4 Ways AI Can Help with Marketing & Channel Partner Sales
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the marketing spectrum, creating better business opportunities, and facilitating seamless channel partners’ strategies. With manufacturers looking for a range of selling channels for their products, AI automates and streamlines the time-consuming and complex processes associated with channel partners’ sales.
According to McKinsey research, machine learning in sales and marketing gives sales teams more time to close deals and make connections. Researchers found that AI-powered sales teams could generate 50% more leads and reduce call times by up to 70%.1 AI helps design successful channel marketing strategies, nurtures partner engagement, and empowers partners with the right tools and insights to grow channel revenue.
Here are the four ways sales and marketing can leverage AI for actual measurable results.
1. Automates and Customizes Partner Enablement
Channel enablement is the key to expanding and growing your business. But as per CSO Insights, one-fourth of vendors or manufacturers say partners take a year or longer to become active in their channel marketing strategies.2
Rather than spending time introducing channel partners to products and discussing the approach to sales and promotion, manufacturers can now streamline and automate each channel partner’s onboarding process with the help of AI.
AI makes prospecting efficient, allowing manufacturers to educate the partners about new and complementary products and services. The partners can then upsell or cross-sell, opening gateways for new revenue opportunities and deliver a great customer experience. Manufacturers can even personalize enablement as per the channel that partners are most likely to engage.
2. Personalized Partner Engagement
According to Dassault Systemes and CITE Research, nearly all consumers today expect some personalization in the products they purchase. Consumers will pay an average premium of over 25% for personalization.3
Distributed marketing empowered by AI allows partners to access personalized, pre-built branded email templates, etc. deepening your brand relationship with the customers. It can also adjust responses based on the data, ensuring each customer receives the right message at the right time. Moreover, the manual generation of these responses is a tedious process.
With AI solutions, partners can better predict the needs and wants of their customers in real-time. Similarly, they can harness the data to swiftly modify messaging or branding for maximum effectiveness. AI also helps partners parse through profiles and identify which prospects are most interested in buying their products and services.
3. Provides Actionable Insights
AI and big data analysis provide valuable insights into how customers engage with your channel partners at each point in the sales funnel. It helps predict customers’ buying behaviors while optimizing future marketing efforts.
These combined insights collected from site activity and marketing campaigns can help provide a personalized experience across platforms, such as website, email, ads, social media, to generate revenue from both new and existing customers. These insights even help the channel partners target the audience, invest marketing efforts and resources in the right prospects, and create a better chance of driving higher ROI.
4. Streamlines the Reporting Process
Channel performance measurement is a crucial activity in partner sales. With a great deal of time spent on standardizing reports, measuring partner engagement, profitability, and calculating ROI, the measuring of channel performance becomes a tedious task, especially when multiple channel partners are involved.
But AI streamlines this process, providing insights into the revenue generated by each channel partner through their marketing campaigns. AI’s analytical capabilities automatically dig into the data and measure it across essential metrics, such as partner performance, market development fund ROI, and ad spend ROI. This manner of insight generation helps accelerate revenue and ensure each channel’s efficient performance.
In Summary!
With so much to manage in a partner relationship, it can be challenging to create an excellent partner experience. Our experts at Red Sky Blue Water help build effective channels, managing and optimizing the end-to-end life cycle of the channel partner ecosystem.
Get in touch with us to know more.
