Rob Spee: My 10 Top Lessons on Partnering

I’ve gained and shared a ton of channel smarts over the past 6 years producing 150 episodes of the Channel Journeys podcast. It’s hard to condense all this knowledge into one episode, so I aimed at summarizing the key insights for successful partnering. It’s an almost impossible task given the wealth of knowledge shared by my fantastic guests.  

It took me awhile to come up with a strategy for finding the top advice from 150 episodes. I started by reviewing all 150 podcast episodes and classifying them based on the core topic. I found they all fell into 17 different categories.  The top 5 categories were:

• Strategy: 27 episodes 
• Partner Management: 25 episodes
• Trends: 12 episodes
• Partner Programs: 10 episodes
• Channel Transformation: 10 episodes

I pulled out highlights from my more recent podcasts in these top categories and made sure everything applies just as much today as when I aired the podcast. These insights will help any organization thrive in the partner ecosystem.

I’d like to give a very big heartfelt shout-out to the 120 guests who have been on my show. Thank you for joining me on this channel journey!  

Key Takeaways

OK, I couldn’t keep it to just 10. Here are my top 11 lessons learned on successful partnering from the first 150 episodes of the podcast:

1. Partnering is a Company-Wide Strategy: Partnering must be integrated into the entire company’s strategy, including go-to-market, product, marketing, HR, and sales enablement strategies. A standalone partnering function is bound to fail if not supported across the company. Listen to How to Make Partnering a Business Strategy with Jill Rowley
2. Executive Commitment in a Must: Achieving successful partner ecosystem strategies requires strong commitment and understanding from the board and executive C-level leaders. They must appreciate the ecosystem’s benefits and actively engage in ecosystem strategies. Listen to Asher & Chip: Growing Ecosystems Around the Globe
3. Embrace Co-opetition: Collaboration with competitors (co-opetition) is crucial for growth. Companies must adopt a customer’s perspective to provide comprehensive solutions, even if it involves partnering with competitors. Listen to Tiffani Bova: 5 Paths to Consistent Channel Growth 
4. Know What Partner Types Your Customers Need: Effective partner management begins with understanding what types of partners are needed and what each type requires to succeed. Creating a partner journey map for each type helps in understanding and improving the partner experience. Listen to Lana King: What Partners do Saas Companies Really Need?
5. Partner Experience Trumps Technology: Winning partners’ hearts and minds is more about providing a great partner experience than having the best technology. Consistent, positive interactions across all company departments foster strong partner relationships. Listen to Crystal Ferreira: How to be a Better Vendor to your Partners
6. Top Performance Requires Effective Partner Management: Driving top partner performance involves recruiting the right partners, cultivating a channel-friendly culture, aligning sales and channel teams, and focusing on the performance and intellectual curiosity of partner managers. Listen to Josh Lewis: Driving Breakthrough Partner Performance
7. Channel Priority has Shifted to Services: The channel is shifting from product sales to services and subscription models. Partners and their vendors must adapt to this change, focusing on customer success to ensure retention and growth. Listen to Jay McBain: Top 5 Ecosystem Plays for 2024
8. Partners are the Customer Experience: Partners play a crucial role in delivering business outcomes by engaging with customers through the entire journey—from pre-sales to post-sales, implementation, adoption, retention, and expansion. Continuous enablement and strong relationships are essential. Listen to How Partners are Driving Customer Success with Nancy Ridge and Norma Watenpaugh 
9. You Cannot Ignore the Marketplaces: The growth in hyperscaler marketplaces (such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) necessitates vendors to have their products on these platforms. Programs must reward partners for post-sales success and adapt to the new market value of the transaction. Listen to Jay McBain: Top 5 Ecosystem Plays for 2024
10. It’s Time for Your Modern Ecosystem Partner Program: Building a modern partner program isn’t that difficult. It just involves creating the elements that support your various partner go-to-market motions and putting them into a single program. The program and these elements should be designed from the partners’ perspective, focusing on their success metrics, and ensuring simplicity and efficiency. Listen to Mike Day: How to Build an Ecosystem Partner Program
11. Simplification is Key: Scale back and simplify elements of your program that aren’t providing a great partner experience. Get back to basics, simplify, remove complexity, and then build from there. Apply as much efficiency and automation as you can, with a smart selection of channel technologies. Strip out any technology that is creating too much complexity. Listen to Katie Landaal: Five Ways to Scale Your Partner Business

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Connect with Rob on LinkedIn
• Try Impartner Partner Management

The post Rob Spee: My 10 Top Lessons on Partnering first appeared on Channel Journeys.