How great #partnerships start to ensure buy-in from the CEO,CRO,CMO and from partners? They start with a 📑 Memo.
But what should be there?
💬 From our workshop with Andrew Beckmann, who shared his insight from leading #partnerships and BizDev in Expedia Group and Meta and launching partnership functions in Sonder Inc. and Hopin.
Memo should encompass:
📊 Context
What is the problem that you're trying to solve with partnerships?
Why is it important?
What is the opportunity?
If you can specify the opportunity with a numerical example or number, ideally that number is reflective of the metric the company cares most about and is prioritizing.
😈 Competition
Another important piece is, and this could be part of context, but I always call out what the competition is doing that may be similar, just to add a sense of urgency.
[E.g.] If you know that one of Hopin's virtual event competitors is building relationships with CRMs in a more robust way, that could provide more urgency to do so, if not better.
🙋 Clear asks and for whom
Another important thing to list in the memo is what are the clear asks, and for whom? People don't just read it and say "This sounds like a good idea."
Be very clear, “CEO and leadership, I want the thumbs up to sign off and give me the green light to go ahead and move forward with this.
Sales (if the ask is to drive a sales partnership) can I lean on you to help me leverage some of your sales enablement materials that I could provide to third parties to make it easier for referrals or reseller partnership arrangements to happen?
Be very explicit on those asks.
✍️Have key people sign on a memo
One thing that I like to do that not everyone does is have a section where you say who needs to read the document and have them sign or initial that they have looked at it and when.
So you can then say, if you get some pushback two months or so down the road, "Well, the CEO approved this at this date. Or Head of Marketing, just a kind reminder, you signed in and bought in on this."
And that can be your working document and source of truth as you ideally operationalize the partnership with the help of the different folks that input in that initial decision.
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