Alliances, partners and go-to-market programs that make a whole company sell together, not one more team chasing the same accounts.
The industry has a recognized playbook for building a partner motion: Forrester's partner frameworks, Partnership Leaders, ecosystem-led growth, and the cloud providers' co-sell programs. Here is each standard, and how I have run it.
Every partner type has a defined role and a reason to sell together.
When NTT bought Dimension Data, I saw a portfolio, not a new parent. Technical and product leaders from every operating company mapped who does what, and we built and published a solution set of natural extensions: each company’s go-to-market extended by the naturally aligned fits from the others.
Partners are selling within the first months, or the partnership usually stalls.
In the first 90 days, executive leadership from the operating companies aligned on the program and the matrix of who leads what was set. In 22 months the program produced more than $200M in contract value and more than $1B in pipeline.
Named executives on both sides own the partnership.
The Americas program reported into the NTT Global Business Office in Tokyo, with operating-company leadership at every regional review. I secure a partner’s support at the executive level before I count on it.
Who owns the account, who leads, and how conflicts are settled, decided before the first fight.
Across 31 business units, separate legal entities and separate P&Ls, each operating company carried a cross-sell number that rolled into mine, and we set who is prime, secondary and tertiary on a deal and who leads on which capability.
Direct sellers earn credit on partner deals, so they help instead of compete.
I designed the cross-entity compensation model so a seller is made whole wherever the deal books. At AWS, when MongoDB moved its reps’ credit onto consumption, I lined up both field teams to sell together instead of against each other.
A standard process protects the partner’s deal and prevents conflict.
A deal intake process qualified every cross-sell opportunity and assigned a cross-company team to pursue it. At AWS we ran MongoDB’s registration process and tracked it in our reporting, and we also ran deal registration with OEM partners.
Shared targets, named sponsors and a quarterly review with each priority partner.
We ran joint business plans with MongoDB and reviewed them every quarter. Quarterly account reviews were the heartbeat of both the AWS partnership and the NTT program.
A repeatable onboarding track, then continuous training of the field.
Regional quarterly business reviews with leaders from every operating company and business unit, marketing packs for their sales and technical teams, and twice-a-month lunch-and-learns in sales offices across the country, pulling in the regional NTT teams, not just the host company. I wrote the One NTT messaging the group adopted.
A working joint sales motion with AWS, Microsoft or Google.
I ran it from inside AWS: an account team, a partner and marketplace team and a service delivery team on AWS’s global MongoDB partnership, on a $172M number grown 24.6% in a down market.
Customers buy through the marketplace against their committed cloud spend.
The motion my team built ran 727 AWS Marketplace transactions worth $130M, and MongoDB named AWS its Cloud Partner of the Year for Marketplace.
Partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue reported separately.
At AWS we tracked which side sourced every opportunity, MongoDB or the AWS account team. In the cross-sell program we always recorded the originating company, even when another company ended up prime on the contract.
Investment follows the partners and plays that produce.
In 2016 and 2017 we ran a program called Data Driven Decisions, tied into Salesforce reporting, to allocate cross-sell resources where they would produce. My region was named Top Region in the NTT Group in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Standards drawn from Forrester (partner onboarding, enablement and joint business planning), Partnership Leaders, Crossbeam's ecosystem-led growth, and the AWS, Microsoft and Google co-sell programs.
When NTT bought Dimension Data, most people saw a new parent company. I saw hundreds of NTT sellers with relationships in accounts we could serve, asked to own NTT as an account, and partnered with NTT Communications to sell into their customers. That won the first NTT Group Cross-Sell Award, and I was asked to build the program for the Americas, reporting into the NTT Global Business Office in Tokyo. The program sat across the operating companies of Dimension Data, NTT Communications and NTT DATA. Each operating company carried a cross-sell number of its own, and those numbers rolled directly into mine, while their sellers and leaders reported into their own companies.
I owned the account plan for AWS’s global MongoDB partnership. The sell-to team reported to me, and the partner team and the technical service team had their own leadership, were dedicated to the account, and ran to the plan I set. When MongoDB moved its reps’ credit onto annualized consumption, I read it as the opening and worked with the AWS partner organization so both field teams kept selling MongoDB Atlas together.
I went to the CEO, told him I was tired of a model that rewarded mediocrity, and asked to move from hardware selling into the first services-only role. That seat became the foundation for Dimension Data’s client partners. Working inside a South African and then a Japanese company taught me to operate inside cultures that are not my own, down to reading the quiet senior executive who is, in fact, the decision-maker.