What are your lessons learned about successfully going to market in a partner's ecosystem?

Great question! At my former company Segment, there were two categories of partners:  Technology (ISV) partners  Solution (SI/agency) partners  The go-to-market is slightly different for those two categories, but a few lessons learned that are relevant to both are: 1) Incorporate the voice of your customer in everything you do. Building a compelling joint narrative is key to successfully going to market with partners. The best way to do this is through mutual customers. Anecdotally, our most suc ...Read More

I follow the following steps to drive a successful GTM motion with partners. Be Strategic: Every partnership does not necessarily warrant the same effort. Develop tiers for each partner type. Set strategic goals for each tier. Collaborate: Deep collaboration with product, business development and sales is a must-have for any partner product marketing plan to succeed. This is in addition to other collaboration across the rest of product marketing and marketing. Plan: Develop a calendar based on l ...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

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: 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. D ...Read More