Channel Marketing Obsession with Appointment Setting Campaigns and What to Do about It
b"With the passage of every day, month and year, content marketing continues to take over marketing (branding and lead generation). Unfortunately, most channel marketers still remain stuck in the archaic 20th century model for lead generation, using appointment setting for their business-to-business (B2B) channel partners. This model still requires a phonebook, a telephone and a script-driven telemarketer. What's wrong with this picture? Actually, a lot. But there is a much better way.\\nBefore we explore what the alternatives are, let's take a look at how we got here. Over the past three decades, as channel became an important asset to go to market in an efficient way, channel partners began to recognize they needed to build their own pipeline. In the 1980s, the proliferation of business database companies led to the evolution of a whole new segment of lead generation companies. They focused primarily on appointment setting, putting sales people behind a telephone and equipping them with a list and a script to cold call at random to find potential buyers. In the beginning this method worked quite well, because the market was not saturated and information was hard to come by before the advent and maturation of the Internet. Business buyers at this stage got hold of information to procure new solutions primarily via magazines, tradeshows, peer groups and random telemarketers calling them with offers.\\nThen the Internet happened. Buyers started to move online, and they began their buying journey by searching on Google and other content sources. This has now become the primary way that buyers find out about solutions. No one waits for a poorly trained, highly scripted appointment-setter to call. In fact, appointment setting is considered to be a nuisance when it comes to most business buyers.\\nBut old habits die hard, so it's understandable that people who saw results a decade ago from appointment setting campaigns still hope the same strategy will yield similar results today. However, reality tells a different story. The good news is that there are many options for a channel marketer to use today to enable their partners to generate leads and develop the sales pipeline. While it's easy to repeat what we know, as marketers we must continuously ask whether what we know is relevant or not. And the reality is that telemarketing-based appointment setting is becoming less and less effective every day. Channel marketers must realign their thought process and go-to-market approaches around integrated inbound marketing instead of age-old telemarketing-based campaigns.\\nWhile it is understandable that a seasoned channel marketer may have doubts and may suffer, potentially, from withdrawal symptoms when moving from tactical appointment setting to more integrated strategic campaigns, the reality is that a state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform can make lead generation using content marketing quite effective, and it can happen quickly and affordably with minimal implementation steps or roll-out risks. The question is how to provide an integrated marketing approach to hundreds \\u2013 may be even thousands \\u2013 of partners on a worldwide basis. The answer is that it can be done in seven easy steps.\\n1. Focus on a two-pronged approach:This should include the entire partner base with a focused fund and activity allocation:\\na) Do-it-yourself: Enable partners who have market development funds and follow-up sales capabilities with an outsourced marketing services agency (MSA) model that can run integrated campaigns over multiple quarters for the partners and build their pipeline.\\nb) Do-it-for-me: Set up campaigns that partners can use with a few clicks, but make the campaigns simple and tactical \\u2013 e.g., email, microsite, postcards, events, search and social.\\n2. Develop multitouch campaigns by segments and pick the right marketing tactics:\\na) Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) \\u2013 If the transaction price of the solution is low,"