View AMA
Question
How does your marketing team usually work with your partner team to promote partners to customers?
Answer
We try to think about partners in every marketing motion we do. In doing so, we align the partner's strengths to the goals of the marketing activity.
Some partners have great brand recognition, while others are great at demand generation and serve a similar ICP (ideal customer profile).
Question
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?
Answer
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).
Question
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?
Answer
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.
Question
When you have two types of integrations, integrations that your team builds and integrations that partners build, where do you draw clear lines of ownership? Do you have an integrations squad as a part of the product team that works with the tech partnership team? Or do you totally separate integrations (optional for customers to use) your team builds from product partnerships where companies are developing to your platform?
Answer
At MotherDuck we have a dedicated Ecosystem team that builds and maintains the most requested integrations, and also supports the partners in building their MotherDuck integrations.
The decision on who builds it usually comes down to leverage; the bigger a company gets the more they transition to supporting their partners in building integrations to them.
Question
What metrics are top of mind for executives and leadership teams when deciding to increase spend on partner budget?
Answer
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.
Question
How do we balance our partner team’s integrations goals with the goals/priorities that product and engineering have?
Answer
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.
Question
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?
Answer
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.
Question
How do you align your revenue teams when integrations are more about retention, NRR, or time-to-value vs new logo generation?
Answer
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.