How to attract and retain top digital agency solutions partners w/ Blend Commerce

Welcome back partnerships people! Alex Glenn here, your host of Make Them Famous - the only podcast bringing you true insights from both sides of the partnership equation.

Today’s episodes comes to you because of a linkedin post from the founder of a top ecommerce agency stressing the importance of incentivizing partners for retention - not just referrals.

I’m privileged to be able to interview Adam Pearce, CEO of Blend Commerce, and his co-founder and CVO Peter Gardner who posted to linkedin and caught my attention.

These two operate a killer fast-growing Shopify Plus agency focused on customer experience design with notable partners - Klaviyo, Octane Ai, and Gorgias.

Peter and Adam receive 6-10 partnership requests per day.

So, we aim this episode on finding out what they will reply and spend valuable resources on, as well as:

• The genesis of their current best partnerships
• What about those make them the best
• If you cannot bring referrals, what can you bring that’s valuable
• How Adam and Peter interpret a new tech outreach for partnership from cold outreach
• What’s critical for tech teams to understand when reaching out to a new agency
• Why they doubled down on Shopify Plus certification recently
• What resource allocations went into that, a similar
• Difference between a low-referral-frequency thought leader expert implementation agency and a high-referral shop that does a ton of quick business and can be a pure referral partner
• Value of going deeper into an accreditation / certification with a tech platform
• Risks included for the agency when deciding
• When to sign contracts, and when you should

A must listen for any partner team having trouble with outreach or enablement of service provider partners...

Resources:

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

‍Partnerhub - for finding and managing your partnerships.

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