Business Lessons — Partner Marketing Failure

Here’s what I didn’t expect in my business.

We partnered with a major non-profit that has a following of 40k. This non-profit is supported by influencers who support their initiatives.

With one post from this influencer, we attracted 600 people to our email list. I was HYPE. I was under the impression that I’d attracted highly qualified leads who just needed a bit more information, and they would convert.

The Twitter stats were:

• 61 reposts
• 197 likes
• 208 bookmarks

It did NUMBERS!

Our pricing was 3.5% the price of leading vendors, so WELL below market. I was certain I’d be able to convert all 800 leads to purchase my program.

Here’s what we had going for us:

1. Highly competitive pricing
2. Halo effect from non-profit brand and career influencer association
3. Differentiated Niche — growing products in big tech with practical experience

I started conducting outreach and email marketing on Mailchimp to recruit students for the program.

They were an engaged group and were highly responsive to my outreach. GOOD SIGN.

Given the price point, their explicit interest in product management, and everything we had going for us, I expected conversions to happen on the first outreach.

But, instead of “Where do I sign up”? the responses were:

• “How much is the program?”

Whomp.

• “I didn’t know the program had a fee.”

Whomp.

• “I thought this was free. I’m not ready to pay right now.”

Whooommpppp.

Our partnering organization covered 57% of the program fee while students were responsible for 43%. Now remember, I shared that the program was 3.5% of the cost of leading programs. For context here’s the breakdown of what I consider the top programs for career transitioners:

1. Product School — ~$5,000
2. Co.Lab — $3,800 (shout out to Sefunmi and team!)

Our total cost was $400 with an expected student contribution of $175. Students received 8 weeks of live classes and 5 workshops from paid vendors, including A/B testing, managing conflict, effectively conducting brainstorming, and more. The program also included 8-chapters of on-demand content and access to a Slack group. As an added point of credibility, it was taught by me, a former graduate of an APM program in big tech. This cost to the student was only $175.

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How did this happen? Where did the breakdown occur?

Well, it’s a case study of a failed Strategic Partnership as a result of my lack of focus on Partner Marketing, being a good steward of my business, and being more passive than I should have. I have a strong relationship with the non-profit, and they were extremely generous in the partnership as always.

The language used in the program’s promotion was:

“XYZ organization is “subsidizing”

“XYZ organization is “sponsoring seats”

All very true statements. However,

1. There was never an explicit statement of the cost of the program to the student.
2. I didn’t have artifacts or marketing templates. I never led an alignment meeting for how to articulate the partnership.

So, the leads were not pre-qualified for payment through marketing. The majority had no willingness to pay and, in some instances, an inability to pay. I had several prospective students request a discount code. I was SHOCKED because I knew how competitive our offering was.

Here’s more context to understand our business goals

Freebies, lead gen, and lead nurturing are all a part of running a business, especially ones that lack a recurring revenue model.

That wasn’t the annoyance or frustration. Though spending more time and money on email credits on low-intent leads is certainly not aspirational.

We considered the relationship with the organization to be a Strategic Partnership. Strategic partnerships are longer-term, have deeply aligned incentives, and usually support a flywheel that is core to the business’s future.

The void is that our program was significantly underpriced at $400 and of course even more so at $175. We expected to increase the program cost to at least $999 moving forward, stripping the workshops and shortening the program to 4 weeks.

Generally, you sell the next cohort while the current cohort is live and/or while recruiting for the preceding one. Our strategy was a BUST.

See the edtech market in general has high price elasticity. The career transition market has EVEN MORE elastic demand. We were serving the career transition market because this audience was both available and accessible and were willing to pay up to a certain point.

My original intent was to serve the early career PM already with a job and a high salary who needed an execution framework in the absence of strong internal coaching. I just needed time to build out a sales motion to attract my ideal ICP.

We’d planned to leverage the leads from this partnership to give us time to build high-quality content and new lead engines in the form of:

1. A podcast with cross-functional stakeholders focused on helping PMs collaborate more effectively with their peers (we recorded 1 episode w/ my fave designer)
2. More newsletter content (since that is how we got our start)
3. LI navigator automation (we started this but w/o thought leadership — points 1 and 2 — outreach is in vain).

Our inorganically acquired leads were useless to us not because we chose the wrong partner but because we needed to partner on marketing and messaging to attract the right subset of their community. And I failed to recognize the importance of this and to plan appropriately for it.

Moving forward and next steps:

In an ideal scenario, I’d create marketing collateral, messaging and graphics optimized for different platforms, and share them with the partner. In a lean environment and short time window, I’ll lead with words and links, along with:

1. Gain context and learn how the partner organization manages and executes direct marketing and their partner marketing. Ask explicitly if there is an internal process or any guidelines they follow.
2. Craft and document marketing language for the partnership in-house and share it with the partnering organization in a shared document with links.
3. Set up a meeting to review messaging, the marketing strategy, schedule for release checkpoints and QA, and ensure we update document status to finalized.
4. Enjoy the process and the partnership

References

• Influencer Twitter Post