If you are a cloud solution provider or you own a SaaS company, you should be looking for new ways of growing your business, reaching new audiences and potential customers, and of course, generating more revenue. One of the best ways of doing that is by partnering with Fortune Brands and hosting Co-Sell events.
Perhaps you know what Co-Selling is, or maybe you know someone that has secured MDF funding in the past and managed to host a Co-Sell event with Fortune Brands. Co-Selling is the perfect opportunity to expand your audience, increase your network, generate leads, and increase profitability in your business. The bottom line here is: You SHOULD be Co-Selling by now.
However, the truth is that not many companies know how to do it. In fact, most companies don’t know that there are funds available for them to carry on with all of their marketing activities. Many companies feel that it is overwhelming or don’t know they can secure MDF funding for these activities.
A tremendous amount of money is destined for marketing development.
And that’s not even it. Millions and millions of dollars destined to Co-Op go unused yearly after year. In fact, it’s estimated that the current annual budget for Market Development and Co-Op is around 70 billion dollars. That’s a tremendous amount of money, isn’t it? However, almost half of it is effectively used for its purpose. It means that nearly 35 billion dollars don’t meet their purpose and go wasted.
Although big companies are not bragging about their marketing boosts for co-selling, the truth is that most tech companies are not familiarized with marketing since it’s not a natural fit for them.
In the end, MDF’s ultimate objective is lead generation. HyperScalers love co-selling. And they really are willing to engage in business cooperation with you. Therefore, funding most likely will be available. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure offer options for collaboration and funding.
What do you need to secure MDF funding for your Co-Sell event with Fortune Brands?
Although learning how to secure MDF funding isn’t rocket science, it isn’t the most straightforward process in the world. In order to do it, you have to comply with certain requirements first. Especially when you’re talking to Microsoft.
Microsoft offers CSP Partner Incentives Cooperative Marketing Funds. CSP partners earn Co-op as part of their incentive reward, and they can leverage co-op to fund demand generation, market development, and readiness activities. These funds are destined to increase the brands’ awareness and drive sales pipeline growth through marketing activities such as (guess what?) Co-Sell Webinars.
However, if things were that easy, everyone would be spending those Co-op Marketing Funds, and no money would go unused. Sometimes, guidelines and guides can be very tricky to understand or find. On some occasions, companies don’t even know where to start. For example, ask yourself the following question: Do I really know how much money my company needs to host a Co-Sell Webinar? Do you know the process for budgeting a Co-Sell Webinar? What are the best practices? Who do I contact for it?
We’ll stop the questioning there. We don’t want you to feel overwhelmed! On the contrary, we want to help you get through this process and come up victorious with a budget for your next Webinar and clarity on the process.
To start co-selling with Fortune Brands, you have to get your fundamentals right. And for every company, the process will be entirely different. Some of the companies that you can partner with to embark on your co-selling adventure are Hello Alice, Women In Cloud, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, Mercer Mackay, and many others.
Companies such as IBM, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have similar processes to engage with them in co-marketing strategies. The first thing you must do is to complete your business profile. It’s definitely a to-do because companies can’t go anywhere with you if they don’t know where you are in their Marketplaces.
Generally speaking, hyperscalers have a menu of services to help you go to market, and many of these tools are automated. It doesn’t matter if your company doesn’t have marketing staff or even a Junior marketing staff. They have resources available for you that we’ve invested at no cost, so you can create turnkey marketing activities and campaigns.
It all sounds fantastic, right? However, they will not tweak what you need for your business. That means that you, as a company, should have a systematic way of delivering value to the market, built on the technology that the companies have. Co-selling is just another component of partnering with Fortune Brands, and you can see it as the engine you’re creating for your demand.
You must complete all the steps and have all the deliverables that the company asks you for implementing your cloud-based solution. You need to know your offer, what your solution is all about, and where it is in the Marketplace. Don’t go into a conversation with them to simply have a conversation. You must have your business model ready, with all the basics. That way, when the company opens the door to you, you should be prepared to discuss business, not to go back to the drawing board. Start the conversation!
There’s one thing you have to take in mind before even considering co-selling with Fortune Brands. First, you need to have a solution (or solutions) published in their Marketplaces. That’s the very first step every company must take. You must have good content levels to describe your solution to create engagement with your company and solution. With that level of engagement, then you’ll start measuring consumption and performance. Once you’re a part of the engine, your solution is embedded in the Fortune Brand’s sales tools.
You have to promote your solution and business, create enterprise interest, showcase your experience, and that’s a responsibility on your part. That would give the hyperscalers an excellent insight to make your solution more attractive for customer choices when they’re faced with an opportunity to bring something new or a new customer to reach a market with new customers and value.
We know that it is a lot of information, and it may seem very overwhelming at first. But at Meylah, we’re here to help you sky-rocket your company with new ways of generating revenues and leads for your company.
And the best way of helping you is by extending the invitation to our upcoming How to Plan and Secure Funding for Your Co-Sell Webinar with Fortune Brands, which will take place as a FREE event on February 8, 2022!
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:
- Understand a plan for a Co-Sell Webinar.
- Estimate what you need for hosting your Co-Sell Webinar.
- Create a budget plan for your webinar.
- Prepare an investment request for the Co-Sell webinar.
You can take a look at all the information by referring to this link. We’re so excited to have you here with us!
There’s a new opportunity to learn how to Co-Sell with Microsoft for you
We’re thrilled to announce that we have launched a new Udemy Course: The 5-Day Co-Sell Webinar with Microsoft Challenge!
Subscribe and learn how to plan & host your Co-Sell Webinar with Microsoft directly from the experts! No prior webinar experience is required. You’ll learn the step-by-step process for setting your webinar from scratch.
The only requirement is that you must be looking for a great opportunity to promote and sell your cloud/SaaS solution through webinars, and preferably be a Microsoft partner.
Click here for more information!
