Balancing relations and operations

Many go-to-market and revenue roles revolve around building relationships and understanding the frustrations and needs of real people. That means spending a lot of working time listening, learning, advising, persuading, and compromising.

The challenge of relationship-heavy jobs, of course, is the risk of inefficiencies and the difficulty in scaling high-touch efforts. So what is the solution? Operations.

“Operations are the foundation for consistent, efficient, and rigorous partnership execution and revenue growth,” says Antonio Caridad, Head of Global Partner Operations at Tricentis. Partner Ops are responsible for managing and optimizing the activities and processes with your partnership team and partners. “Partner managers should be spending 80-90% of their time with partners, and Ops allow partner teams to be their best selves.”

TACTICS

The 4 + 1 pillars of effective partner operations

Partnerships is becoming an increasingly important strategic element of business, and needs an operational structure to fulfill its potential to drive revenue.

At Pavilion’s 2024 GTM Summit, at a session on Partnerships’ role in GTM, Antonio Caridad explained the five key pillars of an efficient, effective partner ops function.

The first four are Systems, Programs, Metrics, and Enablement:

Systems are your tools and processes
Programs are your incentives, alignment, plans, SLAs, contracts, etc.
Metrics are all the data to measure success and ROI
Enablement are all of your assets, communications, cadences and rhythms

These are partner ops’ strategic and tactical foundational elements. They need care and maintenance to support the complex relationship building that defines fruitful partnerships. If there’s a crack in one, can bring the whole house down.

And these four pillars deeply influence and affect arguably the most crucial and fifth pillar: Partner Experience. PX is not a pillar you build on its own, it's built as a result of the investment in the other four.

Partner experience drives customer experience. Antonio noted that there are 28 critical moments in the customer’s buying journey and you alone as a GTM team can only impact a handful. If your PX is bad, then all of the moments that partners influence are gone.

Partner experience has six primary indicators:

Simplicity and ease: Are you a pain in the ass to work with? Your product is great but do partners want to deal with you?
Alignment: Are you really creating that better together story that advances both partners’ goals?
Communication: Are you proactively sharing information and intel that will lead to your partners’ success?
Lead with value: Give first and give often. A lot of companies will identify a desirable partner, but talk only about how great the partnership is going to be for their company, what it will deliver, without thinking about what they’re going to give.
Shared success: Are you maintaining that commitment to giving your partners as much value as you get?
Collaboration: Are you truly working together to achieve that shared success?

With this foundation, the value your partners derive from your relationship will come back to you as a highly scalable source of growth.

STUFF YOU CAN'T MISS

- October 16 — Empowering Women in Partnerships: Self-Care Strategies for Successful Women in Partnerships — TODAY

Jen Waltz (VP, Global Alternate Channels at Kron), Caryn Jervis (Global Head of Partnerships), Lauren Jeter (Co-founder of Pong Agency), Beatriz Rignel (Global Business Development Manager at Meta IT), and Bethanie Nonami (Keynote speaker) will encourage women to reflect on their health and create sustainable routines that empower them personally. Save your place here.

- October 22 — Successfully Presenting Your Plan

Learn from Tai Rattigan (Co-founder and COO of Partnership Leaders) how to effectively present your budget plan to key stakeholders with confidence and clarity. Save your spot here.

- October 24 — Tech Stack Summit ‘24

Join Justin Zimmerman, Tai Rattigan (Co-founder of Partnership Leaders), Kristen Kelly (Global Technology Alliances Director at Netskope), Greg Portnoy (CEO of Euler), and many more GTM leaders as they help you pick the right people, process, or tools to grow your co-sell, integration, or cloud partnerships. Save your spot here.

- November 11-14: Web Summit

70,000 people will gather in Lisbon, Portugal for one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, featuring speakers from leading companies across nearly every technology vertical. Book your ticket to join them here.