Partnership folks: let the rhythm take control—or you could be in serious trouble.
Recap of the nearbound daily this week
- Good Partner Managers Don’t Do This
- Unlocking Intelligence With Partners & AI
- The Simplest Success Equation
- Jessie Shipman’s Partner Enablement Advice
- Matt Dornfeld’s Step-by-Step Guide for Building Partnership Executive Summaries
Recently published
- How to Execute an Effective Nearbound Channel Strategy by Nate Roybal
- Introduction to Partner Manager by Bernhard Friedrichs and Martin Scholz
- An Open Letter to Partnerships, from Sales by Simon Bouchez
- Good Partner Managers/ Bad Partner Managers by Rasheité Calhoun
- How Alliances can Leverage their Channel Partners to Go To Market with their Integrated Solution by Efe Senel
- The Partner Recruitment Deck You Can Use Today by Nelson Wang
- Nearbound Podcast #149: Evolving Partnerships in Business with Pete Rawlinson
- Friends with Benefits #31: Mark Kilens on the Power of People-First Go-to-Market Strategies
Understand this, and everything else gets easier
What is the rhythm of the business?
The rhythm of the business is the cadence at which different things happen across the calendar year in a company.
If you are trying to get things done cross-departmentally, you need to not just have your own rhythm:
Here’s my annual plan. Here’s what I want to get done each quarter. Here are the monthly meetings I’m gonna have.
You need to understand the rhythm of the business as a whole.
- When are the board meetings?
- When is the annual planning being done?
- What are the quarterly cadences, the monthly, the weekly, and the daily, and how can you layer on to those?
You need to know that for each department that you’re working with.
This is especially relevant to partnership people because they tend to work with just about every other department, especially Sales, Marketing, and Success.
You must learn and understand their rhythm because a good idea or a good initiative at the wrong time might as well be a bad idea or a bad initiative.
When it is the end of the quarter and all the Sales team is thinking about is closing deals to hit their quarterly number, it’s obviously not a good time to try to have some kind of a meeting about something that’s not relevant.
And on the flip side, it’s incredibly important to know when a QBR or a sales kickoff is happening, have insight into the topics they’re discussing, and create a game plan for how you can layer into that.
- What are the things you’re doing to interact with them every day?
- What are the things you’re doing weekly?
- Which meetings are you showing up to pipeline meetings, forecast meetings?
- Which monthly meetings are you a part of?
- Are you a part of the quarterly business reviews that they’re doing?
- Are you a part of the annual kickoff meetings?
Understanding the rhythm of the business is one of the most crucial things you can do.
So, create some kind of calendar where you lay out the rhythm of the departments that you’re working with.
Start at the annual level and work your way down to daily.
What are the things that they’re doing on those time slots?
What are the things that you need to contribute or be a part of for each of those time slots?
The result will be a pretty well-defined calendar that shows you what your days, weeks, months, quarters, and years need to look like.
Don’t lose sight of the rhythm of the business.
You can’t ask people to dance to the rhythm that you are putting together when they all have rhythms of their own.
Instead, you gotta dance with them.
—Isaac
Mission critical: rhythm of business
Share this with a partner pro who might not understand their rhythm of business.
