About Marketing to Partners

You can market to your partners to recruit more partners into your partner program, recruit existing partners into a new program, inform your partners about a new promotion or a new product introduction, invite partners to an event, ask partners to participate with you or sponsor an event, or for other reasons.

Siebel PRM and Siebel Marketing allow your marketing managers to market to partners through a variety of channels, and to market to partners in conjunction with their other marketing activities. It is common to perform the following tasks:

"Creating and Executing Campaigns for Marketing to Partners"
"Making Campaign Offers to Partners"

Creating and Executing Campaigns for Marketing to Partners

Campaigns are the key method of marketing to partners or to customers. You create campaigns with specific goals, such as introducing a new product, and offers that are part of each campaign, such as an offer to sell the product at a discount price.

You can use the Campaign Administration screen to create campaigns that are specifically targeted to your partners, create offers and associate them with the campaign, create a prospect list that consists of prospective or existing partners, and send the offers to the prospects through a variety of channels: direct mail, fax, email, Web, phone, or newsletter.

For example, if you are introducing a new product line and want existing resellers of other product lines to sign up as resellers of this new line, you might go through the following process:

Create a new campaign. Navigate to the Campaign Administration screen, add a new record, and enter information describing the campaign.
Add contacts to the campaign. Determine which partners you want to receive the campaign and add them to the campaign's contact list, or use list management to import a list of prospective partners.
Create an offer for the campaign. Determine how you want the partners to get the news about this product introduction, and then navigate to the Offers screen to create an appropriate offer. For example, if you want to contact the partners by email, create an email offer and associate literature (such as a brochure and price list) with the offer. The email can also have a link to the Siebel PRM Portal, where they can find out more about the new product line and sign up as resellers.
Execute the campaign. The email is sent, and partners respond if they are interested.
Create a followup campaign. To follow up the email campaign, you might plan an event for partners to attend if they have signed up as resellers of this product. You could create and execute this followup campaign as you did the initial campaign, except that the contacts are only the partners who have signed up as resellers and the campaign is a phone campaign, so it is executed by your call center. Creating the followup campaign requires Siebel Marketing.

For more information about campaigns, see Siebel Marketing Installation and Administration Guide and Siebel Marketing User Guide.

Making Campaign Offers to Partners

When you do collaborative marketing with partners, you generally create phone offers and have the partners execute the phone campaign. When you market to your partners, you can use a variety of offers, including:

eNewsletters
eMail Offers
Direct Mail Offers
Web Offers
Fax Offers
Phone Offers

Offers can be used for marketing and for communicating with partners.

For example, you can create eNewsletters that update partners on the latest information about your company, or create eNewsletters that are delivered on a regular schedule. The eNewsletters can have a variety of purposes: you can use them for regular newsletters, news releases, quarterly financial results, special promotions, or for other purposes.

Offers have content that can be personalized for each recipient. The Offers screen lets you create sections for each type of offer and to specify rules that determine which sections the recipient sees.

For information about working with offers, see Siebel Marketing Guide.