A letter to C-Suite Execs: the moment you decided partnerships was a department and not a cross-functional growth strategy, you guaranteed its failure. Here's why:
When partnerships is treated like a department, you trade a revenue multiplier for a checkbox.
You expect linear inputs and linear outputs.
You wall it off from the rest of the business.
You starve it of resources, budget, and tools.
You benchmark it against other GTM functions.
You give it six months and wonder why it hasn't scaled.
But when you treat partnerships as a core business strategy, everything changes.
Partnerships is a strategy for:
- Ecosystem Development
- Product Development
- Customer Acquisition
- Customer Retention
- Product Feedback
- Brand Awareness
- Deal Acceleration
- Competitive Moat
- Data Enrichment
- CAC Reduction
- LTV Extension
- Distribution
- Profitability
- Marketing
- Revenue
- Growth
Yes, it needs a dedicated team. But that team has to be deeply wired into every other part of the business to deliver on any of that.
Partnerships doesn't work in isolation.
If your other departments are ships, partnerships is the tide that raises all of them at once.
This week on Partnerships Unlocked
Heather Margolis on how smaller companies can win bigger by teaming up with larger partners, including the Dreamforce collaboration where she gave away a Harley Davidson.
Heather Margolis is the founder of Channel Maven (acquired by 360 Insights in 2021), and one of the most experienced channel and partner strategists in the game. She's back running Channel Maven and building an AI channel marketing tool.
Her frame is simple: the operators who win long-term are the ones who know how to make everyone around them look good.
She joined me to break down how partner teams turn their existing ecosystem into bigger moments, stronger relationships, and better results.
Ride the coattails of your bigger partners at events. Pool budgets, share the stage, split the invite list — you'll get more people in the room than you ever could going alone.
Applying the wrong model to the wrong partnership type will always fail. Channel logic doesn't translate everywhere, and she learned that one the hard way.
Don't let ego keep you pushing on what isn't working. The moment you're too embarrassed to admit something failed is the moment it gets expensive.
Your reputation is your pipeline. In partnerships, the people you compete with today are the people you'll need tomorrow.
Watch the full episode for the complete playbook from Heather.
Ready to activate the ecosystem you already have?
Most partner teams spend their time recruiting new logos while the partners they already signed slowly go dark. No onboarding. No enablement. No follow-through. Heather's playbook only works if your activation infrastructure is built to support it. EULER's Automated Onboarding, Flows, and AI Communications Hub make sure every partner is engaged, enabled, and moving. Not sitting in a spreadsheet waiting to go cold.
Less recruiting. More activating. A program that actually compounds.
Takeaway of the week
The ecosystem you already have is probably worth more than the one you're still recruiting. Go deep before you go wide.