After the incredible meetup (0 to $10M Partner Pipeline Playbook session with Marco De Paulis) we got back together, along with Scott Pollack to dig into your top 10 questions on the topic. If you missed the meet-up, the replay is below.
Question 1: Is there a maximum number of partners that should be promoted each month or on a quarterly basis?
“I think there’s no right or wrong answer here,” shared Marco De Paulis. “It completely depends on the audience you are trying to provide the information with, right? So I look at all of this stuff with regard to partnerships. And then the other side of the coin is gonna be your internal teammates that you collaborate with, whether that’s sales, customer success, marketing, and so on and so forth.
“Thinking about those two, first, what is enough information? What is too much or too little? Then it’s about trying to strike that perfect balance — you don’t want to overwhelm people with information because then nothing gets through. I’d rather start with a little bit less and make sure it’s actually digested.
“Then, you have calls to action that come from that information, so trying to prioritize the partners and ensuring you provide the most valuable and relevant information around those partners is critical.
“In my world, we do one partner launch every money, and that’s gonna be both an internal and an external launch at the same time. Each launch is a big marketing event — it’s all over social and we put together a bunch of promotional material around it.
“On a monthly basis, we also talk about one to two other partners internally. That’s just for our teams, customer success, sales, etc., where we’re doing something on a smaller scale. Maybe we’re sharing a joint case study that we did, and we use that as an opportunity to bring the partner top of mind, encouraging the team to think about them as relevant.
“So that’s how I strike the balance: one big launch every single month that’s both external and internal, and then one to two smaller internal announcements or activities to enable the teams on.”
Scott Pollack agreed, sharing, “Fundamentally, you need to be conscious of what opportunities you have to speak to people and at what cadence they’re going to be able to absorb that information. If it’s an internal team, sales or marketing, whomever else, understanding what channels you should leverage, whether it’s sales kickoff meetings or other opportunities to put the information in front of them.”
Question 2: How can you help a sales team understand partner intros don’t distraction delay of a sales?
“I think what you need to do first is ensure you are aligned with the sales team,” Marco began. “And so what that means is taking a step back and ensuring from the sales leaders and the actual reps on the ground floor understand we are here to provide highly qualified leads that will convert at higher rates. They’re larger than the average marketing pipeline opportunity and we’ll be able to retain them better. Then, support that with data.
“On the flip side, we have to emphasize if you guys want this, then we also need to make sure that we help our partners, and part of that is recommending them within the sales process and the customer life cycle. And the best way to do it is to be a solution-oriented consultant, rather than just a biz dev rep to make sure we’re solving the challenges our prospects are having. I encourage my reps to consider, in addition to our solution, what else can help our customers.
“Then, we want to do all of that in a way where we avoid slowing down the sales cycle while adding value to the sales process to improve close rates. I just try to make sure that everybody understands it’s a two-way street, and we’re all gonna help each other out to succeed. And, most importantly, the prospect will see the most value at the end of the day.”
Question 3: Should you focus on one objective at a time?
“It really comes down to what your teams care about,” Scott explained. “Then, you have to think less about how many objectives there are, and more about what are the specific KPIs and OKRs that those individual teams care about right now. If Sales’ objective is lead generation, demonstrating how your partnerships are going to help aid in their lead generation is going to be the one objective to focus on.
“Fundamentally, with any team, it’s really about how you can show and prove that the value of partnerships ties directly back into their KPIs. I don’t think it’s about the number of objectives, it’s about the alignment of your objectives and the value partnership brings to what they want to achieve.”
“I think that means you have multiple objectives in parallel, as long as there are several KPIs and goals that other teams have,” Marco added. “So typically, they’re going to be a little different from Sales to Customer Success to Product, for example. You should find goals with all of those teams, as Scott said, and then work them in, in various angles and capacities.”
Question 4: How can we prove partnerships to the sales team and overcome their fear that partnerships will cannibalize their business?
“You have to show them the data and the proof that you guys are in this together and, at the end of the day, are going to have some goal,” Marco explained. “Typically, those goals will be pipeline and revenue. So if you just make it crystal clear that you are rowing in the same direction as a sales team, and you all want to generate revenue and pipeline. You need to nail down that alignment however you can and then prove it and celebrate it in action.
“Anytime we bring a lead to the sales team and we get it qualified, we celebrate it internally. We talk up the sales rep and help support them however we can. And that’s because we’re leveraging and leaning on the partners to do it. If you’re both booking meetings and there’s some competitive overlap, then you have to get to the drawing board and find a way to work together. Otherwise, you’re just naturally going to butt heads.”
Question 5: I’m being asked to tier our program and develop programming around tiers. How do I do this?
“I think you should definitely have tiers in your partner program,” Marco began. “The question is, are they externally facing, or are they just internal? In my current role, we don’t have any external tiers where we give different benefits for different requirements because we’re not going for a very large program. Internally, we do have to prioritize them because you can’t give the same thing to absolutely everybody, right? So we’re prioritizing partners based on our alignment.
“In my last role, I had more than 600 partners. We had external tiers because when you have a massive program and you have a lot of demand, then you can start to gate certain features. When you gate these tiers, then you are basically dangling a carrot to say, ‘Hey, we can give you these things, uh, but you need to commit to doing this for us.’
“The best way to structure these is to start by asking your partners, ‘What’s most appealing to you? What could we give you that would incentivize you to go above and beyond your work?’ Then on the flip side, you share what you can offer and what it will take in return to open that up and find a balance. Not all 600 partners should be able to cross the threshold to get that benefit, so you need to make it a bit of a stretch goal, then offer up something so valuable that people are willing to put in the effort.
“We just have two tiers as of right now,” Marco explained of the partner tiers in his current role. “We have a multi-step framework to determine if someone will reach the next tier. A lot of that is the alignment in our KPIs. Some of that is the overlap of customers or prospects, like how aligned are we in our ICP? Then, there is, frankly, the size of the partner team or their resources because we know how much or little they can invest in the partnership. If we’re going to prioritize somebody, we need to ensure there’s very strong alignment, resources, and the ability to execute on the activities we want to do.”
“I think it always comes down to prioritization of resources,” Scott chimed in. “You have a certain amount of capacity and marketing channels, so, when it comes down to developing programming around each of those tiers, you have to understand at a fundamental level, what the capacity is for each of those channels that you can promote your partners through. Then determine from there how you would prioritize based on the alignment of ICP and the potential pipeline or opportunities to create value that can cover those partners.
“I’ll give you an example from WeWork,” Scott offered. “We had hundreds of thousands of members that were all generally small businesses. So, we had a pretty sizable captive audience that pretty much any company wanting to sell something to small businesses wanted to attract. Therefore, we had to be really strategic about how to leverage the varying channels we had — we can only send so many dedicated marketing emails per month to our members.
“So, we really had to work with our marketing team to understand our capacity. That was probably the most important question to answer so we weren’t constantly going back to marketing, asking for more and more, knowing that they were limited because they had other teams internally that were fighting for those same resources. That allowed us to create a strategic framework for approaching which partners to give attention to, and which partners we had to find other ways to promote.”
Question 6: How do you keep your partner interested in working with, promoting, and doing business with you?
“Fundamentally, it all comes back down to demonstrating the value that is delivered to every stakeholder along the way,” Scott began. “The way I think about it is starting with your internal stakeholders, then your partners, and all the way down to customers, and understanding what every stakeholder and individual in that process cares about.
“You keep your partners interested in working with you by having a clear understanding of what they are looking to achieve and how a partnership can help them achieve that,” explained Scott. “And if you can start to realize the benefit, tie it back to the value that every stakeholder in their organization cares about. What does their Head of Marketing care about? What does their Head of Sales care about? That alignment is necessary to keep them invested. If you can help them hit their goals, they will love and engage with you forever.”
“My mantra is lead with value,” Marco chimed in. “If you’re showing that you’re committed and that you can actually drive results for them, then naturally that partner is going to want to do whatever they can to give it back. You start to build up that psychological debt, where your partner almost feels bad that they are getting so much value from you, that they will work harder to give back to you.”
Question 7: How do you handle partner remuneration — lifetime, first invoice, or a lump sum? Is payment based on partner type or partner effort in lead conversion?
“It really depends on the individual organization and what is going to both make sense economically for your company, but what is also going to motivate your partners,” shared Scott. “This might be part of your tiering structure, but I’ve seen all different forms of partner remuneration, including upfront payments to ongoing revenue shares in perpetuity. The timeline of the revenue stream is perhaps one of the most important elements that ties into how long you need and want partners to be engaged. The longer the revenue stream is available to them, the more engaged they will be in the long run because the economics just start to make sense, and the partnership is more valuable.
“The first step is understanding what economically makes sense for you, which partners are aligned with that, the economics you can afford, and how important is any given partner to serving your long-term goals so that you can align your incentives.”
Question 8: What are your favorite tools to use in a partner program?
“A CRM that you make sure is aligned with the Customer Success and Sales teams, whether it’s Salesforce Hubs, whatever it is, you need to start the process early for the proper operations,” explained Marco. “You can use that CRM for partner communications, which is what I’ve usually done historically. The other resource that’s great is an email extender application, like Mixmax or Calendly, where you can seamlessly add in great content, calls to action, meeting times, and things like that.
“I’m a very simple man, so I’m not big on, you know, the PRMs personally and some of the other tools out there,” Marco continued. “So a CRM is always what I start with, and then from there, if needs pop up, I’ll evaluate them as appropriate.”
“I would say that there’s a ton of attention paid to what tools we should be using to be most efficient,” shared Scott. “Of course, this is for good reason. But I think the flip side is that a lot of companies, especially earlier-stage ones where the partner program is brand new, don’t have the budget to support tools. So one thing I would say is I’ve built plenty of partnerships and partner programs using resources like Google Spreadsheets and Excel.
“I’m not suggesting that is ideal, but the point is you don’t have to wait to have your Salesforce instance perfectly customized and tied into the Sales Team or to get the budget to buy a PRM tool. You can get started immediately and then demonstrate value back to your organization so that you can have the budget support when you’ve done your analysis and proven why you need a tool.”
Question 9: What is the best order to hire when building a partner program from scratch? How do you do it?
“If you know you have a really big program and you need Partner Managers to actually spend time with your partners, that’s going to be something you prioritize,” began Marco. “Meanwhile, if you’re really big on co-marketing, maybe it’s Partner Marketing you prioritize. For me, I started with Partner Operations, which I think is a little bit unique, but is an interesting perspective. The reason I did that was I quickly saw how many things I had to juggle that were holding me back from pushing the program forward.
“If you think about all the communications around the co-marketing initiatives, setting up all of the internal education events, internal enablement work we’re doing via Slack, email, and putting together all the collateral, there’s just so much to do, and I’m probably forgetting another 75% of the work. So my first hire was actually a Partner Operations Coordinator Specialist, kind of a Swiss Army knife. Then I shifted to hiring Partner Managers because we were growing a program.
“One of the mistakes I made in my previous career was growing the program and not growing the resources to manage all of those partners,” Marco explained. “And naturally, that’s less time for every partner. I didn’t want to make that mistake again because you spend less time, and you get less out. So, I brought two Partner Managers on, and then my last hire for my current team was a Partner Marketing Manager because that was the last leg of the stool that we were getting up and running.”
“When you’re really starting out from scratch, usually you need that utility player who can kind of frankly do it all,” agreed Scott. “But that’s probably you. If you’re the first person in the team, you’re the one who’s signing partnerships, you’re executing, and you’re doing a lot of figuring shit out as you go along to see what works.
“I would say the most important next hire when you can start to bring on additional resources, is to cleave the team into who’s bringing new partners and who’s managing the partners. So there’s a handoff point, that, as Marco said, it’s the operations elements that can often fall through the cracks. It’s not only about the operations of getting partnerships launched, but then the ongoing management of that relationship, supporting it with other internal teams like marketing, and being the liaison. It’s a tremendously important role, and having someone who’s dedicated to that is probably one of the most important early steps.”
Question 10: How do you improve attribution and accuracy of attribution? What (if anything) do you use to measure the value of influence?
“The way that we’re doing it right now is not the way for everybody,” began Marco. “It depends on the scale of your program. Because we’re in enterprise sales and enterprise customers, we’re not dealing with a massive volume of leads that we are trying to get attribution on. Instead, we’re dealing with a smaller number. So, we’re on a more manual basis because this has to be a warm introduction to this very big company.
“When you find that partners aren’t submitting leads for attribution through your system of choice, you have to think through why this is happening. Are they not incentivized enough to go and submit the lead? Does it matter to them? Sure, it matters to you as a partnership person, but how do you make it matter to your partner? And that’s where you get back to tiers and incentives. Maybe it’s, if you submit X number of leads, you can then work your way to this higher tier, which provides additional benefits.
“At the end of the day, you need to figure out what is going to help your partners keep you informed and what is actually going to motivate your partners to take that extra step to tell you when they are recommending your software and to take action that you can improve attribution on your end.”
“I think a lot of the challenge comes down to how do you ensure the incentives are fully aligned,” agreed Scott. “So echoing Marco’s sentiment is ensuring your partners feel the importance and the other side is to reduce the degree of conflict, so there isn’t any fighting that might happen after the fact.
“That goes back to what we discussed earlier, the idea that sales might feel some sense of cannibalization. So, the ideal state is to reduce the sense of conflict where it’s us versus them and recognize that the value of those partnerships is one that lifts everyone.”
“I think measuring influence is the first piece, and then from there, you can determine the value or the lack thereof,” explained Marco. “So, what I did here was create a different object in our CRM. So this is a unique influence object in our Salesforce instance, and what we do is add that object to an opportunity if a partner has helped influence the deal.
“So you have to take one step back and define what influence is. We have three definitions of influence. One is a positive endorsement. So a partner goes and tells a prospect of ours that we are great and that they should work with us. The second is an integration requirement, so if somebody in the sales process tells our sales rep, ‘Hey, we are talking to you guys because you have this integration with this product that is critical to our business,’ then we know that integration influenced the deal. And then we have a third one that is active in sale, and we define that by co-selling, back channeling or providing access to stakeholders — so when a partner is very involved in a deal.
“Once you have that nailed down and you have that agreed upon with leadership, sales, and marketing so that you can all agree this is something important and worth tracking, then you have to start finding opportunities to have partners influence your deals. As you start to then check that box on those deals and you have more and more data, Then you want to see if you can draw any correlations to deals with influence close at a faster velocity or a higher rate.
“Over time, after 6, 12 months, whatever it is, we run reports on the deals with influence and the ones that don’t,” shared Marco. “Then, we try to bring that data to the team to show them what else we’re helping with — we’re not just sourcing deals for you, we’re helping influence opportunities whether we sourced it or not. Then, it’s about bringing all of these other metrics up compared to the deals that don’t have them. You just have to start somewhere by tracking it, and then you review the data from there.”
Dig Deeper into Marco’s Framework
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.
Whether you’re starting with nothing or you have an established partner program you want to scale, following Marco’s framework can help take you to the next level this year. Grab our 0 to $10M checklist for an easy reference guide on the steps you must take each quarter to succeed.
Also, we do a monthly meetup (virtual) for partner managers and marketers. We share how we generate leads, sales, and new partnerships. It’s crazy, but 200-500 partner people reg/attend these things! So happy to have you at the next one. Here’s the link to our Calendly to see if the time and topics work for you.