Direct selling models are the primary sales motion for the majority of B2B Cloud and SaaS companies.  Can partnerships amplify and even accelerate revenue growth, even for early stage companies? Ben Pastro has a long history in professional services and systems integration in the B2B Tech industry, and has several insights and perspectives on the question of if and how to make partnerships successful for a modern B2B Tech company. After investing 8 years at Oracle, a founding father of leveraging channel partnerships to accelerate revenue growth.  Following Oracle, Ben joined Apps Associates which evolved from a traditional on-premise enterprise software systems integrator to a 100% Cloud based consulting firm focused on Oracle Cloud, AWS and Salesforce.  Ultimately, Apps Associates was sold to Private Equity. Ben recently founded Anumetric to help founders and leadership teams at technology centric consulting firms looking to scale and operate more efficiently. The value of a partnership needs to be viewed on both sides from the partners lens. In fact, having a shared focus on the customer’s business value is the best shared objective.  In the world of annual subscription, recurring revenue, maintaining a focus on the on-going business value a customer is receiving is critical to the long term success of the partnership. Traditionally, enterprise software companies would be more prone to “hand off the customer” relationship to the SI and implementation partner.  Today, with the relationship being re-evaluated on an annual basis, the software vendor and the consulting partner are better served with sharing a long term orientation to the partnership and to the shared customer. Partnerships should not emulate a relay race with a hand-off relationship, rather the partners should collaborate on the both selling process and the project implementation side.  Specifically, the implementation partner should help to design the sales process when they will be involved in the customer implementation and ultimate success.  The most successful partnerships for consulting firms start with an understanding and strong relationship with the software vendors sales resource(s). If you are just beginning to evaluate a partnership program for your B2B SaaS or Cloud company, or are a B2B Tech implementation and integration services company,  Ben is a great resource who has the experiences and insights to optimize partner programs for both B2B Cloud vendors and their consulting partners.