Partnerships are tremendously beneficial but remain under-utilized. In this post, I’ll outline a partnership framework and address what I believe is the #1 cause of that under-utilization: lack of engagement.
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What is “Lack of Engagement”
Lack of engagement means that we are not systematically addressing the mechanics of the partnership. For example, everyone knows that partnering with Microsoft Azure or AWS has “high” potential for any B2B services or technology product firm. But without a clear idea of how to engage and what to expect every week and every month, what we are left with is just a logo on our website with lackluster field engagement, ad-hoc marketing, and almost no attributable revenue impact. It also leads to the problem of productive sales and marketing alignment.
If this sounds familiar, then do not despair because there is an easy way out of this quagmire. The solution is to have a simple, executable playbook using the below partnership framework that you follow over time to drive results. Someone once said, “overnight successes have typically been years in the making”. Sounds accurate.
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How to Prioritize with a Bias for Action – The Partnership Framework
The first step is prioritization. Fortunately, it is the easy part. You look at a list of partners, think of potential, evaluate client demand at target accounts, consider your prior work or experience, think of alignment with your current portfolio, field connects, and so on. A fairly sophisticated model can be built quickly, and yield a fairly justifiable prioritization.
The pitfall is: What Next?
This is where a framework for engagement helps. Once you have that in place, you have measurements that can track the attribution of results (or lack thereof.). That’s the real secret sauce of a partnership.
Start with the following simple partnership framework which can also be called the business plan. It’s implemented slightly differently for product companies versus consulting but I’ll also address that below.
- Co-marketing: how we’ll raise awareness and educate on 3 fronts viz. to clients, partners, and internally
- Co-sales: how we’ll connect with each other, engage clients, pursue conversations, and close.
- Competency: what underlying value will this partnership be based on, viz. solutions, integrations, tech and domain expertise, etc.?
- Governance – executive alignment, target results, constant monitoring of the framework execution and results to make decisions
Consistent execution of this framework is a receipt for success. For a decent list of sales and marketing tactics, see this article by Crossbeam.
The Two Tier Approach
It’s obvious that systematic execution of the partnership framework is not feasible for a large number of partners. So a natural tiering system arises. Here’s how to think in terms of multiple tiers so you can implement them effectively:
High Tier: package, promote and co-sell
This assumes that you have assets (solutions, case studies, trained resources, etc.) in place so you can systematically execute the framework with a focus on consistent revenue generation or expansion. On the competency front, you would focus on packaging the solutions better, getting certifications, etc, On the co-marketing front you would focus on outbound and inbound campaigns, ABM, PR, and brand building. And on the co-sales front you would focus on connecting deeper on the field on a target accounts list, generating client conversations, and pursuing them together.
Next tiers: educate, enable partnership basis, promote
This tier assumes that the current capabilities and/or business potential do not warrant significant investments but you still want to continue to look for opportunistic revenue generation. As that revenue comes in, you then decide whether to move the partnership to the higher tier. As a result, you would still execute the framework, but at a less elevated level. On the competency front, you may focus on a point of view instead of a solution. For co-marketing, the focus will be on awareness rather than specific outbound campaigns, and on the sales front, the focus will be on maintaining a field cadence to surface potential opportunities for collaboration. Sustained efforts here will always yield results and a movement to the higher tier over time.
Joint-Incentives
This is often lost in translation. It’s important to identify the win-win so we can keep it top of mind. Each partner stakeholder will focus on what they need most – services or license revenue, opening an account, cross-sell, etc.
Be conscious of this and bake it into the governance framework so it can trickle down to sales, marketing, and competency workstreams of the framework. You’d be surprised how often a thing so seemingly mundane as “what’s in it for me?” causes the execution to be excruciatingly painful and slow.
Conclusion
Partnerships can yield tremendous growth and brand impact if they are nurtured systematically. I hope the partnership framework in this article was helpful. I have created some lifelong relationships and driven significant results using this framework. You are the CEO of your partnerships. Your feedback and comments are welcome. Good luck!
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