The Partnership Playbook: How to Make Friends

Attention all London based FP&A professionals, Controllers, and CFOs! I’m coming to your city and would love to meet you. I’m renting out a bar for a happy hour on Thursday September 4th. If you want to join me and 40 to 50 of the smartest CFOs, finance, strategy, and ops pros in the city, please RSVP below.

The hottest AI line item is infrastructure.

I wanted to share the latest Brex Benchmark because it’s wild. Startups now spend 2.7x more on Claude than ChatGPT. But that’s not surprising, we all have our favorite tools. (Don’t you go dying on me, Perplexity.)

The real story? We’re in a full-on space race for AI compute, and startups are leading the charge. They’re locking down infrastructure before it’s scarce. Oracle. Snowflake. Google. You name it.

This makes my inner CFO smile because the devil’s always in the details. The shiny AI tools make headlines, but the Databricks invoices make those tools run. Brex thinks the same way: tracking not just where dollars go but what they really fund. In this case, it’s the AI-powered future.

It’s a masterclass in turning data into strategy, and Brex is handing you the syllabus.

Check out Brex’s data to see it:

When done right, partnerships are a cheat code for customer acquisition. They let you tap into someone else’s distribution and skip the long, expensive slog of building your own channel. But when done wrong? They're an expensive, ongoing coffee meeting that drains your budget and your time.

(My old CRO used to call them “energy vampires”…)

This playbook draws from my conversation with Sean Jacobsohn, who before becoming a successful investor at Norwest, ran biz dev at Upwork, WageWorks, and Cornerstone - three companies that went public and used partnerships as strategic accelerants along the way.

What follows are five rules for making partnerships actually work:

Forget the SPIFF.

If your pitch to a partner is “we’ll give you 8% to sling our product,” you’re doing it wrong. What partners really want is to sell more of their own product (and faster).

Your partner will always make a lot more money from selling their own product than yours (it's just reality). Therefore, you need to tell a story of how your partnership helps them ship more of their own stuff.

Before you even think about economic splits, here are the questions you should ask yourself so you can better hone in on your value prop:

Remember: Your partners aren’t going to get out of bed in the morning to sell your product if it doesn’t first help them sell more of their own.

Partners are a fast pass to new geographies and industries. At Cornerstone, Sean’s team leaned on partners to break into APAC and LATAM before spinning up a direct sales motion. Same strategy for penetrating verticals like healthcare and higher ed.

This largely de-risked their future investments, proving it was worth it to pay for reps on the ground.

Selling to a net new logo is hard. Selling through someone who already has the relationship? Much easier.

TL;DR: Partner first in new areas, build second once you prove you have PMF and predictable pipeline.

Signing a partnership means nothing without follow-through. A signed paper isn’t a victory lap (although they often do coincide with celebratory steak dinners where you go home with a hangover and the meat sweats). Signing is the starting line.

The majority of partnerships die not due to lack of fit, but due to lack of tactical follow through. Of course you both make sense on paper (after all, we gave you the list to hone your pitch in section one of this piece). The problem is you never visited their call center in Omaha to train their inside sales reps on what your product actually does.

Yes, I know Omaha is cold in December. No, you can’t just fire off a PDF battle card via email and expect them to learn it.

If you want partners to resell your product, you have to treat them like your own GTM team. That means onboarding, training, refreshers, and even support on back-office stuff like how to book a deal in their CRM.

Feet on the ground move a partnership forward.

The fastest way to get someone’s attention is to send him business, and without immediately asking for something in return.

Imagine opening your email to new deals… just because? Hard to not answer that guy’s email.

(I even take this approach to newsletter recommendations. I’ll recommend a big writer and send them a few hundred subscribers before reaching out. I want to undeniably prove value before having a convo.)

Partnerships are not charity. So don’t act like a charity case.

And don’t be stingy (or send an Edible Arrangement). Send leads.

Want to get acquired? Embed yourself as a core component within their customers’ workflows.

The best companies are bought, not sold. And the diligence is lived through the partnership itself.

But beware of what I call “pre-traction-Corp-Dev-time-suckers” (another form of the aforementioned energy vampires). There are a lot of tire kickers hanging out in the bowels of Fortune 500 corp dev orgs. Due to either boredom or company OKRs, they pursue activity for activity’s sake (and at your expense). They will drag you along before there’s real momentum.

While it is important to build human connections with stakeholders, don’t overly invest in these exploratory conversations until you’ve collaborated on real code and closed real deals. Otherwise, you’re just doing a book report.

If you take nothing else from this playbook, remember these five pillars:

The most underrated? Reciprocation.

Start by sending business their way. That’s what separates you from the other 97 startups in their inbox. New deals.

Everything else falls in place after that.

Do you like EBITDA? Do you like Sports?

If you answered "Yes" to both of those questions, then this is the podcast you've been waiting for.

I had the opportunity to interview former CFO of Major League Baseball Jonathan Mariner

He's also served as CFO of the Florida Marlins (MLB), Florida Panthers (NHL), and on the boards of incredible companies like OneStream Software, Tyson Foods, and Rocket.

Jonathan was a force in orchestrating a $1 billion turn around of MLB, going from $500M in losses to $500M in profits.

If that wasn't enough, he also invented TaxDay App, which, as a man constantly on the go, I'm a thankful user (no one likes getting "love letters" from the state tax authority).

This episode covers:

Look, templates are annoying. It’s another clunky tab to fill out. Another pre formatted, oddly mustard colored cell (that for some reason refuses to be recognized as a currency). Another row of perfectly good historical data that got wiped out (which you pray you can re-locate). Another column that makes you think, “Wait, where do we even pull that number from?”

I get it.

But here's the thing… as gross as the collection process is, something clicks over time.

Templates aren't busywork if they’re asking for the right shared set of metrics. They're a form of alignment. They're saving you from getting your head caved in during the next board meeting.

As Dave Kellogg once told me: “Templates build agreement.”

Wishing you a balance sheet that foots,

CJ