Beyond the Margin: Building Mutually Beneficial Partner Ecosystems
Larissa Crandall, Global VP of Channels and Alliances at 1Password, on the listening tours that should fill a channel leader's first 90 days.
The short answer
- Spend the first 90 days on listening tours, internal before external.
- Internal discovery builds the executive consensus that makes a partner-informed strategy survivable.
- A smaller group of deeply aligned partners outperforms a large, mostly inactive roster.
- Ease of doing business is a competitive advantage, not a hygiene item.
- If a partner needs to calculate to understand what a program pays, the program is too complex.
A new channel chief arrives under pressure to announce something. Larissa Crandall's argument is that the first ninety days are better spent listening, in a specific order, and for a specific reason.
Internal first, then external
The internal listening tour comes first because it is where executive consensus is built. Without it, a strategy shaped by partner feedback lands inside a company that has not agreed to it. The external tour then refines a strategy that already has internal air cover, rather than creating one that has to fight for it.
- Internal discovery, to understand what the business believes the channel is for and to build executive consensus.
- External partner feedback, to test and refine that strategy against what partners actually experience.
- A roadmap that survives contact with both.
Quality over quantity
A large partner roster reads well in a board deck and usually hides a small number of partners doing the work. Larissa's position is that depth with a smaller, well-aligned group beats breadth across a roster that is mostly inactive, because the relationships that produce revenue take real attention, and attention does not scale by wishing.
Simplicity as competitive advantage
Ease of doing business is a strategy, not a hygiene factor. A program a partner can understand and navigate without doing arithmetic gets used. One that requires a spreadsheet to work out what a deal is worth quietly loses to the vendor next to it.
That is what mutually beneficial means in reality: the partner can see what they get and what it takes to get it, without a translator.
Questions this raises.
- What should a new channel leader do in their first 90 days?
- Run listening tours: internal first, then external. Internal discovery builds executive consensus about what the channel is for; external partner feedback then refines a strategy that already has internal support rather than one that has to fight for it.
- Is a bigger partner roster better?
- Usually not. Deep, productive relationships with a smaller group of well-aligned partners tend to outperform a high volume of inactive ones, because the attention those relationships require does not scale.
- Why does program simplicity matter so much?
- Because ease of doing business is a competitive advantage. A program a partner can understand and navigate without complex calculation gets used; one that requires working out what a deal is worth loses to the vendor who made it obvious.
- Who is Larissa Crandall?
- Global VP of Channels and Alliances at 1Password, and the guest on this episode of the Channel Maven Podcast.