Sarah Nichols

Everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today for our webinar perception versus reality, three ways. Internal communications nurtures, the success of partnership ecosystems. I’m Sarah Nichols engagement manager here at expert marketing advisors. And alongside me is Celeste Malia ARP, our expert at EMA.

And thanks so much for joining us Celeste. We’re excited to hear your input.

Celeste Malia

Thanks for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Nichols

Yeah. So I think we can probably kick off with going through kind of what’s happening today with partnership and internal communication versus external communications.

Celeste Malia

Happy to dive in. You know, when I look at what’s happening in partner enablement community today, oftentimes as businesses are looking to drive growth, they’re looking at who to, how do they become partner of Amazon or Salesforce, or, and how do they define their partner ecosystem?

They’re always looking outward. And then they’re always quick to raise the flag. Hey, I’ve got a new partner, but the reality is that there’s a big audience, right inside of your own community of employees. You have executives, marketing teams, sales teams, products, and that that employee community is really important to help evangelize.

A lot of the partnerships. So I’d love to talk today about how can you take advantage of using internal communications to talk about, to enable the partner partner program. Perfect.

Sarah Nichols

So I think it’d be good. We can go through kind of like the top three takeaways that you’ve seen for internal communications and how that’s really enabled success in various organizations.

Celeste Malia

You got it. You know, I think the very first, the very first takeaway that I often see in companies, and this is probably the number one thing that companies do.

Is that they always think that they could just get employees to share anything on social media. But the reality is that in order to get employees to influence and talk about partnerships, you really need to get their personal buy-in and then once they understand it, Who the partner is, why did you partner with them?

What is the partnership going to do for your customers? And what outcomes do you expect out of that partnership? Those are the kinds of insights that employees need to feel knowledgeable about. And once they have that information, They will probably feel more inclined to want to share that with their community.

Have you seen, have you seen some best practices around this, Sarah, where companies try to get employees to share things socially?

Sarah Nichols

Well, one thing that a lot of companies will ask of us is can you create these social media packs, essentially like giving kind of canned social media copy that they can pass around to folks and they can post on their social individual social platforms.

Do you feel like that’s a new.

Celeste Malia

That’s a really, really good question. I think it’s a really good tool to give people. Here’s some nifty ways of things that you could use, very lightweight that you could just take to your audience or to your communities. But I think even before that, they need to understand the why and the what’s happening.

And that is often communicated in a press release and a press release is geared externally for reporters and customers. And your competitors and it misses the most important audience you’ve got, which is your employee base. So before you hand them over those social tweets, I think you really need to talk about the big why and help them become comfortable with the content.

Sarah Nichols

Okay. And I think that leads really nicely into takeaway number two about, you know, incorporating it into their everyday. Absolutely. There’s a lifecycle to enablement, right? I mean, it’s not just hit and run. When you. Internal communications can be a really good partner strategically for business development partner managers internally.

Celeste Malia

So once you’ve defined a new partner or an existing partner, how do you get, how do you tell that story? How do you integrate that into the everyday work that people. In your, in your businesses do. So we live in multiple places. We live in our phones. We live in our computers and even within our computers, their slack channels, there’s email, there’s so many ways for us to kind of reach our employees.

And you need to find ways to get inside of those work, working with. Proof of points of fact and reach them. So whether it’s a newsletter, an employee newsletter, or a quick slack channel, that’s dedicated towards partner enablement or partner highlights or it can be a top down approach. How about going to an executive or, you know, an executive meeting or a senior leadership meeting talking about the partnerships there.

So you need both in a top-down and a bottom up strategy. And you need to find all the different components that people use to do their work today and communicate through those channels. And I won’t say it’s easy because there’s almost so many ways to communicate. So your internal communications expert is really your guide.

They’re your best guide to help you navigate? What are those channels? What’s the best way to do it. And one to do.

Sarah Nichols

Do you recommend having somebody like like a partnership enablement champion? And if so, what could that look like?

Celeste Malia

I think you’re at you’re you’re onto something. I’ve actually come across some interesting business descriptions recently for some big companies and their whole goal or their whole focus of that role is.

To work with employees internally. And if that person can find the advocates that you mentioned, Sarah whether it’s in the products team, the S the sales teams, marketing teams, all of those key pieces of the business that you need for enablement, and you find those advocates that can help tell your story and even navigate you to the right meetings.

That’s really the best way to keep the partnerships at the top of mine and to keep talking about them. Because once you tell them we found a new partner. Now you’ve got another chapter to tell them, how are you working with those partners? What are you working on? What did you guys do together? And that is a story that you want to keep, keep in the forefront of all employees.

Sarah Nichols

That’s perfect. I feel like if you don’t have somebody championing, championing, it, it kind of falls off as an afterthought. Unfortunately at times.

Celeste Malia

Exactly. It’s something you, oh, I think I remember I go to the website and I see, oh yes, we’re a partner of theirs. Right. But I really good stories, something that you’re constantly telling employees.

And that’s, that’s really the role of the partner enablement today. Along with, with, along with internal comms.

Sarah Nichols

Moving into number three, if you could kind of dive into use cases and customer stories, how you’ve seen this.

Celeste Malia

I think one of the best ways to drive alignment internally when in any type of enablement is to use use cases and customer stories and the internal communications expert can also point you to how to disseminate this information.

How do we get these use cases being talked about. Where should they happen in what format do they happen? I personally have been a part of a menorah organization that had a customer, I’m sorry, a company kickoff session where everyone was kind of broken into different things. And in those groups, we played shark tank and we thought about the product we had and how can it be different?

How can it be used? And employees really are the best asset to come up with these use cases and identify partner use cases that help with existing partners. Or they can also identify partners that you need to add to your ecosystem. And so they may even enlighten you on, Hey, this is where a company direction it should be going.

And so by evangelizing those use cases, it helps, you know, keep it at the forefront. So you’re not competing so much with the priorities of, of products teams, because we all know they get inundated with. Other features they need to build. They’ve got, you know, you’re competing for your existing customer time.

And of course you’ve got partner use cases that could bring in potential, even YouTube. So it’s a story that you need to keep at the forefront. And really that is what you’re trying to drive is shared vision across the company, by using these customer stories and use cases.

Sarah Nichols

That’s great. We always hear of customer success stories kind of external facing on the website, but we don’t really think about them in the context of partner enablement.

So it’s a new way to think about kind of like putting that on display for everybody.

Celeste Malia

Yeah, absolutely. You know, 60 or 65% of strategic business partnerships fail and they park and they fail for a variety of reasons. Communication, not aligned goals. But you’ve got an army within your own organization and that’s your employees.

And if you can integrate customer stories at your company town hall or even through a simple email that gets every Friday of each of each month you could talk about here’s some new customers. Co joint customer wins. We’ve got getting that showing the ROI of your partnerships is equally important to define new new use cases.

Sarah Nichols

That’s perfect. Oh, well, I didn’t go to the side, but broad evangelization of use cases over to that one. Well thank you so much Celeste I think it was really helpful partner. Enablement is such a huge component of a company’s success. And I think sometimes it’s kind of left to the wayside. Something we don’t prioritize all the time.

Just to kind of go through the key takeaways here, really turning your employees into advocates making partner enablement a piece. Everyday work for folks. If that means assigning a champion, a partner enablement champion to communicate with people on an ongoing basis, and then finding a way to develop and communicate those use cases and customer success stories to, you know, keep everybody in the loop.

Anything else to add to that? Celeste?

Celeste Malia

Nope, that’s that’s perfect. Your internal communications expert is really your guide. All of these three scenarios and they could really help build out and shape the program that makes it very easy for any partner or business development

manager to employ across an organization.

So thanks for having me, Sarah, it was great to kind of touch on a subject that no one is really talking about, but a lot of people are struggling with.

Sarah Nichols

And if anybody has any questions or wants to dive a little bit deeper into the topic, feel free to reach out at contact@expertmarketingadvisors.com.

But thank you so much for joining us today. And we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.