What is a JAM and the problems it solves

A joint account map (aka JAM) is an organizational system that allows multiple people from different organizations to see all shared accounts and responsibilities in one place.

Since partners function independently outside their shared accounts, keeping track of each moving part can at times lead to miscommunications and forgotten duties. By keeping everything within a shared space, we're able to eliminate those problems. Another problem a JAM solves is tracking the progress of leads to clients. By displaying target clients within the JAM, tasks that progress a lead to a client are easily mapped and prioritized.

How to make your own JAM

While a JAM should be customized to suit the needs of your partner and you, there are a few basics that should be included:

• Account
• Client or Lead
• Priority Level
• Next Course of Action
• Who is Responsible for Action

Some other items you might want to add, depending on your organization:

• Date Action is Due
• Point of Contact with Account
• Big Picture Goal

The simplest way to put together a JAM is a shared live spreadsheet. This should be shared with everyone who works with clients and client acquisition.

When a JAM is used and regularly updated, everyone knows what they should be focused on despite not having direct contact. This doesn't replace consistent communication, but it bridges the day-to-day gap and prevents miscommunication.

The Role of Partners

Within HR tech, partnerships give smaller companies the ability to reach new audiences and be backed by a trusted brand. On the other hand, trusted brands are able to use partnerships to provide more services to their existing client base and even attract new customers because of who is in their marketplace and what additional features they can offer.

What Is an Effective Partner?

Understanding what each partner is getting out of the partnership is essential in understanding whether your partner is effective. While there are data driven options to learn more about how you and your partners are working together, see partnership audits from PartnerSpring, there are a few ways to tell yourself. Are they consistently bringing new opportunities to your company; is the revenue they bring in increasing, steady, or decreasing; is there an active relationship between you and your point of contact within the partnership? By answering these questions you can diagnose your partnership.

If you have a new or established partnership, a big key factor in health is if you're being included in introductions or effort is being made to create introductions. Not all introductions will lead to new client creation, but not having a foot in the door will always lead to no sales. A partner that is making steps towards an introduction is a great indicator that a healthy partnership is occurring.

As always, increased revenue is a great sign that a partnership is working as it is supposed to. But what does stagnation mean? While stagnation isn't always a bad sign, knowing why stagnation is occurring is always useful information. While increased sales is good, decreases in sales are a sign that something is happening, reach out to your point of contact and see why clients have been dropping your service. How often are you talking to someone within your partnership? A healthy communication cadence keeps the relationship aligned properly and means always knowing where you stand within the partnership. Determining how often communication is needed is between both members of the partnership, but this discussion is definitely necessary to maintain effectiveness.

A partnership can be broken down into 3 areas: high performing, underutilized, and low priority.

• High performing — consistent revenue generation, new leads, and a steady communication flow.
• Underutilized — many leads with no conversion, a steady revenue, and semi-frequent communication.
• Low priority — no new leads, steady or decreasing revenue, and infrequent communication.

Figuring out where your partnership lies within these segments is the first step in turning underutilized partners into high performing.

Turning Partners from Underutilized to Overachieving

One of the distinguishing factors between underutilized and low priority is potential. The first step in rehabilitating the partnership is identifying partners with an existing but inactive pipeline potential. Look for partners that share your client needs, show growth within the client segment, and have clients in need of your services. PartnerSpring was able to help out Qualifi with one such situation, having identified partners and then worked with the internal Qualifi team to make strategic decisions. These decisions would later go on to help Qualifi with their value ahead of a wanted acquisition.

Once you know the underutilized partners, identify how to make lead conversion as easy as possible for your partner point of contact and the accounts you want to target. Look for overlap between their book of business and clients in need of your services. With this list in mind you can begin taking steps towards new client acquisition. Now is the time to look over the use cases presented originally and adjust them to meet the new needs and the target accounts you're trying to attain.

Reconnect with your point of contact and introduce them to the new use cases you created. Let them know which pipeline targets are on your list and whether you adjusted your ideal client recently. Misalignment can cause a lot of issues within a partnership but is an easy fix. Ensure that all parties understand who you should be introduced to and when it would be appropriate for an introduction.

With the realignment of ideal clients and use cases, the next step is to establish an ongoing operating cadence. Lack of communication is what led to the originally high performing partner to become underutilized, and can be fixed. Establishing a JAM (Joint Account Mapping) keeps everyone involved aware of what the other party is doing and is a cornerstone to maintaining effective partnerships. Check-ins daily, weekly, or bi-weekly will do wonders in turning a relationship around.

Last Thoughts

Partnerships need maintenance every once in a while to continue to function mutually beneficially. Ensure your partners are effective for your business and adapt your partner interactions when necessary. For a data backed look and custom guide to turning around underutilized partnerships based on your individual partner ecosystem, PartnerSpring does offer a full audit. All in all, this guide will help you on the path towards the healthiest partner ecosystem you could ask for.

What Is a Use Case

Once you have a partnership established and ink signed, getting leads and new client conversions becomes the priority. However, not every client of your partner needs or is a fit for your services. That's where use cases come into play. A use case is a guideline for when a potential client should be introduced to your services. Use cases help partners establish who they should be looking for to increase sales on both ends, which is why having an accurate written down version is beneficial to all parties.

How to Make a Use Case

A use case is composed of some basic information that is relevant to the team selling your service. To create a use case, start by finding the intersection of your ideal client and who is using your partner's services. You'll want to map out what this client looks like and when it would be appropriate to bring up an introduction. A basic use case example is listed below.

For a hiring scheduler integration, a use case might look like:

• Small businesses that are expanding their organization, introduction to be made when they are beginning to push for multiple new hires across different departments.
• Mid market business with high turnover rates, introduction to be made when they have expressed consistent and recurring need for new hires.

The basic template at its core: (what kind of business and what is occurring within their organization), introduction made when (the business's situation that would align them to the offering of your platform).

By following this template you'll be able to establish a comprehensive understanding with your partner and have leads more likely to turn into new client conversions.

When to Use a Use Case and Who Should See Them

In practice, a well thought out and well written use case ensures that compatible leads are shown to your product and conversations can progress. Having new leads is good, but having the right leads is always better. Essentially with use cases, internal sales teams have a better understanding of who each partner is targeting and what kind of clients to be prepared for. On the other side, partner teams know which of their clients would make good fits and can tailor their approaches with the knowledge required to increase sales. Which is why all partnerships should have use cases that are tailored to their partners.

What Is an Ideal Client Profile, or ICP

An ICP is a detailed outline of what companies and individuals your platform is built to help. Proper ICPs take into account industry, client size, user base, and how users interact with your platform.

How Your ICP Affects Partner Options

When exploring partner options, keep in mind that partners have their own ICPs in mind. Which is why selecting a partner that already is aligned with your own ICP leads to greater success. Since an ICP includes ranged choices, there is a chance that one partner won't meet all your ICP requirements. Or even that multiple partners have similarly matched qualifications. When you have multiple partner options but none match all your ICP needs, look for the closest match to your needs and don't be afraid to diversify your partnerships to match different aspects of your ICP. On the other hand, having too many options doesn't mean you're stuck in a decision paralysis loop. You can partner with multiple similar partners, or if you want a more exclusive offering, examine the marketplaces and see how much competition each partner would offer if you are also in the space.

For help determining partner options based on your ICP, check out the PartnerSpring Potential Partner Quiz.

How Partners Affect Your ICP

When crafting your ICP there isn't one answer for who your ICP looks like, which is important with partnerships. Not all your partners will have clients that meet all the ranges for your ideal clients. Knowing what ranges from your ICP to present and target with each partner is important for success when co-selling with partners.

To successfully tailor your ICP for a partner, evaluate the overlap between your ideal customer profile and the partner's customer base. Consider factors such as industry, company size, buyer personas, common business challenges, buying triggers, technology stack, geographic focus, customer maturity, and where your solution naturally complements the partner's offering. The stronger the overlap and the clearer the use case, the easier it becomes for both teams to identify and refer to qualified opportunities.

Why Add Partners to Your Existing Ecosystem

Selling direct to customers takes time, money, and a considerable amount of team members. And yet, without these investments platforms would just be code on a laptop. While it works for a while, there are better ways to create leads and turn them into customers. By finding partners and working towards co-selling strategies, companies are able to have the power of two companies working together to bring in clients. By finding the right partnerships for your company there should be a noticeable overlap between existing clients looking for solutions, and what your platform can provide. The benefit for partnering lies within this overlap. When paired correctly, clients are able to get all their needs within one company as your partner provides the major software components and with your partnership the rest of the clients' needs can be met, keeping clients within the same ecosystem by providing even the most niche of benefits. As such, partners are incentivized to co-sell both products.

Even with co-selling adding to your revenue stream and creating a cycle for new customers and growth, just signing partnership papers does not mean that work is done for your company. Successful partnerships involve continued work from both partners. There are some tricks to ensure that the work needed is more seamless between partners.

Ideal Customer and the Correlation with Partnerships

When determining which company you should consider for your partner ecosystem, the first step is understanding your Ideal Customer Profile, aka ICP. By choosing to prioritize matches with partners that have similar or matching ICPs to your platform, you'll have a higher likelihood of attaining the partnership and growing within the partnership.

Differences in Major HR Tech Companies

ADP

Company Focus — ADP's base technology focuses on staff management with their users being any part of a company. They don't focus on a specific business size, and can accommodate anyone from small business to enterprise grade.

Partners They Seek — As one of the bigger players in the HR tech field, they work hard to offer a marketplace that rounds out their offerings. Instead of focusing on just software that complements their existing base platform, they diversify their marketplace offerings to turn their platform into a one-stop-shop for their clientele, with a focus on partners they can integrate into their existing platform.

Ashby

Company Focus — Ashby shines in the ATS arena, with upgrades for CRM, analytics, and scheduling processes. While they can accommodate all business sizes, they specialize in small and mid market businesses.

Partners They Seek — Ashby likes to stay within their existing product space, and find integration partners that complement and expand their product line. Their marketplace is made up specifically of software that can be integrated into their platform and have easily accessible API information to make it easier for developers to add integration capabilities.

iCIMS

Company Focus — iCIMS is one of the largest and most established companies within the field of HR technology. They specialize as an ATS platform with capabilities in recruiting and go beyond the hiring process to help establish the employee brand and display company culture. As a major industry leader, iCIMS works primarily with mid market and enterprise grade companies.

Partners They Seek — iCIMS's marketplace stays within the realm of recruitment, working to expand what iCIMS can offer clients, and branches out to seek partnerships that provide talent management services and employee benefits. They also offer multiple styles of integration into their platform to best fit the needs of potential partners.

Phenom

Company Focus — Phenom focuses on three major areas of HR tech: talent acquisition, talent management, and HRIT. They primarily focus on mid market and enterprise business, and are a newer major player within the HR tech space, making a splash with many AI-forward capabilities built into their platform.

Partners They Seek — Being newer in the space, Phenom currently has a smaller marketplace compared to some other options. Currently their marketplace focuses on partners that seek to expand their current product offerings.

UKG

Company Focus — UKG focuses their platform on HCM and employee experience. As one of the major players within HR technology, they have a robust platform that shines when working with mid market and enterprise grade companies. Their company offers a wide range of products revolving around enhancing employee experience and HR needs.

Partners They Seek — Since UKG is a robust platform, they look for partnerships that help expand their current offerings and add new features in the realm of employee management, while also including partners that go outside the range of employee experience to provide hiring capabilities.

Picking the Right Partner

As stated above, a partner with matching interests leads to better cohesion and a higher likelihood that the partnership is mutually beneficial. Judging which partners to seek is a delicate balance. Using the information above can be a helpful starting point to figure out which companies align with your platform services and who are your clients. The companies listed are some of the major players within the HR tech community, but aren't the only options for partner opportunities.

Doing research, either through internal teams or external consultants, on potential partner options means knowing what the platform offers, who they cater to, and what they seek in their partners. Diversify your partnership programs by seeking out partners that meet multiple company requirements but overlap in different ways. When you are able to have a venn diagram style overlap with partners, all your bases will be covered.

If you are having trouble determining a potential partner, use the PartnerSpring Partnership Potential Quiz and get an analytical answer to your question.

What Does a Partnership Team Do?

Partnership teams, much like sales, are an industry that values relationships and networking. However, instead of focusing on direct client sales, partnership teams try to look for collaborative B2B relationships, focusing on a mutually beneficial partnership in which each partner brings an expertise or service that the other partner is in need of.

Within a partnership team, there are multiple roles that can be broken up into multiple team members or consolidated into single members with multiple responsibilities. The duties can be broken into three categories:

• Outreach
• Relationships
• Growth

Outreach is responsible for searching for companies to partner with, and initiating all outreach campaigns. Searching for partnerships doesn't necessarily end with a list of companies on the first page of Google. Due diligence is required to verify that a company meets the standards for partnership. From there a partnerships team member needs to determine who would be the best person to be an outreach point of contact — this could be someone on the potential partner's partnership team, a CorpDev executive, or even the CEO/Founder. Determining which person within the company would lead to your desired outcome can be the factor between a signed contract and being ghosted. Even when a company meets your partnership needs and you're connected with the ideal person to move a partnership forward, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to get a response back. At the end of the day, it is still a numbers game. After you know who to contact, the next step is the outreach campaign — draft your messaging and figure out how you want to go about contact. Some popular ways include direct reach out, like email, or social media platforms, such as LinkedIn.

Relationship teams work on the day-to-day tasks needed with upkeeping the partnership relationship. This encompasses a wide range of responsibilities including weekly routines and sometimes one-off tasks, such as co-selling, co-marketing, and re-selling. Relationship teams work with both internal teams and partners to discover why roadblocks exist. PartnerSpring, an external partnership consulting team, was able to discover one of these roadblocks within a client's partnership and help craft an enablement plan that within a few months turned a low lead-generating partner into an active partnership. Relationship work is about how the partnership is managed.

When working on partnership growth, the focus is on expanding the existing relationship.

Internal Team: Cost

As a business grows and expands, at a certain point creating an internal partnerships team will become necessary — however the timing of this is important. The cost for building your internal team is broken into two major categories: personnel and tools.

Like with any department build, you won't start with hiring a full multiple-person staff. With that in mind, here are a few roles within a partnerships team that you should be aware of when considering how you want to build your department.

Executive Vice President of Partnerships (EVP) / Chief Partnerships Officer — average base salary $275,000–$400,000

• Setting the overall partnership strategy and managing existing partnership ecosystem
• Overseeing partnership revenue and executive relationships
• Ensuring partnerships align with company goals
• Reporting to executive leadership

Senior Vice President (SVP) / Vice President (VP) of Partnerships — average base salary $180,000–$275,000

• Executing partnership strategy and developing partner growth initiatives
• Managing Partnership Directors
• Overseeing KPIs and forecasting
• Negotiating strategic partnerships
• Ensuring partnerships are cross-functionally aligned

Director of Partnerships — average base salary $170,000–$235,000

• Leading day-to-day partnerships team
• Coaching managers
• Overseeing strategic partner accounts
• Developing an overall partnership process and playbook
• Tracking performance metrics
• Ensuring successful partner execution

Partnerships Manager — average base salary $100,000–$125,000

• Sourcing and recruiting new partners
• Conducting outreach and discovery calls
• Managing partner relationships
• Coordinating partnership launches
• Executing co-marketing initiatives
• Conducting quarterly business reviews
• Identifying opportunities for partner growth and expansion

Now that the roles within a partnership team are mapped out, we can begin to look at what tools they use and the cost of them. Most of these will be platforms already in effect in some capacity, however if you don't have a similar tool in place when you start building your internal team there may be difficulties.

Benefit of Having an Internal Team

When investing in an internal partnerships team there are many benefits. Since an internal team works solely with your business, they have a deep understanding of the services being offered and a laser focus on your business needs. Building a team from the ground up also means that you're able to cater your tool choice towards the needs of your team and your partners, giving greater control over what you're using and who has access to your data.

Hiring an External Team: Cost

External teams fall into a few categories, and price varies based on the amount of work needed from the external team. The most basic breakdown for cost is based on consulting work and business size:

• Startup — $3,000–$8,000 per month
• Growth Company — $8,000–$20,000 per month
• Enterprise — $20,000–$50,000+ per month

More complex variations of pricing are based on fractional team members and what roles these fractional members are fulfilling:

• Fractional Executive Vice President of Partnerships — $8,000–$20,000+ per month
• Fractional Vice President / Director of Partnerships — $5,000–$12,000 per month
• Partnerships Manager / Execution Support — $2,500–$6,000 per month
• Partnerships Coordinator / Operations — $1,500–$3,500 per month

Lastly, hiring an integration team to bridge the development gap between your current platform and the integration needed for partnership can run $2,500–$5,000 per month.

Benefits of Outsourcing

While internal teams provide the benefit of complete control over all aspects, looking for external teams — to consult with your internal team or act as your partnerships team — means all the work for establishing relationships is started already. While consultants, contractors, or fractional teams aren't dedicated solely to your company, they are able to allocate their resources and knowledge with precision to facilitate your partnership goals. External consultants already have their own tried-and-true process, meaning they know what works and can advise on courses of action that will be more likely to lead to a successful partnership. Along with the network they've already worked to establish, external teams can use their insider knowledge to advise which partnerships would be better based on the type of deal you're looking to acquire and the existing marketplace of the partners you're considering. In regards to tool choice, it's true outsourcing means no longer customizing what platforms work with your data, but it also means the cost to acquire all the tools needed won't be coming from your business.

Parting Thoughts

At the end of the day, whether you choose to build an internal partnerships team, outsource the work to a fractional team, or even meet in the middle and hire a consultant to assist your internal team, there are benefits to all three options, and what you prioritize will make choosing between them easier.

• For complete control, full decision-making ability, and willingness to spend to create long-term solutions, choose to build an internal team.
• For knowledge and tested methods, choose to contract an external team.
• Looking to maintain control, gain the knowledge of experienced teams, and alleviate load for internal teams? Get a consultant to assist in building, running, or decision making.

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