What are the best data and analytics tools for making partnership decisions?

Crossbeam & Reveal! Both are extremely powerful tools to identify overlaps with partners, which are a very powerful indication of a partnership's potential.

Identifying potential partners is more complex than identifying potential clients. In sales, you must identify customers who use or consume your product. You solve their pain and give value in exchange for money (= transaction). In partnerships, you must identify partners willing to include your product in their portfolio (= collaboration). Money transfer between the partners is not always the case. A strategic and operational fit between partners is needed. You must analyze and understand your and your partner's business model well to identify opportunities. I do not know a tool that does this precisely and on scale today. However, tools like Crossbeam, Reveal, and PartnerOptimizer are really close to solving that issue

La piste de départ est d'identifier le challenge que vous cherchez à adresser. En ayant une mission claire, il vous sera plus simple d'aller chercher des partenaires dans votre domaine aussi bien que dans des domaines insoup?onnés qui pourtant répondent à la même demande, sans pour autant vous faire concurrence

Instead of SWOT and SMART goals, I recommend you create a detailed Ideal Partner Profile, including the firmographics and persona. Your ideal partner is a company with a "partnership-capable person" working for it in a position of power required to execute and sustain the partnership. To qualify: 1. The PARTNER OPPORTUNITY: check for a cultural fit, added value (1+1=3+) for your customers, the presence of executive sponsorship, and that your objectives are aligned in the long-term. 2. The CHANNEL PARTNER: check that your partner has a suitable customer base, has the credibility to sell your product, is capable (e.g., qualified staff, infrastructure), and has sufficient commitment to execute continuously after the onboarding.

Literally anything you can do to drive contracting through your CRM and into Legal systems with templates and automation will reduce account manager admin time, standardize your process and terms in structured ways your systems can work with and report on, and will accelerate your time to market with new partners. To that end, the tools themselves are less important than the ease of use and agency they provide your teams to manage their own work.

If you can get your CRM to effectively track your partner performance as impact on Direct sales rhythms you'll be way out front of lots of companies. Think filters for Partner and Partner Program that live on your core metric reports for Closed/Won rates, velocity, time-in-stage, Avg Deal Size, Customer Satisfaction, Total Lifetime Value, etc. The goal is to see how partners impact those metrics (they generally will improve things) and begin to understand what makes a partners successful. Metrics are two way in today's world - how partners perform and how you support their efforts.

Everyone wants to solve the attribution problem but often don't realize that attribution is an extension of account and program management. It's common for companies to skip over those details and processes until it's time to track attribution, at which point the systematic updates tend to fall short and focus only on attachment methods for leads and opportunities. Suddenly partner teams are being asked to update deals in a system that's not at all equipped for their day to day work efforts. When PartnerOps shows up it's an effort to get all this caught up, connect the dots, fill in the middle, and prepare the organization to scale. If you start with accounts and program structures you'll save that future hire a lot of time.