Please, welcome the new entrants to High-Tech B2B Marketing Capabilities Model. They are:
(1) Customer Community Management;
(2) Sales Enablement; and
(3) Channel Enablement.
According to Edward Hadley who cites the Forrester Research, Inc. report released in June 2012 customer community management accounted for 9 percent of all high-tech marketing expenditures in 2012, while channel and sales/field enablement - for 8 percent correspondingly. Backed by the money they are no more the buzzwords only, sir!
Those terms are not coined in Wikipedia yet. You will scarcely find scholar papers on them. Several years will pass until you will read about them in the textbook. But companies allocate budgets, hire people and develop job descriptions for them. They are part of volatile competitive landscape already. And let's review them with all due respect.
1 Customer Community Management
Process area: Marketing CampaignJennifer Grayeb, the Community Manager of @theYEC, says in her article 'The 4 Pillars Of Community Management' that was contributed recently to Forbes: "While the field of community management is still in its infancy, it has quickly proven itself valuable to many businesses."
Amber Rinehard, Text 100's Global Community Manager, arguing '4 Reasons Your Brand Needs a Community Manager' provides the following description of this job: "It’s this individual who will bridge the gap between your brand and its customers by working across departments within your organization to build and nurture relationships with your customer communities to the benefit of your company’s bottom line. It’s more than just managing your social media channels – it’s knowing how to identify what gets your customers talking (both online and off) and how to tap in to that knowledge base to identify actionable insights for the organization."
In a nutshell customer community management capability belongs to the Marketing Campaign process area. It is about bridging the internal and external stakeholders of your brand by the means of social media.
The Eloqua Grande Guide To Community Management defines three core functions of community manager:
- monitoring social media discussions about you and your competitors;
- nurturing external and internal social networks;
- involving customers and representatives dispersed among different departments across organization into meaningful communication.
2 Sales Enablement
Process area: Marketing Management
According to Forrester sales enablement is defined as following:"Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system."
Kurt Andersen, the executive vice president of sales enablement at SAVO, adds that sales enablement "empowers sellers across the entire lead-to-cash process, powering collaborative sales asset management for acquiring and developing customers and accelerating deals through the pipeline" (source).
3 Channel Enablement
The Channel Enablement Marketing Managers are responsible for planning, creating and delivering channel programs that secure intermediaries marketing capabilities and alignment required to maximize customer retention and sales.
The typical primary responsibilities for this job are:
- Creating curriculum and executing partner training, including topics associated with product launches
- Coaching chain partners' sales and marketing teams
- Facilitating cross-partner communication and collaboration in the channel
- Documenting best practices and creating sales content for delivery to partners
- Developing sales toolkits, channel marketing materials to support channel partner sales efforts
- Maintaining partner certification programs
- Developing measurement and assessment frameworks to track channel partner readiness and channel productivity
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