Partner Operating Systems - Under Development

What is a partner operating system and why it’s important

The journey to alliance development is often put together haphazardly. A small company grows, puts a succesful sales person that has worked well with partners in change, and then fails due to a lack of understanding on how to make sure that all the cogs are moving together at the same time. Or a mid size company is ready to grow and they bring in a “professional” alliances person that has very little sales background and focuses mostly on develping the alliances via non-monetary KPIs and end up with great paper but little revenue growth. What is needed is a governance and activation first methodology that doesnt get in the way of “low hanging fruit” revenue generation but focuses on corporate alignment to external goals.

I put together my first partner operating system to be able to communicate internally all efforts. As you will see, it starts with work with sales leadership on goals and realistic expected impact, growing into internal cross-functional alignment, smart targeting and cost effective targeting, internal and external training, relentless execution and tracking thru CRM and ICP driven dashboards, integration into sales efforts and teams, and feedback mechanisms such as steering committees. It was developed to communicate the importance and revenue potential of alignment. Since these plans are strategic and confidential, I will only list the components below, to not reveal confidential info from former employers. If you do need additional information in any specific area, please drop me an email and I will be happy to help.

Partner operating systems create predicatable revenue from alliances. They align sales, product, and partners around a single scorecard and cadence, so you co-sell, co-market, co-pay, sell to, sell thru, and even sell for where it matters, and stop what doesnt.

The Partner OS should create cross functional agreement, tie partner plays directly into field motions, publish executive and operational dashboards with sourced and influenced pipeline, ACV, win rates, target partners, and run field integrated QBRs that drive action. It should drive account based Ideal Partner Profiles that target special accounts and should come complete with relevant market intelligence and be mapped to your adopted sales methodologies to push success.

If you do this, you will have a measureable outcome with more opportunities, faster cycles, higher win rates, and repeatable sales plays for the company.

Remember that no snowflakes are alike, so you will have to modify it to your instance, but the overarching goal is the same: drive unified goal setting, cross functional communications, shared expectations, and shared direction. This will provide your team extended reach, improved close rates, increased partner retention, and increased lifetime value (CLV).

Below are the components of the plan. Obviously your plan should be adjusted to your circumstances, but these are meant to be ideas on how to construct the different swimlanes that you need for your operating system.

THIS SECTION IS UNDER DEVELOPMENT

Alignment with Sales Leadership

Step number one is to understand that Alliances are revenue vehicles and sales leadership drives that mission. Complete alignment with sales leadership is job 1: You MUST align on goals and set CLEAR EXPECTATIONS. You must:

Understand leadership and board expectations for sales and for alliances
Asses the state of your alliances efforts, how its viewed by leadership, what how metrics are measuring up
Understand the delta between leadership expectations, KPI driven reality, and interal perception.
Understand the industry that you are working in, benchmarks associated with it, and opportunities for alliances to make a difference.
Develop partnership strategy based on those agreed upon expecations with clear KPIs to fulful and timeline to meet stated goals. Those expecations must be negotiated to be achievable, with funding to resource that achievement a key component of the strategy.
Develop time limited operational achievable goals that drive the strategy forward and are based on that partnership strategy.
Define key metrics and tracking mechanisms for those key metrics to be presented and updated on operational data driven dashboards.
Establish team timelines that are slightly more agressive than commited to timelines and KPI team members based on those.
Align yourself completely with sales peers and leadership. Have team members attend all sales team calls. Ensure alignment conversations in your weekly team meetings.
Align yourself also very closely with sales TECHNICAL leadership as they are going to be the ones that help you solve tehcnical issues, prove your solution to your partners, and make things work for you.

Cross Functional Teams

Alliances have great benefits for the whole company, but you might encounter push back from important internal cross functional teams, as they might have previously spent their valueable time trying to help get badly configured partnerships up and running.

My advice is to always start fresh and include the teams that you need help to help you from the very start. I would suggest that you have a cadence with them to update them on the vision and progress and even setup a steering committee or advisory role for them to contribute to the cause.

The teams that must be included include partner marketing (or marketing in general if there is no partner marketing), legal, sales operations/partner operations, product marketing, product engineering, support, and consulting/professional services.

Even though all of those are critical, you will need to rely on partner marketing as your brother or sister in arms. This marriage is so critical that I’m dedicating a whole sub-section to it.

Legal is often overlooked as a core team member, but it’s absolutly foundational. One of the biggest issues with partnerships falling apart is often related to badly built contracts or unreasonable expectations due to misunderstanding. I will go into more detail in a subsection on why legal is critical from your initial setup.

Sales Ops and/or Partner Ops provide you with the means to make your partnerships a success. They will not only make your life easier when you have to have special processes like you need to sell in the cloud hyperscaler marketplaces, but will provide you with the data that you need to manage your business, to build your dashboards, and to alert you of issues.

Product marketing and product engineering are the engine of the company. Not only will you need to be able to represent your partners interests to them and to get their buy in, but you will need to understand the impact of the direction of products on your partners.

Support is also often overlooked and the team that is treated as maybe inferior when managing alliances. Having good alignment with support enables you to manage issues early, to have the right to ask for special favors or special treatment, and are often the key to a happy relationship.

If Engineering is the engine of the company, Professional Services are the wheels. This team is critical not only in making customer implementations successful, but will also be critical in out of the box requirements, like sub contracting, etc.

The Partners Steering Committee

It’s a good idea to develop a team to help you steer the ship, sell internal alignent for you, and lookout for your interests.

The partners steering committee is an advisory committe that I’ve used in the past to help steer the ship, use as a sounding board, do the political work that might be required for your program, and create a sense of joint success.

I typically like to include sales leadership immediately below the CRO, a couple of top sales people, sales engineering leadership, marketing, legal, operations, engineering/product marketing, professional services, and if possible, support. Note that the composition of the team really does come down to your business, but having this alignment early on is important as your business becomes their business.

I typically start with a simple strategic and execution plan to get the buy in. I develop swim lanes for each component and ask input from all to make those components reality. Getting their feedback and buy in becomes critical when you have to compel the company to act differently.

Developing the Ideal Partner Profile

Just like in sales we have the Ideal Customer Profile, partner leaders need to understand what the ideal partner profile is

The marriage with Marketing

You will need to steer the marketing ship to your team’s benefit, and they can provide cover for you in helping you develop a much higher level of partnership with the larger targets.

For example, with the help of marketing, I have been able to get hundreds of thousands of MDF dollars for events, programs, and research from cloud, hardware, and software partners.

Consider this team your legs, because they will enable you to run instead of crawling.