Get into the nitty-gritty of PartnerOps and learn how to define PartnerOps, establish your partner operations, track the right metrics, and leverage the right tech stack.
“You can’t prove what you can’t measure.” — GTM Partners
They’re right: How are you supposed to prove the value of your partnerships if you don’t have the proper processes and metrics in place?
And even though we agree with Elliot Smith, former Head of Partnerships at 6sense when he says that “Partnerships have become critical to the growth and scalability of SaaS companies,” you still have to track your efforts and their outcomes.
If this feels impossible because your team of one (or maybe three) has to wear multiple hats, it might be time to hire Partner Operations.
As Latané Conant, CRO at 6sense, wisely states, "It’s not about the size of your Partner team. It’s about the infrastructure. PartnerOps isn’t an extra — it drives the process."
PartnerOps will help you empower your partner team and finally prove the value of your Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG) strategy.
To get into the nitty-gritty of PartnerOps, we interviewed Aaron Howerton, COO at Partner Foundations, a native Salesforce app built specifically to manage partners and attribution, and founder at PartnerOps Partner, a niche community built for Partner Operations professionals.
We covered a lot of ground, including:
- The role of PartnerOps
- Establishing Partner Operations
- The metrics you need to focus on
- The tech stack you need
Let’s dive in!
The real job of PartnerOps
We have to start by acknowledging that the PartnerOps role isn’t well defined. The scope of work can vary widely from one company to another and be heavily influenced by program needs. What is consistent, however, is that PartnerOps has a central role in cross-functional representation.
“[PartnerOps] are the advocates for partnerships for the rest of the organization," says Aaron. "You might not be joining your partnership team, you might be on RevOps, but your job will always be to advocate for partnerships and the impact they have beyond sourced revenue.”
PartnerOps mainly focuses on establishing the processes, operational management, and data points, and aligning your partnership team’s KPIs with your company’s KPIs.
“If you’re in Ops, you have to know what your company has to achieve,” Says Aaron. “Ops help your partnership team align with that metric by building reports and processes to do that, so your partnership managers can focus on building relationships and leveraging their ecosystem.”
The role of PartnerOps is to make sure partnerships are valued in the organization — they are the liaison between what your business is going after, and your Partner team.
According to B2B strategy advisor Jill Rowley, “PartnerOps is related to data, workflows, processes, and automation. They’re the ones who bring science into partnerships.”
Establishing Partner Operations
Before jumping into building workflows, dashboards, and data, you need to build internal relationships, optimize processes, and then you can start showcasing data.
Step 1: Know all the right stakeholders in your company
You will need to know who you are working with across the organization, including, but not limited to, SalesOps, Product, Legal, Finance, Customer Success, and Marketing teams.
PartnerOps can bridge the gap between your Partner team and the rest of the company, so you will need as many internal allies as possible. Those allies are the ones that are going to help move the needle forward around critical initiatives.
It’s worth noting that Partnerships may seem like your primary stakeholder. You absolutely need to have a good relationship with them to help drive their agendas, but the company itself is ultimately your primary stakeholder. Balancing Partnership needs within the larger company strategy, including direct GTM rhythms, is paramount to long-term success.
Step 2: Optimize partner processes — don’t become the bottleneck
Meet regularly with other teams to understand their expectations and how partners can help. The key here is to enable your team on existing and new processes.
During those meetings with the rest of your team, include requirements, changes, and goals.
It’s understandable that you might start your processes by throwing together a spreadsheet. The problem with spreadsheets is that everything depends on the person who creates or manages the document. Every change, new partner, opportunity, and customer requires a manual analytical process. It's a case of "you snooze, you lose".
So, when designing a process, focus on making it as simple as possible. Ensure the metrics are aligned with your company’s KPIs and priorities.
“If I’m having a meeting with the Finance team, and I’m asking for resources and help to achieve a goal, you need to answer questions about what finance cares about, otherwise you won’t get anywhere.” Says Aaron. “If you don’t have the metrics to prove the impact of your partner program, and how those influenced/sourced opportunities or deals translated into revenue, you're not going to get much success getting buy-in.”
Having those answers sounds easy, but without the proper architecture and processes, getting trusty-worthy metrics requires more effort and slows your ability to secure buy-in. Opposite this are strong processes that collect accurate data on which decisions can be made with confidence and in a timely manner.
Decisions like, “Is this potential partner a good fit?” or “Does this program make financial sense for the company?”
Having great relationships with your internal teams allows your to incorporate partner needs holistically within the company’s operating rhythms, providing a stronger foundation for partner analytics.
“Book recurring meetings, build stakeholder relationships, identify those stakeholders — those are things you do early in the process,” says Aaron. “Then you maintain those relationships and adapt all the already existing processes — try not to alter a lot of those processes that aren’t yours — to include partnership needs, requests, ideas, and results.”
Partner sourced vs…?
The first metrics many companies attempt to track for Partnerships are Partner-Sourced and Partner Influenced revenue. Sourced revenue is the ‘easy’ end of this, often tied to Deal Registration processes and PRM adoption. Influence may involve a lot of negotiation and often requires Direct approvals for validation. This is often when companies first consider hiring a ‘PartnerOps’ role as well.
These metrics may help ‘prove the value’ of your Partnerships but they are not the only points to track for long-term sustainability and success. As you mature your operations, you will want to expand your reporting to include things like:
- What do you give to partners: deals sent out, open opportunities, etc.
- How long does it take you to recruit a new partner?
- How long does it take for a partner to generate revenue?
- How long are your partners staying on average?
- How many new partners does it take in a given program to generate $X revenue?
“You should look at partnerships as a full funnel — just like with customers, there’s a partner life cycle. Understanding that life cycle will help you identify those KPIs you can track.” — Aaron Howerton
Aaron’s tip: Start by aligning your partner metrics to your direct metrics for key outcomes. This should include things direct cares about, such as close rate, avg deal size, deal velocity, days to close, days in stage, etc. It's essentially an overlay of those metrics filtered by partner and program to measure partner impact. Combined with sourced vs. influenced, you get a solid overview of what the actual impact on revenue is.
“I’m all about alignment. We exist as a function of a larger company, we have to align to those goals and speak in the same terms,” says Aaron. “Alignment is one of the ways we have for people to understand partnerships. And PartnerOps helps you with that, they bridge the language gap between the teams.”
The PartnerOps tech stack
This alignment we’re talking about doesn’t happen magically. PartnerOps need some tools in their toolkit — even though most of the time there’s little budget for partnerships.
One way around the budget issue is getting an integrated solution that shows all partner data directly in your CRM. But if you have the opportunity to buy some partner tech stack, try to answer these questions first:
- What are you trying to achieve with that specific tech? What problem does it solve and how will you value the solution (revenue gains, time saved, etc.)?
- How does this tool impact the Partner Experience? Net gain, neutral, or net loss to value?
- Is the technology tied to a specific strategy, like Account Mapping for co-selling support, or a generalized acquisition to improve underlying frameworks?
- How does this tech impact your long-term strategy? As an example, if you’re looking at a PRM, is it tied to a long-term experience vision for multiple partner types or specifically targeting a high-volume play around deal registration?
- Who will own and administer this solution internally? Do you need a dedicated role or will it be manable within your current employee base?
“Companies need to take a more holistic approach to partnerships within their tech stack. When you are looking for any technology, base your decision on ‘how does this support not just direct sales pain points but also the partnership needs to grow and expand their ecosystem,” says Aaron.
He believes tooling is a balance between what’s available at your company and the specific strategies for growing your ecosystem. Partnerships should start with CRM customization and adopt further tools to meet their strategic goals: Marketplace, workflow tools, account mapping, PRMs, etc.
A final thought
If you’re considering adding PartnerOps to your team here are some things to consider:
- Early hires support long-term scale with cross-functional alignment to drive partnerships into core operational rhythms within those teams.
- Treat ops as a strategic role, and give them room to advise and help.
- Bad data is the result of a bad process. The more complicated the process is, the more manual it gets.
- Prioritize building relationships with your internal GTM team. They are your key internal stakeholders that will help educate the rest of your company about partnerships.
- Relentlessly define and target your key metrics, especially overlays with Direct and key value definers for Partner Sourced and Partner Influenced revenue. Be able to defend them at all times.
“There’s a lot of room for improvement in the partnership industry,” says Aaron, “but at its core, Partner Ops is about helping Partnership teams define and measure their success. As long as we are working toward those outcomes we can be confident we’re providing value that supports the existence of both Partnerships and the role of Partner Operations.”
