If you're a VP of Partnerships, you’re building a business within a business. Here are the 16 most important lessons I learned building partner programs from $0-30m ARR:
1. Prioritize ruthlessly. When there are 100 things you could be doing, spending time on the right ones is the difference between hitting your goals and missing them.
2. Guard your time. It's your most valuable resource. You can never be good enough at this.
3. Stay focused. Shiny object syndrome will kill your program. Stay locked on your core value prop.
4. Ask for help. You don't need to know all the answers. You just need to know how to find them.
5. Leverage your network. Most people love to help. Your network is one of the most underutilized growth levers you have.
6. Ask your partners what they actually want. Then go build it for them. Simple as that.
7. Make decisions quickly. Most decisions are reversible. Moving fast beats getting it perfect on the first try.
8. Fail fast. If you make a misstep, identify it and correct it quickly. Don't let it linger.
9. Trust your instincts. You've come this far for a reason. Don't overthink it.
10. Just ship it. Done is better than perfect. Get your offering in front of partners and iterate from there.
11. Good partners are priceless. If you want to go further, go together.
12. Sincerity matters more than you think. People want to work with genuine, honest, trustworthy people. Be that person.
13. Build what partners actually need. It's not about your vision. It's about their problems.
14. Use design partners. It's a lot easier to get it right when you're building for real use cases with real partners in the room.
15. Happy partners pay dividends. Treat them like partners, not paychecks. Add real value and they'll become your biggest growth driver.
16. Ignore the naysayers. Creating something from nothing is hard. Most people want to do it but few actually will. Don't let anyone talk you out of your conviction.
Building a partner program is one of the most challenging and fulfilling things you'll ever do.
You'll work harder than you ever have. And you'll be addicted to it.
If building is in your blood, I salute you.
Keep building.
This week on Partnerships Unlocked
Kelly Sarabyn on how HubSpot co-sells across nearly 1,600 tech partners — and what breaks when you skip the planning work
Kelly Sarabyn is the Director of Technology Partnerships at HubSpot, running tech partner program strategy across nearly 1,600 technology partners.
This week she shares the frameworks behind HubSpot's 1,600-partner ecosystem, including:
Why you need to map your white space before recruiting — If you don't know your own product gaps first (enterprise CPQ, ABM, partner tech), you end up with partners that look good on paper but don't move the needle in co-sell.
The real cost of moving fast without a plan — Kelly's own field event fell apart not because the idea was bad, but because no one documented who owns what before kickoff. Excitement without clarity is the most expensive mistake in co-marketing.
How attribution and AI are separating winning programs from losing ones — If you can't capture it in data, it didn't happen. Programs that aren't building attribution discipline and AI into their workflow right now are already falling behind the ones that are.
More takeaways waiting in the episode.
Co-sell is hard enough. Your ops shouldn't make it harder.
Most partner teams have the co-sell instinct. What they're missing is the system to execute on it.
Partner managers spend half their week on manual coordination instead of the relationship work that actually moves deals. Deal tracking alone consumes most of that time. Enablement lives in stale Google drives. And attribution is a mess.
EULER is built to fix the operating model underneath your co-sell motion. Automated onboarding. Enablement that reaches partners where they already work. Reporting your leadership will actually trust.
Less overhead. More time selling together. A program that actually scales.
Takeaway of the week
Co-sell doesn't fail because the partnership was wrong. It fails because nobody planned who owns what.