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Sam Collins, a new partner manager, managed to revamp Reachdesk's partner program in 6 months. Here's the story of how he did it.
Inside Reachdesk’s partner program
Sam Collins, a new partner manager, managed to revamp Reachdesk’s partner program in 6 months.
Here’s the story of how he did it.
Eleven months ago, Sam Collins transitioned from his position as a BDR into partnerships.
When Sam took over the program,
- Cross-departmental buy-in was sparse
- Partnerships weren’t being treated as an overlay to GTM functions
- Existing partnerships weren’t being optimized
Now,
- Cross-departmental buy-in is secured
- He’s using partnerships as an overlay to existing GTM functions
- He’s established new partnerships
If you’re a new partner professional taking on an existing partner program, or trying to get your program from 0 to 1, you know all about Sam’s struggle.
So, how can you replicate his results? We’ve compiled three nearbound plays Sam used in Reveal to achieve success in less than six months.
Keep reading to learn how Sam:
- Diagnosed the health of his program
- Revamped his partner strategy using nearbound GTM principles
- Ran nearbound GTM plays with alongside his GTM team
Click here to read the full story.
Step one: find the story the data is telling
Sam needed insight into the health of his partner program:
- How many partners did Reachdesk have?
- What was the state and health of the program (KPIs)? How were partners being leveraged?
He looked at his Reveal data to find immediate red flags and low-hanging fruit.
One of the things he learned was most of his partners weren’t regularly engaged.
How can you be a partner when you’re not actually talking to people?That’s not a relationship.
With a few key problems in mind, he started revamping the strategy.
Step two: Revamp Reachdesk’s partner strategy
As a one-man partner team, Sam knew he couldn’t run partnership activity at scale without the help of his other teams.
So Sam re-evaluated his IPP, constructed a strategy, and began building a bridge between partnerships and the rest of the company.
He met with every major stakeholder, took a vested interest in their goals, and found ways to evangelize nearbound.
For example, Sam asked Sellers about their top accounts and used Reveal to uncover nearbound opportunities for intel, intros, and influence. He would then facilitate his Sellers’ success.
Sam understood what takes many partner pros years to understand: buy-in requires that you show your teams what it looks like to succeed, even if that means a lot of upfront work.
To learn more, read the full story.
Step three: Run nearbound GTM plays
Sam shared three plays he’s running to open opportunities and win deals:
- Events
- Co-marketing better-together stories
- Partner prospecting campaigns
To learn how he runs events and partner prospecting campaigns, read the full story.
Here’s how (and why) Sam builds better together stories.
Nearbound play: better together stories
Sam began building better together stories to enable stakeholders—partners, execs, GTM teams, and customers—on existing partnerships because a common issue is a lack of alignment and understanding.
Every stakeholder needs to understand the what, why, and how of every partnership.
- What partnerships exist?
- Why are they valuable and relevant to our customers, our company, and my function?
- How do I uncover opportunities with this partner?
This kind of content is simple and easy, but most companies and partner pros don’t prioritize it. For that reason, most stakeholders have no clue what partnerships exist, or what they do.
Sam’s three-step process:
- Look at the data. Sam looks at his Reveal data (sometimes uses Chat GPT too), connects with his CSMs, and pulls out a compelling story.
- Using mutual customers as a starting point (ideally over 30 mutual customers) I can quickly connect with CSMs to understand what a better-together story would look like.
- Build a minimal pitch deck. He builds a minimal pitch deck to share that story with his primary stakeholders.
- Marketing builds the official story. If approved, Marketing turns the pitch deck into a thorough better-together story.
Here’s an example of a better-together story Reachdesk did with Reveal.
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Click here to check out the better-together story.
Every partner pro should make visibility into existing partnerships easy for stakeholders.
Whether it’s building a better-together story like Sam and the Reachdesk team, or an executive summary like Matt Dornfeld (check out Matt Dornfeld’s step-by-step guide to executive summaries), partner impact should always be understood.
And a huge shoutout to Sam Collins, Ben Smith, and the rest of the Reachdesk team for letting us highlight their story!
Read the full thing here.
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