Savings Are a Funding Vehicle
Ask enterprise sales reps how their deals die and most of them will not name a competitor. The champion wanted the platform. The evaluation went well. The business case was …
Peanut Butter & Jelly: A Recipe for Partnership Success
Editor’s note: This is an expanded version of a post I first published in August 2018, “Peanut Butter & Jelly: A Recipe for Business Success” (https://powerinpartnerships.com/2018/08/28/peanut-butter-jelly/). The metaphor has not …
ICP / IPP Mapping: The Online Dating of Strategic Partnerships
North Americans spent an estimated $2.2 to $2.5 billion on dating apps last year. Globally, the number cleared $6.1 billion. People pay that much because technology changed how we find …
Integrity Is Not Old School
More than once lately, I have walked away from a conversation with someone I respect and sat in my truck a little longer than I needed to, turning over what …
Referral Commissions Have Nothing to Do with Value Creation
Open almost any partner program pitch and the commission table shows up early, usually dressed up as the headline: generous referral fees, aggressive percentages, payouts designed to get a partner’s …
Count Contacts, Not Partners
Ask a partner leader how big their ecosystem is and they will give you a partner count. It is the wrong number. A partner is a logo on a slide. …
No Channel Team? No Sweat: Your Sales Reps Are Channel Managers in Disguise
Partners rarely leave loudly. They go quiet. A partner who stops hearing from you stops thinking of you, and the deal that should have come your way goes to whichever …
Architect vs. Operator: The Two Jobs Inside Every Partner Program
My last piece was about sequence: fractional first, then the W-2 hire, because a partner leader cannot succeed in a program that does not exist yet. This one is about …
Fractional Then W-2: The Right Sequence for Building a Partner Motion
Let’s take a deeper dive. It’s not fractional vs. W-2. It’s fractional, then W-2. Too many companies rush to hire a full-time W-2 leader for their partner program. It’s not …
The AI Governance Check That Stopped the Wrong Assumption
The most valuable AI intervention in my work this year wasn’t finding a coding error. It was stopping an assumption from becoming product behavior. I build software using a multi-AI …