2 of 3 companies consider #partnerships “very important to their future”, but they are non-scalable without Partner Ops.
📅 We started this year discussing them in On Deck’s BD & Partnership Fellowship.
You can also use Partner Insight for example, if you’d like to accelerate 2-sided partner collaborations with all-in-one lightweight PRM.
📈 Partner tech has been rapidly evolving.
Recently Kelly Sarabyn @HubSpot and Asher Mathew @Partnership Leaders authored a great study of 650+ partner pros and execs, They shared many insights in our session on the "State of Partner Ops & Programs '22", including:
😨 In many cases, partner managers doing partner ops work or worse, partner leaders doing partner ops work.
The market is understanding that a role is needed so that people that are supposed to be customer- or partner-facing can spend more time in revenue-generating activities.
The minute the first four partner deals are done, you should already be thinking about the partner ops process. Maybe not the headcount yet, but you should definitely be thinking “if the next four deals come in, they are going to happen, because the first four did happen.”
🤝 Companies tend to stick with initial set of partner types
Early stage companies <100 FTE already have multiple partner types.
Enterprise companies have more partner types, but it was a little bit over 4, while for earlier stages closer to 3.
Most likely what's going to happen to your company as you grow is you're going to go deeper into these partner types that you've already started, rather than expand out to having 8-9 partner types.
📍 For startups that means, make sure you're thinking very carefully about the partner experience from the get go, because it can be extremely disruptive to later make huge changes, especially wanting to pull back any benefits or commercial terms.
📊 KPIs
Sourced revenue is the most used KPI across all organizations.
Influenced revenue was the second KPI.
That is more reflective of the different ways that partners can drive impact.
From there, it dropped off to other things that you’d expect, like leads, active integrations, partner satisfaction, partner profitability.
📑 One of the biggest indicators of driving more revenue from partnerships was to have a programmatic allocation of your resources through your partner program.
50-100 FTE is where people say they have some kind of a program going.
At that stage, it's more the partner ops work is being done by the partner manager or someone maybe who's just an admin/ programs /analysts / manager.
You might see a partner ops person closer to 20 0 FTE.
🏆 Check all 7 insights of 2022 here.
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