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?

The short version: enable early, and often! The longer version: we’ve moved through several iterations of partner enablement at Intercom over the past 3.5 years or so. We’re mostly focused on our sales team (and our support team to a lesser extent) we have a number of different touchpoints we look to enable at: - During new hire onboarding: this is typically a higher level, foundational look at our ecosystem - who we partner with, why they’re important, and how to work with them - Live classroom training: this is usually planned as part of bigger enablement campaigns or initiatives, for example if we’re launching a new product which has a lot of exposure to our ecosystem, or if we’re launching a new sales playbook. Again this tends to be more high level and would cover a partner category - e.g. our analytics partners, or our phone partners - or a new process - e.g. how to use account mapping data in our CRM - Partner-specific enablement: these are usually shorter live sessions - we call them “Facts & Snacks” - where we’ll invite a partner to present an overview of their product, their integration, and their value proposition - as well as take Q&A from the sales team. This works well both for new partners, and as refresher training if we’ve got an updated partner integration - Always-on enablement: We have partner content housed in our LMS, which is used by both our Sales and Support teams. We’ll have more detailed content and playbooks for the partners we’re actively co-selling with, and shorter snippets for our other partners. Our processes and workflows are also documented here so sales and support teams know how to work with our team and how to engage effectively with partners For other stakeholder teams, we’ve done a more high level ‘partner roadshow’ in the past, aimed at providing an intro to our team and our ecosystem, as well as identifying potential opportunities for collaboration.

I think you need spend time on both face-to-face education as well as creating on-demand content (videos, one-pagers, etc.) to help your sales team understand the benefits our partners bring to the table. Be it a tech partner or an agency, you’ll need to create these resources and invest continuously in internal education. This is mostly important for more sales-driven organizations (as opposed to marketing-driven ones) though

I always suggest having a variety of different themes within enablement sessions. We want to keep partners top of mind and also add value to different roles across the business, going beyond the introduction to the partner. . Here are some of the themes that we have found successful. 1. Initial intro, with Demo (if applicable) and a heavy focus on how our partnership works 2. Joint customers are invited to speak to both companies about what our partnership has meant for their business and impacted their goals 3. How-to sessions ( Set up the integration, optimise integration/use cases etc) 4. Subject matter experts - get someone from within the partner's organisation to come in and talk about a specific subject they specialise in. This could range from a service such as PPC/SEO to leadership or sales skills 5. About my role - get someone from within the partner's organsation to come in and talk about their day-to-day and what matters to them. This helps our teams understand more about the best ways to communicate and interact with our partners to drive more engagement and ensure we always know what matters to them. On top of this, social activities where stakeholders across both businesses are extremely successful. Although not structured learning and enablement sessions, the conversation are invaluable and led to better understanding of eachothers businesses and roles and personalities.

TEST EVERYTHING AND GET FEEDBACK. Everybody learns differently and has different preferences. Also, not everybody may be bought in just yet. Try videos, (good) lunch & learns, email overviews, easily accessible directories. At the end of the day, serve information to people where they work and make it as easy as possible to digest. It's a never-ending process and there is no one-size-fits-all. This is arguably the hardest part of partnerships IMO.