[Tony Rock]

Great question and I think most of us need help in this area. What types of partners do you have today? And how many do have on the books and how many are you looking to onboard in the future?

[Katayoon Dej-Panah]

We have channel, tech integrations and value add partners. We have about 200 + partners across those categories. Currently, I am focused on reorg and streamlining.

[Michael Doherty]

I am a firm believer that there needs to be enablement before the enablement. I’ve seen instances where organizations focus heavily on sellers to the detriment of the partnership and rollout. Prior to conducting sales enablement I want to make sure that I not only have executive leadership buy-in, but also that they are committed to engaging in the process and certain actions to ensure the success of the process. I want the appropriate executive to “assign” certain tasks to his team, such as building out the compensation framework, quota impacts, support runbooks, escalation paths, etc etc. The list goes on, but essentially this needs to be viewed as a new product/service launch and be treated as such. Once the back office and technical (support, architects/eng, pre-sales eng) enablement has been completed, audited and approved by the partners exec team and your team, then its marketings turn in terms of materials suporting the sales process, campaigns/outreach methodologies, etc. Now you have your calendar and marketing support, it’s time to focus on the sellers. Three distinct training types are typical: Product Sales training, Sales Process training, Partnership dynamics training (think- I have a question about X, whats my escalation path? How am I getting paid? – anything that a seller may want or need to know about the relationship).

One thing I like to do is have the CEO announce the partnership internally. I typically build an email template that my partners can use for internal announcement that gives a high level overview of the what, why, and how of the partnership, replete with timelines and general ownership.

To get such buy in, I make the signoff on the enablement process part of my sales process when signing a new partner. I have the appropriate parties review and sign off on the enablement overview document and the associated timelines. This eliminates any pushback on said activities down the line.

[Mark Brigman]

Michael, this is awesome. Thanks for the great reply and I couldn’t agree more. It is critical to have full executive support and awareness in each of your partnering initiatives. The PARTNERNOMICS methodology encourages leaders to use an Organizational Partnering Plan (OPP) to align the stakeholders and create clarity on the strategy. And secondly, create Strategic Partnering Plans (SPP) to overtly identify each of the components you raised and more. Thanks for your contribution!

[James Lezzer]

Katayoon, I would start with reviewing what your GTM strategy is for new partners and then revisit that list with everyone to fill in the gaps.

What’s been really powerful for me is working down the list of the specific action items that we consider best practice in getting the partner up and running. That list includes all areas of my partner’s team: partnerships, marketing, sales, and implementations/customer success. It eliminates the single-threaded conversations and creates more alignment across the partner’s organization. We want to educate and enable their team to get everyone aware of our solution(s) and how it benefits their clients.

Additionally, we’re asking them for insight on things like micro pitch decks. That becomes education for our sales team to help them open up those conversations and drive new opportunities. The outcome of this is that you have a very clear picture of which partners are really engaged and which ones you can either put on the back burner or terminate.