Building a World-Class Partner Marketing Playbook

By David Ronald

Not so long ago I joined a fast-growing startup, with an energetic marketing team. 

And, in addition to my “day job”, I had been volunteered to lead partner marketing.  

But, in reality, partner marketing was little more than a wish list.

Every few weeks I tried something new – a webinar, a co-branded asset, and, if there was budget left over, a field event. 

But nothing connected, and this is how things went for weeks. 

Until, one day, our CRO said to me, “Partners are either a strategy or a distraction. But they can’t be both.” And this statement forced me to admit that we really didn’t have a partner program.

So, I began building one - and, over the six months, partners went from a side project to a core growth engine.

In this blog post I share how we did it, and how we developed a world-class playbook for partner marketing. 

1. It Started With Clarity

An epiphany came during a QBR when we were reviewing partner performance: 

• 29 partners listed.
• Five generating pipeline.
• Two producing real revenue.

Wow! I had been treating every partner like a priority, but the truth was that none of them were.

So, I gathered my key constituents together and asked the hard questions: 

• Which partners actually help us win?
• Which create real customer value when combined with our solution?
• Which partners do sellers actually care about?
• Which ones are aspirational, but not practical?

That meeting became the foundation of our partner segmentation model. For the first time, we had clarity on where to invest, and where to stop spreading ourselves thin.

This was the beginning of our partner marketing playbook. 

2. Recruiting the Right Partners

Before my reset, partner recruitment looked like this: “Great logo. Let’s sign them.” After my reset, recruitment looked like this: “Where is there undeniable customer value and mutual benefit?”

And one example stands out: I met with a consulting firm who had expertise in industries we struggled to break into. On paper, they weren’t the biggest partner but, when I dug deeper, I found something better: a perfect customer overlap and immediate value in co-delivering solutions.

Within three months, they sourced more opportunities than several large partners combined. And that’s when I realized that partner recruitment is about strategic fit and fast time-to-value, not quantity.  

My onboarding processes shifted too. Instead of dropping partners into a portal and wishing them luck, we built an experience: 

• A shared value proposition.
• Enablement paths.
• Playbooks they could use on Day 1.
• Quarterly success plans.

And, looking back, I believe that this was when the momentum began. 

3. Enablement Becomes the Multiplier

A turning point came while we were chasing a major opportunity.

One of our partners emailed us: “We pitched the solution ourselves. They want a demo now - can you join us for next steps?”

So, in other words, this partner had delivered the pitch, perfectly.

And that was the moment we truly understood the power of enablement.

We had provided them with: 

• Messaging frameworks.
• Industry-specific one-pagers
• Battlecards.
• Co-branded decks.
• Sales plays.

But, in my opinion, the best marketing teams don't just hand partners a bunch of content – they give partners them the confidence to sell their product. 

4. High-Impact Co-Marketing

Looking back, I’d have to say that for months we ran “partner webinars” that generated little more than vanity metrics.

But, once we rebuilt the program, we transformed co-marketing from random acts into predictable momentum.

Here’s one example: We hosted a joint webinar with a mid-market technology partner. Normally we’d just send a few emails, post on LinkedIn, and hope. This time was different: 

• We aligned on a single ICP.
• We co-developed the narrative.
• Both sales teams committed to follow-up.
• We built a shared nurture sequence.
• We held a pre-brief and post-brief with the partner’s SDR team.

What was our outcome: 

• 342 registrants.
• 11 qualified enterprise opportunities.
• 3 closed-won deals within the quarter.

We repeated that play several times, with content launches, events, marketplaces, roundtables, and partner ABM, and each time the story was the same: coordinated co-marketing creates pipeline, fast. 

5. Co-Selling Takes Off

Before we built our playbook, co-selling was sporadic at best. Sellers weren’t sure when to bring partners in, which partners made sense, or what partners could even offer.

Once we fixed that, everything changed.

We built: 

• Clear rules of engagement.
• Joint sales plays.
• Account mapping workflows.
• Deal registration guidelines.
• Co-branded sales materials.
• A repeatable co-sell process.

The breakthrough came when a partner AE called one of our reps: “I’ve already scoped the project. They’re ready to buy. Can you join the final call?” 

The partner had done 80% of the work – and that was the moment leadership shifted their view of partnerships from optional, to essential. 

6. Expanding Through Customer Success

It’s my belief that one of the best kept secrets in partner marketing is this: Your biggest wins often come after the customer signs. 

I learned this during a large-scale deployment where implementation was handled jointly by us and one of our partners. The customer experience was seamless, and when renewal time came, the customer expanded their contract through both of us.

 That’s when we built shared success programs: 

• Joint customer workshops.
• Shared QBR frameworks.
• Co-delivered implementation offerings.
• Partner-led training and onboarding.

Customers began seeing us and our partners as a unified solution, and not two separate companies. 

It was this perception alone created stronger renewals, faster expansions, and more advocacy stories than we had expected. 

7. Measuring What Matters

At first, the metrics we tracked were basic: 

• Number of partners.
• Number of meetings.
• Number of campaigns.
• None of that told us whether the program was working.

But, once we rebuilt our measurement model, I chose to focus on metrics that actually matter: 

• Partner activation rate.
• Time to first deal.
• Co-marketing sourced pipeline.
• Co-sell win rate.
• Partner attach rate.
• Retention and expansion influenced by partners.

The numbers showed that partners were no longer a side channel for the team, but a competitive advantage. 

Conclusion

By the end of that first year, our partner program didn’t look anything like the one I’d inherited.

Partners were closing deals on their own. Sellers were bringing partners into opportunities early. Co-marketing programs were producing pipeline consistently. Customer success teams were collaborating with partners by default. 

What changed everything wasn’t a new portal, new incentives, or new logos... 

It was a commitment to building a playbook that turned partnership chaos into partnership momentum.

The story we lived became the playbook companies everywhere can use: 

1. Get clear on which partners matter.
2. Recruit for strategic fit and fast value.
3. Enable partners so well they don’t need you on every call.
4. Build repeatable co-marketing plays.
5. Shift co-selling from reactive to strategic.
6. Extend partnerships into customer success.
7. Measure the metrics that truly reflect impact.

When done right, they open markets, increase credibility, deepen customer trust, and accelerate revenue in ways no single team can accomplish alone.

Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post useful.

Are you interested in discussing how to improve your partner marketing? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

Are You Showing Up in ChatGPT Searches?

By David Ronald  

If you’re focused on discoverability, you’ve probably invested years sharpening your SEO strategy – optimizing keywords, building backlinks, and producing content that earns you a coveted spot on Google. 

But now ChatGPT and other large language models have upended tradition.  

The rise of AI assistants has fundamentally changed how people find information, evaluate products, and make decisions.  

Increasingly, users are asking ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for direct answers, instead of typing queries into a browser.  

So, in many cases, AI output is the new first impression.  

And the real question becomes: are you showing up in ChatGPT searches?  

In this blog post, I examine what you need to do to ensure the answer is an empathetic “Yes”.

Why ChatGPT Visibility Matters

AI assistants operate differently than search engines.  

They don’t simply point to links; they synthesize knowledge.  

That means if your brand is not referenced in the datasets, reviews, documentation, product comparisons, community discussions, or signals these models draw from, you’re effectively invisible in a fast-growing channel of discovery.  

This matters for three big reasons:

1. AI is becoming the first stop for research

Business buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT for vendor comparisons, market overviews, and product recommendations. If your competitors are being named and you aren’t, that’s a competitive disadvantage you may not even know about.

2. AI shapes buyer expectations

When models summarize your space, they define the narrative. If you’re missing, or inaccurately described, you lose control of your story.

3. AI visibility compounds

As more people ask AI about your category, the model’s understanding of “the top players” entrenches. Being excluded early can lock you out of future visibility.

How to Improve Your AI Visibility

Showing up in ChatGPT results is a content and reputation strategy. Here’s where to start:

1. Strengthen your public footprint

AI models pull from publicly available text across documentation, reviews, press, help articles, blogs, interviews, and reputable databases. The more clear, consistent, factual, and useful content you publish, the more likely you are to appear.

2. Clarify your category

Models respond best when companies articulate their category, target audience, and value proposition clearly. Ambiguous positioning leads to ambiguous AI output.

3. Invest in third-party validation

Analyst reports, customer reviews, independent comparisons, and reputable media coverage give AI models confident signals to learn from. These sources often matter more than what you publish yourself.

4. Answer the questions real users ask

If buyers frequently ask, “What are the best tools for X?”, you should create content that directly addresses those queries. AI learns from patterns of language and intent.

The New Frontier of Discoverability

ChatGPT search visibility has become as important as Google search visibility once was.  

And businesses that take this onboard will earn a durable advantage as AI-native discovery accelerates – while those that ignore it may find themselves missing from the conversations that matter most.  

So, ask yourself this question: when someone asks ChatGPT about your category, are you part of the answer?  

Thanks for reading.  

Are you interested in discussing how to improve your visibility with ChatGPT and other large language models? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

Measuring the Impact of Product Marketing

By David Ronald

Here’s a thorny paradox.

Product marketing is one of the most influential functions in a company’s go-to-market motion, but it’s also one of the hardest to measure.

Product marketers shape the market perception, the competitive posture, the customer understanding, the go-to-market strategy, and the launch campaign. They often orchestrate how a product becomes something the market wants but, because they operate upstream, the results of their work typically show up downstream in metrics owned by other teams.

This is why many organizations fall into the trap of measuring product marketing by counting activities  such as the amount of content created, sales decks delivered, campaigns supported, and so on.

These are important operational signals, but they don’t reflect strategic contribution – they don’t show how product marketing changes customer perception, strengthens sales performance, accelerates adoption, or increases pipeline quality.

As economic conditions tighten and companies demand clearer attribution for every dollar spent, product marketing leaders must elevate how they communicate their value.  

Measuring the impact of product marketing is essential for shaping strategic decisions, securing budgets, and driving predictable revenue growth – but doing it well requires a shift in mindset.  

In this blog post I examine how product marketing can start demonstrating that it is indispensable. 

Why the Impact of Product Marketing Is Hard to Measure

Unlike sales, product marketing doesn’t close deals. Unlike demand generation, product marketing doesn’t run ads; unlike product, product marketing doesn’t ship features. And, unlike customer success, product marketing doesn’t own retention.

Instead, product marketing influences all of these things. 

That influence is where its power lies, and also where measurement becomes difficult. 

• When product marketing strengthens competitive positioning, it improves win rates – but sales gets the “credit".
• When product marketing improves messaging, it changes how prospects understand value – yet this shows up as higher conversion rates on the website or in sales calls.
• And when product marketing clarifies the ideal customer profile, pipeline quality improves – but demand generation sees the lift. 

The key to measuring the impact of product marketing is to recognize that it is a causal function rather than an ownership function. 

Which means that you are not trying to prove that product marketing owns a metric; you are demonstrating how product marketing contributed to its improvement.  

It’s this mindset shift that unlocks a world of meaningful measurement. 

Five Areas Where Product Marketing Creates Impact

Although product marketing’s responsibilities vary by company, its influence tends to fall into five interconnected areas: 

1. Customer and market insights.
2. Positioning and messaging.
3. Cross-functional alignment.
4. Sales enablement. 
5. Product launches and go-to-market execution.

1. Customer and Market Insights

Product marketing sits at the intersection of market intelligence and product decisions.

Customer insights from interviews, alpha programs, advisory boards, and win/loss analysis shape the roadmap just as much as they shape go-to-market messaging. Competitive insights influence positioning just as strongly as they influence sales tactics.

Measuring this impact means tracking the decisions that flowed from product marketing insights. 

• How many roadmap priorities were informed by user research?
• Which product changes came from product marketing-identified friction points
• How did pricing evolve based on segmentation work? And what improvements followed?

Although these are sometimes qualitative, organizations that build a culture of documentation often find that product marketing plays an outsized role in the decisions that matter most.

2. Positioning and Messaging

Positioning is one of the most powerful levers in go-to-market performance, because it shapes every downstream motion. 

When product marketing improves, it affects website engagement, sales conversations, product adoption, analyst perception, and even investor narratives.

The impact becomes visible through the clarity customers express during calls, how well prospects articulate the product’s value back to you, or the degree to which sales teams naturally adopt the new narrative.

More formal signals, such as improvements in win/loss themes or increased engagement on core pages, provide quantitative support.

Not just that, the most effective product marketing teams track the before-and-after moments: what did customers believe, understand, or misunderstand before the messaging changed, and what shifted after? 

The narrative itself becomes a measurable asset. 

 

3. Cross-Functional Alignment

Product marketing is the glue. 

It is the connective tissue that ensures product, sales, and marketing share the same story, target the same segments, and prioritize the same opportunities.

When this alignment improves, everything else improves – campaigns perform better, sales cycles shorten, launch quality increases, and internal friction decreases. 

When alignment appears, product marketing is almost always the reason.

Measuring alignment can be as simple as tracking cross-functional readiness or conducting periodic internal surveys to capture clarity, confidence, and alignment across teams.  

4. Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is one of the most underrated sources of measurable product marketing value. 

When product marketing equips sales teams with a compelling narrative, strong tools, and great training, revenue performance shifts quickly and tangibly.

The strongest indicators of enablement impact appear in win rates.

Plus, improvements in time-to-first-deal for new reps also reveal whether product marketing has improved sales readiness.

Sales leaders often express the impact qualitatively first, such as “the team finally understands how to sell this”, but the quantitative metrics eventually reflect the shift. 

What distinguishes high-performing product marketing teams is that they measure enablement by how results improve, and not by how many assets they create. 

5. Product Launches

Launches are one of the most concrete places where product marketing influence is both broad and deep.

Product marketing sets the launch strategy, narrative, target audience, enablement plan, and success criteria. A well-run launch accelerates adoption, drives pipeline, and shapes market perception – while a poorly run launch can bury even the strongest product.  

To measure launch impact, product marketing teams focus on the outcomes that tie directly to launch intent. 

• If the goal is adoption, look at 30/60/90-day usage trends.
• If the goal is revenue, examine pipeline influenced or opportunities created in the launch window.
• If the goal is awareness, track media coverage, analyst response, and engagement.

Launch impact is clearest when product marketing establishes a baseline from previous launches and shows how the new playbook lifted results. 

Over time, this becomes a compelling proof-point that product marketing is a multiplier on product investment.   

 

Shifting the Measurement Conversation

The most successful product marketing organizations use a simple mental model to anchor measurement: inputs, outputs, and outcomes. 

1. Inputs are the strategic foundations product marketing provides – research, segmentation, competitive insights, and messaging.
2. Outputs are the assets, programs, and launches that translate those insights into motion.
3. Outcomes are the business results that reflect product marketing’s influence – better win rates, stronger pipeline quality, higher adoption, and clearer market differentiation.

Product marketing teams should track all three, but communicate primarily about outcomes, and the causal story that links them back to product marketing’s work. 

Executives don’t want to know how many assets product marketing created – they want to know how product marketing helped the company win more deals, launch better products, and improve customer understanding. 

Conclusion

High-impact product marketing teams embrace a simple principle: measurement must be designed into the work, not bolted on afterward.

Before launching new messaging, they benchmark current performance. Before launching a product, they define what success looks like. Before rolling out new competitive content, they capture current win rates.

This allows them to tell a clean, credible narrative: 

• Here’s where we were.
• Here’s what we changed.
• Here’s what improved.

Although product marketing may once have been an “invisible function”, it is quickly becoming one of the clearest drivers of differentiation and growth.

And the organizations that measure product marketing well are the ones that unlock its full potential.

Thanks for reading.

Are you interested in discussing how to measure the impact of your product marketing? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

15 Powerful Tools to Unlock Buyer Intent Data and Drive Growth

By David Ronald  

Understanding buyer intent has become one of the most powerful levers for accelerating growth.  

By uncovering who is in-market, what they’re researching, and when they’re ready to buy, marketers can focus their efforts where it matters most.  

Buyer intent data helps align marketing and sales teams, shorten sales cycles, and personalize outreach at scale.  

In this blog post I take a look at a variety of tools can help you capture and act on these insights. 

(Just a heads-up: this reads a bit like a laundry list – my apologies for that – some people express themselves through poetry but I, apparently, prefer bullets.) 

1. Third-Party Intent Data Platforms

Third-party intent tools collect and analyze behavioral signals from across the web, such as content consumption, searches, and engagement, to identify companies showing buying interest.

• Bombora – one of the best-known providers, aggregating intent signals across a massive B2B data co-op.
• ZoomInfo Intent – combines intent topics with firmographic and contact data, giving sales teams a clear picture of who to target.
• 6sense – uses AI to predict buying stages and prioritize accounts for outreach.
• Demandbase – integrates intent insights with account-based advertising and personalization campaigns.
• Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) – identifies the companies visiting your website, even when visitors don’t fill out a form.

When used together, these intent sources give marketing and sales teams a multidimensional view of in-market buyers, allowing for more precise targeting and higher-converting outreach.

2. First-Party Intent Tools

Your own data can be just as powerful.  

First-party intent tools leverage website activity, email engagement, and content downloads to uncover high-potential leads.

• HubSpot – provides lead scoring and behavioral tracking across all your owned channels.
• Marketo (acquired by Adobe) – uses predictive scoring to identify accounts most likely to convert.
• Drift (now part of Salesloft) and Qualified – surface real-time engagement signals from live chat and conversation flows.
• Clearbit Reveal (acquired by HubSpot) – identifies anonymous website visitors and enriches them with firmographic data.
• Mutiny – personalizes website experiences for high-intent visitors to increase conversions.

When combined, these first-party insights give you a clear, real-time picture of which accounts are leaning in, so you can engage them proactively and accelerate pipeline.

3. Review and Content Engagement Platforms

When buyers are comparing vendors, their research activity becomes a goldmine of intent data.

• G2 Buyer Intent – alerts you when companies are viewing your product or category pages.
• TrustRadius Intent Data – highlights which businesses are reading reviews or running side-by-side comparisons.
• Capterra and Gartner Digital Markets – offer similar insights for software buyers across various verticals.

These signals give you near-real-time visibility into active evaluation cycles, helping you prioritize accounts that are closest to making a purchase decision.

4. Data Enrichment and Signal Integration Tools

Intent data becomes most powerful when connected across systems.

• Apollo – merges verified contact data with intent signals for targeted outreach.
• RollWorks – integrates intent into your account-based marketing campaigns.
• Slintel (now part of 6sense) – combines technographic and intent data for precise segmentation.
• Triblio – automates follow-up by syncing multi-source intent scores with your CRM.

By unifying these sources, you create a single, actionable view of account readiness – enabling smarter orchestration, tighter alignment, and more effective engagement across the entire GTM motion.

5. Social and Search Intent Tools

Social and search activity reveal valuable signals about buyer interests.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – surfaces engagement data within your target accounts.
• SparkToro – identifies where your audience spends time and which topics influence them.
• Google Ads and Search Console – provide keyword-level insights into what prospects are actively searching for.

These signals help you understand what topics are resonating in the moment, allowing you to tailor content and outreach to match active buyer interests.

Conclusion

Buyer intent data doesn’t just help you see who’s interested, it also helps you act faster and smarter.  

The strongest buyer intent strategies combine third-party, first-party, and contextual data sources. By leveraging this combination you will observe better alignment, higher conversion rates...

And a marketing engine that’s driven by insight.  

Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post useful.  

Are you interested in discussing the tools that you can leverage to uncover buyer intent? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.