BOULDER, Colo. (PRWEB) February 20, 2020
Channel marketing expert Heather K. Margolis, founder and CEO of Channel Maven Consulting, today announced the launch of Spark Your Channel, a marketing automation platform that overcomes the challenges of demand-generation for vendors with channel partners.
For the first time ever, Spark enables channel partners’ sales and marketing teams to quickly and easily personalize and share vendor-provided multimedia content, such as webinars, podcasts and especially video, which is proved to be significantly more effective in generating leads. Marketers and salespeople who use video gain 66 percent more leads, according to Optinmonster.
Along with multimedia content, Spark also supports personalization and sharing of text- and graphic-based content, such as ebooks, sales sheets, presentations and infographics – so all assets are accessible from one place.
Plus, partners can use the Spark platform without compromising their leads or data privacy by loading their customer contact lists but still giving vendors tracking and performance metrics.
“Spark Your Channel is the first through-channel marketing automation platform that allows partners to personalize video and doesn’t ask them to load their list,” said Margolis. “While vendors spend millions of dollars to enable their sales channels to market to their services, partners are either not getting results or not using the platforms in the first place. We’ve heard usage rates ranging from 7 to 17 percent.”
After a decade leading technology channel programs and another running Channel Maven’s channel marketing practice, Margolis has used nearly all the available tools on the market to deliver on demand-generation objectives through channel sales partners for some of the world’s largest technology brands. Her experience as well as feedback from vendors and, most importantly, channel partners is that best practices for demand generation were being ignored and prospects were being bombarded and alienated.
Rather than join the chorus of critics, Margolis sought to understand why they weren’t working and what, if anything, could fix the situation. (Margolis shares what she learned and how that inspired Spark in her blog, What’s Different About Through-Channel Demand Generation Today?)
“We developed Spark Your Channel to address challenges of through-channel marketing, giving vendors and their partners an affordable and easy-to-use channel marketing automation platform,” said Margolis. “Most importantly, it puts the sales rep in control. They can personalize professional content and share it with prospects via their own email, social, marketing automation or texts as part of their existing sales process.
“Plus, unique automation features feed partners ideal content according to their preferences, so it lands in their email box, already personalized and ready to share.”
Spark Your Channel will be generally available February 24, 2020, to enable channel sales partners in a variety of industries, including IT, telecommunications, automotive, automotive, manufacturing, insurance and financial service.
Annual subscriptions for Spark Your Channel are affordable for small and midsize vendors and are based on the number of partner organizations, not users, encouraging widespread use of the platform.
Spark Your Channel has raised an angel investment round, including several channel veterans, and is now raising a seed funding round lead by York IE, Manchester, N.H.
Quotes
“Spark Your Channel is the only platform that lets us personalize video – that’s one of our favorite things about it, and we’re creating sales video campaigns for partners to share.”
- Sean Lardo, Vice President of Partner Development for managed VoIP provider OIT LLC
“We’ve been doing demand generation on our own for years even though our vendors use a through-channel marketing automation tool. We find it too cumbersome and have no interest in loading our list. The entire team is really excited to use Spark Your Channel as a way of personalizing our vendors’ videos and sending them out ourselves.”
- John Goodson, Founder and CEO of Merito Solutions
About Spark Your Channel
Spark Your Channel is the through-channel marketing automation platform partners will actually use. Launched in 2020 by channel marketing expert Heather K. Margolis, Spark Your Channel solves the challenges of demand-gen for vendors and their channel partners. The cloud-based software platform empowers partners’ sales and marketing teams to engage in demand generation the right way, leveraging multimedia content and adhering to privacy rules while making it easy to personalize content and slide it into existing sales processes. At the same time, Spark Your Channel enables vendors to provide content, measure clicks and track performance – all with an affordable annual subscription based on the number of partner organizations (not seats) activated, expanding (rather than limiting) access and adoption. For more information, visit http://www.sparkyourchannel.com.
See how Spark Your Channel works in our overview videos: Vendors, Ignite the Power of Partners and Partners, A Through-Channel Marketing Tool Built for Your Business. To demo Spark Your Channel, contact ignite@sparkyourchannel.com.
