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?

To improve collaboration and ensure partner-related projects get prioritized, internal enablement is crucial. Regularly educate your internal teams (marketing, sales, customer success) about the role of partnerships, the value they bring to the business, and how leveraging partners can help them achieve their goals. Quarterly presentations or internal decks can reinforce this message. Addressing lead attribution issues is also essential. Without proper attribution, it’s hard to demonstrate the value of partner campaigns. Work with analytics or marketing operations teams to ensure your current attribution model can track partner activities. Aligning partner marketing efforts with existing marketing systems, like Salesforce or Marketo, allows for seamless tracking. Tag campaigns clearly (e.g., we use a “PAR” indicator for partner attributions) to ensure visibility in reporting. Another approach is to integrate partner marketing activities into existing campaigns. If a marketing team is already planning an integrated content campaign, propose adding a partner-driven webinar that aligns with the theme. This way, you support existing goals while demonstrating the added value partners bring. Once teams see the success of these integrated activities, they’ll be more willing to prioritize partner projects in the future.

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.