In the latest episode of the PartnerUP podcast, Stephen Ceplenski talks about designing and managing Marketo’s Partner Program. Celpenski has been managing Marketo’s program up until a few years ago when Marketo got acquired by Adobe. He shares his insights on how to best structure a partner program.
Here’s what we learned.
- Your partner program doesn’t work if you can’t attract the right partners.
- If you thoroughly analyze what you need from a partner program, you stand a better chance of choosing the right partners
- If you get buy-in from all of the departments in your company, creating a partner program goes a lot more smoothly. For example, once Marketo’s software engineering department understood that they’d get a private beta environment with partners willing to test products in advance. This testing would ensure that the engineers were aware of product issues a lot quicker and partners would be willing to be thorough in their testing as any product issues would affect their reputation as well. Once the software engineers understood this, they were much more receptive to the idea of a partner program.
You’ll want to listen to this podcast if you’re thinking about creating a partner program, are in the process of creating one or are looking to redesign yours. Listen to it here.