How to pitch a partnership to a CRO: An interview with Asher Matthew, founder of Partnership Leaders
How to pitch a partnership to a CRO: An interview with Asher Matthew, founder of Partnership Leaders
R is for Repeatability
Partnerships can be a great way to accelerate growth. However, most biz dev folks approach them completely wrong.
The most common mistakes in pitching partnerships:
Not doing your research to understand your prospective partner’s ideal customer profile, the pain points they solve for their customers and their existing processes and workflows for prospecting, closing, onboarding and managing their customers. As with any sales role, research is a pre-requisite for effective outreach.
Generating one-off ideas that sound exciting and seemingly have high potential but are not aligned to both parties’ existing strategies and therefore require resources to be diverted away from responding to the needs of existing customers. The “R” in “CRO” stands for “Repeatability” as much as it does for “Revenue”, as the CRO’s job is to build a repeatable set of processes that result in revenue, so as a biz dev person you need to figure which existing processes you are going to improve and how.
Over-optimism that co-marketing and co-selling will drive results when nobody is asking your prospective partner for the solutions that you provide. Most sales teams struggle to sell their own product effectively, so trying to get them to sell a third party’s product (i.e. yours) is unrealistic unless their customers are already asking for it and all they have to do is add it to an order form.
I recently sat down with Asher Matthew, cofounder of Partnership Leaders and VP GTM at Demandbase to discuss:
The root cause of these issues being the amorphous nature of business development roles and the resulting lack of clarity in setting goals.
How to overcome these issues by taking best practices for enterprise sales and adapting them for partnerships.
Examples of successful partnerships from Guideline/Gusto to Avalara/Netsuite and breaking down why they worked.
Our podcast is up on YouTube on the Partnership Leaders channel. Give it a listen and let us know what you think!
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