If you’re not top of mind, someone else is. In my opinion, this is the golden rule to a partner strategy, or for that matter sales in general. Being top of mind doesn’t mean peppering your partners with emails and marketing content, but rather maintaining meaningful and relevant communications at a personal level.
In this age of digital automation, I think there’s this notion that we can automate personal communications and replace the need for human interaction. This trend first started in telephony where IVR and ACD systems began to replace the need to have an actual human answer your call – Press 1 for this, Press 2 for that, and so on. The primary business drivers behind this movement were to drive customer self-service resulting in a reduction of human capital expenses and reducing the real estate footprint of customer support centers. Let’s be honest…who actually enjoys interacting with a machine through a keypad pretending to be a human? You simply can’t replace sincere human interaction. Many companies that started down this path have reversed course and have gone back to having a real person answer the phone as their customer service rating were plummeting in their effort to automate people out of the process of interacting with people.
Shifting gears, I see this same mistake being made with business partnerships, and sales in general. There are a sales and marketing automation tools available that allow you to schedule and automate all your communications and interactions. Much of this falls into the category of SPAM. There’s nothing personal about it; regardless of how hard you try to emulate a personal interaction through these automation tools. It really boils down to sincerity. You simply can’t automate sincerity. Having spent the majority of my career working with partners, I’ve always taken a sincere interest in the company and the people I’ve worked with. When it comes to the people I’ve worked with through the partnerships I’ve managed…I know what college their kids went to. I know their interests outside of work. I know their favorite sports team. I know their favorite beverage. I know their favorite vacation spot…and so on. They may get some marketing materials from the company I represent, but the real partnership happens by building a personal relationship. These personal relationships often extend beyond our professional interests; hence, we form a level of loyalty and friendship to one another that extends beyond the respective logos on our business cards.
This is the power of a partner program and having the right people to manage your partnerships. We too often focus on the widget or service we’re selling and forget that we’re selling something truly intangible – TRUST. Trust that you won’t cause harm to their business. Trust that you will take care of their valued customers. Trust that you won’t introduce unnecessary risk. Trust that if something goes wrong you will take care of it. Trust that you will operate your business to a high moral standard. Trust is something that happens at a personal level and you need skilled people on your team that can EARN and maintain this trust with your partners and customers. “Earn” being the operative word. This is often times a company’s competitive advantage; more so than their product or service they take to market.
Bringing this full circle…”if you’re not top of mind, someone else is”. People will remember your last conversation before they remember the last marketing piece that landed in their Inbox. I’m not saying choose one over the other, but have a balanced mix of both. I sometimes see an over correction of trying to automate too much and forgetting about the importance of maintaining a personal level of communication and engagement. Humans like to interact with humans. That is the recipe to staying top of mind in your partnerships and sales engagements.