My path to heading up Citrix strategic partnerships began as a happy accident. Early in my career, I was working in enterprise sales for a Fortune 500 technology firm. I had three great back-to-back years and caught the attention of management, who were surprised at how many of my transactions involved partners.
To me, it just made sense: I’m selling product, partners are selling services, and when we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, we can bring a comprehensive and tailored response to our customers’ business needs. Apparently I made a convincing case, because I was plucked out of my role and tasked with working exclusively on partnerships, helping the company replicate what I’d done.
Since then, I’ve had the privilege of working with all sorts of partners all over the world. What I find most rewarding — the lesson I learned early on and that’s held true ever since — is that strategic partnerships are a team sport. Done properly, everyone benefits — technology providers, partners, and especially the customers they serve.
Partnerships as a Team Sport
A successful strategic partnership benefits both partners and customers in a myriad of ways. On the sales side, both product and service sellers benefit from collaborating by extending their reach to more customers and opportunities. Effectively, every dollar of software sold generates multiples in services, making the pot bigger for everyone.
Partnerships also fuel innovation. Even if you’re selling a great product, when you don’t step out of that silo, you can end up with a skewed sense of the value you’re offering. When you work with partners though — the people on the ground helping customers implement and adopt your product — you’re forced to consider other perspectives and ideas that might never have bubbled up in isolation.
Customers realize significant benefits from partnerships, as well:
- Customer-centric focus by default: When a vendor collaborates with a partner, it’s much harder to lose the forest for the trees. You have no choice but to think through the lens of the customer and the problem they need to solve. And if you stray too far, your partner will keep you honest.
- Reduced complexity: The technology world is getting more complex — and the enterprise IT stack even more so. But expectations for customers’ business outcomes are as high as ever. When customers work with vendors piecemeal, they’re forced to act as a general contractor, taking on the complexity of evaluating and integrating all the different components of the solution they need. When partner and vendor work together to present a more holistic solution, much of that burden goes away.
- Accelerated business outcomes: By reducing complexity and reducing the integration burden, partnerships help customers get to their solution — and realize the value of their investment — much more quickly.
- Increased innovation: As software and services partners work more collaboratively and identify new ideas and opportunities, customers enjoy the fruits of that innovation.
In the end, everyone benefits. By being more innovative in supporting our customers’ business outcomes and reducing their complexity, we make it easier for them to consume our solutions. That, in turn, means they’re more likely to want to do business with our partners leveraging our solutions.
Three Principles for Successful Partnerships
Obviously, I’m an evangelist for partnerships. However, that doesn’t mean that any partner strategy will yield the same results. It would take more than one blog post to capture all the lessons I’ve learned over the last decade-plus about partnering successfully, but here are three that are always top of mind:
- Build partnerships before you need them. We already know the major players our customers are likely to work with: big consulting firms, hyperscalers, major cloud/SaaS providers. By proactively considering how we can work together to solve our mutual customers’ problems, we’ll be in a much better spot than if we wait until there’s a specific customer need and we’re scrambling to react.
- If you’re not working with the partners your customers trust, assume competitors will. I’ll never forget the experience I had working for a Fortune 500 IT hardware and software company back in the early 2000s. We had a strong, loyal customer base and were very confident in our market position. What we didn’t realize was that a competitor had carved out a partnership with one of the major SaaS players at that time. One by one, our customers started getting picked off. It wasn’t personal — the customers still loved our company. It was just easier to use the solution bundled with one of their most important business applications. The lesson was clear: If a customer has to choose between a stronger product versus one that’s good enough but more integrated into their IT stack, “simpler” often beats “better.” To stay relevant, always focus on your customer.
- Your approach to partnerships should be global, but execution must be local. Not every partnership is relevant to every part of the world. Indeed, one of the core benefits of being a global company using a partner-led approach is that you can work with people who intimately understand your customers’ business, culture, and mindset. Successful partnerships embrace those differences. The way you work with partners should be consistent across the company, but your execution priorities have to be regional and local.
Thank Goodness for Happy Accidents
I could go on about the value of partnerships, but selfishly, I have to admit that this unique combination of strategy and sales is just the perfect role for me. I love the complexity of figuring out how to meld two companies’ interests together for the benefit of a customer. I love the sales side, too — working on a deal, talking through a deal, understanding why a customer purchased something and how they plan to use it to achieve business outcomes. I may have stumbled into partnerships by accident, but it was a fortunate one.
Today, I’m thrilled to be leading GSI and tech partner business at Citrix, where I get to focus my energy and passion on expanding these revenue generating relationships. Together with our amazing global partners, we’ll continue to find new ways to deliver exceptional business value to our customers.
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