Hiring Exceptional Partnerships Talent: A Guest Post from Nancy Mottice

Guest author: Nancy Mottice, former Head of GTM Partnerships at Clay. Introduction and closing by Nelson Wang.

The core idea

Match your partnerships hire to the maturity of your partner motion. For early teams, Nancy prioritizes learning potential, ownership, critical thinking, and product passion over a previous partnerships title.

Hey Partner Leaders,

I get asked about hiring more than almost anything else. Who should my first partnerships hire be?  How should the interview process go?  What does “great” look like for specific roles?

So this week I’m handing the mic to Nancy Mottice, former Head of Partnerships at Clay. Nancy’s results speak for themselves:

• Took partner-sourced revenue from zero to 17% of sales-led ARR in 18 months

• Doubled partner-sourced pipeline quarter over quarter, landing at 118% to goal

• Landed Fortune 500 logos alongside partners

• Worked with over a dozen PE teams to advance AI GTM maturity across their portfolios

• Cut partner ramp time in half with dynamic, personalized enablement curricula

What makes her story even more interesting is the team behind those numbers. Nancy hired her first three team members from outside of partnerships entirely, and it worked.

Here’s how she thinks about it, in her own words.

Nelson

The best partnerships hire for your team depends on one thing more than anything else: how mature your partner motion is today.

When I started building the team, we were early. We had a beloved PLG business, and were finding our foray into Enterprise for the very first time. There was no partner playbook. There was a blank page, a product people loved, and a lot of unanswered questions. That shaped every hiring decision I made.

Principle #1: Hire for the Maturity of Your Motion

None of my first three hires came from a partnerships background.

That was a deliberate choice. At the 0 to 1 stage, the job looks a lot like a founder’s job. You are figuring out which partners matter, why they should care, and what a good partnership even looks like for each other’s businesses.

So I looked for profiles that matched where we actually were. I optimized for a combination of three things:

1 Grit. A real hunger to build something from 0 to 1, plus the intellectual honesty to look at what isn’t working and iterate.

2 Passion for the product. This one is huge for credibility. Partners can tell when you actually love what you sell. It also makes it far easier to teach partners the “why” behind the product and the technical know-how that come with it.

3 Communication. Partnerships people sell all day long. They sell externally to partners. They sell internally to sales, product, marketing and leadership. If you can’t communicate – and quickly shift your talking points from new VP of Sales to the marketing agency founder in the next meeting – you can’t do this job.

If your motion is more mature, your profile will look different. The point is to be honest about what stage you are in and hire for that stage.

Principle #2: Hire for Slope

Where someone is today matters less to me than how fast they are climbing.

A candidate with a steep learning curve will outgrow a candidate with a great resume but flat trajectory over the years. Look for people who have picked up new skills quickly, taken on scope before they were “ready,” and gotten better every time they got feedback.

Principle #3: Hire for an Ownership Mindset

Early partnerships work has no clear lines and the best are able to navigate a lot of ambiguity. Nobody hands you a territory or a quota that makes sense yet.  You’ve got to figure it out.  It’s just like starting your own business from scratch.

You need people who treat the outcome like it’s theirs. They see a gap and fill it. They don’t wait for permission to fix a broken process or chase down a partner who went quiet. Look for candidates who have spearheaded a personal project, business, or new initiative at their company (in a big way!) and can speak to the successes and failures in their entirety.

Principle #4: Hire Critical Thinkers With a Bias Toward Action

These two traits have to come together.

Critical thinking on its own leads to beautiful strategy docs that never ship. Action on its own leads to a lot of motion with no direction. The people I want can break a messy problem down, form a point of view quickly, and then go test it in the real world.

Principle #5: Hire People With a Deep Passion for the Product

Your partners are going to learn your product through your team. They need to speak to and sell your product as well as – and sometimes better than! – your own sellers.  If your team is excited about it, that energy carries into every enablement session, every joint pitch and every conversation with a partner’s customer. If they aren’t, partners feel that too.

If you want partners to be confident in your platform, your team needs to be too.

So ask yourself:

Can they nail an incredible demo?

Can they talk about the product with a customer-centric view?

Can they explain the business outcomes the platform can drive?

Principle #6: Interview Like a Founder

Early on, my interview questions were pretty much the same ones a founder asks when finding their first hires.

I leaned heavily on behavioral questions and on how candidates showed their values. These were far more generalist questions than a typical partnerships interview loop. Three of my favorites:

• “What types of problems are you most excited to solve?” This tells you whether someone gets energy from ambiguity or from structure. Both are fine. You just need to know which one you are hiring for as you think about team composition.

• “What’s the most difficult piece of feedback you’ve had to receive? How did you respond, and what did you do about it?” This is where genuine self-awareness and reflection  shows up. The best answers include a real change in behavior afterward.

• “Tell me about a time you took on a project outside your job description. How did the situation arise? What did you do?” This is a real peek into a candidate’s ownership mindset. You also learn a lot about what makes them tick, where they bumped into interpersonal challenges, and how they think about diagnosing problems and affecting change.

You can teach someone how a referral program works, or how to structure a partner agreement. It’s much harder to teach someone to own a problem or to take tough feedback well. So that’s where I spent my time in interviews.

Principle #7: Sell Them on Partnerships

Here’s something people forget. The interview runs both ways.

Every one of my early hires was evaluating other roles at the same time. Most of them had never once thought about a career in partnerships. So I used the interview process to show them why partnerships is THE place to be, and why it’s far more exciting than they assumed.

The key was figuring out what motivated each person and anchoring the pitch there.  Let me give you real examples.

For the builder. This type of persona loves a blank canvas and tons of greenfield to launch with.  For this person, I focused on the complexity they would get to wrangle and the chance to pave completely new channels for the business. I anchored on the swath of new assets, complex workflows, and tooling that needed to be built – touching on everything from referral flows across a diversified partner base to automated partner-to-customer matching engines. These are the people who got excited about building a system to elegantly solve referral payouts, or developing new bespoke relationships the company has never had before.

For the grower. Another hire is motivated by personal growth and building their toolkit for the future. With this person, if they were coming from a sales background and were interested in partnerships, I would anchor on why 1:many is far more interesting than traditional 1:1 selling. In partnerships, you develop more leadership opportunities and much more nuanced relationship building skills, because you are influencing people who don’t report to you and don’t have to listen to you.

The same role can be the perfect job for very different people. Your job as the hiring manager is to connect the role to what each person cares about most.

Putting It All Together

Hiring exceptional partnerships talent comes down to a few principles:

1 Hire for the maturity of your motion.

2 Hire for slope.

3 Hire for an ownership mindset.

4 Hire critical thinkers with a bias toward action.

5 Hire people with a deep passion for the product.

6 Interview like a founder.

7 Sell every candidate on why partnerships is the place to be.

Some of the best partnerships people you will ever hire have never held a partnerships title. Your job is to spot them, and then show them what this career can be.

Nancy

Thank you, Nancy, for sharing this with the community.

If you’re building up your partnerships team and want help thinking through who to hire and finding top talent, book a time here:

Book a partnerships hiring consultation

Cheers,

Nelson Wang

Founder, PartnerOS

Hire top partnerships talent with PartnerOS