Digital disruption is driving constant innovation to drive growth, expansion, and customer experience. Partner ecosystems have become more critical than ever to navigate these challenges and provide more agility, responsiveness, and scale to organizations. Sharing here my opinion of 3 most important principles for building a thriving partner ecosystem:
Build a shared vision: Creating a vision, a strategic pillar to build a partner ecosystem. It is important to factor the nuances of a partner's business and build a strategy on how they can make them successful instead of crafting a strategy on how can one (OEM ) can be successful through partners. This is quite a shift in building the ecosystem framework. This alignment and participation of partners while building a vision brings in their skin in the game, makes markets and unlocks new growth avenues.
Redefine Tiers: As the ecosystem grows, it is vital for every SaaS organization to segment partners on the basis of their business contribution and shift focus to grow them. Revenue based tiering is dated in today’s dynamic world, and it must be looked through various complimentary lens such as community competency, and skill building – ensuring best in class customer delivery and product co-creation. Community and talent ecosystem - product evangelisation and help create a talent pool for tech adoption and bottom-up technology democratization.
Own it as your own Team – Easier said than done. It is an important thought process that can make a huge difference to driving ecosystem ownership and loyalty. Enable partners with the right resources, treat their teams and people as your own and empower them to drive business outcomes. Inclusion of partner business teams in planning to execution to cadence to measurement to recognition can create a culture of accountability and joint success.
To Sum Up
In nutshell, developing a successful partner ecosystem is a strategic pillar for your organization’s durable growth and scale. Culture of belongingness, compassion and learning are the core differentiators to create a sustainable and agile partner ecosystem.
