Shifting the Partnerships Perspective: From Enablers to the Determinants of SaaS Sales

The balancing act between business growth and partner success

One of the Partnership leader’s most foundational responsibilities is to walk the tightrope of enabling partner success while ensuring that border organizational goals and functional targets are met. The key to progressing along this trajectory is to invest in partnerships as a key lever of the overall GTM strategy early in a business's life.

“Invest in partnerships as a GTM play no later than Series B to avoid the friction of building a new channel into an established DNA.”

Striking this balance is particularly challenging when your business units (professional services) have offerings that have direct competitive parity with those of your partners.

However, transparency and a commitment to delivering the greatest value to end customers will serve as the pillars of a strong partner association. Rohan’s own track record during his time at Zuora went from almost zero partner attachments and partner-sourced opportunities to 30% partner-sourced bookings in 3 years on the strength of this approach.

Operationalizing partnership efforts through top-level and cross-functional alignment

Education is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to building partnerships as a core GTM function from the ground up. As the partnership leader, it will be your responsibility to win C-level buy-in by educating them on the long-term impact and the path to getting there through an investment in the right resources. This has to then percolate from the top-down with leadership support.

For businesses that invest in partnership early, this process happens with much more seamlessness. In the podcast, Rohan shares how Pigment’s foresightedness allowed him to work across the org to build interconnectivity at the function’s nascency, and drive incremental results as it scaled. Batra advocates for the need for the partnership function to be heavily embedded with sales, deeply integrated with the product organization, aligned with marketing on attribution and co-marketing opportunities, and collaborative with BDRs on the joint messaging.

Partner leaders also need to have accountability for how success is defined and measured along the way in the form of KPIs or qualitative milestones. Rohan recommends an approach of constant communication throughout the org so that execs are aware of progress towards an end goal, or where struggles are.

Integrating partnerships into sales deal cycles

The partnership org has to define the strategy, qualify and onboard the right partners. For this undertaking, you will need to evaluate your product's maturity and capabilities, how easy it is to implement and how much market demand there is for it. Using these product and demand signals, you will be able to explore and evaluate the form of partnership that will help achieve your broader goals. This will allow you to make the call between technology, ISV, cloud marketplaces or SI partnerships. Or a mix of them all. Once this has been incorporated, the partnership team will need to enable the internal field teams on the partners’ strengths.

Because the magic happens when there is close interconnectivity between the sales organization and their conduits in the partnership team through open dialogue.

Rohan recommends sales reps to -

• Orient their prospect list based on demographic or other factors of commonality
• Bring the partnership team into the conversation to identify partners who could add most value to each specific cohort
• Work with counterparts on the partnership team to get the right introductions made at the partner orgs, and present a compelling joint value proposition to mutual prospects

Moving partnerships from a zero-sum game to a critical lever of revenue growth

Partnership is a multi-year journey and sales is a short term game, and that’s something that needs to be kept in mind while setting expectations. At the initiation of a partner relationship, partnership leaders will need to articulate the expectations over a multi-year period for mutual success.

That should inform also the requirements of how you structure your partner program - especially on how much you feed vs how much partners source in return. Rohan recommends having an open dialogue on leveraging specific expertise for combined success - for example, your company may have certain strengths in terms of outbounding or growth, a partner might have strengths in terms of industry or use case expertise. Find creative ways to combine the two for mutual benefits.

Branching into new partnership motions with cloud marketplaces

Branching into cloud marketplaces in a border strategic discussion that - once again - involves top and cross-functional discourse. There’s a reason why Cloud GTM has been dominating SaaS sales and procurement plays since the 2020s. However, the broader conversation on when to list on cloud marketplaces has to take place with an understanding of the product, market and most importantly the customers’ demand.

Like with any other revenue channel - and perhaps more so in this case - Cloud GTM will need a short and long-term roadmap, adequate resourcing in the form of partner ops and enablement, and most importantly clarity on timelines to achieve RoI. Align on how fast you want to move by resourcing adequately at the outset to build velocity. However, as Rohan says, the impact from Cloud GTM isn’t immediate and is something you need to build up to through the consistent routing of deals through this channel, and sustained efforts to create mutual value with the hyperscalers. The method to build value is by first leveraging cloud marketplaces as deal accelerators by tapping into the prospects’ cloud commit and eliminating the friction of having to procure an incremental budget for purchasing your company's software. Over time, you will be able to tap into the vast hyperscaler seller networks through co-sell.

Rohan also calls out the overlooked opportunity for customer success to speed up renewals and save time on follow ups by offloading that to the cloud vendor. Since your software is part of a larger cloud commit spend, it's also less likely to get rationalized as part of cost reduction efforts.

Before getting started with an evolving and innovation-driven GTM motion like cloud partnerships and marketplaces, it is important to – a) research and build knowledge, b) define clear ownership of each element of the roadmap, and c) operationalize your partnership with one or all three of the hyperscalers through the investment of internal engineering bandwidth or with the help of an industry-leading Cloud GTM automation platform like Clazar.