Just as product managers need to be great writers✒️, the same is now true for partnership teams.
Why?
💜 Achieve buy-in from your management, partners and teammates
It’s increasingly difficult to persuade anyone that “this partnership will be amazing” without crafting a compelling story and business case.
Management needs to see what we can achieve with this partnership.
Partners need to see an inspiring case study how your other partnerships worked out.
Teammates are curious about what's in it for them.
🎯 #Partnerships now include the full cycle from building/integrating to marketing and co-selling
Not only do you need to help to create a partnership case, you may need to help write a spec, prepare marketing, sales collaterals, etc.
It may be tempting to say that “this isn’t my responsibility”, but in partnerships, like in startups. If you’d like this to be done, you’re ultimately responsible.
📅 Turn every step into a template
While each partnership is somewhat unique, a big part of partnerships is a repeatable process.
You life will be 10X easier if you create:
Partner onboarding templates
Partner FAQ
Reusable partner deck
Marketing and sales nuggets, etc.
💌 Engagement is key in partnerships
While you can automate parts of your partner engagement with platforms like Partner Insight, your partner nurturing, pipeline building and scaling will be heavily reliant on your ability to communicate effectively.
Crafting concise and engaging emails are part of partnership toolkits.
⌛️ Learn and iterate
Probably the most underestimated part of writing is that it forces you to refine your thinking and iterate on it. None of the materials mentioned above should (or will) be perfect from the beginning.
But they will drastically improve over time with consistency.
🚀 Before you know you will have a scalable partnership process.