From Test Suites to Outreach
My initiation into Partner-led growth
I got into business development as a necessity. My company was undergoing a transition that required a change in focus. And I was the senior team member in North America. Always up for a challenge, I said, “I’ll do it.” I knew where I wanted to start.
I had one partner in mind. Our team had many stories attached to their product. They had a partner program. They were growing. “Perfect”, I thought. And it was, but my naïveté began to show quickly. If I could get some of their Account Executives to chat I could tell them all about our great customer stories. They’ll wave us right in, eager to collaborate. Record scratch. Not so fast.
The first thing to do was to become a partner. Easy enough. At this point, I felt like the gnomes from a South Park episode,
I had to start a campaign. I had to reach out. So I took to my oft-ignored LinkedIn account and began the search for partner Account Executives, Directors, and VPs. I was on the hunt for people who would resonate with my team’s stories. Some semblance of a strategy began to take shape.
I built outreach lists. I tracked the who and when of connections. I worked hard on the narrative to tell. How much was too much? What does rapport look like? What kind of stories land? How much does “What’s In It For Me” play a part? My process was far from perfect. But I was moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence—the fog was beginning to lift.
Filling in that “phase 2” question mark belies a lot of work. A lot of stress. A lot of stretch. Software had been my comfort place for well over a decade. Leaving it, I discovered I had traded consistent determinism for human dependencies. Test suites gave me instant feedback. An outreach email? Not so much. Was I too wordy? Was I uninteresting? Was the recipient too busy? There is no pass/fail for those.
It’s still a work in progress. It always will be. I still straddle engineering, too. What’s more, that’s been an advantage in navigating customer discussions.
Would I do it again? Yes.