DigitalGenius Head of Partnerships, 💬 Stephen Joneson Partner Program Strategy

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

I view training and certification separately. Partner training and enablement is a critical step in the process of developing buy-in to the partnership across your partner's organisation. Training sessions solve the first two steps of the Educate > Enable > Motivate framework for developing great partnerships. I haven't gotten to the stage where my current org is certifying partners. It can often be a vanity exercise - imo, it's useful for the following three things: 1. Showing which (if any) individuals at your partner organisation are seriously interested in the partnership 2. Giving your partners a project for you to work towards together, building collaborative momentum 3. (The most difficult thing to get right) Certified partner training can provide an in-depth technical understanding of your product for resellers and channel partners to use your solution to provide additional services

There should be a direct ROI on your partner marketing spend. I'm in the very luxurious position, in my current role, of having an outbound team who are fantastic at opening opportunities in real life if they're somewhere with prospects who fit within our ICP. It's easy for us to show an ROI on our Partner Event marketing spend, so I haven't to dig too deep in to UTMs from partner content - we can just take a holistic view and do the things that we intuitively know are right to do (like collaborating on partner content), without being concerned about the attribution. This is the dream scenario to be in but, in general, measurable impact on revenue is ALWAYS the right answer to working out whether your partnerships efforts are successful or not...

1. Introductions to your clients 2. Cash poured directly into their customers acquisition by sponsoring marketing efforts (like content and irl events) 3. Introductions to your partners (it's surprising how valuable this can be!) One little tactical tip to employ is: helping your partners to be experts It's such a small thing, but when you spot that key partners are giving public talks that involve your area of work (e.g. we sell AI for customer service in retail), proactively offer to help them prepare. Ultimately, partnerships is about human<>human relationships; so any opportunity to build a better relationship with people that serve your ideal clients is something to jump at!

I actually think that a critical audience being missed in this question is how you communicate the value of your various partners to your internal teams. Getting cross-organisational buy in to your partnership activities is difficult when you don't make your prioritisation of your partners clear and transparent. Again, having been a part of larger partner organisations previously - I've seen that segmenting your partners can provide a great "carrot" for your partners to get access to better rewards in higher tiers; but this isn't something that I've needed to be concerned with while building a referral and marketing partner programme from zero to $1m in sourced revenue over the last two years. It's probably something we'll need to be concerned with as we grow the programme from a $1m run rate to $5m though!

1. You have to justify your existence - it doesn't matter how much buy-in you have from leadership, or how fluffy your metrics appear to be. If you can't tie outcomes from your work to money coming in to the business, your career security is always out of your hands 2. Focus relentlessly on short-term outcomes. Partnerships is inherently a long-term endeavour. If you put at least 80% of your time into activities that will generate your desired outcomes in the next 3-6 months, then the long term will take care of itself. 3. Everyone is a salesperson. Whether you know your quota or not, you have one. Whether you report to product or sales or marketing or the CEO directly... there is a revenue number that you must contribute to the business. If it doesn't seem that way, it's because no one has done the maths yet - not because the maths doesn't exist.

Be very willing to be wrong. "Strong opinions, loosely held" is a great mantra for partner leaders in an early-stage programme. In my most recent role, there was a single reseller partner that had driven 25% of new revenue in the previous 12 months. My first thought was "find their competitors and this will be easy! Speak to their top 8 competitors, and even if you only successfully activate one or two, you'll have doubled or even tripled the partner revenue!". In the two years after joining the company, we drove $0 in new revenue from any reseller partners, including the one I inherited. My initial hypothesis was very wrong, but by staying relentlessly focused on short term outcomes I was able to discover other avenues for partnerships; including a new cornerstone partner. Partnerships contributed 42% of new revenue for the financial year and more than half of that came from this one critical partner. If I had stuck to the (seemingly sound) logic of investing time and effort into replicating what had already worked, we would've completely missed that opportunity, drove 0 new clients, and I'm sure I wouldn't have been asked to stick around for very long!!