Partnering with companies like SAP, Salesforce, and other "Strategic Partners"

Fresh from the desk..Sharing my thoughts and learnings from- What I have learned about Partnering with companies like SAP, Salesforce, and other "Strategic Partners"

“#StrategicPartnership” is one of the most casually overused buzz phrases in the saas industry today. Many companies proudly describe and list their long rosters of strategic partners on their websites. Yet the true value derived (by each partner and their shared customers) from the minority of alliances that really deserve to be labeled strategic is much harder to achieve.

While building and running partnerships for years I have worked with various kinds of partners, of all shapes and forms across 40+ countries.

Among the other top allies who really moved the dial positively and have really helped scale the show to the next level are Salesforce and SAP with their deeply penetrated global AE network and a vey well defined Partner Program. The message that these companies deliver, resonates best with their partners, sales teams across levels(internal and external) focuses on how the partner will do one or more of the following...

-Source?a lead

-Enlarge?the deal (as measured in Annual Recurring Revenue)

-Accelerate?the deal progress to closure

-De-risk?the deal competitively

-Just about every other message is noise -- at least to the sales team -- understandably and justifiably so.

The partners who struggle to earn and sustain attention and engagement with these companies were those who approach the AE's directly with their hands out asking for leads and customer introductions, with little of any incremental value-added.?

Few Tips of the Trade >

$ Pay to Play:

Achieving and maintaining preferred status in a vibrant partner ecosystem requires sustaining and growing revenue and, therefore, contributing to this companies' revenue growth. A truly strategic partnership doesn’t remain so unless each partner is making meaningful money from it. The investment in building an app on these platforms to market to customers in the ecosystem can be a very expensive bet-your-business decision. When deciding if investing in a #strategicpartnership with Salesforce or SAP or others for that matter makes sense for your organization, these criteria can lead to a good selection:

1. Does the ecosystem represent the best fit for your solution?

2. Is the total addressable market (TAM) for your solution well represented in their ecosystem?

3. Are there competitive offerings built on the same platform?

4. Do the vertical industries on which you’re focused complement them?

5. How receptive will the customers and their sales team be to your value-add?

It might appear tempting to hedge your bet by investing in multiple large platform partnerships. But trying to build on two partner platforms concurrently will expose how?difficult and expensive it is to play proactively in two or more ecosystems.?The incremental effort is not just reflected in engineering time, money and sweat equity building and evolving in parallel on two disparate platforms.

$ Dating Other People:

Partnerships are rarely exclusive. These companies will partner with several players in a particular category, all of whom can have significant success in the ecosystem given the large size and fast growth rate of the total addressable market.?

Don't sit home waiting for the phone to ring.?Just because you've established a "strategic partnership" with Salesforce doesn't mean they'll start showering leads upon you.?It typically only means you've established an entry-level credential in the campaign to get their sales and alliances teams and prospects and customers to return your calls and invest time in understanding the relevance of your value proposition

$Place Your Bets:

Since very few partners among #SI’s and #ISV’s can afford to go all-in by saying “yes” to every event sponsorship opportunity, the rest of the partner community must make judicious decisions on where to invest precious time & money.?This can be based on the partner’s focus by industry, solution category and/or geography.?

$Be an Expert:

Partners who are perceived as relevant in the ecosystem are usually those who have a specific targeted use case, persona, industry, cloud solution, or a specific module integration. This focused identity facilitates more meaningful connections that are easier to establish with the Salesforce or SAP team.?This enables and even requires narrow focus as opposed to trying to cast an impossibly wide net across the entire global go-to-market organization.?When operating in a domain of differentiated vertical or horizontal capabilities and expertise, you’ll also encounter less competition.

$$$ The Payoff:

What’s the pot of gold over this rainbow??The reflex answer often points to the high rate of acquisitions of ISV’s and SI’s by the large platform ecosystem players. And, in fact, the employees, customers, and shareholders of acquired ISV’s such as Quip (Salesforce), CleverSafe (IBM), Success Factors (SAP), NetSuite (Oracle) and SI’s including Cloud Sherpas and Tequila (Accenture) would testify to positive outcomes.