Part 9: The Partner Success Plan

Hello everyone,

Welcome back to issue number 9 of the Partnership Pocketbook, your weekly dose of actionable partnership content delivered to you every Monday morning.

As always, I will kick it off with a conversation I had this week that got me fired up about the future of partnerships.

This one comes from a conversation I saw that was recorded at SaaStr between Will Taylor, Head of Partnerships at PartnerHacker and Nick Capozzi. You can watch it here.

In the clip, Will mentions we are “Just at the start of a J curve for partner tech”, and I agree, not only at the start of a J curve for partner tech but also the overall understanding of partnerships.

So for anyone reading this that is stressed, that is figuring this thing out as they go - we are all in this together. There are tools and education that are being created right now to help us all through this journey.

Oh and one BIG update for you all, and one that I am personally pumped about… I have launched my own business to help partnership teams thrive!

One thing that I have always struggled with in partnerships is marketing resources! Regardless of program size you are always going to have a gap when it comes to marketing material, so I created an agency to help out with this, you can check it out here!

This week’s partnership in the wild one comes from Postal.io. For those that don't know, Postal is a company that enables direct gifting to prospects and customers.

I came across their integration with Calendly recently and I love it!

The Postal + Calendly integration enables you to add a gift to a Calendly link, meaning that either after or before a meeting with a prospect, they can redeem a gift card or something similar as an incentive to attend a meeting.

While incentives like gift cards are not a new tactic, this partnership just makes the whole process much more seamless, saving valuable time.

It just makes sense, and I love it.

Good work from the partnership teams here!

With that out of the way, let's jump into the topic this week, partner success plans.

Success plans have been around for a while.

They are extremely common in the world of customer success (which is where I got my start).

A customer success plan is usually created at the start of a relationship with a customer, and sets some high level goals for the future relationship.

The same thing is possible with partners, but I come across more and more partner managers that are not tracking success with their partner relationships.

So lucky for you, I am about to share with you the core components of a partner success plan, and how you can create one that will drive impact moving forward.

So…where do you start?

For me, there are 4 core factors that need to be included in a PSP, they include the following:

So what would I include in each category?

1. Goal setting

You need to understand what matters to the partners, it's not always about leads.

Your role as a partner manager is to understand your partner's business as well as your own. This includes what your partner counterpart is held accountable for, and what equals success to them.

For example, brand awareness might be a big objective for some partners, so co-marketing and the addition to your partner marketplace could be even more appealing than leads.

It's up to you to dig into what matters, and then do the work to help them meet their specific goals.

2. ICP Mapping

This is a huge one, and will underpin a lot of the activity that you take part in with your partner:

🧐 Who do they sell to?

🧐 In what verticals?

🧐 Who is their buyer profile?

This is important because they may only appeal to one part of your customer base.

When you are creating co-marketing campaigns, it might be better to do a targeted email campaign to a certain vertical of your customers where your partners play - instead of a broad campaign - which won't appeal to all of your customers.

3. Co-marketing

Newsflash, every partner wants to co-market!

It's a standard part of every partner's kick off call!

But if you promise every one of your partners a blog post, your marketing team is not going to be able to meet the demand.

Have a frank conversation with your partner counterpart and understand what they are able to do, what resources are available and what each side is going to commit to. Have the same conversation with your marketing department.

It's much worse promising the world and not delivering, than picking something small and crushing it.

4. Enablement

Just like co-marketing, you should also understand what enablement means to your partner counterpart.

Do they create battlecards?

Are they able to get you in front of their customer facing teams to talk about your solution?

Take it slow.

Create tasks that you can accomplish in the next month, and build from there.

It's always better to get some slow, quick wins, than try and do everything and deliver on nothing.

So those are the components of a good partner success plan.

But maybe you’re thinking now -  how do I put this all together into a format that works, and is trackable?

Don't worry, I’ve got you!

First document I would create is a Partner Memorandum, which acts as a contract of sorts between you and your partner counterpart.

Alex Glenn of Partnerhub has a great example of a memorandum on his site, you can find it here.

With the memorandum you would list out all the above, with small next steps outlined that are going to be worked on before you meet again.

You can then track these steps in a simple Excel spreadsheet. Here is one that I use that I made publicly available for my loyal readers:

Partner Success Plan Template

Update it every month to hold both sides accountable!

So there it is, a brief overview of partner success plans, how to create them, factors that go into them, and how to hold your partner counterpart accountable.

Until next week…


Cheers,


Ben