🤔 Ask the right questions

When Apple announced their strategic partnership with Salesforce I was tasked with developing the technical enablement program.

I did what I always do...

I started with curiosity.

I reached out to my enablement counterpart at SFDC and asked these questions:

1. What is your internal enablement strategy?

2. What can we do to fit into that strategy (rather than disrupt it)?

3. Here’s the structure and cadence we’re thinking about... does this align with your enablement goals?

4. Is there anything we can do for you on our end?

The response I got:

None of our partners have ever asked us this before. 🤯

Turns out that what seems like a simple thing, wasn’t as common as I thought it was.

A full partner enablement strategy can be nuanced and complicated.

But getting it started is pretty simple.

Thanks for contributing to this section of the PhD, Jessie Shipman.

Partnerships and marketing come together

Tyler Calder, CMO at PartnerStack was recently on the Marketing Together Podcast with Logan Lyles.

Tyler takes a careful, calculated approach to marketing, and he tests everything.

Then, he iterates based on the feedback.

When Tyler is testing out his partner-led marketing efforts, he tests in sprints.

He’ll devote a few weeks to one tactic, then measure to see if it worked.

And it doesn’t always work.

Sometimes you need to have tough conversations and let your partners know it’s not working.

But most of the time, partner-led marketing blows everything else out of the water 🌊.

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See you and 10,000 more soon in November.

📅 Happenings

• July 26th, 2 PM ET – Mastering Power Dynamics in Negotiations – Join Janet Giesen (Principal at JetPath Consulting) and Scott Pollack as they teach effective strategies to leverage power dynamics so you can negotiate from a position of strength.

Quote of the Day

The interesting thing that I see is some of those are marketing people grabbing partnership budget. So they’re sitting in the marketing seat, and they’re like, "Hey, I think there’s something here with this partnerships thing. — Tyler Calder, CMO at PartnerStack on the Marketing Together Podcast

🤝 Help a partner pro get curious, share the PhD

Share the PhD and get some PartnerHacker swag while you’re at it.