Channel Partner Marketing Certification and Training

Partner marketing is a discipline of its own. The person doing it plans campaigns they will not run themselves, spends budget through companies they do not control, and has to show a return on both. The Channel Institute's Certificate in Channel Marketing is the global gold standard in training and certification for that work, and it is the partner marketing certification taken by marketers inside technology vendors in the hardware, software and manufacturing sectors.

The certificate is a structured, assessed partner marketing course rather than a workshop. Ten modules cover the core concepts, frameworks and tools of channel partner marketing: how to plan a co-marketing campaign with a partner, how to agree who owns which part of it, how market development funds are allocated and governed, how to build the assets a partner can actually use, and how to measure what came back. It is taken online and at your own pace, and it ends in an exam.

It suits a partner marketing manager at any point in their first fifteen years in the channel. People arrive in these roles from corporate marketing teams and from partner teams, each carrying their own vocabulary for the same activities, which is why two people can plan the same campaign and mean different things by it. The certificate puts one set of definitions and methods under all of it. The syllabus is reviewed and approved by the Industry Advisory Council, an independent panel of 27 senior channel leaders at companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and SAP, so the content is directed by the employers who hire partner marketers rather than written in-house.

Do your channel partners need partner marketing training too?

Most channel partners cannot be marketing experts. Technology resellers are typically small businesses founded and led by technologists. They rarely have a full-time marketing person, let alone a marketing function, and where they do have someone with marketing experience, that person has usually never had to co-market with a vendor and does not know where the differences lie. Meanwhile they are selling in crowded markets with solutions that look much like everyone else's, which is precisely where marketing would help them most.

Vendor partner teams and internal partner marketing academies go some way to closing that. The partner marketing courses, workshops and content produced by the Channel Institute fill the pieces those programmes tend to leave out, and for some vendors the end point is a full channel partner training and certification programme run for their partners.

Many of the larger technology organisations already hold a volume purchase arrangement with the Channel Institute to train their partners, so check with your channel account manager or your training department before booking anything directly. Partners sometimes also need to hear a different voice from an independent authority, and the Institute provides speakers for channel and partner marketing events.

Working with vendor partner academies

The Channel Institute works alongside technology vendors to supplement their own partner marketing training and enablement academies. That can mean a few modules dropped into a course a vendor already runs, or a full series of webinars and in-person workshops built around what their partners are missing. Corporate training covers how that works and what it costs.