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Let’s begin this discussion by taking a stab at defining through-channel marketing automation (TCMA). What does it really mean? Basically, it’s about enabling channel partners to generate leads by using marketing assets and a set of marketing tools provided by a vendor or company. The entire purpose of through-channel marketing automation is to enable partners to create brand presence by leveraging the vendor brand and associating it with their own brand, and then driving demand for a set of solutions that include offerings from the vendor. For a through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform to be successful, it must have a core set of application modules. In this article, we’ll take a look at what each of those application modules must be able to do and how they can help you automate processes to drive profitable growth at both the local and the global level. Before you can begin to market through partners and make them aware of the campaigns and assets and tools are available, you need to be able to set up a partner-facing website. That’s where content management comes in. The website or portal needs to have relevant, up-to-date content, and your team should be able to dynamically manage those web pages facing the partner from a web content management perspective. Content management and group & user management go hand-in-hand. Once you have created content for users to access, your through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform will need to be able to assign groups and users different levels of access depending on the role of those groups and users. Different types of partners will have access to different kinds of content, depending on who they are. You may have global channel marketing people in your own organization who need to access certain parts of the platform relevant to their role, and global sales or marketing people who need access to content uploads and modules for tracking results. You may have agencies at both the global and the local level who need access rights so they can go in directly and upload content. You will also need operational levels of access, whether it’s for channel account managers, partner business managers or solution managers, or for some other job function where people are managing partner entities, such as a dealer network or reseller network, system integrators, VARs, etc. All of these people need to have access to the platform, and you need to be able to define their access rights at various user levels that specify things like which web pages, which integrated tools and which campaigns they can the access. This is complex stuff, and a good automated tool will help you manage the process much more efficiently. Partner profile management capabilities should address the challenge of setting up dynamic parameters like partner size and specialty, number of technicians, number of salespeople allocated to a product, total number of products sold by a specific partner over the past 12 months, and so on—establishing a set of parameters that can be used to define a partner’s medallion status, such as platinum, gold, silver, bronze and so on. The profile management module of your through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform will be critical in ensuring you can dynamically create and manage these groups and assign them to specific sets of content within the portal, as well as the campaigns and other modules that are appropriate for them to access. Once you’ve taken care of content management, group & user management and partner profile management, you can now focus on setting up lead-generation tools. First among these are digital assets for co-branding. These may include print assets, email templates, event templates, etc. These are assets that partners can co-brand, customize and download for use in an offline system. If you have large partners, chances are they have marketing automation tools like Eloqua, Marketo and ExactTarget,