PartnerHacker.com Audio Articles

In last week’s GoToEco article we introduced the need for a standardized 6-step Co-Sell Orchestration Playbook & Program. The 6 steps are broken into Planning (Focus, Alignment and Ops) and Execution (with Partner, Process and Reporting):In this week’s article, let’s dig into the details of each of these program elements. As you’re reading, keep in mind Rob Rebholz’s words of wisdom:“Let's debunk a myth right off the bat: co-sell orchestration isn't a drawn-out, half-year project. By adhering to best practices, you can have it operational in mere days or weeks. And although it's not an instant magic bullet, co-sell orchestration can significantly bolster your lead volumes, improve close rates, shorten sales cycles, and enhance ACVs. If you're aiming to demonstrate how partners can boost revenue, it's high time to embrace co-sell orchestration.”

The world is more complex than ever before. Since COVID, it’s no longer unusual to be required to show proof of ID, proof of vaccination, and maybe even verify your phone just to get into something as simple as a social event.Complexity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs to wrangle complexity and provide new value to customers. On the other hand, there is a temptation to try to simplify everything to the most basic common denominator.But simplicity isn’t always the answer. Managing complexity requires deep attention to customer care, service, and quality. We need to embrace the complexity of the ecosystems. When we do this, we can find new ways of creating value for our customers. 

Partner Teams are now poised to unlock ecosystem potential armed with co-sell motions that result in predictable revenue. Through business-case alignment with their Revenue Teams, Partner Teams, and Partners, they can finally receive the support required if they follow a planning and execution-based playbook that orchestrates and standardizes their approach to co-selling. This article explains the why, what, and how of Co-Sell Orchestration. 

In April 2020, Hopin had an unusual problem: too much demand. As the leading virtual events platform, we were swamped when the pandemic shut down every in-person event. Everywhere.  What sounds like heaven can turn into hell if you don’t scale fast enough. Many startups crumble under this insane pressure. They open the floodgates and are overwhelmed by sales and support requests. Customers have a bad experience. Your reputation is ruined. Game over.Unless you call in the cavalry: partners. Hiring, training, and managing sales and support people takes time. If your demand spikes, an in-house team might be too slow to respond. In those cases, agencies can help you reach scale in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

Does anyone remember the good old days of travel? When you could park, check-in, and board a plane in just 10 minutes? 🛫Now, we have more tech, more options, and yet... less comfort. 😓Air travel isn't the only industry affected. This shift is everywhere. From the apps on your phone to customer service experiences. Everything seems more complex, and customer service has gotten worse.So, what's the solution? Embrace complexity. Stare complexity in the face and take a radically human approach.Instead of simplifying a productive complex system, you need to maintain its order. To get it to yield fruit season after season - more and better fruit if you’re doing it well - you have to continually tend it, prune it, water it, and protect it from damage, decay, and predatory critters.

In last month’s column, we talked about Co-Sell Orchestration as the new imperative for every partner team. We explained the different co-sell segments, Co-Sell Orchestration objectives, and key processes and roles, and responsibilities.Today, we’re excited to present the story from the POV of the Revenue Team, starting with how Co-Sell Orchestration solves B2BSaaS’s biggest problem, the core elements of a Co-Sell Orchestration Solution, and a crawl, walk, run plan to get to the promised land.By Allan Adler.

Collision 2023 was THE tech event of the year. It brought together tech from all areas — from hardware to software. The main theme? AI. 🤖Although it wasn’t the kind of AI you’re thinking of. The overarching theme was about bringing authentic intention to your business dealings.

This is the second article in a series that focuses on a quick list of prerequisites companies should consider before figuring out their monetization approach.Check out Part 1 here.The goal of this series is to look more deeply into the topic of tech partnerships, building on a series of conversations Allan Adler had with Avanish Sahai on Tidemark’s The Platform Journey podcast: Part 1 - Monetizing Technology Partner Ecosystems.

When it comes to event planning - don’t make the mistake of going at it alone. Why would you spend 100% and get 100% returns when you could spend 50% and get 200% returns?Everyone is striving to be unique while cutting costs, and the stress of delivering is real. But it doesn’t have to be that way.When you partner on events, you get the opportunity to play together and win with others. It brings in more ROI, and it’s more fun!By Hope Anderso

When it comes to event planning - don’t make the mistake of going at it alone. Why would you spend 100% and get 100% returns, when you could spend 50% and get 200% returns?Everyone is striving to be unique while cutting costs, and the stress of delivering is real. 🤯 But it doesn’t have to be that way.When you partner on events, you get the opportunity to play together and win with others. It brings in more ROI, and it’s more fun!By Hope Anderson.

Scrolling through LinkedIn, it's hard not to see Gong and its well-positioned brand. What I saw this time though had a bit of a twist: Gong’s “Partner Month.” I immediately thought to myself: “Well, that’s interesting… a whole month? Just for partners? Heck yeah!”To find out more, I spoke with Eddie O’Brien (SVP of Partnerships), Eran Aloni (EVP Ecosystem & BD), and Craig Hanson (Senior Director of Market Strategy) - all well-established professionals executing on the partnerships ethos. But this isn’t just some feel-good story about who I got to learn from; it’s a tale of what happens when you listen to the customer, pay attention to their needs, execute on driving value to them, and never doing it alone.By Will Taylor.

Today, let’s dig in and explore additional dimensions of co-selling and what we believe to be the most important job to be done by partner teams, namely, driving co-sell orchestration.We’ll start with an overview of the different co-sell motions, each of which is unique. Then, we’ll look at the three key objectives for co-sell orchestration, and we’ll close with a review of the core processes and organizational responsibilities that allow co-sell orchestration to drive B2B SaaS revenue team mastery.By Allan Adler.

If trust is the economy of partnerships, referrals are the currency.What is the point of building trust if it never results in a business outcome 🤷‍♀️?That business outcome should be revenue. Sourced revenue is just another way of saying a referral that resulted in a sale.While referral programs are one of the most powerful tools available, they've always had a fundamental problem.Being top of mind 🧠.Channel partners struggle to keep all of their partners and their solutions in their conversations. Software partners struggle to be top of mind at their channel partners. Both are missing out on opportunities for revenue.By Jessie Shipman.

We've had enough "humbling" news in the world as of late, so I put together a piece on something I feel we have going for us that, well, just makes me feel damn good.It's about where we come from.I hope it inspires you to feel a part of something great here, as the best ecosystem in SaaS, is definitely the partner ecosystem!-- Jared Fuller

The goal of this series is to look more deeply into the topic of tech partnerships, building on a series of conversations Allan Adler had with Avanish Sahai on Tidemark’s The Platform Journey podcast: Part 1 - Monetizing Technology Partner Ecosystems.This first article in the series focuses on why ecosystem-based tech partnerships are becoming increasingly important in the lifecycle of a technology company. I'll focus on where they fit in that lifecycle, and how they are different from traditional partner relationships that large companies have come to rely on.By Dylan Charles.

The tech channel is all about relationships. We naturally create connections with people and companies whose interests align with ours. However, we may not realize that these informal relationships could lead to formal go-to-market partnerships that benefit both parties. Leveraging relationships to reach our revenue goals might not be our initial goal, but it can become a vital revenue generation, retention, and expansion strategy. By Gwyn Edwards.

Airmeet is leading the charge on driving revenue through Event-led Growth (ELG). It’s part of a Nearbound strategy to use trust and influence to reach customers through the excitement of live, interactive online events. By Will Taylor.

Car dealers have had special favors bestowed on them over the years. In many cases, they run the local chamber of commerce and hold a lot of sway in their local communities.But the power of the dealer is beginning to erode. Last year, Ford said it would begin focusing more on online sales of electric cars.  More and more, cars – especially electric ones – will be built to order. The first trillion-dollar car company, Tesla, sells cars from small retail locations offering direct orders.By Jay McBain

Google used to be king. It’s not anymore. Today, the winners are community platforms. Before the internet, getting connected to information was hard. Google made it easy. But as the digital age matured and people adapted and learned to game search engines, the value of “how” information decreased. Now, a major shift has happened in the digital world; the dominant question has moved from “how” to “who.”There’s too much SEO-optimized, pre-manufactured content. People don’t need another 5-step guide to starting a partner program or another listicle.Instead, they need context-specific information. They need to know how to solve a specific problem, within a specific context.Just last year, we reported that people were using Google to search Reddit. AI is taking that a step further. AI Platforms want to train their models to answer context-specific questions, but the only way they can do that is by learning from authentic, community conversations.In the “who” economy, value won’t come from “how” information. Value will come from the things that are authentic, human, and non-manufactured. Information from nodes of trust.Want to know how valuable all of the “who” information is?Just look at how much people are willing to pay for Reddit’s API.

Have you ever engaged in an enablement program that seemed to be all over the place? You know the one, where you're being asked to do a training, or webinar, or engage with some piece of content but you have no idea why? It's likely that the culprit for this scattered enablement approach is a lack of operations.In the same way that RevOps is the foundation of sales enablement, so to is PartnerOps foundational to Partner Enablement.By Jessie Shipman.