Adapting a sales enablement kit for the local market

When looking at sales enablement, it can have a wider scope than advocating for the product itself. Here's an example of a project I collaborated on, aiming at providing an adapted series of assets to promote Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Partner Marketing Program.

🔍Background

Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) business relies on direct and indirect sales, the latter being called the Channel (resellers and distributors) and representing 70% of the sales.

One of my mission as Partner Marketing & Communication Officer was to manage the budget release of the marketing development funds (MDF). With the local Channel Marketing Manager, our role was to be MDF ambassadors both internally and externally.

This budget is essentially a support for the resellers to perform co-marketing plans. Here's a summary of the MDF's lifecycle:

• To approve the release to each reseller, each account manager has to submit the marketing activities of each of his/her accounts. For each activity, there is a series of criteria to fulfill (type of activity, date, goal, audience, etc...) before even discussing a budget for it.

• Then it is up to the Channel Marketing to gather all the requests, and present their recommendations to the Channel Sales Management for budget release approvals. Our recommendations are based on an assessment of the feasibility of each plan, a report of the budget used in the past quarters, and a study of the sales potential of this partner

• Once both Sales Management and Channel Marketing agree on a number, the activity has to be logged into the CRM and can be executed within a certain timeframe

• Eventually, when the partner claims the approved amount of money, it needs to submit proofs of costs and proofs of execution, depending on the type of activity that has been performed (for example, an event and digital banners will not require the same documents)

• In parallel, the global Channel Management will need KPIs to establish the correct budget governance. The main data requested was the list of leads, that is to say that each activity has to generate leads reported by the reseller

As you can imagine, this a very tideous process with a sea of information and spread amongst a large amount of people. It took me about a year to have a complete clear picture of the entire process.

🧭 Problem Definition

The MDF is a topic on which the Channel Marketing is an expert on, however it is not part of the day to day missions of the account managers. They need support to gather the all the infomation regarding the MDF lifecycle.

📝Contingencies

From HQ to a local level. The company does have documentation about the MDF, available on the partner portal, or by email for the internal collaborators. All the guidelines are handed over by the headquarters in the US, sent out to the head of the region (Europe for France) and then applied locally. It means 3 layers of management to go through to make any move, and time spent to digest all the content. By taking this time, we get to understand what is applicable to our local market and anticipate the questions from partners.

From corporate lingo to local vocabulary. One issue for any MNC is the translation to provide relevant assets to the local market. A recurring complaint from our partners was that the content on the partner portal was in English and not French. Moreover, even if all of the processes were explained in several documents, they remained quite vague and were not adapted to the day to day activities of the marketing departments of our partners. There was therefore a major need for a local adaptation.

A web of information. The issue for us was to get the account managers to sit with every of their account from their portfolio (in average 8-10 each), concentrate all the information in a single file, and then for us to compile all the requests. It gets even more complicated when the information are not filled properly in the first round, which means we need complimentary information to make a final decision. That is why it is key that all the actors understand exactly what is expected of them the first time.

Detailed criterias often updated. In the 2 years spent at HPE, a lot of changes occured in the governance and the guidelines. Any solution that we came up with had to be flexible and easy to communicate to all the stakeholders.

🗺️ Solution

A lot of my first year was learning about the entire MDF lifecycle, from strategic definition, number crunching, budget release, ROI analysis and expenses tracking. It is therefore only during my second year of apprenticeship that I took upon creating toolkits, so as to make them as accurate and efficient as possible.

Q&A during the Channel Management monthly meeting. This monthly gathering of the Channel Sales Team is the best opportunity to reach anyone who is involved in indirect sales. However, the larger the amount of people included, the longer the reunion is, and only the important topics are therefore selected to be discussed. Thus the importance of making a case and convince the Sales Managers that including an MDF Q&A was necessary. It started out as a simple way to map the most frequent questions so that I could eventually compile them, but in the end I was asked to come back at least every two reunions to host it. This allowed me to ensure of the relevance of the content I was created, as well as the format.

MDF Kit for the partner business managers. A single straight-forward document reminding the complete lifecycle of the MDF, in French. Even though it seems simple, I often had the same questions from the PBMs and almost every quarter. Often caught up in the daily operations, we often forget about the big picture. Step by step, I updated it with hyperlinks with more detailed tutorials, including screenshots of our internal tools. It was a way for them to be more efficient and increase their productivity.

MDF Booklet for the marketing managers of our resellers. During an event from the Channel Marketing Academy - gathering of marketing managers from our resellers - it was pointed that if I were to create content in French for them, I should also adapt the HPE abreviations to "general understanding". Indeed, the MDF Kit for the PBM was not usable by the resellers, they needed curated content, adapted to their operations. That is why I raised a case to our IT teams to create a beta partner account and use the HPE marketing tools from a visitor's perspective. This led to generate more relevant content and improved the value of the document. With the collaboration of the entire marketing team, we created a separate e-booklet that was given during the next Marketing Academy.

Webinars before the key deadlines. The guidelines from the corporation came with deadlines for each market. In order to anticipate and generate best practices from our resellers, we organised 3 webinars dedicated to the marketing from our resellers, split on 2 topics :

• Budget release criteria : reminder or refresher on the criteria to get approved, categories of activities approved by the worldwide management, share of best practices and processes to follow

• Claiming and KPI report : reminder or refresher of the necessary documents to provide and the data needed for our KPI report

✅ Assessment

By the end of my apprenticeship, there were definitely less questions about technical issues. The discussions shifted from being process-related, to bringing actual marketing plans on the table. Both PBMs and resellers used it to optimise their workload and there was a definite improvement to anticipate the deadlines.

A great KPI would have been the number of downloads of the documentation in our emails.

In my case, it was a great support to train other stakeholders in the company, as well as my replacement.