AMA: ServiceNow Senior Manager, Strategic Technology Alliances Marketing, Andy Yen on Partner Product Marketing

Honestly, having worked in both product and partner marketing, I don't think product marketing teams focus enough on partnerships. Product strategy to me is simple, it involves three components: "build, partner, buy". Based on my own experience, product marketing teams are great at executing the "build" aspect of the strategy - new product launches and adoption of new features. However, as companies and products mature, features in new releases become more incremental, so it's important to tell ...Read More

Focusing on the right partners and building an integrated co-marketing plan are critical. Sponsoring events is part of the game in partner marketing, but I'm not sure how much of your time should be spent sending out cold emails and cold calls to prospects.  It sounds like you're working with biz dev and alliance teams to identify the right partners to work with. I'd recommend starting with a handful of select partners, learn about how to leverage the resources within their ecosystem, and build ...Read More

Not all partners are created or treated equal. Even if a partner has a really compelling and complementary offering on-paper, if there’s no executive alignment- your success in driving GTM with that partner will be very limited. So pick the partners you choose to work with wisely!  Given the number of internal and external stakeholders you have to work with across each partnership –alliances, marketing, product, corp strategy, sales, customer success – it's really important to dedicate most of y ...Read More

Everything. Just kidding! It’s really important to communicate the impact you’re making with your partners across your internal teams. It's not always easy to find time to plan, execute, and then have to report out on all of the campaigns and activities you're driving. But if you don't advocate and promote what you're doing, no one else in the company is going to do it for you - and most likely they'll ask "what does partner marketing do?" From the outside looking in, partner marketing looks a l ...Read More

This is a great question. The partner marketing approach for sales enablement is very different from the traditional product marketing approach of creating a BOM and enabling your own internal sales and GTM teams.  The best way I've found to teach partners about our joint offerings is to ask them to participate in the joint value proposition definition. Getting your internal marketing teams at both companies to participate in this exercise gives them skin in the game, and usually results in a mu ...Read More