Marketing is only effective when you have the right resources in place. But if you’re technically minded, and not from a sales or marketing background, how do you know where to focus and how?

How do you know what skills to bring in?

What exactly do you need?

This isn’t just related to internal hires either; its equally important when bringing an agency partner or consultant onboard.

Make the wrong move and you’ll find your plans and ambitions stall pretty quickly.

So, that’s what this edition of “Marketing with Intent” is dedicated to: resource.

There will be some hard truths here, but don’t take them personally. They’re meant in the best possible way, with the absolute best intentions.

I hope you enjoy it!

Nathan Selby

What resource do you need?

At the end of the day, what’s right for you won’t be right for another partner. Why? Because your businesses are not the same. You could differ against a range of criteria:

• Goals & ambitions – what is it you’re trying to achieve? Not every IT partner wants to scale aggressively. Some prefer to grow organically.
• Deal size – what sort of customers are you trying to land? Are they SMB or enterprise? The resource required (in terms of skills and possibly volume of staff will differ drastically, as will the tactics used (and therefore set of skills and experiences become super important)
• Ability & capacity to support – do you need someone to just get on with the job, or do you have time to be involved and give direction?
• The budget available – you might want the most experienced and capable teams but if budgets cannot accommodate that, you need to be reasonable and start small and then build from there
• Previous experiences – have you had resource in place before? Where they effective? Did they deliver the expected quantity and quality of output? If so, do you think you were asking too much of them?

Beyond these five quick bullets, you may not know. And that’s common in the Microsoft partner space – and it’s nobody's fault. I don’t pretend for a second to know how to develop complex solutions to customer challenges, so I wouldn’t have a clue where to start if I had to deliver a project. What would I hire? What skills would I need? How long will it take with the right skills in place?

These are some of the questions I’m asking myself as I write this – putting myself in your shoes.

Thinking of hiring a graduate? Take note

Despite the clickbait-style subhead, this isn’t a diss at graduates. They’re ace. But too many partners expect the world from somebody fresh out of University, which does a disservice to both parties.

Graduates are keen and eager, but they’ll need support and direction. So, if you’re hiring one, make yourself available. Or provide them with support, training, mentoring – whatever – to support them. It’s in everybody's interests to do so!

In-house or agency: which is best?

There are pros and cons of both types of support.

You’ll get more hours of time from an in-house hire, but you won’t always get the quality of output or experience. And in-house expertise (at an hourly rate – even with an experienced (more expensive) hire, it will still cost you less per hour to hire. But with salaries come additional costs of NI, pensions, IT, etc. Not to mention, you might not need a full-time hire, or having access to an agency for 1-2 days a week might be sufficient for your needs at this point in time.

But you *might* get more focused value from agency expertise, meaning that something that might

Things to consider:

• What do you need? A doer or something more strategic? If you want a doer, it might be better to hire directly. If you need strategic, you could still bring in a doer to support in execution – the hybrid approach is quite a popular one to go for.
• What budget do you have available? If you’re limited by spend, you might want to start with an agency on a few days worth of focused each month, start to build confidence and see some results (whatever they are) and then grow from there.

The agency approach: things to think about

Going down the agency route? Then think about the agency you’re working with. Do they get the Microsoft Partner ecosystem? Are they familiar with what is a pretty complex set of solutions, constantly evolving?

If they’re generalists, you may need to invest time and effort upfront to bring them up to speed on the solutions you’re involved with. If they’re specialists like @Resultful? Well, you can generally hit the ground running…

Throwing my two-pence in

It might go against what you’d expect, but I wish every Microsoft partner had at least one internal marketing person. Having resources gives you insight into marketing, and (most of the time), insight shows you the level of value marketing can add. It might not show you value in every area you’d like, and hiring resources and expecting leads overnight is unrealistic, but you’ll hopefully see things like:

• Greater brand consistency
• Greater volumes of output
• More informative reporting
• Improved data – search impressions, social reach, prospect engagement (to name a few)

There’s a lot of opinion packed into this newsletter – and a lot of “might” – not every situation is as clear as this newsletter might make out, and there are absolutely some incredible marketers in-house at partner businesses. Kudos to them!

Jargon

“Customer intent” – the name given to signals that somebody is interested in buying (or at least worth a proactive conversation with). For example, they repeatedly visit a solution page on your website. There’s a guessed level of intent there. It’s a bit finger in the air sometimes, but it shows they’re more engaged than a completely cold prospect.

Spotlight – Destination AI

Today, @TD SYNNEX UK&I launch their Destination AI virtual event, which covers the journey into the future of innovation.

Interested? Please read all about it and register here. https://tdsynnex.cloudchampion.co.uk/c/td-synnex-destination-ai-your-journey-into-the-future-of-innovation?register=1