This is a clip from an hour strategy session we recorded with Maddy Martin on How Smith.ai uses and converts revenue from free partner accounts. This clip focuses on the strategy of aligning with agencies to co-market successfully.

For the full class and course on PARTNER ENABLEMENT strategy, including the assets mentioned, head to: learn.partnerprograms.io

Summary: Nothing will make your partners understand and take the time to learn your product inside and out as relying on your tool for their own business. This class is all about partner enablement by giving the partners the client experience first hand.

You need your partner to act as if they are dependent on your product to grow their business. How best to achieve that mentality then to first onboard them into the product as if they are a paying customer.

*Note: If your tool simply cannot be given to new partners, or used by partners, then do anything you can to get them to use the tool for their clients. A great example of this is our clients Recart and Tapcart who partner with ecommerce marketing agencies, but implementation requires shopify, and of course agencies sites are not shopify sites… so their strategy is to give the agency an account to use for free for one of their clients in order to work together in the implementation to ramp learning faster and enable them to sell.

Takeaways:

Why it’s important to treat partners as paying clients.
Why making them a free user on your software is necessary to speed enablement.
Partner communication and usage playbook from Smith.
Continually build their experience out as a playbook for using your software they can then hand clients.
If you have a use case directory (templates, workflows, playbooks…), then use what they do with the software as an example in that directory for mutual demand-gen and CRO for your site.
How to prove the ROI of free software + co-marketing and gain buyin of that process from your CRO/CEO.
The process of converting a co-marketing relationship into a referral or co-selling “partner.”

Links:
https://smith.ai/blog/how-to-track-smith-ai-live-chat-in-google-ads-google-analytics

https://docs.smith.ai/article/k0xk4nl2f7-how-to-integrate-smith-ai-chat-with-google-analytics-google-ads-using-google-tag-manager

Resources:

Sendoso.com - The leading sending platform.

Partnerstack.com - Partner tracking and payouts.

Sharework.co - A free account mapping solution.

What happens when a Product-Led org launches a solutions partner program…

"Make Them Famous!" - For better partnerships.By Alex GlennMay 22, 2023