The Value of Partnerships and Ecosystems

Setting the stage

As we embark on a mature(rer) approach to partnering and ecosystems holistically, we will have to answer the question pertaining to the value we’re creating. More often than not vendors will look at the value based on incremental (meaning accretive, net new) sales. And while I agree that this is a huge value driver, it’s not this singular dimension that we need to look at.

In literally every job description for Channel managers, ecosystem executives you’ll find one phrase: increase sales and exceed quotas. Increase sales - what does that even mean?

More pipeline? Better pipeline? Net new logos? Access to verticals or regions and users we didn’t have before? Faster transactions with higher win rates and bigger transaction sizes or full stack solutions that actually solve end to end issues? As we peel back the onion on the value, we have to realize that this is a multi-facetted approach that we need to understand in order to justify investments. Add timing as an important factor in a company’s sales lifecycle and you will quickly realize that in each and every step there are elements where your partner ecosystem can – and should – help drive value.

Furthermore, in this section I will not compare the various RTMs which will have significantly different impact on various KPIs but mostly talk about it more generally. The one point I will make is there’s different degrees of maturity of your ecosystem. And you’ll have to move through the stages of them. On the highest level your team will move from assist to co-selling, sourcing new opportunities to the pinnacle, true joint solutions. 

I created this page only as a brief teaser but by now the entire chapter is written and can be found as pdf here.

At a minimum you’ll find core KPIs in the table to the right - but as i’ll be continuing my journey to turning ecosystems and partnerships into C-Suite topics, I guess this will get a lot more detailed.

Stay tuned.

I will be using a version of customer lifecycle for this approach, otherwise I’ll start to ramble and we all get lost in my ramblings. It’s a complex topic, so let’s use the customer life cycle as our NorthStar. We can summarize these steps into bigger chunks, but for the purpose of our discussion let’s keep this. I’m also aware that I didn’t add an ‘entry point’ – truth is I believe in every arrow is a potential entry point, but I’m horrible at graphics so please ‘think’ entry arrows in above picture - everywhere. And exits.