Know Yourself, Know Your Partners

Every week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at 1 pm Mountain Standard Time, some of the best grapplers in Colorado show up at my home gym of Easton BJJ Centennial for competition (comp) training.  During the hour that follows, and for those that are brave enough to throw their hats into the ring, you know that you're going to be physically, mentally, and emotionally tested as you go round after round on the mats against opponents who are looking to push their limits and find the outer limits of yours.  This hour is simultaneously exhilarating, exhausting, frustrating, painful, and euphoric and, on the occasions that I can make an appearance, it's easily one of my favorite times of any given week.

Now, if you look at the pictures of the people that attend comp training, most observers would notice something immediately: not everyone in the room is created equal.  There are men and women; massive, physical specimens and those who are small of stature and slight of build; kids still in high school and adults years past retirement; and, of course, every belt color and experience level along the BJJ spectrum.  If you walk into that room and approach every one of those opponents with the same mentality, the next hour on the mats is probably going to be long, unpleasant, and mostly devoid of growth.   

While it may seem obvious that opponents, and by extension, partners, can't all be treated the same, it's amazing how many organizations tend to do just that.  Rather than knowing where they and, more importantly, their prospective partners rank within the ecosystem, they approach each one like a headstrong white-belt looking to "win" the room.  

With the rest of this post, I'm going to lay out the spectrum of partner types as I see it then, over the next several weeks, we'll explore each one in greater depth.  As we do so, it's important to keep in mind that even though one type of partnership may appear to be significantly more appealing than the others, that type may not be where your organization should be focusing its efforts.  Harkening back to last week’s post, it’s important to be realistic with one’s aspirations and abilities.  I may very well want to dominate the 250 lbs, black-belt, Greco-Roman, US Olympic bronze medalist (yes, an actual person I train with) but the chances of me doing so are pretty close to the chances of me successfully capturing, and riding, a unicorn (life goals anyone?) so I do what I can with the tools at my disposal and look for small, personal victories during our mutual time on the mats.

We’ll save the majority of the approach and strategy for each partner type for the later posts but, as you read through these, it might be helpful to think about how your organization categorizes and approaches different partner types and see if that approach resonates with my own or if there’s something you might add to this conversation.

So, with that, let’s explore the different types of martech partners (The names I’ve assigned to each are simply what I’ve decided to call them so, if you label them differently...cool).  

Alliance Partners:  Like the aforementioned massive black belt, these are the organizations that surpass our current capabilities in almost every way and, in many ways, what they’ve accomplished is precisely what we’d like to achieve ourselves someday.   

These are typically global enterprise companies with names that anyone in the industry, and most outside of it, would immediately recognize.  Some key characteristics of most Alliance Partners are: a sophisticated, tiered, globally distributed, sales organizations; a strong, well-developed customer success organization that “owns” much of relationship with their customer base; a effective, empowered marketing organization with a group dedicated to partner enablement; and a well established partner organization that is equipped to take advantage of the strengths offered by smaller organizations looking to engage.  

With Alliance Partners, there is no single strategy that will achieve success and, in engaging with them, you are committing to invest significant amounts of time and resources into the relationship with returns sometimes taking months, even years, to pay off.  Technological integrations, sales and CS alignment, marketing opportunities, and message validations and amplification are all, simultaneously, on the table with these types of partnerships so resource planning, expectation setting, and organizational alignment are absolutely vital in approaching these types of relationships.  

Technology Partners:  Technology partners, like similarly sized and experienced grapplers on the mat, are going to both provide a variety of challenges and provide a mixed bag of results.  Like the training partners, these companies are, on paper, going to share an experience level within striking distance of our own but, as the old, commercial disclaimer goes, “results may vary.”

Where the Alliance Partners are bright, shiny objects with seemingly unlimited promise that we pursue with vigor, we tend to approach our technology partners much differently.  In this group, we have companies that are of varying sizes, competencies, maturities, funding levels, and sophistication.  They are sometimes almost entirely complementary and other times are more competitive. Some of them seem much more appealing than others based on market trends, client needs, marketing prowess, relationships with other partners/competitors, and dozens of other factors but, as is the case with a junior high school dance, it’s not always those who we desire most that are the best fit.  As with the dance, frequently your best partners will come, not from the pool of the most popular, but from those who haven’t quite received the same amount of attention but are equally as capable and more willing to be meaningful, co-equals in the relationship. 

Revenue from this group comes in many forms: monetized integrations, product lift through integration, account mapping exercises, account intelligence, message amplification, co-marketing, enhanced legitimacy with a given customer set, etc. so it’s important to define what you hope to gain from any given relationship and determine if you have the resources necessary to execute.  If you do not have the resources but proceed anyway and don’t deliver, it’s easy to establish a negative reputation which has the potential to burn potentially important bridges along the way.

Agencies/Systems Integrators:  For most of us, this is where the holy grail of channel partnerships exist.  To stay consistent with the BJJ analogies, I look at this group similar to the way I look at dropping into other academies/gyms/schools around the world: there’s a lot to gain by doing so but each academy is going to carry with it its own set of rules, its own personality, and, on occasion, it’s going to be a complete waste of time.  

For a deep-dive on this subject, I have a guest who will be sharing his successful approach but, as we’re thinking about getting started, some of the keys items to consider are: A) figure out which handful of agencies (I’ll use “agency” as a blanket term for services-oriented partners) are the best fit for your product B) of those, determine if members of your organization already have relationships with anyone at those agencies and C) figure out what motivates them.  

There are dozens of other considerations (training, enablement, certification, support, billing, etc. to name a few) to take into account before embarking upon the agency journey but figuring out that final point of determining how to motivate them is, in my opinion, the lynchpin that will determine whether or not your initial engagements will succeed or fail.

Pure Integrations:  Frankly, I don’t have a great, grappling analogy for this group and that’s possibly because this group only fits tangentially under the partner umbrella.  Where with each of the other partner groups revenue can be attributed in a variety of fashions, pure integrations are typically going to fall largely to the Product team as they create product enhancements or address specific client needs for third-party integrations.

The only reason the partner team gets involved here is because product teams, many cases, are not well equipped to find contacts and set meetings with the right people so, in this case, we come in for the assist then, once a connection is established and a meeting is set, we can typically hand things off and extricate ourselves from the conversation.  

In the coming weeks, we’ll further explore each one of these partner types and begin to discuss some of the strategies surrounding engaging with each.  As we continue on our journey, different themes around each one of these groups will arise and the conversation will take twists and turns into the nuances, pitfalls, and rewards that come from successful partner engagements.  For now, remember that not all partners are created equal and, just as it’s important to do so on the mats, it’s critical that we go into each one of these engagements with an honest understanding of our capabilities, skills, and, most importantly, limitations.

Key Takeaways:

1. Focus efforts on technology partnerships that offer the promise of mutual engagement and shared benefit.
2. Alliance partners require comprehensive strategies unto themselves; know what you’re getting into before you commit.
3. Don’t get tunnel-vision on partners that aren’t demonstrating interest just because they’re the “cool kids” right now.