Saqib Mustafa

So many people are selling to B2B professionals today, so if you don’t differentiate yourself, you will fail. And to me, what’s worse than 1 vendor selling to a customer? 2 vendors selling together. Thus, I always suggest leading with the voice of a successful customer. Customer examples are the best way to showcase a partnership. Successful companies like Snowflake, AWS, etc., put customers at the front and center of their marketing. Thus, when co-selling, it is important to show how two or more partners solve a genuine customer problem. Just declaring a partnership is not enough. It would be best if you had concrete messaging on why the partnership will solve customer pain points and preferably back that up with customer examples. I genuinely prefer campaigns and marketing motions that put joint customers as a focus. And go a step deeper, if you can show how your products / solutions solve an industry problem backed up with a customer example, it is always well received by your audience. Plus, the sales structure must be such that both partners must benefit. If sales do not see benefits in the partnership, marketing will not be successful other than creating some baseline awareness. This means better customer experience, competitive edge, and even incentives for sales (although incentives only work if their product solves a genuine problem).

Staying on the theme of putting customers first, integration partners are essential in showcasing how customers can use a stack of SaaS-based technologies together. Thus, integration partners must show how customers can use their product with your platform. The easiest, most beneficial activities are where you can showcase the power of the technologies working together and get customers/prospects to use them. They must also have easy paths to try the technology. If the integration partner makes it easier to do the integration and get started, it becomes easier to use and thus market the technology. Physical or online hosted labs and demos are terrific to try and buy. Another good way to get adoption is to use Solution Partners to develop solutions that solve a specific customer problem. This is where having a strong Partner SE team really helps.

Interesting question: I had to skip this one initially to return to the question and collect my thoughts before answering it. I have seen that sometimes people get stuck in the Partner Marketing sourced pipeline vs. the overall marketing sourced pipeline. Partners should be involved in as many Marketing activities as possible. When partners are correctly employed, they elevate and scale everything you do. So partners can have the same effect on the pipeline. They can help scale your pipeline. However, it shouldn't be a situation where Partner Marketing vs. Marketing is sourced. It should measure what impact the Partners are having on the health of the overall pipeline. Some interesting metrics are sourced meetings, sales accepted deal reg, and net new vs. existing customers. Failed campaigns are usually because of two reasons: Lack of Alignment: This can be at various levels. The partners need to be aligned on the reason to run the campaign. Partners do not have buy-in from sales, product, or partner teams. Whatever the reason, aligning the three levels: Product / Solution, Sales / Partner teams, Execs (including marketing exec) is essential. Playing on Weaknesses rather than Strengths: Play on the partner's strengths; don't ask them to do something that is your or their weakness. No amount of money or resources can suddenly improve a partner's weak channel to one of strength. The campaigns also need to be mutually beneficial to all the partners involved. It is funny how many people forget that a campaign should benefit all partners involved. I see this so many times where partners are especially asking partners to do things unnatural to them. Be clear to yourself and your marketing leadership why something should benefit a partner. With more significant, more prominent partners, ride the wave rather than ask them to change how they go to market. Plus, things are easier when you ask someone to play on their strength. I would also like the industry to develop interesting ideas to try out! I love seeing new innovative campaigns. I still see some laziness and too much reliance on content syndication agencies. 1) I have never seen great content being produced by these agencies. 2) In my experience, I have struggled to see the impact on meetings and the actual quality of the pipeline from content syndication other than getting leads. There, I said it, I provoked it; content syndication is lazy and in my experience, never really had impact on the final pipeline. Will give you a ton of leads, but those are generally not engaged leads. I really hope no one from one of the content syndication agencies is following me here.

Something I learned from one of the best Marketing leaders B2B SaaS in the industry, Denise Persson, CMO Snowflake: Always play on strengths! So, to answer the question, let’s focus on the strengths of each partner type. Consulting Partners, Services Partners, SIs, whatever name you use, are great at 3 things: 1) Daily use of technology. These partners are users of your technology just like customers, sometimes at customer locations; thus, they can produce great technical content. Build benefits that incentivize the production of content. 2) Developing solutions to solve vertically focused customer problems. Focus your vertical efforts, showcasing vertical solutions on your website. Evangelize these with sales, especially as you move towards a vertically aligned model. 3) Access to customers / c-suite. As your customers and deals become bigger, the access to c-suite becomes much more important. These partners sit with the customer daily. Thus, it offers benefits to make high-level introductions. Technology Partners: 1) Create products and technologies that work together seamlessly. Thus, focus benefits on showing how to demo, labs, and customer examples of integrations. 2) Driving direct consumption in accounts of your product. (Not limited to tech partners but directly measurable). Thus focus on the consumption of SaaS in accounts

Take a step back and focus on activities that Put Customers First! B2B SaaS buyers want to learn from their peers, not just from another vendor or a bunch of vendors. Preferably, lead with customers' examples of how they use it. Then, you can decide which channels are good/beneficial for both partners. Make sure, though, that you are using partners for their advantages rather than focusing them on activities where they don't have strengths. If you ask a partner without a strong online demand engine to drive an online motion, they will fail. What I have seen is that capturing attention with customers examples, and following up with “how to solve your problem” campaigns generally leads to the best results. These could be solution deployments, or trial campaigns, or labs / campaigns getting prospects hands on with your products. Before considering the activities, another thing that helps is strong messaging together. This can be a short form document. Sometimes, a slide on better together with 3 - 4 core pillars of advantages is all you need. Sometimes, the best messaging is the simplest messaging.

Great Question. Two (out of 5) core pillars to Snowflake Marketing are relevant to this question: Scale with Partners and Strong Alignment with Sales. These pillars had buy-in from the entire marketing leadership, including the CMO. This question is about customer accounts and not prospect accounts. Sales are extra careful about introducing the right partner to the customer accounts, and rightfully so, because Sales has put in a lot of work cultivating these accounts for customers. Thus, alignment with Sales is key. The Marketing team collaborates with Sales and Partner team to identify the relevant partners in customer accounts, especially during growth and planning sessions. Each account planning session requires identifying which partners are appropriate and aligned in an account. Then, the marketing team will activate various channels based on the partner's strengths. Some partners are great at Field Marketing, and some are great at Online Demand Generation tactics. It is important to understand the partner's strengths and play on those rather than trying to introduce them through channels where they can fail. For example, asking a partner to do a field event in an account where they must have a field presence for the first time (sales or marketing) will generally lead to a subpar experience. Interesting side fact: listening to Blackhole Sun by Soundgarden while typing this answer.

I am watching an episode of Brooklyn 99 at this time. Any 99 fans out there? The episode I am watching is about Raymond Holt asking Jake Parelta to wear a tie to work. His point was that the tie represents a certain way of being a detective. I love this show! Like I stated before, I prefer campaigns that put joint customer success front and center. So any campaigns that showcase customer success, and how the customer / user got there, are great. At Snowflake, we were so focused about leading with the customer, even our billboards today highlight customers. Any channel you activate should highlight customer success, and same thing goes for Partner campaigns. By the way, I have never seen negative campaigns or competitive campaigns highlighting a competitor ever be successful long term. Why would you give any oxygen to a competitor? Focus on what is right for your customer. Highlight your strengths.

Partner Marketing at Snowflake was about scaling Marketing for Snowflake with Partners. So we focused on scaling various functions Marketing and measured accordingly. Typically Partner Marketing will have yearly targets around partner involvement in Marketing activity like joint pipeline, joint customer success examples, and investments in activities. And then it is important to focus on quarterly targets which focus on large initiatives. Collaboration with different teams is dependent on how bought in is the leadership on commitment to partners. At Snowflake we were lucky that the leadership was very committed to partners. Thus from the beginning all teams collaborated and thought about bringing in partners. It is important to have strong collaboration with the Partner team, demand generation teams (online and field marketing), and product launch teams (PR, Product Marketing etc). At Snowflake we would make sure to share our priorities, yearly targets and quarterly goals with all teams regularly. And at times the Partner marketing team set the goals 2 - 3 quarters ahead of every one else, thus making sure we were ahead of all campaign planning processes. We even shared our priorities with our partners before the beginning of a fiscal year, thus making sure any joint planning / execution can focus on these.

Success breeds success! And outreach to different partners depends on the type of partners (obviously solution partners are very different from CSPs, and technology partners). Solution partners love to learn about complex technologies and how to build on them. They also are closest to your customer / prospect, so they love learning about peer success. They also want to solve complex industry problems rather than just being technology experts. They want to know how they can build a services practice on your product. Technology providers want to generally create tighter integrations and be differentiated compared their own competition. In each case, articulating how partners can be successful in building businesses around your platform with examples is important. Ideally you are activating all channels: Online with regular webinars to promote to new partners, regular in person partner meetups in territory, celebrating successful partners with awards and recognition at conferences, SKOs etc. These efforts should also train partners about your product / solution and highlight how easy it is to work with your organization. I do want to ask whoever submitted this question, why do you want to get more partners? I have seen programs try to recruit partners for different reasons. However recruiting partners just for the sake of numbers is not a great way to grow your business. You need to grow it with purpose. So feel free to ping me on LinkedIn and I would love to dive in more into your problem.