Technology partner

Titles vary from company to company, but: CEO, CRO, CMO, CPO (this latter one only if tech partnerships are a focus area)

Betting on partnerships is not a quick win, not something that can be done in a quarter. Thus, executive alignment needs to be there. After establishing a partnership team, it won’t magically start generating revenue, and I think it’s important to understand for every C-level executive, that there are other aspects / benefits a partnership can drive. Of course, after some more time, if partnerships is not a revenue-driving function, then something needs to be fixed. But it’s more on the scale of a year, than a quarter. (disclaimer: I’m in the fortunate position where the Hygraph C-level understands this more than anyone else I’ve worked with before. If you’re a partnership person who wants to work at a company that *gets* partnerships, feel free to reach out to me.)


This depends on the type of program you're building: services, technology, affiliate, or alliance partners. 

From my experience, it pays for partner managers to be highly connected within their company. When in doubt, schedule a coffee meeting. If it was relevant, make it a recurring bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly synch.

Because partnership teams are so small, people often forget they exist. It's your job to toot your team's horn, celebrate every win internally and externally, and keep up to date with any major development that could impact partners.    

Great question! Partner program’s aren’t going to be successful unless you have executive buy-in and cross functional leadership buy-in (product, CX, TS, Marketing, Sales, Ops). Why? Because the program is going to provide benefits and you will need resources and investments from those teams to make the program successful. As an example, partner programs provide marketing benefits. Marketing benefits such as co-marketing material, incentives, lead sharing, events, content, campaigns, resources etc are coming from the marketing or sales budget so having their buy-in is critical to the success of the program. Think about how your program could help the internal teams achieve their goals, not just the overall revenue goals of the company. 

BD is typically one of the most cross functional teams in the org. At a minimum, it requires alignment with marketing, sales, product, and customer success.

Not-so-serious answer: As many as possible! 

Serious answer: Partner strategies can’t exist in a vacuum. Our success is directly dependent on the alignment of other teams - but the inverse is also true.

If you’re building a partner strategy, you’ve got to be super clear on how your ecosystem is going to map to your broader business strategy, and that you’re aligned with broader business priorities. Then, it becomes a question of understanding who’s responsible for each of the success pillars you’re mapping to, and recruiting champions within the leadership of each of those teams.

This might look like:

Pillar 1 - Awareness - How do partners drive increased brand reach and tap into new markets? Your stakeholder here is probably going to be in your marketing / demand gen team - find them and align with them.

Pillar 2 - Sourced revenue / logos - How will partners source net new revenue for your business? How well are they doing this today and how does that compare to your other sales channels? This will typically map to sales / growth leadership - another key champion.

Pillar 3 - Activation & maturity - How do partners help unlock value within your product or extend the value out? How does this move the needle for your business today? Finding a champion here can be trickier - your stakeholders could be in your customer success org, or your product org if you’re mostly PLG - but they’re a vital party to have bought in.

Pillar 4 - Retention & Renewal - How do partners help retain business? There might be macro trends to point to here (e.g. having X integrations connected to your product will boost retention by Y%), or more specific examples - you’ll have product, CX and probably sales leaders championing this and responsible for this number.


And remember - partner strategies are inherently unique and proprietary - because your ecosystem is unique and proprietary! - so think through what your version of the above might look like before you start stakeholder mapping.

I love this question!

I believe the following leaders need to be aligned for a partner program to be successful:

CEO - for a partner program to be successful, it needs to be a key initiative for the company. If a company treats Partnerships as an afterthought, it’s doomed for failure. If the CEO is not engaged or doesn’t see the benefit of Partnerships, it’s hard to succeed. 
Sales/CRO - sales will be the closest department to Partnerships. Partners need co-selling assistance and Sales will need to be sending leads to partners for services and implementations. If sales are not aligned, you will find yourself fighting over leads and not having proper deal flow for partners.
Product - from my experience, service partners care most about being heard, and having input on the product roadmap. If your partner feedback won’t be heard by the product teams, your partners will grow frustrated.




For a partner program to be succesfull,  it’s crucial to involve the right team leaders across different departments to ensure alignment and collaboration. Critical leaders that should be involved are the following:
-Sales leaders: hey will drive the revenue impact of the partner program. They need to be aligned on how the partner program can help them closing deals and how the partner can add value to the customers. 
-Product leaders: They allign product strategy to partner offerings. They also provide product guidance and technical support to partners. 
-Marketing leaders: They assist on co-marketing activities and partner marketing campaigns. 
-Customer Success and Partner Success leaders: They ensure that the partner program contributes to long-term customer satisfaction and retention. 
-Operations, legal and finance leaders: They guarantee partner compliance and structure in their deals. 

Your CFO! Partner generated business often has the best metrics aka lower CAC, better LTV:CAC ration, higher conversion etc. Start highlighting these to your CFO and they'll be your biggest advocate and will resource you. Don't forget to show them how to scale (CFOs sometimes think the ROI on p'ships is lacking due to the perceived idea that it's a heavily human-led LOB)

Sales: 
Why: Ensure alignment on goals, pipeline integration, and partner-driven revenue targets.

Marketing: 
Why: Support co-marketing initiatives, partner enablement campaigns, and brand alignment.

Customer Success:
Why: Drive partner adoption through onboarding, training, and retention efforts.

Product Management:
Why: Collaborate on integration development, roadmap alignment, and technical support.

Operations: 
Why: Streamline partner processes, data management, and reporting systems.

…All of them. 

This is a catchall answer, but it’s true - partnerships have the potential to touch almost every area of the business, and as partner leaders, it’s important for us to understand each team leader’s goals and build a cohesive narrative. For example: 
- Product leaders tend to care about user journeys, experience, engagement, and adoption. Product integrations should be built to meet customers’ needs; a focus on solving real user problems with integrations will resonate with product leaders here. Strong integrations drive user engagement across your platform, so there’s a win-win. 
- Marketing leaders often care about top-of-funnel, brand awareness, storytelling, and building credibility with different customer bases. Demonstrating how partners can help contribute to these goals by activating their audiences will resonate with marketing leaders. 
- Sales leaders care about meeting customers’ needs and the revenue those customers generate. If a partner integration helps meet a customer requirement or influence a deal, that real impact on revenue will resonate. 


What team leaders should be stakeholders in your partner program's strategy in order for the program to be successful?

I think you need spend time on both face-to-face education as well as creating on-demand content (videos, one-pagers, etc.) to help your sales team understand the benefits our partners bring to the table. Be it a tech partner or an agency, you’ll need to create these resources and invest continuously in internal education. This is mostly important for more sales-driven organizations (as opposed to marketing-driven ones) though

I always suggest having a variety of different themes within enablement sessions. We want to keep partners top of mind and also add value to different roles across the business, going beyond the introduction to the partner. . Here are some of the themes that we have found successful. 

1. Initial intro, with Demo (if applicable) and a heavy focus on how our partnership works 

2. Joint customers are invited to speak to both companies about what our partnership has meant for their business and impacted their goals

3. How-to sessions ( Set up the integration, optimise integration/use cases etc) 

4. Subject matter experts - get someone from within the partner's organisation to come in and talk about a specific subject they specialise in. This could range from a service such as PPC/SEO to leadership or sales skills 

5. About my role  - get someone from within the partner's organsation to come in and talk about their day-to-day and what matters to them. This helps our teams understand more about the best ways to communicate and interact with our partners to drive more engagement and ensure we always know what matters to them. 

On top of this, social activities where stakeholders across both businesses are extremely successful. Although not structured learning and enablement sessions, the conversation are invaluable and led to better understanding of eachothers businesses and roles and personalities. 


TEST EVERYTHING AND GET FEEDBACK.

Everybody learns differently and has different preferences. Also, not everybody may be bought in just yet. 

Try videos, (good) lunch & learns, email overviews, easily accessible directories. At the end of the day, serve information to people where they work and make it as easy as possible to digest. 

It's a never-ending process and there is no one-size-fits-all. This is arguably the hardest part of partnerships IMO.

The short version: enable early, and often!

The longer version: we’ve moved through several iterations of partner enablement at Intercom over the past 3.5 years or so. We’re mostly focused on our sales team (and our support team to a lesser extent) we have a number of different touchpoints we look to enable at:

- During new hire onboarding: this is typically a higher level, foundational look at our ecosystem - who we partner with, why they’re important, and how to work with them

- Live classroom training: this is usually planned as part of bigger enablement campaigns or initiatives, for example if we’re launching a new product which has a lot of exposure to our ecosystem, or if we’re launching a new sales playbook. Again this tends to be more high level and would cover a partner category - e.g. our analytics partners, or our phone partners - or a new process - e.g. how to use account mapping data in our CRM

- Partner-specific enablement: these are usually shorter live sessions - we call them “Facts & Snacks” - where we’ll invite a partner to present an overview of their product, their integration, and their value proposition - as well as take Q&A from the sales team. This works well both for new partners, and as refresher training if we’ve got an updated partner integration 

- Always-on enablement: We have partner content housed in our LMS, which is used by both our Sales and Support teams. We’ll have more detailed content and playbooks for the partners we’re actively co-selling with, and shorter snippets for our other partners. Our processes and workflows are also documented here so sales and support teams know how to work with our team and how to engage effectively with partners

For other stakeholder teams, we’ve done a more high level ‘partner roadshow’ in the past, aimed at providing an intro to our team and our ecosystem, as well as identifying potential opportunities for collaboration.


We start with new hire onboarding, where we have an "intro to partnership" session. We also support sales deals regularly by providing input on the right partners to attach in deals (and unblocking deals by troubleshooting with integration partners). 

Building good documentation around partners, the use cases they serve and when to work with them is a great way to do this at scale. And AI interfaces are making it easier to search (we use Guru for this currently).

When designing internal partner training activities to help different teams and stakeholders in your organization, it’s important to make the learning experience interactive and engaging.  Here are several activities that could be useful: 

Partner Webinars: Let your partners present themselves in a webinar to your organization, make it interactive with open Q&A.
Partner mini clips: Create Brief Videos (5 min max) of your partners presenting themselves. 
Partner Role Play: Create role-playing activities where each team assumes the role of a different partner, or customer, to simulate collaboration scenarios.
Collaborative Partner Success Stories: Facilitate a storytelling workshop where different teams can share success stories from your partners.

What activities would you suggest for internal partner training to help the different teams and stakeholders in my organization learn about the partners we have in our ecosystem?

Early days - I find individual champion reps in different departments or roles. I also spotlight specific deals from reps.

If a specific SDR is booking a high % of meetings by mentioning we partner with X, I give him/her kudos, their manager and the wider team to see if anyone else wants to book more meetings in a similar fashion :) Similar goes for a CSM/AM who makes referrals to partners to help the health of their account, retention rate and get an additional $ in their pocket or for the business. It's an additional plus if CSM/AM cross-functionally enjoys the logic that intros to partners will likely lead to introductions back to their sales department. Early champion spotlight shows that reps think outside their traditional roles to hit KPIs and get others to follow (if they want).

In the early days, internal advocacy - pitching the value of partners relying on market data - and looking for ways to show results even if they are not scaled. For example, look at the big open opportunities in the pipeline and then see where partners can influence the deal, or show that a key integration is a given as a dealbreaker by customers or it improves retention by X percent. 

Once it is more established, internal advocacy and showing data at scale and tracking partner influenced and partner sourced revenue in addition to impact on customer retention and satisfaction and ACV. 

Hey there! A few thoughts:

You'll want to make sure you understand the goals of each of your internal teams. What does your blog team care about? What are they goaled on? How about your customer success team or email marketing team or demand gen team? Understand the needs/blockers of each team, then get a sense of how the partners you work with can help each team with their goals. For example:

The blog team is goaled on traffic to posts. They need help getting more views on their blog posts. Well, we have an integration partner that focuses on X topic. If we highlight a partner in a blog post, they will share the post via their email and social channels, driving more traffic to our blog.

The customer success team is goaled on retention and upsells. We know that the more integrations a customer has connected, the more likely they are to retain. Therefore, integrations = higher retention rate. Customer success should highlight integrations to their customers in order to drive up retention.

Etc, etc for each team. Talk this through with each team, show progress on those goals, and you'll have cross-functional buy in and a team that sees the value in partnerships. Work with your internal teams as much as you can with a focus on helping them reach their goals.

It is crutial to involve all required stakeholders from the early stages. You can achieve that by getting executive support and involving key leaders in the early stages of your partner and recruiting planning. It is important to set clear expectations and KPI´s with all the different stakeholders that will interact in your strategy. 

My guiding star is to always work back from the customer experience. You should build things that customers are already asking for, or are clear that they need. Innovation around use cases that don't yet exist in the wild are rarely successful; they are just expensive press releases.

My hot take is also that not every company needs a partner program; and many that build it don't see a return as they didn't think through the customer journey before they set out to build it.

If you focus on what partner motions are needed to close deals, you won't find it hard to get buy in.

How do you get cross-functional buy-in to support your tech partner program, both in the early recruiting days and once the program is more established?

To expand a little bit on my earlier question - they’re going to care most about demonstrable impact your team is having, that’s clearly aligned with wider business priorities.

So be prepared to dig in and show up as a strong driver of new business growth and/or existing business expansion and retention.

But, in addition to that, being able to show comparative impact versus other channels on things like win rate and deal size, as well as team metrics like productivity, is really crucial. 


At SmartSuite, it's pretty straight forward:

MRR/ARR impact.
Number of trails and conversions.    

We try to attribute partnerships to rev as closely as possible.

Direct revenue attribution is king; as a partner leader I always want to own a P&L and contribute to revenue directly. That can take the form of resell, referral or distribution partnerships.
The more direct the line to revenue is, the easier it is to make the case for additional spend.
Of course, there are many partner programs you will need to build that don't directly source revenue - but those need to be supporting the overall revenue motion. For example, building a program that sub-contracts consulting partners into your sales engagements doesn't bring significant revenue on its own; however it feeds business to the partners which in turn makes it much easier to ask for referrals and intros from them.

Metrics will differ based on your partnership team’s goals (see notes above on metrics like total user engagement, influenced revenue, etc.). Demonstrating quantifiable impact that aligns with stated company goals is most important here, coupled with clear customer stories and examples that back up the value of your partner program. A good exercise here is to take materials that outline your company’s goals and overlay your partner program’s contribution(s) to each relevant area. 

You also want to be clear on the expected outcome from an increased investment in partner budget; if partner budget is increased, what can leaders expect and why does that matter to them? Be clear and realistic on the upside, downside, and risks associated with increasing partner spend. 


What metrics are top of mind for executives and leadership teams when deciding to increase spend on partner budget?

Work back from what customers need, and treat integrations as product features like all others. Partner with Product and Engineering to prioritize them (P0, P1, P2 etc) and put them on the roadmap. At MotherDuck, we have such a high need for ecosystem and integrations that we staff a full-time Ecosystem Engineering team.

How do we balance our partner team’s integrations goals with the goals/priorities that product and engineering have? 


Like in any human relationship, COMMUNICATION is the basis of everything. With clear communication, trust can be built, and having trust, good things start happening in the ecosystem. I usually try to engage AE´s with partner executives from the early stages of the onboarding so that we can build a startegy together. Red Flags should be raised when communication is broken. 

As the partner manager, I like to put myself in the sales team's shoes; what value to partners provide to them, and which partners would I lean on if I were selling the product? Then communicate that clearly and continuously to sales. I like to put partner training in the sales onboarding materials. 

I encourage for the sales team to have relationships with key partners directly, away from the eyes of the Alliances team. I facilitate those encounters but don't need to be on every call with them.

Also understand that its enough for one bad deal experience to sour a relationship between a seller and a partner. So demand excellence from your partners.

5 Keys to Co-Selling Alignment & Trust: 

1. Shared Goals & Metrics: align on KPIs like revenue, pipeline influence, and deal ownership.
2. Clear Co-Selling Process: use account mapping tools and define lead-sharing workflows.
3. Sales Enablement: train teams on product positioning, ICP fit, and joint playbooks.
4. Consistent Communication: hold bi-weekly syncs and use shared dashboards for real-time updates.
5. Trust & Accountability: ensure fast lead follow-ups, fair deal handling, and transparency.

Red flags to watch for:
- Misaligned incentives 
- Slow follow-through
- Competing priorities
- Data hoarding
- No exec buy-in

The best way to create alignment between the sales team and partners is to ensure that both sides have a clear understanding of the value of their collaboration. When sales teams recognize how partners contribute to their success—and vice versa—it fosters stronger engagement and more effective teamwork.
Choosing the right partners is essential. Partners should be carefully selected based on their ability to help the sales team achieve its goals rather than just broad market coverage. 
A fair and transparent partner program  strengthens alignment by ensuring that both teams are working toward a shared objective, rather than competing against each other.
Building trust and strong relationships is key. At the end of the day, sales teams will naturally work more closely with the partners they know, trust, and see as valuable allies. Encouraging frequent collaboration and open communication helps deepen these connections.
However, challenges can arise—especially if the channel team and sales team are not aligned or have different priorities. This is why having shared OKRs and clear, measurable goals is crucial. When both teams operate with the same objectives and priorities, collaboration becomes more seamless, driving better results and long-term success.


First – see my answer to “What’s the absolutely best way to coordinate those early co-selling conversations between AEs and the prospect?” above

A tip for increasing mutual trust is having key partners join for the last 30 minutes at the end of your sales team’s QBRs to get really specific on where they can help your team & your clients. These partner QBR presentations can also be followed by a partner + sales team happy hour or dinner, providing an ideal opportunity to get both teams comfortable with one another and excited to collaborate!

To the second part of your question, here are couple of co-selling red flags I’d keep an eye out for:

- Don’t just show up with your hand out - In a situation where the partner is making an introduction to a greenfield account for your company, ensure your AE has at the very least researched the account thoroughly (for some Target accounts, maybe your partner team even contributes to the account research). Ideally, you & your sales team can also come prepared with specific use cases and case studies that you think the end client could be interested in – show these to the partner and get their feedback as to how they anticipate the client will respond.

- Prevent “co-opetition” with partners - If you’re working with a services partner on an opportunity, be careful that your sales team maintains a care to detail - down to adjusting their standing desks - to avoid any faux pas such as: positioning or promoting your company’s own internal services over a partner’s in a co-sell situation, or including your partner’s competitor’s logo in a client-facing presentation.

- Avoid Client Engagement Friction - I’ve seen countless situations in which a prospect goes dark on one or both parties. For example, perhaps your team is having a hard time progressing procurement conversations, but the partner continues to have regular syncs with the client. Or conversely, the partner stops hearing from the client, while your team’s conversations continue. 
Sometimes, the fear of deal slip or progress slowdown will make your sales team want to join a standing partner call.

The best way to avoid friction is to keep honest, consistent communication with your partner. I recommend standing 15 min weekly or biweekly syncs, or even creating a joint Slack channel or group GChat to make it easy for both teams to provide quick updates.

Whenever possible, try not to “ambush” the client by having a partner unexpectedly join your sales team’s call with the client, or having your sales team join a standing partner + client call. Instead - ask a specific question on behalf of your partner, or have the partner take specific questions to their own client call!


What are the best ways to create alignment and trust between sales teams and partners to ensure smooth co-selling? Are there any blockers/red flags I should watch out for?

If the partnership helps retention, NRR or some other non-acquisition metric - you may be better off going through your Customer Success, Professional Services or Support teams.

Usually there is someone at the company who cares about that metric, so educate them on how your partner can help. But also be clear about your priorities; if your company is currently focused on new logo generation, thenhighlight partners that help you hit those goals.