My sister tried telling me this throughout our entire childhood, but this week, I finally realized she may have been right all along…

Ok, so maybe the context of her telling me I was an idiot during our childhood is a little different from this week’s realization, but for all the years of torment I put her through, I’ll give her a W for this one.

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Sponsor: HockeyStack

Your CEO just slacked you: "We have our board meeting in 2 days. Send me a slide with what's working + anything they need to know."

Did your palms get sweaty reading that?
Or is this an easy ask because you can easily get to this info already?

I'm neurotic about forecasting + tracking performance. I have reports upon reports and dashboards upon dashboards.

So when Emir over at HockeyStack asked me what my perfect dashboard would look like, I immediately started geeking out. And when they sent this dashboard mock-up back to me, I was in nerd heaven 🙌

Q1 just wrapped up. And it's also never too late to add some solid reports or views to your dashboard, so hopefully this provides some inspiration to any of you who are looking to level up your dashboarding game.

Check out the dashboard

I’ve been doing partner marketing wrong

“We just finished our integration with your platform, let’s set up a time to go over our announcement plan for the market!”

How many of you have written or received a message like that? I’d be willing to bet the heavy majority of you have. And for those of you who haven’t yet, let me spare you what it’s taken me far too long to realize.

I’ve neglected the SINGLE most impactful part of successfully rolling out and benefiting from partner marketing: internal marketing.

A few days ago I was on a call with a new integration partner. And they asked the question.

So I started on the answer:

“Well, we can post about it from our company page on LinkedIn. Can spin up a blog post about it + also share that in our monthly newsletter…”

Then I stopped dead in my tracks.

It was like my sister magically appeared in front of me saying, “Sam, you’re an idiot.”

I paused for a few moments, then turned back to the camera (because, Zoom meetings 🤷‍♂️) and said, “You know what? Scrap all of that. I’m going to be honest, we both know LinkedIn company page reach is minimal, and no one’s going to go and read that blog post proactively.”

Then I dropped the truth bomb as a stream of consciousness on the call as it hit me:

“80% of our partnerships don’t net out to any new business for us or the partner for one reason - our team has no idea that 1) we have a partner that handles what your [product/service] does and 2) we have resources available to educate them at a high-level for how it works and what makes a good fit customer for your product/service. The single best source for making this work is each other’s employees knowing this exists + what it does, yet we rarely educate our employees on this. We do the LinkedIn post + blog posts thinking we have our bases covered, then scratch our heads when no new business is generated.”

Silence for a few moments.

Then they replied back saying not only that they appreciated the transparency, but that they fully agreed when thinking about it.

I swear I didn’t write this email to myself

What we’re doing instead

Alright, here’s the 47-step playbook we landed on that is going to help us crush our partner co-marketing goals together after the chat:

…..

Kidding. We’re keeping it simple. Stupid simple. Idiot-proof simple? Yeah, let’s go with that - ties in nicely with the subject line + today’s theme of pure self-deprecation.

Real talk, here’s what we landed on: team education is THE most important element of this working. We need to make sure they know we have a partner that helps solve this problem AND can talk about it at a super high level to determine if there’s interest from the prospect in solving for it. Based on this, we said let’s get 2 simple deliverables created to share internally:

A quick 1-3 minute overview video showing how their product works + where specifically it hooks into the workflow our customers follow when using our product
A document containing all the important info for us to add to our company intranet. Things like:
1. Quick summary of what it does
2. ICP details for who does/doesn’t make a good fit for them
3. Process to follow for making an intro to ensure it gets to the right person over there + we’re able to track it for our revshare

Stay tuned for how this pans out, but I have a hunch that this “new” process and handling is going to go 100x better than the others following the “typical” partner co-marketing announcements.

And for any of you who’ve already solved this or have a framework that is killing it with partner co-marketing, let me know! Full sponge mode on this right now, so reply back with what you’re doing. Who knows, could include it in the part 2 or even have you guest post on this topic 🤓

Book quote of the week

“When you make a mistake, don’t make the second one - keeping it to yourself. Own up. The time to sort out rotten eggs is at the nest. The deeper you hide them in the case the longer they stay in circulation.”
- Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, by George Horace Lorimer

In case you missed these this week

Friday health thoughts: thick thighs save lives. Every 10% bump in leg strength decreases your risk of dying from any cause by 23%

Board: "How did marketing perform last quarter?"

"Marketing is not a science, it is an art. And art will always be a human language."

Steve Jobs. Michael Jordan. Sara Blakely. Jeff Bezos.
There's one trait they all possess that spurred their greatness:

See you next Saturday,
Sam

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I'm an idiot