10 skills a partnerships manager should have to be successful.

1. Communication and listening skills

As the primary liaison between your company and your partners, your partner manager should have excellent active listening skills and be able to convey what your company brings to the table effectively. On the other side, listening to and understanding partners’ needs and how they fit with your company's offerings is key to success and can create long-lasting opportunities.

Being a good communicator means having strong verbal communication skills and using non-verbal and visual communication, written communication and contextual communication. These skills collectively help create a better experience with partners. Also, since partner account managers will frequently liaise with other internal stakeholders (marketing, finance, leadership, etc.) they should be able to apply those sharp communication skills internally, too.

2. Masterful relationship-building and relationship management

Partner account managers do more than help recruit and onboard partners. As the title suggests, they also manage partner relationships. Building trust and reliability goes a long way in ensuring partners feel comfortable working with your company. You want a candidate who can create those positive, long-lasting relationships built on respect, support and appreciation. Please be sure to look for someone who excels in relationship management.

3. Sharp problem-solving and decision-making skills

Partnerships managers deal with a network of external partners, each with their own set of priorities. A core tenet of the role is helping others navigate their own goals, and in the process of enabling everyone else to meet their revenue targets and reach new audiences, partnership managers continually have to enable their partners to sell and keep the interests of their own company in mind. Conflicts, problems and roadblocks will come up, and the best partnership managers are adept at resolving them.?

Identifying and rectifying potential problems is a required skill to keep both sides of a partnership happy and feeling valued. Whether that means working with other departments to find solutions or collaborating with your network partners to find a win-win, the ability to identify problems, come up with solid solutions and make quick but educated decisions is invaluable in this role.

4. Excellent time and project management

Partner account management is often a one-person job, especially at the start. When the whole program depends on one person, it becomes essential to manage time well. Not only that, but the aforementioned network of partners will all be relying on this person. Being organized, knowing when to follow up or check in and setting enough time aside to efficiently complete all tasks also go a long way when it comes to hitting deadlines and building trust with partners.

Planning, prioritizing, setting boundaries and knowing when to say no are all great examples of practical time management skills.

5. Strategic thinking and innovation

Whether you’re looking to stand out to new potential partnerships or want to entice people to work with you, having an innovative partner account manager who can think strategically and long-term is an asset, especially given the fast-changing pace of the industry. Being able to identify new beneficial initiatives and pursue them can have a significant effect on how quickly you grow in your company’s strategic direction.

The nature of the industry lends itself to strategic innovation. It’s all about new connections, growing ecosystems, diversifying revenue streams and finding new ways to sell products and services. Those leading the charge must be nimble and strategy-driven.

6. Foundational sales skills

There is a reason partnerships are often nested under the sales function: to entice a potential partner to buy into the value of your product is essentially sales. While partnership managers don’t have to be salespeople, they should have the salesperson’s ability to speak to the value of the product and convincingly join their partnership program.?

7. Cross-functional collaboration

Remember when we mentioned liaising with other departments? Partner account managers don’t just work with ecosystem partners, they also work with other departments to launch effective partnerships and GTM?business strategies. They’ll need to work closely with sales, marketing and finance, among others. In that sense, having a collaborative spirit and being willing to work with the team is critical and will lead to better long-term success.

8. The ability to prioritize

When it comes to partnerships, there are a lot of balls in the air at any given time. Partner account managers seek out and nurture new partnerships, manage ongoing partnerships and report to your company, which means they have a lot on their plates at any time. If they want to take the lead and achieve success in these tasks, managing multiple ongoing projects, meeting numerous daily deadlines, handling distractions and prioritizing and organizing tasks are essential components of practical prioritization skills (and the use of automation to get back time helps, too).

9. Technical prowess

Partner account managers will need a basic level of technical know-how to set up their management software, upload and distribute educational documents, manage an LMS, set up trigger emails and show partners how to navigate their portals. Partnership managers will also likely use CRM software and other basic programs like Excel, so they should be able to pick up new SaaS tech quickly, plus be able to understand their partners' technology and how it can integrate with their own.

10. Product knowledge

While partner account managers don’t need to be versed in the minutiae of the product, they should be able to speak to its main value propositions and functions. Ideally, they’re comfortable enough to convey its value to prospects and educate on its main features to partners, but they have the support of a product team to tackle more in-depth queries.?