GEC NEWS WIREMarwa Abdulwahed, Senior Regional Marketing Manager, Channel & Distribution Field for META at Dell EMC talks about their Marketing Institute that helps their partner community with marketing and awareness of Dell EMC solutions and their individual capabilities.
Tell us more about the Marketing Institute. What prompted you to establish such a forum?
The Marketing Institute is where Solutions Providers and Authorized Dell EMC Distributors participating in the Dell EMC Partner Program earn their marketing accreditation. It is located within the Partner Academy which can be accessed through the Dell EMC Partner Portal. The curriculums available vary depending on partner type and tier level. The trainings within the Marketing Institute will empower the channel to discover our program, tools, resources and processes to effectively manage their marketing initiatives.
We know our partners are invaluable at helping tell the Dell EMC story, so this effort aims to make marketing simple, self-service affair. By investing in these capabilities through industry-specific courses, we want to enable our partners to scale and create effective marketing initiatives that ensure success and help them win new business.
How can the institute help in building the knowledge ecosystem and how will the forum function? Or in other words, how will it work with the various tiers of partners and their level of knowledge?
The curriculum and training modules provided by the institute count towards partner accreditation and tier eligibility. We encourage anyone who manages or supports MDF, programs, process or logistics for Dell EMC to complete the credential. However, only one marketing contact from a company is required to complete the credential.
Courses will be available on training, measuring marketing ROI, maximizing MDF, social media marketing and growing partners’ business with distribution and brand awareness. Gold Partners can complete the Marketing Specialist or Expert Credential 2017. Platinum and Titanium Partners must complete the Marketing Expert Credential 2017. Dell EMC Authorized Distributors need to complete the Marketing Credential for Distributors 2017.
This full suite of marketing resources serves as a knowledge center which can be tapped to understand and cascade the best practices to the ecosystem and do some focused trainings, so that partners can increase their resourceful-ness and reduce their dependence on vendors for lead generation.
Will this have any direct benefits for your customers?
Absolutely! Primarily, this complete turnkey operation helps partners embrace innovative marketing tools to reach their customers. Following which, the training curriculum is designed to impact their overall knowledge on marketing trends and Dell EMC resources. The courses are dedicated to enhancing the acumen of partners around marketing, helping them scale their marketing awareness and scale their training. In addition, partners earn credentials at and individual level and these counts towards company competency goals. All in all, these trainings are aimed at providing the channel ecosystem with the necessary tools to seamlessly make their marketing efforts an extension of Dell EMC and cater to the length and breadth of their customer’ needs.
What opportunity does this bring to the channel?
The marketing institute allows our partners to effectively develop and execute campaigns, while offering them the ability to closely monitor customer response and campaign performance. The curriculum embraces emerging technologies like machine learning, IoT and security, which enables partners to become strategists and advisors to their customers, providing them with tailored information that can help them better unlock the potential and benefits of the products and services the organization is implementing.
