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This CEO shares how to become partner-led and turn a lose-win relationship into a major revenue driver.
Welcome to the ELG Insider Daily—the #1 newsletter in the world keeping thousands of GTM professionals on top of the latest Ecosystem-Led principles, tactics, and trends.
PRINCIPLES
Drive on a two-way street
The most successful partnerships are built on mutual value and reciprocity.
To create a thriving partner program, prioritize the success of your partners just as much as your own — understand your partner’s goals, challenges, and market position.
When both parties invest in each other's growth, everyone wins.
If you stop delivering value to your partner, they will stop helping you. And we’re guessing you wouldn’t want to miss out on intel, introductions, and influence, right?
TACTICS
The basics that so many partner programs
are missing
In 2017, Greg was the Head of Partnerships at Hawke Media — Hawke was Klaviyo’s number-one partner by revenue. Unfortunately at that time, this wasn’t a reciprocal relationship.
But Greg didn’t give up. He knew the potential and was willing to try, so he challenged Klaviyo to be a better partner.
In 2018, Mike Eng took over Klaviyo’s partnership program. Mike knew that Greg built a partnership program which accounted for 65% of revenue, so he asked Greg how he could achieve the same at Klaviyo. Here’s what Greg shared with him:
1. Customer first: Build a program that delivers value throughout the customer journey and everyone wins.
2. Drive growth for partners: The success you drive FOR your partners is as important as the leads/referrals you get FROM them. Make supporting the growth of your partners a core KPI.
3. Treat partners like customers of your partner program: Map out your partner journey and what a healthy partnership looks like. Break this lifecycle into stages and track funnel metrics throughout. Then create a strong feedback loop with partners to optimize it.
4. Simplify, simplify, simplify: A program with a bunch of “benefit” checkboxes that can’t be fulfilled are broken promises that you’ll need to repair down the road. Build a clear program that makes it easy for partners to understand, onboard, engage, and realize value.
5. Alignment is critical: Make sure you have alignment with key stakeholders internally. From the Board, to the C-suite, to cross-functional leaders across sales, marketing, customer success, and product. You’ll need all of them to build a truly powerful program.
6. Use data to scale: Having the right metrics, and the infrastructure to track them, will allow you to create predictability and scale. You (and your partners) will always know where you stand, what’s working, and what’s not so you can make informed decisions.
7. Tier your program (when at critical mass): Identify all of the benefits you can reliably offer to partners, organize them by value, and align with a tiering system that incentivizes partners to increase engagement with you.
“These are the basics that so many partner programs are missing. Klaviyo came into a crowded category, with entrenched incumbents, and out-paced them all through partnerships.
If you're struggling with partnerships, take a page out of their playbook. Keep the focus on scalability and mutual value. That's the foundation of a $1B partnership program.” — Greg Portnoy, CEO of Euler
FROM THE ECOSYSTEM
You can’t catch every fish in the sea
It might be tempting to partner with every company you see on a Partner directory like Partnerbase, but you have to keep in mind that not everything that shines is gold.
The broader you want to start your partner program, the less likely you are to succeed. Take the advice of Rob Rebholz, Co-founder and CEO of Superglue:
“One of the biggest mistakes I see in early partner programs is a lack of focus and a targeted Ideal Partner Profile.
It was certainly the most costly mistake I ever made.”
A SPECIAL FAVOR
Future of Revenue survey
As a GTM leader, your experience and insights are crucial to understanding the direction of revenue strategies in our industry.
We’ve partnered with Pavilion to survey GTM leaders, and we’d love it if you could take 7 minutes to share your thoughts.
Your input is anonymous, and you’ll get early access to the report before its big reveal this fall.
Share your experience here.
STUFF YOU CAN'T MISS
- October 1: SalesIntel Annual Summit - TODAY: SalesIntel is organizing a 100% free and virtual summit where you will find specific tracks curated for sales, marketing, and RevOps and roundtable working sessions focused on sharing actionable ways to build pipelines and achieve growth goals. Save your seat here.
- October 1-3: RevCon - TODAY: RevGenius partnered with Common Room, Sigma, Avoma, The Juice, and many more to bring you a 3-day virtual conference to reunite your sales, marketing, RevOps, and CS leaders behind to learn and discuss about the future of SaaS. Save your spot here.
- October 9: The Next Era of Ecosystem Technology: 360Insights and GTM experts like Hannibal Scipio (Forrester), Cody Sunkel (Partner Fleet), Maisa Fernandez (ServiceNow), Kevin Linehan (Crossbeam) and many more, will dive into how ecosystem orchestration is reshaping go-to-market strategies. Save your spot here.
- October 14-16: GTM2024: Join Pavilion at The Fairmont in Austin, TX to get ahead on your 2025 GTM strategy, learn about market trends, and boost your GTM strategy. Get your ticket here.
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