For organizations without a partnerships strategy, knowing how to approach building one can be a head-scratcher. There is so much to consider, and yet there are far fewer resources to turn to than what can be found for sales & marketing strategy.
To that end, I’ve outlined a set of guiding principles that I hope will serve as a helpful starting point for those looking to build out their first partner strategy.
Strategy vs Function
Partnerships, alliances and collaborative go-to-market strategies can have a huge impact on organizations. They can materially change core parts of your product and go-to-market strategy. For example, making a strategic decision to partner with a company providing a service or feature that fills a critical product gap instead of building out that same feature or service in house. Another potentially high impact approach would be to build an integration between your product, and a product offered by another company in the same tech stack used by a shared group of customers. This latter example in particular creates exciting opportunities for building joint go-to-market strategies that enable both companies to benefit from the shared brain power of both GTM teams and customer bases.
When partnerships are limited to being a function, rather than a fundamental part of a company’s strategy, the scope of the impact they’re able to deliver becomes limited in turn.
Diversification of Revenue Sources
Investors are paying attention! If all of your revenue is coming from direct sales and marketing, you’ll look far less investable than a comparable company with 50% partner-sourced leads. This kind of diversification creates more stability, which is crucial at this time.
For investors, the value of partnerships goes an important step further: B2B is changing massively right now. More traditional sales and marketing activities are becoming increasingly inefficient, and partner teams typically deliver far more favorable Go-to-market metrics. Particularly:
Higher ACV
Higher conversion rates
Longer lifetime values
Shorter sales cycles
When to Build a Partnership Strategy
I think the right lens to look at this question through is organizational maturity. At Supernode 2022, Bob Moore highlighted that previously, companies would wait until they had maybe 200+ or 300+ people before hiring partner people. Now, it’s starting to happen sooner, often a partnership hire will be brought in as hire number 5 or 10! [you can listen to the talk here]. In the last couple of years I’ve seen this shift first hand. Even if you’re not comfortable bringing in a dedicated partner hire so early, should at a minimum be building partnerships thinking into your strategy as a fundamental element.
What Departments can Partnerships Impact, and How?
Sales
Often a trap that organizations fall into when starting out with a partner strategy, is to assume that partnerships is primarily a tool for lead generation. Though partnerships can impact much more than the top of the funnel, they are a powerful tool to harness to bring new business into your company.
Partnerships can impact everything from lead generation through referrals, through to helping to win deals currently in the pipeline through the sharing of insights, introductions, recommendations, and co- and cross-selling.
Customer Success
Through integrations, collaborative selling and support, partnerships can have a huge impact on the value and stickiness of your solution, and in turn, they can reduce churn. For those customer success teams responsible for upsell and expansion, it’s also possible to work with partners to grow within accounts.
Product
In product, partnerships can impact everything from filling gaps in the product to leveraging partners to understand how a product needs to evolve to win in a market. When a product gap is found, there are typically 3 fundamental options; build it, buy it, or partner. The latter is not always the right approach, but it often will provide the solution faster, and more affordably.
Marketing
For marketing, there are so many hugely impactful partner marketing activities out there! If you’re not collaborating with partners on joint marketing efforts, you’re missing out in a big way on opportunities to build the brand, trust, and to generate leads.
Katie Landaal described partner teams to me when we first met as being like the A-Team for the organization they’re in. Whenever there’s a problem, you send in the partner team, and they look beyond the scope of the internal org to find creative solutions through partnership plays.
Building Adoption of Partner Strategy Within Your Organization
If your organization is new to partnerships, building adoption of partner strategy will likely come with challenges, but don’t let that put you off. The challenges are solvable, and the reward is absolutely worth it!
The main challenges are:
Many folks in B2B aren’t used to working with partner teams, and
They don’t know the value that they can deliver.
You won’t solve these overnight, but by building partnerships into your company strategy, you’ll communicate to the organization the importance of partners to the company, and in doing so, you’ll lay the cornerstone for successful adoption. Next, consider supporting your teams by sharing examples of successful partnerships, highlighting the impact they’ve had on organizations, and by educating the teams on how partnerships can help them achieve their goals. Follow this with clear communication on the steps you’re taking to build high-impact partnerships, and celebrate partner wins as they begin to trickle in. By no means is this a comprehensive list, but if you can take these steps early in your journey, you will be well on your way to success with adoption.
Great insights. Thanks for sharing.