Partnerships OS

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Welcome/Overview

Nick Valluri

Intro

I’ve spent most of my career working in partnerships at companies ranging from Google to 20 person startups. Partnerships is an incredibly versatile space, but one thing is remarkably consistent: there aren’t great tools designed specifically for Partnership teams. That’s changing over time, as APIs and integrations are now table stakes and companies are investing in co-selling earlier and earlier in the process, but it’s still not ideal.

In particular, the most challenging part for me has always been the CRM. I’ve tracked partnerships in everything from Salesforce to Copper to a Google Sheet to Asana. Each of these solutions has some great functionality but often felt like it was designed for something else.

When I joined Coda, I had used it in my previous role and was obviously impressed enough with the product to join the company. That said, I didn’t really understand the true power of the product until I spent a few months with it and started running my entire partner management/business development process through Coda. I’m proud to introduce my Partnerships Operating System, or Partnerships OS. It is equal parts CRM, task manager, note taker, and product/launch brief organizer, with a few extras thrown in.

Some basic familiarity with Coda is helpful to make this doc work for you. I suggest checking out the learn doc:

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Learn Coda via guides, courses, videos, and more | Resources Explore our resources to learn how to use Coda. Discover guides, courses, videos, and help documentation. Get started in Coda and become a Coda expert. coda.io⁠

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Set up

Go to

CRM⁠

and define your

Partnership Stages⁠

and

Partnership Categories⁠

fields. Everyone has different buckets of partners and by making these stages and categories flexible you can edit, add new ones, or remove old ones.

Add your

Companies⁠

- make sure to include logos and fill out the relevant context. If you have other fields you want to be able add and sort on (like “SDK beta launch partner” or “Referral agreement in place” this is the spot. You can also create an Partner Management brief from here.

Add

Contacts⁠

for each company.

Add

Opportunities⁠

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Review the templates for

Opportunity Briefs⁠

and

Partner Management⁠

- you can tweak these to suit your needs, but the idea is that you have standardized formats that you can re-use for each new opportunity or strategic partner. Take note of the sentiment tracker in the Opportunity Brief template; it’s a great way to get quick feedback from your team on the direction of a launch.

Create

Opportunities⁠

. For me these are new launches, co-marketing initiatives and integrations. For each opportunity you create, you can also create an Opportunity Brief by clicking the button in the table and duplicating the brief you set up in the previous step.

Set

Milestones⁠

for each opportunity (you can switch between a Table view and the Timeline view to make this easier).

Start adding

Meeting Notes⁠

. You can tag the companies and attendees from your contacts list, making it easy to search and filter using the controls above. Meeting notes will also show up in the Companies view (and you can create views within Partner Management pages to pull in meetings for specific partner, or in the

Cadence⁠

page for a specific partner manager).

Check out the

Toolkit⁠

for a handful of tools I use every day, like stack ranking partner opportunities, a template for running meetings, managing a beta, and a backlog for triaging and tracking partnership opportunities.

Make sure you’re familiar with Views (this is how you’ll slice and dice all the data, like creating a view of partners that are signed up for the beta launch) and Controls (such as the “Company” selector at the top of the Meeting Notes page that lets you filter the notes down to just the companies you select). They can get even more complex, like partners you haven’t had a meeting with in the past 30 days, or a control that only shows you blocked items in the Partner Management Scorecard.

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A few of the 25,000+ teams that 🏃‍♀️ on Coda.

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Coda is an all-in-one doc for your team’s unique processes — the rituals that help you succeed. Teams that use Coda get rid of hundreds of documents, spreadsheets, and even bespoke apps, to work quickly and clearly in one place. This template is a Coda doc. Click around to explore.

Find out how to Coda-fy your rituals.

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Connect with a Rituals Architect

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