Partner Strategy Framework -...

Competegy, LLC www.competegy.com 1

Partner Strategy Framework

Cloud and software providers have the enviable opportunity to become a platform on which others build. Despite this

potential, most software companies think narrowly about scaling through partners, focusing on resellers and strategic

alliances. Platform-minded companies take a broader approach toward partners, developing a community of partners to

drive long-term growth.

It takes significant resources and focused execution to design and manage a successful platform partner ecosystem. This

whitepaper provides a framework for companies to maximize the value of upstream cloud and platform vendors, strategic

alliances, program-managed partners, and the developer community. The objective is to grow revenue by establishing a

loyal partner ecosystem (such as those enjoyed by Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and others).

Direct questions and comments to [email protected]. Additional copies of this paper are available at

www.competegy.com.

Competegy enables cloud and software companies to develop winning partner strategies and

deliver tangible sales results. Specialties include Partner Strategy, Channel Development,

and Alliance Management with specific expertise in leveraging Microsoft as a partner.

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.competegy.com/



Table of Contents Partner Strategy Framework Model ....................................................................................................................... 3

The 4 Stages of Partner Development ................................................................................................................ 4

Strategic Partner Planning .................................................................................................................................. 4

Strategic Alliances ................................................................................................................................................... 6

Strategic Alliances - Reach .................................................................................................................................. 6

Strategic Alliances - Enable ................................................................................................................................. 7

Strategic Alliances - Activate ............................................................................................................................... 8

Strategic Alliances - Sell ....................................................................................................................................... 9

Breadth Programs ................................................................................................................................................. 10

Breadth Programs – Reach ................................................................................................................................ 10

Breadth Programs - Enable ............................................................................................................................... 11

Breadth Programs - Activate ............................................................................................................................. 12

Breadth Programs - Sell ..................................................................................................................................... 13

Developer Ecosystem ............................................................................................................................................ 14

Developer Ecosystem - Reach ........................................................................................................................... 14

Developer Ecosystem – Enable ......................................................................................................................... 15

Developer Ecosystem – Activate ....................................................................................................................... 16

Developer Ecosystem – Sell .............................................................................................................................. 16

Vendor Management ............................................................................................................................................ 17

Vendor Management – Reach .......................................................................................................................... 17

Vendor Management – Enable ......................................................................................................................... 18

Vendor Management – Activate ....................................................................................................................... 19

Vendor Management – Sell ............................................................................................................................... 20

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................. 21


Partner Strategy Framework Model

The Partner Strategy Framework Model expresses the key actions to take in developing relationships across managed

partners (upstream and downstream) and the broader community of partners and developers. The verbs at each point of

intersection in the model encapsulate the key action to focus on for that partner initiative and development stage.

The 4 overall partner initiative areas are:

1. Strategic Alliances: manage your closest, most valuable partners. These are the partners that would directly impact

your business if they were to switch their go-to-market strategy away from your product offerings.

2. Breadth Programs: you can’t justify depth resources (technical and business development staff) for the breadth

partner community so define efficient, scalable programs that nurtures their support.

3. Developer Ecosystem: evangelize developers to grow advocates within breadth and depth partners.

4. Vendor Management: most software companies leverage other vendors for cloud, database, operating system, and

other software needs. Align with vendor (or open source community) interests to maximize your marketing and go-

to-market support.

A comprehensive partner strategy could include all 4 initiatives, depending on the scope and extensibility of your product.

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The 4 Stages of Partner Development

Let’s consider the 4 Stages of Partner Development: Reach, Enable, Activate, and Sell. The following table outlines

activities that should be pursued and resulting outcomes for each partner development stage.

Activities will be executed differently across depth and breadth partner audiences, but the general approach and “target

outcomes” will be the similar. Let’s consider the “Reach” stage in context of the 4 Partner Initiative Areas:

Strategic Alliance partners should be assigned technical and business development advisors who keep them apprised of

new product developments and provide marketing opportunities in context of the alliance relationship.

Breadth partner reach comes in a more automated form (newsletters, blogs, video recordings, etc.). The goal is to grow

these partners into deeper levels of partnership commitment while minimizing partner account manager labor costs.

Relevance is the primary objective in breadth partner communications – think in terms of “talk with”, not “talk to”.

The developer ecosystem needs to be reached in a way that they feel connected to your company and its products. Your

message needs to be delivered in context of their development and infrastructure preferences. The goal is to grow

advocates among this target ecosystem — they represent an indirect way to influence your depth and breadth partners.

Reaching upstream partners (vendors) entails keeping them informed (to the degree they require) and continually

probing for additional opportunities and initiatives. The goal is to retain your preferred partner status and tap into

available marketing incentives and sales resources.

Strategic Partner Planning

Strategic partner planning is about selecting the right partners, applying the right resources, developing the right

programs, and delivering the right results.

Planning is important for selecting the right strategic alliance partners and developing the right expectations with those

partners. Consider the following lifecycle approach to managing strategic alliances:

- Analyze and assess existing channel partners for productivity and impact as well as potential recruit targets

(particularly those representing a channel to significant market impact). This will inform your managed partner

list as well as your partner recruit list.


- Plan and document your joint accountabilities such that it is clear what is to be delivered by both parties

(including technology adoption and support, marketing and sales activities, and overall partnership success

criteria).

- Train and support partners to develop their product development or integration capability (and grow their ability

to support your product ongoing). There is also a coaching element at this stage to help them identify early

adopter customers.

- Market and drive awareness such that partners align with your marketing messages, synch with your PR timing,

and fulfill marketing execution expectations.

- Provide sales support in the form of pipeline review & coaching as well as appropriate collaboration with your

sales teams.

- Nurture the relationship to ensure a productive and satisfying alliance. Consider a net promoter score kind of

measurement to ensure partner team is accountable for the quality of the relationship.

Partner selection should be an annual process (to align with your budgeting and business planning cycles and to minimize

the planning overhead). Two ways to approach partner selection are 1) based on capabilities needed and 2) based on

market potential.

The capabilities approach considers what competencies are needed in the ecosystem to fulfill customer demand and

aligns more with VAR and SI types of partners. For example, if your product requires services partners with data scientist

expertise to bring value to your big data solution, you’d prioritize sourcing partners with that expertise across the primary

industries you service.

Assessing partners based on market potential lends itself to software partners. In this approach, you look at the market

impact (size of the potential partner and the segment they serve), technology alignment (are they likely to pull through

your current release), and strategic factors (are they a unique industry channel, do their products represent a

convergence opportunity to create a new product segment). The result of this assessment is a short list of strategic

alliances. These partners receive the support of an account team and executive sponsor. Account teams should include

business development and relationship management, sales & marketing collaboration, and technical advisory services and

support.

Some partners may not make the cut (given the limited account team resources) but are important enough that you can’t

direct them to self-service partner programs. In those cases, you can get the benefit of programs enrollment and

lightweight partner relationships through a call center approach. Your account executive-to-partner ratio can be much

higher because call center account executives don’t travel and require simpler partner plans. This is a good place to

nurture potential alliances, but not a good way to recruit competitive or strategic partners (deeper commitment including

face to face engagement is required in those scenarios).

Let’s consider the planning approach for breadth partners. Start with the addressable

ecosystem of potential partners. For example, if you are looking to develop software

partners at scale in the US, perhaps start with a guesstimate of 30,000 ISVs. Then consider

how many you engage through your online and offline awareness efforts (the Reach and

Enable steps of the Partner Strategy Framework).

How many of those engaged are recruited in your partner program and what percentage

are delivering applications that integrate with your current product? If you keep this funnel

perspective, starting from the potential addressable ecosystem, you’ll be less likely to

become complacent with existing breadth partner recruitment.


Strategic Alliances

Develop strategic alliances with companies that represent the greatest market growth, will embrace and leverage your

latest product offerings, and derive enduring value from the partnership. In this segment, we’ll discuss how you reach,

enable, activate, and sell with strategic alliance partners.

Strategic Alliances - Reach

Strategic alliance partners will be more inclined to embrace your product in advance of customer demand if you provide

compelling business justification, offer commitment-based marketing investments, and ease their technical uptake of

your new capabilities.

Roadmap briefings, product presentations, and customer/market analysis help make the early adoption case for large

partners if delivered collaboratively in context of coaching. Document your agreed-upon milestones and gives/gets in a

shared business plan. Revisit this plan monthly or quarterly to assess progress.

The KPI for strategic alliance “Reach” is whether the effort yields highly satisfied partner relationships (and/or new

partner recruitment). Partner survey scores can be an internal performance indicator and partner comments (from

feedback surveys) is always enlightening.

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Strategic Alliances - Enable

In the Enable stage, you’re looking to educate them on your product/service capabilities. It implies more active

engagement, with partners seeking to learn your offering in detail. Help your strategic alliance partners understand your

product capabilities more quickly through assigned technical pre-sales support (advocates, evangelists, or engineers).

Their objective is to become trusted technical advisors to their partners and accelerate partner development.

It is valuable to know what partners have which projects planned so you can manage their progression toward a

marketing event (e.g., product launch or other marketing campaign) and map solutions across top customer scenarios.

Guide your alliance partners such that you have the high potential industry segments covered (requires strategic planning

in advance to identify those gaps).

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Strategic Alliances - Activate

At this point your partners have already taken steps to learn about your product capabilities and initiated meaningful

development activity. Those innovations can serve as evidence in support of your product marketing campaigns.

Communicate expected marketing cycle and opportunities to encourage partners to align with your release timing.

If you’ve done a good job with joint business planning in the Reach stage and early adopter support during the Enable

stage, you’ll have nurtured alliance partner solutions across key verticals and customer segments. Provide marketing

support to promote those solutions. Following are example marketing tactics:

- Customer Events are the shortest path to revenue and will have the greatest appeal to partners. For example,

host customer executives and represent your best partners as reference stories.

- Industry Events provide customer influence and help grow mindshare among partners and press. Leverage

alliance partners to serve as showcase references for these high profile events.

- Developer Events help influence the ecosystem and grow advocates. Consider documenting the development

experience via blogs and video to help developers understand how to implement key capabilities more quickly.

Use alliance partner developers to showcase new features that leverage your platform capabilities.

- Partner Led Events are important for achieving scale. Provide joint marketing templates (e.g., customizable

product literature, campaign management tools, social media templates) to enable partners to carry your

message.

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Strategic Alliances - Sell

In the Sell stage we want to convert partner development efforts into market awareness and sales (resulting in pull-

through of your product). This entails connecting partners to sales channels and co-selling with high-impact partners. 3

ways to approach partner sales acceleration are Joint Selling, Partner-Led, and Partner-to-Partner.

Joint selling is reserved for the toughest industry segments. An example is an industry where you have very little

penetration, but by investing in an incumbent you can establish references that will open the door to other customers.

“Investment” in this context refers to joint development funds (to offset their product development risk) and/or joint

marketing funds (e.g., matching dollars for approved marketing campaigns and tele-marketing efforts). 10:1 is a

reasonable benchmark for joint marketing ROI ($1 of your investment should yield $10 of sales pipeline).

Aside: Establish a Partner Council to periodically review and refine the managed partner list. This council should include

executive representation from internal product groups as well as customer segments (if you engage customers via

different internal organizations). Its purpose is to review industry alignment, revenue impact, and early adoption potential

in order to define the partners that can best be served with limited partner management resources. Identify top partners

per industry/sector so your sales teams can position compatible solutions more easily.

A more common scenario is Partner-Led selling. Encourage partners to confer with you (as needed) on active

opportunities. Partner Account Managers can help make sales team connections. In large, complex companies you may

wish to implement a “solution center” which matches field solution requests to preferred partners. Standardized quick

reference materials and scenario-oriented Q&A will also help partners with field engagement.

Establish Partner to Partner networks that enable your partners to form their own alliances. Connections can be

facilitated through social networking tools, in-person networking events, and online directories.

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Breadth Programs Engaging breadth (unmanaged, non-strategic) partners is about communicating in context of business needs (vs.

developers where you’re communicating in context of their functional skills and expertise). Breadth programs should

serve both alliance partners and unmanaged partners. Key elements of breadth programs include:

- Online resources where partners can educate themselves on your product and partnership value

- Incentives to align partner readiness with your release timeframe (tracked in your early adoption system)

- Self-service marketing materials to enable sales (with special marketing opportunities for innovative and

influential solutions)

Breadth Programs – Reach

Often partner ecosystems are represented as a pyramid with high

value partners (directly managed) at the top of the pyramid and an

incubation zone in the middle for up and coming partners

(proactively managed through an outbound call center). Breadth

partners are “program managed” through self-service programs and

reactive call centers.

Nurturing breadth partners entails raising awareness of partnership

potential (for those not already in your partner program), increasing

access to product and partnership information (in exchange for

contact info so you can continue communicating with them), and

reducing friction to doing business with you as a partner (e.g., easy

product trial access, simple go-live licensing).

Aside: partners react negatively to arbitrary program changes but favor program distinctions where they can demonstrate

their superior capabilities. Carefully think through partner segmentation (credentials, technical expertise, customer

references, etc.) before establishing or changing partner program tiers.

Communications Channels

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There are numerous channels to communicate with partners and potential partners. I recommend you avoid messaging

confusion by centralizing the communication responsibility. Example communication channels include:

- Partner Portal: a “partner with us” segment of your web site. Centralize your partner profiling and use that data

to personalize your communications (by role and partner type) across your online channels.

- Monthly Email Newsletter: a regular drumbeat of communication through old-school monthly email.

- Social Media: your content will be similar, but digested more real-time (be prepared to respond to feedback

quickly). Product groups may have their own support-oriented communications (e.g., product blogs) outside of

the partner channel.

- Partner Events: get out on a regular basis to educate and listen to your partner community and have an annual

event where you provide perspective on industry direction, describe how you’re evolving the partnering

program, recognize top partners, and update them on your product roadmap.

- 3rd Party Events: recruit new partners via industry events and 3rd party advertising & sponsorship where

warranted. In addition, encourage existing partners to host co-branded events (e.g., user groups).

Breadth Programs - Enable

During the Reach stage, you deliver relevant communications to sustain your partner base (newsletters, websites, etc.)

and engage potential recruits via 3rd party channels. The call to action built into these breadth communications is to get

educated on your product and program offerings.

If you are a platform player, err on the side of openness, posing little to no friction between your audience and your

product/program info. In particular, don’t hide training content (webinars, product demos) behind portals requiring

partner ID sign-in or profiling. Types of education campaigns to consider:

- Early adopter campaign: to elicit exploration of new technologies before they are released to market. Provide

learning plans in addition to core technical product information.

- Competitive recruitment campaign: offers to the ecosystem of a competitor that is undergoing a platform-

breaking shift, describing your differentiation and value proposition.

- Partner advocacy campaign: activate loyal partners by engaging an “inner circle” of advocates.

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Breadth Programs - Activate

After educating breadth partners on your new platform or product offering, you want them to commit to product

development. This is a recruiting effort in that you’re converting them from simply learning about your product to

delivering in-market solutions.

Capture and nurture partner readiness through an early adoption program. This program should provide a partner-

accessible web site where partners can request participation, learn about training events, and obtain support. Once

captured in your adoption tracking system, you can prompt when you reach certain milestones and when partners should

be taking action to align with marketing opportunities. For example, you may communicate when new beta features are

introduced. Partners find value in being notified of these technical updates, particularly if positioned in context of what it

means from their perspective. The rationale behind a technology shift can help partner architects and development VPs

make better decisions about their own product development.

Another benefit to early adoption systems is alignment of marketing messages and timing. As you approach release, you’ll

want to demonstrate momentum to press, customers, and other partners. Communicate milestones for testing and

release to enrolled partners and how they can leverage (and amplify) your launch momentum.

Whenever possible, take a full lifecycle, integrated approach when creating partner systems. You should have one

adoption tracking system (spanning breadth and depth programs) that feeds short term marketing evidence needs,

partner management priorities, and go-to-market sales prioritization. Retain system memory over product release

versions so you can invite prior generation partners into your next release cycle when it comes around, enabling a

relationship over time, even with breadth partners (e.g., “thank you for using version n-1, we’d like to offer you an

opportunity to be an early adopter for version n“).

Aside: There are varying approaches to launch: rolling thunder, big bang, and social. Generally the larger you are, the

more effective you can be at rolling thunder – where you have a growing crescendo of market announcements over a

period of time before your ultimate release. The big bang effect entails keeping partner and your own announcements

quiet until you’re able to announce to the press, in hopes of cornering industry (and customer) attention at a specific time.

Social launches tend to occur where budgets won’t warrant a press-grabbing launch and so the approach is to engage

guerrilla tactics to spread the word of your new release. These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive and you’ll want to

engage in social network amplification of your message through partners regardless.

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Breadth Programs - Sell

After reaching, educating, and activating breadth partners, it’s time to accelerate and amplify their go-to-market activity.

Promote partner solutions will result in pull-through of your underlying products.

Catalogs and directories can be helpful for connecting partners and potential customers, particularly if you represent a

center of gravity for an industry segment or platform. Avoid getting lured into the complexity of providing direct

transaction support unless you’re providing a substantial market for add-on solutions where you can dictate the business

model.

Your partner program should communicate consistent product messaging (particularly leading up to product launch) so

your key themes are reinforced across PR channels. Provide template-driven joint marketing assets where partners can

combine their logos and company information with your branding and messaging.

An advanced technique is to activate partners as evangelists by providing a club-like context (including monthly calls,

product group access, event recognition, etc.) in exchange for exceptional press influence. You need to be careful about

not having them formally represent your company without disclosure for legal reasons, but acknowledging and rewarding

good partnership behavior is a good intent.

As you inventory solutions that came out of your adoption tracking system, segment and prioritize them such that you

have a few top references per industry segment that can be communicated in your PR/marketing campaigns and field

sales customer engagement. There is a balancing act between partners that are large and have more customer traction

(but are more conservative in the amount of change they’ll introduce) and “innovative” solutions that tend to be from

smaller companies with less market influence.

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Developer Ecosystem

Developers influence the technical direction within your customers and partners through their opinions and preferences

for technologies. They enable faster prototyping and testing if they like your technology and conversely can impose

friction if they prefer other solutions.

Incubating developer engagement before your product releases provides an opportunity to gather feedback. Develop

active listening/reporting mechanisms to yield better (and more competitive) solutions for customer needs.

Developer Ecosystem - Reach

The reach stage of partner development for the developer ecosystem is about connecting with your target audience. It is

important to invest appropriate time and energy up front, to be perceived a member of the ecosystem. If you

communicate without context or are perceived as pitching your wares without establishing a balanced viewpoint, you’ll

actually drive dissatisfaction among developer audiences.

Enlist your technical staff to engage developers online and task product marketing managers to monitor, measure, and

guide the messaging (e. g., provide core talking points for new releases). There are a range of online channels where you

can influence sentiment by listening, learning, and sharing. Examples include:

- Webcasting: videocasts and podcasts can serve as a platform for telling customer and partner stories that

support your product themes.

- Blogs: product-specific blogs provide transparency for your development process and can be a good source of

customer/partner feedback.

- Social networks: provide a mechanism to communicate and be part of the discussion around emerging trends.

- Industry review sites: monitor sites that review products in your category and engage reviewers/commenters

appropriately.

You can measure Connect activity by tracking visits to your own properties, but more interesting is your communications

reach into 3rd party channels.

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The key point for the reach stage is to connect with developers, be a part of their community, and establish a level of trust

that lets you have an informative point of view toward your company product/service releases. You’re seeking credibility

at this stage so you can draw individuals into the Enable stage.

Developer Ecosystem – Enable

Recall that Developer Ecosystem is about engaging individuals (not companies). Our purpose in the Enable stage is to not

only educate developers on our product capabilities and value proposition, but enlist their support as advocates.

After defining your addressable ecosystem, determine the number of unique developers you currently reach (using

unique users to your developer web pages, impressions from 3rd party advertising, etc.). In the Enable stage, we focus on

connecting these developers to learning channels. Example channels include:

- Your own online developer site and events (where it is easy to control the message and measure the activity)

- Industry events and websites

- Community activities (user groups, competitive forums)

- Industry influencers/pundits

Judge the success of developer marketing by how many developers partake of online and in-person training

(participation) and the quality of their experience (satisfaction). Establish a consistent measure (based on % of target

ecosystem) to ensure appropriate aspirations (in context of the addressable audience).

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Developer Ecosystem – Activate

Convert developer efforts from learning about SDKs and services into action (active development). Incubation/early

adopter programs help register developer interest and nurture them along development scenarios. Introduce helpful

features, frameworks and techniques along the way and acknowledge success (e.g., submissions into your online store).

Contests and open source contributions can also motivate developers and advance their applied knowledge of your

underlying product. Consider sponsoring such initiatives to rally developer ecosystem interest.

Developer Ecosystem – Sell

Once developers have hands-on experience with your product/service, we want to amplify the favorable voice of those

developers. Amplify developer efforts by showcasing solutions that demonstrate individual productivity and creativity.

Provide a context (e.g., developer oriented launch events) where innovative developers from the community represent

their work. An advanced approach is to create a club context whereby the most committed developers actively evangelize

the company interests in public channels (press, social media). Implemented the right way, developers will get fulfillment

(e.g., recognition at events) and value (e.g., product group insights) from being associated with your company as you

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benefit from more scalable community reach. You can go further by creating an elite tier (e.g., Microsoft MVPs/Regional

Directors) which recognizes the most influential developers and secures their alignment with your company.

Vendor Management

As a software company, you depend upon other software companies for platform elements of your own solution such as

database, operating system, middleware, cloud infrastructure, and components/plug-ins. The idea behind Vendor

Management is to get the most from your relationship with those software providers. Platform provider partners need to

be handled differently than your other partner relationships due to their influence on your future innovation potential

(and they tend to be larger firms with greater market clout).

Vendor Management – Reach

Learning the organization and role dynamics of larger partners is important. You can waste a lot of time with the big

platform players if you don’t narrow your efforts to relevant groups. Stay current on the primary roles and teams that

influence your product, particularly over fiscal year boundaries as strategies and scorecards change.

Even as an unmanaged partner, you can sometimes qualify for marketing support if you align with a vendor’s strategic

initiatives. If the risk of new technology adoption isn’t worth the potential marketing payoff or you’re otherwise unable to

get out of the unmanaged status, focus more on leveraging what the partner programs offer and how other partners in

that ecosystem can help you. Reassess partner benefits after each major vendor’s annual partner update. These events

catalyze their messaging and program development. New opportunities to engage value-add programs will be at their

height around that timeframe.

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Vendor Management – Enable

Vendor management is most relevant where you have a material impact and can affect some leverage on your upstream

platform providers. Once you have a sense of their goals and how they are measured, it’s time to work out a joint plan for

success. Joint business plans are often driven by the platform vendor, seeking to gain your commitment to a certain level

of sales and ensure your satisfaction with the partnering relationship.

Partner business plans are initiated after the strategic alliance list is locked. You have to be collaborative and approach

with a win/win objective of course, but realize you have leverage to request more support in context of the business plan

if you’ve already been designated a strategic alliance partner.

Platform vendors sometimes require technical certification of your developers, regular sharing of your pipeline &

roadmap, and that you accomplish certain pull-through sales volume. In turn, you should seek their commitment across

technical, marketing, and sales efforts including:

Preferred positioning with field go-to-market teams (particularly if your solution is industry-specific)

Prominent positioning in online directories & advertising/sponsorships

Joint marketing support such as tele-sales campaigns, case studies, and placement in prominent launch events

Channel building efforts (e.g., introductions to a target list of partners)

Executive sponsorship (perhaps speaking at your annual user conference)

Access to preferred technical training and support

Partners often view joint planning as an administrative task rather than a tool to define and guide the relationship.

Review the business plan quarterly with your account manager to ensure you’re both on track. Seek concessions where

the vendor isn’t fulfilling their end of the plan. If done properly, partner business planning gives you the justification for

greater resources (to achieve common goals) and permission to ask for more as the year progresses.

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Vendor Management – Activate

Where there are sufficient incentives, synchronize your product development and marketing efforts to align you’re your

platform vendor. Platform vendors may have different marketing teams such as product-centric marketing (influenced by

product groups), industry marketing (owning the message to an industry segment), and/or audience marketing (targeting

developers, consumers, enterprise, or small/medium businesses). Since you’ve already learned about the partners

organization (in the Reach stage), you’ll know who to ask to understand key themes the vendor wants to convey. Assess

how your own product development and marketing messaging aligns, then make the case for preferred placement in

marketing channels. Examples include:

Case studies, online profiles, literature

Sponsorships and co-branded advertising

Speaking slots in national and regional launch events

Reference speaker at internal meetings (e.g., vendor’s annual sales events)

Reference speaker at vendor community events (e.g., partner conference, user conference)

Tele-marketing (joint branded event with jointly funded tele-marketing leads development)

Synchronize your marketing requests with vendor budget cycles so you’re in consideration at the time marketing

decisions are made. Start engaging your account manager to determine marketing priorities a couple months before their

new fiscal year and engage marketing teams with proposals as new budgets are approved.

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Vendor Management – Sell

Leverage platform vendors to accelerate your own sales. Align with their go-to-market messaging and channels so you

have cause to tap their sales team for customer insights. Vendors take several approaches to partner selling: partner led,

sell with, and peer partner selling.

Partner Led (most common) is where you are expected to drive and own all opportunities. Leverage the vendor sales

team (which should have deeper customer relationships for your new opportunities) to learn about decision makers,

budget cycles, and adjacent opportunities for your product in the account.

Sell With scenarios are where you and the vendor jointly engage customers in the lead development process. This is rare,

but more likely when you dominate a critical market for that vendor. Their desire to access that customer segment may

result in short term sell-with activity. Sometimes vendors provide financial incentives to achieve certain revenue targets

or pull-through sales. Evaluate the ROI of chasing these incentives and whether it is a natural motion to your sales

process.

Peer partner selling can be valuable if the vendor has taken steps to differentiate and inventory their ecosystem such that

you can efficiently engage other partners. These relationships can generate complementary partner channels as well as

enable more complete solutions (e.g., where ISVs loosely integrate their products, perhaps to take on a larger

competitor).

Aside: To maximize your Vendor Management, align with their field sales objectives. Managed partner status (often not

explicitly represented in partner programs) is a pre-requisite to getting this kind of placement. Also pursue preferred

placement for field engagement and go-to-market positioning (e.g., preferred industry-specific solutions). Engage those

roles that have the greatest applicability to your offering and provide quick-reference materials as a job-aid for their

customer engagement.

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Conclusion

Thinking in platform terms doesn’t come naturally for most software companies. However, becoming the platform upon

which other companies build provides great industry advantage and market momentum: partners pull through your

technology when they’ve taken on a platform dependency, thereby reducing your sales efforts and providing stickiness

(loyalty) in the face of competitors.

The lifecycle of reach, enable, activate, and sell applies across the various partner initiatives including larger strategic

alliances, long tail breadth programs, and the developer ecosystem. Taking on a platform perspective bring service and

compatibility responsibilities across your product releases. Plus, it requires ecosystem-development systems and

resources to nurture an ongoing cycle of partner communication, product education, market activation, and sales

enablement.

I hope you found the walkthrough of the Partner Strategy Framework of interest. Direct feedback and questions to

[email protected].

Competegy enables cloud and software companies to develop winning partner strategies and deliver tangible

sales results. Specialties include Partner Strategy, Channel Development, and Alliance Management with

specific expertise in leveraging Microsoft as a partner.


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