How to Build Strong Partner Relationships

A common partnership snafu is that companies want partnership success, but don’t provide the resources to get there. I heard of a case where a whole marketing team quit, the partnerships team was given no marketing support, and they didn't yet have an integration with product -- and yet, the CEO expected the partnership strategy to deliver instant revenue. Wild. But not uncommon. Partnerships can't thrive in a vacuum. They need cross-functional support—marketing, product integration, sales enablement—all aligned to succeed. Before you set revenue targets for your partnerships, ask yourself: Do we have the resources to support them? If the answer is no, you have to help your leadership teams to reconsider their expectations. To help create the cross-functional support needed for partnerships to thrive, here are four strategies: 1. Involve Cross-Functional Leaders from the Very Beginning Bring key leaders from marketing, sales, and product into the partnership planning phase. Early involvement gives them a sense of ownership and ensures they understand how partnerships align with their own goals. Strategy: Schedule a kick-off meeting with stakeholders from each relevant department. Create a shared roadmap that outlines how partnerships will impact each team and their specific contributions. 2. Tie Partnership Success to Department KPIs To gain buy-in, tie partnership goals directly to the KPIs of each department. Aligning partnership outcomes with what each team is measured on ensures they have skin in the game. Strategy: During planning sessions, ask each department head how partnerships can contribute to their targets. Build specific KPIs for each function into the overall partnership strategy. 3. Create a Resource Exchange Agreement Formalize the support needed from each department with a resource exchange agreement. This sets clear expectations on what each function will contribute—whether it's a dedicated product team member for integrations or marketing resources for co-branded campaigns. It turns vague promises into commitments. Strategy: Draft a simple document that outlines the roles, responsibilities, and deliverables each team will provide, then get sign-off from department heads and the executive team. 4. Demonstrate Early Wins for Buy-In Quick wins go a long way toward securing ongoing resources. Identify a small pilot project with an internal team that shows immediate impact. Whether it's a small co-marketing campaign or a limited integration, these early successes build momentum and demonstrate the value of supporting partnerships. Strategy: Select one or two partners to run a pilot with, focused on delivering measurable outcomes like leads generated or product adoption. Use this success story to demonstrate value to other departments and secure further commitment. Partnership success requires cross-functional alignment. Because partnerships don’t happen in a silo.

Before Klaviyo was a unicorn, before their $9.2B IPO, and before partnerships were driving over 30% of their revenue… their partner program was in terrible shape. Here’s how they turned it from struggling function to secret weapon: BACKSTORY: In 2017, I was the Head of Partnerships at Hawke Media. Hawke was Klaviyo’s #1 partner by revenue. But, Klaviyo was far from Hawke’s top partner. For over a year I challenged them to do better. Every check-in call was a reminder of how lopsided our partnership was. Then, in 2018, Mike Eng took over their partnership program. I shared my feedback with him about their gaps and areas for improvement. Instead of brushing it off, Mike relished the feedback and asked for more. He knew that at my previous company (Bronto) we had built partnerships into 65% of revenue and he wanted to do the same at Klaviyo. Over a series of calls, and trips out to LA, he grilled me. Here are the best pieces of advice I gave him (according to Mike): 1. Customer First Build a program that delivers value throughout the customer journey and everyone wins. 2. Drive Growth for Partners The success you drive FOR your partners is as important as the leads/referrals you get FROM them. Make supporting the growth of your partners a core KPI. 3. Treat Partner like Customers of your Partner Program Map out your partner journey and what a healthy partnership looks like. Break this lifecycle into stages and track funnel metrics throughout. Then create a strong feedback loop with partners to optimize it. 4. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify A program with a bunch of “benefit” checkboxes that can’t be fulfilled are broken promises that you’ll need to repair down the road. Build a clear program that makes it easy for partners to understand, onboard, engage, and realize value. 5. Alignment is Critical Make sure you have alignment with key stakeholders internally. From the Board, to C-suite, and Cross-functional leaders across Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product. You’ll need all of them to build a truly powerful program. 6. Use Data to Scale Having the right metrics, and the infrastructure to track them, will allow you to create predictability and scale. You (and your partners) will always know where you stand, what’s working, and what’s not so you can make informed decisions. 7. Tier Your Program (when at critical mass) Identify all of the benefits you can reliably offer to partners, organize them by value, and align with a tiering system that incentivizes partners to increase engagement with you. TAKEAWAY: These are the basics that so many partner programs are missing. Klaviyo came into a crowded category, with entrenched incumbents, and out-paced them all through partnerships. If you're struggling with partnerships, take a page out of their playbook. Keep the focus on scalability and mutual value. That's the foundation of a $1B partnership program.

I made it to VP at Amazon because of the people I partnered with. The same is true for building my part-time business that made $950k last year. Create the partnerships that will let you leap forward - here’s how: 1) Understand Productive Partnerships Here are some examples of the partnerships that propelled my career: a) I partnered with my first boss out of college. I taught her technology, she taught me leadership and drove my first two promotions (lead engineer, then manager). b) At Amazon, my first lead engineer and I worked together for 8 years. I went from Senior Manager to Director to VP while he went from SDE to Senior SDE to Manager to Senior Manager to Director - FOUR PROMOTIONS. c) My COO, Jason Yoong, reached out to me and initiated our partnership by volunteering to build my Substack newsletter. Someone has to take the first step, and he did. d) Most recently, I formed the “Career Growth Collective,” where I invited LinkedIn voices Omar Halabieh, Steve Huynh, and Rajdeep Saha to work with me to amplify our messages across platforms and groups to help more people. Each person in this partnership brings different strengths. Steve and Raj are senior individual contributors with strong YouTube presences. They bring the “Principal” level perspective. Omar is based in Dubai and is actively leading a big team. He also cranks out amazing graphics every day. The different strengths that each person brings leads me to part 2. 2) The Partnership Recipe: i) Build trust with your potential partner Be honest, be friendly, be helpful! ii) Figure out a win-win partnership With my first boss, she needed a technical advisor and I needed management sponsorship. Years later, my first lead engineer did for me what I had done for her. He provided the technical expertise while I sponsored his growth With Raj, Steve, and Omar, we all want to find new readers who will get value from our work. Tip: Take the first step. Invest in the other person without a guarantee of repayment. This will kickstart the partnership, whereas waiting for the other person to make the first move will not. iii) You don’t need perfection I proposed the Career Growth Collective idea to 4 people. 3 accepted and we are thriving together. The main message I want to share with all of this is that you do not need to “go it alone” in your career. What you do need to do is risk that a few people will not return your investment in them when you try to establish partnerships. That is OK. Learn, move on, find others who will. The value of the successful partnerships will greatly outweigh the time and effort put into the ones that didn’t pan out. Who have you partnered with? Praise or thank them in a comment! Who would you like to partner with? Send them this post with a note saying it inspired you to work more closely with them. Steve, Omar, and Raj have shared their own ideas on partnership today. Follow them and read their ideas.

🤝 After 10+ years in partnerships and thousands of calls, emails, and meetings, I realized one fundamental truth 💡: → The most important foundation of any successful partnership is RELATIONSHIP and TRUST. This realization led me to rethink how we build partner relationships and trust—starting from day-one. And that’s where it gets interesting. There are many critical factors in a partnership: ✅ Product fit ✅ Mutually beneficial value creation ✅ Overlapping ICP and potential to scale ✅ Professional expertise ✅ Education opportunities (for clients and team members) But here’s what often happens—partner managers focus so much on these, they underestimate the power of trust and relationship-building as the ultimate success factor. I’ve seen hundreds of partnerships fail despite a perfect product fit. And I’ve seen companies with average products build hundreds of partnerships, driving >45% of their ARR—just because they mastered relationship-and-trust-building. So how do you accelerate relationship and trust-building in partnerships? PUSH vs. PULL Partnerships: A Game Changer Most partner managers focus on PUSH partnerships—outbound outreach, warm intros, and cold calls (don’t get me wrong, these are needed too in order to scale). At Mailability.io, I’ve discovered a new model that naturally pulls partners in. 🔹 PUSH partnerships: Require effort to convince and convert partners. 🔹 PULL partnerships: Happen organically because they’re needed. This happens more often with marketing and email agencies. Why? Because clients need both the agency and Mailability.io to optimize their performance. Instead of pushing for a partnership, we’re pulled into collaboration with the partner, initiated by the client, to form a natural triangular relationship: ➡️ Client ➡️ Agency ➡️ Tech Partner And the results speak for themselves: 🚀 Faster trust and relationship-building through real-life collaboration (client onboarding and optimization) 🚀 No pitches—partners see real results from day one 🚀 A referral flywheel—as value is proven, agencies bring in their next clients The Question for You: Are you relying on PUSH partnerships—or are you creating PULL? Drop a comment below—what’s working for you? Here's to relationship building legends 🍷 - John-David Klausner, Alexander Lazoff, Itay Vladomirsky, Ben Kadory, Gal Deitsch ✨, Sean Last, CFA #eCommerce #emailmarketing #klaviyo #partnerships #ai