The last few years have been hard on SaaS companies. Budgets are tighter than ever. Employees are dealing with higher workloads after layoffs. And leadership is paying close attention to which departments generate ROI.
Despite these challenges, expectations inside organizations remain high. Teams are still responsible for hitting KPIs. Projects must hit deadlines. Customers still need support.
If you’re a technology partnership professional, you probably have it even worse than the average worker. Why? Because you have two extra obstacles to overcome.
1. Your organization hasn’t clearly defined how partnerships fit into the company’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
2. You have KPIs that require:
That was the bad news. But here’s the good news: partnership leaders can overcome these challenges!
Here are five strategies to demonstrate partnerships' value to the organization, even in difficult economic times.
You need to make other departments in your organization aware of the value of partnerships. Partnerships can positively impact sales, marketing, product, and customer-facing teams like account management and customer experience (CX).
That said, it’s not always clear to other departments what the partnership team does and how your work impacts the company.
You must keep other departments in your organization informed about new and upcoming tech partnerships and how they affect performance. Understand how each team is measured and their goals. That way, you can outline how your goals align with theirs.
Here are some actions you could take to better collaborate with different departments inside your organization:
Creating and running a solid partnership program is a group effort. It requires collaboration with other departments and cross-functional teams.
You need to create strong relationships with leaders in other departments. This way, they can act as your champions and support and advocate for you from inside their departments.
You need to present a compelling business case to secure internal support.
List the specific benefits you’ve already achieved and show how they tie back to your organization's strategic goals. Compare your results to industry benchmarks to make your case even more compelling.
Then craft a story around these results. Paints the picture of why partnerships are a clear pathway toward achieving company goals.
If you’re stuck and not sure what kind of data to report on, try some of these examples:
Related content: How to Track the ROI of SaaS Integrations
In times of economic uncertainty, you must be more efficient than ever. Be very deliberate when choosing what to spend resources on. Only invest time or money in your focus areas.
Technology partnership teams must decide where to focus their efforts. Be strategic with your choices.
When setting priorities, consider two key aspects: strategic alignment and value creation.
Align your focus areas with the organization's strategic objectives and long-term vision.
Stack rank partnerships based on which have the highest potential to drive growth, enhance competitive advantages, or address critical business needs.
Establish a vetting process before entering into a new partnership or investing in integration development. Outline how it will generate value for all parties involved, including the company, the partner, and, most importantly, the customer.
Related content: Unlocking Seamless Integrations: Exploring Embedded iPaaS and Integration Platforms
Value creation can take various forms, such as increased revenue, improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer experience, or access to new markets and resources.
For more help prioritizing, check out this shared integration prioritization framework from the Director of Tech Partnerships at Yotpo. He includes how to analyze customer overlap, product synergy, product strategy, and co-marketing/co-selling opportunities.
Access the framework here and an integration prioritization template here.
Obtaining the resources and investment you need to bring integrations to market can be daunting. And if your organization doesn't have a dedicated integration development team, it can feel next to impossible.
In such cases, technology partnership teams should consider using an outsourced integration infrastructure platform like Pandium.
These platforms let technology partnership teams streamline integration development, accelerate time-to-market, and focus on expanding partnerships.
While also reducing the burden of the maintenance and support required to scale an integration ecosystem.
An integration infrastructure platform can be the tool that lets you stop talking about integrations and actually start launching them.
