Partnerships are the channel lean teams keep ignoring

In my first six months back at MATE, we launched two streaming partnerships, won the telco spot in a big four bank’s loyalty program, and signed a wholesale deal to power another well know businesses own-brand telco.

None of that came out of the media budget.

I’m not saying that to show off. I’m saying it because when I talk to other lean marketers, partnerships are almost always the channel they’ve thought about least. They’ll spend hours tuning a $5k paid campaign and never make the call that could put them in front of a million customers someone else already has.

Why lean teams avoid partnerships

There are good reasons, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

Partnerships are slow. A paid campaign can go live this afternoon. A partnership can take three months just to get through the other side’s legal team.

They’re political. You’re negotiating with people who have their own targets, their own bosses, and their own idea of what “a good deal” looks like.

They’re hard to attribute. And they depend on another team doing their part, which means some of your results are out of your hands.

If you’re a team of three with a quarterly target, all of that pushes you towards the channels you can control. I get it. But control isn’t the same as efficiency.

Why they’re worth it anyway

A good partner gives you two things you can’t easily buy.

The first is reach you haven’t earned yet. Your partner has spent years (and a lot of money) building an audience. A partnership lets you borrow some of that.

The second is trust. When a customer sees you through a brand they already use, you skip part of the “who are these people?” stage. That matters more now than it used to. AI search tools lean heavily on credible third-party mentions when deciding which brands to recommend. A partnership with an established brand is exactly that kind of signal. I wrote more about that in priming and proving.

The maths can also be very different. Here’s a simple illustration (the numbers are made up, the lesson isn’t). If paid media costs you $150 to acquire a customer, and a partner can deliver customers for a $40 incentive plus a small revenue share, you don’t need huge volume for it to matter. Two hundred customers a month at that gap is $22k a month you didn’t spend in the auction.

The three questions I ask before I say yes

Most bad partnerships look great in the first meeting. These three questions filter out most of them.

1. Do we share a customer without competing for them?

The best partners serve the same person you do, at a different moment, with a different product. Streaming and broadband is a clean example. Someone who wants to watch sport needs a decent connection to do it. Neither product replaces the other.

If you have to squint to see the overlap, the customers won’t see it either.

2. Can I write what each side gets in one sentence?

I write two sentences before any serious conversation. One for what we get. One for what they get.

If I can’t write theirs clearly, the deal will stall. Usually around month two, when their team works out they’re doing all the lifting for someone else’s growth.

3. Who does the work?

This is the question almost nobody asks early enough. Who builds the landing page? Who handles support when a customer’s promo code doesn’t work? Who pulls the reporting? Who owns the customer if they leave?

Get that on paper before you sign anything. It’s far easier to agree now than to argue about it after launch.

The workload trap

Here’s the part that catches lean teams out. A partnership isn’t a deal. It’s a small product launch that never quite ends.

Rough numbers for a single partnership in its first year:

• Landing page and offer setup: 20 hours
• Launch comms, emails, and assets: 15 hours
• Partner meetings and approvals: 2 hours a week, so about 100 hours a year
• Reporting: 1 hour a week, so about 50 hours a year

That’s roughly 185 hours. For one partnership. That’s more than a month of one person’s time, before anything goes wrong.

So, if you sign three partnerships in a quarter with a team of three, you haven’t added three channels. You’ve quietly given away a big share of your team’s capacity. Plan for it, or pick fewer partners.

I’ve made the mistake of spreading too thin with two many partners before. Pick one good one, work out how to activate it properly and streamline the operations. Then adding a second one is easier.

Measure it like a channel, not a favour

Partnerships have a habit of being judged on feel. The launch looked great, both CEOs were happy, everyone moves on. Six months later nobody can say whether it worked.

Treat partner customers as their own cohort and compare them against your other channels on the same three numbers:

• Cost to acquire (incentives, revenue share, and the team hours above)
• Churn, because partner customers sometimes come for the deal and leave when it ends
• Value over time, because some partner cohorts are worth much more than your paid customers, and you want to know which ones

The partnerships that last are the ones with a simple report both sides actually read every week. It doesn’t need to be clever. It needs to exist.

Where to start

If you’ve never run a partnership properly, don’t start with a big-name pitch. Start with a list.

1. Write down ten companies that already serve your customer and don’t compete with you.
2. Score each one on the three questions above. Be honest about the workload one.
3. Pick the top one and pitch a small, time-boxed pilot. Ninety days, one offer, one landing page, one weekly report.
4. Decide in advance what result would make you extend it.

A pilot is much easier for the other side to say yes to. It’s also much easier for you to walk away from if it doesn’t work.

Paid media will always feel more comfortable because you’re in control. But for a lean team, the channel you control isn’t always the one that grows you fastest. Sometimes the best move is borrowing someone else’s audience and doing the work to deserve it.