Ideally the “time to the first value” in a partnership should be 90 days or less

You signed a new partner? Congrats! An intricate and exciting journey 🎈 now begins.

While engagement and speed are key to make #partnerships successful, 40% of companies take 30+ days just to onboard a partner.

💰 Ideally the “time to the first value” in a partnership should be 90 days or less.

You don’t need to start generating revenue from the get go necessarily, but it’s essential to show to both companies first signs that this will work and has potential to create great results.

Common hack here is to “give first” - e.g. hand over a few leads to your partner to show them the value immediately (your own sales team might not be too happy about that ofc).

Another one is to launch a test marketing campaign to a set of potential users to generate success stories.

You get the point.

🤝 Engagement in the first 30 days is telling, following 60 days set the tone of the entire collaboration, after which partnerships usually run on a quarterly cadence.

The name of the game here is to get key stakeholders buy-in and generate excitement and momentum in both organizations.

Without momentum, excitement fizzles out and everyone starts to think “okay, this is actually a partnership for our press release” or “another nice logo for our investor deck.”

🚩 I’m sure you’re not in a group that takes more than a month to onboard a partner, but you still might consider partner onboarding more seriously, as the average time is 23 days.

✔️ A few high level ideas:

Turn every repeatable process in a template.

Treat every partnership like a micro startup.

Start simple, move fast and add details as you see signs of success.

✔️ Agree on a high level KPI, rev share and roadmap with key milestones. You'll be adjusting your strategy of course, but you need to have one to begin with.

✔️ Connect both teams by sharing points of contacts from sales and marketing and engineering, so your partners get support if they need. Partnership team could be a gatekeeper on all things partnerships in the beginning, but as the program scales , your internal team typically starts engaging with partners directly more.

✔️ Share key marketing and sales enablement materials and templates they might need.

✔️ Keep both teams engaged by sharing success stories and small wins monthly.

💡 We talked about launching partnerships in one of our firesides chats in Partner Insight, where we've built an intuitive SaaS that helps to onboard partners in minutes.