Strategic partnerships are one of the powerful tools in a startup’s arsenal when looking to increase market presence and accelerate sales. However, with great power comes great responsibility (yes, I know we’ve all heard that one before!), making it crucial to formulate a partnership that aligns with your business objectives and interests.

Often, teams can rush into partnerships without evaluating aspects that could determine the success or failure of your channel sales program. I’ve compiled a list of a few best practices that should be followed by teams looking to design and implement a partnership program.

Dedicated Teams

Having dedicated partnership teams provides the level of focus and dedication needed to build out a successful partnership program. These teams are the advocates for the program through the company and combined with senior management are crucial for any program to gain traction – particularly within sales teams. Smaller companies, who do not have the resources to bring on dedicated teams, need to have their partnership programs run by their CEOs who can provide a much-needed high level perspective.

Setting Objectives

Companies need to define clear objectives before launching a partnership program. What is important to the team in a partnership? What business metrics are you looking to impact? Are these objective attainable without a partnership? How challenging and realistic are our objectives? Does this strategy align itself to what our customers want? These are key questions that need to be answered, as these will be the bedrock of your partnership program.

Value Creation

Objectives allow you to determine the value that you are looking to bring to your business through a partner program. The next step is identifying the value you will provide to your potential partners. Keeping engagement consistent through a program via a well-thought out incentivization and reward structure ensures everyone is performing to their peak potential, providing significant value to everyone involved. If partner sales teams aren’t properly motivated to pitch your product, the program is as good as non existent.

Partner Selection

Partners need to be aligned in many aspects, but most importantly, in terms of what they are looking to achieve out a partnership. Do the technologies complement each other? Do our key target customer segments overlap? What KPIs are we looking to influence? Are our combined products what our target market is looking for? Being technologically aligned to your partners is as important as any of the above, as you can waste significant time and resources in building a common technology platform. With both companies working closely together, partnership teams cannot afford to overlook the importance of a culture fit as well.

Training and On-boarding

Getting sales teams to sell your product with the same level of passion and clarity as your team can only be done by a battle-tested training program. Providing the same level of time and commitment to your partner sales team as your own sales team will help them to create unique value for the platform in the minds of their customers, directly impacting ROI.           

Evaluate and Re-evaluate

Create mutually agreed upon check-ins to evaluate the progress of a partnership. This helps you determine the health of your program and allows you to remedy areas which might need to be focused on. Doing this at pre-determined time intervals will also enable quicker conflict resolution, should there be any.