Part of being a manager is to be able to delegate tasks effectively. This means knowing which tasks can be entrusted to others and which need to be handled by the manager himself. But how do you leverage partner management in business-to-business SaaS partnerships?

The common partnership manager’s job description is to maintain clear and consistent communication with all members of the partnership, including partner managers across different companies they’ve partnered up with. An increase in their companies’ success rate means they are able to run their business with the right technology and product integrations, having enough product knowledge and partnership software available. This includes setting expectations for performance and deliverables and providing regular updates on progress and results. The side of the job is to find the best ways to:

• Integrate the right PRM software
• Discover new partnership opportunities
• Manage marketing campaigns
• Cultivate your and your partner’s resources
• Determine the target market audience
• Build strong partner relationships and enablement
• Craft the way companies collaborate and create value for customers together

How do you become a Strategic Partner Manager—the right way?

This guide will help with the day-to-day roles of partnership leaders, including lead generation, creating a sales funnel, increasing revenue, and researching products and services.

Partner Managers across different companies have the responsibility to communicate well with the Director of strategic partnerships, product managers, and sales reps.

A 90-day plan is a great way to get started in any business development role, but it’s not the only thing you need. Jump into these introductory articles to get a grasp of the basics of partnerships and business development.

• Business Development 101: An Introduction To Sales And Partnerships
• Business Development 101: Tech Partnerships
• Business Development 101: Strategic Partnerships
• Business Development 101: Introduction to Account Mapping
• Business Development 101: Qualifying Possible Partnerships 

During the first 90 days in a partnerships role, starting a new job as either a partner manager or a partnerships manager (however your company has named it) can set you up for success in the future. This blog will help you navigate this crucial time and also provide tips on how to do it right. Let’s look at different tactical strategies for building trust, avoiding pitfalls, and taking steps forward.

What to expect in this blog post:

• 7 DON’Ts to avoid transition traps
• Best practices to gain new partnership opportunities
• What must be learned first?
• First 90 days as a Partner Manager guide

7 DON’Ts to avoid transition traps

To become a Partner Manager, you must avoid these common mistakes many partner managers fail to make:

1. Don’t assume past success factors 

Remember: the past is not always a good indicator of future success. Just because two companies did a job well together in the past doesn’t mean they will continue to do so in the future. Instead of assuming that everything will just work out, it’s important to deliberately prepare for the unique challenges that each new partnership brings and the new company you now work at!

2. Don’t rush to act before learning

Instead, take your time, research, and accelerate your partnerships. While it may be tempting to try and get things moving as quickly as possible, it’s important to take the time to learn about your new company and its partners (or lack thereof). This means understanding your culture, politics, and technical needs. Trying to forge ahead without this knowledge is likely to lead to problems further down the line.

3. Don’t waste time doing too many things

Instead, focus on quality over quantity. Trying to do too many things will only lead to frustration and, ultimately, little accomplishment. It’s better to tailor your strategy to the specific roles you want your partners to play. This way, you can maximize their potential and help improve your business in the process. 

4. Don’t jump to premature conclusions that cut off allies

Instead, focus on building your team’s credibility and momentum with early wins. This will help you create a strong foundation for long-term success. Premature conclusions can often be based on assumptions or misunderstandings. If you’re too quick to write your internal teams or existing partners off, you could miss out on a valuable opportunity.

5. Don’t focus on technicalities

Instead, focus on building a healthy relationship with your boss, managing expectations, and negotiating success. By taking a broad-strokes approach, you’ll be able to navigate the partnership landscape with ease and avoid any potential pitfalls. So remember, when it comes to B2B partnerships, it’s all about the big picture!

6. Don’t focus on only vertical relationships

Instead, collaborate and align a plan with your organization’s strategic direction. Just because two companies are in the same industry does not mean that they are natural partners. Collaborating with a company that occupies a different value chain stage can create a more efficient process and offer your customers a better product or service. 

7. Don’t fail to clarify objectives and then fall short of expectations

Instead, take the time to sit down with your internal teams and existing partners, clearly define what you’re hoping to achieve, and set your expectations. If your team doesn’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, they’re not going to be very motivated to help you achieve it. Even worse, they may have their own objectives that conflict with yours.

Best practices to gain new partnership opportunities

Build cross-team relationships and allies

A successful partnerships strategy isn’t just about what you know; it’s also about who you know. It’s important to build strong cross-functional relationships with people in different departments and teams so you can create a network of allies. Allies can help you get your foot in the door for new opportunities, provide insights and feedback on projects, and be a sounding board for ideas. You want internal champions so that as you orchestrate the partnerships in your organization, you have supported them early.

Maintain balance and manage yourself

Any successful internal relationship or business partnership is built on a foundation of trust and respect. However, even the strongest relationships can be strained by disagreements and conflicting priorities. Maintaining a balance between what’s best for the internal unit or external partnership and what’s best for yourself is important. 

Accelerate others to multiply their own benefits

If you’re looking to accelerate your partnerships program, then you need to focus on accelerating others. That means helping them to multiply their own benefits with the help of others. By doing so, you’ll benefit from their success and create a ripple effect that will benefit everyone involved. Great things can happen when both partners work towards concrete goals and a vision.

Learn, action, learn, action, learn…

In order to achieve their objectives, companies need to engage in continuous learning, both internally and externally, that will push them to perform at their best. By constantly expanding their knowledge, skills, and existing strategy, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and build strong relationships with their partners. The critical part of learning is that the information is actioned. Build as you learn, and you’ll learn some more. You’ll need to consume information at the start, and as you begin to build the MVPs, you’ll see the compound effects pile up.

What must be learned?

1. Product

Whether you’re trying to build new capabilities or simply refine your value proposition, continuous learning of your products should be one of your key priorities. This is especially true in the world of B2B partnerships, where the stakes are often higher, and the competition is tougher. By continuously learning about your markets and your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), you’ll be better equipped to succeed in today’s ever-changing business landscape. 

2. Competitive landscape

Keep tabs on your top competitors and why you lose to them. Similarly, understand why you win against them. Stay attuned to what makes your partnership appealing to potential co-marketers. And also, ask yourself why partners would want to dive deep or co-market with you over your competitors. You can ensure a strong and long-lasting partnership by continuously learning and keeping your finger on the pulse of these dynamics.

3. Marketing opportunity

This means learning about the current market hold, what kind of marketing presence your company has, and what pieces of content are typically the most successful. Explore what has been done in the past with partners and look for ways to improve upon it.

Develop regular pieces of content and determine how partners can be involved. Is video the best medium? Or is a podcast more engaging? Perhaps a webinar would be most beneficial. Attend relevant events and get partners involved in upcoming opportunities.

4. Current partners

You need to know who your current partners are, what drew them to you in the first place, and how well they fit into your business model. Furthermore, it’s crucial to have conversations with current partners in order to learn from them. This includes asking questions about who has been a good partner fit vs. those who have not qualified and how you can better streamline the partner onboarding process moving forward (e.g., announcement, kick-off, affiliate/referral link, “partner package,” introduction to anyone on our team, etc.).

5. Available resources

This means being aware of the available resources and the budget you or the team has to invest in new resources as they become available. What web development resources can you utilize? By continuously learning about the resources at your disposal, you will be better equipped to achieve your objectives.

6. Sales Metrics & Processes

Understanding your sales metrics base helps you better understand where partners can fit in. For example, if you have a low contract value and a quick time to close, you may want to consider an affiliate strategy over an agency strategy. So understanding the current sales metrics proves to be a valuable tool for partner professionals in their first 90 days. 

This will also help you better understand your ICP and how your sales team works and give you a base that you can compare against as you start including partners in your initiatives. 

All of this information will help you create stronger, more fruitful partnerships in the future. So don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves and do some digging⁠—it will pay off in the end!

Partner Management: First 90 days as a Partnership Manager

Part of a partner manager’s role is to understand how its business flows both ways.

What exactly are the partner manager roles? No two situations are alike, but this plan will serve as a roadmap for your first three months working together—and it’s important to get it right! Here’s a quick overview of what your plan should include:

Day 1: Team Onboarding

Introductions: You’ll want to introduce yourself to your team and the key stakeholders. This is a great opportunity to make a good impression and start building relationships. A bonus if you use video with tools like Vidyard.

Regular check-ins: Schedule regular one-on-ones with major stakeholders at your company. This is a chance to stay up-to-date on what’s going on and make sure everyone is on track. Partner managers must keep a pulse on all business units, goals, and activities.

Base assets: Start creating the base assets that will be used by your team going forward. This includes things like setting up a shared drive or bookmarks folder. Ask around and see what other people have found useful in the past.

Manager onboarding: Have a candid one-on-one with your manager. Get excited, get curious, and talk about where this can go together. Learn what the manager cares about and what will make them successful.

• Where do they want to progress to?
• Where do they want the team/company to grow?
• What are their metrics + what makes them successful?

Product dive: Get to know the product inside and out. Create weekly or bi-weekly product dives to stay on top of changes and updates.

Perspective: Schedule time with 5-10 people to chat. Ask everyone, “What’s the one thing you wish more people would ask you?” Finish each conversation with “Who else should I talk to on the team?” By getting different perspectives, you’ll better understand the partnership and the people who work around it.

Day 7: Building Relationships

Ideal Partner Profile: Start developing your Ideal Partner Profile (IPP). First, begin with a high-level map that you can start filling in. This will be a list of characteristics that your ideal partner would possess. This will help you focus your outreach and target the right companies.

Skeleton of cadence: Set up a cadence for yourself to consistently reach out and touch base with potential partners. You can use your IPP as a guide to reaching out to potential partners. By day 30, you should have at least 10 companies on your list that you are actively pursuing.

Build a path to first win: By day 7, you should have a built path to your first win by 90 days. This is general but good to define what that win is. Is it the number of partners acquired? Is it the clients you won from partners? Is it the number of marketing programs run with partners? Whatever it is, this is your north star for the next 90 days and beyond. 

Ideal Customer Profile: Take some time to understand your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP). What are their core problems, and how does your solution solve them? 

Feedback: Feedback sessions should be held at least once every two weeks in the first quarter. During these sessions, both you and stakeholders in each business unit should take turns giving and receiving feedback. After the initial three-month period, the frequency of feedback sessions can be reduced to once every month or so, depending on the needs of the partnerships you have. Take the initiative to set this up and help you remain top of mind and allow for constant feedback.

Customer stories: It’s high time you understand where you exactly situate yourself in the market. For that, you need to acquire relevant and most used customer stories. These stories will help you further your understanding and give insights into how you can improve your product. This will give you a better understanding of the market and help build rapport with your customers and potential partners that serve them. 

Day 14: Sales and Marketing

Internal relationships: Develop at least 5 internal relationships. This allows you to have internal champions when you need to make an ask internally.

Current partner base: Get to know your current partner base. Meet with them, learn about their needs and goals, and find out how your company can help them achieve those things. This will give you a good understanding of the lay of the land when it comes to existing partnerships. Further, you’ll understand why they came to you in the first place and through which means.

Marketing strategy: Understand current marketing initiatives and marketing calendar. These will show you where partners can fit in, fill gaps, or enhance existing programs. Also, it will give you a sense of the marketing strategy, answering questions like: “What are our focuses? What are our strengths? Where are we developing? These will all inform what kind of co-marketing initiatives you bring to your partner.

Growth metrics: This means being extremely data-driven and focused on understanding what growth looks like for your company and where partners can fit in to support it. These will be a foundation for what you compare the results of the partner program against (i.e., how do they impact these metrics?)

Sales

• Sales metrics are a great way to track progress and success, so close rates, response rates, average deal size, reasons for winning, etc. should all be closely monitored. It’s important to keep an eye on how long it takes to close deals, as this can impact your partner’s pipeline and bottom line. 

Marketing

• What’s the usual performance of your campaigns? What’s the cost of the acquisition of customers? How many MQLs are converting to SQLs? What’s the lifetime value of a customer? Then take a look at your website traffic. How many people visit your site each month? How many views are your blog posts getting? How many attendees do you have for your webinars? What’s your CTR? Are people downloading your content? Lastly, generate new leads. This can be done through networking, online marketing, or even cold calling. 

Base discovery questions: Create base discovery questions to ask potential partners. You’ll want to understand how the partner has engaged in partnerships in the past, their growth goals, where you align, and what resources they have available.

Previous marketing initiatives + co-marketing activities: What can we learn from? What can we templatize? What has been templatized? How can we repurpose these programs with partners? These are all questions you can answer by looking at past activities. You’re not recreating the wheel here but bringing efficiency to the process.

Tracking process: What tracking processes are already established? What tools are in place? How can you translate this to partnerships? Do you need to implement a new tool? Understand this earlier rather than later so you can prove the benefits of the partner program.

Day 21: Partner’s Responsibility

Create a “partner package”: This should include all of the assets that your partner will need to effectively promote your relationship, including branding guidelines, boilerplate copy, standard images, social post templates, and more.

Once you’ve got the logistics out of the way, it’s time to start thinking about how to best market your partnership. This may involve creating a special announcement to fit existing campaigns or developing new ones from scratch. Either way, make sure that you have a clear call-to-action (CTA) that will encourage your audience to take advantage of your partnership.

Create a partnership kick-off deck: It would be a great way to establish guidelines and expectations for a new partnership. It should include an overview of the relationship’s goals and how you expect to work together to achieve those goals. A social contract can be a helpful way to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and it can also help to identify who should be contacted for what purpose.

Regular syncs are also essential in any partnership, and they should be used to check in on progress, give feedback, and raise any concerns. It’s important to understand your partner’s business goal so that you can determine how best to collaborate.

Establish a tracking process: Collaborate on the attribution process to ensure leads are influenced by partners appropriately. This will help you identify which partners are actually driving results.

Day 30

You have now fully settled into the inner workings of your new company. The sales team has taken notice of your skills in acquiring partnerships, and you have already closed 1 successful deal. Your work doesn’t stop there, though, as you now need to focus on maintaining and developing that partnership.

Here’s what you should aim to achieve in this time period: 

• Have one successful conversation with your partner. This will help you get to know them better and build rapport.
• Create one activity with an existing partner. This could be simple: a social post attending an event together or coordinating a blog post.
• Fully understand the sales cycle, product market fit, and competitive landscape. This knowledge will be essential when it comes to pitching your partners the value of your product or service.
• Create a base ideal partner profile document. This should outline your ideal partner’s characteristics and can be used as a reference when vetting new prospects.
• Prepare a partner-to-sales handoff process document with the workflow and main point of contact (POC). This will ensure a smooth and efficient transition from sales to partnerships.
• Touch base with the sales team to collaborate on partner acquisition strategy. Discussing the idea of sales-partnerships alignment will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

If possible, present your success to the team. Partner acquisitions or notable partner learnings are both great examples of things that would be valuable for both parties.

Day 60

By this milestone, you should have acquired three partners and prepared three marketing activities with them. General targets are acceptable if there are none established for the program. This is also dependent on the program type, space, and solution. But overall, this will generally be a good milestone to aim for a new program at this stage.

You now understand how each partner likes to work and what they’re looking to get out of the relationship. It’s time to utilize this knowledge to create joint marketing activities and incorporate partner learnings into your sales team to help you reach your goals. 

At this point, you should have a wealth of knowledge about what makes your partnerships successful. Share this information with your sales team so they know how to best interact with partner leads and what to look for when considering new partnerships. You are also responsible for presenting your successes (and failures) to your team (not necessarily each of the team members) and asking for their feedback.

Day 90

So, you’ve made it to day 90 in your new partnership role. By now, you should have a pretty good idea of how things are supposed to work around here. And more importantly, you should have acquired at least six new partners. If you haven’t reached that number yet, don’t worry – there’s still time. Remember that the key to partnership success is always to focus on quality, not quantity. 

As for marketing activities, you should have at least three prepared and/or executed by now. If you’re lagging behind in this area. Remember, partnerships are all about creating win-win situations. By executing well-planned marketing activities, you can ensure that your partners see the value in working with you. 

Keep up the good work, and don’t forget to celebrate your accomplishments along the way. The first 90 days in any new role can be tough, but if you focus on the right things, you’ll set yourself up for success.

Large rocks to aim for as a Partnership Manager:

9 new partners engaged, 3 partners per month

This may seem like a lot, but it’s actually quite achievable if you break it down into 3 partners per month. And remember, engagement doesn’t have to be complicated—a simple conversation or meeting is often all it takes.

9 partner activities planned and/or executed

This could include co-blogging, quoting on a blog, guest posting on each other’s websites, hosting webinars or podcasts together, running joint email campaigns, account mapping and diving into overlaps, or launching new products or services. 

Are you ready to take on the responsibility and become a Partner Manager?

Just as before, the numbers may vary, but research shows that partners are being engaged, and new partnerships are developed now more than ever. Partner activation programs will be key to maintaining momentum, so keep it high-level with focused co-marketing campaigns!

90 days may be short, but you should have a clear sense of who your partners are, what they bring to the table, and where you want these partnerships to go. So buckle down and get ready for an amazing ride!