Mary Vue explains how sales, marketing, and RevOps teams can use partners to accelerate growth through co-selling, referrals, and demand generation. A partner strategy must be top-down: early-stage companies assign it to the CEO or CRO, while mature firms should hire a dedicated partner leader whose reporting line aligns with where value is realized.
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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Yeah. Want to shout out our sponsor, Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
Okay, so if all of that sounds exciting and that's kind of where you're headed, you want to get to as you're, you know, working on your product market fit, there are a couple things to consider, right? And you don't have to do this alone. Certainly you could bring in, you know, leaders, you could network and have them help give you insights. But these are some partner types to consider as you're thinking about this, right? Everything in green is, you know, things that drive revenue. Things in blue helps your product and engineering team. Things in black and gray kind of helps you build out that army, that ecosystem of whatever your product is, right? You're trying to build a community, you know, you're always thinking like, hey, I'm building a direct community of my users. But you know what, I guarantee you 50% of those users are your partners or consultants. people who could become your partners, right? So these are all things you want to think about as you think about product-market fit. How do you fit into perhaps places that there might be a gap, and how do you accelerate that motion? From there, looking internally, how do you maximize that partner strategy cross-functionally internally, right? I know I've, you know, talked talking about partnerships. If you're not a partner leader, that's okay. You might be a sales leader, marketing leader, customer success leader. You might be a leader of any one of these business units. And my point here is essentially the partner strategy has the ability to impact your business and has the ability to certainly work cross-functionally with you to help drive the success of your function, right? I want to zero in on sales and marketing. Um, I want to zero in on sales and marketing, right? Sales, you might think, hey, uh, you know, why would I, uh, you know, how do I work with partners? Well, you know, you can certainly co-sell with them. They can certainly refer leads and opportunities to you. They can certainly help, uh, resell. They can certainly help you with expansion. You don't have to sit in every deal that you close. If you plant a partner there, they'll do the work for you and they'll come back to you and say, hey, Mary, I've been in this deal for 6 months. I've implemented them. I've followed them. I've advised them. And we found this new deal, right? And that's where those sorts of value comes in for the salesperson. Beyond that, certainly, you know, we can't be an expert in everything. Partners, a lot of times they've been in that industry for 20+ years. Leverage them as a subject matter expert resource, right? Gain kind of confidence from your prospects that you know what you're talking about by bringing your partner to that conversation to really add value. And then lastly, 3x3 relationships. You know, don't have just a siloed one-way conversation with just the one person. Maybe your 20-plus-year partner or 10-plus-year partner might already have executive-level relationships there that they can certainly help advise and introduce and influence. For the marketing team, I mean, you're not alone, right? I mean, think about it. Partners, you know, whether it be consultants or ISVs, you could certainly leverage the clout and the brand equity that partners already bring. Ride that wave, you know, don't— I mean, of course, your goal is to build brand equity, to create lead gen, demand gen. Leverage this rich set of resources to help you accelerate that motion, right? If you're not leveraging it today, you should think about it because it certainly can make your job easier. You know, be the host, have the partner create the content, that sort of thing. So I hope that kind of gives you just a very quick touch of what maximizing a partner strategy across functionality might look like for your organization. So how do you get started? Partner strategy is a top-down initiative, right? And you want to start with your product, you know, what you're selling, your product, Is interoperability table stakes for you? Are you entering a new market? Does that product require services? Does it require advisory? Does it require, you know, help to get to go-live, right? Understand the value that your product could have and the role that partners could play in your product, right? And once you understand that, then you can start to then say, hey, I'm going to go after this type of partner. And I kid you not, even low-code, no-code products, right, that requires absolutely no integration or no coding from partners, no billable hours from partners, still leverage partners. And so there's many ways to kind of slice this. So who owns this? Again, like I said, partnership— partner strategy is a top-down initiative. The investment in a partner leader is important for this function, right? Certainly, if you're pre-seed, great. Maybe you're not quite ready. Have the CEO, CTO, CPO, CRO run it, right? Depending on where you think that the most value of your partner strategy is going to play out, right? When you get to kind of a stage where you say, okay, now I'm ready for somebody to run this full thing. Then you start to look for a partner leader, right? Depending on your product, if it's purely like, if it needs to run across your organization, you need it to generate sales for you, you need it to, you know, get you into different marketplaces, you need it to do technology, those sorts of things to be able to make your product valuable and function, you know, across all your customers. You might want that to report to your CEO top-down. If it's purely just affiliates, referrals, lead gen, channel sales, purely sales, then certainly you want to kind of start to minimize that and bring it down to, hey, report to the CEO or CRO, right? And then if it's purely a tech play, alliances, we need to partner with Salesforce or HubSpot, because that's, you know, where we've bet our entire core business on, then, you know, perhaps maybe even in that motion, it might be purely kind of tech only. And you want that to refer, you know, report or dot a line to your CEO, CTO, or CPO, because those pieces require kind of, you know, technical functional kind of alignment, right? So this is something to think about, right? When you start thinking about that partner leader, and where you might want to put them to be able to maximize your investment in the partner strategy is dependent on your product. And then lastly, get educated, right? So learn from your peers. Maybe you're not quite sure yet to go all out and put out a job rec and say, hey, come and be a partner leader here, be a VP, be a head of partners. That's okay. You know, reach out to your network of CEOs, your founders, your leaders, your peers. Folks that you've seen stand up a partner ecosystem, folks that you've seen hire on a partner leader, folks that you've seen successful partners. They're happy to certainly share, even lend their partner person to you to give you a brain dump on some things to think about and, you know, some things to figure out, right? Talk to your VCs. Your VCs have an entire portfolio of successful customers who certainly included partner strategy in their in their PMF, in their hypergrowth, in their scale, right? And lastly, communities like Rev Genius, certainly, you know, even Rev Genius has 26,000 members. There's bound to be, I'd say at minimum, 10% of the community that is familiar with working with partners, is leading partner strategy, is, you know, our CEOs, VP of marketing, CMOs, that are collaborating with their partner counterparts. So, so the education, like educate yourself. And then, you know, from there, certainly, you know, decide when you're going to take that next step to bring in partner strategy into your PMF motion.
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