Dharmesh Shah explains why enterprise partnerships often fail: companies pursue "Barney partnerships," superficial alliances that generate no real value. Startups should target partners where they deliver something unique and use investor connections to get insider access, since breaking into large organizations without relationships is nearly impossible.
Chapters
High-order enterprise partnerships is generally really hard. It's actually at some level even harder than doing enterprise sales. Selling a customer, it's like, oh, here's the product I'm selling or whatever, versus like signing up for a partnership is often harder. You need to find someone that's from the domain because as a, as a new entrant, if you're looking for someone to kind of pre-fund development or sign up partnerships, unless they've like done it a bunch of times. But the issue with finding people that have done like 100 partnerships, let's say you're going to someone like an IBM or some group with an IBM. If they've done it a bunch of times, you're not going to stand out. And so it's not going to move your numbers at all. So it's what I call the kind of the Barney partnership. The Barney partnership is like, I love you, you love me, we both love each other, but neither one of us is making any money on this partnership. Like, no sales happen, nothing happens. It's just a we love each other press release partnership, essentially. So you need to find the companies that you will be able to stand out where the actual economics will move. Otherwise, it's a huge, massive distraction. And the only way I can think of, either through investors or through friends, you're going to have to find someone that's on the inside because it's very hard to break in.
