Pt.2 What I wish someone told me when I started my career in Partnerships

This is the second part of my story sharing "What I wish I knew when I started my career in Partnerships"

Over the past six years, my journey in building one of Europe's most successful Partnership organizations at Teamtailor has been a blend of success and continuous battles with our own demons. Despite the polished exterior, our path has been far from straightforward. In this series, I open up about the challenges, the learning curves, and the unique experiences that have shaped our journey.

From being thrown into the world of partnerships to navigating through unrelatable research and guides, I've come to embrace and love the complexities of this role. As I share these insights and stories, I invite those new to the field to learn from the lessons I wish I knew at the start of my career in Partnerships.

If you haven't read the first part, I highly encourage you to explore it before delving into this one 👇🏻

Part one

Internal Stakeholders: By far your most important partners

I came into the world of Partnerships from sales. Which is arguably the most common entryway to the world of partnerships. Of course, the way you do sales varies across organizations, but for the sake of the story, a general assumption is that Sales is individualistic. Your success is often determined by the work you put in and how skilled you are as a salesperson.

Going as far as saying partnerships are the opposite might be extreme, but in many ways, it is the truth. The success of your partner program is generally not determined by your relationship with other partner managers, but rather your ability to get your internal stakeholders to collaborate with their stakeholders.

To make a football analogy (or soccer for you Americans), you go from being one of the players on the pitch to being the manager of the team.

If the goal of partnerships in your organization is to facilitate growth then this is what your starting eleven will look like.

Your sales team = Your Forwards: Sales team is focused on scoring – in this case, closing deals and acquiring new clients. Their primary objective is to convert leads (opportunities) into actual revenue (goals).

Your marketing team = Your Midfielders: Playing a crucial role in creating opportunities and setting the stage for sales, effectively 'passing the ball' to Sales to score.

Your Customer Success team - Your Defenders: They ensure client satisfaction, address issues, and maintain the integrity of existing partnerships, preventing 'goals' against the company (like churn or dissatisfaction).

Your Management team & Finance team - Your goalkeeper - The last line of defense and the big-picture overseers. They make crucial decisions to save the company from bad investments or strategies and keep the organization's financial health and operational integrity intact. In an ideal world they should never see any action, but when they do you need to make sure you have a solid foundation and their support.

So what's your role as the manager of this team?

The first thing you need to consider is that you and your partners are on the same team, your starting eleven will consist of players from both your organization and your partners.

What makes it tricky is that you can only influence your players, so your goal as a partnerships manager is to enable your players on the field to work with your partner's players on the field.

Your goal is to set a game plan together with your opposing partner manager and make it as easy as possible for your players to work with each other.

For example: Understanding when it makes sense for your midfielder to pass to their striker and making that as easy as possible for them to see that opening and to make that pass.

Eventually, you're going to need alignment across all roles in the company. But when you're initially starting you need to focus on the departments that have the highest impact for the goal you're trying to accomplish.

Just like with partners, you need to understand the WHY. Ask yourself the question, how does what I do make them reach their goals? In the same way as with partners, the WHY doesn't need to be the same, but both parties need to see mutual benefit from being involved.

Start with aligning with your management & finance team, then start working with the department that is most closely aligned with your goals.

This took me longer to realize than I'd like to admit, but your success is not determined by your relationship with your counterparts or how skilled you are at sales or marketing. But rather how well you are able to influence and incentivize the players on the pitch.

Your "players" are the ones actually doing the work from scoring goals & making the passes to your partners. Therefore they are your most important partnership and if you read part one, it needs to be very clear what's in it for them and WHY they should work with you

Part 3