Why read this guide
An effective partnership strategy requires conscious organisational decisions on identifying, attracting, onboarding and managing partners. To avoid underperforming or unprofitable partnerships, we’ve developed this guide, based on conversations with Caroline Egan, CEO and Founder of Inspiren, who has 30 years’ experience in developing and executing on effective Channel, Partner & Alliances, and Sales & Marketing strategies in early-stage, growth and established B2B technology organizations.
An effective partnership strategy requires conscious organizational decisions on identifying, attracting, onboarding and managing partners. To avoid underperforming or unprofitable partnerships, analyse your market dynamics, solution and aspirations to pinpoint suitable partners and commercials for your specific needs, stage and organizational maturity.
Develop the right partner strategy for your business
Your market dynamics
Your market maturity, customers’ buying behavior and competitive landscape will have the greatest influence on your partnership strategy.
Your solution
To work out your solution’s resale potential, consider the complexity of the pre-sales, purchase and post-sales processes. For example, do you need to provide installation and implementation? How many stakeholders are required to close the deal on the buyer’s side? Is ongoing customer engagement required post-sale? This will determine if you need a partner just for pre-sales or a partner that supports you through that whole buying journey (and even post implementation). A particular factor to consider is the services required to implement the solution (or offer it as a service) and how much of that is reliant on skills that only you have as a business or skills that a partner could have (or easily skill up on).
Your aspirations
Be clear on what you want to achieve in the medium and long term. For short-term goals, such as winning a lighthouse client in a new market, you can be opportunistic. But for strategic growth, identify where you want to be in two-five years and what ‘success’ looks like. This will inform the resources and skills you need, how you target prospects and what you're looking for from partners. Outlining your value drivers at the outset and implementing a phased partner strategy will help you meet those aspirations over time (and avoids wasting time on short-term partnership-building).
Engage the right partners
After identifying your IPP (Ideal Partner Profile), you need to attract their attention, get them up and running and then manage the relationship to ensure it’s profitable for both parties. Here’s what you need to do:
Three partnership pitfalls to avoid
Examples of partnerships’ impact
Here are a few examples from across the AlbionVC portfolio, highlighting teams who have successfully built and developed commercial partnerships that have contributed significantly to their successes and, in some cases, provided a valuable link to strategic acquirers:
Example Partner/(s) | Portfolio Company | Nature of partnership |
Accenture | Quantexa (data analytics) | Channel and services |
Elemica | OmPrompt (rpa) | Channel and whole product (and acquirer) |
Gitlab | Diffblue (copilot for unit testing) | Channel and whole product |
Hitachi | Perpetuum (condition monitoring rail and rolling stock) | Channel and whole product (and acquirer) |
Intrum | Ophelos (compassionate digital debt recovery) | Channel and whole product (and acquirer) |
KPMG | Imandra (gives AI the power of reasoning) | Channel and services |
Oracle | Grapeshot (contextual feed into digital marketing) | Channel and whole product (and acquirer) |
PTC | Atego (environment to reliably build mission critical code) | Channel and whole product (and acquirer) |
Siemens | PSE (digital twin of any physical process) | Channel and whole product (and acquirer) |
Many including: Accenture, Nvidia, Snowflake, Tibco Spotfire | Brytlyt (software to enable efficient use of gpus for deep learning) | Channel and whole product |
Many including: Adobe, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle | Speechmatics (understanding speech in any context and deployment) | Channel and whole product |
The partnership checklist
Partnerships start presenting opportunities from a very early stage of an organization's maturity. Evaluate partnership opportunities early to not only accelerate your growth, but also increase overall organisational profitability and valuation.
Before embarking on a quest for new partnerships, ask yourself these five questions:
- Have you analysed your market maturity, competitor’s sales strategy and your customers' buying behaviour?
- Have you mapped out the types of organizations that have access to your target customers?
- Are you clear on what you want to achieve from partnerships in the next two years?
- Do you know what you specifically need from the partner and what you’re willing to give them in return?
- Do you have internal alignment on your partner strategy?