Artificial intelligence (AI) and partner programs have a lot in common when it comes to improving your business. Both AI and partner programs make it easier to educate the market about what you offer and win higher value deals, all while using less time and fewer resources.
Imagine how much further your organization could go if it combined a partner program with the power of artificial intelligence. It’s an appealing thought in theory, but hard to pull off in practice. But if you take the time to start understanding how these two forces come together, you can get a head start on your competition.
In this article, we’ll break down how you can leverage AI for partnerships while sharing some insights from PartnerStack Customer Success Manager, Ola Ogungbemile.
How to leverage AI in partnerships
Before you use any new technology – AI or otherwise – it’s important to understand what you’re trying to accomplish without the technology. In this case, you’re trying to grow your business by leveraging the strengths, expertise and resources of the different partner companies in your ecosystem. Most partner programs do this through three main steps:
- Partner recruitment
- Partner onboarding and activation
- Partner expansion and growth
“What you can do is accelerate what you do by being really curious and asking yourself, ‘What does world-class look like at each stage of the journey and how do I make sure I’m doing that in my program?’” explains Ogungbemile.
Determine the process, then bring in technology
Understanding the different stages of your partner journey is one strategy for leveraging AI for partnerships. The other approach is to ask yourself questions about your partner program and its processes. Ogungbemile recommends using the following questions as a starting point.
- What processes or tasks have we already nailed down?
- What are the tedious tasks that take up a lot of our team’s time?
- What are some of the big questions that we have and how can we use AI to help augment and accelerate our research in order to address those big questions?
Before we look at both of these strategies in detail, it’s important to understand one main distinction between the types of AI tools available today: chatbots vs. agents. Chatbots are simpler AI tools that handle straightforward, repetitive tasks. For example, you could include a chatbot on your partner program landing page that answers commonly asked questions in natural language. Meanwhile, an agent serves like an assistant that can handle more complex tasks and even make decisions. That said, it’s still about the philosophy behind the tech.
“What I truly believe is the core of partnerships is building meaningful relationships,” says Ogungbemile. “I think both [AI] chatbots and agents are really doing the same thing. They’re unlocking time for you as a human to build a meaningful relationship with someone else who you want to partner with. As far as I know, you can’t automate relationships.”
Related: How new tech will impact affiliate marketing.
Let’s look at the three major stages of the partner journey and see how you can leverage AI to enhance each of them.
How to leverage AI during partner recruitment
Your partner recruitment strategy consists of both inbound and outbound methods. Both of these methods require repetitive activities to ensure a steady stream of leads.
- Inbound partner recruitment involves making your website and your products as organically discoverable as possible; people find your product through regular search results instead of paid advertising.
- Outbound recruitment involves active outreach through Google searches, LinkedIn searches, cold calls and cold emails.
Determine the operations involved in inbound partner recruitment
A successful inbound partner recruitment strategy includes a landing page that describes your program and outlines the incentives. It’s also a good idea to prepare lead magnets that encourage site visitors to share details that will make it easy to segment them, such as name, job title and company. Once you have your landing page and lead magnet, it’s helpful to create different email sequences to support inbound recruitment, such as nurture email sequences and onboarding email sequences.
How can AI speed up inbound partner recruitment operations?
There are two main ways that AI can help with the inbound partner recruitment process: by accelerating creative asset generation and by executing rapid test-and-learn cycles.
AI can help you create optimized landing pages while saving time and money. Once you feed an AI tool information about your landing page, it will generate page titles, subheadings, and paragraph copy. Examples of AI landing page builders or assistants include HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant, Unbounce and Sitekick. There are also AI tools that can help you by A/B testing different landing pages automatically and learn which ones work best by monitoring user interactions and by conducting split tests.
Similarly, AI can speed up the process of writing email subject lines, pre-headers and body copy. It can also help with the creation of different graphics that align to your brand guidelines. Meanwhile, AI can help you A/B test different subject lines to find the ones that lead to the best open rates.
Determine the operations involved in outbound partner recruitment
For a successful outbound partner recruitment strategy, you need an ideal partner profile (IPP), a research-backed description of what your best-fit partners look like. Then you’ll need to do some prospecting through Google searches, LinkedIn searches, cold emails, cold calls and by using tools like PartnerStack’s partner discovery tool. This may also require conducting research on the people you’re reaching out to, so you can have meaningful conversations.
How can AI speed up outbound partner recruitment operations?
Firstly, AI can help you create your IPP — or refine it if you already have one. It can analyze information about your current customers and use this to create a more accurate ideal partner profile. There are also AI tools that help with prospecting by analyzing large quantities of sales data and using that information to identify trends and help business development representatives reach out to the right people, at the right time. Tools like Salesforce Einstein allow you to generate insights from your CRM data while tools like HubSpot Breeze offer specialized AI agents that can support your prospecting efforts, such as the Breeze Prospecting Agent. AI tools can also help craft cold emails and LinkedIn InMail when reaching out to prospects.
How to leverage AI for partner enablement
Determine the operations are involved in partner onboarding and activation
An effective onboarding and activation strategy makes it as easy as possible for partners to learn about and sell your product. This is accomplished by delivering regular communications, providing easily accessible enablement materials, providing clear goals and acknowledging and celebrating wins. One of the main ways that companies do this is through creating partner enablement materials and through regular email communications.
How can AI speed up partner onboarding and activation?
AI can help with the creation of enablement materials. You likely already have documented information about your products and services. AI can help you create different copy for different channels or collateral, such as one-pagers, emails, articles and infographics. Tools like Jasper can help you quickly create excellent product and partner marketing copy. Tools like Storydoc can help you create interactive partner marketing collateral for your business while Canva offers AI-powered tools for design such as Canva Magic Design and Canva AI Image Generator, so you can easily design partner enablement materials. AI tools can also help you automate your email sequences and trigger them based on specific user behaviours or if they haven’t engaged with your program in a while.
How to leverage AI for partner growth
Determine the operations involved in partner expansion and growth
Partner expansion and growth requires understanding your partner program’s current stage, incorporating the right technology, leveraging your existing relationships, reviving inactive partners and analyzing your data so you can pivot when necessary.
How can AI speed up partner expansion and growth?
AI tools such as Amplitude can help you understand the current stage of your partner program by analyzing multiple types of data such as sales metrics, engagement levels of your partner program emails, landing pages and partner portal, as well as your partner performance data. This data can be turned into visualizations that can help you identify trends and bottlenecks and see how different segments of your partner program are performing.
“You can ask Amplitude in natural language about things in your data and then it’ll create a chart for you. It’ll create a dashboard. It’ll create a table for you right there,” explains Ola.
You can also use AI to help you identify gaps in your current tech stack. There are tools, such as BetterCloud, that can conduct a data-driven analysis of your current tech stack and identify gaps and opportunities for automation. These kinds of tools can also help with trend identification. If you already know what part of your process is causing you issues and what kinds of results you’d like to enjoy, an AI tool can tell you which tools on the market have solved that problem and have delivered proven ROI for customers with a similar challenge.
AI can also help you revive inactive relationships by analyzing your communications and sales data with previous partners to identify what caused the relationship to fizzle. It can also help you segment your partners based on their behaviour, so you can sort your partners into different categories, such as partners who need additional training. AI tools that offer predictive analytics capabilities can also help you draft personalized outreach emails and figure out the best time to send them for optimal engagement.
Leverage AI to optimize your partner program by asking the right questions
What processes or tasks have we already nailed down?
What if you’re interested in leveraging AI, but you’re already feeling really good about your processes? Well, you can put those excellent processes to the test. Ogungbemile recommends doing the following —and by the way, he recommends this for processes that you’re not so happy about as well.
“One good question you could easily ask AI is, ‘Here’s my current process. Here’s the goal I’m trying to achieve. Can you pick this apart and see what I can do to automate and optimize that?’ That’ll already improve your process.”
What are some tedious tasks that take up a lot of our team’s time?
Another thing you can do is look at tasks that take up a lot of time or that you just don’t enjoy doing. An example of a task like this is scaling your communications and engagement. While connecting with partners one-on-one is fun, it can be hard to do this when you have to maintain a relationship with multiple channel partners. AI can help you do this, especially if you’re using a combination of chatbots and agents.
“That’s the big delineation between a chatbot and an AI agent where you can tell it, ‘Hey, can you go find me a list of the top partners in my space, organize it based on these decision criteria, create a personalized email for all of them and go ahead and send that email to recruit them,” explains Ogungbemile.
What are some of the big questions and how can we use AI to help augment and accelerate our research in order to address those big questions?
AI can also help you go further and expand your partner program’s reach and revenue. There are two main ways that you can do this. One is by using tools like Amplitude, which we covered earlier. Another option is to encourage your team to think about their biggest questions and find answers using AI.
Something that I think is super useful is just creating prompts and challenging your team to say, ‘Okay, what are some prompts we can create to improve our partnership recruitment efforts?’ Those prompts should come from the challenges you’re having,” says Ogungbemile. “Based on those challenges, I bet you there’s a prompt or a question you can come up with to ask that you can plug into AI or plug into something like a ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude to then give you more insight on how to improve that specific challenge.”
How can I leverage AI in a way that keeps things responsible and ethical?
Using AI ethically and responsibly is a big concern for many companies, but leaders are often unsure where to start. The good news is that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. Ogungbemile points to resources such as the Responsible AI Institute as a good starting point. If these principles inform your organization’s overall framework, then you have a sandbox where you can safely play with AI. After that, Ogungbemile says it’s a matter of being an encouraging employer.
“Don’t deter people from using AI,” says Ogungbemile. “What comes with that is having clear guidelines of what responsible AI use looks like.”
Partner ecosystems and AI make for the ultimate coupling
AI is here to stay and the companies that adapt this technology to their unique business — instead of impulsively purchasing the trendiest tools — will come out on top. The companies that are most successful will identify specific use cases and processes within their organization. Partner programs are full of processes and use cases that can be automated by AI, giving partner managers more time to focus on cultivating relationships.
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