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Managing partnerships up: exec and cross-functional
The hardest part of running partnerships is rarely the partner. It is the internal room: a sales leader who attributes a miss to partner distraction, a CFO who has never seen the credit model, a board deck that reduces a year of ecosystem work to one line.
This topic is about handling those conversations with structure rather than defensiveness — postmortems that assign mechanics instead of blame, exec narratives that lead with the number, and the strategic alliance and investor-ecosystem angles that change how the function is perceived.
Written by Chris Lavoie, founder of Partnership Mastermind.
Quick answers
- What do you do when sales blames partnerships for a miss?
- Move the conversation from intent to mechanics within the first minute: which specific deals, what the handoff contained, where the next step was dropped, and what changes in the process next quarter. A postmortem that produces a process change is credible; a defence of the function is not.
- Why do PE and VC relationships matter to partnerships?
- Portfolio-level relationships create repeatable warm access across many companies at once, and they change who inside a target company takes the first meeting. Treated as a motion rather than networking, they are one of the few sources of partner pipeline that compounds.
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