Blogs

I have to start this one with a disclosure. I have never run a marketplace partnership as a vendor. I have built resellers, distributors, OEMs, alliances, and I have sat in standards bodies, but I have never had my product listed in a cloud provider's storefront and tried to make that the way it...

Early in my career I sold a hardware board that accelerated a specific video codec. We had one competitor that mattered. Small company, sharp founders, and they were building the same board we were, on the same API, so they could put it inside their own encoding appliances.

There is one partnership type where the people across the table are the companies you are trying to beat, and the outcome is a document that makes it easier for a customer to switch away from you. It is also the one that grows the whole market, and it is the one almost nobody in a partnerships...

Two executive sponsors meet at a conference and agree this makes sense. Two partner teams are assigned. A joint business plan is written with a number in it that neither side's field carries in quota. The kickoff is well attended. Then nobody opens the plan again, because the field teams on both...

OEM is the partnership where you disappear. Your part goes inside their product. Their name is on the box. The customer may never know you exist, and if the deal is structured right you are fine with that, because every unit they ship is your revenue and you did not have to sell a single one.

A few weeks ago I told you about a production company that sent us the occasional name, and how the referral was not the value, it was how I found the value. Here is the second half.

I spent twelve years inside one of the largest integrators in the world, so I have seen this partnership from the inside, and I will tell you the thing the partner managers on the outside usually get wrong.

One distributor was half the company's revenue. I built that from a standing start, no distributor, then one, then that one was half the number, and it was one of the best decisions that company made while I was there, because it let a small engineering-heavy company sell into places it could...

For three years I was the buyer, and every time a vendor told me their product worked with another one, I asked to see it in the product. Not the slide. The product. Most of the time it was not there yet.

A small minor league club on the East Coast, one of the first to bet on new technology instead of waiting to see who else tried it, wanted its fans to have something they could not get anywhere else in the ballpark.

I have never made a buying decision because of a referral fee. Not once, on either side of the table. As a buyer I did not know the fee existed and would not have cared. As a seller the referral partners I inherited produced a name or two a quarter, usually someone who was already talking to us.

Every partnership I have built that lasted started with a piece of paper I wrote myself, not one marketing handed me. Four questions, in order.

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

I have asked that question in a lot of rooms over 25 years and the answer is usually "a partnership." That is not an answer. It is a category. Inside it there are at least eleven different animals, and they eat different food.