In today’s volatile business landscape, partnerships are crucial to breaking out of poor economic cycles, innovating quickly, and achieving long-term success. The right relationships can open doors to new markets, drive expansion in existing markets, accelerate revenue growth, and improve customer retention. To effectively manage partnerships, you’ll need to cultivate suitable relationships by identifying, recruiting, and prioritizing resources, without compromise. I know this can seem complex. Fortunately, utilizing key metrics and principles will both simplify execution and optimize results.
Let’s explore how to leverage metrics to build and manage your partnerships practice.
Partnership Principles to Live By
Did you know that typically, one partner or partner type isn’t solely responsible for driving higher deal sizes? Often, strategic, channel, and technology partnerships are all contributing factors. Don’t fall into the oversimplification trap of concentrating all your resources on a single partner or partner type. Instead, use data to identify all the partners that consistently contribute to larger deals.
Find and Focus on High-Impact Partners
Identify the partners that consistently contribute to a higher win rate. Once you identify the high-impact partners, make them a priority in your partnership strategies. To understand what makes these partnerships successful, analyze the characteristics of the partnerships, such as industry expertise, complementary solutions, and target market alignment.
Collaborate for Growth
Collaborate with partners who boost your win rate and drive revenue growth to create joint sales and marketing initiatives. Work closely with these partners, exploring how you can enhance the value of your joint offerings. To create compelling solutions that solve specific customer challenges, collaborate on product development, integrations, and go-to-market execution. After identifying the partnerships that contribute to larger deals, adapt your marketing and sales strategies to highlight the added value these strategic partners bring to the table. Ensure that your CMO is aware and committed to developing targeted campaigns, co-branded content, and joint events showcasing how your partnership attracts new customers.
Optimize Sales Processes
Engage with your CRO and RevOps to analyze your sales processes and determine the strategies that work well with high-performing partners. Identify the key factors that contribute to success, such as sales enablement, programmatic communication, aligned incentives, and seamless integration of solutions. These are the best practices and processes you’ll want to apply across your partnerships to improve overall partner program performance. Get obsessed with process improvement.
Use this chart to familiarize yourself with core metrics function-by-function. Knowing how your ecosystem contributes to and can positively influence these will metrics help you gain friends and influence others – for good.
Functions, Metrics, and Use Cases
For a successful partnership practice, your entire organization needs to commit to the initiative. And alignment on an executive level will enable the partner team to maintain its focus where it should be – on the partners. Use this chart to manage your conversations with executives, using data-centric language that’s relevant to them.
Ready to leverage metrics to build and manage your partnerships practice more effectively? Focus on high-performing partners, collaborate on joint initiatives, and tailor your marketing and sales efforts to maximize your company’s strength, your partners’ strengths, and ultimately your combined strengths. And remember that successful partnerships require continual nurturing, transparent communication, and analysis of agreed goals.
With an understanding of influence and deal size principles, you’re well positioned to develop a partnership management strategy that drives long-term success. These principles support data-driven decisions, the effective allocation of resources, and the adaptation of your strategies to changing market conditions.
Let Drag37.io help you with focusing partnerships, streamlining execution, and optimizing results.
