When a product improvement is meant to benefit another department (e.g., reduce support tickets), don't just ship it and hope for the best. Create a joint, aligned goal with that department's leader. This ensures they are accountable for accruing the benefit (e.g., reallocating saved capacity) and solidifies your impact.

Avoid the trap of trying to achieve everything with one launch. Instead, define a single primary KPI—such as press mentions, sales rep message adoption, or a specific user action—and build the entire campaign strategy around optimizing for that one goal.

Metrics like "Marketing Qualified Lead" are meaningless to the customer. Instead, define key performance indicators around the value a customer receives. A good KPI answers the question: "Have we delivered enough value to convince them to keep going to the next stage?"

The ROI of partner enablement is critical but notoriously difficult to quantify. To create a tangible link to revenue, connect enablement activities like training sessions to specific, trackable outcomes like SPIFs or other direct incentives that drive a desired action and can be measured.

Before launching any partner activity, define target customers, tactics, and follow-up processes with partners and internal teams. This pre-alignment is the key to achieving and proving ROI, moving beyond just tracking spend after the fact.

To prove business impact beyond vanity metrics, define success by aligning with key departments *before* the campaign starts. Executives want pipeline, product wants trials, and customer success wants retention. This prevents a disconnect where marketing celebrates impressions while leadership asks about revenue.

Most business struggles stem from a misaligned or forgotten North Star Metric (NSM). A successful framework aligns the entire company by ensuring all OKRs ladder up to a single, durable NSM, with KPIs serving as health checks for those OKRs. This creates a clear hierarchy for decision-making and resource allocation, preventing strategic drift.

Smartsheet's Scott Strubel argues that vendors who truly succeed in marketplaces like AWS are those who approach it with proactive enthusiasm. A reluctant, obligatory presence is insufficient. This mindset shift drives deeper integration, better sales alignment, and ultimately, accelerated revenue.

In a B2B supplier or distributor model, success depends on going downstream. You must understand not only your direct partner's business drivers and KPIs but also the needs of their end-customer. This allows you to align strategy across the entire value chain.