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?

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

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

Hey there! A few thoughts: You'll want to make sure you understand the goals of each of your internal teams. What does your blog team care about? What are they goaled on? How about your customer success team or email marketing team or demand gen team? Understand the needs/blockers of each team, then get a sense of how the partners you work with can help each team with their goals. For example: The blog team is goaled on traffic to posts. They need help getting more views on their blog posts. Well, we have an integration partner that focuses on X topic. If we highlight a partner in a blog post, they will share the post via their email and social channels, driving more traffic to our blog. The customer success team is goaled on retention and upsells. We know that the more integrations a customer has connected, the more likely they are to retain. Therefore, integrations = higher retention rate. Customer success should highlight integrations to their customers in order to drive up retention. Etc, etc for each team. Talk this through with each team, show progress on those goals, and you'll have cross-functional buy in and a team that sees the value in partnerships. Work with your internal teams as much as you can with a focus on helping them reach their goals.