A guide on how to land your first partner

Today's issue reaches your inbox on a US national holiday, Labor Day, and also my birthday! I am sending this issue from a beach in Destin, Florida, so if everyone can send me some birthday love (or cocktails 🍹) it would be appreciated!

If you aren't on holiday then I hope you are still having a good day and will enjoy reading this week's issue.

It's been another GREAT week in the world of partnerships. Two things happened this week which I think are worth calling out:

1. PartnerHacker just released a book packed full of great information, hit up Jared Fuller or Will Taylor on LinkedIn to get your free copy.
   
   
2. I was able to join a wonderful webinar on account mapping with the team at Crossbeam. Account mapping tools like Crossbeam and Reveal have changed the game and put tangible information into the hands of us as partnership professionals. I love the growing creation of partner tech.
   

This week's partnership in the wild is one that I have first hand experience of using.

It comes courtesy of Apollo.io & Vidyard.

Apollo.io is a sales prospecting tool that enables you to pull emails and create sequences for email outreach.

They have a technology partnership with Vidyard, a tool used to create and send video.

Using the two together enables you to send personalized video messages that can be used to encourage people to respond to your outreach campaigns.

I use it ALL the time when I prospect potential partners.

Click here to read more about the integration.

Great work partnership teams!


Now let’s dive in 🐬  

Last week, I went through how to build out an ideal partner profile. This week we are approaching the next step of the partnership puzzle: how do you identify and prospect the companies that fit into your ideal partner profile?

Its an easy-ish exercise figuring out who would be a great fit for you as a partner (if you didn't check out last week's issue, I map out how to do it). It’s a harder task narrowing down the specific organizations and recruiting them to be a partner.

It requires yet another skill for you to learn as a partner manager, how to become an expert BDR.

There are a couple tricks of the trade that I wanted to share with y’all that are easy ways to identify and recruit partners.

1. The competitor deep dive 🤿
   

One of the many reasons that partnership programs are created is that your executive team has seen partnerships be successful for a competitor.

If you have a competitor that already has a fully fledged partnership program, chances are they have a portal detailing these partners.

An external partner portal is table stakes from a co-marketing perspective, meaning that they often promote signed partners, with the hope of driving some easy revenue their way.

Here is an example of HubSpots partner portal.

(6500 odd partners! Great job HubSpot)

Next step after interrogating this partner portal, and comparing it to your ideal partner profile you should be able to ascertain a decent list of partners to target.

You can ask your BDR team (if you have one, if you don’t you can find someone on Fiverr for a decent price) to create a list of the correct people at these companies, and put them into a good old outreach sequence.

But Ben… if they are a competitor partner why would they want to work with us?

Simple - there is always a need for a competing solution!

Oftentimes, especially partners who are consultants, agencies or outsourced IT companies hold the title of “trusted advisor”. To be a true advisor, you need to be able to suggest a solution that is the best fit for the companies you serve.

Again, we all love a real life example -  let's take Help Scout.

Help Scout is a customer support tool that services primarily SMB businesses, we are easy to set up, have great UI, and come at an affordable price.

One of our competitors is Zendesk: big, complex and fairly expensive.

What this means is that every company and consultancy that currently is a Zendesk partner could potentially be a Help Scout customer.

This is a sample of my outreach message, something like:

Hi {{first_name}},
Happened to see that you are a Zendesk partner,
Ever run into scenarios where Zendesk is too expensive / complex for smaller customers?
Help Scout caters specifically to this use case, being the tool that is preferred by 15,000 SMB businesses.
Worth a chat to see if we could be that alternative option for your customers?

Give it a go, its an easy way to get started.

2. Could your current customers be your partners?

Now this tactic is an interesting one!

This is a really easy way to recruit partners quickly.

Now granted it won't work for everyone but it's worked for us at Help Scout.

Sometimes you can identify partners by looking at your current customers.

Two ways you can do this:

1. Run a query against your CRM data and pull out any email domains that don't match your customers email domains. This indicates a 3rd party managing their account, perhaps a consultant or an outside IT org that might be a good fit as a partner.

2. Another trick is once you have built your ideal partner profile (i.e. BPO organizations are a great fit for Help Scout), run another query and see if you have any BPO organizations as current customers.

The positives of recruiting customers are:

- They know the product (this means less potential sales training)

- They trust the product (this means they will respond to your emails)

Here are the results of my latest Outreach campaign to potential partners that are current customers

Find me a better performing email sequence….

3. The Google expert method

If the above two methods don't work for you, then the next step is to use that internet education.

I am talking about Google.

Being a good Googler is a talent, get good at it.

You have the ICP mapped out, so now type that into Google and see what you discover.

For Help Scout, I typed in “customer support consultant” -  that gave me a good list of partners.

You’ll also stumble across websites like Clutch like I did while looking for partners for Help Scout which have great lists of consultants, agencies and everything in between.

Pretty simple? Yes!

But a critical method in getting you that list of initial partners.

That's all for today!

If you want a deeper dive into ICP mapping, or if you need a partner recruitment strategy created, shoot me an email.

I am now consulting for a select few companies!

🌊 Sea you next week (Can you tell yet that I am really enjoying being seaside?)

Cheers,

Ben

P.S. I did a thing! If you are wanting more partnership education  (or you are just curious to hear my accent) sign up to “Howdy Partners”, a new podcast I host with Will Taylor and Tom Burgess, you can find it here on Spotify.