What's the best way to teach partners about your product and which assets/resources should be developed to maintain their knowledge?

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. 

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 much better result than when this entire process is completely outsourced to a third-party. You also get introduced to additional stakeholders beyond your alliance and partner marketing team who can become advocates for you within your partner org. Working with these other stakeholders for me has resulted in content to be featured in earnings calls, exec keynotes, analyst briefings, etc. It's a great way to scale your influence. 

Most of the time the content you work on and provide to your partner will just sit in an internal partner hub for enablement. These internal partner hubs are often maintained by a shared services team in marketing, the L&D department, or a consultant. There's a lot of room for human error - content may not get updated, it might not be easily searchable, someone might leave the company - etc. Basically you're dealing with all of the challenges of managing your own sales enablement hub, with no control at all. 

If you have a good relationship with your marketing lead at your partner company, ask them to share how your content is performing, and what type of content performs well for other partners. 

In addition, here are two assets that have resonated well with partner sales teams based on my experience.

1. Internal win wires. These are written a little bit differently from case studies and can be delivered in PDF, single slide, or video format. Win wires are focused on how the account teams at both companies came together to strategize around a particular account, which resulted in NNACV and/or product adoption. We include additional talking points on what the partner brought to the table - whether it was intelligence around budget, or an introduction to a key relationship in the account. These win wires can also feed your pipeline of external customer stories which take longer to develop. 
2. Partner first call decks. You should only build these for your most strategic partners. This deck should highlight why you're working with a partner at the highest level, and enable anyone in your company to tell the story of why you are partnering with company XYZ. While we typically include some information how our products and solutions complement one another - we don't get too into the weeds. I don't like setting a sales rep, to have a conversation on a technical integration on their very first call with a customer. We also work with product management and customer success to make sure that they can support GTM teams who need to conduct a deeper dive on specific product integrations. 

Educating your partners is critical to understand a company’s vision, overall priorities, and ultimately, where partners fit to further inform how you will work together.

My approach to educate the partner company is as follows:

1. Introduce them to the company, vision, and the dedicated partner team

2. Share the value proposition,  key product priorities (not all products within a portfolio are equal), customer target, and messaging

3. Identify dedicated training that may be needed for the immediate team, and/or sales

4. Provide access to the customer facing learning center

Next, in development of the on-going working relationship it's important to:

1. Establish the value of the partnership with a focus on the problem you are solving together for the target customer

2. Develop a joint message that layers up to the company value proposition and is relevant for the target customer

3. Identify KPIs, keeping in mind, they may be different for your company vs. the partner

4. Collaborate to identify a joint GTM plan, as not all tactics are effective depending on the learnings each company has in reaching the target customer

5. Understand partner appetite for testing versus scaling GTM efforts

6. Ensure there are check-ins simply to see how things are going as part of building the relationship