In my experience, the most successful #partnerships have Momentum, Trust and 🎯 Moments of magic that are created between you and partners.
But partnership teams rarely have enough resources to create all of that themselves. What's a solution?
📈 Momentum
By definition, partnerships require more prep work compared with sales, let's say. A famous example is that just partner onboarding in many companies takes 30 + days.
However, the best partnerships start with excitement and keep the high pace until the first meaningful results become evident for both sides.
♻️ When I was figuring out partnerships in the beginning, my solution was to collect and reuse everything that was at least remotely repeatable:
Onboarding checklists
Partner pitch decks
Marketing content bundles
Customer email templates
Internal partner introduction templates, etc.
Contracts, of course
For #channelpartners:
Product advantages and competitive analysis
Deal registration, approval process
Pipeline review cadence, etc.
🤝 Furthermore, momentum requires engagement of both sides
I’ve been speaking recently with many partnership leaders who struggle to get updates from their partners. They typically say “we need more people, so somebody is responsible for partner engagement. But we’ll unlikely get more people…”.
🚴🏼 One of the solutions is to set a culture of high velocity internally and agree on the rules of engagement with partners. It is impossible to grow partnerships to a meaningful scale without templates and a process like this. Just like sales repeatability is built on a regular pipeline review, the same is true for partnerships.
A few additional thoughts:
✔️ The best time to introduce the process is right in the beginning of your partnerships.
✔️ You need to make it super simple for you and your partners to update each other and keep all details in one place. Consider no-code solutions or off the shelf tools.
✔️ Partners should feel that they may discover something new and helpful while they update you, visit your portal, log into your partner management platform, etc.
In short - keep things fast and exciting for partners, but don't hesitate to demand engagement in return.
We’ll talk more about creating Trust and Moments of magic for your partners soon - stay tuned.
💡 In the meantime, check what we’ve built in Partner Insight to accelerate partnerships and engage both sides in a truly 2-sided collaboration.