I’ve built 5 partner programs from zero to one that have driven $150m ARR.

One of the most important parts of this building process is focusing on the customer and understanding their journey.

From there, you can map your partner types to where they help in that journey and what their impact will be.

To effectively build the customer journey map, make sure you:

1. Interview your top customers and hear it directly from them.
   Hearing the language they use will be incredibly impactful both from a learning and marketing+sales perspective downstream. It’ll also be far more effective in helping you understand which partners to bring in. This qualitative process is hugely important in understanding the customer language being used. It also ensures you really understand their pain and gives you credibility internally.
   Saying “I’ve met with 50 of our top customers and learned...”
   goes a really long way!

   
   

2. Interview your internal cross-functional teams.
   
   

   This will help validate what you learn in your customer interviews and also give you insightful viewpoints from different roles. It will also bring people along for the journey as they will help shape your partner program.

   
   Collect feedback in both a quantitive (so you can run reports easily and stack rank) and a qualitative way (so you can deeply understand their point of view on the partnerships strategy).

   
   

3. Interview the partners your customers are already working with.
   

   You’ll hear firsthand how they are helping and what the business impact is.
   You can see a list of questions to ask the customer in my partner strategy template here (please note this is a premium template).
   
   

   To make this process easier for you, in partnership with nearbound.com, I made a free template with 3 major partner types in mind (Resellers, Solution Partners / Services Partners and ISVs / Technology partners) that maps to the customer journey.