📰 Press
🌐 Website
📱 Social
This playbook requires the following signals:
Monitored Signals
1. Why should I care about a new strategic partnership?
Here’s why it’s a big deal:
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2. Examples of strategic partnerships
Strategic partnerships are common across the tech landscape. They typically fall into two categories:
Technology/Integration Partnerships: This is when two software companies create a deep integration to enhance their products. A well-known example is the partnership between Salesforce and Slack, which created a seamless experience between the two platforms before the acquisition.
Channel/Reseller Partnerships: This involves a competitor's product being sold by a third party, like a large reseller or consulting firm. For example, a competitor might partner with a major player like AWS to have their solution sold on the AWS Marketplace, instantly expanding their reach
3. How to monitor competitors for new partnerships
A new strategic alliance is a major market signal. You need a system to detect these announcements early to understand their nature and mitigate the new advantage.
Zimt is the go-to competitor monitoring tool for B2B SaaS companies. We have over 35 competitor playbooks you can launch on autopilot, including one designed specifically for this scenario. Activating the playbook allows you to:
Monitor Announcements: Automatically track joint press releases, news outlets, and social media for partnership announcements.
Track Partner Ecosystems: Get alerted when a competitor appears in a potential partner's official directory, marketplace, or solutions catalog.
Access This Playbook: Put this playbook, and many more, to work. Automated.
If you're not using Zimt, you must manually track press releases and news outlets and rely on your sales team to report when partnerships are mentioned in deals.
4. Playbook Response Options
4.1 Expose the Partnership Gaps & Amplify Our Native Strengths
ⓘ Best for: Responding to a technology/integration partner where you have superior native functionality. | ||
Goal: Position your all-in-one platform as the simpler, more powerful, and lower TCO option by creating FUD about the competitor's clunky, multi-vendor solution. | ||
Strategic Rationale: This strategy highlights your product's inherent strengths and seamlessness. It can be highly effective but is less so if the competitor's integration is genuinely deep and valuable, and it requires a sales team that can effectively explain technical nuances. |
Conduct a technical teardown of the integration.
Get a demo or analyze the technical documentation of the joint solution to identify weaknesses, such as if it is a shallow "logo-slap," requires separate logins, or if data sync is delayed.
Create a "clunky vs. seamless" comparison asset.
Develop a datasheet or webpage that contrasts their multi-vendor, "bolted-on" solution with your native, seamless, all-in-one platform.
Update sales battle cards with probing questions.
Arm sales with questions that expose the hidden costs and complexities of the partnership, such as "Who do you call for support – [Competitor] or [Partner]?".
Launch a "power of the platform" marketing campaign.
Run a marketing campaign focused on the benefits of a single, unified platform: lower TCO, better user experience, and a single point of contact for support.
4.2 Enable Our Direct Sales Force to Outmaneuver the Channel
ⓘ Best for: Responding to a channel/reseller partner when you have a strong, agile direct sales team. | ||
Goal: Leverage the speed and expertise of your direct sales team to win deals before the competitor's new channel partner is fully enabled and ramped up. | ||
Strategic Rationale: This approach leverages your existing strengths to protect key accounts in the short term. It does not scale as effectively as a channel and is less effective for reaching entirely new markets where the partner has a strong foothold. |
Create an internal "direct vs. channel" guide.
Develop a guide for the sales team detailing the inherent weaknesses of a channel GTM model, like slower quoting, less product expertise, and higher prices due to margin stack-up.
Develop a "rapid response" deal desk process.
Create a streamlined process for approving competitive discounts or custom terms for deals where the new partnership is a factor, emphasizing speed.
Train sales on the "specialist vs. generalist" narrative.
Coach the sales team to position themselves as deep product specialists who can solve complex problems, versus the partner's reps who are generalists selling dozens of products.
Identify and target key accounts held by the partner.
Proactively identify key accounts where the new channel partner has a strong relationship and launch a targeted outreach campaign to get in front of them directly.
4.3 Form a Competing Alliance
ⓘ Best for: When the competitor's partnership creates a powerful new ecosystem that threatens to lock you out of the market over the long term. | ||
Goal: Directly counter the competitor's ecosystem play by forming your own strategic alliance, opening up new markets and lead sources. | ||
Strategic Rationale: This is a strong, strategic signal of strength to the market. However, it is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, and your success becomes partially dependent on your new partner's execution. |
Identify and prioritize potential counter-partners.
Identify the top 3-5 potential partners who are direct competitors of your competitor's new ally (e.g., if they partnered with AWS, explore a partnership with Google Cloud or Azure).
Develop a "better together" joint value proposition.
For the top partner target, create a compelling pitch deck outlining the value proposition of a partnership for you, for them, and for your mutual customers.
Initiate high-level executive outreach.
Use executive networks to secure an initial exploratory meeting with the target partner's alliances team or leadership.
Negotiate a partnership agreement.
Work through the details of a formal partnership, including technical integrations, co-marketing commitments, and any potential revenue sharing.
Develop and launch a joint go-to-market plan.
Once the agreement is signed, work with the partner to create and execute a joint GTM plan, including a press release, sales training, and co-branded content.