We’ve already uncovered the benefits of expanding your business through partners and alliances. Let’s take that idea a step further and explore how to accelerate ecosystem growth with a Fractional Partner Leader.
Not all companies can afford to hire and maintain a whole partner organization. Vice presidents, directors, partner sales representatives, marketers, and operations leaders are expensive. In today’s business climate, optimizing your overhead investment by combining internal and external talent is wise. This is where fractional partner leaders come into play.
The Rise of the Fractional Chief Partner Officer
In recent years, the fractional leadership movement has gained traction, allowing companies to get partial access to leaders with dozens of years of experience at a fraction of the usual cost. Fractional executives like CFOs, CMOs, and CROs have experience scaling an organization. They can execute the right initiatives to accelerate results — all for a fraction of what it costs to hire someone like that full-time.
The goal of a Fractional Chief Partner Officer (FCPO) is to lead selected initiatives for building, enabling, and selling with partners and alliances. An FCPO is embedded into your organization and can manage full-time employees and contractors. You get a senior partner leader with a proven track record of overcoming the issues and obstacles you have today.
5 Key Advantages of Hiring a FCPO
The fractional model makes experienced, proven leaders more accessible to your organization. Some of the advantages of hiring an FCPO include the following:
- Efficiency: FCPOs can execute quickly and with urgency. As a result of their previous experience, they can apply best practices and enable processes as they manage internal and outsourced teams.
- Experience: For start-ups and smaller organizations, founders often find the FCPO’s experience managing more complex operations invaluable. They want to scale and reach maturity, and their FCPO already has experience doing just that.
- Flexible investment: For mature companies, the FCPO model can be a viable approach to scale coverage and sales without the burden of increasing the partner organization. The FCPO is part of the leadership team and implements pragmatic and selected actions to accelerate demand generation with partners in key business segments. The FCPO supervises the partner program execution and leverages contacts to engage with the right alliances.
- Repeatable success: The success with selected initiatives can be adopted as new best practices and deployed on more segments, adding more partners.
- Scalable leadership: The FCPO can scale with the management of external talent sourced via several options available on the market (near-shore marketing, partner sales, and operations, among others).
Curious about the FCPO model? Our CxO4 team would love to connect with you.
Stay tuned for our next article, when we examine one of our client’s stories and explain how they worked with one of our FCPOs to accelerate their ecosystem success.
