Part 17: The Era of the Ecosystem is Here

Hello everyone, welcome back to another issue of the Partnership Pocketbook.

Firstly, thank you!

Last week's issue was a deviation from the norm as we went into the issue of mental health, but the responses were phenomenal. I had people reach out and tell me that they felt the same or gave me tips and words of encouragement; it meant a lot.

This week is back to the norm, with a healthy dose of partnership based content, and touching on the AMAZING week partnerships just had.

The title of this episode is entitled “The Era of the Ecosystem is Here”, and it well and truly arrived in the form of the PLX Summit.

The Summit was billed as the time that partnerships hit the mainstream, and it delivered.

📣 Shout out to the team at PartnerHacker for a wonderful event.

The production quality, the caliber of guests, everything was amazing!

Before we dive into more on this topic, I would be remiss without outlining my “Partnerships in the Wild” for this week.

This partnership is one that was actually announced at the PLX Summit and involves two partnership powerhouses in Reveal and PartnerStack.

This is a winner for partnerships teams everywhere.

With the Reveal / PartnerStack integration partnerships team can find opportunities they share with their partners, track the deal from opportunity to closed-won, and automatically pay partners for the deals they close.

A great end to end experience which will save your teams a ton of time and improve the partner relationship.

So with that, let's dive into this week's issue.

This week we are going to dive into key takeaways from this week's PLX, and recap why each department needs to buy into partnerships in order to drive a healthy partnership strategy.

🟢 SALES 🟢

The sales team are often the biggest blockers to partnership teams in my experience.

They are often mistrustful of partners, and don't always see the value of bringing partners into deals.

It makes sense.

They are competing at one thing, and that is selling your core product.

Anything that gets in the way of that, will typically be received poorly.

But, as PLX taught us, partners can help with exactly this.

In fact, partners are proven to speed up the sales cycle, and enable sales reps to get deals over the line quicker.

Think about it.

If you are in a traditional SaaS buying cycle, they tend to be complex, and involve multiple parties.

If you have a partner that has already sold into this org, then chances are they have inside information on who you should be talking to, what they care about, and additional insight that will help you get that deal closed that much quicker.

As a partner manager, it is your job to provide your sales team with the information needed to know which partners they can bring into which deals.

🟣 Customer Success 🟣

The next department up is customer success.

Customer success as a function is going to be increasingly important as we are starting to face times of economic uncertainty.

So what did we learn from PLX:  how can customer success and partnerships work together impactfully?

Firstly, in a similar way to sales dept., if your customer success managers are facing a tricky renewal, they can leverage your partner network to get things moving in the right direction.

A common issue in customer success is the loss of your main point of contact, either through promotion, retirement or career transition.

This can be a killer for a customer success manager.  Their contact is usually their champion who often will fight for them at renewal.

When this person leaves, if they aren't able to find additional champions, it could mean a churned account.

Contacting your partner counterparts and gaining inside information on who else might be involved can be a great benefit for customer success and would get them excited to be working with partners.

Again, your role as a partner manager is to align your customer success teams with the right people at your partners organizations.

🟠 Marketing 🟠

Co-marketing is one of the key pillars of a successful partnership program.

It's an easy way to amplify both you and your partner's company and hopefully start the relationship off with some mutual lead generation.

Webinars, blog posts, whatever works for your particular organization: having the ability to work together towards a common goal and show your partner that you care will start the relationship off on the right foot.

The main benefit to the marketing team around working with partners is brand amplification.

If you are a thin or under-resourced marketing team, the ability to have another company market to you is $!

Especially for smaller companies that are going to market with larger partners -  the network effect and the eventual lead generation is something that should make the marketing department pumped to work with partners.

It's up to you as a partner manager to coordinate activities with your marketing teams and define activities that you are going to work on together.

🔵 Product 🔵

The final group / department that can get a massive amount of benefit from partners is the product team.

The way that people buy software has changed.

A lot of companies make buying decisions based on their already existing tech stacks and finding additional products that integrate into them.

This means that integrations are quickly becoming one of the key drivers to pull customers in from other tools.

Aside from new customer acquisition, integration partners can also add additional functionality to your product which lowers time and money spent by your product team building similar features.

From a partnership team perspective, your role is to:

1) handle incoming requests from potential partners that want to integrate
2) align it with your current product roadmap
3) ensure that there is a replicable process to follow so that integrations are created in a timely manner and promoted to your current customer base.

The partnership team can also actively help through use of tools like Crossbeam to find customer overlap and provide data to the product team ahead of them building out integrations.

The old way of developing integrations (mainly based on customers feedback) was that you have some large customers that need an integration, so the integration is built.

But what if - before you started to build one off integrations - you could get a full understanding of how many customers overlap, allowing your product team to prioritize based on total addressable market?

A mindset shift leads to more partner possibilities!

So that's it for this week's issue.

Remember, your role as a partner manager is to help out every department.

It starts with you.

Take these tips, get in front of your teams, and help them understand the benefits they can get from working with your partners.

Cheers,

Ben