Building a brand new partner program from scratch is hard. Getting it from 0 to well over $10M in revenue pipeline in 12 months is even harder. Which is probably why over 337 partner people registered for my meetup with Marco De Paulis.
During this 67 min session, we learned 13+ questions to ask (and the order you ask) them that determine the speed and results you get, such as:
Do you first scope out partners or secure internal buy-in?
When do you start the internal alignment process?
How many partners should you launch with?
If you donât know Marco, but he’s worked in partnerships for the last eight years with agencies and SaaS companies. During that time, he has stood up multiple partner programs. Today, Marco is the Director of E-commerce Partnerships at Ryder and today you can “borrow” this playbook and make it your own.
TOC
The Partnership Value Flywheel
One of the first things he talked about was The Partnership Value Flywheel. This how Marco typically approaches partnerships and how aligns using a top-down and a bottom-up approach.
This means he works with both leadership and “the troops on the ground” to ensure he finds and empowers champions within every team.
After creating alignment with leadership and those team, he says “itâs much easier to enable partners” and create value because you arenât working on an island, youâre working collaboratively.
“As youâre able to work together, you will be able to drive far more value to your partners”.
Marco has found that partners (internally and externally) naturally will give back because they know how you add value to them. With each initiative, youâre depositing into your relationship for sustaining success.
This framework is how Marco “starts up” new partnership program.
Q1: Prepare for the Year
What I’ve seen from the community, there’s a lot is uncertainty around “know “what alliances are or how to structure and benefit from them”. To help change that, I asked Marco shared these guidelines.
Create Alignment
Step one in Marcoâs playbook is “build alignment across every department” in your organization, including your leadership team. To create alignment, Marco said it’s best to start by approach teams and aim to understand what theyâre focused on (and why).
Marco recommended asking questions like:
- What does your day-to-day look like?
- What are your goals?
- What are your KPIs?
- How can we connect the dots between your goals and partnership initiatives?
Once youâve found mutually aligned goals and outcomes, teams naturally want to work with you.
Offers & Asks of Each Department
Marco highlighted how each department “measures value” and along with “how to ask and offer”. Below is a breakdown of that. He told the us to “remember to ask your internal teams what their goals and struggles are, then frame your value and asks around those.” Youâll likely be able to support many of their goals, while easing their common challenges.
Marketing
Value to Marketing
- Expanded audience reach
- Extended life of assets developed
- Increased content engagement
Asks of Marketing
- Collaboration on co-marketing content
- Support building initial program marketing assets
Customer Success
Value to Customer Success
- Enhanced customer experience
- Additional customer support resources
- Reduced customer churn
Asks of Customer Success
- Support understanding customer needs & challenges
Product
Value to Product
- Increased capabilities
- Reduced workload when partners can help develop integrations
Asks of Product
- Support developing integrations, sharing APIs as applicable
Sales
Value to Sales
- Reduced time to deal close
- Increased leads generated
- Greater customer lifetime value (LTV)
Asks of Sales
- Support understanding prospect needs & challenges
Research Partners
Having big market of potential partnerships is both a benefit and challenge. There are so many potential organizations to partner with. And without priorities and filters, itâs easy to drown in opportunities.
Marco found a way to drive long-term success: maintain a narrow focus while going really deep with your partners, instead of trying to support hundreds of surface-lever partner relationships.
His key to doing this “avoid onboarding tons of new partners whom you have no relationship with”. He said, “instead, start with your Customer Success and Sales teams to dig into your product” and look for existing partnerships.
For example…
If your product has existing integrations, but no relationship, thatâs a prime opportunity to approach. As an added benefit, itâs far easier to get traction with a new partner when you already have established a mutual understanding of your joint value to customers, rather than starting at zero and trying to build something new.
When looking at these potential partners, Marco suggested asking:
- What do you care about?
- How is your current process working for you?
- What would you like to see?
By starting with organizations already poised to work with you, itâs far easier to develop your ideal partner profile, program incentives, and requirements because you already know whatâs working.
The key here is coordinating with Customer Success and Sales to keep an ear out for opportunities, then work together to identify good-fit partners.
Q1 KPIs
- Forge internal alignment and gain buy-in from various departments.
- Understand the goals of your internal teams and how you can support them.
- Work with Customer Success and Sales to get a clear picture of who your ideal partner may be.
- Identify existing integrations or overlaps and begin building partnerships.
Q2: Build Enablement
Weâve all heard itâs critical to lead with value, that way, you get the most attention from your partners and can drive value back to your organization. And as we learned, in order to drive value to partners, you have to start by
- helping your internal team understand the value of partners
- how to work together
- and the best way to speak to partners
Instead of starting at zero, it helps to have your team already know what to do with partners. Then, once the program is up and running, youâre ready to start working with partners and driving value immediately.
Next in his process “is external enablement with partners”.
Marco foun he doesnât need a formal partner program in place before he can begin enabling partners.
His perspective is, âWhy wait to give partners resources to support and incentivize them when I can make them as successful as possible from day one?â
Another benefit of starting with enablement is that you can work directly with your partners to build a program that meets their needs. You can approach your program development with an open state of mind, asking:
- Whatâs working?
- What isnât, and what do you need?
- What conversations are you having, and how can we support those?
- What can we do to facilitate a better experience?
An overarching theme of Marcoâs approach is to avoid guessing what partners want and, instead, let them tell you what they need. In his own words, âIf you can be curious every single day, in every conversation you have, youâre going to see success, for sure.â
His thoughts are “when you let your partners tell you what their enablement playbook is, they help you write it” and you can jump straight to driving value for your partners. This helps with building stuff no one wants or will use!
Top Enablement Activities to Consider
When it comes to enablement, every individual â even within one team â will learn things differently. It has to be the right time for things to “click”. Marcoâs philosophy is to try everything, do it consistently, and see what works well. You never know what will work at the right time for the right person, so Marco tries it all and asks for feedback.
In his role, he conducts:
- Email enablement
- Slack enablement
- Virtual sessions, like spotlights or lunch & learns
As he puts it, “you have to be where your partners are, and the only way youâll know what works is by asking them for feedback.”
Q2 KPIs
- Enable your team to work well with partners before building your program.
- Ask what your partners need instead of assuming.
- Provide enablement in various formats, then adjust based on partner feedback.
Q3: Launch Program
Marco “launches” partner programs (GTM) as a marketing play. He said his program launch takes about six months of work â finding the right partners, conducting conversations, getting feedback â then creating the pieces you need to GTM.
His âofficial partner program overviewâ includes:
- What you can offer to partners
- Why what youâre offering is valuable to partners
- How customers will benefit from your program
- What you will provide to partners (make sure this includes the benefits and incentives that your legacy partners told you they value)
Getting these pieces created helped him launch with the right marketing assets â landing pages, forms â that are public-facing and speak the right language to entice his ideal partners. Following this will help you reduce iterations and start driving time to value faster.
Focus on Activation vs. Growth
Marco emphasized the value of launching with fewer, more targeted partners, instead of partnering with hundreds of organizations.
In his most recent experience, he launched with around a dozen partners and was really conscious about each partner he chose to work with.
He framed his perspective as, âEach partner you bring on takes time away from another partner you could be working with. You need to really be smart and learn how to say ânoâ respectfully. This will help you ensure youâre not overpromising and under-delivering.â
Marco has found this approach helps his team more easily prioritize partners for opportunities like co-marketing, webinars, and enablement sessions. If youâre running a massive program and finding 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of customers, itâs time to prune your partners to optimize your time spent and improve overall results.
Q3 KPIs
- Build your program marketing assets â landing pages, forms, email outreach, etc.
- Focus on quality over quantity.
- Be ruthless in pruning partners that donât drive value.
Q4: Hire to Double Down on Partner Marketing
With your partner program up and running, he said “you can begin approaching co-marketing initiatives”. Marco found co-marketing to be one of the lowest-hanging fruits to add value to your partners â all it takes is a bit of time with your marketing teams to develop joint assets.
To start, he said “you absolutely need buy-in and alignment from your internal marketing team” so they understand how their efforts on thought leadership and joint content pieces contribute to increased traffic and marketing engagement.
If youâve established that alignment internally early, it’s much easier for your marketing team to start pulling in partners once youâre ready to GTM.
Prioritizing Partners with Which to Co-market
Marco recommends even if you donât have external partner tiers established, create them internally. This might be based on activity, success, or a matrix of a few factors.
Then, you can approach marketing with your top list of partners to engage. This allows you to focus on the partners youâre really trying to activate so you can maximize value.
Create Co-marketing Assets in Bulk
One of Marcoâs top recommendations for effective co-marketing initiatives was to “develop content in bulk.” Instead of spending eight hours on a single blog post, heâs found itâs far more effective to spend twelve hours and create six content pieces.
Once youâre already working together on a theme, itâs a lot easier to create more pieces of content.
Itâs a simple strategy, but an effective way to “pour gasoline on the effort youâre already investing” in joint content pieces.
Invest in a Partner Marketing Resource
Marco highlighted “when you get started with co-marketing, itâs likely that your internal marketing team will take on these efforts”.
So as your program expands, itâs will become necessary to invest in a partner marketer. While it’s hard to find an experienced Partner Marketers, Product Marketers have many of the same skills and can be great to start with.
Q4 KPIs
- Prioritize your top 10 partners to co-market with, the following 10, and the bottom 10 not to bother with.
- Develop co-marketing assets in bulk.
- Invest in a Partner Marketer as your needs scale.
Reach $10M in Pipeline This Year with Partner Playbooks
Whether youâre starting from zero or you have an established partner program you want to scale, I made pulled some of the highlight from my meetup and this put and put them into this Zero to $10M checklist, so you can have an easy reference (to guide you quarter to quarter).
Interested in more on this topic?
Watch the full meet-up with Marco De Paulis to hear all of his insights on building a partner program from scratch.
Also, we do a monthly meetup (virtual) for partner managers and marketers. We share how we generate leads, sales, and new partnerships. Itâs crazy, but 200-500 partner people reg/attend these things! So happy to have you at the next one.
Hereâs the link to our Calendly to see if the time and topics work for you.