WIN with Debbie Kestin by Unlocking the Vault of Vendor Marketing Funds

Join me: Carrie Richardson, partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting, on today's episode of WIN, where we talk about something everyone likes:  free money!

Unlock the mysteries of Market Development Funds and Joint Marketing Funds with the expertise of Debbie Kestin, the marketing guru from Kestin Impact Consulting.

You're in for a treasure hunt as we navigate through the untapped potential of MDF and JMF, resources that could be the catalyst for your marketing breakthrough. 

With Debbie's rich background from IBM, we tackle the hurdles that prevent many MSPs from claiming the funds that sit idle each year, while offering strategies to overcome the fear of upfront costs and unrealized marketing goals. Sure, the terms and conditions of these 'free money' pools may seem daunting, but by the end of our conversation, you'll be equipped to approach them with confidence and a game plan to elevate your business's marketing game.

In a marketplace saturated with products and services clamoring for attention, it's vital to understand how to make the most of vendor support in marketing efforts. 

Dive into the world of effective proposals and the execution of campaigns that capture the imagination, both of which Debbie and I dissect with precision. 

We share the playbook on hosting events with a magnetism that extends beyond the primary audience to their families, ensuring a memorable experience and solid lead generation. As we spin tales of past co-marketing triumphs and the significant advantage of collaboration with marketing firms adept at analytics, this conversation promises a cascade of insights to refine your approach to vendor-supported marketing funds. 

Join us, and let's boost your marketing impact together.

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with either of them here: https://randr.consulting/connect

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Chapters

• 0:00 Unlocking Market Development Funds
• 13:22 Maximizing Marketing Funds With Vendor Support

Transcript

[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Background

[00:00:00] Carrie Richardson: Hi There, I'm Carrie Richardson, one of the partners of Richardson & Richardson Consulting and the host of WIN - What's Important Now. With me today is Debbie Kestin, who spent 20 years in marketing for I B M prior to founding Kestin Impact Consulting. 

[00:00:15] Debbie Kestin: Hi everyone, I'm Debbie Kestin Schildkraut. And I'm founder and president of Keston Impact Consulting.

[00:00:21] Debbie Kestin: And I'm excited to be here to talk to you about MDF today. And just very quickly earlier in my career, I ran an agency within an agency for IBM business partners, helping them to create their advertising and marketing initiatives. And I was then invited to join IBM to start channel marketing there for the PC division and then worked in other groups.

[00:00:42] Debbie Kestin: And what you know, today's IBM partner plus previously IBM partner world, I helped build that program. So during my 20 plus years at IBM, I've built and executed many channel marketing programs, work with 140 distributors around the globe to help with partner recruitment, enablement, demand [00:01:00] generation and lead past programs and also work with partners Delivering.

[00:01:04] Debbie Kestin: Oh, I think it was about 150 or so workshops to partners teaching them basically how to maximize their, marketing presence their digital presence on web and social and how to leverage often come as. And then earlier this year, I opened up my own consulting business and have been meeting and helping with many MSPs on various aspects of their business.

[00:01:28] Carrie Richardson: We're happy to have you and it's really exciting to talk about MDF because it isn't something that gets taken advantage of very often. The general consensus that I found with managed sales pros and would suggest to a company that maybe they should talk to their vendors about the MDF that might be available or a JMF depend on depending on what area you come from.

[00:01:49] Understanding Market Development Funds (MDF)

[00:01:49] Carrie Richardson: There is a MDF is market development funds, 

[00:01:53] Carrie Richardson: JMF joint marketing funds. So for those of you who've never explored the magical land of [00:02:00] free money from your vendors. This is going to be a very eye opening episode for you. So one of the things that we found 

[00:02:08] Carrie Richardson: was that people didn't apply for joint marketing funds because they didn't want to do the paperwork that was affiliated with receiving the money.

[00:02:17] Carrie Richardson: So I think back in the day, it was more of a free for all, right? Like your partners 

[00:02:22] Carrie Richardson: would give you joint marketing funds. You could do whatever you wanted, right? Like people were just buying t shirts and hosting events. And there was no real way for the vendor. To determine what their return on investment was for those marketing, spends.

[00:02:39] Carrie Richardson: Obviously those days ended, people had to be, 

[00:02:44] Carrie Richardson: better 

[00:02:45] Carrie Richardson: caretakers of the money that their vendors would provide to them and now reporting is required and you usually have to be a certain level of partner. So I'm going to let Debbie take it from here. One of her areas of expertise has been [00:03:00] successfully. Applying for market development funds for her partners, and that is a service that she's offering to the MSP makeover. 

[00:03:07] How to Access and Utilize MDF

[00:03:07] Carrie Richardson: So Debbie, tell us about MDF. How do we find it? How do you help people get more of it? 

[00:03:14] Debbie Kestin: Absolutely. And feel free to ask me questions and stop me along the way. Because, there's a lot to talk about, but it's not as I think hard, I think, as people think, I think there's this, just this fear, like you said, of the administrative aspects of it, the proof of performance.

[00:03:29] Debbie Kestin: And think about it when somebody's giving you money everybody needs to have some kind of ROI or accountability for, their spending, right? So it's not unreasonable, but I think vendors have been hearing partners loud and clear on trying to keep things more simple.

[00:03:44] Debbie Kestin: So let's just back up for a minute. Vendors do have funds and they do want. Their partners to use them for marketing. And just as a sidebar distributors often have some kind of co marketing or market development funds as well for supporting partners. [00:04:00] They also want you to use them.

[00:04:01] Debbie Kestin: So we should just keep that in mind. It's we're going to probably maybe focus on vendors a little bit more. But don't forget your disties. They, very often will have funds. They may have different requirements. Sometimes they're easier. Sometimes they're not, but it's definitely something to not forget about because that could be more money on the table for you.

[00:04:18] Challenges and Solutions in Leveraging MDF

[00:04:18] Debbie Kestin: So here's the challenge we want to uncover for you today, right? MDF or JDF or co marketing dollars are available typically to MSPs and who would want to leave that money on the table, right? And significant amounts of money as, Carrie said, are left on the table year after year. I think I heard some crazy stat last month that somebody said that there's only on average about.

[00:04:39] Debbie Kestin: 14 percent of funds generally are utilized, which means there's a lot of money that's just sitting there, which is a loss, right? Because the challenge is that MSPs don't have a dedicated marketing staff sometimes, or often. And even if they do, it's difficult to find that time to navigate through what are all the T's and C's.

[00:04:57] Debbie Kestin: If you work with multiple vendors or multiple [00:05:00] distributors, you're not really sure how to access those funds. And then how to go through the administrative processes to leverage them. So it's fear of upfront spend, it's fear of administrivia, it's fear that what if we don't perform on that marketing initiative time and it's just overwhelming.

[00:05:19] Debbie Kestin: So what we want to uncover today is for you to better understand what these funds are, what they typically cover, how to maximize the opportunity to use those funds to grow your business. Sound good. 

[00:05:32] Carrie Richardson: That sounds perfect. 

[00:05:34] Practical Tips for Successful MDF Application

[00:05:34] Carrie Richardson: Let's start at the very beginning. How does a 

[00:05:39] Carrie Richardson: How does an MSP know whether or not there are marketing funds available?

[00:05:43] Carrie Richardson: For example last maybe two years ago, Microsoft did a promotion where if you could get five people into an online event. They would give you 2, 500 cash and if you could get more than 2, 500 you [00:06:00] got like an incremental like almost like a kicker on that money.

[00:06:03] Carrie Richardson: So if you could get five people, whether they were already using Microsoft products or not into a webinar, you 

[00:06:10] Carrie Richardson: could make up to almost 5, 000 per webinar. We couldn't convince a single person 

[00:06:17] Carrie Richardson: to do it. Even with free money. Why? 

[00:06:21] Debbie Kestin: Again, I guess it's just this fear of what's the administrivia behind where the strings attached, right?

[00:06:29] Debbie Kestin: It's really important for partners to first understand do they have funds? Do they have access to funds? And usually the way to do that is people get overwhelmed. They want to have to go look in the partner portal or look through their emails. But if you've got some kind of rep or focal point, that's the 1st place to start.

[00:06:51] Debbie Kestin: And if you don't have 1 trying to get 1 most partners should have some kind of reps. Some reps may handle multiple partners, but trying to find that [00:07:00] champion in the vendor is really key. Who owns you. Marketing funds who owns MDF funding and who they are and trying to establish a relationship is really key.

[00:07:10] Debbie Kestin: But start out go to the partner portal. I don't know Sometimes, obviously, and MSP is working with multiple vendors, but pick 1 pick the 1 you do the most business with. And. Go to their partner portal and look to see what's there. There's usually something published as a starting ground and so you can understand what you qualify for.

[00:07:30] Debbie Kestin: But getting a rep is really a good, a really good way to have a focal point. And then be proactive like plan ahead, right? So the way we're like right now we're in Q4, everybody's focused on wrapping up the year and their numbers, but right now is when you need to be thinking about.

[00:07:44] Debbie Kestin: Funds available for Q1, like once you hit Q1, guess what vendors and even distributors are already thinking about planning for Q2. So ideally one full quarter ahead of time would be the time to look into asking for money that [00:08:00] that you want to implement something, there's also, sometimes sometimes there's a minimum threshold to qualify.

[00:08:09] Debbie Kestin: And if that's the case, you want to understand what that is. And sometimes there's just gradated, like amounts of money that can be available to a partner, depending on what revenue they've shown in the prior year. So it really can vary. Unfortunately, vendors are not consistent between their programs across the industry.

[00:08:27] Debbie Kestin: So it's good to really just find out the base of what is the program? How do you qualify? And how soon in advance do you need to apply for something? To your point earlier because people are overwhelmed vendors are trying to make it easier having lived at a vendor for many times for many years and having worked with a lot of distributors and other vendors partnering.

[00:08:53] Debbie Kestin: They do want to try to make it easier. So I really encourage any MSP who's been trying to [00:09:00] use MDF or co marketing to give feedback. on what you need to be successful. What are you finding hard? Let them know because they want you to use the funding because it's a win, right? If you implement a lead generation campaign and you sell more, that's good for everybody.

[00:09:17] Debbie Kestin: It's good for the distributor. It's good for the vendor. It's certainly good for you. So they want you to be successful. Let them know where things seem to get stuck. Is it like in the application process? Is it in you've submitted and never heard. back? Is it that you've been rejected? Like what whatever the hang up is, it's really important to share with whatever that might be.

[00:09:39] Debbie Kestin: So they're looking to create templates, sometimes ask is there a, at IBM, we had a marketing, digital marketing content platform. There's a lot of different companies out there that provide that kind of content and service. service that vendors are using. So sometimes there's like templates that are like pre created that you can work off of.[00:10:00] 

[00:10:00] Debbie Kestin: Now, obviously nobody wants to look exactly like another partner's communication, but it gives you a good starting ground because sometimes it's hard to figure out where to start on creating a template, whether it's for an email or a social media post or whatever it may be, or an invitation to an event.

[00:10:15] Debbie Kestin: And sometimes they have marketing agency partners who will provide special rates or discounts for partners as well. So it's good to really understand again, the forms in the process for applying the deadlines for applying, if there's templates, if there's agency support or access, anything that might be discounted or free.

[00:10:35] Debbie Kestin: Got to ask the question. 

[00:10:36] Carrie Richardson: In your experience where, which partners have. Regularly available MDF or jam. 

[00:10:47] Debbie Kestin: Sometimes there's these different levels and programs, right? Whether it's like a silver gold, platinum or whatever it is obviously the partners in the highest tiers are absolutely usually getting funds [00:11:00] because they're delivering, but don't assume if you're a smaller partner with a smaller revenue base that you're not because a lot of, vendors will have jumpstart kinds of offerings to get those partners to grow their business. Also, I don't want to forget to mention that sometimes it's not easy to find MDF or co marketing called that some vendors will include it as part of their front end or back end rebate programs. So that might be another place to and some of those programs will allow you to earn back a percentage for everything you sell.

[00:11:38] Carrie Richardson: So if I I'm a smaller MSP partner, I've never taken advantage of, any of the offers that have been made by my vendors to date. How can you help me? Navigate that. 

[00:11:55] Debbie Kestin: So if a small partner doesn't have a solid [00:12:00] contact at a vendor or 1 that they can find, distributors are supposed to help be that and I hate to use the expression middleman because there's so much more, but they are there.

[00:12:10] Debbie Kestin: They facilitate working with the vendor. By reaching out to your distributor contact, and everybody should have a distributor contact, they can help you navigate if they've got funding available for you. And B, who at the vendor now is in charge of marketing or and what's really key is being able to submit a proposal.

[00:12:33] Debbie Kestin: Usually I know that this worked. Ultimately IBM, because we tweet the program throughout the years submitting a marketing proposal again in the prior quarter. Gets you earmarked for funding so if usually that gets approved because you've you've committed to doing something that those dollars are committed for you.

[00:12:54] Debbie Kestin: And when you go to execute, it's really important, whether it went well or [00:13:00] not, whether it went as planned, or whether you did or didn't get the number of people you were hoping to get, you still executed, you still made an effort. To implement some kind of demand generation initiative. So it's important to still submit.

[00:13:14] Debbie Kestin: Here's what we did. Here's the number of emails we sent out, the number of social posts we did. If you know how to track impressions, it's usually showing to you right there on a post, whatever you did to try to get people there, the number of people that showed up vendors recognize that, there is an instant sales very often, right?

[00:13:33] Debbie Kestin: There's pipeline, right? And it takes time to complete that sale. You're not going to automatically have. Very often any kind of Hey, we want X million dollars of business or whatever from that effort, it takes time, but you've gotten some leads of some sort, whether it was 5 or 10 or 100, you've gotten some leads from the people that, that participated or showed up.

[00:13:59] Debbie Kestin: So [00:14:00] that's what you just have to show the vendor. If you show the vendor. Effort you've planned you've executed. This is the outcome. Hopefully every time you do something in life, we learned from it. Maybe what worked what didn't and you have to keep trying and vendors recognize that.

[00:14:18] Debbie Kestin: So I know a partner shouldn't. Feel that. Oh, it didn't go. Forget about it. They're not going to do anything for me. If you made the effort, they're going to support it and the other thing to be careful of. Sorry. I just want to mention a couple of tips. Something as we go along the way is, if you are doing an event, let's say it's a demo event or a webinar, whatever it may be, and or a tabletop event and you're showcasing technology But you might be showing multiple vendors.

[00:14:47] Debbie Kestin: I think it's really good to be transparent about that because if a vendor says, Oh, you didn't make this exclusive to me, we don't want to fund you. You don't want to be caught with that being an [00:15:00] issue later on, vendors recognize that sometimes you're going to have multiple solutions that you're going to share and highlight, and then they'll make, they may prorate it as opposed to just.

[00:15:10] Debbie Kestin: Outright rejected. So I think it's just something to understand what the rules are. If it has to be exclusive to that vendor, or if it can be multi vendor thing that you're doing so that you can get the percentage from each of those vendors. If you're doing a multi solution approach, does that make sense?

[00:15:30] Carrie Richardson: In our experience back in the day, we used to invite people to a lot of, co sponsored events. We used to do them ourselves. So a Cisco was a big partner of ours back in the day, and they would sponsor a cigar lounge, for example, we did most logistics we'd have to apply for approval for costs and we'd have to submit a plan for how we were going to get people to come to the event, but [00:16:00] ultimately it was a co marketed event between managed sales pros and Cisco.

[00:16:03] Carrie Richardson: And at the end of it win or lose, we have to provide a list of everybody that you. Showed up and everything that we learned about them because it's not just about people attending the event. Most of the time it's. We acquired the email addresses for 20 MSPs that we didn't have yet, and they gave us this information and X percentage of X percent of them are already buying from Cisco and X percent are not.

[00:16:35] Carrie Richardson: So at the end of the day, we've got four or five MSPs that aren't currently buying from Cisco. And now we have a way to interact with them. They've given us opt in permission to contact them. So it's not just 

[00:16:47] Carrie Richardson: about Hey, these companies bought 

[00:16:49] Carrie Richardson: this. It was very much focused on how much net new lead generation or pipeline activity can we create through this event.

[00:16:59] Carrie Richardson: So [00:17:00] working 

[00:17:00] Debbie Kestin: with a company that is used to tracking those metrics, I 

[00:17:05] Debbie Kestin: think first and foremost is important. So you can go at it alone, 

[00:17:08] Debbie Kestin: or you can partner with 

[00:17:09] Debbie Kestin: a marketing firm that understands how to. Report the results of your events back to your vendors. 

[00:17:18] Carrie Richardson: So in this case, Debbie, one of the things that you're 

[00:17:20] Carrie Richardson: offering to the MSP is.

[00:17:23] Carrie Richardson: Helping them navigate how to apply who to talk to what events get the most traction, what events are more likely to be sponsored. If you ask me the events that are most likely to be attended, 

[00:17:37] Debbie Kestin: not necessarily sponsored by a vendor, 

[00:17:39] Carrie Richardson: but nobody wants to come to your office for lunch, right? People will RSVP for that, but they will not show up.

[00:17:46] Carrie Richardson: And so abandon the idea 

[00:17:47] Carrie Richardson: of unless your office is like a showstopper and there are 

[00:17:52] Carrie Richardson: offices like that. If you look at the data office in Connecticut, for example, that was a showstopping office when you came into the data office and [00:18:00] you saw that great big control panel. They had an enormous wall of, it looked like NASA, right?

[00:18:08] Carrie Richardson: That is a showstopper your office space in a strip mall in northern Las Vegas. is not a showstopper and people, even if 

[00:18:19] Debbie Kestin: they are SVP probably won't come. We 

[00:18:22] Carrie Richardson: found sporting events, even local sporting events, right? Like those 12 baseball 

[00:18:27] Debbie Kestin: games, right? Where you get up, you get a box, you stock it with booze 

[00:18:32] Carrie Richardson: and people show up.

[00:18:34] Carrie Richardson: And so that always works really well. 

[00:18:35] Debbie Kestin: And you get to interact with them for an entire baseball game. They can bring their families. They can hit, right? When you think about the things that people like, if you're going to ask somebody 

[00:18:45] Carrie Richardson: to give you their time outside of a business out, like outside of nine to five 

[00:18:50] Debbie Kestin: business hours, my experience 

[00:18:53] Carrie Richardson: has been, 

[00:18:53] Debbie Kestin: if you make 

[00:18:54] Carrie Richardson: it attractive to their spouse or their children, they are far more inclined to attend.

[00:18:58] Carrie Richardson: Golf. Yes. Everybody [00:19:00] likes to go golfing, but you, 

[00:19:01] Debbie Kestin: it's very expensive 

[00:19:03] Carrie Richardson: and you can only interact with so many people at once. So getting someone to sponsor a 

[00:19:06] Debbie Kestin: golf tournament at an exclusive golf club, 

[00:19:09] Carrie Richardson: when you are a bronze level partner, the odds on that happening are very slim. So 

[00:19:17] Debbie Kestin: it's also a long, like it's a long day commitment out of the office.

[00:19:21] Debbie Kestin: As much as people love it, So unless it's piggyback into some kind of event where people are already understood to be out of the office, it's hard to pull that's lost selling time. So that there's, that consideration as well. I think you're right.

[00:19:35] Debbie Kestin: The baseball games have been very successful. I would also think that just thinking about experiential, right. Experiential kinds of things that create value, whether it's like fun value, but also where they get to really get to the heart of. Understanding maybe a technology solution hands on anything that's hands on trying by [00:20:00] that whole trying by concept that we've all heard about forever is something that actually still really works.

[00:20:05] Debbie Kestin: And people forget about it, right? Because I've done some stuff in my IBM time where we had I built a program called business partner innovation centers where The VAD, the distributor flavor one was partners would come in to get trained and experience different kinds of technology combinations.

[00:20:25] Debbie Kestin: So more of a training and enablement aspect, but then there was the partner run centers where customers could come in and before they make the investment, they could actually see the technology at work because everybody's always afraid that when you change something, it's going to break everything else.

[00:20:40] Debbie Kestin: So when you can show people. New technologies or technology combinations get that experiential thing going. Make it fun. Think of fun delivery ways to integrate that it's memorable. And it's just fun. I've done some stuff some [00:21:00] events where even for MSPs, helping them to really understand some cyber security strategy building.

[00:21:06] Debbie Kestin: We've done it through some of these strategy games, right? And you put the cyber security angle to it. So any way where you can get people to really feel really engaged as opposed to just sitting and listening to talking heads, talk up and down, which is the typical, not to diffuse that and say it's so bad.

[00:21:23] Debbie Kestin: But those are typical events where someone presenter gets up and then the next person goes up and talks and Make it change it from that. Change it up a bit. Get that experiential aspect. Think about ways to creatively do that. And I'm happy to brainstorm with people on ways to do that.

[00:21:38] Debbie Kestin: But I think that's what makes those events memorable and really makes an impact. So whether you're going to upsell, cross sell somebody or whether you're going to get a net new, client, it's really important to, to think of those creative ways to engage. 

[00:21:55] Conclusion and Contact Information

[00:21:55] Carrie Richardson: That's all the time we have to talk about MDF with Debbie today.

[00:21:58] Carrie Richardson: If you need help [00:22:00] navigating. applying for and planning for the use of joint marketing funds if your vendors have any available.

[00:22:08] Carrie Richardson: Make sure you talk to Debbie, learn more about Debbie, 

[00:22:11] Debbie Kestin: connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, 

[00:22:13] Carrie Richardson: So Debbie, any parting comments for us before we call it a call it a podcast 

[00:22:19] Debbie Kestin: today. Yeah, just basically hopefully this was a little bit helpful in terms of things to think about. Key takeaways. Be proactive. Try to find your focal points. At the distributor or at the vendor.

[00:22:33] Debbie Kestin: Apply early. apply often for funding. And again, I'm very happy to help you navigate that if you don't have a dedicated person to help go pursue that and take the time to do that. I'm happy to help you reach out and find out that information, find out what you can qualify for.

[00:22:53] Debbie Kestin: I'm reachable at Debbie at Kestin impact. com and on, and or on LinkedIn. And happy to [00:23:00] see if I can help you just grow your business and don't leave that money on the table. Who would leave money on the table?

[00:23:06] Debbie Kestin: So I'll go get it. Go get it. We want to help you go. 2024 the year of free money. Let's go find some. Absolutely. 

[00:23:14] Carrie Richardson: All right. Thank you so much, Debbie, for joining me today. Again, my name is Carrie Richardson. And I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again very soon.

[00:23:24] Carrie Richardson: Have a great afternoon. 

[00:23:25] Debbie Kestin: Thanks. Thanks, Carrie. Thanks, everyone.

[00:23:30] ​