What are your lessons learned about successfully going to market in a partner's ecosystem?

Great question! At my former company Segment, there were two categories of partners: 

• Technology (ISV) partners 

• Solution (SI/agency) partners 

The go-to-market is slightly different for those two categories, but a few lessons learned that are relevant to both are:

1) Incorporate the voice of your customer in everything you do. Building a compelling joint narrative is key to successfully going to market with partners. The best way to do this is through mutual customers. Anecdotally, our most successful campaigns are when a customer webinar or event is at the center. 

2) Align to partners sales motions (and make sure they align to yours). It might seem obvious, but as you build out GTM plans and think through prioritization, pick the partners with sales motions that align with yours. This makes getting buy-in from key cross-functional stakeholders easier and accelerates GTM efforts.

3) Deliver value to their sales team. The most successful partnerships I've seen are those where the partner sales team is excited about your solution to the point where they start bugging marketing and execs to do more together. Partner marketing can influence the relationship by building out customer stories or taking the initiative to create enablement collateral that then is shared with the field. When the partners' field team starts paying attention to your solution and have unlocked the value your solution provides to both customers, but also their sale (eg answering 'what's in it for me' - does it accelerate the sales cycle? increase overall deal size?) then you will typically see the rest of the GTM pay more attention to you.

I follow the following steps to drive a successful GTM motion with partners.

Be Strategic: Every partnership does not necessarily warrant the same effort. Develop tiers for each partner type. Set strategic goals for each tier.

Collaborate: Deep collaboration with product, business development and sales is a must-have for any partner product marketing plan to succeed. This is in addition to other collaboration across the rest of product marketing and marketing.

Plan: Develop a calendar based on launches to co-market with partners. Measure and learn through each campaign and apply the learning across the partnerships

There are many lessons I continue to learn as I drive more partnership go-to-market initiatives. These are the top ones that stand out so far:

1. Driving adoption is key - especially when the integration UX is on the partner's side. User adoption is what keeps a partnership alive. Without it, the partnership won't last beyond the initial splash of the launch. Not having the UX be in your control puts more of a need for you to have a pulse on the levers needed to drive user awareness and adoption.
2. Decouple product releases from marketing launch. Depending on your sales cycle, launches can happen before or after the product release. This allows both teams to run on their timeline without dependencies that can slow you down. This applies to any product launch, but more so to partnership launches - as the window of opportunity and competitive environment have strategic importance. 
3. Understand and prioritize the partner's KPIs. It is critical to operate a win-win partnership and invest in producing outcomes that matter to your partner. This leaders to a more productive partnership in the long run, especially in an ecosystem.

Not all partners are created or treated equal. Even if a partner has a really compelling and complementary offering on-paper, if there’s no executive alignment- your success in driving GTM with that partner will be very limited. So pick the partners you choose to work with wisely! 

Given the number of internal and external stakeholders you have to work with across each partnership –alliances, marketing, product, corp strategy, sales, customer success – it's really important to dedicate most of your time to the top strategic partner(s). Go deep and learn about their ecosystems, get certified on their products. As you build relationships across your partner's org - this will help you understand how things work even more with your partner's ecosystem.

Building an integrated co-marketing plan across demand generation, new customer stories, product launches, events, and mapping out how much you'll spend each quarter with your partner, is a critical foundation to your success. It's the best tool/asset to get internal stakeholders on-board to support your co-marketing activities. There will always be changes and new initiatives that are introduced, and anchoring on your plan is the best way to keep you on-track. 

I've also found it helpful really helpful to share success metrics and KPIs with partners. Partner marketing and alliance teams are increasingly being asked to show ROI for their activities and campaigns. Sharing your success and KPIs not only builds trust, but enables your partners to adjust their strategy to support you - whether it's providing more budget for co-marketing lead generation program, a critical event sponsorship, or identifying the right resources within their company to move an initiative forward. 

Success in your partner's ecosystem breeds more success - meaning if you're doing the right things your partners will dedicate more resources, and expectations will also skyrocket :).