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They said they wanted to partner, then ghosted after agreeing. In 2017, I was doing hundreds of customer development calls. There was a common problem with partners joining programs and doing nothing. The typical response from a partner manager was to babysit. They’d keep checking in, chasing down, sending

Credit to Jill Rowley for conversations inspiring this post. More to come. The customer journey depicted as a funnel is dead. Right? I mean, all the cool kids are talking about flywheels and ecosystems and networks and loops. Customers don't live in funnels, they don't want to be crammed down

There’s something different happening in business. People are sharing. Not just a basic tit for tat, quid pro quo. Companies are beginning to open up. They’re beginning to default to a sharing mindset, not just skeptically sharing when pushed. They are baking it into their processes and strategies.

The traditional sales and marketing funnel has run its course. Today’s relationship-first, trust-mediated world demands that we adopt a new framework for establishing and maintaining customer, community, and ecosystem partner relationships. The new framework must be customer-centric vs company-centric, relationship-based vs transaction-oriented, and ecosystem-aligned vs direct-driven. In last week’

Over the last year, I interviewed over a hundred CEOs, VPs of Partnerships and partner managers. They all understood the value of ecosystems and ecosystem-level thinking. But many were still struggling to make partnerships work. Again and again, the same issues came up. By the end, I identified nine themes

You Wake Up There are no sales people. Nobody spends their day chasing leads or cold-emailing prospects directly. Nobody wants to. Why would they? Your company has a mix of specialized and cross-functional employees. There is a vast ecosystem of people and companies outside of your own that work with

The traditional sales and marketing funnel has run its course. In today’s relationship-first, trust mediated world, we must adopt a new model to engage in customer, community and ecosystem partner relationships. The new model must be customer-centric vs company-centric, relationship-based vs transaction-oriented, and ecosystem-aligned vs direct-driven. The new model

Don't ask your partners to do something for you first. Do something for them. The typical partner program pitch goes something like this: 1. Apply or make initial contact to become a partner 2. Do something for us 3. Now we accept you and list you on our site This