PartnerHacker Articles

Just like Geoffrey Moore's product adoption curve and Everett Rogers' Diffusion Of Innovation theory illustrations, There is a similar pattern that describes the journey organizations go through when building their channel ecosystem.

Before pursuing new partnerships, take the time to learn the landscape, prepare the foundation for a solid partner program, and set the proper expectations for the journey ahead.

When hiring for sales positions in partner ecosystems, it may be tempting to think that sales skills are always transferable. They often are not.

The reason why those skills don’t always transfer has more to do with the differences in environment and sales dynamic than the skills themselves. Partner solutions have complexities and orchestrations which require more fluidity and trust than many traditional sales environments.

If you want to have a fruitful relationship with your business partners, you need to learn to speak their language. Learn how to become fluent in your partner's love language. You’ll be surprised how well you can help yourself and your company when you learn you learn to talk in your partner's love language first.

Article by Stewart Wesley & Marco De Paulis

The timeless 4 P’s of Marketing apply directly to how we need to GoToMarket in an Ecosystem; they are:

• Product: features, quality, packaging, etc.
• Place: channels, location, market coverage, etc.
• Promotion: demand generation, PR, etc.
• Price: pricing strategy, price, terms, etc.

What’s problematic for most B2B SaaS companies is that when it comes to the orchestration of partner ecosystems, they fail to effectively address some of the critical P’s. In particular, Product, Place, and Promotion. This is why most suffer from a lack of EPS (Efficient, Predictable, and Scale-able) revenues.

by Allan Adler.

Customers need help.

But B2B SaaS companies are optimized for building, shipping, and selling great products. They use repeatable, scalable systems and processes. It’s the only way they can survive and scale.

They’re not optimized for countless unique support requests from customers.

Yes, great CS teams can provide support docs, live chat, and content to help customers. But again, to work at scale, these CS resources have to be pretty uniform, standardized, and repeatable. The SaaS business model isn’t built for and can’t sustain too much variation, hands-on support, or edge case problems.

Support tickets represent costs. Servicing them does reduce churn, but not needing to service them at all is ideal for the business. The fewer support requests, the lower the cost per customer, the better the margins, the more can be invested in growth and the product.

You get the idea. Customer support requests are kind of like lead. Abundant, heavy, not easy to work with, and not very valuable.

What if you could turn them into gold?

By Isaac Morehouse

I’ve spent a large part of my career in the world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). And I believe that many of the things we’ve learned in CRM can, and should, be translated into the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) context.

In particular, I believe that the future of partner management lies in making partners feel like valued, informed individuals - just like customers, but in a somewhat different way.

💡 In other words, it’s time for PRM to learn some lessons from CRM.

This is especially true because I believe that PRMs play an essential role in partner management.

Most organizations have huge partner operations problems. Those problems look different based on the company size and industry, but due to the changing nature of partnerships, the crazy number of stakeholders, and the newer technology, almost all organizations are failing to nail their partner operations.

Scott Brinker, Jay McBain of Canalys, Asher Mathew of Partnerships Leaders, and I have teamed up to run a survey on partner operations and programs. Our goal is to collect 500 responses so we can generate market-wide data that will provide valuable insights into how organizations are tackling this challenge.

I just got back from attending the first Partnership Leader Catalyst conference in Miami last week. The conference was amazing, as is some of the data that is coming out on Partner Ecosystem performance. Reveal is calling this the Nearbound effect. Their data suggests that account mapping and other tools help B2B SaaS partnership teams to crush it with their tech partnerships by:

1. Boosting their win rate by 41%
2. Increasing their average deal size by 43%
3. Generating two times the revenue

Not to mention, there are some pretty amazing statistics showing a causal relationship between tech partner integration deployment and the virtual eradication of churn!

By Allan Adler

For the past 20+ years, B2B has been driven by one thing: data. But customers are done with data. They’re drowning in data. They wish data was dead. Ok, not dead – that would be crazy. The point is that data is overdone. Every B2B brand is pumping out the same data-driven, algorithmic drivel, and it’s nothing but white noise to buyers. 

When it’s time to buy, customers aren’t going to take your word that you’re the best solution to their problem. They’re going to turn to online reviews, influencers, colleagues, and their network to decide if you’re worth their dollar. They’re going to talk to the people they trust. And that’s what the PartnerHacker Handbook is about.

In this book, we’ll walk you through what we’re calling the “Era of Partner Ecosystems,” where trust, not data, is the central currency. Featuring contributions from prominent B2B thought leaders, the Handbook will teach you:

• ‍What a Partner Ecosystem is and what it means in the broader context of B2B
• The importance of trust in the modern buying process
• How a Partner Ecosystem will accelerate revenue and bolster customer retention at your business

Many leaders, especially revenue-focused executives, have asked me:

I fire off:

1. You need to look for a company that has an established customer base,
2. has a solid sales organization,
3. can run co-marketing campaigns,
4. has an engineering team that can deliver solutions,
5. has cultural fit with your own,
6. and will allow you to scale!

While they take notes and try to digest everything I’ve said, I finish with,

The question is genuine, as is the intent, but it’s not an effective question to ask sellers.

When a seller hears this question - it's not interpreted as: What can my partner team do to support me? It is interpreted as: What kind of support would be helpful from anyone? It becomes a pie-in-the-sky question.

There are no boundaries of what is actionable for a partner. Sellers don’t know what is in their partner team's sphere of control or influence.

How could they?

What tends to happen is sellers answer the question with ideas and requests that most partner teams can’t do anything about. The responses can be frustrating for partner leaders because they know they may not be able to meet the requests. Requests can feel like a crazy wish list or sound like excuses from sales teams.

In order to understand GoToEcosystem (GoToEco), we need to look at why we started this crazy, exciting movement in the first place. We grew up in the distribution channels era of the 90s, before anyone knew what cloud computing was. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, everything changed. New companies like Google, SalesForce, and Amazon helped usher in new business models (platforms), new organizational models (product integrations), and new channel models (tech partners as a GoToMarket driver).

In a perfect world, every person in an ecosystem would be valued the same, and partner managers would have enough time to give everybody the same amazing treatment. That's not possible, though, and far from reality. Partner managers today are super busy, and most don't have time for all their contacts.

I recently talked to a partner manager at a big tech platform, and she told me she only manages to actively engage 30 of the 80 partners she is assigned. And she furthermore needs to prioritize whom within those partner organizations she engages with. She doesn't have time for every AE and CSM in those partner organizations but focuses on a few key people. She's not alone. It's what almost every partner manager will tell you.