Getting Traction in Partnerships Part 3: The Data Component

Gino Wickman starts Chapter 5 with a story that I thought warranted repeating here. Because it directly reflects my own experience in partnerships, it might also be yours.

“Picture a small plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Halfway across, the captain announces, ‘I’ve got bad news and I’ve got good news. The bad news is that the gauges aren’t working. We are hopelessly lost, I have no idea how fast we’re flying or in what direction, and I don’t know how much fuel we have left.  The good news is that we’re making great time!’ Does that sound at all familiar? That’s how most entrepreneurs run their organizations. They’re flying blind with no data to let them gauge where they are, where they are going, or if they are heading in the right direction. But they always remain optimistic.” - Gino Wickman, Traction

When I first stepped into partnerships, I learned how cut out I was for this line of work. My reason—optimism. I felt like the job required me to tune in to my naturally optimistic leanings and then hold on for deal life long enough to make that optimism a reality.

Maybe the hard part was that it worked.

At first.

Then I was struck with the reality that I had no way to defend my job with data like so many of my peers in Sales or Marketing. I didn’t realize how scrutinized my work was until I was asked for data to prove my value.

I had great stories, but I had terrible data. As partner managers and leaders, we need to mature beyond managing based on "assumptions, subjective opinions, emotions and egos.”

What’s our solution? A scorecard. A partner scorecard that will help us communicate where we are, where we are going, and, maybe more importantly, how we relate to the rest of the company.

Your company has a scorecard, a set of metrics they look at that help them know they’re going towards a joint goal. If they don’t, you can use this and Gino Wickman’s book to guide you through what is helpful as you round out and grow your partner program.

Before we get started, I emphasize the importance of aligning your scorecard to your company’s scorecard. Too many times I’ve presented, or been in a presentation, where the numbers and achievements highlighted do not align to the company’s goals. If you’ve ever felt siloed in partnerships, I wonder if this is our problem. Make sure your scorecard is aligned to and in support of your company scorecard.

Here’s how to get started. 

Step one - Identify the key metrics that matter to your business, and think weekly numbers that you can constantly and consistently track. This is important because it will help clarify people’s roles and responsibilities from week to week. When you’re in your weekly meetings with your team (more on that later) you’ll have a way to keep your team on track for your quarterly rocks. There’s a lot of resources out there that will help you build your partnership metrics. But if you need any reminders, here’s a few that might get you started on the right track.

• Weekly influenced and sourced revenue
• Partner meetings
• Partner leads
• Customer retention
• Partner activation/engagement
• Customer overlap (populated by an account mapping software like Crossbeam or Reveal

Step two - Assign a person to a number. Everyone gets a number. Period. If you don’t give responsibility to your individual team members, then they will vacillate between any other urgent email that comes in their inbox. Giving responsibility reminds your team that they are owners, and creating ownership always elevates your business.

Step three - Make sure you have a clear way to gather that data. Whether you’re using an Excel spreadsheet, CRM, PRM, or other partner tracking tool, it doesn’t really matter as long as your whole team (and the company) agree that this can be a source of truth. Sometimes we assume that we know where the source of truth is, but if we show up with numbers that don’t come from the company’s source of truth then we might as well not show up at all.

Lastly, and most importantly, like any system or tool we use it makes no difference to your business if you don’t use it. So that’s step 4 - Use it! And stick with it. Over a long period of time, give it a few months, and even that might be too short if you want to get traction with your business. 

We struggled with this in a previous role I had in partnerships. We were being held accountable to a scorecard, which was great. But then after implementing a scorecard we started altering a few of the measurements. We added a few new pieces of information here and there and continued to alter the scorecard for a year after implementing it. By the end of the year we had completely separate data from our initial measurement we had no comparison, and because we had no comparison we didn’t know if we were heading in the right direction.

There’s a lot more that could be said about data, which data matters, and how to track it effectively. And there are a lot more qualified people who could help you with understanding your data. I’d encourage you to reach out to them. You might have a data analyst in your company. Buy them a coffee or jump on a Zoom call. Your partnership program and your company will thank you for it.

As we close out this week’s post on Getting Traction, I leave you with this as a reminder. It can be easy to elevate data to the single most important part of your business. And though it’s important, it’s not the end all. It’s part of the story. Data is great, but useless unless you can keep as part of the whole. Data is not the whole, this whole series comes together to help you gain traction. Data is a lagging indicator, it will tell you what happened, not where you’re going. That happens later on in this story.

So keep on joining us week after week as navigate through growing our partnership programs and ultimately gaining traction.

Because we know that our companies win when our partnerships get better.

——————————————————————————————————————————

Building partnerships is like building a business. Every time we meet with a potential partner, we follow very similar steps as entrepreneurs who desire to give their business the best chance of success. 

As CoPort is growing, we’re learning so much about how to grow a company—steps, processes, people to meet, etc., and there is a common thread among so many—giving us the best chance possible to succeed. There’s no promise, no guarantee, but there is opportunity to make something truly special.

And every new business partnership does the same. There’s something new and exciting at the prospect of working with another company—whether an MSP, a reseller, VAR, tech partnership, you name it. It’s an exciting opportunity to build something new that no one has ever seen before. 

At the same time, there’s some key frameworks that can help us succeed and give us the best chance at helping our companies grow through partnerships. 

So, for the next 6 weeks, we’re going to mine the gold in Gino Wickman’s book, “Traction” to help us build partnerships. We’re going through the process ourselves at CoPort, making sure we give ourselves the best chance at success. 

Once partner leaders begin to see partnerships as an entrepreneurial journey, then we can get our footing to get going and keep going. It’s a long process to build a strong and sustainable partnership program. The good news is, there’s some handholds along the way. I don’t think Gino Wickman intended for his content to be applied to partnerships, but that’s what makes it amazing, it does!

Thank you for joining our series, we’re so grateful and honored we get to come alongside you in your personal and professional growth story.

Subscribe below for more.