How do you balance the quality and quantity of your partner activities and outcomes?

Actually, I disagree. Rather, co-create the goals & metrics with partners, clients, & stakeholders. Here is how I try to balance quality & quantity while leveraging co-creation in strategic partnerships. 1. Adopt a co-creative approach, where each party contributes its unique skills, knowledge, & resources to achieve the desired outcome - customer delight. 2. Prioritize projects and initiatives that create shared value for all parties involved. 3. Be prepared to adapt & adjust strategies as needed to respond to changing market conditions, partner needs, & other factors. 4. Build trust & nurture long-term relationships with partners. With a co-creative mindset and focusing on shared value creation, we can achieve better outcomes.

I meet with partners weekly, interviewing new ones and catching up with existing ones on open opportunities. I plan time each week just as I do with customers.

Strategic partnerships are an essential part of business growth, the rationale for each may differ based on what each party can bring to the table. From accessing new markets and widening reach, to improving retention, building trust or innovating. Due to the variety and complexity of partnerships, I have always opted for building the relationships on trust and openness, collaborating from the outset to define metrics and goals. By the very nature of these relationships, communication is key, which provides ongoing opportunities to informally check in to ensure each party feels they are getting the expected value from the relationship. As with any relationship, adjustment, compromise and communication are crucial to building value.

I would suggest to implement these strategies for successful partnerships: 1. Set Clear Goals. 2. Prioritize Partners. 3. Tailor Programs. 4. Monitor Progress. 5. Foster Communication. 6. Collaborate in Planning. 7. Encourage Feedback. 8. Offer Incentives. 9. Allocate Resources. 10. Stay Adaptable. 11. Measure and Report. 12. Conduct Regular Reviews. 13. Manage Risks. These steps ensure partnership success.

Define Qualitative and Quantitative goals for you and your partners. As a good practice, also involve your partners to define their goals and compare the goals to understand the synergies and divergence. Try and address the divergence. It can be possible that certain goals are unique for your resp. partner, and needs to be respected. This is perfectly ok, as long as it does not create a major conflict with your brand or business positioning. If synergies are more than divergence, you have more scope to go deeper with the partnership for mutual success.

Leading global partner marketing strategies, most often I have seen that companies focus only on lead generation activities and that does not bring good results. Why? Because you have to look at your sales funnel, market across each touch point of the mutual customer journey vs. doing a bunch of co-marketing activities like email marketing, webinars, creating landing pages etc. Ask why are we doing what we are doing. Which channels have been the most successful on both sides? Answer how are you making your mutual customers aware of your co-branding, value proposition, benefits of your solution, then, how would you make them consider your solution for their problem and how will you convert those hand raisers into leads.

Creating the ideal ecosystem should begin with the customer's perspective. Consider what support and surrounding services your customers want for your offering. The key metric here, is "are we showing up with what our customers need?" For instance, if you're a software vendor, do your customers need implementation assistance, best practices advisory, or a full transformation program? Will they host your solution on the cloud? Will they purchase it through a reseller or a consulting partner private offer (CPPO)? Answering these questions will help identify the partner elements necessary for your ecosystem.

A key requirement to understand is - How do you actually measure the value and impact creation from the partnership. I propose a quantitive and qualitative grid for mapping the value and impact created. The benchmarks could be many - brand visibility, creating raving fans, market penetration, social welfare awareness etc.

Once everyones expectations of the partnership has been established and agreed, I have always found that when I then overdeliver on my part (whether that is on quality and/or quantity), which I always try to do as a goodwill gesture - that is then (nearly) always reciprocated as well. This leads to both sides gaining trust and enjoying the partnership more, leading to a much more fruitful partnership in the long term, which is then also benefiting our customers. So it's a win-win-win.

The qualitative impact is very important when you talk about Strategic Partnerships. I use a system of rating (from a scale of 1 to 10, 10 can be the highest rating) for understanding the qualitative feedback on a number of things. Some of the key impact factors to consider: > Relevance of the partnership / offers to the current needs of the target audience > Real Savings for the customer > How has brand visibility increased for the partners? > What is the effective use and reach of marketing channels used? > what is the volume of cross selling and upselling happening that is driving brand revenue etc.

A critical metric to track, specifically with Integrated Partners, is the customer value. Tracking the impact of the integration, on customer workflows and outcomes will help in two ways. 1. Provides meaningful examples of how other customers in both partner's base can benefit from the partnership, and by extension, all prospects in the market. 2. Provides a playbook for other partnerships with similar companies, who offer similar solutions to your customer base. Giving you great examples to expand the partner roster in your app marketplace.

In addition to the balanced scorecard approach, you can also measure > the LTV - Customer Life Time Value enhancement > ATV - Average transaction value - are your customers spending more per transaction with you? > Cross Selling & Upselling Tracking - Sell more across your portfolio > Brand Recall > Referral Score - Are your customers referring you to new customers ? This will help to align the structure of your value propositions, campaigns and the overall progress of the partnership for mutual success.

I would add the following metrics also: Business stability Innovation - how to create a new combination Cultural fit - how can you align with cultures of different stakeholders, internal and external. Social extension - how do you fit into the social fabric of the target market.

Analyze the data to : >Read the trends and patterns which will help in preparing for future > Track the progress on your key metrics and objectives > Verify if all the info captured is relevant to what you want to manage so you are not swamped with excessive data and can focus on the core info for best results.

There is no better way to accelerate a partnership than celebrating and socializing wins. When working alongside partner or internal sales teams, communicating these wins as well as the blueprint for how they came about is much more effective than repeated training sessions. Sales people like to see real world examples so they can use that same methodology with their own customers.

After analysis, repeat what worked well for both parties in order to 2-3x the impact, make a note for what did not go well and why. Discuss and test other alternative strategies that might work well next time and repeat.

Strategies that worked in my practice: - Monthly partner spotlight sessions - Joint case study development - Quarterly success celebrations - Regular executive showcase events Impact: 80% increase in partner engagement through systematic recognition.