Build Your Partnership Marketing Talent by Hiring for Aptitude

While experienced partnership marketing talent can be hard to find, it’s crucial to know that great talent can come from anywhere.

Partnership marketing is one of the most exciting growth channels in marketing. In this model, brands work with an extensive network of marketing partners on an outcomes basis and only pay for guaranteed results. But while partnership marketing is a good fit for any company’s marketing portfolio, it requires good staffing practices to get results.

Leaders looking to build a partnership marketing team must overcome a lack of experience talent in the industry. However, over a decade of hiring, training, and promoting employees in the partnership marketing space, our company, Acceleration Partners, has developed a playbook that can be used to build and train a great team to staff the partnerships channel.

While experienced partnership marketing talent can be hard to find, it’s crucial to know that great talent can come from anywhere. The essential skills of managing a partnership marketing program—building trusting relationships, recruiting partners, generating data reports, or managing program compliance—are skills you likely already have at your company.

These same skills can be found outside your organization as well. Rather than conducting a narrow search only for candidates with partnership marketing experience, it’s better to build your partnership marketing talent by hiring for aptitude.

Hire For Aptitude

Due to the supply and demand imbalance in partnership marketing staffing, people with significant industry experience are expensive to acquire and can be very hard to retain in a hot job market. Instead of focusing on experience, look for the following characteristics that suggest a strong growth trajectory, regardless of the role:

  • Did they excel in their role early and demonstrate a drive and ability to learn rapidly? If so, they have the potential to learn the partnership marketing model quickly and easily.
  • Do they have a track record of building external partnerships, working in a sales role, or managing relationships? These skills suggest an aptitude for recruiting new partners and building effective relationships with them.
  • Have they worked on or even led strategic marketing campaigns with external stakeholders? This experience can indicate an ability to design effective campaigns and leverage the right partners to get the best results.

While inexperienced talent takes more upfront investment to train, high-aptitude employees within the partnerships industry usually outperform experienced employees in the long run. With the proper instruction, people who are talented and driven to prove themselves can pick up the nuances of partnership marketing faster than you’d expect.

This brings us to step two of the playbook: train thoroughly.

Train Thoroughly

When you have high-aptitude talent, giving them the training they need to execute a partnership marketing program is essential.

Our training process at Acceleration Partners typically starts with giving new hires detailed case studies, then having them shadow one of our more experienced managers. We also train and certify new hires in the technology necessary to manage programs. Plus, we send employees to industry conferences to learn, begin developing their networks in the industry, and meet with publishers.

Once this foundation has been set, new hires work on the administrative tasks of an account, then grow into managing client accounts and eventually become account managers.

This works well for us as an agency. But companies looking to build a small team to manage the partnerships channel may require a different approach.

Companies with a partnership marketing program, or at least an affiliate program, should document as many of their processes as possible for future hires. For example, you need to have a written guide for effectively operating a program—how to recruit partners, investigate fraud, and use the company’s preferred partner technology platform.

If you are attempting to build a partnership marketing program from scratch, you’ll likely need outside training resources from thought leaders in the partnerships space to get your team up to the level they need to perform.

You can also pull together training resources for partnership marketing by drawing from your in-house expertise in related areas. For example, your business development team might share some best practices on outreach, and your other digital marketing channels can share best practices for campaign design.

Once you’ve got a partnership marketing program off the ground, it becomes easier to build a robust training program for new managers. Suppose you’re operating an in-house partnership marketing program. In that case, as we have at Acceleration Partners, you will likely need to onboard only one person at a time rather than creating a training program for entire onboard classes of talent.

Build A Career Path

The crucial third step is to create a career path in partnership marketing. Few things deter business growth more than talent turnover, often when employees believe there is no path to advance within an organization. If you show high-aptitude talent how they can build a career in partnership program management at your company, they are more likely to stay for the long haul.

A crucial part of creating a career path is to promote people when they’re ready for a step up. Suppose your partnership marketing program is new and the most senior-level person managing that portfolio is a manager. In that case, it’s good to plan for what it might look like for that person to reach the senior manager or director level, where they are managing people, not just managing a program. If a manager has mastered program operations, is scaling the program, and is ready to bring people on board and manage them, promoting them to a senior manager or director role is an excellent way to reward them for their results.

If you don’t find ways to keep your best talent growing, you will just be creating a revolving door for employees to enter and exit your organization quickly. Remember that even if you are wary of making a new role for your people to advance into, a competitor might be very willing to create that role and swipe your talent.

Unlocking the potential of partnership marketing requires an effective, well-planned talent development strategy. The tips above will get you on track to manage this high-growth channel and get better results for your brand.

To learn more about partnership marketing, check out Moving To Outcomes: Why Partnerships Are The Future of Marketing, which releases March 22 and is available for preorder now.

Matthew Wool
Matthew Wool is is the co-author of Moving to Outcomes: Why Partnership Are the Future of Marketing. He is the CEO of Acceleration Partners. After joining the company as its fourth employee in 2012, Matt served as General Manager and then President of the company before becoming CEO in 2021. During his tenure, Matt has been a driver of Acceleration Partners’ success including the company’s numerous placements on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies, multiple Most Effective Agency nods from the Performance Marketing Awards, and numerous Best Place to Work awards from Forbes and Glassdoor. Matt is a member of the Fast Company Executive Board and is a frequent speaker at performance marketing industry events.