We’re taking the next steps in our partner journey with an exciting offering – marketing development funds! Read on to learn about what we’ve developed so far along with our partners and how both sides are benefiting.
As Basware has taken the turn to collaborate more with partners, we have made great investments to become the preferred company to partner with when it comes to Networked P2P business. Of course, it all starts with outstanding solutions. But also, topics like onboarding, support, and knowledge sharing are necessities that are easily taken for granted. Over the past couple of years, we have made great investments to make sure our partners are or can be trained to be self-enabled.
But the core to a successful partnership is of course the actual business that’s being generated with and through partners. So next to all the technical and content support, we aim to help our partners in their marketing and sales processes. We see how we can jointly address (shared) prospects, increase the win rates, and expand the network.
In the partner marketing function, we have been developing a multitude of initiatives to help partners to build, develop, and monetise a pipeline. And where Basware is eager to focus more and more on the early-stage pipeline, to make future revenue better predictable and identify possible gaps in an early stage, we help our partners to do the same. After all, the channel contributes greatly to our global success.
In addition to campaigns in a box, enabling partners to re-brand and execute (parts) of Basware’s global campaigns, co-marketing, and joined events, Basware has introduced the Marketing Development Funds (MDFs). All partners are invited to submit their marketing campaign ideas to Basware. Complete campaign plans, including the steps, suggested assets, target groups, and execution plan. Also, a prediction of response rates, pipeline contribution, and ARR are required. Based on those plans, Basware will estimate how the initiative can be supported, both in money and in resources.
After two rounds of MDFs, we have run some interesting campaigns. Varying from attendance to live television, instruction videos and follow-up around the new French e-invoicing legislation, research on the P2P readiness in the Netherlands, an end-to-end workflow campaign, executive dinners with finance leaders in the UK, and shared events across the US.
While many of these campaigns are mostly co-funded by Basware, we aim to support our partners in non-monetary support as well. For some of our partners in central Europe, we offered the help of our business development team to reach out to prospects on behalf of the partner. This helped our partners speed up the lead-to-opportunity process just by adding man hours to the equation, but also, our well-trained and highly experienced BDR team increase the conversion rate.
We have also seen examples where the digital team at Basware was able to help a partner optimise their online find ability. This one cuts both ways. We make sure we are not competing on bid words, and in the meantime, we help the partner be better found online.
We prefer to keep the initiative with the partner, and it is important that the partner also has skin in the game. For a campaign to be successful, all parties need to invest time and effort and need to have the drive to succeed. Most of the executed and finalised MDF campaigns have driven a positive result and boosted the spend to pipeline ratio in a positive way. And even if some did not result in the expected outcome, because we invite partners to come up with new ideas and out-of-the-box thinking, we still benefit from the lessons we learned.
Currently, we are in the planning phase of a vertical campaign for a partner that is planning to expand their business cross-border. We help them with the messaging, the audience, the outreach by our BDR team, and with local presence. On the other side, the partner is working to make sure they are ready to run the follow-up, the references, and their positioning, and together we are working to anchor our joined presence in this market. We know we always will be stronger, together.
Do you want to hear more about how our partners experience our marketing development fund support? Watch our short video to learn more!