The roadmap for successful modern SaaS partnerships with Nelson Wang

The customer-led route to building a successful partner ecosystem

The 30% year-on-year growth reported by the SaaS industry in 2024 hasn’t been in isolation. With the partner ecosystem contributing upwards of 38% of the overall revenue, and influencing more, it has emerged as a significant growth lever for SaaS. As new partnership models take shape in response to shifting buyer demographics, pre existing ones are also recalibrating to encompass new routes-to-market like Cloud GTM. 

In a prior conversation with Jay Mcbain,Chief Analyst at Canalys, he noted that customers today have the involvement of at least 7 layers of partners in their buying journey, because they aren’t looking for a product – they’re looking for a singular solution to a business problem. Therefore, it’s imperative that an ISV’s partner relationship strategy is derived from the customer journey. This is something that Nelson Wang also echoes as the basis for a strong, sustainable, ISV partner program. 

Nelson recommends that partner leaders assimilate the experiences of key enterprise customers first-hand to understand their challenges and determine the right partner fit to get them to their goals. Working backwards from the customer journey also helps you understand which partner types to prioritize based on the business impact that they are likely to have on customers, and therefore, on you. Parallely, it is also important to qualitatively study and diagnose variances in key growth metrics across customer cohorts, to understand they can be bridged by partner solutions.

“You might look at a customer cohort with no integrations built out versus one set of customers that does have an integration built out. And you might notice a huge lift in net retention and ARR growth when that integration is actually activated or maybe a growth in like weekly active users as an example. “

With the broad strategy in place, Nelson shares his “4Cs” framework for evaluating the right fit partners from a pool of millions -

Capability : Add-ons in terms of integrations a partner might be able to offer, workflows they unlock, complementary services they provide, or the ability to drive procurement through contractual vehicles they own

Capacity : Resources in terms of delivery bench, consultants or GTM field teams

Commitment : How "in it" the partner is to create and act on a joint vision, beginning with executive-level alignment, the dedication of delivery and GTM resources, and the willingness to set up joint cadences to enforce (two-sided) accountability

Customer: Target customer overlap by key demographics or segments, the most important areas of overlap being customer vertical or economic buyer, to ensure that there is value in the coming together of the two offerings

Underscoring the importance of the right enablement mechanism for GTM and partner teams

In a Gartner survey of sales leaders and practitioners, a whopping 82% of respondents expressed the need for enablement content/delivery to change in order for the sales team to meet GTM revenue goals. Often, the blind spot is in the area of partner enablement – their strengths, area of expertises, book of business – and how they could add value to ongoing prospect conversations or deal cycles.  The onus on getting this information and percolating it down to the GTM org lies on the partner leader. In parallel, it is equally important for the partner leader to enable the partners on how to maximize their impact on joint pitches and deal conversations as well. 

To build these resources, Nelson believes that there’s no substitute for active, on-the-ground experience. He recommends that as the function is being built, the partnership leader should attend joint calls with the end customers, to see what language, value proposition or cadence is working and what needs to be iterated upon. In his experience with enterprise customers in particular, Nelson noted a few specific expectations that emerge on such calls, that should inform any training and enablement program built subsequently - 

1. Customers expect personalization: Do you already know about the challenges that the customers are experiencing? Ideally, you will need to have that teed up in advance, so you enter the call with context and you are not seeking discovery in that very first interaction while you pitch and position services. 
2. Customers need to be convinced that partners are up to the task: When they want to look at engaging a partner on a deal, customers will expect information on how many times that partner worked on their specific use case, economic buyer or vertical previously to determine what value they bring to the table.

Having this perspective can prove invaluable to sales teams, as they tailor their pitches to preempt questions and provide genuinely valuable and fresh information.

“What I found is when you get into the weeds and you actually do the mechanics and go through that motion with the customer, then that allows you to be able to build great enablement.” 

However, it obviously isn’t sustainable for a partnership leader to make it to every call – especially as the motion scales. The need for direct leader-level involvement and the call to divest these activities into the hands of the partner team depends on the kind of partnership and the level of involvement customers expect. 

Once the insights have been gathered through these calls, the delivery mechanism to transmit this information to internal and partner GTM teams can take two routes, each depending on the need and maturity of the engine in motion. 

When you’ve decided to go all in with your partners, it is incumbent on you to try to facilitate their readiness as much as possible so long as the quality does not degrade. If you're able to certify your partners and have them meet a high quality bar based on the rigorous requirements you set, you’ll be able to set an enablement engine in motion that doesn’t always need you in the driver’s seat - if you have the right systems and processes in place. 

“Often what I've found is if you don't have the right systems, you'll need a lot of that manual high touch to be able to make the motion successful. So a big part of this also is thinking about platforms and systems that allow you to remove the human element in those engagements to be able to go scale it out.”

Establishing a best-fit partnership model

Determining the right partnership model for your business begins with your company goals. Nelson’s approach is to determine the businesses’ top priorities and then identify where, from among the various partner types, each can make an impact on those to prioritize those partnership models. Being informed by qualitative and quantitative impact is key, however it might be hard to actually find enough data at the start of the motion. 

“You've got to do the best you can to gather all that information and then go have a point of view and to go make a bet. And then what you can do is you can write business memos on those prioritized partner types that you want to go make the investment in.”

From here, Nelson recommends the Amazon way of doing business - write about what you want to accomplish, why, and what you'll need to get there - in the form of a business memo.  

When you send this memo out in advance to the exec responsible for signing off on it, you'll have a sharper focus on where it stands when you present it. When your executive conversation does take place, you’ll be able to get directly to the crux of where this whole motion stacks up against other company priorities and get to a decision much faster. 

When it comes to determining the right timelines, you need to factor in your company’s growth/maturity stage.

The partnership metrics that matter 

Presenting key success metrics is the strongest way for partnership leaders to showcase value and impact. However, Nelson offered some added perspective during our conversation – not all data has the same degree of relevance for everyone in the org. When you take a macro view at all the GTM teams the partner leader needs to align with, your list will include sales, customer success, professional services (if that's a part of your business), marketing, product, finance, and operations among others.

And while you are responsible for tracking and presenting KPIs against overall organizational goals, you're more likely to get this cross-functional buy-in by tailoring the metrics you present to each functional leader.  While there are sure to be overlaps, each function will have their own success barometers and performance data indicators. When you measure and present partnership influenced numbers against those, you will have everyone's interest.

For the Sales leader, who are the key custodians of the customer relationships, metrics like ARR, net retention, win rate, ACV, average selling price, and sales cycle length would be particularly impactful in determining the efficacy of a partner motion. For the customer success team, in addition to net and gross retention, satisfaction survey scores like CSAT or NPS for partnership influenced deals are key metrics to track. 

Ultimately, having a single pane of glass visibility into your marketplace operations is essential not just for you as the leader to track its impact, but also for all other internal stakeholders to visualize theirs.