your Facebook Business Page. Reserve your private opinions for your personal Facebook Profile Page, and keep in mind that it’s not good for your business to alienate or offend current or potential customers.
• Boost your posts on your Facebook Business Page. This provides the chance to be seen by even more Facebook users than the ones who have already liked your page. This is an advantage of having a Business Page, because you cannot boost posts on personal Facebook Profiles.
• Get insightful analytics. This is another advantage of Business Pages that can help you measure how your current and potential customers are engaging with your posts.

The good news is that this change is an opportunity to embrace best practices. Even better news is that you have all the support you need, with SproutLoud’s Local Marketing experts ready to help you connect with customers and maintain a competitive edge in your local market.

For more information, contact a SproutLoud Local Marketing expert at customerservice@sproutloud.com.

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The truth is, Partners find traditional Channel Marketing to be highly complex:

• Submitting proof of performance required for Co-Op Advertising claims can be a hassle.
• Waiting weeks for Co-Op reimbursement checks can wreak havoc when your Small Business budget is already stretched thin, covering payroll and inventory.
• Knowing which Brand campaigns to run and which tactics to select can complicated.
• Sorting out how to get the right marketing materials at the right time to keep up with the most current campaigns and promotions can be time-consuming.

Partners will inevitably have questions and need help. But we need to level set here, to understand why Sales reps are spending so much time on marketing issues. The reality is that when Brand marketing budgets shrink, something has to give. In some cases, Brands end up not hiring regional marketing managers or marketing field reps that would be dedicated to assisting Partners. Other Brands opt to outsource regional marketing. When this leads to gaps in serving Partners’ needs, historically, it’s been easy to say: Just let the Sales reps do it. That’s how Field Sales reps end up providing impromptu marketing assistance. This is by no means an ideal situation. In fact, it’s problematic, because your Regional Sales managers and Field Sales reps are experts in sales, not marketing.

You need a great Channel Sales team that understands the local territory and excels at finding and onboarding Partners with the training and tools they need to close customers. Sales reps need time to:

• Nurture Partner relationships
• Help Partners build product expertise and connect with their local communities
• Focus on product positioning
• Help Partners develop effective strategies for sales probing and closing customers

Keeping Your Sales Team on Track

To ensure your Brand is setting up both your Sales team and your Partner network for success, it’s essential to separate the Sales role – of announcing and positioning marketing – from the Marketing role of managing and executing marketing while simultaneously handling all the back-end administrative work. Your Sales reps need to engage Partners. They’re not equipped to go deeper when Partners have questions about sourcing vendors, or which campaigns to run, or which tactics drive more store traffic.

Channel Sales teams can waste a great deal of time attempting to resolve administrative issues caused by outdated Channel Marketing processes. For example, it could take 10 conversations and a string of emails for a Field Sales rep to find someone to answer a Partner’s question, when the issue could have been resolved in one call to the right Local Marketing expert. Yet the traditional Channel Marketing approach lays the burden of success squarely on the shoulders of your Channel Sales reps. This means your Sales reps have to spend too much time talking about marketing and too little time talking about sales. This leaves Partners frustrated, Sales teams overloaded, and Brands facing dismal sales results.

Innovations in Channel Marketing Automation

Today, innovations in Channel Marketing Automation technology are making it cost-effective for Brands to remove the burden of marketing from the Sales team. Automating the entire process on a SaaS Platform simplifies every step of Channel Marketing, including:

• Building and customizing ads for both Digital and Traditional Marketing
• Managing and executing Brand-compliant campaigns
• Using an integrated network of expert marketing vendors
• Streamlining claims and reimbursement
• Opting for Instant Funding with Co-Op Advertising
• Accessing real-time, relevant analytics to demonstrate ROI

They key is to look for one comprehensive, easy-to-navigate platform that comes with expert Local Marketing support for your Partners and your Brand team. This evolution in Channel Marketing Automation technology means your Partners receive the expert support and service they need, while your Channel Sales teams can finally focus on what they do best: Sales.

Your next read:
Part 1 of the 4-part “Channel Sabotage” series:

Channel Sabotage: Is Your Channel Marketing Strategy Undermining Your Sales Team?

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• Solving claims and reimbursement issues
• Answering questions about marketing
• Wasting time delivering marketing collateral

In this fourth and final article in the series, we’ll take a look at the impact Partner Churn has on your Brand and the proactive solutions that allow your Sales Team to stay focused on sales.

The Challenge: Partner Churn

It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, losing Partners hurts. Whether you lose a Partner to the competition or have to fire a Partner for poor performance, the cost of replacing that distribution point in you Channel strategy is significant.

Most Brands commit IT resources to help Partners execute marketing and sell their products. This could include CRM software, POS systems and portals to check the latest pricing or promotions. Turning down a Partner that has integrated all these systems requires IT to dedicate time and headcount to terminating access and keeping the Brand secure.

Channel Partners also have significant resources in their possession. Whether this involves demo products or just POS materials, getting a field marketing rep or Channel Sales manager to their location to retrieve these items distracts from their core mission: selling.

Whether the Channel Partner decided to stop carrying your products or was let go for poor performance, this change can harm the Brand’s reputation in that community. Customers that purchased your products from that location or Partner will have questions about the change — and whatever the answers may be, it won’t shine favorably on your Brand.

Finding a new Partner to replace the one you lost also takes tremendous effort. Searching the local community, qualifying that Partner and having them pass all the background and credit checks takes time. Every day that you are onboarding is a day you are losing potential sales.

Assuming that most Brands have extensive qualification checks when adding a new Partner, failure is usually caused by just a couple of factors.

First, the Partner didn’t understand the value of the product or how to effectively position it. This failure falls directly on the Channel Sales team’s shoulders and is most often caused by the Partner not getting enough sales support.

Secondly, the Partner doesn’t market either their business or the Brand’s product effectively. This is most often caused by Partners not participating in Brand marketing. In fact, according to recent Channel Marketing industry research, 75 percent of local businesses don’t participate in Brand marketing programs because they aren’t sure whether it is a good investment. And 57 percent of Partners, who opt not to use Co-Op, decline to participate because the process is so difficult. Failure to market effectively in their local market means less traffic, less sales and maybe loss of their Brand affiliation.

Getting It Right: The SproutLoud Solution

Helping Partners be successful will not only increase total sales but also keep the Partner ecosystem stable. Less churn of Partners means less time, money and effort spent trying to keep the lines of distribution flowing.

SproutLoud has solutions for the major problems that cause Partners to fail.

First, our SaaS-based Partner Portal simplifies Channel Marketing, so more Partners will invest in Brand campaigns. And because Brands can use SproutPay Instant Funding to distribute marketing dollars directly through approved campaign assets, Partners will execute the effective tactics that the Brand prefers.

Because the Brand’s funds are instantly applied, Partners can invest more money in campaigns each month. Better marketing means better sales, which keeps Partners happy and eliminates churn.

As we discussed, helping Partners understand how to probe for need, position products or get customers to close is the responsibility of the Channel Sales team. Partners usually fail here because they haven’t had enough face time with their local Brand representative.

By automating much of the work associated with local campaign execution, SproutLoud removes sales teams from the Channel Marketing equation. With no collateral or promotional items to deliver and most marketing questions being answered by SproutLoud, Channel Sales teams can focus 100 percent of their time with Partners on probing, positioning and closing. That level of coaching helps Partners become much more effective at capturing potential sales.

The Next Evolution of Channel Sales

As a sales leader, you know that success in the Channel can drive exponential growth for your Brand. But the complexity of traditional Channel Marketing processes often leaves the field sales team holding the bag. Tracking down reimbursements, outfitting a store with Brand materials and answering questions about local marketing tactics — all this takes away from the core mission of every great Channel Sales manager: Drive more sales. Losing and replacing Partners in a local market disrupts the flow of distribution and takes days or weeks of productivity away from the Channel team.

At SproutLoud, we have developed local marketing solutions that allow Channel Sales teams to focus on sales. By simplifying the development and execution of Partner campaigns, SproutLoud can remove the burden of administrative work from your field sales team. Because SproutPay Instant Funding takes all the red tape out of paying for local campaigns, your Channel Sales team can spend more time coaching on sales techniques instead of calling a claims processor to hunt down a reimbursement.

SproutLoud improves the effectiveness of Partner marketing by automating the execution of campaigns through best-in-class vendors and providing expert guidance through our Local Marketing Coordinators. If you care about growing your Channel Sales numbers, then SproutLoud is the one marketing tool that your Sales team can’t do without.

Read the previous articles in the Channel Sabotage series:

Part 1:
Channel Sabotage: Is Your Channel Marketing Strategy Undermining Your Sales Team?

Part 2:
Why is Your Sales Team Still Delivering Collateral?

Part 3:
Your Sales Team is Not the Marketing Help Desk

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1. Channel Sabotage: Is Your Channel Marketing Strategy Undermining Your Sales Team
2. Why is Your Sales Team Still Delivering Collateral?

In this article, we’ll take a look at why Brands can’t afford to let Partners use the Channel Sales team as a resource for marketing guidance:  You are not only wasting valuable sales time, you might be wasting money as well.

The Challenge: Avoiding Being
Mistaken for the Marketing Helpdesk

Delivering a highly targeted campaign that uses digital and traditional tactics to drive customers from awareness to consideration to decision takes a lot of expertise. In fact, the Top 3 challenges local business owners face with Brand marketing programs are finding the right program, customizing marketing materials and getting reimbursed. But understanding how to align Pay-Per-Click Search Advertising with Social Media Campaigns is not what you hired a Channel Sales manager to do. So, why would you put them in a position to help Partners make those decisions?

Local Partners are incredible assets for a Brand to have. They know their community. They understand how to drive sales. But they have a lot of questions about marketing:

• “Which campaign should I use?”
• “How much should I invest?”
• “Which vendor is best for executing Dynamic Local Display Ads?”
• “What customization should I add to a campaign?”

All these questions are valid, and they all need a valid answer. But even if your field marketing team had the expertise to answer them, it would still take valuable time away from sales focused training.

Getting It Right: The SproutLoud Solution

SproutLoud’s platform takes a lot of the complexity and questions out of Partner marketing. When Partners log into their Partner Portal, they will see all the tactics that are available to them. The Brand funding offer is attached directly to the campaign tactic, so making decisions on which tactics to launch is simple.

The execution of those tactics is handled by SproutLoud’s Marketing Service Provider (MSP) ecosystem, which includes over 75 world-class marketing vendors for virtually every tactic your Partners could need. Since SproutLoud ensures that MSPs are delivering expert execution, your Partners no longer have to worry about which vendor to choose which means fewer questions for your sales team.

The actual customization of the asset by your Local Partner is simple as well. All assets are presented in highly dynamic templates. During enrollment, SproutLoud helps Partners preload all their location and contact information, along with any imagery or logos they would like to use in ads. This automation allows Partners to customize ads in minutes instead of paying out of pocket for local agency help.

Regardless of how strong the technology is, it is expertise that always drives success.

That’s why SproutLoud’s Expert Marketing Support takes the burden of guidance off your Channel Sales team. SproutLoud’s Local Marketing Coordinators will proactively reach out to your Partners and help them understand every function on the platform. With SproutLoud’s Digital Diagnostics product, Local Marketing Coordinators can help each Partner understand how their online presence compares to their top competitors. This is the first step to helping Partners understand which tactics can help them drive more traffic, leads and sales. SproutLoud’s Local Marketing software, services and support does the heavy lifting, so your Channel Partners —and your Field Sales Team — can focus on what matters most:  Sales.

Your Next Read:

PART 4: How Sales Success Combats Partner Churn

The post Your Sales Team is Not the Marketing Help Desk appeared first on SproutLoud.

The Challenge: A Trunk Full of Collateral

In my 18 years of helping build indirect Channel programs, I have consistently heard one complaint from senior management: “Our Partners aren’t using the right materials!”

When your executive team visits brick-and-mortar Partner locations, they inevitably find that a Partner is using old signage or displaying outdated offers. Even promotional items may be last year’s models. When sitting down with service-oriented Partners that don’t sell to customers in stores, executives find similar problems. The Partners might have the wrong marketing collateral or one-sheets of expired promotions. They may even be outfitted in last year’s branded clothing.

The reason this happens is that the Channel Sales team is often responsible for delivering these items to Partners.

Don’t believe me? Do a trunk check. Go to any Channel Sales reps or field marketing reps you have and ask them to open their trunk or the back of their SUV. I can tell you what you are going to find: posters, standees, huge stacks of collateral and probably multiple demo items or giveaways.

The sad part is, if you had opened a Channel Sales rep’s trunk in 1965 or 1985, you probably would have seen the same thing. Brands have acclimated to the idea that this is the way Channel Marketing and Sales works: Your field team is the primary funnel by which all marketing is delivered to Partners.

This is wrong for so many reasons:

• INEFFICIENT AND EXPENSIVE

First, this outdated process is very inefficient. With centralized asset distribution and an incredibly competitive shipping market, it is far cheaper to send items — posters, collateral, POS displays — directly to Partners.

• ROOM FOR ERROR

Secondly, depending on Channel Sales reps to deliver marketing materials opens the door to significant human error. Marketing is creating huge amounts of collateral that should be put in front of customers. Having a salesperson or field marketing manager try to keep up with what goes where creates a less than ideal result. Some items will be lost. And there will be inconsistencies regarding which pieces were delivered to which Partners.

• WASTE OF TIME

Most importantly, asking field sales teams to deliver materials takes precious minutes away from the limited time they have to focus on selling.

Imagine that a field marketing manager or Channel Sales rep has 20 Partners in their territory. They want to get to every Partner every week. That is four Partners per day. If the rep wants to spend at least an hour with every Partner, half of every day is dedicated to coaching and training Partners. Toss in travel time, internal sales meetings and administrative work that probably takes up the rep’s entire week.

Now, let’s focus on that hour. Imagine that the Channel Sales rep shows up at 10 am. The Partner is ready and available. First, the rep has to make sure it is ok to bring in the materials without disrupting customers. By the time the rep gets the Partner to give them the go-ahead, five minutes are gone. Next, the rep goes to get the materials from the trunk, and another five minutes gone. Explaining what’s what to the Partner and helping with display takes another five minutes. That’s 25 percent of the total time the Channel Sales rep has to talk to Partners about selling — but instead, it’s been dedicated to administrative work.

Partners need to understand how to probe for need, how to recognize pain points and how to align product benefits with those pain points to drive more sales. If you believe, as I do, that sales is a craft and not a talent, then losing a quarter of the time that should be dedicated to coaching Partners is totally unacceptable.

Getting It Right: The SproutLoud Solution

The SproutLoud platform takes the Channel Sales team, or field sales reps, out of the marketing equation. Partners log into the SproutLoud Platform through a custom Partner Portal, where they can see all the collateral, POS materials, promotional items and clothing they need in one simple web-based portal. They are able to order these items with a click of the mouse. For marketing materials that are covered through Co-Op Advertising Funds, there’s an added benefit for both Partners and the Brand with SproutPay Instant Funding. With SproutPay, both the Partner’s portion and the Brand’s portion of the payment are immediately applied — which eliminates the need for a cumbersome and time-consuming claims and reimbursement process. And the items being ordered — everything from a new brochure to a plexiglass display frame — can be sent directly to the Partner’s location with Ship-to-Your-Door convenience.

Now, let’s say that you believe there is value in having your field team talk to Partners about the latest and greatest items on a campaign — no problem. Partners can still engage on these items, but you are still getting back over 15 percent of that sales coaching time back.

Read the next article in the Channel Sabotage series:

Part 3:
Your Sales Team is Not the Marketing Help Desk

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Yet, getting Local Business Owners to upgrade to great websites with sophisticated demand-generation functionality can be challenging. They’re often under the impression that building a website optimized for lead conversion is too difficult, time-consuming and expensive, when their current website seems to be doing just fine. The thing is that savvy consumers aren’t looking for “good enough,” especially when, only a click away, there’s no shortage of competitors offering more:

• 97 percent of consumers go online prior to making a purchase to research products and services locally (BIA/Kelsey)
• 72 percent of consumers who search online visit a store within 5 miles (WordStream)
• 53 percent of online searchers visit a business within 48 hours of searching (ReviewTrackers)

What Brands need is a simple, fast and inexpensive way to give their Partners the ability to get great websites — with all the functionality to increase engagement, capture leads and drive sales in local markets throughout their Partner networks. To meet the needs of Brands and their Partners, SproutLoud developed a solution that uses leading-edge Through-Channel Marketing Automation technology to give Partners the ability to easily create websites with the critical features they need to grow their businesses, such as:

• Content optimized for Google and other search engines, so their store website shows up in search results
• Web forms and Automated Email Programs to monitor and nurture leads
• Responsive web design that works on phones, tablets and PCs
• Simple interface so Partners can point and click to update images, copy and offers
• Multiple Brand-approved website templates and theme options, available in various languages
• Automated Product Feed
• Social Media Integration
• Ability to add events, coupons and promotions
• Location Finder that supports automatic geolocation, auto-completing address search, and distance search within a given radius
• Built-in best practices for a seamless transition to an upgraded website, mitigating any potential traffic loss

With SproutLoud’s comprehensive SaaS Platform, your Partners can easily integrate their new demand-generating web design with the marketing tactics and programs they need to drive traffic, leads and sales, including:

• Paid Advertising on Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Directory Listings
• Mobile and Video Advertising
• Reputation Management
• Social Media posting and other SEM digital marketing programs

Measuring website performance is already a built-in capability for Brands and their Partners, because analytics are embedded in the SproutLoud Platform. Brands have 24/7 access to analytics and performance metrics across their entire Partner networks. And Partners receive convenient monthly website performance reports, which include pageviews and goal completions.

SproutLoud’s Local Marketing experts provide your Partners with hands-on support, by fielding questions and offering continued guidance. Once your Partners enroll, SproutLoud handles the heavy-lifting — from domain transition and automatically pulling in business information on the new site to creating redirects and a site-map strategy — to ensure uninterrupted traffic and a seamless transition.

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