5 Strategies for Strengthening Dealer Marketing & Relationships
By Two Rivers Marketing
In B2B, customer perception is shaped almost entirely by the local sales rep's performance, not the manufacturer's intent. To go to market effectively, your corporate and channel teams have to be in sync. Go-to-market strategy is driven by such areas as the marketing channels you play in, the marketing strategy you deploy, your current use of and integration of customer journeys and data, and how your company’s marketing metrics perform compared to your industry’s benchmarks.
The uncomfortable truth is that you can build a beautiful go-to-market strategy on paper, but if your channel partners aren’t equipped to see it through, you’ll stall out. A strategy is only as good as the local rep executing it. Your customer will experience whatever your dealer executes.
For B2B companies selling through a local sales channel of reps, dealers, and distributors, the channel is your brand to the customer.
In our 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic research, we evaluate Go-to-Market Drivers to gauge the health of a business’s marketing strategy, messaging, customer experience, and data. By measuring the effectiveness of these areas across corporate sales and marketing teams as well as the local/regional field team, we can identify the troublespots that have punched holes in the business’s growth plans.
When we assessed two construction OEMs, the Go-to-Market Drivers pointed to some issues that are unfortunately all too common for many B2B organizations.
Where your go-to-market strategy becomes reality: data and measurement in channel marketing.
The gaps between back-office strategy and frontline execution can’t be accurately captured with just one measurement.
For example, when we reviewed the Go-to-Market Drivers for OEM 1, both the scores from corporate sales and marketing teams and the scores from the dealer averaged around 3.3 – demonstrating total alignment. Granted, this is relatively middling alignment on a 5-point scale, but the scores matched. Meanwhile, OEM 2 had a 1.2-point gap between how corporate teams scored their go-to-market effort and how dealers saw it.
But confidence isn’t capability. At OEM 2, dealers rated their own go-to-market efforts a healthy 3.8, yet on closer inspection there were cracks and bald spots, including:
- Receiving customer insights from the OEM (2.0)
- Regularly using customer data for marketing purposes (2.0)
- Being held accountable to key marketing metrics (2.0)
In open-ended responses and interviews, dealers also expressed how thin capacity was on the ground. As one dealer put it, “We do not have a dedicated marketing person … I am the sales/marketing manager.”
This matches feedback we’ve heard from more than 25 years of running channel marketing programs for B2B companies: Channel partners aren’t just short on staff. They’re short on time.
On any given day a dealer may carry dozens of brands, each pushing its own portal, programs, training, and “top priorities.” For some B2B companies, you could be one brand among 10+ brands the dealer carries, and each one is competing for a few minutes of an overloaded team’s attention.
Channel partners’ unspoken ask is simple: Make my life easier. If your go-to-market shows up as one more thing to figure out, it won’t get executed, no matter how good it is.
The results showed that for OEM 2, when the go-to-market strategy leaves corporate HQ it lands on a channel that’s enthusiastic about what they can do but largely improvising — executing without the data, tools, or time to execute the way corporate envisioned. With no shared CRM and a channel largely working on its own, it's likely that little CRM data flows between corporate and the channel.
The tread is thin where it matters most
The tight alignment between the corporate and channel teams at OEM 1 hid a second problem in their Go-to-Market Drivers. In our research, we found the market-facing work going well but the foundational elements lagging far behind.
These results tell us that corporate teams feel better about the surface (the campaigns and the creative) and worse about the data and systems that measure whether any of it works. It’s a set of tires with good sidewalls and no tread: fine in the showroom, no grip on the road.
This gap in back-end systems was a frustration shared by OEM 2 as well. A corporate respondent didn’t just rate the CRM low; they said, “We do not have a CRM system.” Another summed up their internal marketing efforts: “Whatever we are doing to market ourselves, it is not working.”
Ouch.
How to fix your go-to-market drivers
Today, B2B buyers expect an easy, relevant, Amazon-grade experience that’s connected end to end across every touchpoint. That experience is built on data, not on louder campaigns running on disconnected channels.
Plus, budgets are tighter and scrutiny is higher than ever before, so every dollar invested in going to market has to show measurable ROI and revenue growth. A well-connected back-office with unified, reliable data that’s shared across corporate and channel teams on the frontline is fast becoming table stakes.
Here are three ways to give your go-to-market efforts more traction:
First, fix the foundation before you buy more reach. Running bigger, more frequent campaigns in-market is useless without measurement. Always ask, “How will we prove this worked?” before you start any marketing strategy. And invest in clean first-party data and a CRM people actually use, tracking metrics everyone is accountable to. These steps may feel unglamorous, but they are the essential ingredient that turns activity into traction.
Second, equip your channel partners. The dealer/rep is where your strategy meets the customer. They likely don’t have the time or resources that you do, so give them simple shared data, ready-to-run campaigns, and enough support that a one-person marketing team can execute your brand well in a few clicks. And match that support to the partner: A national, multi-line dealer group and a two-person shop need very different things. Earn your spot in their store by being the easiest brand they work with.
Third, make the data flow both ways. Your channel partners have loads of anecdotal insights on what customers care about, the questions they ask, where they’re struggling, and what they wish they had. Corporate sales and marketing teams are sitting on a wealth of digital insights, behavioral data, and other metrics. Close the loop with each other. When both corporate and channel teams understand what’s actually happening with customers, you all gain more traction and generate more momentum in-market.
See your own score. The 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic reveals the specific areas where internal misalignment may be stalling your go-to-market strategy. Take the free 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic to see where your corporate and channel teams are struggling to propel the business forward.
