Partnership Development

Partnership Development

Guide the user from "we should partner with someone" to a signed, launched, and well-governed partnership. Cover the full lifecycle: sourcing and scoring candidates, choosing the right partnership model, making first contact, negotiating workable terms, executing a joint launch, and running recurring health reviews so the partnership compounds instead of quietly dying after the announcement tweet.

When to use this skill

Use this skill when the user wants to:

• Identify and prioritize potential partners for their product or company
• Evaluate whether a specific inbound or outbound partnership is worth doing
• Choose between co-marketing, integration, reseller, or referral models
• Draft partner outreach, a partnership one-pager, or a proposal
• Structure deal terms (rev share, exclusivity, MDF, SLAs, term length)
• Plan a joint launch or co-marketing campaign with a partner
• Set up partner governance: scorecards, QBRs, escalation paths

Do NOT use this skill for:

• Paid affiliate programs with self-serve signup and tracked commissions — use affiliate-program
• Paying creators or individuals for sponsored content — use influencer-marketing
• Cold email mechanics (deliverability, sequencing, personalization at scale) — use cold-email-outreach or linkedin-outreach; this skill provides partner-specific messaging, those cover the channel craft
• Selling to a customer rather than partnering — use sales-proposals and lead-qualification
• The public announcement press release itself — use press-releases
• Your own product's launch plan independent of a partner — use product-launch or go-to-market

Inputs to gather

Ask the user for these before starting. Where they don't know, apply the defaults.

1. What they sell and to whom — product, price point, ICP. If a personas doc exists, use it; otherwise ask for a two-sentence description. (Suggest customer-personas if they've never defined this.)
2. Partnership goal — pick ONE primary: new leads, credibility/brand, product capability (integration), new channel/geography, or retention. Default: new leads, since that's what most users actually mean.
3. Stage — sourcing partners, evaluating one specific partner, negotiating, launching, or managing an existing partnership. This determines which Process steps apply.
4. Resources — who owns partnerships (founder, marketer, dedicated partner manager?), engineering availability for integrations, and budget for co-marketing. Default: founder-led, no eng availability this quarter, $0 budget — which rules out heavy integration and paid MDF plays.
5. Audience size assets — email list size, social following, monthly traffic, customer count. Needed for co-marketing reciprocity math. Default if unknown: assume small (<5k list) and steer toward asymmetric value (content, product access) instead of audience swaps.
6. Constraints — exclusivity sensitivities, competitors they won't partner near, legal/compliance requirements (regulated industries need data processing terms early).

Process

Step 1 — Define the partnership thesis (30 minutes, not a strategy offsite)

Write one sentence: "We partner with [type of company] who already serve [our ICP] at [adjacent moment in the customer journey], so that [primary goal]." If the user can't fill this in, work backward from their best existing customers: ask "what tools/services did your last 10 customers already use before they found you?" Those vendors are the natural partner pool.

Step 2 — Build the candidate list (target: 20-30 names, shortlist of 5-8)

Source candidates from four pools, in order of typical yield:

1. Shared-customer vendors — tools your customers already use (check integrations pages of competitors, ask customers directly).
2. Same-ICP, different-problem companies — sell to the same buyer, no overlap in what they solve.
3. Upstream/downstream workflow neighbors — customers use them immediately before or after your product.
4. Agencies/consultants who implement in your category — high-trust referrers with recurring client flow. Use competitor-analysis output if available to see who competitors partner with — a partner of your competitor is either off-limits or highly persuadable, and it's worth knowing which.

Step 3 — Score fit and prioritize

Run every shortlisted candidate through the Partner Fit Scorecard (see Frameworks). Score 1-5 on each of six weighted criteria. Decision rule: pursue scores ≥3.8, park 3.0-3.7 for a lighter-touch model (referral instead of integration), drop <3.0. Never pursue more than 3 new partnerships simultaneously with a founder-led team — each active negotiation consumes 2-4 hours/week.

Step 4 — Choose the partnership model

Match the model to the goal and resource reality using the Model Selection matrix (see Frameworks). Decision points:

• No engineering time available → co-marketing or referral only.
• Partner is much bigger (10x+ audience) → don't propose an audience swap; propose something asymmetric they value (exclusive content, customer intros, product access for their team).
• Recurring revenue is the goal and the partner touches purchase decisions → referral first, reseller only after 6+ months of proven referral flow.
• Product gaps are the goal → integration, but scope a v1 that ships in <4 engineering weeks or it will never ship. Default sequencing for a new relationship: start with one low-cost co-marketing act (webinar, guest post swap) as a trust trial, then escalate. Partnerships that skip the trial phase have a high failure rate because neither side has proven follow-through.

Step 5 — Make contact

Find the right owner: at companies <50 people, email the CEO/founder; 50-500, look for "Partnerships," "Business Development," or "Ecosystem" titles; 500+, find the partner program page and apply through it AND email a named partner manager. Warm paths beat cold 5-10x on response rate — check for shared investors, mutual customers, or event overlap first. Draft outreach using the Partner Outreach Email template below. Partner outreach benchmarks: 15-30% reply rate for well-targeted warm-ish outreach vs. 1-5% for generic cold — if replies are under 10%, the targeting or the specific-value line is broken, not the send volume. For channel mechanics (sequencing, follow-up cadence), hand off to cold-email-outreach.

Step 6 — First call and mutual discovery

Structure the 30-minute intro call: 5 min context swap, 10 min "what would a win look like for you?", 10 min explore 1-2 concrete first plays, 5 min agree next step with a date. Qualify the partner like a lead: Do they have an owner for this? Have they done partnerships before? What killed their last one? Exit the call with ONE specific proposed first action, not "let's stay in touch."

Step 7 — Propose and agree terms

Send a one-page Partnership Proposal (template below) within 48 hours of a positive call. For anything involving money, IP, data sharing, or exclusivity, follow with a light term sheet before lawyers. Deal term guardrails:

• Referral fees: 10-20% of first-year contract value is standard for SaaS; 20-25% if the partner sources AND helps close. One-time or 12-month trailing, rarely perpetual.
• Reseller margin: 20-40% off list depending on who handles support and implementation (higher margin = partner does more).
• Exclusivity: default NO. If forced, cap at one named competitor exclusion, 6-12 months, with a minimum performance floor (e.g., "exclusivity lapses if fewer than N referrals/quarter").
• Term and exit: 12-month initial term, auto-renew, 30-60 day termination for convenience. Never sign a partnership you can't exit in under 90 days.
• Pilot first: for anything complex, run a 90-day pilot with 2-3 defined success metrics before signing the full agreement.
• Data: specify who owns leads generated jointly, and how customer data is shared (usually: it isn't — each side keeps its own).

Step 8 — Plan the joint launch

A partnership without a launch moment produces nothing. Use the Joint Launch Plan (see Frameworks): work backward from launch date at T-6 weeks minimum for anything with content or product components, T-3 weeks for a simple co-webinar. Assign every deliverable a named owner ON EACH SIDE. The single most predictive launch success factor: both sides have the launch date on their content calendar with committed distribution slots (newsletter send, social posts) — get those commitments in writing in the plan. Coordinate announcement mechanics with press-releases and product-launch if the integration is a product event.

Step 9 — Instrument and govern

Before launch, agree on: shared tracking (UTM scheme like utm_source=partner&utm_campaign={partner-slug}-{play}, unique referral links or codes), a shared doc or Slack channel, and a single named owner per side. Then run the governance cadence:

• Monthly: async metrics swap (leads passed, leads received, pipeline created, deals closed).
• Quarterly: 45-60 minute Partner Health Review using the template below — score health, review the last quarter's plays, commit the next quarter's 1-2 plays.
• Annually: renew/renegotiate/retire decision against the original scorecard. Kill criteria — recommend sunsetting when: two consecutive quarters below 50% of target, the partner's owner has churned twice with no replacement, or reciprocity ratio (value sent vs. received) stays worse than 3:1 for 6 months despite escalation.

Frameworks & templates

Partner Fit Scorecard (weighted, score each 1-5)

Criterion	Weight	1 =	5 =
Audience overlap with our ICP	25%	<10% of their customers fit our ICP	>60% fit
Reach relative to ours	15%	<0.2x our audience	1-5x our audience (sweet spot; >10x scores 3 — hard to get attention)
Strategic complementarity	20%	Vague adjacency	Customers explicitly ask for the combination
Competitive risk	15%	Roadmap likely collides in 12 months	No plausible overlap
Ease of execution	15%	No partner function, no APIs, slow legal	Existing partner program, docs, fast yes/no
Brand/values alignment	10%	Reputation risk or quality mismatch	Association actively lifts our brand

Weighted score = Σ(score × weight). Pursue ≥3.8, lighter model 3.0-3.7, pass <3.0.

Worked example: A 15-person email-marketing SaaS scoring a popular Shopify landing-page app: overlap 5 (same DTC ICP), reach 4 (3x their list), complementarity 5 (pages feed email capture), competitive risk 3 (partner could add email later), ease 4 (has a partner page), brand 4. Weighted: 5(.25)+4(.15)+5(.20)+3(.15)+4(.15)+4(.10) = 1.25+0.60+1.00+0.45+0.60+0.40 = 4.30 → pursue, start with co-marketing, propose integration once trust is proven.

Model selection matrix

Model	Best when	Cost to run	Time to first value	Typical economics
Co-marketing (webinars, content swaps, bundles)	Goal is leads/brand; low trust so far; no eng time	Low (hours)	2-6 weeks	No money changes hands; value = audience access
Integration	Customers ask for the combo; product gap; retention goal	High (2-8 eng weeks + maintenance)	1-4 months	Usually free/mutual; sometimes marketplace rev share 10-30%
Referral	Partner talks to your buyers but won't sell for you	Low-medium	4-8 weeks	10-25% of first-year value per closed deal
Reseller	Partner has sales force + your buyers; you lack channel reach in their segment/geo	High (training, enablement, deal reg)	3-6 months	20-40% margin; expect 6-12 months before meaningful revenue

Template 1 — Partner Outreach Email (first touch)

Subject options (under 50 characters): [Their company] + [Your company] idea or Our customers keep mentioning [Their company]

Hi [First name],

[One-line credibility + connection: "We make [product] for [ICP] — [specific proof: customer count, notable customer, or metric]. I noticed [genuine specific observation: their recent launch, shared customer, their integration page]."]

[The overlap, concretely: "Roughly [X]% of our customers already use [Their product] — they use you for [job A] and us for [job B]."]

[ONE specific proposal, smallest viable: "I'd love to explore a joint webinar on [topic their audience cares about] — we'd bring [your concrete contribution: list size, speaker, data]."]

Worth a 20-minute call? I'm free [two specific slots].

[Name]

Rules: under 120 words, one proposal only (not a menu), name what YOU bring before what you want, no attachment on first touch, follow up twice at +4 and +10 business days then stop.

Template 2 — One-Page Partnership Proposal

[Your co] × [Partner co] — Partnership Proposal Date / Prepared by / For: [names] Why this works: [2-3 sentences: shared audience, complementary products, the specific customer problem the combination solves] What we propose (Phase 1, 90 days): [1-2 plays, e.g., "Co-hosted webinar in [month] + reciprocal newsletter features"] What each side commits:

	[Your co]	[Partner co]
Deliverables	[e.g., landing page, speaker, follow-up sequence]	[e.g., speaker, promotion to list]
Distribution	[e.g., 2 emails to 12k list, 3 social posts]	[e.g., 1 email to 40k list, 2 posts]
Owner	[name]	[name]
Success metrics: [e.g., 300 combined registrations, 50 leads each, 5 opportunities each]
Economics: [None for Phase 1 / referral fee of X% on sourced deals, paid within 30 days of collection]
What Phase 2 could be: [one sentence — integration, reseller, bundle]
Next step: [specific action + date]

Partner Health Review (quarterly, 45-60 min agenda)

1. Scoreboard (10 min): leads passed each way, pipeline $, closed $, campaign metrics vs. target. Compute reciprocity ratio.
2. Health score (5 min): each side rates 1-5 on: business results, ease of working together, strategic importance, executive support. Anything ≤2 gets a named action.
3. Wins & friction (15 min): one thing that worked, one thing that didn't, per side.
4. Next quarter plays (15 min): commit 1-2 plays max, with owners and dates. More than 2 = none will happen.
5. Decisions & escalations (10 min): anything needing exec or legal attention; confirm next review date before ending the call.

Health verdicts: Invest (avg ≥4 — escalate the model), Maintain (3-3.9), Fix (2-2.9 — one quarter with explicit remediation), Sunset (<2 or kill criteria met — exit gracefully, keep the relationship warm).

Joint Launch Plan skeleton (T-minus schedule)

• T-6 wks: kickoff call; agree launch date, target metrics, and this checklist; open shared channel
• T-5 wks: landing page copy drafted; integration in QA (if applicable); draft announcement copy both sides
• T-4 wks: each side confirms distribution slots in own calendar (newsletter date, social dates); co-branded assets brief
• T-3 wks: assets final; tracking links/UTMs created and tested; support/sales teams briefed with a 1-page FAQ
• T-2 wks: partner page/directory listings live (unlisted); email drafts approved by both sides
• T-1 wk: dry run of demo/webinar; embargoed customer or press preview if warranted (see media-outreach)
• Launch day: publish simultaneously; both teams amplify within the first 2 hours; monitor signups/support queue
• T+1 wk: metrics readout vs. target; retro; agree the follow-on play while momentum exists

Output format

Deliverables depend on stage; produce them as clearly-separated markdown sections (or separate files if the user asks):

• Sourcing stage: partnership thesis sentence + scored candidate table (name, category, weighted score, recommended model, suggested first play) sorted by score, with the top 3 flagged.
• Outreach stage: ready-to-send outreach email (personalized, under 120 words) + two follow-up variants + suggested contact/title to target.
• Proposal stage: completed one-page proposal + a terms summary (fees, term, exit, exclusivity, data ownership, pilot metrics) with any negotiation guardrails flagged.
• Launch stage: dated T-minus plan with named owners per deliverable per side, tracking/UTM scheme, and target metrics.
• Governance stage: filled health review agenda, health score, verdict (Invest/Maintain/Fix/Sunset), and next-quarter play commitments.

Every deliverable ends with a "Next 3 actions" list: specific, owner-assigned, dated within 2 weeks.

Quality checklist

Verify before delivering:

• The partnership thesis names a specific partner type, shared ICP, and ONE primary goal
• Every scored candidate has all six criteria rated with the weighted total computed correctly
• The recommended model matches stated resources (no integration plays when the user said zero eng time)
• Outreach email is under 120 words, contains exactly one proposal, and states what the user offers before what they ask
• Outreach references something genuinely specific to the partner (not swappable to any company)
• Proposal includes named owners on BOTH sides for every deliverable
• Any money terms fall inside guardrail ranges (referral 10-25%, reseller margin 20-40%) or the deviation is explicitly justified
• Exclusivity, if present, is capped in scope and time with a performance floor
• Exit terms allow termination within 90 days
• Launch plan works backward from a real date with at least the T-4 distribution-slot commitment step
• Tracking scheme (UTMs/referral links) is defined before launch, not after
• Governance cadence is stated with kill criteria, not just "check in regularly"
• Success metrics are numbers, not adjectives ("50 leads each," not "strong lead flow")
• Deliverable ends with 3 dated, owner-assigned next actions

Common mistakes

• The logo-hunting partnership. Pursuing a big brand for the announcement, with no defined play behind it. A partnership with no first play scheduled within 60 days of signing is a press release, not a partnership.
• Opening with a menu. First outreach that lists five possible collaboration types forces the partner to do your strategy work. Propose one small specific thing; expand after it works.
• Proposing an audience swap to someone 10x your size. Reciprocity math fails and you look naive. Offer asymmetric value: content, data, product access, or customer intros.
• Skipping the trust trial. Jumping straight to integration or reseller agreements with an unproven partner. Run one cheap co-marketing play first; follow-through is the real diligence.
• Signing perpetual or auto-escalating exclusivity. Exclusivity without a performance floor and expiry is a free option you granted for nothing. Most early partnerships need no exclusivity at all.
• Nobody owns it on the other side. If the partner can't name a single accountable person, every play will stall. An unowned partnership is already dead — it just hasn't been announced yet.
• Rev share on unclosable referrals. Paying referral fees on "leads passed" instead of closed revenue invites junk. Pay on collected revenue, define "sourced" precisely, and set a 60-90 day attribution window.
• Launch-and-abandon. Everything peaks on announcement day, then the shared Slack channel goes silent. The quarterly health review with kill criteria exists precisely because partnerships decay silently by default.
• Measuring vanity reciprocity. Counting social mentions instead of pipeline. Track leads passed, pipeline created, and revenue closed each way — a 3:1 imbalance for two quarters means renegotiate or sunset.
• Letting legal lead. Sending a 20-page agreement before alignment on a one-pager. Sequence: call → one-page proposal → light term sheet → contract. Reversing it kills deals that would have worked.