What are some of the most important activities for a partner manager to do to improve technology partner adoption?

It is important to be on the same page with a partner to start. Ensure through discovery and onboarding that you have clearly identified goals, ICP match and clear documentation. Once you have an integration built, it is important to work closely with your partner to market this launch. You want to ensure your customers will know about this integration which is a value add to their business. Engage in co-marketing initiatives, ensure your internal teams understand the features and benefits of the integration and ensure your mutual customers are set up correctly to leverage the integration. Education of the sales team will also be valuable so they can explain the benefits of the integration to all new prospects.

I cannot stress the importance of having and using IPP (Ideal Customer Profile) before beginning any type of partner recruiting — honestly this should be done before programs are built but I digress. The IPP allows you to clearly define the characteristics of your best fit partners. When both teams find overlap magic can definitely happen. Discovery calls. During these calls listen to the concerns partners raise and (hint at). Encourage your colleagues to be frank, so you have a clear picture of the opportunity or lack thereof. If interest, opportunity, and resources are available, prioritize that partner and frame the benefits you can provide to ease any concerns. Help partners make the business case: Share case studies or data with the partner that illustrate an integration’s ability to help them achieve their KPI. Regularly touch base with the partners you are managing, this keeps your team fresh in their minds and allows you to ensure that the benefits your program offers align with those goals. Clear documentation and readily available technical support. If you don’t have a PM assigned to integrations/technology partners or an engineer is not available to help I often look to CS team’s more technical team members for help. Building out integration guides (in addition to clear documentation). These guides should serve as a roadmap for the full adoption process. They should also be geared towards the non technical people who will be involved with this process (ie Partner Managers). They should provide context on the benefits of adoption, guided code snippets and their uses, mockups, best practices, examples of successful implementations, resources needed, and timelines for GTM. Check in during the build process and proactively offer support. There have been many times an integration has been deprioritized because a roadblock has been hit and no easy access to support was available. Provide partners methods to measure how successful their efforts have been. Offer training for partners, sales teams, and customer success teams. Make sure your sales and customer success teams are also in the loop.

It’s a bit of an overlap with other questions, but in a nutshell: - your marketplace (or any other format where you list your integrations) should feel like a core part of your product, not an afterthought that is just put there - work together with marketing to launch and then continously promote an integration - educate your sales team so when they’re in conversations with prospects, they’ll be able to answer integration related questions effectively

Answered this in another question: 1. marketing that integration to your customers via newsletters, blogs, landing pages, and other co-marketing activities. 2. training your internal teams on the details of the integration and giving them supporting assets to share with customers/prospects when specific conversations come up. 3. literally going through customer accounts and finding ones that would see value in that integration and giving CS scripts to use to share the integration information with that customer to name a few...