Food for thought

When it comes to partnerships in SaaS, it’s crucial to understand the type of collaboration you’re entering.

Classifying your partners as candy, vitamins, or painkillers can help maximize potential and achieve long-lasting success:

🍭 Candy partnerships: These collaborations create buzz and excitement through activities like co-marketing but don’t address a critical need. Pre-trade show events with other ISVs often fall in this category.

🍏 Vitamin partnerships: These relationships are vital for long-term health and growth. SI partnerships often fall into this category. They may not seem essential, but they drive significant value over time. Take your vitamins!

💊 Painkiller partnerships: These game-changing collaborations address major pain points or problems for your target audience, like filling a significant feature gap. Not partnering creates a major business risk, so these partnerships provide immediate relief and a clear value proposition.

Before entering into any partnership, ask yourself:

Is this a candy, vitamin, or painkiller partnership? 🤔

Prioritize accordingly.

Thanks for contributing to this section of the PhD, Rob Rebholz! 

Good partnerships require good people

Matt Dornfeld has worked in partnerships with some of the biggest names out there.

He’s worked with TikTok, Amazon, and Walmart.

I asked him to tell me the secret to great partnerships.

His answer:

One of the major principles is quite literally no d*ckheads." — Matt Dornfeld

He said that the key to partnerships is finding out what your partner needs.

You want to align incentives and structure your teams so that they’re looking to give more than they receive.

It’s not about making money right out of the gate.

Matt encouraged partner pros to:

• Spend time figuring out how THEY get paid, and how you can help THEM.
• Be curious and ask tons of questions.
• Find out what your partners are trying to do.
• Figure out what your partners really care about.

Listen to Matt Dornfeld share some partner wisdom.

Stop fighting over half the pie. Grow the pie instead.

Arvind Krishna of IBM was recently on the Chambers Talks Podcast. He spoke about why it’s necessary to see partnerships as a win-win strategy.

Partnerships isn’t a zero-sum game.

Instead of fighting over the size of the slice of the pie you’re getting, focus on using partners to expand the pie.

It’s better to have a small slice of a large pie than fight over half of a small pie.

Check out the convo here:

Arvind Krishna explains how partnerships are used for mutual benefit. Watch here.

Happenings

• Firneo’s Partner School Series – Wednesday, May 10, 12 – 1 PM EST – Navigating the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem with Juhi Saha, CEO of Partner1 and former Managing Director at Microsoft – Join a conversation with Juhi Saha, CEO of Partner1 and former Managing Director at Microsoft as she shares the insider secrets of how to effectively navigate the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Register here.
• Lead Forensics x PartnerHacker – Thursday, May 11th 2023, 11:30 EDT, 16:30 GMT – Unlock The Secrets of Partner Marketing with Jared Fuller – Jared Fuller will be diving deep into partner marketing tactics you may not even know you’re missing. Register here.
• PartnerHacker x OneFlow – Thursday, May 11th, at 9am EST – Surviving and Thriving in 2023: Unveiling the Secrets to Unbeatable Customer Retention and Win-Back Strategies – Join us for an upcoming live discussion with industry leaders from Oneflow, HubSpot, and Avidly, as we explore the critical roles that customer retention and win-back strategies play in driving business growth in today’s uncertain environment. Register here.

Image of the Day

Thanks for the image, Allan Adler!

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