Technology partner

There are multiple teams and an org structure laid out here, so I’ll try to answer it best according to how our team is currently organized at Aircall. For reference, I sit under—and always have—the demand generation org which is essentially our entire marketing team concerning revenue. Customer marketing has been under operations or product marketing for us. 

I work with our North American-based tech partner managers on their individual partner plans. This includes, but isn’t limited to: partner business development (new contacts and strengthening GTM relationship with existing partnerships), integration GTM launches (major integration updates), and generating new business through referrals, partner marketplaces and comarketing campaigns. 

When customers come into play, it’s generally for integration GTM plays or comarketing campaigns. For example, a joint offer for your partner’s customers and their offer for Aircall customers is a great demand gen play for partners reaching new audiences. We promote these via customer marketing through emails or our monthly customer newsletter. If you’re on Crossbeam, even better. You can identify specific populations of your prospects that might be a customer of your partner, shared open opportunities for co-selling etc.

If we’re launching new integration updates from a partner that may meet our customer’s needs, we’ll segment out those customers and promote the update to them via marketing or even our CSMs. 

For comarketing campaigns like webinars, both partners have to be upfront if they’re willing to promote to their customer bases and that the content is relevant. I’ve found with bigger partners, their customer marketing is often controlled by a different team, so it may not be as streamlined to promote to them as one thinks. 

I think partner managers are worthless without great teammates from marketing, sales and product. The marketing team specifically helps you deliver on co-marketing campaigns, create case studies, launch ebooks, events, webinars, tc. In Hygraph, there’s a dedicated partner marketing person who owns any partner-related marketing activity, but we also work with product marketing because integration announcements fall more into their expertise. I think an important, but often overlooked part of “marketing” your tech partnerships is writing good documentation, so your tech writers will help you greatly too. So most of the time, the partner manager brings the idea, the opportunity to do  something with a valued partner, and then the marketing team will help you make that happen.

Most of the time the marketing team will have a backlog with tons of competing priorities, and it’s your job as a partner manager to help them evaluate the opportunity and assign a priority to it. Most probably you’ll also need design resources (sometimes it’s a different department, sometimes it sits with marketing). In that case, the best approach is to ask for some templates, something that you can work from when you need something quickly that’s relatively easy, but when you need some custom for a bigger campaign, you need to let them know well in advance.


I'm still new here at Celigo, but in my previous role I would have a regular cadence scheduled with the Marketing team to highlight new and existing partners in our Partner Newsletter as well as choose a specific Partner to spotlight that week. We also had a "Featured Partner" section on our directory which would be customized quarterly to highlight key partners that stood out. 

Case studies are an obvious go-to for promoting a partner to your customer base. Whilst there’s no denying that case studies offer great promotional value, they’re not always quick wins. They can take time, patience, and you need buy-in from numerous stakeholders. Furthermore, they’re not a scalable co-marketing activity. Partner marketers aren’t able to create case studies with every partner in their ecosystem - it just wouldn’t be possible and you also need to prioritize the right stories. 

It doesn’t always have to be a huge campaign to drive value to partners. At LoyaltyLion, we identify or create low-lift opportunities to showcase how a partner has driven great results for a mutual customer (e.g. social media spotlights, newsletter spotlights, featuring short partner testimonials/quotes in blogs or ebooks).

We have recently created a partner spotlight social tile that is a trial of “self-serve” content. Our Partnerships Managers can make a copy of the tile, add the logo of the partner they want to celebrate for achieving a particular milestone, and share it across their network. I’m really excited to see how our audience engages with it! 

The partner team works with marketing to decide which partners to have create a closer 1:1 marketing GTM together. Within that plan your marketing person works to help promote the collective value prop - this could be in many ways - social and exposure on social, customer newsletters, case studies, and incentives of our partners solutions or incentive to our IT partners to sell our solution (solely or with another integration partner). You can also invest in a partner “directory” connected to your website so prospects can see who your top partners are and what they specialize in as it relates to your product. 

Signifyd has an incredible marketing team that works in tandem with our partnerships org. We actually nest partnerships into a greater “marketing & alliances” department so that we’re always working together when it comes to marketing initiatives. 

This allows us to seamlessly integrate partners into the planning and design of many of our marketing campaigns. For example, our monthly customer newsletter has a ‘partner’ section where we feature the cool and interesting projects led by our partners. We also tend to have a partner component, whether it’s a sponsor for one of our ‘Crimes & Cocktails’ webinars, a partner that’s selected as part of Signifyd’s 30 Most Influential in Ecommerce, or a speaker at Signifyd’s annual FLOW Summit, partners are part of our go-to-market strategy when it comes to marketing initiatives.

Finding lower-lift content is one of the easiest ways to get the marketing team onboard to promote your partners. Social media spotlights, newsletter spotlights, or having a partner provide a thought leadership quote in a blog that the marketing team is already writing, is a simple but effective way to drive awareness for your partners with your customers. Not everything has to be a huge campaign.

As a partner marketer who lives under the partnerships team, it's my role to be the bridge between the marketing and partnerships teams. I work with my partner managers to understand their goals with each of their partners and find the right low-lift opportunities with the marketing team so that everyone accomplishes their goals.

How we promote our partners to customers depends on the type and tier that the partner falls into within our partner program. Here is an overview of the different activities that we focus on; 
1.  Co-marketing - Events, whitepapers, sponsorship, joint case studies 

2. Identify signals for each partner to help identify when their solution is relevant to our customers - Marketing creates content for CSMs and Sales, such as 1-pagers or short videos, for CSMs and Sales team to include in their QBRs or throughout the sales cycle 

3. Enable the sales & CS team so they are familiar with and trust our partners and are happy to make introductions - Marketing helps with the enablement content 

4. Partner Spotlight -every month we feature a partner and push content to our customer base, through social, email and events 

5. Partner updates and promotions in our monthly newsletter 
Promotion of our integration partners within our platform to create more awareness

6. Optimisation of our partner directory (through partnerpage.io) 

7. ABM strategy for Enterprise 

8.Spiffs


When working with partner marketing, it's important to prioritize which partners you want to promote to customers. You'll need to consider what partnerships will be most beneficial to your company and then create a plan of action for how you'll promote them.

Often, co-marketing can be a very effective way to promote partners. This involves working together with your partner marketing team to create joint marketing campaigns that will reach your customers.

It's also important to keep in mind that partner marketing is a two-way street. Your partner team will likely want access to your customer data in order to better understand how to market to them. Be sure to establish clear lines of communication so that both teams can work effectively together.

For example, Pendo created a joint customer case study with Calendly on a mutual customer, Credly, and detailed how they used both products for quicker, deeper user research. 

By using a joint mutual customer, and showcasing how that mutual customer used both products effectively to grow their business, we were able to continue to grow trust in all 3 companies, show examples to current and prospective customers what our product can be used for, and strengthen our relationship with a key partner. I hope this helps! https://www.pendo.io/customers/how-credly-combined-pendo-and-calendly-for-quicker-deeper-user-research/

At Caspio, we're fortunate to have a Marketing team that believes strongly in supporting Partners, and we do that through running joint webinars (one a month), press releases, social media posts, blog posts, and an actively maintained partner directory - besides call outs in our newsletters. We also actively support partners who want to run co-branded campaigns with marketing collateral and assets. Our guidance to partners is bring us any idea you have and we will be open to listening and implementing it as long as it can add value to our customers.

The key underpin to successful partnerships/marketing collaboration is buy-in and support from Marketing so that the work you pitch and request gets done and that they see value in it. This is a whole other conversation I'm happy to dive into to build. Once you have that...

Before I brought on a Partner Marketing Manager: We have a shared slack channel where we'd put all requests/ideas for co-marketing initiatives. We'd put project plans in place for each project, loop the partner in accordingly, and execute on that project with weekly check-ins to monitor progress. You have to be highly involved to make sure things are being handled properly and on-plan/meet expectations. This is a lot of work for a partner manager but important to the success of your partnership/

Now with a Partner Marketing Manager I am less involved in the day-to-day and our PMs give him our ideas/requests and he owns and manages the full execution with our guidance. He leans on Marketing for resources around copy/design/ads but we trust him with leading and owning the vision and overall execution and checks in with us to make sure it's going in the right direction and will help us accomplish our goals.

Great Question. Two (out of 5) core pillars to Snowflake Marketing are relevant to this question: Scale with Partners and Strong Alignment with Sales. These pillars had buy-in from the entire marketing leadership, including the CMO. 

This question is about customer accounts and not prospect accounts. Sales are extra careful about introducing the right partner to the customer accounts, and rightfully so, because Sales has put in a lot of work cultivating these accounts for customers. Thus, alignment with Sales is key. The Marketing team collaborates with Sales to identify the relevant partners in customer accounts, especially during growth and planning sessions. Each account planning session requires identifying which partners are appropriate in an account. 

Then, the marketing team will activate various channels based on the partner's strengths. Some partners are great at Field Marketing, and some are great at Online Demand Generation tactics. It is important to understand the partner's strengths and play on those rather than trying to introduce them through channels where they can fail. For example, asking a partner to do a field event in an account where they must have a field presence for the first time (sales or marketing) will generally lead to a subpar experience.

Interesting side fact: listening to Blackhole Sun by Soundgarden while typing this answer. 

How does your marketing team usually work with your partner team to promote partners to customers?

I've found that service partners are typically motivated more by a bit of healthy competition than by money. At the end of the day, the service partners looking to be motivated are the ones typically aspiring to become your top partner or within your top tier. It's important to create clear goals for them to accomplish every month/quarter/year and then be sure to acknowledge their stellar performance in a relevant way based on their preferences - some appreciate public recognition where as others prefer private. 

Partner motivation is critical to getting sponsorship and a partnership kicked off, and personally I find this easy as long as you are working with the right partner, and you can understand their goals, objectives and where your partnership fits into their business. 

I think too many partner leaders focus on things that are important to them, but may not be important to partners. Take the time to learn about your partner, their mission, vision and values and their goals as an organization and their goals as a company, business, and team level. 

The better you can understand their goals, the better you will be able to articulate how your program and your company can help make them successful. Maybe they need customer introductions or MDF funds or a listing on your website - take the time to do discovery and ask questions to find out what is important to THAT partner. 

Be different. I don't like to talk about the standard, cookie-cutter benefits of our program. I like to talk about the ease of partnering up. The benefit of having a partnership in place with an iPaaS vs. having to come up with your own integration strategy and having to build native integrations. I like to talk about the customer's experience and/or the prospect's journey throughout the process - going from a partner referral to entering a co-sell motion. The partner wants to know that the customer or prospect that they are referring will have a smooth journey, and thats the point I like to touch on. 

It’s super competitive so a compelling partner program has many facets. First, how can they be profitable with your solution and can they add any services to increase profitability? Those services could be before the deal, in addition to the core deal, or after the sale. Besides profitability, marketing support (in the form of assets, campaigns, blogs, incentives, lead generation) would be the second most important element to your program. I’m seeing more interest in exposure and how the partner can get more exposure and access to your network of other partners and customers. I also have seen executive alignment with your execs and yours on a consistent basis work well. Most importantly, ask them what they like about other programs and do your research around your competition. The internal partner teams and your partners can give you many of the answers. 

I'll start by answering this question with a point I've made throughout this AMA: ask your partners what they want. This is a 'smack on the forehead' moment that I've found with a lot of partner managers, but the better you understand the motivators of those around you, the better you can tailor your offerings to cater to them. Some things I've found to be very value-adding to my partners include:

Marketing lift (Signifyd has an incredible marketing team that's incredibly supportive of Partnerships, so we're able to produce a lot of content/provide heavy lifting on co-sponsored events)
Co-sponsorship efforts ($, lead generation)
Co-selling efforts
Certification (public recognition, market legitimacy)
Lead generation (creating opportunities to get partners in front of customers)

These elements are baked into Signifyd's partner program to ensure that any partner that engages with us is invested in our partnership!


The most important thing that partners look for is the potential to grow their business by partnering with us, and towards that we help them with various co-marketing and co-selling motions. We have also removed all the friction from partnering with us, so that partners can easily sign up, get certified, be listed on our directory, register deals, use partner collateral and win recurring commissions. Post-sale as well, they know that their customers can rely on our outstanding support so they don't have to spend too much time on support and maintenance, but can rather focus on adding value.

TLDR: Ask them, listen, and build what they need.

I love this question, but there is no simple answer here because the answer will be different for every organization. The method to discovering this, however, is pretty standard.  You need to ask them what they need.  They will tell you exactly what they need from your platform to be more successful. The key is to listen and build (within reason) what they are asking for - and also listen to their business workflows. Building what they ask for and gating it behind “joining” the program will give you the best results. 

Example: The #1 thing that Glide Experts asked for when I first joined Glide was a way to receive revenue sharing for existing Glide users.  To give a little context, when I first joined the only way to get revenue was if someone used a sign-up affiliate link.  There wasn’t any real way to have revenue sharing for teams that already had a Glide account. So - I built this into Glide, and now if you join the Experts Program you get automatic revenue sharing on teams you join.

Long answer - but I hope it helped. ;)


The second question answers the first!

Find out what they want and give it to them.

So many things in our working lives are much easier than we build them up to be in our heads. Managing someone is easy; care about them, learn what they care about and then try to help them get it - if they aren't capable of getting it, even with your help, then focus your time elsewhere.

Partnerships are identical to this! Sales, partnerships, management, dating...

Care about the other person. Learn what they want. Honestly evaluate whether you can provide what they want. Do what you can to make that happen...

Generally speaking, what our partners want most often is additional revenue - we help them gain that by providing introductions to our clients and amplifying their marketing through our own social channels, email marketing, etc.: irl events are also huge for us and sponsoring partner events is a great way to generate some reciprocity for the leads they send us <3

How do you approach motivating partners to engage in your partner program? What do they want and how do you give it to them?

The best way to activate newly recruited partners is to have a pre-made 30-60-90 day plan with the partner, and to present the plan with them on the initial partner kickoff call. The beauty of having a solid 30-60-90 day plans is that it not only lays out the specific actions that are expected from both you and the partner during the first 3 months of the partnership; but it also puts DATES on these actions. When you put dates on actions, you avoid the risk of "things coming up" or "being put on the backburner" on both the partner's side and your side.

When I started to implement this with our partners, we saw partners start to bring on clients to our platform in a much shorter time than before. And, not only that, we were able to give the partner exactly what they needed in the timeframe that was best for them too.

Some things we include in our 30-60-90 day plans is putting a joint webinar on the calendar to promote Trainual to the partner's audience, creating custom content that shows affiliation of our partnership and helps to empower the partner's audience to make an easy decision about moving forward from our software, and having the partner think about the optimal way they can offer Trainual in their service offerings.

This is a fundamental question because you want to be sure that the Integrations work to getting a new partner up and running is bolstered by your commercial conversation. My advice here would be to focus on getting new partners excited about your company, the shared value your services will bring to your mutual clients, and ultimately, the commercial benefits they will receive by being and growing within your partner program. 

What we do @ Adjust is that the moment the PM qualifies the partner as worthy of an integration, simultaneously when Integrations is doing their work, we have the partner onboard onto PartnerPage (our Partner Marketplace). This provides them control over how they are presented to our client base about the brand exposure they hoped to achieve by partnering with us. Once the integration is live, we push the partner’s listing to public, and the PM managing the relationship will add them to our client-mapping tools to begin account mapping. 

For me, it's critical to provide newly recruited partners with a clear to do list, and a clear set of performance KPIs to work against. If you fail to provide clarity out of the gate on what is expected within your program, you may lose the opportunity to build any momentum causing the partnership to drop in priority for both sides.

Typically I would have categorised them into different tiers/groups. Some partners are more relevant for marketing, others for retention whereas some are all-round. Below an example for a top tier tech partner that is relevant for all departments of my organisation (not in order):

- Landing Page on Marketplace
- LinkedIn/Social Announcement
- Add into our monthly customer newsletter
- Setup an enablement session (both ways)
- Partner referral agreement (but this financial add shouldn’t be the primary driver!)
- Account mapping on both a macro level (partner manager to partner manager) but also a micro level (pairing of regions/vertical reps) when appropriate
- Mutual customer success story (this is of course dependant on if we have mutual customer at start or not - as you want months of joint value to display)
- Where possible but is prioritised.. giving introductions and intel to new tech partner :)

Once you have gone through the discovery phase and you have indicated a mutual partnership fit. The onboarding and enablement phases are extremely important. These phases will be different for all partners depending on your partnership goals. 

During the onboarding phase identify metrics to measure your success. This can be done through creating some kind of mutual success plan. Here you can share all enablement materials (one pagers, sales decks, case studies, stats) in one central hub. Include information on your ICP for them to refer back to. As well as indicate next steps to keep us on track. Setting a communication cadence as well as outlining communications methods will be critical as well. 

In a sales role, think about the attention to detail and level of dedication we provide our customers with during onboarding. We want to ensure these customers are set up for success from the beginning and a partner should be no different. 


I love working with new partners, when the excitement is high, and possibilities are endless. But you must have a plan to get partners to a predictable level of success, and that requires both plans and planning. 

I am a strong advocate of setting up joint success plans with partners, and creating a joint action plan that tracks your goals and the actions needed to achieve them. 

A joint success plan aka JSP can be part of partner software, or tracked on Box note so don't worry about the technical details, it's more important to connect and document both your partner goals, and your goals and the activities needed to achieve them. 

For example, if a partner wants to achieve 100K installs of your integrated solution, or driving $1M in revenue, document those goals and start to peel back the actions that each party will need to take to start to work towards achieving those goals. 

First, the starting point is to share information on how our product is used and what our strategic priorities are to make sure there is alignment while learning the same from the partner. The overlap is the most important part and dictates everything from the design of the technology underlying the partnership, the terms of the partnership, and the timeline. 

From there, issue instances of your product for the partner to get comfortable with our technology. In some instances at LaunchDarkly, we have had customers look to become a tech partner which helps knowing they are familiar with the product. In parallel, look at the overlapping customer base to see if you can learn about how customers are leveraging the two products together. At this stage there are a few questions worth looking into: is there a large number of overlapping customers? If not, are there significant customers that overlap or customers with sophisticated use of our product? Are customers using your products in ways that have overlapping capabilities or are the two products being used in very separate ways? 

From there, be responsive to the partner as they look to develop the technology. It's important to have humility and respect for partners - every team is resource-constrained and being responsive and easy to work with is important in moving things along even though deadlines may be missed. 

Once the partner is ready, have resources to collaborate around what a launch might look like and, depending on where the tech lies in your strategy, see what additional things you can do for more strategically important tech partners. Remember: prioritization of your ecosystem is key and not all partners are equal. 

From there, it's really up to the customers to decide the fate of the partnership and getting their feedback dictates what the next steps are. 

I like to break new activation into 3 phases: discovery, onboarding, enablement. 

During discovery your focus is gathering information needed to evaluate the partnership (and set rough targets), understand the partner’s goal, find overlaps in those goals with your own, and identify the correct point of contact/decision makers for partnerships activity. There may or may not be NDAs that need to be executed. Once initial conversations conclude, and you confirm the partner is a “good-fit”, agreements are typically signed.

Now we head into onboarding. This is when you will begin to set communication cadences, educate the partner on your platform/service/tool, and begin to share brand assets and resources. Partners are also typically provided access to portals and or slack channels (where applicable). Setting up an autoresponder can be extremely helpful in streamlining this process, but only use this method to deliver resources and walk the partner through basic onboarding steps. With anything else I would lean on making the communication more personalized — remember you are building a relationship with this partner. 

A sample sequence can look like this: 

Welcome message: Introduction to the program, share support contact information, reminder of benefits & expectations (aka goals)
Resources: How to access to access the portal, training materials, and partner resources available
Activity 1: Reminder to schedule training sessions
Activity 2: Booking a kickoff meeting
Resources: Samples of best practices (to reach agreed upon goals) and relevant resources

Most PRMs will have some functionality to help with this, but you can also always use an ESP like AWeber too.

Last, but not least, you will move the partner into the enablement phase. During this phase you will begin your normal outreach cadence. Activities typically include:  
Bi-weekly to Monthly check in calls (these should be more frequent earlier in the relationship or when a GTM activity is underway). You can also substitute calls for async emails or slack communications. I also recommend including partners on some sort of newsletter to provide feature updates, new opportunities, etc.
Announce the partnership (where appropriate)  
Plan and execute initial partner activity (this varies based on the type of partnership but blog swaps or webinars are a great place to start)
Revisiting partner goals and tracking progress against those goals (goals can range from completing training to new customer acquisition or a set number of connections to an integration.
Discuss areas for improvement, roadblocks, and any upcoming initiatives (from both your end as well as the partner’s)

I think it all starts with one mutual customer. If we can find one mutual customer and find a way to make their process more efficient using both of our technologies, and then find a way to document this in the form of a case study, we can use that story to build our mutual customer base up.

I think this depends on the partner type, but activation is a very important part of the partner journey just as it is with customers. This stage is great for aligning around technical plans, business objectives, and GTM launch plans. 

For managed partners, I would have a standard template to align on business objectives and GTM launches. This would include what the cadence of touchpoints is and KPIs for each side of the partnerships. Ensuring partner enablement content around the product and marketing side is strong also helps to kick off the partnership on the right foot.

For low touch/scaled partners, setting up automations and GTM enablement content can increase activation rates as can a well-designed partner portal.

For all partners, make sure to track inactivity or low performance of partners out of the gate, and put in place automation or direct contact that discovers and helps to fix the problem.    

When starting from scratch, target smaller partners with similar ICPs (ideal customer profile). You'll start getting a sense of what your IPP (ideal-partner-profile) then, you can rinse and repeat. 

A lot of times, referrals will be your best partners to work with or individuals that you meet in person (e.g., happy hours, dinner, conferences) 

Most people assume that a tiered partner approach works best: hold a carrot on a stick (e.g. the next tier of your partner program) and make the partner work for it. 

Assuming you done your diligence and the partner is relevant and capable to serve your customers, try to invert this approach:

Ask not what your partner can do for you. Ask what you can do for your partner.

Give first. Prove to them that your program is not all hype, but you can provide value to their business. Send them leads or make relevant intros.

It'll be much easier for your champion in the partner org to unlock resources for your partnership if they have the numbers to back up this investment.   

Getting to action and their first deal quickly will get that partner activated quickly. Depending on resources I like to have an “onboarding” guide or person to get them through the first hurdle of understanding your product. Make sure the program is spelled out simply and can be easily accessed so they know what they are getting/giving becoming a partner. Share best practices of your most successful partners. First you have to educate them and they have to commit to some education. You can make it light, in short snippets, and interesting (think video!). Once they educate, agree to help them get their first deal - perhaps give them one as a gift. You can also send them some cool swag for becoming a partner and taking the first education event. Create an incentive for that partner to sell their first deal or their first few deals. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Consistent touch points - stay in front of them with interesting industry information. Invite them to your communities. Again, give them exposure i.e. linkedin post welcoming them to the program with a little shout out to something they excel at in their space. 

The best thing a partner manager can do to activate newly recruited partners is to spend time with them.

I do my best to get on a 30-minute call with every partner I feel can have an impact on our program. Other methods we use, are making sure partners get certified so we are confident they know the product well, and making sure they have all the information. Another thing we’ve seen to be very successful is making sure they all end up in a Slack channel with our team and talking to each other. This gives them a sense of community and a place to go when they are unsure about something. 

For activating newly recruited partners: 
1. Define what "activation" is meaningful to you. 
2. Establish a checklist of how they can get there. 
3. Reward the partner at every step along the way: both completing the checklist and achieving activation. 

Let's use an example: 
1. A partner is considered activated when their integration has 10 users. 
2. To attract new users, partners should a) announce the new integration to their email list and b) make the integration discoverable in their product UI
3. Once the partner completes the email and in-product messaging, they get a lightweight co-marketing perk, a social media tweet about our partnership. Once they "activate", i.e. reach 10 users, they advance to the next tier of the partner program. 

What is your go-to playbook for activating newly recruited partners?

Some* factors to consider:

- Use case of a possible integration and what value it can provide to existing customers and new prospects.
- What gap does the partner fill in our product. Are we going to build anything similar internally?
- What overlap do we have from an ICP, revenue, region and account perspective?
- Is this tech partner relevant just from a product perspective or can it be used to help co-sell, co-market or assist with retention of existing customers?

Always important to find the healthy balance of variety tech partners with similar services/value. e.g. partner with a variety of QA tools at the start but too many. Too many options can spread partner momentum too thin and can act as a blocker for your internal team to feel confident selling partners within their roles (choice overload/paralysis).

What partners can provide value to what your customers need? What tech partners can fill gaps where your product is weaker or missing? It depends on your business and product strategy and that will determine where tech partners come into play. 

Tech partners are inherently different from affiliate or reseller partners (often referred to as channel). While co-selling and referrals will come from tech partnerships, think about the core need that's coming from your customers, your target audience, which audiences you want to reach 1-3-5 years from now etc that a tech partnership can solve. This is also thinking about your partnerships proactively and in an outbound mindset. If you have an open API and provide support to developers, you'll find that there's also the opportunity for inbound integrations being built and your own business being that central node in the ecosystem. 

Which ecosystems does it make sense based on your customer pain points and business opportunity to be a part of? What type of ecosystem could your business lead or be a central node in?

The short answer is: align partner selection around your ideal customers, IPP, and KPI.

When I am identifying potential partners for outreach I first build a list while considering the following: 

Reviews of specific tools your customers use outside of your platform 
The personas/or use cases your company serves most effectively. What tools/platforms are these folks using? What workflows could be streamlined with an integration?

As the program grows take a step back and look at the types of tools your successful customers use (ie CRMs, Website Builders, Communications Tools, Hardware, Sales Automation). Find all the major players within these areas.

Once I have an initial list together I begin to gather information to evaluate each potential partner’s alignment with my team’s mission, values, and goals. I use a simple scorecard that has each of the IPP characteristics and requirements outlined — each value is weighted based on its importance to the team. Willingness and ability to build are line items on this scorecard by the way. The higher the total score, the more tightly aligned that prospect is to our partnerships program. More highly aligned partners are the relationships that are typically more likely to succeed, so they are prioritized for further exploration.  

It is valuable to review these evaluation metrics from time to time … things change after all. Also, take a look back at existing partners and determine which partners are helping you meet goals consistently. Find or grow more of these partners.

This depends on what we are seeing in the field. I think we all tend to gravitate towards partnering with the most popular tech apps, thinking that those partnerships will naturally bring in more business because they are deemed the "most used" apps, but that isn't always the case when it comes to what you find within your customer base's tech stack. I tend to try to document the types of tools found in our customer's tool box, figure out what those tools could possibly connect those tools to, and then partner with those companies.

I would look at: what customers are requesting for integrations, what product features are missing from your product and could be filled by partners, what the partner is willing to invest technically, what the partner is willing to invest on the GTM side, what the partner is willing to invest to support and upgrade the integration, the quality of the partner product, the number of shared customers, the number of shared prospects, and the cultural and brand overlap with the partner.  

I look at a few things:

- How many customers does the partner have? How many people on their email list/social channels. This is basically getting a sense of their reach and how established they are in the market.
- How many joint customers do we have? Who is their audience? Are they aligned with ours?
- Do they have access to marketing resources? Do they speak in a similar voice and tone as us?
- How do they approach building integrations? Security? Updates and support?
- What is their vision for the future of their business? Where are they going?
- Why should we prioritize this partner? Is their solution/integration something our customers are asking for?

This will give you a really good sense of the partner and how you might work together.

Easy: are there joint customers? If yes, who and how many? 

Over the past 3 years, I've found this to be the single biggest determiner for the success of a partnership. "Build it and they will come" can work, but it's a gamble. You want assurance that when you build the integration, somebody will use it.

Similar for service partners and agencies: if they have happy joint customers, it means they 
a) know how to provide services for your product
b) likely have a lot more customers who fit your ICP. 

Tools like Crossbeam and Reveal allow you to measure customer overlap before you commit to an integration. Joint customers are table stakes. 

I was responsible for selecting Grammarly's first-ever technology partners. I applied the product prioritization framework "RICE" to this process. 

Here's how I made it work for partnerships: 

- Reach: What is the partner's audience (# customers)? Will they support us with co-marketing to expand our reach? 
- Impact: Does the partner's audience fit with our ICP? Does working with the partner unlock valuable new functionality for our customers?
- Confidence: How confident are we that we can get this partnership over the finish line?
- Effort: What is the level of effort to get this off the ground? Do we need to build an integration? How complex is it?

Adding quantifiable scores to these indicators made prioritizing the most impactful partners easy, and using a familiar framework made it easy to align with product leadership and stakeholders. 

How do you choose which technology partners are a good fit for your business?

You have to define success first and what results you're looking for. This question is asking about specifically generating leads. So, for higher-funnel lead generation, I would recommend: 

- Virtual Industry panels or AMAs: Bring in an expert from your industry (or a few), or even an influencer if there are any in your field. You can have someone from your company and your partner company either moderate and/or be a part of the panel. This gets a lot of attention and leads if the topic is timely and relevant to your audience. Split the coordination and set-up of the webinar (landing page, emails, graphics etc) 50/50. 

- Comprehensive "State of" or Benchmark Reports: If you're able to partner with a company or two you can use your own customer data, conduct research or hire a 3rd party to compile data and create an overarching authoritative type of report. These are great for your industry or field for lead gen, will often be able to collect leads throughout the year and then be repeated again on a regular basis (quarterly, monthly, yearly etc). 

- Templates: Another content download. Partner with a company and create a template that can be used by your target audience and provide value to their everyday. Whether it's a sales plan, a sales cadence outreach,  or an end-of-the-year checklist, it can live as an evergreen lead generation asset honested on one, or both of the partners' websites. 

I think that ultimately, the partner wants to know if they can trust you with the prospects and/or customers that they are sending your way. If they feel that you are handling the lead hand-off with care, they will feel more comfortable sending more and more leads your way. The other part of that is making sure that you are able to take it further than just another sale - can you generate content from this new relationship such as creating data sheets and/or case studies, customer references etc. involving (and highlighting) the referring partners technology in that content.

Customer success stories for joint customers and webinars targeting the partner's customers 

Great comments from everyone else here. I'd add asking partners to give your customers an offer—this could be a discount, a walk through of their integration, a consultation with one of their experts. It'll help your team promote their company to have something exclusive to your customers to share in content, emails, etc.

Plan promotion effectively - as mentioned above, it’s key that you work out how and when you will promote the co-marketing initiatives that you commit to to maximize the number of sign-ups you drive. 

Make sure the content is relevant to your audience - it seems obvious, but ensure the partner marketing opportunities you take part in offer value to your customers and prospects - they’ll be much more likely to engage with the content if it resonates. 

Don’t get lazy with promotion material - some partners very kindly create sample copy to help you promote webinars and ebooks. Make sure to tweak this copy to avoid overlapping contacts getting exactly the same messaging from numerous partners. To my point above, I always try and position how the co-marketing initiative I am inviting merchants to will help them enhance their retention strategy. 
 
Highlight brands’ involvement with co-marketing -  If a partner marketing event/webinar has a brand on the lineup make sure to highlight it! Brands love hearing about what other brands are up to, or how they have achieved great results. We always see an increase in CTR and sign-ups when we do this.

I have leveraged a BDR team to call out to partner lists or internally generated lists. You could give them a chance to go after deals that were “no shows" meetings or fizzled out for some reason. Sharing specific customers for them to upsell post-sales services they provide in return for new front end opportunities. Joint events that you sponsor or co-sponsor on a local level have been good ways to economically generate leads. In any arrangement, be sure that you both get something out of it. 

When we co-market with a tech partner, we know they have a sizable marketing database and can usually help drive leads together. We'll put a minimum lead threshold and if they make that, then we share the full lead list with them. This is pretty standard practice for co-marketing amongst tech partners.

But for agency partners, it's often about giving and not just getting. They don't always have the same large database sizes as a tech partner, so we know co-marketing with them won't always drive us leads if we include them in a webinar, e-book, or even an in-person event. But including top partners in these campaigns gives us an opportunity to share the lead list with them, which is a value for top partners that have already driven a lot of value to our company with their referrals.

Generating leads for partners can be a challenge, but it's not impossible. Here are a few tactics that have worked well for me:

1. Develop a co-marketing campaign. Partner marketing can be extremely effective when done in conjunction with a co-marketing campaign. This involves developing content or offers that are mutually beneficial to both parties, and then promoting them together.

2. Host webinars or other online events. Online events are a great way to generate leads for partners, as they allow potential customers to learn more about your product or service without having to leave their homes or offices.

3. Use lead magnets. A lead magnet is an offer of something free in exchange for contact information. This can be a great way to entice potential customers to provide their contact info, which you can then use to generate leads for your partner.

It really depends on the partner type (service provider, ISV, referral partner, etc.) and their offering, but generally speaking, the more you can leverage your organization's distribution to showcase a partner's value proposition to the right audience, the better off you'll be in generating leads on their behalf. More specifically, I've seen a few tactics work really well:

Joint Webinars with the Partner: These provide an opportunity to combine both brands’ expertise and thought leadership, giving potential customers insights into how the partner’s solution integrates with or enhances your product. Webinars can generate high-quality leads because they attract attendees who are actively interested in the topics being discussed. Ensure that you align the content with mutual goals and follow up with attendees promptly to convert interest into action.

Campaign Kits: Providing partners with ready-to-use marketing kits that include email templates, social posts, landing pages, and educational content (like eBooks or white papers) allows them to run co-branded campaigns efficiently. The easier you make it for partners to execute marketing campaigns, the more likely they are to engage and drive leads. These kits help partners maintain consistent messaging while saving them time on campaign creation.

Content Syndication: Sharing co-branded content across digital channels is another powerful way to generate leads. This could include blog posts, case studies, or joint research reports that highlight the value of both companies working together. The key here is to ensure that the content is positioned to solve specific pain points for the target audience, making it a compelling reason for prospects to engage.

Partner Listings in Directories/Marketplaces: If your organization has an app marketplace or partner directory, featuring your partner prominently within these platforms can significantly increase their visibility and generate inbound leads. Customers who are already in your ecosystem are more likely to explore partner solutions that are trusted and integrated with your platform.

Joint Sales Plays: Aligning your sales teams with the partner’s sales teams can also drive lead generation. By collaborating on specific accounts, running account-based marketing (ABM) plays, and sharing target lists, both companies can maximize outreach and tailor messaging. This cross-pollination between sales teams can dramatically increase the chances of landing new business.

Exclusive Offers or Trials: Offering exclusive discounts, product trials, or bundled solutions when both products are purchased together can create urgency and appeal. This approach can be particularly effective for ISVs or service providers that rely on differentiated value propositions. The key is to ensure that both parties actively promote the offer through their respective channels.

Co-Branded Events: If budget allows, hosting in-person or virtual events with partners—such as industry conferences, workshops, or user groups—can be a great way to generate leads. These events provide a platform to showcase both solutions and their combined value to a broader audience, offering direct engagement with potential customers.

Overall, the success of any partner marketing tactic hinges on close alignment between the marketing, sales, and partner teams. Regular communication, goal-setting, and performance tracking are essential to ensuring that both parties are investing equally and benefiting from the campaigns.

Celigo Strategic Alliances Manager, Leeran (Lee·Ron) Schwartzon Partner Marketing

How does your marketing team usually work with your partner team to promote partners to customers?

How do you approach motivating partners to engage in your partner program? What do they want and how do you give it to them?

What is your go-to playbook for activating newly recruited partners?

How do you choose which technology partners are a good fit for your business?

What have you experienced to be successful partner marketing tactics to generate leads for partners?