More than the revenue line, and the question underneath

Tuesday I listed eleven kinds of partnership. Before I take them one at a time, two things that apply to all of them.

First. A partnership produces more than the revenue line, and if revenue is the only number you track, you will kill good partnerships and keep bad ones.

Here is what a real partner produced for me that never showed up in a bookings report. Stage time at a conference where we could not have bought a slot. Half a booth at the biggest mobile show in the world, inside a partner's space, with their traffic walking past our demo, at a cost to us of a plane ticket and the demo itself. Analyst briefings we were not senior enough to get on our own. Reference customers who took the call because the partner asked, not because we did. And roadmap intelligence, which is the polite name for knowing what a company three times your size is going to build next year because their product team told your engineers over lunch.

None of that is revenue. All of it becomes revenue, later, through a door a sales VP cannot see from the forecast.

Which gives you a cheap test. Look at your marketing budget before and after the partner program. If partnerships are raising your marketing cost, something is broken. A working partner is a marketing channel someone else is paying for. A logo on your website that you also have to pay to promote is not a partner. It is a sponsor, and you are the one sponsoring.

Second, the question underneath all of it. What are we short of that this partner fills, and what are they short of that we fill?

Write both answers down. One page. I have started every partnership I ever built with those two lists side by side, and the ones that worked were the ones where both lists were honest. The failures were always the same shape: we knew exactly what we wanted from them and had never asked what they were short of. That is not a partnership. That is a wish.

One more thing about who runs that exercise. In a lot of companies it lands in marketing, because partner marketing is the part with a budget. Marketing can execute the program. Marketing should not be the one deciding what the company is missing. That is a strategy question, and if nobody owns it, the answer will be whatever fits in a co-branded webinar.

Next Tuesday: how to run that gap analysis yourself, in four questions. Then the referral partnership, the one everybody sets up first and measures last.

Who runs the gap analysis at your company, and would they say the same list you would?

Part 2 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.