Pt.4 What I wish someone told me when I started my career in Partnerships

This is part 4 of the series "What I wish someone told me when I started my career in Partnerships"

This is shared from my experience of building a partnership organization from scratch over the past 6 years which is now one of the more proficient partner organizations in Europe.

But when I first started out I was lost, none of the guides and articles I read seemed to be relevant to me and with the emergence of partnerships in the world, I want to help guide those who come after and share some of my learning from this journey. In the hopes of helping those who've got this journey ahead of them.

If you haven't read the three previous parts. I highly encourage you to explore them before delving into this one 👇🏻

Part 1 -Understanding the WHY

Part 2 - Your important Partner - Your internal stakeholders

Part 3 - Becoming a formal and informal leader

Up until now, I've focused on the foundational skills and the shift in mindset that might be required for long-term success. If you're comfortable with all of the above you will have a great foundation for enabling your team and partners for success.

So let's shift our focus to the actual partnership's work, building partnership programs and managing partners.

Start small (with scalability in mind from day one)

In Part 1 we covered the WHY. It's the essence of why partners want to work with you and what value you provide to each other.

But once you've got this figured out. Don't feel the need to hurry to create multiple programs for different partner portfolios. Nail one and then expand.

Start with the lowest-hanging fruit or the ones that will bring the highest return based on your goals. Once you have identified this partner profile, you need to start working on the processes and frameworks to support success.

Initially, this is going to be manual and ad-hoc, but you should always strive towards scalability. In an ideal world, much of your admin is automated or delegated and you can spend time on what actually matters, building & strengthening relationships with external & internal stakeholders and executing strategies to improve how they play together.

The processes you put in place may vary depending on your organization and the partners you're working with, but some of them are generally consistent across the board.

These are my top 4 that you should work on creating:

• The Partner Acquisition Process

• The Partner Onboarding & activation process

• The Partner Management & Enablement Process

• The Lead sharing, co-selling & collaborating process

All of these combine into what is often described as a Partnership Program and throughout all of these processes you need to always have the WHY and stakeholders in mind.

The Partner Acquisition Process

This is essentially your sales process to acquire new partnerships. You WHY be the guide to what kind of partners you want to be approaching and trying to acquire. Not all partners are going to be a good fit so you want to create an IPP (Ideal Partner Profile) to help qualify partners at an early stage to avoid wasting time.

The IPP is core for scalability in the acquisition process, with a defined IPP you know who your partners are, where they are, WHY they want to work with you, and WHY you want to work with them.

The Partner Onboarding & activation process

In comparison to sales, the easiest part of the partnership lifecycle is acquiring a new partner and the real work starts when you've agreed to partner.

If you've done proper due diligence you should both have a clear WHY. Your goal here is to get some quick wins and build on those. These goals will vary, for some it's the first shared opportunity, and for others, it's a co-marketing collaboration.

You're going to be fighting for the attention of all of their individual goals and other external parties with the hopes of being top of mind whenever an opportunity arises. The onboarding & activation process is to create a sense of "holy shit this works" and to make the other party comfortable in collaborating with you.

The Partner Management & Enablement Process

So at this point, you've got a great new partner onboard, they're excited and comfortable with the collaboration. A common mistake partner people make is to focus on a heavy onboarding and then leave the partner out to dry afterward and move on to the new cool kid on the block.

The management & enablement process is your way of working to strengthen relationships, stay top of mind and empower stakeholders (internal & internal), and make sure that a partnership doesn't fall through the cracks. The same principle applies here as it does with your internal stakeholders. It's easier to go from 1-2 than from 0-1.

Worth emphasizing that this process isn't just about having quarterly meetings and QBRs, but rather where the real work of partnerships exists. Your goal is to create incentives for partners to work more with you, to climb the ranks. (This is usually why partner programs often have different tiers and all tiers have different benefits attached to them).

The Lead sharing, co-selling & collaborating process

This is probably the most boring but in many ways the most important process. It is essentially the way you track and measure success. If the goal of your partnerships program is to generate referrals and revenue.

This process is put in place to make it as easy as possible for you to track the progress with the difficult balancing act of trying to make it as easy as possible to send and receive referrals. It essentially dictates the way you measure success, and how you play together on the playground.

A general rule of thumb here is that you want to make the threshold of sending & and receiving opportunities as easy as possible.

I always envisioned this as you want to create multiple goals for someone to shoot at and that it shouldn't matter which goal they decide to score. All of it is tracked and measured. Doesn't matter if it is through email or a form from a UTM link.

All of this takes time, what you build now will most likely not be able to be the final version you have years down the line and it's okay with some manual if it's a temporary way that helps teach you something.

This leads me to the final thing you should think about when starting out.

Quality > Quantity

This doesn't necessarily just apply at the beginning of your partnership journey. But it is especially important early on. It is pretty self-explanatory that it's better to have 10 good partners that help you reach your goals than 100 bad ones who help you accomplish the same thing. But when you're starting out you're going to be introducing partners to your team and encouraging a new way of working.

It's much easier for you to reach success if your team knows that there are 3 partners they need to keep track of and they know the WHY behind those partners and how those partners fit into your puzzle. The added benefit is also that they start building close relationships with their peers and people are more willing to help someone out if they like that person. From there it's easy to gradually add another partner to the mix, and another partner to the mix.

If you instead went the quantity approach you'd never allow your team to build strong relationships and collaborations with the partners, the relationships would be diluted and they would struggle to reach their full potential.

Part 5 coming soon