How to Launch Partnerships Early on Without a Partnerships Lead

in on Feb 11 2025

Intro

Many of my calls are with CEO’s asking the same questions around their launch into partnerships - Where to start? What to expect? When and whom to hire…?

The personas I’ll speak about in this article are:

1st - Agency CEO’s without a first partnerships hire who assume there is potential for the operation of a partnership, but haven’t made the leap into operationalizing it.

2nd - SaaS Founders who know they need to begin partnering with service providers sooner rather than later to stay in sales cycles with the larger organizations who are getting strategic advice from a consultancy.

The persona who may not benefit from this article:

First hire partnerships team leaders.
Teams who are trying to launch an affiliate marketing program.

Speaking of the personas mentioned above, I often hear excuses and incorrect presumptions. There are always reasons not to undertake a difficult operation like Partnerships. But, especially now, when review sites and customer logos aren’t taken seriously, third parties are either pointing customers back to you or pointing them to your competitors.

Thankfully, (also for the reason I just mentioned) I am talking to more founders of earlier-stage companies eager to get partnerships operations started!

…

I had a great call the other day with an agency ~$20M in annual revenue, #1 license holder for some of the biggest tech in #ABM and #RevOps… And zero positive experiences in #partnerships. However, they knew there was a ton of potential for their agency. So, here was my suggestion to this #agency CEO who should start operationalizing partnerships for their agency:

First, do not go into partnerships at this stage in a siloed way.

By siloed, I mean a scenario wherein the CEO appoints or hires a Head of Partnerships and that person is tasked with getting the program off the ground by themselves, and with the “blessing” of the CEO.

IF the partnerships operation roll-out is siloed in that way, it will only disrupt and become a nuisance and a disaster. The leader will run into walls with every department lead and struggle to find the support they need.

Instead, partnerships need to be welcomed by the entire company and become a positive part of the culture.

To achieve this, the operation should be launched throughout all departments simultaneously - Marketing, Sales, and Client Success. Everyone should have a role to play, and a KPI, to ensure success without disruption.

Which is actually not as difficult of a challenge as you may think.

In fact, *partnerships-led organizations often do not have a partnerships department for much of their growth. These companies simply incorporate partnerships into their sales, marketing, product, and customer success strategy from the beginning.

I’ll explain by referring to a few examples of how to incorporate partners into departmental operations to increase efficiency and begin creating that *retention moat that we all know partnerships will provide.

Here are examples of how any organization can incorporate partnerships into their teams early on - before they have a partnerships department:

1) Customer Success-Led Partnerships.

Your customer success team should have lists of companies, freelancers, and agencies they refer your customers to when specific issues arise. Depending on your organization's size, it’s ideal that this list is created and edited by the founder(s) to start. When a partner program is formalized, the Partnerships Manager can take over.

The preliminary goal for this strategy should simply be to have a company-reviewed [expert] third party to point these customers to when in need. In other words, a referral partner.

The practice of trying not to say “Sorry, we don’t assist with that…” And instead having a list of companies or people who can help, not only establishes the foundation for partnerships in the future but makes your CS team that much more valuable for your customers whom they are there to help.

Note, in the beginning, your organization’s relationship with the companies on this referral list does not (I’d even say it should not) be contractual - requiring signatures on anything. I recommend you simply establish a mutual understanding with the other company that they are on the list and it’s their responsibility to keep your CS team in the loop and educated in order to remain on the list. One strategy to make this practice more effective is to have a CS (and sales) standup lunch and learn twice a month where you invite one of the companies on that referral list to educate the team on anything relevant to what they do. This not only leads to a better partnership, but you can get your team skilled up on relevant new trends your customers care about.

If you decide to implement this strategy, here are a few best practices:

Make sure you have a mandate for the CS person to loop the partner in regarding important communication’s around shared projects. To make sure this happens, CS needs to update the customer profile in the CRM with a custom field stating who their referred partner is, and the nature of their business together.
Have two custom fields in your CRM; one for the name of the third party the customer or prospect is working with, and another for the nature of their business.
Have your sales team ask all prospects if they have agencies they work with, and if so, a point of contact to update those fields in the CRM.

2) Product-Led Partnerships.

Not to be confused with “integration” partners. “Product-Led Partnerships” are my way of describing one of two main scenarios wherein the product team is automating partner-sourced referrals and/or conversions by bringing partners into website and product funnels.

It’s a term you may not have heard before. I coined it in this article a couple of years ago. And it only applies to SaaS.

The best product teams will make sure referrals and inviting 3rd parties ultra simple - even gamified to a degree using credits etc…

One example of this in action is what drove Monday.com’s partnerships success - driving over $30M in sourced revenue for them in a single year. The product is inherently partner-centric. Project management workspaces and user accounts were built to include other companies and freelancers.

The product team made it very easy to invite partners to collaborate, and those partners would then create an account > collaborate >> become fans of the product themselves >>> buy new licenses… And the cycle continues.

The second form of Product-led Partnerships is inherent in great SaaS like Webflow, Airtable, Databox…

I’m referring to expert-created templates showing how they use or design the product.

Implementing a template directory with examples from experts will increase conversions from you site.

Here’s how the simplified version of this strategy works:

Source templates for how your product is used in conjunction with other products OR how it’s customized (think BI dashboards… CMS templates…).
Create a small library of those examples in a folder to start.
Plan to publish those templates in a directory.
Design these template landing pages with a clear section showing authorship of the template - profile pic (or logo) + company name + link. I also suggest designing the directory listings to include the authors name on each tile / listing. Watch this video to see examples.
Before publishing, reach out to service providers - sharing the folder - and offering to brand one of the templates (provide authorship + a backlink) to them so they receive the credit and thought leadership of the template after it goes live. And, if they do not see a template they would want to claim, offer to publish one they submit instead.
Create a funnel for new template ideas to be submitted (form and the Marketing team can review and decide who’s submissions get published).
This templates directory is then published, and submitted to search for indexing, and then Marketing can take over to promote it, tag the experts, ensure the experts are sharing there listings… And that alone (backlinks + leads + thought leadership) will encourage more experts to submit their ideas. I suggest the Product Marketing lead runs this operation.

Now, if you really want to hit this strategy out of the park, your product team will connect these templates to the product so your users can launch with one of those setups.

Airtable’s Universe or Webflow’s Marketplace are great examples of how you can onboard into those platforms via a template that is credited to being developed by a service provider who’s a clear expert in these platforms.

…

Here are the subsequent things you will need in order to launch a fully integrated templates directory:
User backend management of their purchased or in-use templates.
Experts account level designation (after application approval).
The ability for said experts to create / submit new templates.
Potentially - the ability for experts to price and share in revenue generated for templates they have sold via your directory. However, this should not be necessary IF you do a good job at promoting the Directory and showcasing the experts so they are receiving leads in the form of your users who want further support.

Check out this video for a detailed explanation of how your product team can play a major role in the company’s growth by building out these funnels with partners.

3) Marketing-Led Partnerships.

In all of my Head of Growth roles, I made sure the first thing I did was to find the key players in the ecosystem and begin including those individuals and companies in my marketing campaigns. By ‘include’ I mean expert highlights, podcast interviews, quotes, webinars, and hopefully co-branded product use cases or even templates like the second strategy above.

The reasons you include these potential partners in your marketing campaigns are as follows:

Trust flow. In other words; you are not the thought leader in that space (yet…). In order to earn your potential customers’ trust quickly, you can bring those who have their trust already into your campaigns.
Budget efficacy. Your dollars can only go so far if you’re marketing alone. When you tag and gain shares from those with an audience of your ICP, your marketing budget has a much larger impact.
Better content. Your writers and marketing team can create the most insightful content for your audience… But, it will always be biased, and therefore not taken seriously by everyone who sees it. However, if your content includes thought leaders who do not work for your organization, it will be taken more seriously.

What’s in it for said thought leaders giving you great content? Backlinks, and getting into your promotions to a shared ICP. You should not have to pay these third parties. However, depending on how busy and large their personal brand, you may need to layer on incentives like; paid promotion of the posts, highlights in your newsletter, a little bit of exclusivity in the content calendar…

When you start to pay for these thought leaders, that becomes an entirely different strategy - affiliate marketing, and/or B2B influencer marketing. And will require another strategy.

So, if you are in agreement, you should at least have a conversation with your marketing team. If they are good marketers, they should also agree.

Deployment of this strategy is as simple as making sure thought leaders who already have the ear of your prospects are in your marketing content.

…

There you have it. My suggestion for how to incorporate partnerships early on and successfully without having to staff the program.

If you enjoyed my thoughts please subscribe.

Deploy and manage any of these strategies inside Partnerhub®.

In partnership,

Alex

…

*partnerships-led organizations - a company that incorporates outside organizations in marketing, sales, customer success, and product development. Ironically, these companies usually operate for years without a partnerships teams.

*Retention moat - a metaphor based on the moat around a castle that works to protect the kingdom. B2B partnerships help create that protection because your happy/loyal partners will point your customers and theirs back to you - therefore increasing sales and retention.