Service 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.




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

The product should be the primary channel driving adoption. You can write the best newsletter, create the best promo video, spend a ton on ads, etc. If your integrations marketplace doesn’t feel like a core part of your product, it’ll be hard to drive adoption.

Creating additional moments for customers to become aware of, be inspired by, and easily implement. These can take the form of: 

- Including announcements of new integration launches and success stories in customer newsletters (I had to get at least one mention of email marketing in here 😀)
- Ensuring the integration connections are as simple as possible and easy to find within your application.
- Implement in app notifications (with the appropriate context of course)
- Sharing content about successful customers using the tech partner/integration <--- this is my favorite option and makes for great sharable social media content as well.
- Creating very clear setup documentation and templates/recipes for success 
- Host workshops, courses, and challenges for customers interested in using the integrations
- Provide some sort of training to the sales or customer success teams (for both partners) where possible. The more comfortable these folks are in understanding the solution’s benefits and implementing the tool the more easily they will be able to make recommendations during conversations with customers. That’s a win!
- Talk to integrated customers (from power users to folks who installed but have not used the integration). Use your findings as a guide. Regular and power users are going to be the best fit for the integration in its current state — knowing this you can find more existing customers that match their characteristics. Then make adjustments to the integration if necessary to convert those inactive integrated customers to active ones.


Exposing how I/we as a company use those technology/platforms and integrations ourselves.

Caspio provides open REST APIs along with exhaustive documentation and clear in-product callouts for integrated services besides covering it in our documentation. We have some exciting plans in this space which we will be announcing soon to make it even easier to integrate with us and build joint solutions – we encourage potential tech partners to reach out to us from our Partners page with ideas.

1. marketing that integration to your customers via newsletters, blogs, landing pages, and other co-marketing activities.

2. training your internal teams on the details of the integration and giving them supporting assets to share with customers/prospects when specific conversations come up.

3. literally going through customer accounts and finding ones that would see value in that integration and giving CS scripts to use to share the integration information with that customer

to name a few...

Evergreen marketing > campaign-based marketing 

Whenever possible, highlight tech partners with always-on, evergreen marketing, such as a dedicated email in drip series or in-product messaging during onboarding. This allows the partner to grow as you grow, versus flash in the pan co-marketing like on social or events, and is particularly impactful if you have a strong PLG motion. 


Once a partnership is established/integrated the partner success team analyzes performance and looks at leading metrics like conversion (quote to policy). They discuss on recurring meetings with partners how these metrics can be improved:
- adding a new relevant product in the mix (ie pet insurance next to renters insurance, home warranty next to homeowners insurance)
- figuring out where in the customer journey the best conversion happens and adjusting the flow or API 
- adjusting the quote API to have less questions in the flow, making a purchase easier for the end consumer 
- to have more partner adoption, we can also work on easier integration options like iFrame or affiliate marketing

What are some ways to increase the adoption of tech partners/integrations with your existing customer base?

It is important to be on the same page with a partner to start. Ensure through discovery and onboarding that you have clearly identified goals, ICP match and clear documentation. 

Once you have an integration built, it is important to work closely with your partner to market this launch. You want to ensure your customers will know about this integration which is a value add to their business. Engage in co-marketing initiatives, ensure your internal teams understand the features and benefits of the integration and ensure your mutual customers are set up correctly to leverage the integration. Education of the sales team will also be valuable so they can explain the benefits of the integration to all new prospects. 


I cannot stress the importance of having and using IPP (Ideal Customer Profile) before beginning any type of partner recruiting — honestly this should be done before programs are built but I digress. The IPP allows you to clearly define the characteristics of your best fit partners. When both teams find overlap magic can definitely happen. 

Discovery calls. During these calls listen to the concerns partners raise and (hint at). Encourage your colleagues to be frank, so you have a clear picture of the opportunity or lack thereof. If interest, opportunity, and resources are available, prioritize that partner and frame the benefits you can provide to ease any concerns. 

Help partners make the business case: Share case studies or data with the partner that illustrate an integration’s ability to help them achieve their KPI. 

Regularly touch base with the partners you are managing, this keeps your team fresh in their minds and allows you to ensure that the benefits your program offers align with those goals. 

Clear documentation and readily available technical support. If you don’t have a PM assigned to integrations/technology partners or an engineer is not available to help I often look to CS team’s more technical team members for help. 

Building out integration guides (in addition to clear documentation). These guides should serve as a roadmap for the full adoption process. They should also be geared towards the non technical people who will be involved with this process (ie Partner Managers). They should provide context on the benefits of adoption, guided code snippets and their uses, mockups, best practices, examples of successful implementations, resources needed, and timelines for GTM.  

Check in during the build process and proactively offer support. There have been many times an integration has been deprioritized because a roadblock has been hit and no easy access to support was available.

Provide partners methods to measure how successful their efforts have been. 

Offer training for partners, sales teams, and customer success teams. Make sure your sales and customer success teams are also in the loop.

It’s a bit of an overlap with other questions, but in a nutshell:


- your marketplace (or any other format where you list your integrations) should feel like a core part of your product, not an afterthought that is just put there
- work together with marketing to launch and then continously promote an integration
- educate your sales team so when they’re in conversations with prospects, they’ll be able to answer integration related questions effectively

Answered this in another question:

1. marketing that integration to your customers via newsletters, blogs, landing pages, and other co-marketing activities.

2. training your internal teams on the details of the integration and giving them supporting assets to share with customers/prospects when specific conversations come up.

3. literally going through customer accounts and finding ones that would see value in that integration and giving CS scripts to use to share the integration information with that customer

to name a few...

What are some of the most important activities for a partner manager to do to improve technology partner adoption?

Relationship building is key to scaling partner adoption. You want to ensure you are maintaining the relationship as well as continuously enabling your partners. You want to share all successes and all ways to improve with each other and your respective teams. It is also crucial to share what your expectations of your partners are and vice versa. This way you can support each others goals and initiatives, deepening your relationship and showcasing results to your leadership teams. 


From my experience, there are two types of partner activation activities:

Ad-hoc: Flash in the pan type activations. Email blasts, launches, SPIFFS etc. They can be a great spark to start the fire, but by itself they're meaningless.

Embedded processes: customers receive recommendations for different partners as they use the product. 

These require more investment and long-term commitment to a partner, but yield the best results over time. 

One example here is our live streaming product StreamYard. We work with massive social media companies, and many of them have featured us in posts or emails. 

Yet the best lever for sustained partner-led growth are the onboarding flows for new creators when sign up to live stream on a platform. 

Embedding yourself in workflows of the partner tool works because customers self-select (e.g. by trying to live stream) and are therefore receptive to your pitch.

This, in my opinion, is where a partner program comes into place. A well-designed partner program bakes in recurring activities, continuously keeping you and your partner top of mind and prioritizing each other. When you invest in understanding your partner's motivations, goals, and priorities, and continuously check in to understand how those have shifted or adjusted over time, you will keep yourself in a position to grow the relationship.

My top three are; 
1. Mutual case studies with tangible results. 

2. Comprehensive documentation and access to marketing resources. 

3. Stakeholder mapping. Accountability across all functions to build relationships with their counterparts at the partners organtion. Joint slack channels are hugely beneficial to support this. 


Need more context here to fully understand your question. But, my gut reaction to this is to TELL LOTS OF STORIES.

If you see success, shout it from the rooftops so that people can see the impact with things that actually matter to them.

Case studies with random brands are good, case studies with YOUR CLIENTS/TEAMS are WAY better.

Celebrate every win and make sure everyone knows about it. The more proof in the pudding, the more interest and engagement you will get.

What's the most effective way to scale partner adoption beyond the first few partner engagements that happen?

Some metrics to track partner adoption are partner sourced net new revenue and partner influenced revenue. If you are seeing these metrics are performing well with certain partners, it's a good indication that you have successfully enabled that partner to sell your offering. As well as your ICP’s are aligned and customers are seeing the value of both of your services. You must track metrics for all your partners as each one of them will have different goals established. 


If you are looking to measure how well your partners are performing, take a look at revenue they produce for you, # of deals, average deal size, # of sales reps within the partner that are selling your solution (ie partner penetration), and those downsteam partners that produce (if that’s applicable). If a partner brought you one deal a quarter, ask what it would take to get 1 a month? How can you co-invest in your joint success? You still have to figure out the ROI of that channel to measure its effectiveness over other channels/partnerships you invest in. It’s also important to understand how much revenue your solution represents to the partner. Depending on the type of partner, a good rule of thumb is to be 10% of the partners’ business. If you don’t make up 10% of their revenues they may not care as much about having a strategic partnership. Make sure you understand why the partner should sell it? Why should they care? What does it help them solve? Does your solution represent a larger deal, better solution, stickier solution to help with retention? Those answers and creating an ideal partner profile (IPP) will inform how you want to GTM and which partners to pursue. Create a scorecard so you can evaluate your partnerships on an ongoing basis. With the strategic partners, agree upon KPIs that you measure together and meet on a consistent basis to ensure you are both meeting or exceeding those expectations. 

Number of mutual case studies 
Number of mutual clients with partnership use cases set up 
Number of introductions into clients made / Closed ARR 
Number of stakeholders involved 
Number of enablement sessions run 


This is a good one. Just did a presentation on it the other day:

Marketing Reach & Acquisition
- Partner-sourced Cost per Customer Acquisition (CAC)
- Volume of partnerships content
- Audience expansion
- Addressable market reach & LTV potential

CS Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Retention of partner-sourced accounts vs. non
- Retention of accounts with integrations vs. non
- Integration usage vs. LTV
- NPS vs. LTV

Sales Net New & Expansion Revenue
- Sourced net new revenue
- Average Sales Price (ASP) of partner-sourced deals
- Close rate of partner-sourced deals
- Influenced revenue of non-sourced deals
- ARR by Partner/Integration
- Cross-sell expansion revenue




I’m going to be very unhelpful here and answer this question with a question 🙂

The answer to this is going to depend on what you mean by ‘performing’ - what does mean for your business? And does this differ based on partner type?

For example - you might want to set up and track one set of KPIs to measure how the adoption of implementation partner services impacts on your customers’ time-to-value, and their eventual renewal and expansion rates. From this, you can start to form a view on which partner services are most impactful, and where you need to build partner capacity to maximize that impact.

You could also take this same approach with technology partners and measure these metrics based on a specific integration, or combination of integrations.

Or, you might want to track revenue impact more explicitly - ie tracking revenue growth that is directly related to or correlated with adoption of a specific integration. 

As with all KPIs - the best first step is to take a step back, and understand the 'why' behind the KPI, before setting it! 


Consider the end-to-end adoption funnel. 

- Top of funnel: app installs/auths
- Middle of funnel: varies depending on the use case. Track events that show an intent or attempt to use the integration. 
- Bottom of funnel: DAU, successful "runs"



What are some KPI's you would recommend for us to track to understand how well our partner adoption is performing?

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?

I think the best way to do this is by treating your partners the same exact way you would your sales team members. Meaning, give them the same kind of training and materials you would give your sales team. That looks like:

1. Thoroughly documented information on how to pitch the product, complete with scripts, objection busters, and hooks that help to sell the product
2. Holding training calls that go over mock sales calls, your pitch in action, and the opportunity to answer questions live from your partners
3. Providing them with tons of sales enablement materials such as slide decks, case studies, and other helpful information.

If you treat your partners like your sales team, they will sell like your sales team. It can be easy to make the case of not giving them as much information; but if you want them to be successful, you have to empower them with the right material.

Shadow! 

Have partners shadow your sales teams when they are pitching prospects. 
Then 
Have the partner pitch you on your own product. 
Then
Shadow your partners when they are pitching your product to their prospects. 
Finally
Have the partner "teach" one of your sales reps how to pitch the product. 

You can build all of the training, and one pagers you want, but the best way is shadowing, it keeps everyone accountable to doing the work, and you will quickly find invested partners and partners who are not invested. 
Another PLUS, it will decrease the 'channel conflict' with your sales teams. 

One of the most important parts of aligning partners with your sales pitch is making the customer journey clear out of the gate. You are making it easier for them to successfully pitch to your customers if the swim lines are clear between what a customer should go to you, the vendor for, and what they should go to a consulting partner for. For example, the second that you start offering competing services to your consulting partners you are creating a point of confusion for customers which will in turn make the pitch process more challenging for everyone involved.

It takes months for your own sales reps to get ramped and effectively sell your own product. They spend most of their working hours training to be as successful as possible in doing just that. It is unreasonable to think that a new partner can do it effectively in a short period (considering that they are busy selling/learning their own product/service).

I usually only get the more experienced team members involved with partner co-selling. Prior to that, pairing reps to share intel and learn each others business in micro 1on1 sessions is a great way to start having reps understand 1 partner at a time.

Training partners on your products / services is extremely important, but remember, nobody knows how to sell your products and services like your sales teams. I believe the most effective way is to provide enablement materials to partners. The goal is to get them comfortable with speaking to your offering and opening the door to a conversation with you. Enablement materials can be in the form of sales decks, one pagers, email templates, case studies or key metrics to share. Another enablement tool is recorded sales pitches with prospects, if you have permission to share on all sides. 

Once you feel like your partner is comfortable speaking to your offering, the next important step is how to hand off a referral. This is a great time to introduce your partner as the subject matter experts. Here your partner will be able to take over and go a little deeper as you have already set them up for success. 


It's important to set the expectation that you are not a solely a channel for these partners - ultimately tech partners should be focused on having a compelling story on the product side. That's the mechanism by which access to your customers can be made available and it's on them to create the technology and the story to help drive new business for themselves. 

The most effective way I have used to ensure partners align with your sales pitch is to provide training. The training does not have to be long or live. However the training should be run by someone from your team who can effectively emulate how pitches should be made. 

Providing enablement materials (ie 1 pagers, decks, email templates, talk tracks, case studies, and key value metrics) that can be used during these conversations is also helpful. Be sure to refresh these resources regularly. 

Conduct joint pitches with partners if your team has the resources.

Provide easily accessible support (another repeating tool in the toolkit) and open lines of communication for feedback. 

Track failed pitches as well as the reason for the nos. Use these to improve the pitches and/or product.

What's your advice on aligning partners with our sales pitch and how to we enable them to successfully pitch to our customers? 

We broke our goals up into two parts during the initial ramp-up of our program: we first measured success on NUMBER of partners when we were intially scaling the program. This allowed us to get tons of partners in the door with us, and give us a large pool of partners to work with.

And the second part, when we got a large number of partners, was focusing on NEW revenue referred by partners. This allowed us to focus on the key relationships within our partner pool and revenue-generating activities to help us get new business. Of course, you always want to keep this in mind throughout even the early phases of your program. But because the revenue won't always come incredibly quickly when it comes to partnerships (we all know its a long game!) getting more partners under your belt to start the relationships can help to give you a good base to start going after the revenue once its go-time.

In regards to that second part of the question, the two biggest numbers that I like to report on are:
1. New recurring revenue generated by partners
2. % of total new MRR generated by partners

That first one clearly shows that your partnership efforts are leading to new business for your company. And if you show that number is growing and is at a healthy clip, then you'll easily get the eyes of the exec team.

But, I would argue that second number is more important. Because if you can show that a large portion of your MRR is coming from partners, and that the proportion of that number is growing, then your team is going to want to invest in partnerships more heavily because it is a growing part of the total new MRR.

This is a tough one to answer without more specifics - but I’ll hazard a guess you already know what your exec team cares about this year. 

It’s probably along the lines of efficiency, effectiveness, profitable growth, defensibility - some or all of the above. 

So, the closer you can attach to those focus areas in terms of the KPIs you create and manage to, and the targets you set for yourself, the better.

And if you’re early stage, it’s super critical to be able to show the progress QoQ and to show that you have a healthy, diverse partner pipeline. 

If you don’t have a dedicated revops resource, make friends with someone in your revops team ASAP. Buy them coffee and a donut and ask them to show you the ropes on reporting!


What sort of revenue goals or other goals should I be setting for my service / certified partners program? What does the exec team need to see to know the program is going well and growing?