The majority of SaaS partnership leaders do systems integrator partnerships wrong (including myself). Below are 5 things I wish I knew when I was VP Partnerships at a SaaS company.
Background: I spent the last 3 years leading partnerships at a SaaS company. During that time I tried and, frankly, failed at building scalable, sustainable partnerships with systems integrators (SI's) as well as global consultancies and agencies. I've spent the last 6 months in IBM consulting, building a practice, working with ISVs of all sizes and seeing what good and bad looks.
Here's what I've learned so far:
1. Depth of relationships for SI's are unmatched
I didn't realize how small a fish I had been in SaaS until I started hearing about the BILLION dollar footprints that SI's have at accounts. SaaS companies sales reps might think they "know their client" but I would challenge their depth of relationship relative to what I've seen. SaaS leaders should lean in to those relationships hard and empower the SI's to be power users/sellers/advocates of their products
2. Economics drives behavior
SaaS companies operate with 70%+ gross margins while the best SI's will probably be at or below 30%. This means that there is a lot less room for error - harder to recover from bad investments or throw things against the wall to see what sticks. This leads to inherent risk aversion in building new partnerships and SaaS companies need to do what they can do to derisk investment by the SI
3. Along those lines, constraints of SI's = opportunities for ISVs
Because ISVs have so much more room for error, they can create tons of opportunities for SI's by flexing their margin a little bit. An easy way to do this is to create free POC or land deal offers that the SI's can take to their clients - funding work that the SI's would typically need client $ to fund is a great way to create some flexibility.
4. Importance of upskilling within SI's
I didn't appreciate that behind a faceless SI was thousands of humans of varying skills, interests and disciplines. A huge challenge for SI's is constant upskilling and education. Certifications are critical to quantitatively evaluate progress and FUNDING certifications is one of the best ways to solve a chicken/egg problem in the early days of SI partnerships
5. Practice/Persona alignment
A lot of SaaS partnership calories are spent on the wrong persona within SI's. For example, I am an industry partner, which means I have access to clients but have no real interest or ability to build global partnerships. So when you talk to me, I want to talk about how you can help clients within my industries, not about generic partnership milestones like signing commercial agreements, co-marketing, global account mapping etc. I'd recommend trying to find a practice to align to early-on and focusing on a first win.
Hope this is helpful, its what I would have wanted to hear 3 years ago.
Enterprise AI Leader | Startup Advisor | Dad
2w❗❗❗ https://www.cbsnews.com/video/innovative-program-offers-free-egg-freezing-for-egg-donations/