How to setup your program for teams who do not have a dedicated partner manager

This came about from a discussion I had with a team who has 230 agency-partner applications, 5 core agencies as partners, a CMO leading the strategy, and wanting to formalize a trategy, test it, then onboard a partner manager and enable them to scale it.

Here is the strategy for launching your partner program WITHOUT hiring a head of partnerships:

Step #1 - find agencies who are already administrator users:

1. First, look into your CRM for any user accounts with more than the median number of admins.
2. Pull out those accounts and find emails of users who are not at that org.
3. Try and find a few consultants/agencies amongst those admins.
4. Reach out to them for a call to find out their association and services.

Step #2 - determine your two partner types:

1. Meet with the team to define co-marketing / co-selling persona, and an implementation / service provider persona.
2. Look into the list of your partner applicants and try to put them into one of those buckets.
3. The litmus test to be in the co-selling bucket is if they have similar client logos.
4. The litmus test to be in the implementation partner bucket is if they sell a service that can be supported by your solution.
5. Form an onboarding process for each bucket.
6. Those just in co-marketing / co-selling will onboard with marketing/sales - and those conversations will be purely content creation and account mapping.
7. Those in the implementation partner bucket will be onboarded through product and be given product incentives (discounts possibly, a sandbox account, sales assets...)
8. Get the team aligned on this strategy and SOPs.
9. Create a partner-sourced content calendar.
10. Set a date and choose a third party to launch your implementation partner directory.
11. Create your assets folder (notion, airtable, Google Drive).
12. Create two calendar events - one for each persona.
13. Start inviting both persona's to calls.
14. Put them onto tracks and instead of thinking of it as they will have one POC internally, think of it as they will have a POC for co-marketing and receive those offers as they come out over email. Then they will have a customer success POC for their client needs. And finally, a sales POC to account map and introduce.

Step #3 - create the monthly routines:

1. The partner newsletter with co-marketing opportunities + highlighting published co-marketing + big wins that happened through co-selling + new sales enablement resources available.
2. Schedule monthly stand-ups with your active co-selling and co-marketing partners with the POCs on sales/marketing.
3. Schedule one product webinar a month for partners only - to come and ask product questions. This will be the next step in onboarding for all implementation partners.  

* Note: I suggest tasking one CS person with partnerships-related calls and creating a calendar event / URL that has the words /partnerships-success in it so they know when partners book.
* Same thing for sales - pull one salesperson into the co-selling process to test it a few times to get it right before you add more and break it up by vertical or geo.

Relevant resources:

The Partner Tracks template - for pitching your program at lunch/learns. Reveal - the co-selling solution we recommend to co-sell with agencies. The Collective workshops - for learning partner sales and marketing.

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