Most companies know how to announce a partnership. A press release is published. Logos are added to two websites. A few LinkedIn posts appear. Perhaps the partners host a webinar together once a quarter ordraft some joint blogs.
It’s not that these activities don’t accomplish something. They do. They tell the market that a relationship exists.
What they DON’T do is explain what that relationship makes possible.
But your customers don’t experience partnerships as corporate agreements. And if you have a bunch of them, they probably gave up on your website partner list after page two (poor partners on page six because of their business name).
Customers want solutions. And they want them from you. Because, after all, they already went through all their due diligence to choose you. And if you have partners because they make MORE POSSIBLE for them, it’s beneficial for everyone to be able to easily see and understand those benefits.
And there are ways to make partnerships more visible; it just takes a little more intention than just running through your New Partner Launch project.
Making the Ecosystem Visible
Meaningful visibility is about one thing and one thing only: UNDERSTANDING.
For your current Partner Ecosystem, how confident are you that your clients:
- Understand the problem the partners address together?
- Understand which organization contributes to what?
- Understand how those contributions connect to their business case?
- Understand what becomes possible that neither company could deliver alone?
- Understand where a customer can easily enter the ecosystem?
And understanding THAT? It takes talking to our customers—directly—to know if that’s true. And yet, I see that activity so rarely in Partner Ecosystems; and there’s a big reason why.
Who’s Making Money?
We’re all in business to make money. If you’re not, you probably won’t be in business for very long. That’s why it’s so common for Partner Ecosystems to protect their revenue over focusing on customer understanding.
And the challenge isn’t really that you can’t do both...
It’s that protecting and investing are rooted in different mindsets.
One ends in a silo. The other ends in expansion.
And an expansion goal (Partnership Ecosystem that generates revenue) only works with expansion inputs. Protection inputs cannot get the expansion result.
So, neither party does the customer research because neither party wants to carry the cost. Therefore, neither party knows what their customers understand. So, we make assumptions about what to communicate with them. And that communication falls flat.
Weird, right? Not.
Ok, so let’s say we see the benefit here, and we start investing a little more in understanding our customers. If we’re lucky, they totally understand our partnerships (I would put this at Unicorn status actually). Likely, they don’t understand our partnerships at all, which then means...what?
Who’s Leading the Conversation?
If you look at your Partner Ecosystem, how many people are attempting to “own” the partnership? If you come to my website, I will say, “My Partners”. If you go to my partner's website, they will say, “My Partners”.Visibly, EVERYONE is owning the partnership.
Now partially, this is good. If you have a Partner that DOESN’T want to call you Their Partner, you’re probably in trouble.
But by default, this means there isn’t one party running the show.
And the answer isn’t to DEFINE which party runs the show, but to create what I’ve started referring to as a “Headless Partner Ecosystem”.
A Headless Partner Ecosystem, for the sake of this conversation, is defined as a network of organizations working toward a shared outcome WITHOUT one permanent organization directing the whole. A key component of an ecosystem like this is that leadership moves seamlessly between participants based on the capability, expertise or customer relationship required at each moment, allowing every member to lead from its role while contributing to a connected experience.
Most importantly, it’s not that there is NO leader. It’s that every participant leads “the something” that makes them valuable to the ecosystem as a whole.
To participate effectively, each member must be clear about three things:
- Where do we lead? Which part of the experience are we best equipped to guide?
- Where do we contribute? Where does our capability strengthen something another partner is leading?
- Where do we follow? When should another partner’s expertise, relationship or proximity to the problem take priority?
Oh, and everyone in the ecosystem needs to understand the roles of each party. Again, if only one member understands all the roles, that sounds like One Leader to me. And we saw what happened with the One Right To Rule Them All idea, right?
THIS IS AN INVESTMENT. An investment that partners won’t make in Protect Revenue mode. And the output isn’t an Ecosystem Map; it’s Ecosystem Understanding.
Inviting the Customer In
Our customers have enough on their plates. We can’t expect them to put all our ecosystem dots together too. And we shouldn’t expect them to scroll endlessly on our website to find a partner that matches them; we already know they’re NOT doing it.
Our job is to HELP them. So, let’s help them.
Not just in seeing and experiencing the ecosystem. But with how they can ENTER it.
After all, when one of our clients benefits from a member of our Partner Ecosystem, OUR relationship gets stickier too. That's the value exchange. And when the customer experiences how connected you are as partners? Well, that’s definitely something they want to be a part of 😊
So, the next time we’re wondering whether we’ve made our partners visible (or if WE’RE visible in our partner’s ecosystem, because let’s be honest, we’re mostly thinking about ourselves, right?), what if, instead, we asked:
Does the market understand what becomes possible because we participate together?
Let’s go find out.