Transitioning to Partnerships: Why and How to Make the Switch
Transitioning to partnerships is nerve-wracking — just like assuming any new role is. But there are ways to make it a little less scary.
Talking to people who’ve done it before, building up new skills before you make a change, and being equipped with the right tools as you start your journey can put you a little more at ease.
And we’re giving you a headstart.
We spoke to several folks who’ve made the switch and can help you understand why a role in partnerships can be beneficial to your career, and what you really need to know if you want to be successful.
But before we unveil their best advice, let’s take a minute to clarify the difference between sales and partnerships.
What’s the Difference Between Sales and Partnerships?
If you’ve worked in sales for a while, you’ve probably heard of partnerships. But if you don’t have a partnerships org at your company (or it’s not prioritized from a budget or leadership perspective), it’s hard to tell what they actually do.
Here are a few ways the partnership team’s work differs from that of sales:
- How they sell:
- AEs sell products or services directly to an end customer.
- Partnership teams work with other companies to win deals through joint sales, referrals, or joint go-to-market strategies.
- The relationships they form:
- Sellers build relationships with the buyer and other folks who influence the sales process.
- Partner teams form long-standing relationships with their partners, meeting at a regular cadence to identify mutually beneficial referral, comarketing, and joint go-to-market opportunities.
- Their end goals:
- A seller’s ultimate goal is to meet or exceed their closed-won deal quota.
- The main goals of a partnerships team are: to grow their partnerships program, spread awareness through comarketing, drive sales through referrals, and build credibility among thought leaders.
- Who they work with internally:
- Sellers work closely with marketing for lead generation. They may also meet with customer success and product teams from time to time to learn about the latest things customers are asking for.
- The partnerships team interacts with virtually all teams in a company to learn as much as possible about their company and convey that information to partners in a digestible, strategic way.
These differences aren’t good or bad — they just are. Knowing what they are can help you understand whether partnerships is a road you want to head down or if it’s not a great fit for your talent and interests.
3 Reasons to Transition to Partnerships
If you’re on the fence about transitioning to partnerships, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
1. Do You Want to Vie for CRO One Day?
If you’ve got big ambitions, having a solid understanding of how each core revenue team works is essential. Since you already know the ins and outs of sales, spending some time in partnerships can round out your experience.
Plus, it develops different skills that leaders in the C-suite need. For example, being on the partnerships team forces you to:
More Deeply Understand Your Product or Service.
Now, you’re not just selling to an end customer — you’re selling to a company that then has to sell to, or deliver something to, an end customer. To package the information they need in a way that is digestible and repeatable means you have to know that information by heart.
Build Stronger Internal Relationships.
Members of the partner team need to be the ultimate liaisons:
- They need to work closely with marketing to throw events, launch joint campaigns, and publish co-marketable collateral.
- They need to work closely with sales to close partner-referred deals.
- They need to communicate partner-sourced ideas with the product team.
- They need to get input on training and certifications from customer-facing teams.
The leaders of those teams will likely have a say in your path to promotion, so getting to know and help them now and nurturing those relationships over time will serve you well.
2. Do You Enjoy Forming Long-Term Relationships?
As we mentioned up top, sales can be fairly transactional. You get to know your prospect during the pitch and negotiation parts of the selling process. But that’s really it — unless you reach out to them again to close an upsell or cross-sell.
Pouring your time and energy into getting to know someone (who you may really like working with) and then barely speaking to them again can get old. Or it just may not be your jam anymore.
Sales can also be fairly solitary. A lot of times, you’re out there wheeling and dealing, only pulling in your manager or a peer once and a while to strategize.
With partnerships, you’re never flying solo — and there’s rarely a one-and-done kind of relationship.
To build a steady flow of new deals or leads, you have to build deep relationships with your partners, meeting with them every month or even every week to brainstorm new ways to reach potential customers, penetrate large accounts, and get in-flight deals over the finish line.
And, as we’ve discussed, you have to work cross-functionally internally, too.
You probably already know the sales team well, but they’re just one group you’ll interface with. Working closely with engineering and product will help you design robust partner training and communicate changes to partners early. Marketing can help you get the word out about your partnerships and come up with ideas for events or other co-sponsored campaigns.
3. Are You Excited to Try Something New?
Transitioning from sales to partnerships isn’t going to be a walk in the park. For some people, that can be discouraging.
But for others, that challenge is what gets them out of bed in the morning.
Learning new things gives them energy. They like working with so many types of people inside and outside of the business. And they want to have a broader impact — identifying and building relationships that have the potential to amplify their company’s reach, unlock new markets, or uncover new capabilities.
6 Tips for Transitioning to Partnerships
If your answers to those three questions (or even just one of them) were a resounding “yes,” transitioning from sales to partnerships could be a rewarding move. But before you take the plunge, here are a few words of wisdom from folks who’ve done it before:
1. Be Ready to Slow Down
Partnerships don’t drive revenue overnight, and that can be a big adjustment for sales folks who are used to winning new business quickly.
“Our company has a very fast-paced sales cycle. As a rep, I was closing deals every day,” explains Brandon Swain at Tithe.ly.
Brian Futral at The Marketing Heaven had a similar experience when starting a partner program. “One of the hardest things for me was adjusting to the idea that not every interaction needed to end in a signed deal.”
“When I first made the transition to partnerships, I put my foot on the gas a little too much — I had to learn I couldn’t keep going at the same pace. Partnerships take time to develop.”
But being patient paid off. Within a year, Brandon realized that the primary way that Tithe.ly’s buyers make decisions is based on relationships — relationships that he was building.
“Cultivating a strong word-of-mouth engine is crucial. I know now that if one of our partners says something good about us, it really solidifies a sale.”
2. Learn to Sell Internally
Despite the fact that partnerships account for the majority of many companies’ revenue and pipeline, the partner team doesn’t always get the credit they deserve. Often, partnerships initiatives take time (see #1). In an executive’s eyes, that time — and accompanying budget — could be spent on other activities.
To be a great partner leader, you have to be good at convincing your bosses otherwise. And to do that, you have to get really good at making a compelling business case.
“My biggest piece of advice for someone making this transition is to refine your storytelling skills. Returns on partnership investment take time but could have a huge payoff, and you need to be able to communicate that internally,” says Brandon.
“Part of telling that kind of story is about knowing what’s important to each stakeholder and leader and tailoring your message.”
Bryan McKinstry at CallTrackingMetrics agrees, “One of the best skills you can develop to excel in partnerships is good communication and the ability to speak with C-level executives.”
Get Some Practice In
Have you been thinking about bringing up a potential new project or process but keep putting it on the back burner? Now’s the time to test the waters and propose it to a peer or your boss.
Stitch together your what, why, and how, and add in data where possible. After you present your case, ask for critical feedback so you can hone your skills. Practicing now can bolster your confidence at game time — during internal partnerships QBRs or budget planning.
3. Trust Your Instincts
Being the outsider on a team can be a huge asset. You can see the forest for the trees where others can’t and apply your knowledge from sales in new ways. So don’t be afraid to express those ideas and ask the questions that need to be asked.
Brandon shares, “I wanted to try something that we hadn’t done in the past. I explained why I wanted to do it in great detail, but higher-ups still weren’t sure about my decision.”
“But I knew that taking this one chance could open the door to thousands of new customers, so I went for it. Sometimes, you just need to trust your gut and push back in a respectful way when you know your strategy makes sense for the business.”
Brandon and others described this phenomenon as “applying the challenger sale model in your own company.” In partnerships, there are times when you have to be the one to get people to think outside the box because you’re the one with the most internal and external context.
4. Tap Into Your Creativity
A lot of your work in partnerships will be creative. Partner managers have to find ways to:
- Grab the attention of managing directors at Big Five consulting firms who (usually) aren’t interested in talking to you.
- Position their company’s product as a fantastic fit in a prospect’s tech stack — that they think is just fine as-is.
- Bring prospects to joint booths, happy hours, or keynotes.
And they have to do all these things while keeping their company’s interests, their partners’ interests, and their potential end customers’ interests in mind. That takes curiosity, critical thinking, and business savvy. If you naturally have those qualities, lean into them now so you can get in more reps.
“Since transitioning to partnerships, I really feel like I’ve gotten to flex my creative skills, tailoring my pitch for each kind of partner, strategizing joint sales plays, nailing our better-together message. It’s fun to collaborate with partners on this level,” says Brandon.
5. Take Advantage of Free Partnerships Resources
These days, it’s getting easier and easier to be self-taught in any field — including partnerships. YouTube videos, gated guides and playbooks, and even podcasts can be helpful ways to dip your toes into the partnerships world.
Here are some of our favorites:
- Firneo: Learn how to build better partnerships from experts at Shutterstock, Google, and Tumblr.
- Canalys: a leading global technology market analyst firm with a distinct channel focus.
- PartnerOptimizer: An AI-powered partner intelligence platform that consistently publishes top-notch content and hosts webinars with smart leaders in the partnerships community.
- SaaS Alliance: A one-stop-shop of resources, content, and learning materials for those in SaaS.
- Partnership Leaders: A strategic partnership network for professionals at any stage of their partnerships career.
Going to local partnership events or conferences and joining Slack communities can be especially useful if you’re the lone partnerships person on your team. Talking to other groups of people who have more mature programs and may have even come from sales themselves could be fabulous mentors as you chart your path.
6. Familiarize Yourself with the Partnerships Tech Stack
In sales, you have a sales ops person (or at least a Salesforce or HubSpot admin) who can help you identify new leads coming in, traverse any reporting obstacles, and build dashboards that communicate your progress to the leadership team in real time.
But most partnerships teams don’t have that luxury.
That means you’ll have to figure out how to do pipeline monitoring, downstream reporting, and internal communication yourself when you transition to partnerships. On top of that, you’ll have to add:
- Partner training
- Partner comms
- Business planning
- Co-marketing
- Account mapping
Thankfully, there are a few tools that make these hoops a little easier to jump through.
PRMs
PRM stands for “Partner Relationship Management,” which refers to the business processes vendors use to manage the outside companies that resell their products via the channel. But PRM can also refer to software platforms you can use to automate parts of your partner program and reporting.
The best PRMs come with Partner Portals, which give partners self-serve access to all the partner-facing components of your channel program, such as:
- Partner Enablement, including training, certification, and joint business planning
- Channel Marketing, including sharing content (in a library or co-branded marketing materials), marketing development fund (MDF) management, and email marketing
- Channel Sales, including deal registration, referrals, and lead distribution
Without centralizing this data and activity in one platform, you’re stuck trying to manage expectations, create alignment, and assess your progress in a mixture of email and spreadsheets. Knowing what PRMs are on the market, what features they include, and how they work can inform the way you run your program.
As Richard Dalder at TraderVue points out, “The biggest challenge I faced during my transition from sales to partnerships was aligning the objectives and expectations between our company and our partners.”
He continues, “I found that misalignment could lead to confusion and inefficiencies, especially if partners were not adequately trained or equipped to sell and support our solutions. Establishing clear communication channels and ensuring that both parties shared a common vision became crucial to overcoming these obstacles.”
Account mapping platforms
Account mapping tools expedite the partner sales process by uncovering:
- Prospect accounts you and your partner want to co-sell into
- Accounts you want to close that your partner has a relationship with (and could introduce them to)
- Accounts your partner wants to close that you have a relationship with (and could introduce them to)
…in just a few clicks.
Getting this information upfront in a platform like Crossbeam can help you and your partners focus your efforts on executing strategies rather than figuring out where the opportunities lie. Plus, they eliminate the need for manual data-sharing methods, such as spreadsheets or emails, which can be inefficient and insecure.
Sign up for a few demos of account mapping platforms to get a better sense of how these work before using them or asking for budget to buy one.
Integration platforms
Because partnerships is so interdisciplinary, it’s not uncommon to be tasked with connecting other existing sales and marketing practices with partnership processes or moving partner-related data downstream.
The best PRMs come with native integrations to your CRM and other security or marketing automation platforms. But your company may have unique systems that your PRM doesn’t have pre-built connections for.
Tools like Zapier can help you build out those connections on your own — without much help from sales ops or engineering. Experimenting with tools like Zapier is a good idea before hopping to partnerships (and there are plenty of cool use cases for workflow automation outside of partnerships you can explore).
Transition to Partnerships With a Tool and Team That’s On Your Side
At Channeltivity, it’s been a priority for us to (1) deliver actionable content that’s rooted in real people’s experiences and (2) design a PRM software that has all the features partner programs need but is intuitive enough for anyone to use — whether they’re new to the field or a veteran of the channel.
If you haven’t checked out these resources yet, maybe it’s time to give them a read, particularly if transitioning to partnerships has been on your mind lately:
- Building a Career in Partnerships: Advice From 7 Partner Leaders
- New Channel Partner Manager? Here’s How to Excel in 6 Ways
- What You Need to Launch a Channel Program
- 4 Universal Partnership Team Roles in High-Tech Channels
Or, if you’re about to embark on a partnerships role, let us be the first to introduce you to a tool that’s built to make your life easier.
Channeltivity is an out-of-the-box partner portal and PRM software with the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry. Our platform covers everything you need to manage the partner lifecycle — from planning to recruiting to onboarding to successful activation and ongoing management.
Want to experience it for yourself? Schedule a demo with our team today.
What Makes a Great Channel Partner