In today's business landscape, companies look for sustainable and scalable growth. The most successful among them recognise that harnessing the full potential of their partner ecosystem is absolutely critical to achieving this goal.
(Please also read the GTMHIVE article on the Type of partners and how to incentivise them, you can include in your ecosystem mix. )
Navigating the world of partnerships within a Fintech Software as a Service (SaaS) organisation presents a couple of challenges. As a partnerships manager or team, you're not just orchestrating external collaborations; you're continuously aligning internally, ensuring that the ecosystem becomes the lifeblood of your revenue stream.
To achieve this it is important that everyone in the business is fully aligned behind the partnership teams activities, understand the mission, the plan, and have visibility of progress. To support you, in putting together a program that yields a strong return of investment I have created this 7-step programme - let's dive in! 1. Partner Engagement and Expectation Setting
Before making any significant decisions, invest time in securing relationships with your partners. While you may perceive the partnership as fruitful, it's important to ensure alignment with your partner's objectives, needs, and strategic priorities. Use partner meetings as a forum to secure approvals for joint initiatives and collaborations. You can set up monthly and quarterly business reviews, involving different stakeholders to reassure agreed topics and monitoring of the actual progress.
2. Data-Driven Decision Making
The success of partner management is heavily dependent on personal relationships build with the ecosystem companies. Alongside this personal touch, we recommend a data-driven approach to evaluate the partner mix you have been building. For continuous monitoring of the partner performance you can consider the matrix below:
Number of intelligence share calls/meetings with partners. Internal and external sales teams need to be committed to share information.
Lead conversion rates from intel share calls/meetings to pipeline. Both lead generation flows from the partner to your organisation and vice versa need to be recorded in the CRM system. A good indicator of how the give-give relationship are in the total portfolio of partners in your tech, advisory, system integrator and cloud infrastructure ecosystem.
Number of qualified pipeline, compared to other lead flows from marketing and public relations. And Conversion rates from qualified pipeline to closed/won business.
Client retention rates post-closed/won business. Are partner touched deals stickier than direct deals? In our view all deals should be partner touched in one way or another. This to fuel the give-give relationship build-up.
3. Executive Alignment and Buy-in
Secure buy-in from executive leadership to create a partnership culture, across the organisation. Align partnership initiatives with broader business objectives, and internal teams like marketing, HR (e.g. partner portal initiatives to enable both partner- and internal personnel), finance, sales and product; demonstrating the value proposition of partnerships. Create accountability and transparency by setting clear expectations and milestones for partnership success.
Partnerships and ecosystems are the future of sustainable growth. It's time to start the next chapter of your Go-To-Market strategy, involving senior management and C-suite. All SAAS companies should consider a C-level seat for partnerships; a Chief Partnerships Officer role, reporting to the owner and/or the CEO. A sales leadership independent place in the organisation, would emphasise the strategic nature of this GTM asset.
4. Budgetary Alignment
Review your budget allocation to ascertain its alignment with your partnership targets. Assess the need for additional investments, such as hiring, event participation, and marketing initiatives. Explore opportunities for cross-functional budget alignment to optimise resource utilisation.
5. Establishing Shared Goals and KPIs
Align your partnership KPIs with broader organisational objectives, creating synergy across departments. Collaborate with Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and Product teams to set shared goals that maximise the value derived from partnerships. Identify opportunities to influence company-wide KPIs through strategic partnership initiatives.
6. Process Optimisation and Scaling
Map out processes tailored to the maturity of your partner program. From onboarding to enablement, streamline operations to enhance partner experience and drive efficiency. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deploy scalable processes that accommodate program growth.
7. Data Infrastructure and Analytics
Visibility is critical to ensure that the partner and channel teams contributions are recognised. Establish robust data infrastructure and dashboards to track partnership performance effectively. Monitor key metrics such as sourced and influenced pipeline (both ways), closed/won revenue, and partner engagement activities, both internal and external sales activity. Evolve your reporting capabilities to uncover insights that inform strategic decision-making and resource allocation.
In Summary:
Secure executive buy-in to foster a partnership-centric culture.
Encourage cross-functional collaboration and goal alignment.
Invest time in aligning with partners' objectives.
Make sure your CRM-system contains the right mandatory input fields to save partner related information and educate internal and external audiences on why this is important.
Base partnership decisions on data-driven insights.
Ensure resource allocation aligns with targets and goals.
Evaluate partner performance systematically and tailor engagement strategies.
Unlock the potential of partnerships and propel your organisation towards more sustainable growth. If you're forming your partner and channel strategy, and would like to ask any questions, please reach out to us.
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