Service partner

Comp neutrality is critical. The partner teams will not be successful, plain and simple. And partners won’t want to work with the sales teams because they will be afraid the reps will take the deal directly. You need the CRO or CSO alignment to be sure it’s written in the rules of engagement and the sales comp plan. This is non-negotiable in my book. 

This is an interesting question! I do believe that every sales org is different dependent on the size, maturity, and market position of the company, but when partner deals are incentivized or prioritized, the outcomes can include:

1. Increased affinity by the partner (by proving you're easy to work with and provide white-glove service)
2. Increased incentive for sales to participate in partner initiatives (ex. outreach for client-facing events)

However, to be successful with a sales team, I find it most important to be able to showcase the value that a partner brings to a sales cycle. We often find that our partner-led sales cycles close faster and at a higher win rate. We're able to gain more information about how the client is feeling and get more clarity on the pain points they're experiencing. 

Managing potential friction with a direct sales team, that is not inclined or aligned to co-sell is a dangerous proposition that can lead to losing trust.  A few factors to consider: Does the sales cycle require touches and engagement from the sales team? Is your direct team compensated at par value for deals that transact via partners? Do you have a process, program in place that protects partner margin aka deal registration? Are your company's sales, finance and partner leadership teams on the same page about the role of partners in driving revenue growth?  I would aim for full compensation alignment and clear roles and responsibilities early on.  Now, in the case of supporting a geography or vertical that may not have or need direct sales support, you may opt to increase the expectation from the partner and also consider paying a higher percentage of revenue to offset investments that the partner makes.

The best way to get sales reps more involved with partners is to make it comp neutral for them. 

Example - List price is $100. Partner gets 40% discount off list so $60 is what the company nets. Comp neutral would be the sales rep at your company getting quota attainment and commission on the $100, not $60.

I prefer an in the middle approach of splitting the difference as the customer is unlikely to pay list price if they had gone direct so the sales rep in this scenario gets comped on $80.

Should we be comping our sales team on involvement in partner deals and if so how should we set this up?

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.

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

Great question! I recommend you spend time meeting with individual team members - the CSMs and support agents actually working with your customers - to get a better understanding of their day to day before trying to get them to leverage service partners. It's important to recognize how busy these teammates are already just trying to ensure customers are happy and they may not have immediate capacity to take on something new like leveraging a service partner. Once you do find teammates that have capacity, be sure to work with them to educate other teammates on the benefits they experienced while working with you to leverage said service partner.

Facts and data will help you prove the case. Showing a business case that supports reducing the costs to the business by off-loading services the partners can provide. Most internal support teams are limited with their resources so share how partners can take on those services to help them achieve their goals (retention, resolutions, call time etc). Also showing either in-house or industry data around retention of customers through partners. Normally better retention rates are possible through partners which means (in SaaS) billings continue longer and the CLV is more valuable to the company. Share how specific partners are driving value for your competition.  

I’ll answer this question with a question (annoying, I know.) What value does the customer success and support team get from service partners? This is a question that my team has been working on with our customer success team, all year. We’ve created workflows to incorporate partners into renewal and upsell conversations, or to help smooth out friction with customers experiencing challenges. But until you know how your CS/Support team perceives Partnerships, as well as what their needs are, it will be hard to drive adoption of service partners.

Good enablement is essential for anybody in your organisation to be able to leverage service partners.  The main objective of the enablement sessions should be that the teams have a good understanding of the value that partner will drive to their clients/prospects, are confident in how your teams would work together, and ultimately trust those partner to make them look good. 

Three things that can be done to help support this and build trust are; 

1. A strong joint value proposition
2. Multiple case studies with mutual clients 
3. identify the key signals that indicate that client or prospect could benefit from your services partners offering. 


1. Start by creating a customer success plan. This will help outline the goals and objectives of your customer success team, as well as how they can work with service partners to achieve these goals.

2. Make sure your customer success team is properly trained on how to work with service partners. They should understand the role these partners play in achieving customer success, and be able to effectively communicate with them.

3. Work with your service partners to create a strategy for customer success. This should include the services they offer, as well as how they can help support your customers’ success.

4. Cooperate with your service partners to measure customer success. This will help you track progress and ensure that both your team and your service partners are meeting the needs of your customers.

This is a bit tough to answer without more context. It depends if your CS team is designed to service accounts or not, and if that is an additional revenue stream for your company or not. 

Basically, you have to find an angle that a service partner either saves them time/work and improves the end product/experience for your users.

Figure out what their goals are and what challenges they experience. Then try and solve for those with your service partners.

Additionally, what data can you find to support how beneficial your service partners are? Do they have a higher Avg Sales Price (ASP)? Do they retain longer? Do they use more features? Give them quantitative data on top of qualitative data to build your biz case.

This can be tricky, but very doable. There are many ways to accomplish this, and one of the easiest is leveraging community. If your support uses a specific tool to chat with customers, for example, you could leverage AI to try to answer questions that the community has already answered. 

Also, usually service partners are usually the first line of defense for your customers and their questions. You can relieve support if you create special levels of support for your partners so they can better support their clients. Enable the partners to field their client's questions where possible. 


How can I get the customer success and support teams in my company to leverage service partners?

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?

Depends on what you are enabling your partners to do. 

If its leads and sales, then... you should be seeing leads and sales. 

Some subtle indicators that your enablement program can be improved: 
- Leads are not closing at a rate equal or better to your organic leads. 
- Customer churn is outsized on your partner led customer base. 
- Leads start and diminish to zero over time. 
- Customer support cases are outsized on your partner led customers. 

- My colleagues are asking the right discovery questions in their customer and prospect calls.
- They are initially bringing me into some customer calls to help with discovery but then afterwards are able to run that process by themselves.
- The number of introductions, intel or efforts we as an organisation provide to partners (and the other way around).
- Number and success of marketing activities that take place with partners.
- Tracking % of partner influence on new revenue but also existing reoccurring revenue.

The best is when you see the momentum increase and you as a partner manager become less of a bottleneck.

Any strategy should have measurable, time-bound outcomes determined prior to a project. Success is achieving what you set out to achieve! When building a partner enablement strategy, first identify your goals. Do you want to publish one co-authored content piece a month? Are you interested in signing up 10 partners for a partner program? Would you like to achieve 1 lead per partner per month? Once defined, set a timeframe in which you expect to achieve results and identify the resources you'll need (marketing, sales, CS) outside of your team to accomplish what you're looking for. If you're not tracking to those goals, identify if there are resource gaps constraining your success, or if there is a different roadblock in your path.

If you want to know if your partner enablement strategy is successful, here are a few things to look out for:

1. Are your partners actively promoting your products and services?
2. Do they seem knowledgeable about your offerings?
3. Are they providing positive feedback about your products and services?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you may need to revisit your partner enablement strategy. Try focusing on training and tools that will help partners better understand your products and how they can be best used to generate leads and close sales. You may also want to consider incentives or rewards to encourage partner engagement and success.

Eventually the true North Star metric is partner-sourced and influenced revenue. But towards that, we have other enablement indicators such as how many certifications partners are obtaining, how many deals they're registering with us and the pipeline value, etc. The actual revenue that partners themselves are deriving is not always possible to ascertain, but in lieu of that, when we see our partners hiring for more Caspio developers on their rolls, and when we hear positive feedback from them on how they were able to win deals or execute projects faster or cheaper with Caspio, that's great anecdotal evidence as well!

Some leading indicators here might be: are you seeing more requests for partner intros? An uptick in engagement with partner content in your LMS? An uptick in mentions of key partners in your call recording software?

Ultimately though, improved partner enablement is going to show up downstream, in metrics like partner influenced revenue (new and existing business), partner-assisted retention, and improved activation & maturity rates through higher integration install rates.


How do you know if your partner enablement strategy is successful?

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?

To me, the most important part of getting partners certified is helping validate which partners a customer should choose from when looking to hire a service partner. As a partner team, you are building the necessary training and technical certification tracks that should, in theory, help filter through the potential options for your customers. If your training/certification materials are not doing this effectively, it may be worth exploring new tracks you can implement to ensure the right partners are recommended to customers.

If you form strong partnerships with the right companies/teams, you can get to a setup where your partners act as extended ears/eyes in the market. 

If you train/certify correctly, then they understand what value your product/service can bring and to what type of customers so that any of their reps from AMs to SDRs can act as an additional intel source for your team.

Rather than just relying on your direct outreach, marketing and sales team, partners can exponentially extend your reach and qualify effectively. They would be motivated to introduce or let you know of opps for your organisation through referral kickbacks but more importantly, general partner collaboration as hopefully you are doing the same for them in return.

I cannot stress enough the importance of partner training. It is impossible for a partner to support with referrals or any initiative at all if they do not know what you do. 

You have to ensure you are providing adequate training to your partners in different forms. Everyone learns differently and we want to ensure we are enabling all the right people at their company. Which means different types of digestible enablement materials. Not only do you need to provide training to partners on your offering but you need to also share insights on your “better together story”. The reason being, when your partner sets out to make introductions on your behalf, they will likely be faced with many questions and in some cases some objections. They need to be equipped to handle these types of things when they come up. This will help to ensure we are showcasing the value of our partnership to our customers and prospects. 


I love this question, because I get to share what I think is one of the most valuable things I learned from being on the receiving end of many lunch and learns or partner enablement sessions:

Your partner will NEVER sell you if they do not know what you do, or how it benefits their client.

Think about this one, deeply - when your partner is pitching your product to one of their customers, they will likely face some questions from their customer, including but (definitely) not limited to:

Why do I need this? 
How much does it cost? 
How will it benefit my business? 
Why is this better than what I have in place?
How long will this take to implement?
Will I have to shut down critical business practices to enable this?
How will my team have to manage this?

If your partner cannot stand up to questioning about your product, THEY WILL NOT PITCH IT. They won't stake their reputation, especially when you think about who is pitching, which is usually not your partner manager! 

So with all of that context...
1. Partner training trains the right people on the right questions about your product, and 
2. Partner certification enhances the legitimacy of their pitch to their customers.

The other benefits of certification are covered in the question "What's the most effective way to scale partner adoption beyond the first few partner engagements that happen?"

For our solutions (consulting) partners, we provide free training and certifications, and they can obtain the Silver tier and be listed in our directory only after obtaining at least one certification. For them, having the benefit of a Silver partner logo and being able to claim that expertise in front of customers is enough value to get certified. And when they have been using Caspio for a while, the certification itself isn't too difficult to obtain.

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

What is the benefit of partner training and having partners get certified?

Ah, this is the ultimate struggle: overcoming competing priorities and aligning everyone on your projects! My advice would be to focus on building a strong, foundational relationship with the stakeholders here (sales, engineering, marketing, etc.)  Understand each of their priorities/KPIs, and then set up consistent check-ins with them to ensure you are timing your ask appropriately and tailoring your request to their priorities. 

Maybe your project requires quite a bit of resourcing that needs to be slotted into the overall marketing plan; having these ongoing conversations ensures that you maintain respect for your team members' time, and gives you the flexibility to pivot if needed. Perhaps your request requires a small initial lift that doesn't seem critical on its own, but will ultimately lead to a stronger overall outcome; communicating the long-term vision can help bump the project up on the list of priorities. Help them help you!

Attribution between sales and marketing is always a difficult conversation. Partner marketing should have a separate budget so you can measure the benefit from these separately from direct company marketing. I recommend you ask for budgeting for a specific project based on an agreed upon ROI that marketing wants to achieve. If you can correlate the success of the project based on leads and closed won deals it will set you up for further budgeting and investment. You could also ask for sales or partnerships to fund an initiative if marketing won’t budget for it. Once you prove success you can figure out how to go take it from there. One other tip, show how competition is using marketing and how it’s effective with their partners. 

I’m going to heavily refer to my answer on “How does your marketing team usually work with your partner team to promote partners to customers?”, but I wanted to also answer this question because there was a word in here that I wanted to address. If you suspect what the problem is, you don’t know what the problem is. Ask marketing what their priorities are! I suspect (wink) that you’ll have a lot of overlapping priorities, and even find some ways that partners can take some of the heavy lifting off of your marketing team (driving event registrations, content/copy, sponsor $). 

For collaboration, remind your team that partners can boost the results of the campaigns they're already running!

Yes, partners bring in referrals, but they can also be thought leaders, content distributors, and brand promoters. 

Is your marketing team already doing a webinar? Ask them to include a partner as a speaker and I bet you'll get more registrants then you would have otherwise. Are they writing a blog? Ask them if you can include a quote from a partner and then ask that partner to promote it on social once it's live. These types of campaigns can make your partner managers happy, but won't cause attribution conflicts since they are either non-lead driving, or they are partner-influenced and not directly partner-sourced leads through content.



Partner marketing is a key part of many businesses, but it can often be difficult to get partner-related projects prioritized. One of the main problems is lead attribution and how it affects team budgets and priorities between marketing and partnerships.

There are a few things that you can do to increase collaboration between marketing and partnerships:

1. Make sure that everyone is on the same page with regards to the goals of the partnership.

2. It's important for everyone involved in partner marketing to be on the same page with regards to the goals of the partnership. This includes understanding each team's responsibilities in relation to the partnership.

3. Communication is key when it comes to partner marketing. It's important for both teams to be regularly updated on the progress of the partnership so that everyone is clear on what's happening.

I'm a partner marketer that reports up to marketing and I'm struggling to get my partner-related projects prioritized. I suspect the main problem is lead attribution and how it affects team budgets/priorities between marketing and partnerships. Do you have any tips for increasing collaboration? 

I don't think there are failures when it comes to partner marketing. There's a lot of experimenting and learning due to the nature of partnerships--there are different types of partnerships, different partners per your industry and then every individual company has its own mix of complexities, resources, cultures etc. 

Honestly, I think one of the most ineffective "strategies" is trying to apply the same strategy or process to every single partner, and treat every relationship the same. This often comes out of positive intent like, "We want to be the best partner to everyone and treat all of our partners the same," but the reality is, that won't be effective--especially not in the long-term. 

When starting out with partner marketing campaigns and sourced revenue, and you don't have any historical data or ranking of your partnerships (Make sure you chat about this with your PAMs!), it's OK to be opportunistic and try many things with different partners...but keep track of these results and begin building a ranking and prioritization system for you partners. It will be key to your longer-term success. 

Also, as with any marketing, make sure you keep the end goal and results in mind from the beginning. A lot of times, we just default to a partner webinar, an ebook or some other type of marketing deliverable without actually thinking about what kind of results we want. Whether it's just brand alignment, exposure and top-of-funnel leads or higher intent more sales-ready leads for co-selling, the mutually agreed-upon result will dictate what kind of partner marketing activities need to happen. 

Finding the balance between promoting your owned content, as well as promoting external co-marketing content (e.g. promoting a partner webinar) is key when it comes to growing your partner marketing pipeline. 

In co-marketing, it’s common for the partner leading the activity to ask you to drive a certain number of RSVPs to unlock the full lead list. Before committing to take part in that co-marketing initiative, take a look at what else you’re promoting during that window and evaluate if you have a good chance of hitting the target. You don’t want to go back to the partner empty-handed (i.e. not drive many leads), but you also don’t want to be sending endless emails to your mailing list and making them want to unsubscribe. 
 
Another top tip is to ensure that the partner leading the co-marketing has asked sign-ups to agree (via opt-in) that all partners taking part in the webinar/ebook are able to contact them afterwards. Without this opt-in, you can’t follow up with your hard-earned leads after the co-marketing initiative has taken place. (NB This is true to be GDPR compliant - it may be different elsewhere/with other privacy rules).


I’d like to combine my answer for this question with another question, “Which co-marketing motions do you think are best suited for co-selling and why?” 

 When deciding on a co-marketing motion, my team answers the following questions:
Who is the addressable market we’re reaching in this motion?
Do we have the content necessary to engage and educate that audience?
Are we positioned with the authority to speak to that audience?
Do we have the means to reach this audience?

The first question may seem like a bit of a no-brainer, but not clearly defining the target market for a marketing campaign will create a lot of challenges when it comes to the following two questions. 

I often find that if the second and third questions are not fully answered, the fourth question becomes very hard to address. I have attempted campaigns or strategies that though educational, don’t have enough of a hook, or aren’t coming from a source that stands strong enough on its own. When those pillars fall, it becomes very difficult to engage with the desired audience.


When you're focusing on growing partner marketing sourced pipeline, some common issues that can result in failed campaigns or strategies include:

1. Not having a clear value proposition for partners. If your partners don't understand what's in it for them, they're not going to be motivated to promote your products or services.

2. Having unrealistic expectations. Partners are more likely to be successful if they feel like they're being given achievable goals. Trying to accomplish too much with too little resources is a recipe for disaster.

3. Not providing adequate support. Your partners need to feel like they have the tools and resources they need to be successful. If you're not providing enough support, they'll quickly become frustrated and give up.

4. Failing to communicate. Poor communication can lead to misunderstandings and mistrust. Make sure you're regularly communicating with your partners to keep them updated on your plans and progress.

There are a couple of common scenarios I’ve encountered. 

Firstly - lack of clarity on roles & responsibilities on campaign execution between your team and the partner team. Who’s driving the event, and who’s supporting? What’s expected in terms of promotion on both sides? Who’s running the content and sourcing internal and customer speakers? When you don’t have this mapped out clearly at the start of the campaign, you’re going to end up with work being duplicated, or just not being done at all. And the impact can be severe - poor registration rates, show rates, or worst case scenario, the campaign being scrapped completely.

Typically at Intercom, we’ll centralize all our planning for co-marketing campaigns in a central shared doc, and use the DACI method to define roles across both teams. That way, everyone’s clear up front.

The second scenario also comes back to alignment, and it’s a scenario where the joint value hook just isn’t there. It could be that the integration is super lightweight, or the buyer personas don’t overlap, or that there just isn’t a ton of shared social proof to tell a “better together” story well.

I have to give a shout out to our partner marketer, Mark Iafrate, here, who’s created a helpful framework for us to get aligned up front with partners on joint value messaging before we plan any shared GTM campaigns. We’ve created joint messaging guides with our prioritized partners which cover the who, where, what, why, when, and how of the integration works and how the shared value proposition might resonate with our target audience. This makes planning any joint GTM campaigns much more straightforward, as we know what we’re anchoring to. 

This is a good question!  There is a difference between marketing with your partners to win together and marketing your partners to increase revenue. It’s very important to never treat your partners as a revenue source.  They are your partners - that word is there for a reason. I have seen some programs fall apart when partners begin to feel used. Always remember: They don’t work for you. They have chosen to use you, and they can choose not to use you, too. 

When you're focusing on growing partner marketing sourced pipeline, what are some issues you've seen that have resulted in failed campaigns/strategies?

One of my favorite tactics is the BUDDY SYSTEM - where you bring a buddy from a customer or a key prospect to make an introduction, or to join a meeting with a potential partner. Just last week I was on a call with a sales leader at a key ISV partner, and he made four key GSI introductions for me, just by asking! I also loving bringing top customers and customers, or their POV to meetings to help get a door open. 

How we as an iPaaS can help the partner with their integration strategy. 

A prospective partner page and partner case studies can help here. If you can lay out exactly how your current partners are benefiting from being in your program, it is going to help a prospective partner make the business case for joining. 

Stats like 'our partner directory or integration marketplace gets X views, customers install Y integrations and reach out to Z solution partners' or 'our average partners gets A referrals a month' etc can help to show the value of your program.

Developing a strong partner brand also gets people excited to work with you even beyond the numbers. A brand comes from being a good partner, but also being active in the partner community and showcasing how you are supporting and enabling your partners. 

If you can find a common go-to-market strategy where both parties win, you can create a game plan and see if a partnership makes sense. A lot of times, I'll ask if there's something I can do to help or provide value. From there, you can start building a working relationship.

This is a great question, and I might cheat a little on the answer, so bear with me! 

The best partnerships are the ones that make sense. There are a couple of elements that you can figure out on your own/prior to outreach to set you up for success, such as identifying customer overlap and ICP alignment. If the prospective partner is already introducing your product to their customers, there's an indicator for a relationship to add value. Outreach focused on both alignment (we have overlapping customers) and discovery (is there a way that a partnership can drive value) can often lead to an initial discussion. 

When the other person doesn't respond, I recommend turning to relationships. (yes, cheating!) However, those relationships don't have to be with the prospective partner - they can be with trusted allies in the ecosystem. I often turn to friends at respective service/tech companies to see who they have a strong relationship with, and to get a better understanding of their partnership ecosystem. That often results in a better understanding of 1. what to bring to the table, and 2. if that company has the resources to support a partnership.

Signifyd Head of Global Agency Partnerships, Megan Blissickon Partner Program Strategy