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🏆 I'm so excited to announce that we won "Partner Program of the Year" AND "Partner Champion of the Year" at Catalyst last week in Seattle!
Here’s what actually got us there:
- It wasn’t a huge partnerships team.
- It wasn’t a fancy program design.
- It wasn't a stack of 10 tech platforms.
It was focus.
Specifically on:
- Understanding the customer journey
- Solving meaningful customer challenges with the right partners
- Driving concrete business outcomes
- Finding partner market fit immediately and scaling it up
Here are 5 key principles that drove our success — and that any Partner Leader can apply right now 👇
1. Know your customer
Most partner leaders don’t spend enough time (or any time) with customers.
Do not make this mistake.
One of the first things I did was meet with 60 enterprise customers who fit our ideal customer profile.
I interviewed each of them for 30–60 minutes.
(By the way, you can get the list of questions I've been using over the last ~20 years in partnerships in the Ultimate Partnerships Kit here.)
This critical because you learn firsthand:
- What their key challenges are
- The business impact tied to those challenges
- Which partner types can help them the most (vs guessing)
You can use my customer journey template to help you on this process here.
2. Validate Partner Market Fit
Immediately.
You can build fancy partner plans.
You can build the nicest, most advanced partner portal.
You can create an innovative partner program tiering system.
But none of that matters if you don't have partner market fit.
Priritize finding immediate wins.
You can't just say "let's wait 12 months and see."
If you're solving really important, urgent customer problems, it won't take 12 months - it might take 2 days.
Literally, that's what happened to me - from first meeting to close!
3. Focus on a high quality bar
Do not settle for "good enough."
In fact, don't settle.
Aim for constantly improving...even when things are great.
Set the tone early: Your role is to help partners win bigger (larger deals), efficiently (higher conversion rates) and faster (time to close).
And to deliver customer success (if they are providing services and technology) in a similar way.
How do you raise the quality bar?
It's simple:
Inspect.
Deeply.
Find out the gaps.
And then - Build and improve with them.
This means you need to be in the trenches with them to make them successful.
Let me give you real examples and for the sake of time in this newsletter, we will focus on the Sales Phase:
1.Have you assessed your partner's sales proposals?
- How are they designed?
- Is it polished and well structured?
- Is it personalized to the customer needs and branding?
- Do they focus on the customer challenges and explain the solution and business impact? (This is critical to value selling, which improves deal size and conversion rate).
2. Have you assessed how they run a sales meeting with a customer?
- Do they have a customer centric agenda?
- Do they listen actively vs just speak the entire time with slides?
- Do they know how to uncover true customer pain and how it ties to outcomes?
- How well do they build rapport?
- What types of sales methodology do they use to drive the opportunity?
- How do they capture notes and follow up concisely and accurately?
- How do they demonstrate the right sales presence?
These are just a few examples.
To be clear - it's not enough to assess and score them.
You then need to help them improve. And a lot of times - this can mean "building the plane" with them while you're flying it.
As an example, you can't just say "This sales proposal isn't good enough."
You need to show them an example of what great looks like.
And you need to tell them a customer story of where it's worked (the more, the better).
Partners love proof points. (And customers too!)
And then you need to offer to help build it with them.
Because remember, it's not about you just telling them what to do.
It's about building together.
That's what a real partnership is.
Don’t be another vendor.
Be the partner who truly cares.
And there's no better way to show than to build with them side by side.
Lead from the front.
4. Build in Public
Don't wait until everything is perfect to share lessons and make announcements.
With proper permissions granted, be sure to share updates, key wins and lessons learned (especially from failures) with the partner community.
This builds trust. This inspires partners to raise the bar. This invites feedback to improve. And this turns partners into co-creators of the partner program and community with you.
Transparency can be a growth engine for you - if you learn to harness it. You can do through partner slack channels, regular partner zoom updates or newsletters and through partner events in person.
The power of an engaged partner community can be exponential - learn to tap into it.
5. Operate as One Team
At peak, we had 99 accredited partners and over 2,000 applications — with only 3 people on the partnerships team.
How?
We treated partnerships as a cross-functional effort.
Engage your cross functional teams and ensure you:
-Understand their goals and OKRs and KPIs for success
-Map partners back to how they can help that team succeed with those goals
-Have clear asks re: resourcing and help you will need to drive partnership initiatives, and work to secure alignment and commitment to those initiatives.
The partner strategy deck template has a great slide on this broken down by each cross functional team.
This proverb sums this up: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
I hope this post today helps you go far together. 🚀 🌕
Nelson
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