Ask yourself the following. We recently had the unfortunate opportunity to work with what I would consider potentially the worst channel marketing program in North America.
• Do you ask your vendors to set a guaranteed # of appointments and pay them half market value?
• Do you let Partners determine the data that they want to target and confine that to an unrealistic # of prospects?
• Do you run 5 campaigns in the same geographic area i.e. New York City or Northern California?
• Do you let partners reject leads because they don’t lead to immediate business?
• Do you sign contracts with vendors and then with partners (so essentially you have two different agreements with two different parties?)
• Do you have a common commodity product that is gradually losing market share?
• Do you sit back and let your marketing vendors get constantly beat on by your partners?
• Do you run through marketing vendors, i.e. replace them every year?
This was precisely the scenario we found ourselves in a few weeks ago. I would say in our eight year history as an Appointment setting firm that we have walked away from less than half a dozen customers. We ran away from this client as fast as we could! We have a real can-do attitude and usually give it our all. This one we packed it in about half way and wrote back a check to the customer and they fully understood that they had run another good vendor aground. Matter of fact the previous vendor went out of business. Hard lessons learned from the front line!
How do you know you potentially have the worst channel marketing program in the world?
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