Mekaela Davis, Trintech’s Chief Partner Officer, is well known for leading and developing strong partner programs. In fact, her successful leadership in this area provided her the opportunity to join Asher Mathew and Kelly Sarabyn from the Unlearn podcast to share her experience. The podcast hosts talk to business leaders about unlearning the old ways of bringing products to market and sharing how they are succeeding today with partnerships, ecosystems and more. Her episode, “Driving Partnership Success from the C-Suite” discusses the rise of partnerships in the overall business strategy, how to develop symbiotic relationships, and highlights Mekaela’s path to becoming a CPO.

Partnership myth busting: what is a partnership?

Throughout their conversations with business leaders around the world, Asher and Kelly realized that the definition of “partnering” varies wildly. To some, partnerships are a straight line to additional revenue, but many leaders engage in more subtle, but still value-driving, partnership motions without even realizing it. For example, anytime an integration is leveraged to fulfill a customer’s requirements, you’re partnering to deliver value. And if you are a SaaS solution provider like Trintech, you have to be ready to respond to myriad customer needs through partnership. In Mekaela’s view, partnering is at play in any relationship that drives a better outcome for the end user.

Mekaela Davis: her “approachable” path to partner leadership

As the Chief Partner Officer title gains more visibility at partner-focused organizations, many assume the role is limited to heavy-hitting hyperscalers at massive companies like Google. But, Mekaela suggests there’s a more “approachable” path to becoming a Chief Partner Officer, and the journey is rooted in curiosity and embracing change. “I had to learn a lot of different functions along the way that I … applied to the work I do,” she said. What did that look like for her? Mekaela started by gaining hands-on experience in various parts of the business, including accounting, sales, and marketing, to understand how they operate, what matters to decision-makers, and how partnerships impacted their work. When she moved into a professional services environment at a large consulting firm after many years in SaaS, she was able to leverage her diverse experience to create a more scalable approach to partnerships. “The thing that I like about this work is that no day is the same. There is a wonderful, energizing mix of things to focus on, areas to optimize and people to talk to that I just don’t think you get in any other role,” says Mekaela.

The rise of partnerships in today’s business landscape

Partnerships are changing. Historically, companies partnered to solve revenue problems through strategic engagements. Today, the best partnerships seek to solve business problems proactively to deliver better results. As Mekaela puts it, “The triangulation between your organization, the partners that you team up with, and the outcome with the customer…that’s where the secret sauce is made.”

In her experience, Mekaela recognized that the old transactional approach often led to frustrating and inefficient relationships. She saw that most partner programs were handled in a siloed and inconsistent way, which made them administratively burdensome and made it tough to forecast the business impact. She recognized the need to honor 360-degree relationships: understanding them from the perspectives of all involved parties. Seeing the big picture of partnerships has helped her build better relationships by ensuring a consistent approach from every touchpoint and creating a higher return on investment through streamlined processes and gained efficiencies at scale.

Strong partnerships lead to happier customers

During episode 25 of the Unlearn podcast, Kelly Sarabyn pointed out that in today’s high-tech world, companies are updating their products faster than ever, accelerated by AI, which can lead to integrations breaking down or just becoming obsolete from their original use case. And if there’s no ownership and monitoring of the connections, customers find themselves frustrated, trying to follow everyone’s roadmaps and serve as the go-between for numerous apps. As Mekaela said in the podcast, “Customers want experiences and outcomes. They no longer want a transaction here and another transaction there, with lots of wasted time in the middle.”

This is why it’s critical to work with organizations that have strong partner leadership, like Mekaela provides for Trintech. It’s no longer acceptable to follow a hands off, set-it-and-forget-it approach to applications and definitely not to partner relations. You won’t find a CPO role on every executive roster, but Trintech and Mekaela are paving a path toward stronger partnerships and happier customers. Happy because vendors are working together to pave the way for a more seamless and pleasurable experience. Happy because they are not left to manage these complicated relationships on their own.

There are many more insights where these came from! Listen to the full Unlearn podcast with Mekaela Davis here.