When you think about the people capable of influencing your customers and prospects, take a good long look at your sales channel partners. A channel partner’s sphere of influence can extend far beyond their own customers and territory. Put their influence to work for you by incorporating them into your influencer program.

Success depends largely on choosing the right channel partners. This means curtailing internal politics during the selection process. Likewise, it’s not a popularity contest. Focus on partner attributes that will serve your company well, both out of the gate and over the long run. For example, look for channel partners:

• Aimed at the same core markets and segments as you are
• With an established positive reputation in your core markets
• Willing to invest in their relationship with your company, such as participating in your training and co-marketing programs
• Able to provide reliable customer references

Once you’ve shortlisted the partners, it’s a matter of picking the people within those companies that you want to induct into your influencer program.

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An influencer program can be a powerful asset in countering sales objections. Here are a few well-proven tips from our collection of case studies:

1. Compile and prioritize specific sales objections. Don’t accept generalities at the outset. You can generalize later. Start with clear, articulate objections. Get a good sense of frequency, too.

2. Identify external influencers who have both the credibility and the message to address each sales objection. Remember, your focus is finding 3rd party influencers with credibility in the eyes of your customer decision-makers. The “right” influencer is one who has the credibility and already has the counter-argument to the sales objection.

That’s an important point and it bears repeating:

Your role is to find the right influencers — not to manufacture them.

3. Design appropriate vehicles for capturing influencer counter-arguments and conveying them to decision-makers as objections arise.

It’s straightforward and sheer common sense.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

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Charlene Li predicts that ‘Personal CPM’ innovations will figure in the social media/marketing front in 2009. Personal CPM is one of the more interesting outcomes of joining up social media with consumer marketing. The idea is to analyze social behavior to more accurately target consumers. In Charlene’s words,

“Each person’s profile will command a different, personal CPM based on a trilogy of their behavior, influence, and market demand.”

It’s easy to see how this type of metric would have so much appeal in consumer marketing. It could enhance our thinking about upstream segmentation, downstream personalization, and everything in between. Where we have “personas” today, we could be back to addressable “people” tomorrow.

Personal CPM, as Charlene describes it, could also innovate accepted metrics for identifying and comparing influence among consumers.

Don’t pigeonhole personal CPM as just another advertising model.

Personal CPM has implications for influencer identification and engagement as well.

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No high tech influencer program is complete until it addresses sourcing and vendor management executives. You may think that this group of people is buried deep in your customers’ accounting departments, removed from actual decisions. You may think of them more as gatekeepers on properly filled out forms, credit checks, and other accounting records. Not so. These executives wield enormous potential for influencing computer, software, service and device vendor selection, pricing, Ts&Cs, and more.

The current economic condition makes this an ideal time to take a hard look at sourcing advisors and vendor management executives. Check out the insights one group shared with Forrester Research CEO George Colony.

Take a little of our Influencer50 advice: don’t limit your knowledge of these influencers to what you read in a market research report. Get out there and identify them. Then, engage with the ones who matter the most to you in each of your markets.

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Richard Stiennon raises an interesting point in his Threat Chaos post, Finding Cool Companies: should analysts who blog at online media networks — in this case, ZDNet — be given media passes to competitor’s events — in this case, Gartner Symposium?

I don’t think so, but it does raise an amusing question of ethics.

Stiennon, a former Gartner analyst, recently launched an independent research and advisory venture of his own, IT Harvest. However, he blogs at ZDNet, along with analyst blogger buddies like Dana Gardner and Joe McKendrick.

Now, Stiennon’s attempt at getting a Gartner press pass was probably more hijinks than not. But consider this: Lots of analysts blog at various media sites. What happens if analysts take to the habit of introducing themselves as bloggers OR as analysts depending on what’s most convenient, or who they happen to be contacting at an organization, or … ?

As always, I hope you’ll voice your opinion on my opinion at the Tekrati blog.

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