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Melinda Partin
Director of Marketing Strategy & Enablement at The Channel Company
about
Melinda Partin
Melinda Partin serves as Director of Marketing Strategy & Enablement at The Channel Company, where she develops strategic growth initiatives for major B2B technology clients including Microsoft, HPE, Intel, Dell, AWS, and Geotab. With extensive expertise in partner marketing, she leads comprehensive go-to-market strategies, content development, and multi-channel campaigns that drive measurable business outcomes. Melinda specializes in aligning sales and marketing teams around shared revenue goals while leveraging partner ecosystems to create more effective customer engagement throughout the complex B2B buying journey.
How has your approach to measuring marketing success evolved beyond traditional metrics like MQLs?
We've moved beyond MQLs because they're essentially vanity metrics that measure interest rather than intent. I've downloaded plenty of white papers to get information, only to ignore subsequent emails from sales teams—that's wasted effort for them. MQLs create a marketing-sales disconnect where marketing is incentivized to generate volume while sales is judged on closed deals. This tension intensifies when sales teams chase leads that don't convert.
The B2B buying journey is complex with multiple decision-makers and typically a long research phase. MQLs only capture a single moment in time rather than the full picture. They tell you what someone downloaded but not their specific needs, making personalization difficult.
Instead, we recommend focusing on partner-influenced revenue, tracking deals where partners play a significant role and measuring ROI for co-marketing campaigns. We assess partner participation levels, engagement, and satisfaction with marketing programs as indicators of effectiveness. We also track how effectively we engage buying groups throughout their journey and measure pipeline acceleration—how well we're accelerating partner growth and increasing channel ROI.
These metrics provide a more holistic view of marketing's impact on business growth. A well-executed partner program significantly increases partner ROI and co-marketing maturity, ultimately leading to increased revenue and market share for the vendor.
How has the balance between sales-led and marketing-led revenue generation shifted in your organization?
Revenue generation efforts are increasingly marketing-led, particularly in the context of partner programs. This shift is driven by the complexity of B2B buying journeys—buyers conduct extensive research before engaging with sales, making marketing's role in influencing decisions even more critical.
I experienced this firsthand with a client whose partner program was floundering despite sales team efforts. Marketing stepped in to develop comprehensive lead generation programs, qualification processes, and sales enablement resources. We built partner training that helped them reach more people and close more deals. It wasn't just end-user marketing but a training and change management exercise to equip both sales teams and partners with the tools needed throughout the entire sales process.
The power of partner ecosystems cannot be overstated. These programs rely heavily on marketing to generate awareness, drive demand, and nurture leads through the funnel. We leverage data-driven insights to identify high-potential partners and target accounts, enabling marketing to play a more proactive role in driving revenue.
Given the complexity of B2B buying journeys, how do you quantify marketing's influence across multiple touchpoints?
With increasingly complex and nonlinear journeys, partners help navigate this complexity by providing insights into customer behavior and preferences at different stages. We collaborate with partners to map the buyer journey for specific target accounts and identify key touchpoints where partners can add value, then develop co-marketing campaigns addressing those touchpoints.
We use multi-touch attribution models that give credit to multiple touchpoints across the buyer journey, not just the last touch. We often conduct a weighting exercise with our clients, assigning different values to various touchpoints based on their importance. As we gather more insights, we adjust these weightings according to the types of interactions customers or partners have with different touchpoints.
We track content engagement metrics to understand how buyers interact with content at different stages, including downloads, views, and shares. We also assign partner influence scores based on contributions to the buying journey, such as lead generation, deal influence, and customer advocacy. Intent data provides further understanding of key buyer needs at each stage.
How have you approached the alignment of marketing and sales teams around target accounts?
While communication is important, shared incentives and metrics that marketing and sales work towards together are equally crucial. With our clients, we recommend including partners in the alignment process by creating joint revenue targets between vendor and partner marketing and sales teams, then rewarding sales teams for partner-influenced deals. We facilitate this alignment by helping vendors and their partners define clear roles, responsibilities, and success metrics within their joint go-to-market plans.
Effective tactics include joint account planning where marketing and sales collaborate to develop account plans by defining target personas, messaging, and engagement strategies. We establish clear handoff points with specific criteria for when leads pass from marketing to sales to ensure smooth transitions. Shared metrics and incentives are vital—"your number is my number" as we like to say—along with regular communication and feedback to continuously improve the alignment process.
How has your organization adapted its marketing approach to engage B2B buying groups, and what strategies have you found effective?
We've moved beyond simply identifying buying groups to focus on activating them through partner ecosystems. Partners often have pre-existing relationships and credibility within specific buying groups, making them ideal for driving engagement. At The Channel Company, we leverage our extensive network of channel leaders and deep understanding of the technology landscape to help vendors identify and engage with the most influential members of their target buying groups.
A particularly effective approach has been our webinar programs. For example, with one major client, we help identify partners who are thought leaders in specific product areas, then work together to craft content and webinar experiences. We assist with outreach to different buying groups who would benefit from participation.
Other successful strategies include conducting joint research on pain points and challenges of specific buying personas, then using these insights to create targeted content; developing co-marketing campaigns with partners that target specific roles within buying groups with tailored messaging; and creating persona-based content addressing specific stakeholder needs. We distribute this content across multiple channels, including email, social media, our CRN publication, events, and partner networks. Interactive content like assessments and webinars has proven especially effective at encouraging collaboration within buying groups.
about
The Channel Company
The Channel Company is a premier B2B technology marketing and services organization that connects technology vendors with their partner ecosystems and end customers. With over 40 years of industry expertise, they deliver strategic marketing solutions, channel development programs, and go-to-market enablement that help technology leaders optimize their market presence. Their comprehensive services include integrated marketing campaigns, partner engagement strategies, and thought leadership programs through their flagship publication CRN, all designed to drive measurable business results in the evolving technology landscape.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.