What I Look for in a Preferred Partnership
My framework and vetting process
What should a Partnership Manager look for in order to evaluate their most important Strategic and Preferred Partnerships to take onto their plate?
As a partnership manager, having more partnerships isn’t always better.
Assuming your goal is to drive business to the company to obtain that OTE and feed that Dubai chocolate addiction of yours, you need a framework for deciding what to work on.
But first, let’s look at what kind of partnership we’re talking about here.
Logistics Partnership Ladder
1. Platform Partner - Integrated to one of our products
2. GTM Partner - We do some kind of GTM activities with partner
Standard Partner - Basic announcements, etc.
Preferred Partner - ALL IN on driving new business to each other
How to vet for good Preferred Partners
Chris Lavoie’s Partnership Prioritization Matrix is a fantastic framework for where partnership managers should spend their time
I build on that and evaluate partnerships based on 3 scoring factors:
(Customer Overlap) + (Value Unlock) + (Partner Eagerness & Maturity)
1. Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), or simply “Customer Overlap”
We don’t have much time on this Earth, and probably even less time in our current role, so if we’re going to do something, it should be big. This means that given two partners:
50 customers in my prospects
500 customers in my prospects
I’m going to prioritize the 2nd partner which has 10x as many potential customers to refer. In order to figure out how many customers we have, I exclusively use Crossbeam. Bob Moore, CEO of Crossbeam wrote a book which I’ve reviewed here.
If you can score by total GMV, that’s even better, but it requires a little more work.
2. Value Unlock
a. Value created for shared customer
If the partner’s product or service has no synergy with our own product, then it’s a waste of time. Don’t turn your GTM teams into a referral agency for another company.
b. ICP and Decision Maker Overlap
If the partner is really focused on SMBs, but you’re focused on ENT’s, it’s not a great match. If the your partner primarily sells to CFOs, but you sell to Logistics heads, it’s also probably not a great fit because your key contacts at the lead don’t benefit directly.
3. Partner Eagerness and Maturity
My own addition to the Partnership Prioritization Matrix is Partner Eagerness and Maturity. I’ve had partners who score high on Customer Overlap and Value Unlock, but when it came time to execute, my counterparts couldn’t deliver.
Either they had other priorities or not enough bandwidth, or their company structure lacked the maturity to deliver and execute on GTM partnerships with me.
Crossbeam: A Hard Requirement
The majority of logistics companies are not on Crossbeam, and this is a problem. I have not seen another tool on the market that is as critical for scaling partnerships as Crossbeam. Going through a customer overlap exercises off generic numbers and then deciding to put actual resources into that partnership is a gamble. Trying to execute referrals without Crossbeam is like yelling your sales pitch into a crowd at the market.
You can get the book on Amazon.
