Should B2B Tech Vendors Continue To Outsource Their Channel Marketing?

In Forrester's Q4 2009 North American Global B2B Marketing Organizations Online Survey, tech marketers indicated that channel enablement and management is low on the budget list, just above PR. Yet channel dynamics are becoming a major driver of industry change as tech sellers seek out additional go-to-market bandwidth — and tech buyers get better at discriminating among alternative engagement propositions. The spending on channel enablement and management services and technologies will increase in 2010; even so, only one-third of tech-vendor CMOs have channel marketing as a direct report. Forrester observes that most channel marketing is essentially outsourced to partners that usually are ill-equipped to provide a professional marketing platform. As social media diffuses in the B2B tech world, the behavior of an ill-equipped channel partner can have ramifications far beyond a single customer, area, or industry. B2B tech marketers should integrate channel marketing into their marketing strategy by ensuring channel strategy becomes a chapter of the corporate strategy and doing more channel-specific marketing campaigns.