We've all been there. The splashy press release announcing a "game-changing strategic partnership." The LinkedIn posts with rocket ship emojis. The internal all-hands celebrating this new alliance that will "transform our go-to-market motion."
Then... silence.
Listen to Richard's episode on Apple and Spotify.
Eighteen months later, that partnership has quietly disappeared from the company website, the integration never materialized, and everyone pretends it never happened. According to PwC and McKinsey research, this story plays out 70% of the time—strategic partnerships fail within two years.
Yet 85% of C-level executives believe partnerships are essential for growth. This disconnect between ambition and execution represents one of the biggest missed opportunities in modern SaaS.
This week, I had the privilege of diving deep into this paradox with Rich Ezekiel, author of Coelevate. Rich literally wrote the book on strategic partnerships—and his insights challenge much of what we think we know about building successful alliances.
1. The Partnership T: Why Customer Value Must Be Your Foundation
Most partnerships fail because they start with the wrong question. Instead of asking "What can this partner do for us?" or even "What can we do for this partner?", Rich introduces a framework he calls the Partnership T.
Picture a seesaw balanced on a T-shaped support. The two sides of the seesaw represent the value exchange between partners—this needs to be relatively equal or the partnership tilts and fails. But here's the counterintuitive insight: the T-shaped support holding everything up? That's customer value.
"If you're not building customer value, what are you doing?" Rich asks. "It's not about what you can do for that company. It's about what you can do with that company for the customer."
This shift in perspective changes everything. When Netflix partnered with device manufacturers to get on every remote control, they weren't thinking about Netflix's distribution or Sony's differentiation. They were solving a customer problem: making it dead simple to access the content people wanted to watch.
The Partnership T forces you to think beyond bilateral value exchange to trilateral value creation. Without that third leg—customer value—your partnership is just a deal masquerading as something strategic.
2. Strategic Business Plan First, Partner Selection Second
Here's where most revenue leaders get partnerships wrong: they start with the partner, not the strategy.
Rich's framework begins with what he calls the Strategic Business Plan (SBP) assessment. Before you even think about potential partners, you need crystal clarity on:
-
Your core KPIs and how you measure success
-
Your big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs) over the next 2-5 years
-
Where you need to accelerate, save cost, or build expertise
-
What's core to your business versus context
Only after this deep self-assessment do you move to the P-SWOT—analyzing potential partners through the lens of complementary capabilities that accelerate your specific KPIs.
"Partnerships should not be a distraction," Rich emphasizes. "They should be a focused acceleration of what you're already trying to achieve."
This approach prevents the all-too-common scenario where a C-level exec says "We should partner with Starbucks!" without any strategic rationale beyond brand association. Instead, you identify the attributes you need (regional presence, customer base, technical capabilities) and then find partners who possess those attributes.
3. The Virtual Company: Building Operational Rigor Post-Deal
One of Rich's most powerful concepts is treating strategic partnerships as "virtual companies"—joint entities with their own KPIs, success metrics, and dedicated resources.
This addresses a fundamental problem in partnership execution: incentive misalignment. The people who negotiate partnerships are rarely the ones who have to make them successful. Business development closes the deal, gets their bonus, and moves on to the next shiny object. Meanwhile, product and engineering teams are left holding the bag, trying to integrate systems with no clear ownership or accountability.
The virtual company model changes this dynamic:
-
Dedicated teams from both companies with aligned incentives
-
Shared KPIs that both organizations track and optimize
-
Regular operational reviews beyond just "checking in"
-
Multi-phase roadmaps that evolve as companies grow
"It's not about just hitting the launch date," Rich explains. "It's about having someone accountable for the ongoing success of this partnership based on real business metrics."
This operational rigor is what separates the 30% of successful partnerships from the 70% that fail. It's also what allowed Netflix to scale from one-off device integrations to a self-serve program powering thousands of implementations.
4. Crawl, Walk, Run: The Power of Partnership Prototyping
Silicon Valley loves to "move fast and break things," but Rich advocates for a more measured approach to partnership development: crawl, walk, run.
Start with one or two bespoke partnerships where you can pressure-test your hypothesis. These early partnerships are high-touch, manually operated, and deliberately small in scope. You're not trying to boil the ocean—you're validating that your partnership idea actually creates value.
Netflix didn't start with a partnership program available to every device manufacturer. They began with Xbox and PlayStation, learned what worked, refined their approach, and only then expanded to Roku and beyond. Eventually, this evolved into a self-serve model, but that took years of iteration.
"You want to incubate a strategic partnership, maybe two, and put a few irons in the fire where you come up with a concept," Rich advises. "Test it with companies that meet your ideal partner profile before you even think about building a program."
This crawl-walk-run methodology serves two purposes: it de-risks your partnership strategy and generates the proof points needed to secure internal buy-in for larger investments.
5. Red Flags: Knowing When to Walk Away
Perhaps the most valuable insight from our conversation was learning to recognize early warning signals that a partnership isn't working. Given that partnerships often have long payback periods, distinguishing between "patience required" and "destined to fail" is crucial.
Rich identifies several red flags:
Lack of Partnership DNA: If your partner has never successfully executed partnerships before, that's a major risk. Look at their hiring patterns—are they building partnership capabilities or just hoping it happens?
Short-term Thinking: Partnerships that solve only immediate problems without a multi-phase vision rarely survive. "If you do the one and done, you're one and done," Rich warns.
Missing Operational Rigor: No clear metrics, no dedicated resources, no regular reviews—these are death sentences for partnerships. If you can't answer "How is the partnership going?" with specific metrics, you're already in trouble.
Misaligned Incentives: When the people responsible for partnership success aren't incentivized based on partnership outcomes, failure is almost inevitable.
The key is building these checkpoints into your partnership from day one. Don't wait until year two to discover you've been wasting resources.
Bonus Section from Rich: Brainstorming the Big Idea
Rich co-authored a bonus newsletter section based on Chapter 6 of his book: Brainstorming the Big Idea.
How Revenue Leaders Can Unlock New Growth Through Strategic Partnerships By Richard Ezekiel, Author of COELEVATE (based on excerpts from COELEVATE,
In every revenue leader’s journey, there comes a point when organic growth starts to plateau. Maybe you’ve nailed product-market fit. Maybe your acquisition funnels are humming along. But you know there’s still more upside to capture—and that’s where partnerships come in. The question is: how do you know which partnership is worth pursuing? And how do you come up with the kind of idea that actually moves the needle?
That’s exactly what I dig into in Chapter 6 of my book, COELEVATE. I call this phase Brainstorming the Big Idea—where you architect the core concept that defines the partnership to fuel growth for your company, your partner, and the end customer.
Let me give you an example.
I once worked with a leading online recommerce marketplace that had strong GMV growth and a vibrant buyer community, but they were starting to hit the ceiling. We needed to break through. The North Star metric was GMV, and we saw the clearest path forward was through increasing seller listings—because more listings meant more transactions and, ultimately, more revenue.
So we flipped our lens: instead of just focusing on the buyer experience, we began obsessing over sellers. What did they care about? Where were the friction points? What did they really want?
We discovered that sellers weren’t interested in being locked into a single channel. They wanted amplification—to list across multiple marketplaces with minimal effort, while still protecting their brand. Enter: the multi-channel lister (MCL) ecosystem. By partnering with MCLs, we could plug into an existing seller network, reduce onboarding friction, and extend our distribution footprint.
That was our Big Idea. And it worked. Partnerships with key MCLs helped us unlock new inventory, new users, and new revenue—all by aligning with a core business KPI.
This isn’t just a story about marketplaces or commerce. The same principles apply whether you’re running partnerships for a SaaS platform, building an enterprise GTM strategy, or leading ecosystem growth in your vertical. The process I outline in COELEVATE can help you uncover high-leverage partnership ideas no matter your industry or business model.
Here are a few takeaways from the Big Idea brainstorming approach that I think will resonate with Pavilion members and the broader Revenue Leadership Podcast audience:
1. Start with the KPI.
If your partnership concept doesn’t directly support a core business goal—new users, revenue expansion, customer retention—it’s not a Big Idea. Before chasing logos or dreaming up co-branded campaigns, ask yourself: what metric needs to move?
I call this the “in-out” approach. Start inside your business, identify the pain point or opportunity, and then brainstorm external partners that could unlock leverage.
2. Research fuels creativity.
Too often, brainstorming happens in a vacuum. But the best ideas come from immersing yourself in the ecosystem—what I call widening the aperture. Talk to your sellers. Study partnerships in your market segment. Look upstream and downstream in your industry’s value chain.
When I worked with an early-stage camping site marketplace, I wasn’t an expert in the outdoor space. But after digging into the KOA North American Camping Report and analyzing shifts in camper behavior, I identified a win-win partnership idea with a trusted outdoor brand. The resulting collaboration was implemented and boosted visibility, drove new customer acquisition, and propelled the startup into its next phase of growth.
Your next Big Idea could be hiding in a research report or emerging from shifts already happening in your industry. Go uncover it.
3. Map the ecosystem.
Don’t stop at surface-level categories. Get strategic about who offers access, influence, or scale in your industry. You might assume you need to partner with 30 electronics brands—until you realize you can reach them all by partnering with 7 original design manufacturers. Or better yet, 2 chipmakers.
This kind of mapping is what I call exploring the “food chain.” It allows you to shortcut scale and focus on the points of maximum leverage.
4. Involve your team in “creative geometry.”
Partnership brainstorming shouldn’t be confined to a whiteboard in the strategy room. Open it up. Sales, product, marketing—everyone sees different dots. The magic happens when you connect those dots in novel ways, what my dad used to call “creative geometry.”
You’re not just drawing lines—you’re designing business value. That’s why I recommend building a Big Idea spreadsheet that tracks partnership categories, concepts, objectives, ideal partner profiles, and expected KPI impact. It turns abstract ideas into a concrete framework for prioritization.
5. Look for the spark—but fan it into a flame.
Sometimes, your Big Idea finds you. I’ve felt that jolt of inspiration at conferences, inside customer meetings, or just reading about a trend. But it’s what you do next that matters. A spark isn’t a strategy. You need to shape it into something both your company and your partner can rally around.
When I helped a jewelry startup land a strategic partnership with a social media platform, it wasn’t luck. It started with a spark—and was built on hours of research, product integration, and a clear win-win value proposition that made us irresistible as a featured developer.
If you’re a revenue leader who sees partnerships as a strategic lever—not just co-marketing fluff—COELEVATE is for you. Chapter 6 is where you go from intention to execution, turning abstract goals into actionable ideas.
Whether you’re at a startup looking for traction or a mature enterprise exploring diversification, you’ll need to find your Big Idea—and make it resonate with the right partner at the right time.
If you want to dive deeper into this method, I’d love for you to read the full book. You can find COELEVATE anywhere books are sold, more at www.coelevatebook.com.
Let’s build the partnerships that truly move the needle.
Conclusion: Partnerships as Competitive Advantage
After decades of watching partnerships fail, Rich Ezekiel has codified a methodology that dramatically improves success rates. But perhaps his most important insight is this: partnerships remain a largely undocumented discipline, giving those who master it a significant competitive advantage.
"This discipline is in inning one or two," Rich reflects. "This is not something you can take a class on. Everyone doesn't have all the answers from day one."
For revenue leaders at the 20-50M+ ARR stage, partnerships represent an underutilized growth lever. But success requires more than good intentions and press releases. It demands strategic alignment, operational excellence, and the discipline to say no to partnerships that don't serve your core strategy.
The question isn't whether you should pursue partnerships—85% of executives already know they're essential. The question is whether you'll be in the 70% who fail or the 30% who transform their business through strategic alliances.
The difference comes down to methodology, discipline, and an unwavering focus on customer value. Everything else is just noise.
Further Reading:
Listen to new episodes of The Leadership Podcast every Wednesday on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Want more content from Topline? Check out Topline podcast with Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zam
