Partnerships is who I am

Fourteen posts, eleven kinds of partnership, one test each. If you ran the tests on your own program, you probably found what I always find: one or two types that actually move revenue, wrapped in five or six that exist so the slide looks full.

That is not a criticism. It is what happens when partnerships get built to answer "do we have partners" instead of "what is the market missing and who fills it."

Here is what I actually do, and what I have done my whole career, sometimes for companies I did not even work for. I see a problem one of my connections could fix. This company, run by someone I know, has a great product and is missing one thing. Another company has great technology and is missing something else. I can see that the two are more alike than either of them knows, that each one fills the other's gap, and that together they could push a market leader off the top spot. Neither of them sees it, because each is looking at its own list. I am looking at both lists at once. That is why the type comes last. Once you can see both gaps, the shape of the deal is obvious, and it is almost never the one everybody in the room walked in wanting.

I have sat in both chairs. I built the programs as the vendor. Then I spent three years as the buyer, deciding which partner programs got deployed across a few hundred thousand seats and which died in a folder. The second chair changed how I read the first one. From the vendor side a partnership is a contract, a tier and a logo. From the buyer side it is one question: did this make my life easier, or did it add a vendor, a login and a meeting?

When I was running technical sales I was already bringing other companies in to help my customers, before anyone gave me a partnerships title, because the customer's problem did not care whose logo was on the fix. It has never been about a title. I am a solution seller and a partnerships person at heart, and the thing I am best at is using the network I have built over twenty-five years to solve a problem one company cannot solve alone. That is the work I want to keep doing, and I am looking for the company that needs it done.

I'm pulling the whole series into one piece on my site, with the thirty questions in one place.

Pick the type last. Most people pick it first.

Which one are you actually setting up?

Part 15 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.