#Partnerships that flourish are usually driven by teams that have bias for action 🗽
If you sign a partner and wait for them to perform, your partnerships will go nowhere.
📌 Amazon has a great explanation on what is bias for action:
Speed matters in business.
Many decisions/actions are reversible and do not need extensive study.
We value calculated risk taking.
How does this translate to partnerships?
✔️ Test partnerships and iterate quickly
The best way to build a partnership program is to think from a customer perspective and test various partnerships that might make sense to your customers. These partnerships MVP don’t need to be perfect, just test and iterate on what works.
✔️ Partnerships are indeed reversible
You don’t need to create a joint venture or build deep integrations straight away. Instead start with marketing, then test co-sales, etc. Only when you see actual results start building integration or launching across all geos.
✔️ It’s essential to create a momentum with your partner
Moving fast in the first 90-180 days matters, because it sets the tone for your entire collaboration. And while partnerships are usually more like marathons, they consist of sprints that you need to win.
This also means that you need to keep nudging your partner to accelerate - from helping them to close first sales, to getting your joint message right in shared events, to making sure both teams know who to ping when needed.
💡 This is why it’s MUCH easier to partner with organizations that are hungry for change.
From one of our firesides about partnerships in PayPal:
💭 Here's my list of partner targets people I would love to do deals with. In general, the top 10 are pretty happy with themselves. Life is good, they're doing okay.
But 10 through 20? Pretty hungry and eager to do something different, because they're not in the top 10 of whatever the vertical is. “We are not killing it”.
Why does it matter?
Because I know that my deal requires change on the other side. You definitely want to keep in mind that the target is going to have to do things differently and going to have an incentive to do things differently. You're looking for hunger.
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