AMA: TrustRadius Former Sr. Director, Product Marketing & Brand, Harsha Kalapala on Partner Product Marketing

There are typically strategic outcomes and tactical outcomes to partnerships. Partnership GTM leaders should be goaled on the tactical outcomes, but also incentivized to drive strategic outcomes that may be harder to predict and measure. These are some of the KPIs I've worked with – Tactical KPIs: * Pipeline driven - Number of inquiries, New opportunities created, Expansion opportunities created, In count and in dollars driven * Revenue impact - Closed won opportunities - new business or expansion (this may be long-term, depending on the length of the sales cycle) * Adoption of integration - You launched the partnership. Great! Are users adopting it? KPIs on this can be nested - i.e. installation, configuration, preparation, deployment (this comes in many forms). How can you team up with your partners to drive adoption as quickly as possible? * Customer retention impact - Adoption drives retention. Is the integration showing correlation or causation for customers to renew? This is typically a long-term KPI, and a critical one to track. * Business velocity metrics - Increase in ACV (avg contract value) aka deal size, Close rate * Partner KPIs - Is your GTM driving business impact for your partner as well? This may or may not be part of agreed KPIs, but always puts you in a good position if they see your partnership as a revenue driver. Strategic KPIs: * Launch timing - Were you able to launch before competitors go to market? The best launches are decoupled from a product release – did you coordinate timing with the product and customer-facing teams effectively? It is important to have a less than ideal launch when the window of opportunity with your audience is open vs. doing a perfect launch when you missed the window. * Market gravity - Did your launch activity trigger other vendors to reach out to partner from the splash you made? Are there new press opportunities and content contribution plays? * Integration partner preference and satisfaction - Your partner can always partner with your competitor, and they probably are. What can you do to become a preferred partner? This may be an unofficial sentiment - that they "like" working with you more than the others and give you more attention and opportunities. 

Sales will always welcome your support when you can clearly demonstrate that you are helping them drive more sales. Map out how your partnership initiatives will help deals directly or indirectly. How will you help them hit their numbers faster? Get buy-in from sales leadership, and then enable the sales team with any materials and training they need to take the next step. Make their job easy and rewarding, and they'll do it with you. One approach that always helps is to pick 1 salesperson who others look up to on the team to be your ally. Let them speak for you on how you are helping her drive results. The rest will fall in place quickly.

This essentially involves zooming out with the exec team and making sure the team is on the same page on the definition of "product". If you can get leadership to agree that partnerships, integrations, services are all part of the solutions offered, this job gets easier. The responsibility for partnerships sits in different departments, depending on the company structure. Sometimes it sits with product, and in other instances with sales/revenue orgs, or have its own team that reports to the CEO or CRO. Understanding their KPIs and aligning with their goals is the first step to getting involved with alliances. Make it clear of the value add you bring to the table from being able to amplify these partnerships. 

There are many lessons I continue to learn as I drive more partnership go-to-market initiatives. These are the top ones that stand out so far: 1. Driving adoption is key - especially when the integration UX is on the partner's side. User adoption is what keeps a partnership alive. Without it, the partnership won't last beyond the initial splash of the launch. Not having the UX be in your control puts more of a need for you to have a pulse on the levers needed to drive user awareness and adoption. 2. Decouple product releases from marketing launch. Depending on your sales cycle, launches can happen before or after the product release. This allows both teams to run on their timeline without dependencies that can slow you down. This applies to any product launch, but more so to partnership launches - as the window of opportunity and competitive environment have strategic importance. 3. Understand and prioritize the partner's KPIs. It is critical to operate a win-win partnership and invest in producing outcomes that matter to your partner. This leaders to a more productive partnership in the long run, especially in an ecosystem.

It is critical to have full buy-in from the exec team on the role partnerships play in the company's growth. They should believe in the potential of partner marketing to amplify the partnership's awareness, adoption, and revenue impact. The best way to get buy-in is by making progress and showing traction. There is no better reasoning than evidence to invest further into what is working. I would run with any creative hacks to drive your KPIs and rather ask for forgiveness, not permission to test your hypotheses. Your customers are your strongest marketing assets. Can you find 1-2 customers who will back up your initiatives and represent your voice to the executive team? 

You always want to include a partner's brand and messaging in your joint collateral. Your audience may be attracted to either part of the partnership - so your collateral and messaging should tailor to their interests. I wouldn't include the partner too much in developing the asset - it just slows things down. You can get their final look before you publish it if needed. In most cases things can be changed even after putting collateral out. I would push for pace over perfection on asset creation. 

When starting out, partner PMM work should be an experiment run under core product marketing. The fundamental principles are all the same. What changes in the environment in which you operate, your audience mix, and the non-traditional opportunities you can uncover to get creative in your GTM? Once you see traction and results with the experiments, and the product team is producing a roadmap of new partnerships, it is time to spin off a dedicated partner marketing function to stay ahead of the game. In many instances, the product team leads the calendar on partnerships, and companies are catching up on GTM activities. Flipping this and putting marketing planning ahead of product releases always ends up being a great asset to the company. 

This is an important question. The marketing rule of 7 exposures applies here as well. I try to get on as many opportunities as I can to educate and train partner stakeholders. Ask for a few minutes on their weekly team meetings — the product team, the customer success/support team, the sales team, etc. and walk them through the same talk track on the partnership. Why is it important for you and your customers? What does it do? When does it come out? What can you do, based on your role? Where can you find all the collateral? Who can you ask questions? The key is to steal a few minutes from existing team meetings vs. asking to schedule a special meeting — which will take longer, expectations will be higher, and likely will be less effective. I try to do discovery on what resources are needed very early on in the partnership by connecting with the user-facing team leaders in the partner's org. This really helps develop the right solution for the right problem when you get to the collateral development and training phase.