Intercom Head of Partnerships, Catherine Brodigan profile picture

Catherine Brodigan

Head of Partnerships at Intercom

9 questions answered
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Intercom Head of Partnerships, Catherine Brodigan
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Stakeholder Alignment

Top posts
Question
When you're focusing on growing partner marketing sourced pipeline, what are some issues you've seen that have resulted in failed campaigns/strategies?
Answer
There are a couple of common scenarios I’ve encountered. Firstly - lack of clarity on roles & responsibilities on campaign execution between your team and the partner team. Who’s driving the event, and who’s supporting? What’s expected in terms of promotion on both sides? Who’s running the content and sourcing internal and customer speakers? When you don’t have this mapped out clearly at the start of the campaign, you’re going to end up with work being duplicated, or just not being done at all. And the impact can be severe - poor registration rates, show rates, or worst case scenario, the campaign being scrapped completely. Typically at Intercom, we’ll centralize all our planning for co-marketing campaigns in a central shared doc, and use the DACI method to define roles across both teams. That way, everyone’s clear up front. The second scenario also comes back to alignment, and it’s a scenario where the joint value hook just isn’t there. It could be that the integration is super lightweight, or the buyer personas don’t overlap, or that there just isn’t a ton of shared social proof to tell a “better together” story well. I have to give a shout out to our partner marketer, Mark Iafrate, here, who’s created a helpful framework for us to get aligned up front with partners on joint value messaging before we plan any shared GTM campaigns. We’ve created joint messaging guides with our prioritized partners which cover the who, where, what, why, when, and how of the integration works and how the shared value proposition might resonate with our target audience. This makes planning any joint GTM campaigns much more straightforward, as we know what we’re anchoring to.
Co-selling
Technology partner
Question
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?
Answer
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.
Partner Activation
Technology partner
Service partner
Question
What team leaders should be stakeholders in your partner program's strategy in order for the program to be successful?
Answer
Not-so-serious answer: As many as possible! Serious answer: Partner strategies can’t exist in a vacuum. Our success is directly dependent on the alignment of other teams - but the inverse is also true. If you’re building a partner strategy, you’ve got to be super clear on how your ecosystem is going to map to your broader business strategy, and that you’re aligned with broader business priorities. Then, it becomes a question of understanding who’s responsible for each of the success pillars you’re mapping to, and recruiting champions within the leadership of each of those teams. This might look like: Pillar 1 - Awareness - How do partners drive increased brand reach and tap into new markets? Your stakeholder here is probably going to be in your marketing / demand gen team - find them and align with them. Pillar 2 - Sourced revenue / logos - How will partners source net new revenue for your business? How well are they doing this today and how does that compare to your other sales channels? This will typically map to sales / growth leadership - another key champion. Pillar 3 - Activation & maturity - How do partners help unlock value within your product or extend the value out? How does this move the needle for your business today? Finding a champion here can be trickier - your stakeholders could be in your customer success org, or your product org if you’re mostly PLG - but they’re a vital party to have bought in. Pillar 4 - Retention & Renewal - How do partners help retain business? There might be macro trends to point to here (e.g. having X integrations connected to your product will boost retention by Y%), or more specific examples - you’ll have product, CX and probably sales leaders championing this and responsible for this number. And remember - partner strategies are inherently unique and proprietary - because your ecosystem is unique and proprietary! - so think through what your version of the above might look like before you start stakeholder mapping.
Partner Program Strategy
Service partner