Kristin Montag Brown

I would first want to find out why they are not performing anymore. Has the contact person changed which disrupted the relationship, did they start focusing on a competitor, have we neglected them, did they make any bad experiences with us or in projects, is there an economic reason…? It is important that you (re-)connect with that partner and ask these questions, maybe in the format of a retro (what went well, what didn’t, how to continue?). Once you know the reason and this is still a partner who wants to re-engage with you and sees the potential of the partnership, work on what broke it and make it a good partnership again. You would need to rebuild trust and re-take this partner through your partner journey. Once you experience success together again, the partnership will start flourishing again.

We defined a partner journey process that consists of multiple steps. In our first meeting with a potentially new partner we transparently show/describe these steps so we set expectations for our partnership and are aligned from day one. At Contentful, these steps are: 1. Sales Enablement Run a sales enablement training with the partner’s sales, biz dev, partially technical as well as leadership team. This training consists of our positioning, product information, ideal customer profile, customer use cases (what to listen to), case study examples, how to sell together, pricing concept, training options (certification) and next steps. We experimented with having this as a recorded on-demand session which partners get access to in our Partner Portal but realized that it is often outdated very soon and when running these sessions manually, you can actually have a conversation with your new partner and learn about their ICP and their views on the market and their positioning, as well as ask them questions and potentially hear about some customers they have in mind when you inspire them with your use cases and case studies. 2. Account Mapping We used to run them with spreadsheets, nowadays, we use Crossbeam. Account Mappings are always good to understand each other’s customer landscape and to discover some low-hanging fruits to work on together. For example, if you find multiple accounts in the same vertical and you have a customer case for that vertical, you could run a very specific webinar towards these accounts together. If you are good at replacing or complementing another technology and your partner knows that in some of their customer accounts these technologies are end-of-life and would need to be replaced, or you could add value to a technology as the complementing technology then you could also run an activity (webinar, thought-leadership paper, concrete BDR outreach) towards these accounts. 3. GTM plans and activities Typically after step one and two there are some leads to work on. If not yet, you had a reason to set up the partnership with your partner, which is to create additional value to your customers. The value you produce with your partnership should be bigger than each party going to market on their own (1+1=3). So, think about your joint value proposition, your sweet spot. What are you solving for? Can you offer a specific accelerator, a vertical offering, a technology expertise, a certain services offering etc.? Build a GTM plan around that offering. Specify how you create awareness, what channels and formats to use, what’s your timing, what’s the expected outcome? 4. Certifications Often partners only invest in certifications when they have their first project(s), as they don’t want to take people off other projects without the prospect of upcoming work for them. We have an online certification training, partially self-paced, partially instructor-led and hands-on. It is working very well and partners are typically capable of running a project on their own after taking this training. I recommend having a shorter version for partners who already have a lot of experience with your product. For partners not having had any training before their first project, I recommend a Professional Services offering specifically for your partners to support them during that first project. 5. Grow the partnership Run QBRs with your key partners on your GTM plan, check in on goals and how you track and always plan for the next 2 quarters/12 months. Your partner will grow, gain certs and win projects and climb up the ranks of your partner program. Repeat this process (and enable new people) and also always re-evaluate the tiering of your partners (which might change). With limited capacity, prioritization is important, we do the GTM planning with Tier 1 and rising Tier 2 partners. The baseline for making this activation process work is that you know your ideal partner profile, have qualified the new partner beforehand and that they show commitment to this partnership.

Both teams typically get in touch with partners post-sale, either during the onboarding of the new customer by the Customer Success (CS) team or when they have support inquiries, sometimes sent by the partner. As for CS, partners might just be part of the conversations with the customer and sometimes even the main point of contact. CS needs to understand the role of the partner in the project to leverage them appropriately, for example for architecture or broader strategy questions. We, the partnerships team, are enabling our CS team directly in internal team meetings and are running update sessions when anything changes in our team, program or partner landscape. In these session, we explain what roles partners can have (consulting, implementation, project management, procurement etc.), what services they are offering (e.g. commerce accelerator, mobile app development, FSI focus etc.) and are showing our top partners per market. This way CS knows how to work with them, recognizes names and has some guidance on what potential there is to introduce partners to solve customer challenges. They would still consult with the partner team on the right partners to recommend. For cross-sell and upsell opportunities, it is also valuable to reconnect with the initial implementation partner as well as recommend partners to consult on your offering and how it fits into the broader business strategy in case there’s no partner involved yet. If successful, they might also do the implementation. This way your CS team even brought a lead to your partner which will further boost your relationship with that partner and result in more pipeline further down the line. We track our partner involvement in our CRM so our CS team can check who previously worked with an account. Preferably, you have an internal partner directory where your internal teams can see the capabilities, experience and enablement status of your partners so they have some guidance on what services are available and who of your partners could be a good fit. This would boost autonomy of that team in making suggestions to their customers and you could accelerate and scale the partner recommendation and introduction process. If you don’t have any, CS can still reach out to Partnership and consult with you on the next steps, it will just be a bit more manual process. As for Support, they can be a partner to your partners (our partners get special Partner SLAs with Support) and help you differentiate from your competitors’ partner programs with outstanding support. At the same time, Support can engage with partners to get feedback on Support responsiveness and problem-solving capability as well as input on bugs and product features. We sometimes arrange calls between selected partners and our Support to have these conversations. Give Support access to a list of your partners so they can also recognize them in support inquiries and offer to your support team to speak to your partners. The more they get the partners’ views, the more they will engage with them to open product requests, log bug reports etc. and make your overall product better and increase customer happiness.

We have created the following material. The list is probably not complete and also depends on the nature of each business: - Partner sales enablement deck (see my answer about the content and activation further above) - Certification training (online, in-person possible) - Use case playbooks (how and why to replace an existing technology, how to address a certain use case or vertical) - Partner marketing toolkit (to scale the creation of marketing assets with your partners like blog posts, PRs, case studies…) - Pricing concept overview (training, PDF, deck…) - Competitive analysis (battlecards, USP of your solution) - Product overview (training course, deck, PDF…), can be multiple if multi-product company - Case studies - White papers made available for co-branding (add logo, intro and outro and market it on your own) - Localized material (mostly white papers for re-use)

Some things that have worked for us and generated one of the most powerful ecosystems in our space are: - Partner-specific support SLAs - Regular scalable communication (newsletter, quarterly partner update webinars with sr. leadership) and award ceremonies to celebrate successes and build more credibility around the expertise of your partners - Valuable certification training with badges that increase the person’s value and strengthen your partner’s credibility - Be partner-first and offer product extensibility so partners can build on top of your platform - Include partners in your company strategy (include them in thought-leadership pieces, make them part of your own events, co-present at conferences, invite them to your kick-off, run partner advisory boards… anything you do as a company, you should think, how do I include partners in this) - Offer powerful Marketing Development Funds that incentivize partners to reinvest the gained budget into very targeted GTM activities to grow the joint partnership even further

I talked about partner onboarding and activation above. Not sure if this is an obvious or non-obvious way but giving a lead to a partner takes you a long way. It is very important, though, that you 100% support your partner in the first project to make sure it is a success. The expertise the partner gains in the project, the services revenue they make as well as the delivery success they experience, create very positive momentum and will accelerate their investment in your partnership which will result in faster pipeline creation. You can also give them access to your technology for an internal project they want to run. In our case we are offering a content management platform so our partners can build their own website on Contentful. This way they gain experience in a low-risk environment, have a use case to show to their prospects and will enter the next project with confidence.

The metrics I used to show our sr. leadership the importance and impact of partners were: - Partner sourced revenue as a percentage of sales revenue - Partner involved (besides sourced also influenced, e.g. when you introduce a partner) revenue as a percentage of sales revenue - Partner attach rate (how many opps with partners vs. without) - Average deal size with partners vs. without - Average sales cycle with partner vs. without - Conversion rates of opps with partners vs. without The last three metrics are typically better with partners than without. The average deal size is bigger as the partner consults from a more strategic viewpoint which might also include future considerations, other departments, markets, use cases and therefore, more of your product or more products could be positioned earlier. The average sales cycle is typically shorter as the partner is doing a lot of the pre-sales work (pitching, showcasing the value proposition, comparing to other solutions) and might only come to you when you are already the chosen solution. The partner might also have pre-established trust with the customer which would shorten the trust-building part. Because there is trust and partners are an extended team and independent third-party to pitch in your favor, the conversion rates with partners are typically higher. I was also able to show an increase in partner sourced and involved revenue starting at 15-20% and increasing to a peak of 74% (sourced) over 8 years. Our goal is to reach 80% in the next 2-3 years. As the above mentioned metrics are usually better with partners, a higher partner attach rate (sourced or introduced) is a good leading indicator for increased conversion rates and deal sizes as a lagging outcome. All these metrics helped me to promote a partner-first mindset as well as to shift some marketing budgets from demand gen to partnerships. The case I made was to accelerate what is working and that increased marketing budget invested in our partnerships will have a higher incremental return than increased demand gen budget.

We do have a referral program and our partners can get a commission however this is not what motivates them to bring new business. It is more about the collaboration, regular check-ins, developing business cases and going to market with them. The more you invest in your partners with leads and marketing budget and marketing activities, the more they will invest in you. If they can build a successful business model on top on your product offering, they will come back and sell more. So, with your partners, you need to find out how they can either sell more of their services or expand their offering with the help your product. It does help to have a tiered program with partner levels that express your partners’ expertise and therefore add credibility to their offerings. It is an incentive for service partners to be on your highest level. If you then set up your program with a Marketing Development Fund (MDF) that increases based on the level, or offers more options for use, then you create another incentive for partners to invest in your program vs. another.

The number one thing I look for when qualifying a new partner is their customers. Who are their customers, how many do they have and do they fit our ICP. After that, we would look at their services offering, their other partners (do they fit with our ecosystem, do they work with competitors), their size to understand capacity and when we speak to them we would want to understand their commitment to this partnership (are they agnostic and we would be one of many and they are only looking at us because a customer was asking or did they make a strategic choice on our product(s) and want to go all in). A non-negotiable is when a partner signs up but does not invest in learning, account mapping etc. and just expects leads. Such a partnership will not work out.