1. Smart Partner Marketing Workshops
Trainer Guidance
See the Presenter Guide for class / workshop setup
Smart Partner Marketing Workshops

2. Foundational Marketing: Cloud Challenges and Opportunities
Trainer Guidance
Discuss goals for this workshop
Ask students: What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?
Also describe your goals for the students
Our goals? Help increase partner’s increase their marketing skills to flourish in the cloud era
Foundational Marketing: Cloud Challenges and Opportunities
This workshop will guide you through marketing in the cloud era by introducing modern marketing concepts and techniques that will be the foundation of your marketing efforts. We will focus on how to use marketing to grow your business. To do that you will define, revisit, and refresh who you are selling to, who you want to sell to, and why they will want to buy from you. This workshop is the first in this series of hands-on workshops. It and all the others are designed to be actionable. In our time together today, we will be using a combination of learning and practice to help you gain the skills and knowledge for you to take action and move forward with your own marketing campaigns.

3. Topics in this workshop
Trainer Guidance
Omit any items not on the agenda for the workshop you’re presenting
Describe each item.
How to tell your story
Content marketing
Advocacy
Build your marketing plan
Cloud challenges & opportunities
Buyer personas & best clients
The buyer’s journey
Competitive differentiators
Value propositions & elevator pitches
Cloud challenges and opportunities – The current environment and why marketing is so important today
Buyer personas & cloning your best clients – Who are you selling to and who do you want to sell to?
The buyer’s journey – Understanding the client lifecycle – the steps to a sale and after the sale
Competitive differentiators - What makes you different? What makes you stand out?
Value propositions & elevator pitches – What do you have to offer prospect and clients? What is your Wow factor?
How to tell your story – Getting your messages and content right for your audience
Content marketing – Using content to nurture prospects and clients along the buyer’s journey
Advocacy - Making clients the focus of your marketing
Build your marketing plan - Putting this all together
During this session we are going to focus on the strategic and tactic plans to deliver results. Bottom-line, if marketing is not delivering leads it’s not doing its job.  

4. How to use this workshop
Trainer Guidance
Describe workshop event to students
Draw their attention to the workbook
Some worksheets will be used in class
Some will be used on your own off-line
Some will need input from your staff
You will learn concepts and ideas today
We will practice using some of them as well.
Don’t stop there. Continue to use the workbook after class to take action
Class learning & practice
Workbook after class
We will use some of the worksheets in the workbook together, while some you’ll use after the class to create your own comprehensive marketing plan. In some cases, you will want to get input from your staff to complete the worksheet activities. These worksheets build upon each other. The information you derive from each worksheet will help complete a piece of the information needed to develop plans and take action. The worksheets are not complex or difficult at all. But you will have to think about the items the worksheets call for, so you can create the marketing plans that work best for your business.
Digital marketing skills

5. Cloud challenges and opportunities
Trainer Guidance
Ask partners to offer ideas as to how they think the cloud has changed their clients business models. Then ask the same question regarding their partner businesses.
Write these down on the whiteboard or flip chart.
Cloud challenges and opportunities
The cloud offers amazing new selling opportunities for partners. The cloud also changes selling models. How many of you agree?
Please share your thoughts about how the cloud had changed things. Let’s start with how it’s changed for your clients and prospective clients. Then let’s hear some ideas about how it’s changed or is changing your businesses. Share the good and the bad.
Why do clients want to buy cloud based solutions? One big driver is that they can shift their IT spending from large up-front capital expenditures to smaller monthly operational expenses. Another driver is that cloud based solutions enhance employee productivity, particularly with mobile workforces. Now that it’s much easier to buy, the people making the buying decisions are also changing. In the past it was IT and corporate decision makers who made the buying decisions. Today departmental business managers are much more likely to be the decision makers. These business unit decision makers are sometimes called the “Shadow IT departments.” Having new decision makers is good because it opens up a lot more selling opportunities for your sales people. However, your sales people may not have established contacts and relationships with these new decision makers, who tend to buy IT differently than the way it was previously.

6. Ways it’s changing your partner business
Trainer Guidance
This is a summary slide only. There are slides for each point.
Blend in the responses students provided in the previous questions.
Prospects engage later in the sales process
Revenues per transaction are smaller
Cloud partners outperform their peers
Marketing is more important than ever
Partners need unique differentiators to stand out
Fresh messaging is needed
Modern marketing concepts & techniques
Let’s take a look at each one of these.

7. Prospects engage later in the sales process
Trainer Guidance
Focus on how buyers buy differently today.
Discuss the way we might go about buying a new car.
Ask students for ideas about how to get prospects to engage earlier in the process. Specifically how marketing can help. Write them on the whiteboard or flipchart.
Prospects engage later in the sales process
Prospects self-educate
Prospects look for answers and affirmation of their thinking
Think about buying a car
The cloud also changes your partner business model. Buyers buy differently than in the past. With all the information on the internet, buyers tend to research and self-educate long before they engage with sales people. By the time they do engage with sales, they’ve already made some decisions.
To help illustrate this, just think about the way a buyer might go about buying a new car. Before going to the car dealership, she will likely read about various car models on the internet. She’ll read reviews and make some decisions. By the time she is ready to visit a dealership, she already knows what she wants and how much she’s willing to pay for that car. This poses a challenge for sellers. How can you get prospects to engage with you earlier in the process? Through marketing.
Ask students to offer ideas. Write them on whiteboard or flipchart.

8. Revenues per transaction are smaller
Trainer Guidance
Discuss how revenues per transaction are smaller. More leads, larger sales pipelines, more transactions needed.
Digital Marketing will help generate those leads, grow pipelines and help close those leads faster
Need more sales transactions
Need more leads to grow bigger sales pipelines
Need bigger pipelines to support more sales transactions
Another way partner businesses are changing is that, when selling cloud solutions, you gain recurring revenue streams. This is great in that recurring revenues provide business stability and confidence for you, the business owners, and managers and allows them to make business decisions that may not be as easy when revenues are irregular and lumpy. While these recurring revenues are smaller on a per-transaction basis than buyers’ large capital expenditures, you adjust for this. You’ll need a higher volume of transactions. To support that, you’ll need a higher volume of high quality sales leads (through modern marketing techniques) coming in to create larger sales pipelines. Clients who are buying on a recurring basis represent great opportunities for you to upsell and cross-sell additional products and services.
Today we’ll focus on how modern marketing will help generate those leads, grow those pipelines and help close those leads faster.

9. Cloud partners outperform their peers
Trainer Guidance
Ask by a show of hands, how many in the audience are currently selling cloud based solutions?
Congratulations! You should be enjoying the success
Reference IDC reports in Resources section.
Cloud partners outperform their peers
Higher recurring revenues
Faster revenue growth
Higher revenue attach rates for their own offerings
Higher profits
Despite these changes, the opportunity for selling cloud solutions is vast. According to IDC, the research firm, cloud partners outperform their peers. They have higher recurring revenues, enjoy faster revenue growth, attach more revenues from selling their own solutions, and generate higher profits than the partners who don’t sell cloud solutions.
The message is clear: The sooner you transform to the cloud the better it will be for you. Waiting is not an option because competition will only increase. Once in the cloud, make a difference and tell everyone what you are accomplishing through case studies. Clients buy based upon their knowledge that you have the experience in their industry with Microsoft products.
To read more about the cloud opportunities take a look at the IDC books referenced in the Resources section.

10. Marketing is more important than ever
Trainer Guidance
Emphasize how stepping up their marketing will address the challenges mentioned in prior slides, and enable them to achieve great results in this new era
Engage prospects before sales gets involved
Attract and engage shadow IT prospects
Drive more high quality leads
Help close leads faster
Marketing is not an option anymore. Marketing helps you educate, identify and engage with prospects earlier in the sales process. By identifying prospects who indicate interest in your products and services via their behavior (website visits, clicks, downloads, etc.), marketing can deliver high quality leads.
Inbound marketing techniques such as search engine optimization and pay per click advertising make it easy for prospects to find you. Outbound marketing techniques such as and telemarketing, lets you tell prospects about your company’s solutions.
Marketing is the toolset that addresses all these changes we’ve discussed.

11. Need unique differentiators to stand out
Trainer Guidance
Ask partners what makes them unique?
Emphasize the benefit of vertical market specialization and having high value services and solutions
Mention the IDC information about revenue attach.
Without a unique message, you are one of many
Focus on vertical market expertise
Become a thought leader
Add high value services and solutions
It’s more important than ever to create and communicate those things that make your partner business different from the rest.
Developing and communicating your expertise in a specific vertical market and demonstrating thought leadership in that area create strong differentiators.
Additionally, adding high value services and solutions to the product mix is another excellent way to do that. Examples of this might include things such as change management services, ongoing monitoring and support, and business continuity planning (disaster recovery) along with the cloud services.
Of course we hope you sell Azure to support that business continuity / disaster recovery solution. It’s worth noting, that according to the research firm IDC, partners who sell cloud services can attach $ $5.80 of additional revenue from their own products and services for every $1.00 of Microsoft cloud solutions.

12. Fresh messaging is needed to communicate
Trainer Guidance
Ask audience if they have refreshed their messaging, value propositions, and elevator pitches for the cloud era
Fresh messaging is needed to communicate
You understand their business and their needs
You can solve their business problems
How you are different than other partners
That you will deliver an excellent experience
It’s also time for fresh new ways of expressing value propositions to prospects and clients. They need to hear that you understand them, their businesses, their needs, and that you can solve their business challenges. They also need to understand why you? How do you differ, what do you do better than other solution providers?
These messages are not about technical mastery, number of certifications, or being a one-stop shop. These messages should be in the language of business and of their vertical markets. Your thought leadership-oriented messages should convey your experience and expertise. You need to be seen as thought leaders who they can trust and rely upon to help them successfully adopt, embrace and consume cloud-based solutions. They need to see that you will provide an excellent client-centric experience, whereby they will gain all the benefits of the cloud.

13. Modern marketing concepts & techniques
Trainer Guidance
Ask audience to identify the types of marketing they’re using and if it’s still effective
Prompt them if they don’t volunteer responses
How many are using marketing?
Print advertising?
Trade shows?
Brochures?
Web? SEO and PPC?
Social media & Blogging?
No marketing?
Digital
Business focused
Prospect and client focused
Educating prospects goes a long way
Persona oriented
Modern marketing techniques have also changed. Here is a key message. If what you have been doing is working for you, please continue doing those things.
But also we strongly encourage you to begin using these new concepts we’re going to explore. Marketing today is very digital and has the power to reach more people. Again it’s not to say that non-digital marketing is ineffective. But to be found by prospective buyers who you don’t have a relationship with, you need to employ digital marketing techniques. Modern marketing is focused on the prospects’ and clients’ view of the world.

14. In modern marketing, one size doesn’t fit all
Trainer Guidance
Ask audience by show of hands how many have different marketing messages they use for different types of prospects and clients?
Or do they send the same message to everyone?
Emphasize the need to use messages that are specific and relevant to each audience segment.
In modern marketing, one size doesn’t fit all
You can’t send the same message to all of your clients and prospects. Sure it’s tempting and easy, but it just doesn’t work. We all get plenty of advertising and marketing and we filter out those things that aren’t relevant. Messaging needs to be relevant to the recipient, the more specific the better. One concept that helps us to create and deliver the right message to the right person is called Persona marketing, a topic in this workshop series.
Content needs to be specific & relevant to the individual

15. Review Prospects engage salespeople later in the process
Trainer Guidance
Review what was covered in this section. You can add other items to this list.
Review
Prospects engage salespeople later in the process
They self-educate before buying
Many business people are now the IT buyers
Cloud partners outperform their less cloudy peers
Need unique differentiators to stand out
Digital marketing is key to a successful cloud practice

16. Partner resources to use
Marketing helpdesk: your marketing questions to the workshop developers
Smart Partner Marketing
Microsoft value props partners can use
Marketing planner tool
Partner Marketing Center Ready To Go Marketing
aka.ms/pmc
readytogo.microsoft.com
ModernBiz campaigns
aka.ms/modernbiz
Workshop feedback and questions