How to get started with Tech Partnerships

I’d like to thank Chris Samila Chief Partner Officer at Partnership Leaders, Rich Gardner, Dan Caldwell and Andrew Smith formerly doing partnerships at Klaviyo, Dan Anand from Loop; and Lindsay Kolinsky from Okendo for their great input to help me write this article.

Technology partnerships are hard for a number of reasons, and it took me years to understand how to successfully build them - I learned all of the lessons shared below by doing it wrong first. Before joining PartnerPage as the COO, my experiences in partnerships have been mainly based on eCommerce SaaS. I worked at Swell before it was acquired by Yotpo, continued at Yotpo and then joined Klaviyo. Hopefully, the takeaways described below work for most B2B SaaS companies. 

I see a ton of sharp CSMs, Account Executives, Agency Partner Managers, Product Managers; and people from all sorts of other roles come into Technology Partnerships, and I wanted to share the recipe that worked for me to help all of you succeed in this role. In this post, I’ll do my best to explain why tech partnerships matter, the approach you should take, and 8 steps on how to make sure they are successful.

Why are tech partnerships important?

There are two things to consider regarding tech partnerships: your customer’s perspective and your business goals.

Your customers want tools that work well together and they don’t want to waste their time fiddling with APIs to make things work - they want to grow their business. Create real value for your customers with integrations and so many good things follow.

From your company’s point of view, happy customers who are getting value from your software and the integrations you’ve built will spend more money with you. Integrations help reduce customer churn and increase net revenue retention (NRR). They can also help with new customer acquisition through partner referrals, co-selling, and co-marketing efforts.

At the highest level, when dealing with both of these stakeholder groups (customers and internal teams), I learned that these three principles will guide you to successful technology partnerships: 

1. Build real and meaningful customer value (typically through an integration).
2. Tell stories that are based on real data analysis to your teams and the market.
3. Be empathetic to your partner and every stakeholder (CSMs, Sales managers, customers, partner managers, product managers etc.) in the process.
4. Focus on your top priority partners and get it right, then repeat with the next most valuable partners. Adapt to changing priorities and don’t be afraid to say “not now” when a meaningful partnership doesn’t seem feasible.

8 Tips on how to build tech partnerships:

1. Get your organization ready for partnerships

First and foremost, you need to develop a partnerships vision and strategy that impacts KPIs that people actually care about (especially the KPIs of your boss and your boss’s boss). Additionally, you need to learn about the relevant KPIs and needs of any department you plan to work with on integrations. Because Tech Partnerships are so cross-functional, you are going to want to meet with leaders and individual contributors in Product, Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing. 

Depending on your KPI, some of these relationships will be more important than others. The key to meeting with these teams is that you need to connect the work you are doing on integrations and technology partnerships to the KPIs these teams are trying to hit - if you don’t, they will never be able to find time to help you.

Once you understand the needs of your internal teams, you will need to understand what you can offer to partners from your organization that will actually incentivize them to help you hit your KPIs. You can’t control external partners so you need to build great processes that offer them incentives. Here are a few examples:

• Be really good at sending referrals from your CS/sales team. This will work well if your partners are measured on net new referrals.
• Have an outstanding partner marketing motion that is highly collaborative with your broader marketing team. 
• Build outstanding integrations or integration infrastructure. 

2. Identify partners worth building an integration with (or identify existing high-value integrations)

This should be based on your customer overlap and integration use case potential. Strong customer overlap is great but low customer overlap can also show a bigger net new business opportunity, as long as you have a similar audience. Alternatively, identify partners who have already built a valuable integration.

To do this account mapping, you can use a tool like Crossbeam to understand what companies you have compelling customer or prospect overlap with. Focus on your top priority partners and get it right, then repeat with the next most valuable partners. Adapt to changing priorities and don’t be afraid to say “not now” when a meaningful partnership doesn’t seem feasible.

“Confirm culture fit and investment energy from both sides early. Is this partner going to invest in your success and vice versa? Will they block and tackle inside their organization for you? Sometimes the integration use case is sound but the other company is too busy with other priorities. Understanding that the partner team is onboard, but also getting broader buy-in from around the partner’s business can be vital” – Chris Samilla, former VP of Partnerships at Crossbeam.

3. Align with the partner manager at your partner’s organization on the goals and resources needed for the partnership

Fail or delay a partnership as early as possible in the process! Many partner organizations are too busy for a big project or don’t have full support from internal teams to make a new integration really successful. As Dan Caldwell, Technology Partnerships Manager at Klaviyo, advises, “Proper expectation setting and avoiding false promises is key. Be as transparent and upfront as possible about where you can and can’t add value. There are too many false promises in partner programs. It pays to avoid them in the long run.”

Define what you want to achieve with your partnership from the beginning, and make sure you understand what your partner wants to achieve. The biggest mistake people make in partnerships is focusing on what they need more than what their partner needs. From here, you will set the stage for a great partnership.

Building a strong relationship with your partner’s main point of contact is essential. Befriend them, build rapport, and understand their goals. Authenticity and honesty are crucial. Also, if you can, avoid signing a legal agreement unless absolutely necessary—nothing kills a partnership’s momentum like 10 rounds of redlines between legal teams. 

4. Build an objectively valuable integration for your customers

The way to deliver real value to customers is to truly understand what they need. Data being pumped into your tool or into your partner’s tool is not valuable in itself – it needs to be actually useful to customers. So many integrations have been built and don’t solve an important problem for the customer base.

The best way to build an objectively valuable integration is for your Product team (or your partner’s Product team if they are building it), to do customer interviews to understand what problems need to be solved related to the two softwares. 

Once you’ve built the integration, prove that it works so that customers and customer facing teams can be confident that spending time setting it up is actually going to drive an impact.

“A key question for two companies considering a technology partnership is ‘how would this partnership improve a shared customer’s experience compared to what our two companies can do already on our own? How does 1 + 1 = 3 for customers?”  There may be lots of other reasons to partner with a company, but having a shared understanding of the answer to these questions makes a partnership more likely to succeed.” – Rich Gardner, former VP of Global Partnerships at Klaviyo

5. Educate team members at both companies to drive adoption:

CS and Sales teams are very busy so be very careful about wasting their time. Only train CSMs and Sales people who will actually benefit from the integration, and if you followed Step 4, you can be confident that the solution you have created with your partner will make an impact for them and their customers.

Another option for educating teams are Lunch-and-learns - please note that 90% of Lunch-and-learns are boring and hated by the audience. To make the most out of those when you’re invited by your partner, here are a few recommendations from Dan Caldwell, Technology Partnerships Manager at Klaviyo:

• “Ask what time frame and format their best L&Ls have been in. Some companies like 10 minute presentations and others like 30 minute Q&As without any slides.”
• “Ask for a list of questions or themes that the team is interested in learning more about. Tailor your time with them around these points. This should be your top priority.”
• Have the mindset that this is the partner’s time and not yours. You are there to help them.

• Break the ice! Start your presentation with a few questions to get the conversation going. Once a couple people speak up then others are more likely to. Engagement is key.” – 

To give a good lunch and learn, you need to know your product, know your partner’s product, understand the integration well, and tell people about how it works and the value it adds. Skip the generic sales pitch or you will do more harm than good.

6. Connect client-facing teams from both companies:

Connecting CSMs to CSMs and Sales to Sales allows for two main benefits:

• The customer in common gets some great collaborative support from both partners. The integration can be deployed optimally from both systems.
• The CSM/Salesperson gets to learn about the integration and partnership first hand, which will give them confidence to bring that integration to other customers.

Cultivate CSM to CSM and Salesperson to Salesperson collaboration through ongoing education and team activities. If possible, create a communication channel (like a Slack channel) for both teams to be able to ask questions,exchange ideas and help each other. 

In general, Sales to CSM collaboration is challenging and will typically result in the salesperson asking for introductions to all of the CSMs customers. I believe it is possible to enable this kind of collaboration but I have not seen it work well before. If you do try this out, be prepared to mediate.

“Partner teams are increasingly spending energy on co-selling and co-marketing but the concept of co-retaining or co-succeeding is becoming a more common focus for forward-thinking organizations. Bringing together your CSMs and putting that partner overlap data into the view of that team allows for them to identify accounts where they can drive integration adoption or collaborate with partners on upsell or renewals.” – Chris Samila, Chief Partner Officer at Partnership Leaders

7. Work with marketing to launch the integration.

If you followed Step 2 and 4, you have a ton of customers who will benefit from your integration that has been proven to make a real impact on the businesses of your shared customers. Now you just need to make sure they know about it. Email marketing is one of the best ways to communicate with current shared customers who can benefit from the integration because you and your partner both are marketing to your current customers which include net new prospects for both of you. 

After launch, you can use a tool like PartnerPage’s free Tech Partner directory to easily showcase your tech partners on your website and aggregate all content on the partnership for your sales/cs teams and customers.

8. Work closely with relevant client-facing team members to help customers get the most out of the integration

Now that the integration is out there, it is your responsibility to make sure that customers are actually able to use it. Customer and customer facing teams will need to have help documentation and a direct line to the support team of the company who built the integration. 

Providing support to CSMs and Sales people on the integration is a great way to build relationships with people who will be able to send you referrals in the future. Not providing great customer support is a great way to make sure that nobody wants to touch the integration or your product because it just means more headaches!

Final thoughts:

If you run this playbook, you should end up with:

1. Great integrations that customers and prospects find valuable and that have an impact on your company’s growth.
2. Tons of referrals from customer facing teams who love the integration and partnership because their customers find it useful.
3. Stronger relationships with your partner’s broader team.

Building a partnership is an art and you won’t always be able to follow this recipe perfectly–and that is okay. If you keep empathy and support for customers and your partners at the core of your approach, you will build some excellent partnerships. 

We have a growing community of over 300 partnership professionals where you can get answers to your most pressing questions and learn what works for your peers. To find out more, you can visit PartnerLed.com.