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In last week’s GoToEco article we introduced the need for a standardized 6-step Co-Sell Orchestration Playbook & Program. The 6 steps are broken into Planning (Focus, Alignment and Ops) and Execution (with Partner, Process and Reporting):
In this week’s article, let’s dig into the details of each of these program elements. As you’re reading, keep in mind Rob Rebholz’s words of wisdom:
“Let's debunk a myth right off the bat: co-sell orchestration isn't a drawn-out, half-year project. By adhering to best practices, you can have it operational in mere days or weeks. And although it's not an instant magic bullet, co-sell orchestration can significantly bolster your lead volumes, improve close rates, shorten sales cycles, and enhance ACVs. If you're aiming to demonstrate how partners can boost revenue, it's high time to embrace co-sell orchestration.”
The world is more complex than ever before. Since COVID, it’s no longer unusual to be required to show proof of ID, proof of vaccination, and maybe even verify your phone just to get into something as simple as a social event.
Complexity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs to wrangle complexity and provide new value to customers. On the other hand, there is a temptation to try to simplify everything to the most basic common denominator.
But simplicity isn’t always the answer. Managing complexity requires deep attention to customer care, service, and quality.
We need to embrace the complexity of the ecosystems. When we do this, we can find new ways of creating value for our customers.
Partner Teams are now poised to unlock ecosystem potential armed with co-sell motions that result in predictable revenue. Through business-case alignment with their Revenue Teams, Partner Teams, and Partners, they can finally receive the support required if they follow a planning and execution-based playbook that orchestrates and standardizes their approach to co-selling.
This article explains the why, what, and how of Co-Sell Orchestration.
In April 2020, Hopin had an unusual problem: too much demand. As the leading virtual events platform, we were swamped when the pandemic shut down every in-person event. Everywhere.
What sounds like heaven can turn into hell if you don’t scale fast enough. Many startups crumble under this insane pressure. They open the floodgates and are overwhelmed by sales and support requests. Customers have a bad experience. Your reputation is ruined. Game over.
Unless you call in the cavalry: partners.
Hiring, training, and managing sales and support people takes time. If your demand spikes, an in-house team might be too slow to respond. In those cases, agencies can help you reach scale in a matter of weeks, not months or years.
Does anyone remember the good old days of travel? When you could park, check-in, and board a plane in just 10 minutes? 🛫
Now, we have more tech, more options, and yet... less comfort. 😓
Air travel isn't the only industry affected. This shift is everywhere. From the apps on your phone to customer service experiences. Everything seems more complex, and customer service has gotten worse.
So, what's the solution?
Embrace complexity. Stare complexity in the face and take a radically human approach.
Instead of simplifying a productive complex system, you need to maintain its order. To get it to yield fruit season after season - more and better fruit if you’re doing it well - you have to continually tend it, prune it, water it, and protect it from damage, decay, and predatory critters.
In last month’s column, we talked about Co-Sell Orchestration as the new imperative for every partner team. We explained the different co-sell segments, Co-Sell Orchestration objectives, and key processes and roles, and responsibilities.
Today, we’re excited to present the story from the POV of the Revenue Team, starting with how Co-Sell Orchestration solves B2BSaaS’s biggest problem, the core elements of a Co-Sell Orchestration Solution, and a crawl, walk, run plan to get to the promised land.
By Allan Adler.
Collision 2023 was THE tech event of the year. It brought together tech from all areas — from hardware to software.
The main theme? AI. 🤖
Although it wasn’t the kind of AI you’re thinking of. The overarching theme was about bringing authentic intention to your business dealings.
This is the second article in a series that focuses on a quick list of prerequisites companies should consider before figuring out their monetization approach.
Check out Part 1 here.
The goal of this series is to look more deeply into the topic of tech partnerships, building on a series of conversations Allan Adler had with Avanish Sahai on Tidemark’s The Platform Journey podcast: Part 1 - Monetizing Technology Partner Ecosystems.
When it comes to event planning - don’t make the mistake of going at it alone.
Why would you spend 100% and get 100% returns when you could spend 50% and get 200% returns?
Everyone is striving to be unique while cutting costs, and the stress of delivering is real.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
When you partner on events, you get the opportunity to play together and win with others. It brings in more ROI, and it’s more fun!
By Hope Anderso
When it comes to event planning - don’t make the mistake of going at it alone.
Why would you spend 100% and get 100% returns, when you could spend 50% and get 200% returns?
Everyone is striving to be unique while cutting costs, and the stress of delivering is real. 🤯 But it doesn’t have to be that way.
When you partner on events, you get the opportunity to play together and win with others. It brings in more ROI, and it’s more fun!
By Hope Anderson.
Scrolling through LinkedIn, it's hard not to see Gong and its well-positioned brand.
What I saw this time though had a bit of a twist: Gong’s “Partner Month.” I immediately thought to myself: “Well, that’s interesting… a whole month? Just for partners? Heck yeah!”
To find out more, I spoke with Eddie O’Brien (SVP of Partnerships), Eran Aloni (EVP Ecosystem & BD), and Craig Hanson (Senior Director of Market Strategy) - all well-established professionals executing on the partnerships ethos.
But this isn’t just some feel-good story about who I got to learn from; it’s a tale of what happens when you listen to the customer, pay attention to their needs, execute on driving value to them, and never doing it alone.
By Will Taylor.
Today, let’s dig in and explore additional dimensions of co-selling and what we believe to be the most important job to be done by partner teams, namely, driving co-sell orchestration.
We’ll start with an overview of the different co-sell motions, each of which is unique.
Then, we’ll look at the three key objectives for co-sell orchestration, and we’ll close with a review of the core processes and organizational responsibilities that allow co-sell orchestration to drive B2B SaaS revenue team mastery.
By Allan Adler.
If trust is the economy of partnerships, referrals are the currency.
What is the point of building trust if it never results in a business outcome 🤷♀️?
That business outcome should be revenue. Sourced revenue is just another way of saying a referral that resulted in a sale.
While referral programs are one of the most powerful tools available, they've always had a fundamental problem.
Being top of mind 🧠.
Channel partners struggle to keep all of their partners and their solutions in their conversations. Software partners struggle to be top of mind at their channel partners. Both are missing out on opportunities for revenue.
By Jessie Shipman.
We've had enough "humbling" news in the world as of late, so I put together a piece on something I feel we have going for us that, well, just makes me feel damn good.
It's about where we come from.
I hope it inspires you to feel a part of something great here, as the best ecosystem in SaaS, is definitely the partner ecosystem!
-- Jared Fuller
The goal of this series is to look more deeply into the topic of tech partnerships, building on a series of conversations Allan Adler had with Avanish Sahai on Tidemark’s The Platform Journey podcast: Part 1 - Monetizing Technology Partner Ecosystems.
*This first article in the series focuses on why ecosystem-based tech partnerships are becoming increasingly important in the lifecycle of a technology company. I'll focus on where they fit in that lifecycle, and how they are different from traditional partner relationships that large companies have come to rely on.
By Dylan Charles.*
The tech channel is all about relationships. We naturally create connections with people and companies whose interests align with ours.
However, we may not realize that these informal relationships could lead to formal go-to-market partnerships that benefit both parties. Leveraging relationships to reach our revenue goals might not be our initial goal, but it can become a vital revenue generation, retention, and expansion strategy.
By Gwyn Edwards.
Airmeet is leading the charge on driving revenue through Event-led Growth (ELG). It’s part of a Nearbound strategy to use trust and influence to reach customers through the excitement of live, interactive online events.
By Will Taylor.
Car dealers have had special favors bestowed on them over the years. In many cases, they run the local chamber of commerce and hold a lot of sway in their local communities.
But the power of the dealer is beginning to erode. Last year, Ford said it would begin focusing more on online sales of electric cars.
More and more, cars – especially electric ones – will be built to order. The first trillion-dollar car company, Tesla, sells cars from small retail locations offering direct orders.
By Jay McBain
Google used to be king. It’s not anymore. Today, the winners are community platforms.
Before the internet, getting connected to information was hard. Google made it easy. But as the digital age matured and people adapted and learned to game search engines, the value of “how” information decreased.
Now, a major shift has happened in the digital world; the dominant question has moved from “how” to “who.”
There’s too much SEO-optimized, pre-manufactured content. People don’t need another 5-step guide to starting a partner program or another listicle.
Instead, they need context-specific information.
They need to know how to solve a specific problem, within a specific context.
Just last year, we reported that people were using Google to search Reddit.
AI is taking that a step further.
AI Platforms want to train their models to answer context-specific questions, but the only way they can do that is by learning from authentic, community conversations.
In the “who” economy, value won’t come from “how” information. Value will come from the things that are authentic, human, and non-manufactured. Information from nodes of trust.
Want to know how valuable all of the “who” information is?
Just look at how much people are willing to pay for Reddit’s API.
Have you ever engaged in an enablement program that seemed to be all over the place? You know the one, where you're being asked to do a training, or webinar, or engage with some piece of content but you have no idea why? It's likely that the culprit for this scattered enablement approach is a lack of operations.
In the same way that RevOps is the foundation of sales enablement, so to is PartnerOps foundational to Partner Enablement.
By Jessie Shipman.
There are a lot of different ways you can work with partners.
Two of the more common ways that are getting a lot of opportunities right now are referred to as Channel & Ecosystem Partnerships. There are, of course, a lot of similarities between these kinds of partnerships, but they’re also quite different.
Many companies fail to reach the full potential of their ecosystem because they’re trying to treat them in the same manner as their channel partners. This doesn’t work and is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
When trying to build a partnership program from scratch, I ran into this realization. Due to our position in the market and the maturity of our company, we naturally started working with ecosystem partnerships over channel partnerships.
But when trying to learn and teach myself about partnerships, everything I found alluded to building a program “channel style.” This hindered the growth of my partnership program.
I was essentially trying to run a diesel car on gasoline 🤦♂️.
So why doesn’t it work? Let me break it down for you.
by Fredrik Mellander.
This title 👆 should be THE North Star career aspiration job for all Partnership Pros.
We believe that in the next 24 months, the core skill set of folks who aspire to the C-Suite, and to become CEOs for that matter, will be the ability to unlock the potential of the Ecosystem that surrounds target ICPs and customers.
The ecosystem language has advantages. As evidence, recently (and subtly) partner tech company Crossbeam changed its main tagline from Partner-led Growth (PLG) to Ecosystem-led Growth (ELG).
ELG is another way of describing the Nearbound approach that has become a necessity as the ROI of outbound and inbound decline.
By Allan Adler.
For the first time ever, Bitly has hired a VP of Partnerships. Despite the economy, they’re betting big on partnerships as a growth opportunity.
Kevin Raheja, ex-HubSpot and ex-Typeform, took the job to help build out Bitly’s tech partnerships and enable more use cases for the product.
I asked Raheja why he thought Bitly was investing in partnerships now.
He pointed out a few major trends:
- Marketing and sales channels are getting much more expensive
- Customers are asking for products to integrate with each other
- Partner ecosystems are a huge (compounding) competitive advantage
Every company should be watching these trends.
In the months and years to come, we will see traditional channels become more saturated, customers demand more and more personalized, in-app experiences, and competition becomes even more fierce.
I think CEOs are starting to realize that if they don't have a partnership strategy, their competitors will. And that should terrify any founder or CEO that isn't thinking about that.
-Kevin Raheja, VP of Partnerships at Bitly
Bitly's investment is just another indication that companies are starting to realize and place their bets that this will be the decade of the ecosystem.
This is only the beginning.
Congrats Kevin!
Read the full press release here.
Have you ever found partner tech you thought would be a game-changer for your organization? But then you try to get budget, and no one else agrees? You’re not alone.
Sarah Hertzberg, Head of Partnerships at Gem, stumbled on Reveal and knew she had to get it for her organization. The odds were slim, but she saw the value and decided to go all-in on convincing her leadership it was a no-brainer.
This is how Sarah Hertzberg won budget for partner tech, and how you can too.
The importance of customer experience in driving a company's success has been widely acknowledged. Numerous research studies, customer surveys, and real-life examples have highlighted the importance of customer experience over time.
Top research firms like Forrester, Gartner, and McKinsey have discovered a connection between customer experience and increased revenue, retention, and loyalty. We have all witnessed and learned the success stories of customer-centric companies such as Apple, Amazon, Ikea, and Hilton.
By Bernhard Friedrichs.
Indirect sales channels have long played second fiddle to direct sales, which hogs both the attention and budget. To get C-Suite support and investment for your channel program, you must prove its impact on the bottom line.
To improve your powers of persuasion, you need to present the right metrics in the right way.
By Andy Drummond.
This is the fourth article in a series I've been writing about perfecting your Partnering Reference Architecture (aka The Partenrverse).
If you haven't been keeping up, check out the first three here:
- Introducing the Partnering Reference Architecture
- Your CRM Is The Center Of Your Partnering Systems
- The Partnering Reference Architecture: Managing Your CRM
Now, let's dive into connecting your CRM to the Partnerverse.By Brian Hattaway.
A roundup of partner news:
- Microsoft exec becomes CTO of fast-growing Google Cloud partner
- HP's business model is designed for partners
- Cisco is investing over $100 million in partners and experience
“The end is near,” says Scott Brinker, VP of Ecosystems at HubSpot.
It’s hard to believe a time when you couldn’t go to a website, put items in your cart, flip through multiple pages, and come back to the same cart you left. But just two decades ago, that wasn’t possible.
Cookies began as a tool to enhance the experience of the internet. Since then, they’ve become embroiled in controversy.
So what does a world look like without third-party data?
Scott Brinker and Juan Mendoza took to boldly answer this question in a three-part series of Big Martech.
“Software and hardware providers should be doubling down on their partner ecosystems,”
says Thierry Depeyrot, executive VP at Bain & Co.
In an interview with Channel Futures, Thierry reflected on the state of the economy and shared his belief that,
“The channel is important. It has become even more important as we deal with uncertainty and try to grow despite the challenges ahead.”
He’s optimistic that a downturn creates an opportunity “to rediscover the value of the channel” as a “variable resource.”
As companies face the downturn, he warns them to steer away from looking at things too transactionally. A few points of discount won’t save you. “It’s a lubricant…” but you still need to have a foundation for “the right way of doing business, the right enablement and support and engagement.”
TL;DR:
- A downturn is an opportunity to rediscover the value of the channel.
- Keep a positive-sum mentality, and don’t give in to the temptation to become over-transactional.
- Double down on your partners as a long-term game.
Good vibes attract good partners.
When it comes to implementing a partner program, there has to be a culture that has fostered psychological safety to see it through to its long-term benefits.
Partner enablement doesn’t work if psychological safety hasn’t been fostered not only internally, i.e., that partners can be trusted, but also with our partners, that we can be trusted in their organization.
Without the underlying psychological safety that your partners can trust your intentions, you’ll find yourself always battling against that trust before they can ever learn about how you’re better together.
Be aware of the vibe that your organization is putting out into the world.
By Jessie Shipman.
Brian Hattaway’s article: Your CRM Is The Center Of Your Partnering Systemssparked a ton of debate about the role CRMs and PRMs play in your partner tech stack. Honestly, I was surprised at the amount of energy the partnership community had regarding Brian’s article.
Brian urged partner pros to focus on the task, not the tech. If the tech doesn’t integrate into your mission, get rid of it.
This isn’t controversial; this is just sound business sense. Partner pros, we've been through this before. Let's not repeat the same mistakes of the past.
By Bob Jones.
We know the insights, and we know the desired outcomes; now is the time to define and build the robust playbooks and associated training programs needed to bridge insights to outcomes, the single greatest challenge partnership programs face today.
Raise your hand if you are fatigued by the ocean of fluffy partnership content in the market that focuses solely on surface-level topics such as “Top Partnership Insights” or “Key Outcomes of a Partnership Program.”
This isn’t 2020, and partnership practitioners don’t need any more content on what insights they need or what the target outcomes are: they need to know how to bridge the gap between them.
Tools like Crossbeam, Reveal, and others make surfacing incredibly powerful insights trivial. Now, more than ever, partnership programs are being charged with closed-won partner-delivered ARR; the “insights” and “outcomes” are crystal clear and readily accessible.
By Chris Lavoie
Many partnering tools aren't ready for prime time and can't scale. Partnering tools today are based on a bad structure. I will show you what's wrong, how to fix it, and what to look for in future tools.
By Brian Hattaway.
Last week, I shared the 5 key principles of the Partner Reference Architecture.
Today, I'm going deeper on principle #1: Your CRM is the center of your partnering universe (a.k.a The Partnerverse)
It's the most basic and foundational principle. It starts by asking:
Where should I build my partner program?
By https://partnerhacker.com/author/brian/
Should you partner with a competitor?
If your gut reaction was an immediate “NO!,” I can honestly say you aren’t too far off from my original thoughts on the subject.
However, I have learned it's not as straightforward of an answer as I once thought.
Why would I want to help out the competition?
If you are struggling with that immediate, and adamant, "NO" response, I challenge you to remain open for only the next 5 minutes as I share my thoughts on the benefits and challenges of partnering with competitors.
If you hang with me, I will also share some practical tips for making these "risky" partnerships succeed.
By Janelle Gates.
I've been podcasting for a while. When I was at Apple we did over 100 episodes of FieldPods to bring new ideas and information to field engineering team, from the field engineering team, and I just finished recording my 9th episode of Selling Together.
One thing I've noticed Is that when folks come on to a podcast, they posture as an expert.
Which is great.
Usually, we want expertise in interview-style podcasting. But the episodes with the most positive feedback and highest download rates, are the episodes that contain stories, not expertise.
By Jessie Shipman.
Co-marketing isn’t new.
Companies have been effectively partnering forever. What’s new is the infrastructure that supports Partner-Led Everything, or the use of partnerships across a company’s entire go-to-market strategy. This allows marketers to layer a Nearbound strategy on top of Inbound and Outbound.
A few weeks ago, Will Taylor and I “infiltrated” a B2B marketing conference to get insight into the marketer’s sentiment on partnerships.
A dozen or so on-the-street interviews later, and we were pleasantly surprised by how many marketers were more than happy to talk about partnerships. In this article, we will lay out our findings.
By Micaela Richmond.
What are the key principles involved in the ideal partnering reference architecture?
Over the next few weeks, I will share the principles of good partnership systems design. I'll show you the guidelines, principles, and standards that are needed to set up a scalable partnering program.
I've learned the hard way - through trial and error. Now I want to offer you these learnings so you can assemble the best-of-breed systems to scale your partnership program to the enterprise level quickly.
What are the key principles involved in the ideal partnering reference architecture? Here’s a preview - and we’ll dig into each of these principles in more detail in subsequent posts.
By Brian Hattaway.
I believe that in the near future, software companies will be run by two CEOs.
- CEO#1 will be the inside-out-leader, facing the company, managing the portfolio of company investments and assets, owning Product, Finance, and HR.
- CEO #2 will be the outside-in-leader, facing the market, owning all outside communities of interest, including Customers, Prospects, Partners, and Individual Influencers, as well as key functions like Sales, Marketing, and Business Development/Partnerships
They will truly be Co-CEOs and will share critical functions like vision, planning, strategy, and culture.
By Allan Adler.
Better onboarding and enablement are two of the key use cases companies use Superglue for. And over the last year or so, we’ve learned a lot about the crucial role they both play in driving partner-led revenue. In this post, I’d like to share some of what we’ve discovered.
It might seem obvious that partner onboarding is something to be taken seriously. And personally, I think that many companies do take it very seriously. But even so, many of them still don’t take it seriously enough.
Why?
Because you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression - and onboarding is where you make or break your partner’s perception of you. Your onboarding process sets the stage for everything that comes afterward, and if you ace it, that will open plenty of doors.
By Rob Rebholz.
For any Tech CEO, having a proactive partner network that drives sales of their product is a fantastically alluring shiny object.
The dream of low-cost customer acquisition too often drives madness. The attitude is often “How hard can partnerships be?”
That mindset is a road to expensive learning that can be avoided.
This over-simplification is evident in small and large companies, new CEOs, and experienced teams.
Here are some of the things to consider early in your partnering journey.
By Donagh Kiernan.
You continue to be the only person I’ve ever heard of who sold 40% of the revenue in the history of a company with more than $100M in ARR.
That was the general counsel at Eloqua. We had a good relationship, and he was blown away by the success I was having selling marketing automation into a market that barely knew what to do with it yet.
My success was not accidental. I had stumbled into something that, at the time, didn’t have a name, process, or any tech to support and scale it. I stumbled into the power of Nearbound Sales.
By Jill Rowley.
That is certainly a question...
Many in the partner community will argue that commissions or spiffs are a poor motivator and that they should go away.
I was one of those people.
But the great thing about being a part of an incredible community is the ability to think again out loud, and to reconsider previously held beliefs without fear of judgment or ridicule.
So here goes my argument for why commissions are actually critical to any partner enablement program focused on agency or channel partnerships.
By Jessie Shipman
Digital Bridge Partners Announces the First Standardized Nearbound Process for Monetizing Tech Partnerships - The GoToEco Outbound Referral Playbook
By Allan Adler.
Business leaders new to the partner channel are often perplexed when they sign up partners and revenue doesn’t automatically flow. They’re under the mistaken impression that it’s like turning on a spigot.
Signing up partners for your channel program is only part of the battle. You’ve also got to engage them and get them to close business.
💡 At the end of the day, your channel exists to make your business money.
If what you’re doing is not turning into revenue, you are either not working with the right partners or need to rethink your engagement plan.
So, what should you be doing to engage partners?
It depends.
That’s unlikely to be the answer you’re looking for, but there’s no silver bullet. That’s because what works depends on the partner – not only the organization but the individual working inside the partner organization.
Let me break it down for you.
By Gwyn Edwards.
Selling is both an art and a science.
Great sellers are those who possess certain characteristics that set them apart from the rest.
By Jessie Shipman
One year ago this month, the GoToEco Framework was born. Since then, it seems like everyone is talking about the power of the ecosystem, the decade of the ecosystem, ecosystem-led growth, PL[X], you name it. There is a growing conviction across the entire C-Suite that ecosystems may be the next big lever of growth as traditional, direct GTMs experience increasing headwinds. And there’s data to support those convictions, such as McKinsey’s famous projection that ecosystems will drive $80 trillion or ⅓ of total global revenue up from less than 2% today.
By Allan Adler.
Two years ago, the IncentivePilot team discovered that true gamification (not just points and leaderboards) was the key to partner activation.
Our hypothesis was that we could get more eyeballs if we had a little fun. What we didn’t expect was that engagement is so high with games that reward budgets can be cut by 90% or more.
Virtually overnight, we transformed $150k+ programs with low engagement into $25k programs with staggering returns on investment (ROI).
In fact, all the gamified programs for which we have access to the data have achieved from 10x to over 300x (no, that’s not a typo) ROI for our customers.
By Andrew Phelps.
So you think you've gone through all the steps to establish a successful partnership?
- You have a common ICP. Check.
- There's a clear mutual value. Check.
- You've agreed to terms on a partner contract. Check.
But did you negotiate, at all, who, when, and on what, each company's customer-facing teams would be enabled?
A partner enablement plan is a critical component in the process of creating new partnerships and ensuring their long-term success.
A partner enablement plan outlines the steps and activities necessary to onboard, train, and support a new partner. This plan is essential in ensuring that both parties are aligned in their goals and expectations and that the new partner has the necessary tools, resources, and knowledge to promote and sell the company's products or services effectively.
By Jessie Shipman.
The byproduct of SaaS companies transitioning to being Eco-led (vs being Sales-led) is a massive influx of partnership professionals in the workforce. This is particularly true at the IC level (>150k PMs/PAMs in SaaS alone) as partnership departments take on record revenue contribution expectations (up to 60-70%).
This begs the question: Who is going to train all these IC’s?
In contrast to sales professional training, which is largely established given its long history and the availability of powerful training resources & tools like Gong, Showpad, etc., training for partnership practitioners is still in its infancy.
The consequences of inadequate training for your partnership IC’s in a normal year would be grim, but in a down year could be catastrophic. You need your PMs/PAMs to deliver big results in 2023, and by offering them world-class training and mentoring, they just might do it.
By Chris Lavoie.
When you launch a new integration, do you tease the release, celebrate with fanfare, and involve partnerships across every aspect of your organization?
G2 and ZoomInfo did. And they crushed it.
We sat down to talk with Rachel Gianfredi about how her team at G2 partnered with Zoominfo to absolutely nail their integration launch.
By Aaron Olson
A couple of weeks ago I made an analogy about sales and billiards. But I couldn’t let it go. The correlations just kept spilling out. So here’s a continuation of it.
When the relationships with sellers are strong, support teams can be seen as a valuable gateway to more sales opportunities. In the pool (billiards) analogy, support teams can open up a new kind of shot that couldn’t be done without them.
Think about the role of support teams as another ball in the shot-line. So now, instead of a two-ball shot to the pocket, there are three.
Let's say for the sake of example that the support team is now the cue ball, the 5-ball is the seller, the 9-ball is still the customer, and the corner pocket is still the sale. So it’s the support team to salesperson, salesperson to the customer, customer to the sale.
It’s a combo-shot.
This gives the seller the potential to make a shot that could not have been made before, but it's a high-precision shot.
Imagine a marketing support specialist helping a sales rep craft a focused email specific to a campaign and customer within the seller's book of business. This could open an opportunity that may not happen if the seller were to craft the email on their own. Marketing (cue ball) helps the seller (5-ball) make a connection with their customer (8-ball) to move them towards the sale (corner pocket).
Having the ability to make a combo-shot can be exciting for both the seller and the support team, but it comes with a major caveat.
By Jessie Shipman.
Like jenga stacks and sandcastles, partnership ecosystems are hard to build, but pretty easy to ruin. And some of the most common mistakes people make have little to do with the technical stuff.
Most often, it’s the human side of partner management, the relationship building, and the way their partners feel (more on that word later - it’s important). So, to help well-intentioned partner managers avoid making small mistakes with potentially big consequences, I’ve made this list of the top 7.
By Rob Rebholz.
Since I joined isendu, the challenges from top management have been to: increase brand awareness and boost sales.
I needed a way to learn and accomplish this quickly, so I started documenting how to accomplish these tasks. Here is what I learned.
Let's dive in.
By Gabriele Curvietto.
This week at the amazing Partner Ecosystem Kickoff 2023 event put on by Partner Hacker and Partner Stack, we introduced two playbooks containing proven best practices for scaling referrals to and from Tech Partners. This link will take you to our slides and this link to the live recording of the pitch.
The two playbooks are linked to GoToEco Referral Flywheel model below that we introduced late last year:
The first playbook is designed to deliver leads at scale to your tech partners; the second one creates revenue by generating leads from your tech partners' CS teams back to you.
These playbooks have had amazing results. A well-known B2B SaaS company case study demonstrates substantive ARR, NRR, NPS, and retention outcomes.
By Allan Adler.
The month of January, for me, has been all about metrics.
It started with Architecture - if you can't track it you can't measure it and if you can't get it into the core model you'll have a hard time scaling.
Last week we discussed what I really want - filters by Program and Partner across all primarily leading metrics. It's a clear call back to the whole 'architecture' thing I started with. I also kicked off a fun new weekly partnership with PartnerHacker so you can also read it here (or ... literally here... if you're seeing this on PartnerHacker).
This week we're looking forward into what I believe is a growing trend for Partnership metrics in 2023, built around the core tenant that 'Trust is the new data', literally the tag-line of the PartnerHacker crew,
Here's the top-line summary...
By Aaron Howerton.
Partner leaders are constantly hyping up the value of marketing together, selling together, and innovating together, but are they living out the partner principles in their own org?
So often, I see a podcast from a company I love in which the CEO fails to share it on his LinkedIn page. And the employees fail to share cool things happening in the company they work for.
Why?
If you believe that partnerships are the best path forward – start by partnering with your employees. Get your CEO to share his own podcast and help foster a culture of employees sharing company updates on LinkedIn.
By Greg Wasserman.
"It Is not the critic who counts. Not the woman who points out how the strong woman stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the woman who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly. Who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends herself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows In the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, If she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory, nor defeat."
– Teddy Roosevelt (sort of).
There's two sides to partnerships
I first learned of this quote from the great Brené Brown. It is the muse of her book, Daring Greatly, where the major theme is vulnerability.
But every word of this drips with the partner professional's experience.
Partner professionals must be two-sided partners.
By Jessie Shipman.
Leverage Points are high-impact low-effort strategies to improve the way a system is designed. Hunting for leverage points is an art (not a science) and can be an incredibly powerful tool in partnerships, where efficiency is table stakes.
By Andrew Porter
Hey there, Partnership Managers!
Are you trying to recruit every single partner under the sun?
STOP IT.
While it may seem like a good idea at first, trust me, it's not. In fact, most partnership managers find that the majority of their program's revenue comes from just a tiny fraction of super-involved partners.
By Dylan Connor Fernandez.
How much goodwill do you have in the partnership ecosystem community?
How much goodwill does your company have with its partners?
These are two questions that at first glance appear conceptual and ephemeral. However, I think that unpacking what goodwill means in partnerships and communities can tell us a lot about what it takes to build great relationships in the neighborhood of partner ecosystem pros and between companies that seek to GoToEco together.
By Allan Adler.
Acquisition costs – it's something all organizations are subjected to when they are growing their customer base. Acquisition costs are non-negotiable when it comes to maintaining and expanding your business. Though customer acquisition will always be a priority, it doesn’t need to be such a steep expense. Reducing acquisition costs is attainable and surprisingly simpler than many organizations realize.
By Alex Richards
Gaining cross-department buy-in to partnerships is critical to the success of any partner program. Without their buy-in, you will be on an island with limited resources and make little progress driving impact.
By Justin Graci.
2023 is already ramping up to be a crazy year, with layoffs, IT spending pull-backs, and tech budget freezes. We’re only one week in and it’s looking nasty out there. One can feel nervousness in the air and the desire on people’s part to look for safe harbors and to keep their heads down.
Certainly, caution in the face of crisis is sound, but it's super important for those of us focused on partner ecosystems not to lose sight of the golden rule that should guide all of our actions: Adding value to customers and prospects by leveraging the partner ecosystem.By Allan Adler.
Over the past year, I’ve immersed myself in the partnerships community. I learned that the fractured and individualistic way we’ve been doing business isn’t sustainable. I pored over the statistics, exchanged insights and experiences, and started building relationships with potential partners.
By Eric Sangerma.
📚 These partnership books have benefited me tremendously by providing helpful frameworks to approach partnership programs systematically and structurally.
Would love to hear your book list! 🎉🎊✨🎈. Let me know in the comments to this post on LinkedIn.
By Yansong Pang.
Taking the suggestion from the PartnerHacker crew, I came across Firneo and decided to invest in myself and go through the 8-week Partnership program.
Most of us fall into partnerships; we aren’t formally trained on it, and in my case, even provided support for a role we're expected to perform.
By Greg Wasserman.
Creating an aligned sales message is a lot like pool. Not the swimming kind, the 8-ball-corner-pocket kind. The seemingly simple act of knocking one ball into another, actually requires thought, strategy, and deliberate action. The result is a predicted outcome, ball in the pocket - and real players call the pocket.
Sales is no different.
By Jessie Shipman.
In 1850, French economist Frédéric Bastiat said that looking at unseen losses is essential to consider when making financial calculations.
Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. – Frédéric Bastiat
Bastiat was a master at thinking about opportunity costs. This insight applies to SaaS companies as much as economies.
For example, when we close a big customer, we celebrate 🎉 ! But do we celebrate the customers who didn’t churn with the same gusto? How much time is spent thinking about the customer we didn’t even know we alienated, or the markets we didn’t know we missed out on?
We don’t see those costs unless we really look 👀. The best businesses think about the unseen impacts of their strategies – and as a result, they unlock revenue others didn’t even know was hiding in their ecosystem 💸.
By Aaron Olson.
I have bad news for C-suite leaders who think that organizations designed with a scarcity mindset and traditional hierarchical command and control structures will thrive. B2B SaaS companies that don’t evolve to incorporate community-oriented, trust-based networks and ecosystems in their business are unsustainable and will face serious growth headwinds.
Such companies will not grow, will not get additional funding, will not attract the best, most creative people, and will shrink away in the next three to five years.
By Allan Adler.
Organizations are no longer questioning if they need an enablement strategy, and how to justify programs. Instead, it’s about how to enable teams most effectively. Because of this, sales enablement has surged, experiencing a 343% increase in adoption over the last five years [1].
No matter the scale or method of the strategy, enablement still requires budget and resources like any other business unit.
As enablement continues to grow as a field, and new platforms and analytics become available promising business results like never before, many leaders are trying to figure out: What is an appropriate enablement budget?
By Jessie Shipman.
Since September, I have written five articles discussing the opportunity and value of treating tech partner integrations like products.
- Overcoming the Homelessness Problem
- The Power in GoToEco Bundles
- GoToEco for Sales
- Think like a CRO (with Account-based Marketing)
- GoToEco in 2025 (for Customer Success)
What’s the common denominator in all of these articles? Productize your tech partner solutions and manage them as products to drive NRR and ARR.
By Allan Adler.
A successful partner ecosystems partners require an extension of your company team culture – that’s not an easy thing to do but it will drive success.
CaptionHub has built a successful ecosystem that has delivered 50% YoY growth and delivers over half of its revenue. The success of that largely lies in us considering the teams of our partners as an extension of our own.
That means building very close relationships to drive success with sales teams, marketing teams, and development teams – all the way to the top. Building, extending, and joining two or more separate cultures takes attention, trust, time, and effort. This article will touch on some of the key success factors and drivers we have seen in the last seven years and also some of the risks we’ve identified along the way.
Having built an ecosystem-led go-to-market model from the ground up - we’re acutely aware that the success of any partnership is enabled by considering our partner teams an extension of our own. At times that has felt like anything but scalable, but it can be extremely effective: although it requires as much effort as building out one’s own culture, the results are worth it.
Ultimately when we’re building those relationships and processes, we pay as close attention as we do to our internal processes, if not more. This is, after all, about us extending and joining two or more separate cultures.
Successful ecosystem partners fundamentally rely on your company expanding your brand - and as a subset of that, your culture. Extending your sales team and culture is not an easy thing to do – it’s far from easy building a strong internal culture! So, I’m going to say from the outset here that there are no shortcuts or hacks to making this happen overnight or with any guarantee at all.
By James Jameson.
There’s a lot wrong with how most B2B companies go to market. One of the central problems and sources of many of the challenges facing CROs, CMOs, and CCOs is, to put it bluntly, narcissism. Engaging with the market based on self-interest and manipulation frequently results in customer, prospect, and ecosystem underperformance.
There’s a better way. It requires a shift away from self-interest and isolation; it involves moving from GoToMarket to GoToEco.
By Allan Adler.
In the business world, the customer is always king. But what about your business's partners?
Your partners are just as important as your customers, and if you want to keep them around, you need to treat them like customers, too.
Here's why partner retention is so important and how you can keep your partners happy.
By Dylan Connor Fernandez.
In this inspiring book, Sam Jacobs uses his experience to build the case that nice guys do not, in fact, finish last. Compared to past eras, the internet has made starting a business easier. Where in the past you might’ve had to do business with people you didn’t like, today that’s not the case. Jacobs believes Kind Folks Finish First, and his book is an anthem for a new era of business built on kindness, abundance, and genuine relationships.
By Micaela Richmond.
Those who have heard me talk about building partnerships know about my thesis on the three pillars of partnership success. The premise is that no alliance can ever flourish if we cannot master the following three areas: (i) Operational Excellence, (ii) Tech & Sales Enablement, and (iii) GoToMarket alignment.
If one pillar fails, the other two cannot withstand the weight, and consequently, the partnership will eventually succumb. There are now in the market partner-oriented SaaS solutions trying to address the challenges of building some of these pillars.
I want to discuss a bit more about these three pillars and also share some of my own discoveries on the solutions in the market that are helping partner organizations improve their operations.
By Mauricio Rojas Hacker.
Our attention spans are tiny.
Minuscule even.
We've been trained to scroll after 10 seconds.
If your partner learning strategy isn't trying to conform to this level of attention, you're in big trouble.
Because of this, micro-learning can be a great fit to complement an overall learning strategy.
Micro-learning can be most powerful as a stand-alone, but should still follow the principles of any quality training development.
By Jessie Shipman.
Developing cross-department buy-in for ecosystem strategy really comes down to one skill - being a great storyteller.
The idea of a successful partnership ecosystem is often built on external stories we hear about other companies finding success through robust partnership networks. Those stories begin to shape an idea of what our story could look like, but they also tend to focus on the results.
This is often where the problems begin.
When people talk about SaaS, they often focus on a few key metrics: Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Total Lifetime Value (TLV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC Ratio), and Churn. We could pull other things in, but these four tend to rule the roost in my experience.
Departments will drill down into specific measures of success that create the foundation of these concepts. For partnerships, results are often connected to these points as ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ of success. This gets leadership excited, and they start to plan based on what they see as solid evidence in the data.
💡Data is critical but, by itself, fails to capture the complexity of the journey.
Partnership professionals face an additional layer of a challenge because even after 23 years of SaaS there is not yet a universal understanding of the value and purpose of Partner ecosystems.
To get everyone on the boat, sitting in the right seat, and moving faster, you need to tell a good story.
By Aaron Howerton.
For the past few months, I’ve been living, eating, and breathing educational content about partnerships. As I broaden my horizons, I like to share my #PartnershipsTakeaways on LinkedIn.
I’ve received quite a bit of interest from people outside of the community. But there’s a sense of hesitation in their questions and comments. I remember feeling the same before I went all in on partnerships.
With my past doubts fresh in my mind, here is some advice I'd like to share.
By Eric Sangerma.
If you didn’t attend the PLX Summit 2022, you can view the replay to access the best content on how partner ecosystems are becoming instantiated across B2BSaaS Product, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams. Partner Ecosystems are no longer a company department; they are a strategy, they are a business model, and they are the future of SaaS GTMs.
By Allan Adler.
Imagine this: You’ve integrated into a partner-led organization where growth happens seamlessly. Your salesforce is distributed through the partnership ecosystem across the globe. Your marketing team enlists your partners to build narratives that win. Your product team co-innovates with partners to delight the customer.
By involving your partners from day one, you create forward momentum and set the growth flywheel in motion.
Getting this flywheel spinning isn't easy. It takes forethought and commitment to embed your partner's fingerprints into every facet of your organization, including the most critical element: your product.
The problem most talented partnership leaders face is expanding the organization's view of partner-led growth. They are up against stale mindsets that if the product is great, partners will come, and the flywheel will take off. They tend to think that if they build the product they've been dreaming of, it's bound to get the flywheel in motion.
Wrong!
Building the flywheel doesn't start with your product - it starts with your partners.
By Gary Sabin.
Brains are always learning.
Survival adaptation, living efficiency, and time to value, are all considerations when a person is naturally in their environment.
When adults are asked to learn intentionally as a requirement of their job, they go through a series of calculations to determine if the learning will help them be better at their job, be more efficient, or help them make more money.
They also can tell pretty quickly if the learning is useless, or important only to the entity requiring it of them. And then they learn to move as quickly through the task as possible, to fulfill the requirement, without retaining or applying any information at all.
Even if they've done the calculation and the learning seems relevant, their attention is usually short-lived. Particularly for quota-carrying individuals. And even more so for organizations that have a culture of "this is how it's always been done". For this reason, many organizations have adopted micro-learning as a solution to short attention spans.
By Jessie Shipman
Check out www.getfluincy.com
There's no doubt that the partnership ecosystem is changing the way companies go-to-market. In fact, it's really no longer a question of whether or not your company should partner with others, but rather how you do so effectively.
If you've been hesitant or have put off partnering with other companies because of concerns about time, cost efficiency, or quality control—or if you just don't think it will work for your business—then this article is for you!
By Dylan Connor (Dyls) Fernandez
It’s 2025 and your CRO, CPO, and head of Customer Success have just completed a QBR with the CEO and Board reviewing the results of their GoToEco strategy. This was a stellar review. The hallmark was that growth in net new logo and NRR are at all-time highs.
How did you get here?
By Allan Adler.
A few years from now, competing companies will get replaced with competing ecosystems. We will all need to find our place in this new, more cooperative way of producing value for our customers.
But not everyone has what it takes to build a career in partnerships, let alone to lead partnership initiatives. Partnership ecosystems have a logic of their own.
Let’s talk about the interpersonal skills that you need in order to attract partners and build a good relationship with them. Please note that I don’t want to scare anyone away. Soft skills can be learned too! But you have to take them as seriously as every other part of partnership building.
By Eric Sangerma.
In partner sales enablement there is a paradigm of the story that is told, versus the story that needs to be told.
Every sales rep at some point in their career has taken training or has been presented with content on a product, service, or skill set that is considered required. There's often a naughty list of those who have not completed training monitored and sent out by sales leaders, whose concern is to keep their people off the list.
If the enablement evaluation stops at completion, then all you have is a sales compliance report. There is no success story for TL&D in training compliance for sales.
By Jessie Shipman.
Driving desired outcomes from your channel ecosystem is challenging for any partner leader. Strategic alignment and joint business planning will not provide the momentum needed for your partners to generate pipeline, lead pre-sales engagements, own project delivery/implementation, provide technical support, or drive product adoption.
Partner incentives play a crucial role in driving behavior within your ecosystem, and a solid partner program should include a wide variety of them. A well-designed partner incentives program must consider how to help your partner become more profitable as a whole and also think about how to motivate teams and individuals within your partners.
By Mauricio Rojas Hacker.
Who is excited about PLXSummit? Be sure to register here, if you haven’t already done so. I’m lucky enough to be presenting 3 times on Sales - Day 4 - and Success - Day 5. I am especially excited about my keynote on GoToEco for CROs - here’s a preview if you just can’t wait!
In preparation, I’ve been getting ready to tell a story to GTM leaders, the vast majority of whom focus on and operate Direct-led GTMs. These leaders face an existential crisis in 2022, which is best depicted in my Dilemma matrix below.
By Allan Adler.
Let’s talk about what your partner program can learn from YouTube and Netflix.
Why does YouTube keep reporting gains year after year while growth at Netflix remains stagnant?
Netflix can’t compete with YouTube’s long tail of creators and fans.
On YouTube, you can find anything. There are documentaries, feature films, unboxing videos, and videos to help you fix your sink - any keyword you can think of has hundreds of videos dedicated to it.
In contrast, Netflix only allows a few key players to produce new videos. Every video on their platform has to appeal to a large enough audience to make it worth the investment.
YouTube has a massive inventory that includes videos with only a handful of views. They give small-name creators the same opportunity to use their publishing suite as they do to the big players. Any one of the niche creators is small potatoes, but combined they garner tens of millions of views.
The long tail is about the power of the little guy in two unique ways:
- The cumulative power of many small creators adds up to more than a few big ones.
- The next big creator is more likely to emerge from the long tail than be discovered by company execs.
By tapping into the long tail, YouTube gets both of these benefits, whereas Netflix faces constant pressure to have mega hits and pick the right winners.
By Gary Sabin.
It’s no surprise at this point that partner programs are a force multiplier for B2B SaaS companies. There are countless articles out there with compelling stats about the value of investing in or expanding a partner program to contribute to your growth, so I won’t bore you with those.
But what I’ve seen in my own experience, as well as with other folks in the ecosystem networks I’m in, is that one major challenge is implementing a ‘partner-first mindset’ as an organization.
By Justin Graci.
In 2003, Impartner built the first Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software on the market.
PRM has grown along the way, but only recently has the category emerged as one of the most crucial in the B2B SaaS market.
There are three key shifts that explain why:
- Shift one - The SaaS explosion
- Shift two - Premium expectations
- Shift three - The long tail
When an economic recession is added to these shifts, it forms a perfect storm for many companies.
Let’s explore each shift a little deeper.
By Isaac Morehouse.
I had the opportunity to talk with Chris Messina of Thrum.co.
Chris recently wrote an article on PartnerHacker about what we can learn about partnerships from studying the Green Berets.
Chris takes insights from his background in law enforcement and the military and applies it to his work in partnerships.
By Chris Messina and Aaron Olson
- Do you have a list of top prospects, or target accounts, that overlap with your partners’ customers?
- Do you have joint solutions, use cases, and collateral, and have closed ‘joint products’ deals with your most important ICPs?
- Do you have a way of running Account Based Marketing to sell joint solutions that can produce a Demand Waterfall, like the one below, measuring progress from active, engaged, qualified through to closed/won?
By Allan Adler.
When you get a new iPhone, you feel something.
It’s more than the features. It’s the packaging, the way the box slides open, the sleek visuals, and everything you’ve come to associate with Apple.
You don’t need to do a side-by-side feature comparison. You trust that the latest iPhone will have more or less the same features as competitors. You pick it because of how it makes you feel. You pick it because it is a premium experience.
If you’ve ever purchased a car through Carvana you probably won’t ever go back to a dealership. Carvana makes you feel loved through the whole thing. Dealers don’t. They might offer the exact same car, but the car isn’t the only thing that goes into your buying decision.
Companies like Apple and Carvana have raised the bar and created an expectation of delight among consumers.
Everyone wants to feel like a first-class passenger.
By Robb Franks.
In 2017 I worked for one of the ABM market leaders and pioneers at Madison Logic. We had an opportunity to join pre-Adobe Marketo's relatively new pay-to-play partner program, "Accelerate." Jumping in was no small decision, as it meant a $200k annual investment and me putting my ass on the line to convince our executive team to take the risk.
By Chris Messina.
It can sometimes feel like detective work, but here are some best practices for measuring enablement success depending on the sales environment, in their order of effectiveness.
By Jessie Shipman.
Everyone’s trying to crack the code on how to get more referrals FROM agencies. What better way to do this than for you to prove your value to agencies first?
Last week we heard directly from agencies that they prioritize vendor partners that can provide the following:
- Timely technical support
- Referrals to new clients
- Proactive recommendations that directly support team KPIs
It’s one thing to hear from agencies on what they want – but let’s also hear from some world-class partnership leaders that have an existing track record of moving millions of dollars throughout the partnerships space all thanks to delivering these wishlist items (and more) to agency partners.
By Stewart Wesley.
On October 11 I presented the GoToEco Framework in the amazing GTM Games competition - see my 6-minute presentation starting at 2:30. This column builds on that session, providing a commentary on how to present the case for GoToEco - slides below - to a CRO or salesperson. The goal is to get your CRO to play and to invest money in driving an Efficient, Predictable, Scalable revenue and LTV growth engine leveraging partner joint solutions.
Here’s the summary pitch:
- Problem - B2B SaaS GTM Needs New Blood
- Why a Direct GTM Won’t Solve the Problem
- GoToEco Brings Joint Solutions (as Products) to Market
- GoToEco Joint Solutions Require CO-X (Build, Market, Sell and Retain)
- GoToEco (with Joint Solutions) Outperforms Direct GTM
- GoToEco for CROs - New Logos and LTV STARS
By Allan Adler.
The economy is soft, budgets are tight, and convincing your CEO to invest in partnerships is difficult. For partnerships, today looks a lot like two years ago.
In 2020, we were all dealing with the new normal and the business setbacks from COVID. Some companies were doing exceptionally, and some were failing miserably. Those reading this know the feeling. Let’s look back at 2020 and let the data speak for itself.
In 2020, companies with high-performing ecosystems experienced higher average growth and net profit margins than those without the channel's power. Additionally, companies with high-performing ecosystems drove an average of 1.5 times the cost reduction and generated 2.1 times the incremental revenue growth compared to low-performing ecosystems.
Remarkable, isn’t it?By Gary Sabin.
My second job in technology was in CS working a Tier 1 helpdesk for clients in the sub $50k annual contract range. Tickets came in from more than 150 different organizations for a range of issues that varied from basic login challenges to significant software bugs that needed escalation.
The SOP was straightforward with regard to case management, and at times it got a bit monotonous - check the queue, clear the queue, and do it all again the next day. I already knew this routine well from two and a half years of managing field claims as an adjuster.
By Aaron Howerton.
I had a chat with our Head of Partnerships, Will Taylor about what he’s learned while working in partnerships.
Will is a genuinely kind and funny guy. He’s also grown a huge following on LinkedIn in the partnerships space. I asked Will a few questions about partnerships, work, and life.
By Aaron Olson & Will Taylor.
Building software products is hard. Building cross-product user experiences, where two otherwise separate software products combine to provide a joint solution, is really hard.
Yet, this is what’s required in the era of ecosystems.
You do need to build an exceptional software product to be successful. That’s always been a minimum requirement, but the minimum is no longer sufficient.
There’s massive potential for co-innovating with technology partners to jointly solve really hard problems for users. Doing this hasn’t always been “a given,” and now it’s one of your biggest opportunities for growth.
But, this opportunity does not come without challenges. This is an unfamiliar motion for most software teams. Even among those who have been successful with co-innovation, it’s rare to have scaled that success.
In this post, I want to talk about why and what can be done about it.
By Ryan Lunka.
Everyone has heard of ABM (Account-Based Marketing), but not many know that applying ABM to partner activation, from recruiting/business development to partner engagement, can yield amazing results.
Partner Activation and engagement is a critical Go-To-Ecosystem topic, and one of the biggest challenges companies face when trying to create EPS (efficient, predictable, scalable) partner program results. Even with the best program, value proposition, and business case – if partners aren’t motivated, they won’t activate and engage.
Here at Digital Bridge Partners, we’ve been really fortunate to partner with Ampfactor in developing a shared GoToEco Engine offering. A core component of that offering is leveraging ABM to increase awareness and motivate partners to engage.
It’s my pleasure to have Blake Williams, CEO of Ampfactor with me in conversation to dig into what makes ABM for Partner Activation special.
By Allan Adler.
The "give to get” philosophy is making its way across the partnerships space, and we love to see it. But unless you’re giving something your partner actually cares about, you’re really just using the “give to get” concept to reinforce a one-directional relationship.
You need to ask agencies directly:
What do you really want? What will genuinely motivate you and your team to return the favor in building value-add partnerships?
I did that. Here are some of the responses I got.
By Stewart Wesley.
Many people are under the impression that the effectiveness of enablement programs is not measurable.
This isn’t true.
Enablement effectiveness can be measured whether it’s sales, partnerships, or leadership.
By Jessie Shipman.
There’s a concept in software and platform design known as Composability. It’s founded on the design principle that elements of a system should be “pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and able to be continuously improved.”
The approach allows developers to reduce complexity and build applications quickly and easily utilizing best-of-breed, independent components that can be combined in an API-driven complete solution.
By Allan Adler.
We’ve come a long way from the cut-throat days of revenue-above-all when partners’ needs languished low on the list of most organizations’ priorities (if they were on the list at all). In the past, partnerships were regarded as an input factor of revenue generation, but not central to decision-making.
By Rob Rebholz.
The modern Partner/Ecosystem organization has been in existence for less than two decades and has only been recognized as a critical component of most SaaS companies’ growth very recently. Where “partner” was once synonymous with “channel” in the corporate lexicon, the rapid move to a cloud-based world gave rise to an entirely new fundamental necessity: the need for interconnectivity between disparate platforms and datasets.
As the number of platforms in the marketing/ad/revenue technology space exploded from 150 eleven years ago to over 10,000 today, and the total number of “business software applications” tracked (by G2) is up to a mind-blowing 103,528 solutions today, demand for interconnectivity blossomed into a full-blown critical necessity. But, just like everything else in the hypersonic universe of SaaS, the structures, systems, roles, and, most importantly, skillsets lagged behind the need.
By Chris Messina
Most folks who follow me know that I grew up back when the Channel was characterized by weird terms like “shrink-wrapped software,” involved hard goods by Egghead, and was run by pick-pack-ship distributors.
Today, most of the location-specific value-add that 40 years ago gave birth to IT Channels of Distribution have disappeared.
In a new world dominated by B2B SaaS, almost nothing is physically sent through the channel, and physical proximity – a channel’s geographical distance from the ICP – is completely irrelevant. In fact, the Channel doesn’t even serve up the SaaS - SaaS is ‘delivered’ directly.
By Allan Adler.
I get to (virtually) rub elbows with some of the coolest and brightest minds in partnerships. Here’s how they’ve helped me be better at my job.
By Shawnie Hammer.
Just like Geoffrey Moore's product adoption curve and Everett Rogers' Diffusion Of Innovation theory illustrations, There is a similar pattern that describes the journey organizations go through when building their channel ecosystem.
Before pursuing new partnerships, take the time to learn the landscape, prepare the foundation for a solid partner program, and set the proper expectations for the journey ahead.
By Mauricio Rojas Hacker.