Lynn Brantley-Jones

Sales should always understand the value of partnerships. It’s a give some to get some play. Sales reps should know, the more they provide, the more they’ll get back on their own deals. 

 But if you need more engagement, absolutely, comp your sales teams as appropriate. You can set this up a few ways: 
 Influence: SPIFF your sales team for every time they influence a partner deal

 Referrals: If you have a referral partnership agreement, allow that percentage to go towards your reps quota retirement if the deal closes. This should be very clear for your internal team when you sign referral agreement. 

 If your partner isn’t reciprocating to your sales team, have that open discussion. It takes two to tango.

- Understand that partnerships is a long play. But it doesn’t always have to be a 6-12 month process to stand up. Highlight that that you can uncover quick wins in your first 30-60-90 days. - When talking about “partnership strategy” make sure to include all GTM in that: client success, product and marketing have to all be involved. - Deep discovery into your clients operations. You have to know how every function of your client’s organisation works, because if one thing is off - then partnerships can’t be built.

We recently built an extensive Partner Battlecard that hits everything they need to know about our product as a little 'cheat sheet'. Things we cover on the battle card: 1. Pain points we solve for 2. Use cases for each industry 3. Competitive landscape and snippets on how we differ
 4. ICP and pricing We’ve gotten great feedback from partners, locating everything they need on one pager quickly. We even went as far as printing them out, so whenever we're onsite running enablement, they have it right there.

Partner marketing is important to any strategy and it’s often overlooked with partnerships. Having a clear partner marketing strategy allows you to have different outlets to promote your partnership and engage with your joint prospects and customers for lead flow. Our marketing team has a quarterly kick-off with our partners to discuss marketing activity and our calendars. Defining clear goals and promotion tactics allows each party to carry the weight agreed upon. Expectations up-front is so important for what can be achieved. We build webinars, events and content based off topics / themes that we’re both focusing on that quarter and promote it on multiple channels: newsletters, social and sharing budget on content syndication / ads. There’s an active Slack channel to update each other on registrants and work on a post-follow up plan with our sales teams.

There’s always going to be the straight revenue attribution KPI’s to focus on like - Deal registrations - Partner sourced qualified pipeline - Partner influenced revenue Other KPI’s can be: - Partner marketing leads - Amount of sales enablement sessions - Partner portal engagement, track how often they’re logging in and engaging with content - 
 Partner meetings per week (How many times are you meeting with AEs to discuss accounts) These KPI’s can help with your partner matrix and understand who your top tier partners are and where to focus your time and efforts on.

Championing your CS team is key! The approach to all functions within an organisation is to drive value for customers and prospects. So service partners should always be thought of as an extension of our team. Defining a service package is something you should work with CS on, so there's full buy-in from the get go. There’s a few ways I like to work with CS: 1. Listening to their customer calls and understanding pain points so I know where service partners can fit in 2. Using partner marketing events to drive customer attendance and start to conversations with service partners 3. Introducing service partners before the deal closes, so they can support with any implementation or onboarding services

1. Setting goals and expectations. Understand what value you can actually drive together in the beginning. If there’s only 1 or 2 opportunities you can realistically work on, be up front and focus on those specific wins. This goes back to ICP alignment as well. Don’t try to boil the ocean.

 2. Enablement, enablement, enablement. Ensure they know your value proposition and product so they can build their talk track

 3. Consistency in communication. Engage with your service partners often. Share knowledge that you’re hearing with your prospects and clients, using your service partner as an extended consultant.