This featured play is a guide to building stronger strategic relationships by looking to other teams in your own organization and the strength of your product. 

Watch and listen to Katie Landaal on Get It, Together, powered by PartnerStack.

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Here's a step-by-step breakdown of how Landaal uses internal relationships and a product-first focus to drive partnership results.

Cultivate strong internal relationships and understand roadmaps

Even if your title has “partnerships” in it, building internal relationships is just as important as cultivating external ones — because at some point, you’ll need something from another team.

This doesn’t mean you have to be an expert in everything your organization does. It just means you have to have a general idea of other teams’ roadmaps and priorities. Landaal’s partner team is product driven, so she’s made a point of developing a close relationship with the product team. “I see what’s on the product team’s roadmaps. I know what their priorities are. I know kind of where they’re driving to,” Landaal says. For your partner team, that might look like building closer connections to sales or marketing.

Knowing other teams’ roadmaps makes it that much easier to go to them with questions or requests from partners and point out how those requests fit into the team’s priorities. The majority of the time, Landaal says, the product team agrees to work on something because it fits right into their goals. When they don’t have time to add a feature or product, she’s able to work with them to figure out a timeline and, in the meantime, builds the go-to-market side of the partnership.

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Start with simplicity — build a straightforward program, then scale

Much like Rome, multi-tiered partner systems weren’t built in a day. It’s fine to start with the basics. (If you don’t, Landaal says, you’ll likely have to spend 90 per cent of your time building that partner system foundation anyway.)

The idea is to make your partner program so simple and small that it can run like a well-oiled machine. When — and only when — you’ve got it working, you can start thinking about scaling it. Eventually, you’ll be able to chase bigger and better things. With her own partner program, Landaal says, “now that foundation is there, now the baseline is there, I can now move into these larger, more strategic thinking areas of the business. It’s running as a machine and now the conversations that we have are, how do we make this even bigger for next year?”

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Prioritize product-led partnerships

The rise of AI means there’s lots of buzz about who’s got the newest, shiniest products. “Yes, you could refer, you could do all those things, but at the end of the day, unless you’re bringing something very innovative, something new to the market, something that somebody else doesn’t have or isn’t doing as well at, you’re just not going to get ahead,” Landaal says.

That means now is a great time to use partnerships to drive evolution and results. Look for potential partners on two timelines: those who are a good fit based on current gaps in the market, and those who can help reach your goals over the next three to five years.

With partners who can fill current market needs, get your product teams together to build something new, then craft your go-to-market plan. 

With partners who can potentially drive results over the next few years, you can even use a partnership as a testing ground for an acquisition or merger. Working together will quickly show whether the partner could fit into your organization’s systems and culture.

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Bridge the gap between internal teams

Keeping lines of communication open means everybody wins. When you know what’s going on in sales, product, marketing and more, you can add their projects to your own roadmap, make sure you’re aligned and figure out how you can help deliver value for everyone.

For Landaal, that means acting as a bridge between product and go-to-market by staying in constant communication with the product team — even participating in product calls. “I’m just there to help facilitate and make sure that it’s consumable to our customers, that our go-to-market and sales teams understand it, that it’s really bringing the benefit to the organization the way it should be,” Landaal says. “It should be done with purpose and done for the right reasons.”

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Emphasize data quality when leveraging AI to accelerate decision-making

AI can help you make decisions faster — if it’s built on good data. Lots of companies talk about being data driven, and now, you can ask AI tools for stats or figures and get answers right away to inform your decision making. 

But the tools’ output is only as good as their input. For Landaal, an internal AI tool is a reliable source because her company is, at its core, a data house, and their tool was built by a chief strategy officer and a dedicated engineering org. And the tool has proved its worth, she says. “I just ask it, and it tells me right away, and I don’t have to guess anymore. I don’t have to kind of thumb in the air anymore.”

By focusing on internal relationships and top-notch product, partnerships teams can deliver more value for everyone, from other teams to external partners. PartnerStack can help you run the day-to-day of your partnerships program efficiently, leaving you free to look at long-term strategic plays.

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Meet Get It, Together expert guest Katie Landaal:
This partnerships expert is experienced in building product-led partnerships and is the SVP of Strategic Alliances at ZoomInfo.