There's been a lot of discussion around the "Flywheel" effect of ecosystems and partnerships, but I haven't actually seen a visual on this to illustrate what it would look like.
Here's a visual I put together for you:
This is anchored around these key phases:
1. In the prospect phase, you want to start by giving value. This build trust and gives the partner confidence to move forward with you.
There are numerous company case studies that are public around this including:
-Salesforce ($297B valuation) leads in many cases with their consulting partners to drive successful customer implementations. (I know this well as I was a SFDC PRM customer multiple times and they always recommended a partner!)
And yes, I know they did $600M in professional services revenue, but considering they also did $7.79 billion in quarterly subscription revenue, where do you think a lot of the other services opportunity went?
Yup, you guessed it. Partners.
-ServiceNow ($158B valuation), Atlassian ($50B) and Hubspot ($31B) are other great public case studies as they have a robust ecosystem of consulting and implementation partners that is well documented.
Here's one way you can do this at your company: identify key segments of the market and/or professional services capabilities you cannot or do not want to deliver on and instead route those opportunities to your partners.
By the way - you could also do this with resellers! For example, Cisco ($200B) and VMware ($61B) were both reseller led for 80%+ of their business, and this lead to a massive GTM partner ecosystem that drove the business with them. I know this well as I worked at both companies.
So again, give first and that'll lead you into phase two...
2. In the partner market fit phase, you want to validate as quickly as possible that the partnership will be successful, and this is driven by customer wins together.
3. In the strategic phase, you want to accelerate that partnership with focus and proper resource allocation. One of the best ways to ensure you get executive alignment and buy in to allocate resources is to leverage this Partner Strategy template I built for you as well. I've personally used it for CxO and board meetings at unicorns+decacorns over the 17 years and it's been a game changer.
