How a Partnerships Leader Gets on ELT Radar (and Wins Buy-in)

French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction." 

In many ways, the same is true for a partnerships leader trying to get buy-in from their ELT. “Alignment does not consistent in gazing at each other, but in looking in the same revenue direction.” 

In short, when you’re trying to get executive buy-in, you’re trying to do two things: 

1. Get your executive team to look in the same direction as you
2. Convince your executive team that you can get others to look in that direction as well

So in this article, we’re talking all about how to get your executive team to fall in love with your partnerships initiatives.  

To go beyond flowery quotes from early twentieth century writers and get some hard facts from twenty-first century leaders, we spoke to Mike Head, Chief Revenue Officer at PartnerStack, for some insight into how to win an executive team’s buy-in for a partnerships project — including his own.

To secure buy-in, you’ve got to do the following: 

• Understand what exactly buy-in is
• Remember revenue
• Consider the mindset, familiar metrics and biases of the executive who’ll receive your pitch
• Play to your strengths but prepare for your weaknesses
• Understand the two key types of fear executives experience
• Get feedback by channeling your inner five year old

Understand what exactly buy-in is and why it’s important

If you’re working in partnerships, you’re already gazing lovingly at your affiliate marketing plan and your partner marketing emails. But it’s important to move beyond your own perception and get others to see what you see, so they can bring their unique talents — and that executive signing authority — to your partnerships initiative. Getting buy-in matters, specifically because it: 

• Gives your project credibility: In the consumer world, reputation and industry prominence is the top factor people consider when buying something. The same logic applies to how people “buy” an idea within an organization. If an unfamiliar project gets endorsed by a prominent individual that manages a large budget and a large number of people, it’s more likely to be taken seriously by colleagues. 
• Resources: Better to get credit for 50 per cent of something than 100 per cent of nothing. Getting executive level buy-in means obtaining more resources in terms of time, money and room on the agenda. The unique perspectives, skill sets and money that your project receives can help you turn a partnerships initiative into an entire program, then project, then division. 
• Alignment: You and your executive leadership team can all speak English and still be speaking different languages. And we’re not just talking about industry jargon. We’re talking about understanding what matters in terms of their professional goals and the metrics they’re familiar with. We’ll talk about this later in the piece. 

As Head puts it, buy-in is the “commitment to do something and that commitment will come with investments, whether that's capital, resources or both.” Let’s dive further into some strategies for securing that buy-in so you can live rent-free in your leadership’s head.

Remember revenue: Leadership is currently focused on “growth in an efficient way”

Once you understand the importance of securing buy-in, it’s helpful to understand what’s important to your executive leadership team — and these days it’s all about highly efficient growth. 

“All of 2010 to 2020 was revenue growth at all costs,” says Head. “And then came a large focus on efficiency. And now more recently we’ve rebounded back to ‘We need to see growth.’ But not in the same way of 2010 to 2020 of growth at all costs. It’s now about growth in an efficient way.” 

This is good news because it means that on average executives are interested in hearing about initiatives that can bring them ROI without spending massive amounts of money. Partnership programs tend to deliver that. 

Read more: PartnerStack ELT shares their 2025 GTM predictions.

Consider the mindset, training and biases of the executive receiving your pitch

Next, it’s important to understand the mindset, training and biases of the specific executive who’ll receive your pitch. 

“Depending on whom you're engaging with on the executive team, they're going to have certain biases towards things that they know that work well,” says Head. 

“If you think about a sales leader, they have proven, repeatable processes,” he explains, adding that they may have knowledge that would allow them to predict that investing in certain areas — a BDR or SDR or AEs — with X amount of amount of money, should yield Y amount of results.

Therefore, Head recommends mirroring some of these recognizable thought patterns in your discussions or presentations to them. For instance, consider how to tailor your pitch for different types of executives.

• A sales executive: it’s a good idea to talk about leading indicators, projected leads and potential number of meetings. 
• An executive with a marketing background: it might be a good idea to frame your partnerships initiative in terms of how it can improve your demand generation funnel by providing an estimate of how much it’ll cost to generate an MQL or by providing projected conversion rates at different stages of the funnel. 

It’s also important to consider the time frame. As Head explains, “Another mistake that partnership leaders will make is thinking of too long of a horizon.” Partnerships can be a long game, but thinking that bets need to be made now and the company will see results in a year or two won’t work for most leaders, he says. “For most leaders that’s too long of a time frame and a horizon to think through.”

Instead, Head recommends showing how you’ll deliver incremental value over the long-term. 

You might also like: Overcoming revenue pitfalls to solve your biggest partnership problems.

Real-life example: How a partnership team won this executive’s buy-in

Head describes how a team he worked with used this approach to obtain his buy-in for a new partnerships initiative.

The team already understood the importance of finding influential individuals who had a large number of vendors in their network and introducing them to their product or service. In this case, however, they had a new idea in mind: what if they built their own community of fractional leaders who individually only had a few vendors in their network but altogether had hundreds of vendors? 

This would require focusing efforts on tying together a group of leaders with a shared approach to business (fractional services) but not necessarily a shared industry or existing connections, a departure from existing approaches. The team secured Head’s buy-in using the following methods:

• The scalability of the idea: While the fractionals may be a disparate group with disparate groups of vendors, altogether they formed a specific community with an aligned goal of providing fractional services to high-growth companies. If Head’s team could figure out what was valuable to them and how they could best support their clients using the company’s products or services, it could be scalable and repeatable.  
• Aligning to the company’s existing metrics: When the team presented how the performance of the project would be measured, they aligned the KPIs to the company’s overall strategy and metrics. 
• Limited initial investment: Head explains that there was a limited initial investment, which allowed them to monitor the milestones along the way in a short timeframe. “It really de-risked it. It wasn't a large capital investment that we would need to do over a 12 month timeframe.” Instead, Head said there was a clear understanding of what would be spent up front in order to hit projected milestones at the 30, 60 and 90 day marks. This provided quick cycles where the team could check in on ROI and decide whether this was a worthy endeavour to continue. 

Play to your strengths but prepare for your weaknesses

When giving a presentation or trying to persuade someone to do something, people typically rely on one of two strategies: selling through story or selling through numbers. 

Usually this is because their professional success to date has relied on one of these strategies, and this is especially true for partnerships professionals who typically come from either a sales background or a marketing analytics background. While it’s important to lean on your strengths, it’s also vital to prepare for your weaknesses and balance your presentation. 

“If you're coming from more of a sales background, you probably do a great job of selling the dream overall and you should utilize that internally,” explains Head. “But at the same time make sure that you're learning and growing around the data and analytics.” 

The reverse is also true. 

“If you come from more of the analytics side of things and you're shying away from the narrative and the storytelling, it's super important to know that storytelling is a critical component of human nature in business,” continues Head. “You have to train yourself to become good at also positioning that narrative effectively.” 

Understand the two types of fear executives experience

Leaders do their best to stay rational and focus on the facts. But that doesn’t make them completely detached, especially when it comes to one very powerful emotion: fear. 

“Fear is clearly one of the strong emotions for people to think through,” Head explains. He shares two key fears of executives:

• The fear of making a poor investment
• The fear of not hitting your numbers. 

“Back in the time period of 2010 to 2020, there was the fear of missing out. And then once 2022 to 2024 came around, it was more the fear of messing up vs. missing out.”

A recent article from Harvard Business Review discusses the importance of managing your leadership team’s emotions when securing buy-in. And while it’s hard to predict every single stressor in an executive’s life, Head recommends taking some time to think about what your leadership team’s current headspace might be:

• Are you at the time of year where they’re thinking about hitting their numbers? 
• Is your company in the press for a specific reason? 
• Are you competitors currently advancing in a specific area? 

Consider tactfully aligning your solution as a solution to something that’s top of mind for your organization and figuring out how they can look good in the process. 

Related: The CRO’s checklist to unlocking partnership budget.

Get feedback by channeling your inner five year old

Finally, there’s always the chance that your executive team will say no to an initiative you’re excited about. The good news is that you can turn a perceived loss into momentum for a future win. Mike recommends adopting an almost childlike obsession with the word “why?”

“I like to tell people to channel their inner five year old,” says Mike. Ask questions like:

• What was your reaction to this initiative?
• What did you prioritize ahead of it? 
• What were the concerns and the reasons that you didn't move forward? 
• What was it about how I presented this that didn't resonate? 

“Feedback is very critical overall,” Head explains.This effort will help you develop a better understanding of how the organization operates, how this specific leader thinks and what they care about. You can then prepare yourself to get on their radar and secure buy-in next time.