On December 17 of last month, Partnerships Vet Kelly Benish 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 and Partnerships Guru, Bernhard Friedrichs, and I hosted a virtual meet-up of 18 of your B2SMB Leadership peers.

All of them are in charge of Partnerships for their respective brands. Big players like Zoho , Alignable , Equifax , Liveops, Inc. and emerging players like GetDandy , Creatify AI , and OpenPhone .

In the month of December I personally surveyed 35 more of your peers from brands like Verizon Business, Intuit , Comcast Business , Infobip and Constant Contact .

Of the many questions we asked to our meet-up attendees and 1-on-1 interviewees, 3 stood out because of the answers we got. These questions were:

• How do you currently measure Partnership success?
• What matters most to you when selecting a B2SMB partner?
• What is your biggest frustration with B2SMB partnership development?

The answers revealed why most partnerships fail before they start.

Finding #1: Nobody Has Mastered Measuring What Matters

Here’s how the responses on how partnership success is measured broke down:

• 37.5% measure partnership success by increased market access
• 12.5% track revenue attribution from partner deals
• 12.5% measure deal acceleration for faster close rates
• 12.5% look at pipeline quality
• 12.5% measure impact on the full business funnel
• 12.5% combine revenue attribution, deal acceleration, and market access

That’s a helluva pie chart!

Seven different ways to measure the same thing!

When every company measures partnerships differently, nobody can point to an “industry standard” that demonstrates “good news” ROI to their board.

There is no common framework for proven winners.

Some B2SMB enterprises are measuring top-of-funnel (market access). Some mid-funnel (pipeline quality). Some bottom-funnel (deal acceleration). Some revenue attribution. Some all of the above.

The consequence?

Partnerships that might be working get killed because they cannot be measured against a standard.

Partnerships that are not working endure because metrics are too vague to prove failure, and no one wants to admit defeat (as difficult as a divorce.)

When one executive at the December 17 meeting said “measuring and proving partnership ROI is nearly impossible,” 2/3rds agreed.

Finding #2: The Time Suck of Partnerships Is Killing Partnerships

We asked: What is your biggest frustration with B2SMB partnership development?

62.5% cited “finding qualified partner prospects takes far too long” as their #1 frustration.

Additional responses:

• 15% said “we lack frameworks for evaluation and negotiation“
• 12.5% cited “getting the right decision makers involved” is a minefield
• 10% said “time to close is way too long”

For 80% of Leaders we spoke to, partnership development takes 6 months minimum.

One executive at our December meeting reported a 3.5 year sales cycle to initiate their largest partnership.

For most of our respondents, their partnership dev time is mostly wasted on unqualified prospects, producing no engagement.

Far too much time is spent in endless scheduling of meetings, in cold outreach, and in discovering misalignment after months of conversations.

The consequence: by the time you close a partnership, the market has moved.

The AI partner you negotiated with for 18 months just got acquired.

The channel partner you vetted is now building a competing product.

The Fortune 50 Player you hung your year on just had a really bad quarter, and is doing “the turtle.”

When I asked selfishly what B2SMB Institute benefit would deliver the most value to Partner execs, 50% said curated introductions.

Not networking events. Not databases. Actual pre-vetted introductions to qualified partners.

Finding #3: Everyone Wants Strategic Alignment But Nobody Can Define It

We asked executives to describe their ideal prospective partner.

75% described wanting “alignment with my strategic partnership needs.“

Then we asked them to pitch what those needs actually were.

Most struggled. Fell short. Ran long. Were muddy at best.

The partnership “industry” has a meaning problem.

Here’s what I mean: everyone uses the same jargony phraseology (“strategic alignment,” “mutual value creation,” “ecosystem synergy”) but we often mean completely different things.

One executive’s strategic alignment means distribution reach. Another’s means technical integration capability. Another’s means brand credibility in a new market.

But as if that Tower of Babel were not enough, here’s the deeper problem Kelly, Bernhard and I see: most partnership discussions are chained to the tactical.

We’re far more interested in Playbook alignment than Principles alignment.

We ask “can we integrate APIs? Do our pricing models work together? Can we co-market?”

The strategic principles and their corresponding questions get buried.

Do our 3-year visions align? Are we trying to reach the same market the same way? If the market shifts, will we both pivot in the same direction or in opposite directions?

The consequence: partnership deals get signed based on vague agreement, that “hey, this feels strategic, doesn’t it?“

And then 80% of B2SMB Partnership deals go dark because companies aligned on tactics but had completely different strategic principles.

An example from the December 17 meeting: an exec described a channel partner relationship that looked healthy for two years. Strong tactical alignment. Good quarterly results. Then the partner announced they were building a competing product. Had been building it for 18 months while the partnership was running.

The strategic misalignment was always there. But it was buried under tactical execution until it was too late.

Partnerships on the Solo

Here is what struck me: every executive is facing these same three problems, but solving them alone.

It is a throwback to the very reason we created the B2SMB Institute at this time 8 years ago.

Everybody faces the same challenges.

Nobody talks about it.

Ironic to the max that THIS topic that nobody really talks about is partnerships.

Everyone is flying solo.

And flying solo is pretty lonely.

Consider what we’re missing because of it:

1. No Benchmark for What Success Looks Like

When one company measures partnerships by market access, another by revenue attribution, and another by deal acceleration, there is no way to know if your 15% partner-sourced revenue is excellent or terrible.

You cannot answer your CFO’s question: How does our partnership ROI compare to industry standard? There is no industry standard.

Every partnership team is inventing their own scorecard, which means nobody can prove whether partnerships are working better this year than last year, or better at your company than at competitors.

2. No Way to Avoid Repeating Others’ Mistakes

This is not a stat to be proud of.

Somewhere, you have to imagine that a fellow partnership executive has already vetted that AI vendor you are evaluating and discovered they promise 6-month integration but deliver 18-month timelines.

Somewhere, another exec is learning that the channel partner you favor is quietly being acquired by your biggest competitor.

You are about to spend 6 months and $400,000 discovering what someone else already knows, because there is no mechanism to share partner intelligence.

Real example from a 1-on-1 I had: an exec asked if anyone I knew had worked with a specific AI vendor. I sent the question out via private group chat and three people responded within an hour with their actual (horrible) experience. The executive killed the deal that afternoon, saving a lot of time and currency.

3. No Framework to Separate Strategic from Tactical Alignment

This is a big one.

Executives say they want strategic alignment but most partnership discussions stay tactical. Can we integrate POS? Do our pricing models work together? Will our marketing teams work well together?

The strategic questions get buried, and the principles of great Partnerships get lost. (For more on this topic, I refer you to Bernhard’s “First Principles of Partnerships.”)

Partnerships fail 18 months in because companies aligned on tactics, sent the agreement to legal, and never quite discussed if their combination created value beyond 1+1.

Bottom line: there is no playbook for pressure-testing strategic fit before you commit resources.

Why This Matters Now

Partnerships aren’t optional anymore.

Resources are scarce. Budgets are frozen. You cannot build everything yourself.

Given this environment, you are likely to pursue partnerships for your B2SMB offering for three reasons:

• Shared resources when resources are scarce, e.g. you cannot afford to build the AI capability in-house, but your partner already has it.
• Force multipliers to fend off bigger competitors, e.g. you are a mid-tier CRM facing the Salesforce/OpenAI alliance. You need partner leverage to compete.
• Opportunity acceleration through collaboration, e.g. your sales cycle is 9 months on your own, 4 months with the right partner’s credibility.

But if you cannot measure what’s working, cannot avoid known bad partners, and cannot tell strategic fit from tactical alignment, you’re spending scarce resources on partnerships that drain more than they deliver.

This Is Why We Built the Partners Circle (and B2SMBI)

Eight years ago, we created the B2SMB Institute because enterprises facing the exact same challenges in selling to Small Business weren’t talking to each other.

The irony now?

The very topic nobody discusses in B2SMB is partnerships, the very thing that requires collaboration.

That changes now.

Here’s what the B2SMBI Partners Circle will be solving with your help, and the help of our 300+ current Partners Circle Members:

• Curated Introductions: a process and system for pre-vetted partner connections through our network, driving towards our Matchpoint Deal Summit (May 13-14), our first live curated partner-matching event.
• Monthly Virtual Meetups: peer learning with Partnership Leaders. Real talk about what’s working and what’s not. Instruction from Partnership SMEs. Our B2SMBI model laser-focused on Partnerships.
• Shared Frameworks: Partnership principles, best practices, attribution models, and evaluation scorecards built from collective experience – not consultant theory.

Join Our January 28th Virtual Partners Circle Meet-up

If you’re getting this edition of the Between2Bs Newsletter – and you’ve read this far – you belong in the Partners Circle.

Join us next Wednesday, January 28, as we offer two “meet-up” sessions (same agenda, different attendees). The times are:

• 11:30a EST
• 1:30p EST

We’ll begin with our “Pitch for Partners,” where you’ll have 90-seconds to answer:

• who are you?
• what are you looking for in a partner?
• what do you offer to a partner?

Space is limited to maintain conversation quality.

→ →→ Reserve your spot – just put “Invite” in Comments

My Question for You

Your comments/answers would deepen all of our insights into the state of B2SMB Partnerships, so here’s my question of the week:

“Is your team equipped to build partnerships that can bridge the AI readiness gap for your SMB customers?”

We’re all seeing the same data: 92% of SMBs are investing in AI. 70% feel unready.

That’s not just a market gap – it’s a major B2SMB partnerships opportunity.

Hope to see you on the 28th!