The puzzle of misalignment

Building a successful partner ecosystem with organizational misalignment feels a lot like solving a puzzle with missing and mismatched pieces.

Imagine this: you’re trying to fit things together, but key pieces are either not there or just don’t quite match, making the whole picture (and experience) a bit chaotic.

Each mismatched piece becomes a point of friction, and you begin to wonder if you’ll ever solve this puzzle.

Just as it’s disheartening to start a puzzle knowing some pieces are missing, partner professionals shouldn’t overlook the challenge of securing buy-in.

Ignoring the issue won’t make it disappear; it’ll persist, much like a bothersome puzzle piece, complicating the completion of the overall picture.

How to get your teams involved

Implementing nearbound motions across partner teams starts with getting your internal go-to-market teams actively involved.

Before teaming up with anyone else, your team needs to be fully on board.

Here are the two most common problems when aligning with your go-to-market teams—lack of communication and limited partner engagement—and how to fix them.

Problem #1: Lack of communication

The problem is lots of partner folks think other departments will learn about the value of partnerships on their own.

Instead of waiting, step up as the go-to expert.

The good news?

Every department is feeling the struggle of playbooks that no longer work the way they used to. They’re open to running new motions.

The solution: evangelize nearbound

Be the person who’s always sharing things like:

• What is Nearbound GTM?
• How does Nearbound GTM work?
• Why is Nearbound GTM effective?
• What stats back this up?

Focus especially on how partnerships and nearbound can impact their KPIs. 

Problem #2: limited interaction with partners

Are you making it easy for your teams to engage with partners and jump on opportunities?

Partner pros aren’t meant to be gatekeepers, rather they’re meant to be facilitators and orchestrators of ecosystem value.

In the beginning of a partner program, orchestration looks like heavy-lifting. Whereas later, it becomes more about enabling and supporting.

Often partner pros think their go-to-market teams are going to magically start interacting or asking to interact with partners.

They won’t.

The solution: create value manually, and get your teams excited to work with partners.

What that looks like is tons of cross-functional communication (i.e. asking questions, listening to customer calls, bringing up opportunities/ideas) and enablement (i.e. sharing relevant resources, better together stories, training, and data).

Look for opportunities to insert partners where there are obstacles. And create moments for your go-to-market teams (marketers, sellers, and success counterparts) to go, “Oh wait, a partner can help us solve this problem!”

Reminder: you want partners to be seen as the heroes! Never insert a partner where they’ll be creating friction.

When momentum builds, and teams see nearbound results, they’ll be more incentivized to use tools like Reveal independently.

2024 = Big year for nearbound

2024 marks the end of the cookie and third-party data which means second-party data is now necessary if businesses want actionable intel.

This year we’ll see even more companies turn to partnering, not just for revenue, but also for data.

Thanks for the post, Jay! 

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