SmartSuite VP of Partnerships, Avi Hercenbergon Stakeholder Alignment

Figuring out the incentives and motives of your target partners is key. A lot will depend on what type of partner program you’re trying to build, but ultimately making sure there’s a win-win outcome and a worthwhile outcome for your partners is step number one. The other important thing when starting a partner program is to do things that don’t scale. Meet with every partner or even set up weekly/monthly calls to learn how it’s going and what they want/need. If you try scaling a partner program before working closely with the first few partners, the program will fail. The key to success is building very close relationships and spending a lot of time with your early partners so you can learn what works and what doesn’t.

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.

That’s a great question! The key thing to understand is, why did the partner go cold? Is the opportunity not lucrative enough for them? Then maybe figure out what a better win-win would look like for them. Do they not have proper capacity? Then maybe check in with them to see if that changed or paint a better picture of the outcome and encourage them to shift priorities. Most partners will do anything for more revenue to their business. Did they have a bad experience with your product? Then try to re-introduce them to your product when you have something better to show them. New product releases are a great way to reengage partners. One strategy that has worked for us really well is engaging partners for product feedback, and showing them we implement it. When partners feel heard and Valued, they are encouraged to build a close and strong relationship with the vendor.

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.

I recommend cold outbound, but not automated cold outbound. In the early days of our partner program, all of our partners came via personalized cold outbound. I ran searches on LinkedIn for no-code automation agencies and reached out to them with a pitch of how SmartSuite can solve pain points that they may have with existing tools they partner with. Personal Loom videos have also been very effective. Ultimately service partners care about delivering great products to their clients. If you can prove your product will solve pain points that they currently have many of them will be open to less. Don’t just tell them about the product. Try to show them in a Loom video as much as you can without making the video too long.

From my experience, you want to make sure you have great documentation and support for potential integration partners. At SmartSuite, we create a Slack channel with every company that is working on an integration with our product and they have direct access to our product teams and CTO. For the go-to-market aspect of integrations, we have a repeatable playbook on how we market new integrations to our existing customers, and what we expect the integrating company to do to introduce the integration to their users. Typical go-to-market motions for integrations are blog, email newsletter, social posts, help articles, webinar on how to get started, posts in the community and partner slack channel, etc.

I love this question mainly because this is an underserved area. Partnerships at a PLG company are challenging, because customers can self-sign up without any touch point from Sales or partners, and there isn’t true visibility into the impact partners have on the revenue of the business. Ideally a PLG company should be able to show which partners have impact on which customer referrals and which partners are currently working with which customers. You need to be able to prove the impact Partnerships has on net new business as well as on retained revenue.