How to measure the success of your partnerships business
Spotlight: Measuring Success is part of our Spotlight: series which seeks to surface the best ways to build partnership organizations.
One of the biggest challenges for people in partnerships is getting the teams they work with bought into the value their partners bring. Whether it’s executive leadership, sales, marketing, product, or customer success — most teams have different expectations of what Partnership success means to them.
This quarter, together with Allbound, we set out to understand how the best teams are measuring the success of their partner strategy and engaging with stakeholders in their company.
Expert Interviews
First, Shohei Narron gathered a group of experts on the ground in leading companies to hear how they have navigated measuring the impact of their work and what advice they have for our community.
Noah Thomas, Head of Marketing and Partnerships @ Commercient
We’re measuring total number of signed partners since our partnership model is more like an affiliate channel mode; recurring referrals, as in how long it takes for a partner to bring the second referral; how many leads partners bring in per year; and how many conversions we see per partner per year.
Karen Pattani, GSI Partnerships @ Google Cloud
At a different tech startup, we wanted to increase engagement in our technology integration ecosystem, and we, therefore, focused much more on integration metrics. Your KPIs vary depending on the contribution of your partners to the overall business.
Alex Popp, Digital Natives Business Manager @ Google Cloud
Any partnership organization is going to want to (and need to) track revenue. Then there’s influenced revenue which are deals you sourced directly, but your partner was of material value throughout the process.
Of course, hard revenue isn’t the only thing you should be measuring, especially in technology partnerships. You can look at mutual adoption growth, number of case studies and events, amount of marketing funds invested by your partners, etc. that you should keep track of.
Maryam Lahiji, Global Technology Partnerships @ Amplitude
A renewed focus on referrals has increased the amount of attention from our Sales and Marketing teams. That’s definitely one way, if not the only way, to get attention from the business overall. Of course, there are a lot of other indirect revenue-generating activities like publishing content and building integrations which you should be tracking, but it ultimately won’t matter if these activities can’t be tied to revenue.
Jeremiah Daon, Technology Alliances @ Quantum Metric
We found our technology partnerships were starting to drive our SI conversations. We have a strategic partnership with GCP, and they’d often loop our technology and SI partners into opportunities while GCP leads customer relationships. You can see how individual quotas would hinder internal collaboration. We’ve landed on a team quota because we’re a better team working together.
Fabian Eckstrom French, Head of Partnerships @ Stensul
“At early-stage startups, you should evaluate and measure partners on strength of the joint value prop, ideal customer profile overlap, and partner enthusiasm. You’ll eventually need to show business results within 6~12 months if you want to secure budget and increase headcount, and 12~24 months for it to explode. Make sure you have a CRM as a source of truth as you grow to ensure proper tagging and tracking.”
Measuring Success Expert Roundtables
Next, Travis Bradley got together 40 of the brightest minds in partnerships for virtual round tables to share their experiences and challenges with measuring partnerships success.
The key takeaways were:
All KPIs lead to revenue
- Most agreed that Revenue is the North Star for partnerships success, but being measured only on revenue can limit the longer-term bets and strategic partnerships because of the need for quick wins.
- Despite Partnerships teams having goals which support other teams like Integration for Product, Revenue and Pipeline for Sales, Partner events for Marketing etc. these teams rarely have reciprocal goals to grow the partner ecosystem.
- For strategic longer-term partnerships leading indicators for success are important to establish.
Executive Sponsorship
- In order to be successful, the executive team must be bought into the goals of the partnerships team. Ideally, they would be collaborators on the development of your KPIs.
- The executive team should also be connected and engaged with their counterparts at your most strategic partners so they can see the incremental progress you’re making and help drive the partnership forward.
- If your organization doesn’t have a c-level representative for partnerships then having a c-level ally who will champion your cause (and remind everyone to include partnerships in their planning) is key.
Leading indicators of success
- ‘Partner potential’ scoring can help as a very early leading indicator of future success and help secure organizational investment and buy-in. Suggestions for scoring criteria include market positioning, brand perception, product alignment, integration history, revenue potential, internal champion, domain rank scores, social ranking scores, a track record of tech partnerships, pursuing the same personas. If there are a focus market or persona and a partner is strong in that category — more of a priority.
- Engagement, motivation, and alignment are key indicators of future success. Has the partner completed training courses? Are they attending your events? Are there executives regularly attending your QBRs and planning meetings?
- It’s important to create definite health metrics with the partner mutually based on the success indicators you agree on. Get your execs bought in and hold each other accountable to this progress. It becomes easy to see whether you’re achieving the milestones required to generate future revenue together before you sink too much time and resources.
Introducing our Q4 Spotlight topic: Product Partnerships
So far in our Spotlight: series we’ve covered Account Mapping and Measuring Success. The most contested and challenging topic we’ve been tackling in the community recently is how to build a Product Partnership strategy which expands the capabilities of your product while increasing the market potential for your company.
In Q4 we’ll be digging into how the best teams are approaching product partnerships to build lasting and scaled ecosystems which set them apart from their competitors.
If you’d like to participate as an interviewee or on one of our roundtables please reach out to info@partnershipleaders.com and we’d be happy to hear your perspectives!
Look out for announcements on the Spotlight: Product Partnerships activities coming soon.
About Partnership Leaders
Partnership Leaders is the industry association for Partnerships, Channel, Alliances, and Business Development leaders. The association’s mission is to elevate the role of partnership leaders at their companies and provides a vibrant online community, virtual events, curated professional networking opportunities, and educational resources to drive success for our members.
The community can be joined through the referral of an existing member or by application. Please feel free to visit our website for more information.
