Lumen Strives To Boost Partners’ Marketing Capabilities With New Portal

Lumen Technologies, an enterprise technology platform provider, is striving to boost the marketing capabilities of its channel ecosystem with the launch of a new partner portal.

Working with an industry-leading channel management platform and PRM provider, Lumen said it has developed a new, customized and easy-to-navigate partner portal that offers its channel partners the resources, sales enablement capabilities, and marketing automation tools they need to sell and grow with the company.

Providing partners with an expanded menu of marketing capabilities was “one of the main reasons we developed our new partner portal,” said Dave Young, Lumen’s Senior Vice President, Strategic Sales. “The portal provides partners with a variety of marketing automation tools and resources. They can create and download co-branded sales and marketing assets, launch white-glove email campaigns directly from the portal or using their own campaign tool, and easily share Lumen social media content to their own social networks.”

Channel partners can also reach out to a dedicated, channel-focused marketing team for additional support.

Channel partners who activate an email campaign directly through the partner portal will receive actionable metrics as part of the campaign launch experience. If partners would rather utilize their own marketing automation tool, they can upload the final HTML code into their tool and track their campaigns just as they would with any other campaign.

As Lumen’s channel partner community becomes increasingly savvy in digital marketing, the company is working to provide options to help them go to market. “We are constantly listening to our partners’ business needs and offer many partners market development funds (MDF) to help them develop digital assets in addition to those available on the partner portal,” said Young. “We are focused on providing interactive assets and video to best deliver Lumen’s powerful value proposition in market.”

Because Lumen works with channel partners with a wide variety of go-to-market strategic and vertical focuses, its MDF program is scalable to support both digital and traditional marketing tactics. The funded marketing programs span digital initiatives such as social media campaigns, digital door openers, and virtual customer experiences, to in-person hospitality events and direct mail campaigns.

Lumen will monitor all real-time usage metrics within the partner portal to identify changes to the user experience and available content that will best enable partners to sell. “Our most valuable source of feedback comes from direct interaction with our channel partners,” said Young. “We gave a limited number of partners early access to the portal prior to launch, then solicited their input and listened to their needs as we continued development. Post-launch, we have made it easy for partners to provide feedback within the portal and have a team consistently meeting to work on continued enhancements.”