It isn’t easy to locate relevant content for developing B2B Affiliate Programs, so it’s a real treat to learn from Adam Glazer and Steven Kaufman of Partner Commerce. They own and operate a renowned B2B affiliate marketing firm with vast experience delivering large online sales and leads for companies like Microsoft and Paypal.

After researching the performance of their programs, we discovered three essential lessons you should implement:

Alignment

The importance of alignment cannot be overstated. Strong alignment between the affiliate team and the other marketing/partnership teams is required for B2B and SaaS organizations. When one team manages 

SAAS Thoughtful male person looking to the digital tablet screen

Affiliate Marketing and another manages paid marketing. There is a high possibility of a disconnect over attribution and who deserves credit. Everyone must understand what is at stake, agree on how performance will be measured, and be incentivized toward overall success while limiting risk.

Furthermore, aligning the brand and your partnerships creates new chances. With the correct platform in place, you can design your partner incentivization structure to mirror that value once you’ve established and understood the worth of your customer. When you can organize your program to pay your partners each time you generate money, the earnings of your best partners will keep them motivated to achieve even greater success. Partnerships do not succeed until everyone benefits. 

Complexity with simplicity

3 Secrets to B2B Affiliate Program Success -

Complement complexity with simplicity. Legacy platforms were primarily designed for retail consumer programs, and their capabilities are often binary. In comparison, B2B sales funnels are extensive and complex, and they do not lend themselves to a framework of one-time affiliate payments per customer.

However, the opposite is true with advanced technology platforms capable of assessing and rewarding based on the client journey. To simplify managing B2B partners, you must be able to track every event in their journey, reward partners for driving those events, and provide a deep funnel analysis of their activity. 

Break down the silos

A solid platform for measuring the whole funnel and triggering rewards based on your KPIs is not a luxury — it is a requirement. Deconstruct silos. The ability to track all marketing initiatives in one location keeps everyone on the same page. If everyone wants to take credit for every consumer, you’ll continually be at odds with the marketing staff. 

When all of your data is collected in one place, and accessible reporting is available, you can assist the entire team in understanding where each piece contributes value. This necessitates a careful balance between agreed-upon restrictions and available technologies within the company.

Perhaps your report indicates that an influencer isn’t producing many purchases, but SEO sales are brisk. Isn’t it natural for you to want to avoid the influencer? Dig a little deeper and test a little more. You might discover that your SEO-delivered consumers who were also exposed to the influencer had a greater LTV than those who were not. Insights from deep attribution data help you to realize the true worth of your partnerships ultimately.

As Adam so eloquently stated, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle asserts that the more precisely a particle’s momentum is measured, the less specifically its position can be determined. The act of measuring generates a change in the particle’s momentum due to the relationship or contact between the measurer and the particle.

Simply put, once you become a part of the system being measured, the true nature of what you’re measuring changes. This approach can also be applied to your B2B marketing plan.

The incrementality in marketing is the increase in your target outcome as a result of marketing effort. Keeping Heisenberg in mind, we need an ever-evolving attribution model to obtain anything close to a thorough picture of overall performance.

You’ll need to examine performance from every angle imaginable, Therefore, be open to shifting your perspective to understand where value is created. B2B Affiliate Marketing is all about segmenting the customer journey and then aligning and compensating your partners for the value they provide.

Last Updated on September 13, 2019

Author

Elizabeth is a Senior Content Manager at Scaleo. Currently enjoying the life in Prague and sharing professional affiliate marketing tips. She's been in the online marketing business since 2006 and gladly shares all her insights and ideas on this blog.