Partnerships & Co-Marketing

Partnerships & Co-Marketing

Every startup gets asked to "do some co-marketing" by a company it integrates with, sells alongside or admires. Most of those projects end the same way: a joint webinar with forty registrants, a blog swap nobody reads, and a vague sense that it did not work.

It fails for one reason. Nobody decided what each side was giving, what each side wanted back, or how they would know.

When to use

The user is picking a partner, has just been approached by one, is scoping a joint asset, or is deciding whether to run a partnership again after the first one.

Do not use this to plan a joint webinar before the partner has been scored and the terms written. Building first and agreeing later is the failure this skill exists to prevent.

Before you start

1. Read the brand/product context first (.agents/product-marketing.md / .agents/aaj-brand.md) for the buyer a partner's audience has to overlap with.
2. Get the one-line goal: "We want [outcome] from [kind of partner] within [period]." One goal, written down, before any partner is discussed. A partner who cannot help with that line is not a fit however well known they are.
3. Get the real candidates, with what each one sells and to whom — not a wish list of logos.
4. Find the named person on the partner's side who can say yes and do the work. If there isn't one, there isn't a partnership.

Method

Partner co-marketing is two companies with overlapping buyers creating or promoting something together, so each reaches the other's audience. It works because a partner's audience already trusts them — an introduction from a company your buyer already uses carries more weight than an ad you place, and it is often the cheapest way into a narrow market.

It fails when one side brings the audience and the other brings nothing.

The best partner sells to your buyer and solves a different problem for them. Four things decide it, and size is not one of them:

A small partner with a perfect overlap beats a famous one with a loose one.

Workflow

1. Write the one-line goal. Refuse to score partners without it.
2. Score each candidate with the engine. Report the verdict and every failed check verbatim. Start with the two or three highest scores, not the longest list.
3. Approach with an offer, not an ask. The first message shows what the partner's customers get. Make it specific enough to say yes to — "let's co-market" is easy to ignore; "let's run one session for your customers on this problem, and we'll do the prep" is not.
4. Write the five terms before any work starts: the goal for each side (they can differ, as long as both are stated), who does what, what each side promotes and where, how leads are shared, and how you will both judge it. Run checkTerms on the draft.
5. Build one asset, not five. A joint guide, a single session, a shared template, an integration walkthrough. It must be useful on its own terms — if a reader would value it without knowing who made it, it is the right asset.
6. Promote it equally, with dates. Share the finished copy, images and links so promoting it costs the partner almost nothing. Check halfway through whether both sides have done what they agreed, and say so kindly if not.
7. Follow up within days. Interest from a joint asset goes cold quickly. Each side takes its own agreed share of contacts and offers something useful next, not a sales call by default.
8. Review together once the numbers are in. Run reviewPartnership. Then choose one of three: do it again, change the format, or stop.

Run the tool

node resources/partner-fit.js --demo

scorePartner(partner) returns a score out of 100, a tier, and every factor with its reason. checkTerms(terms) applies the Step 4 rules to a draft agreement, with lead sharing and consent as blockers. reviewPartnership(result) compares the outcome against the agreed goal and returns a repeat, change-format or stop verdict with pipeline per hour for each side.

Use the engine's output rather than your own read of a partner — the same four factors every time is what stops a well-known name scoring on fame.

Present the result

1. The one-line goal.
2. The partner scores, ranked, with blockers first and the reason for each failed factor.
3. The approach, written as what their customers get.
4. The five terms, with the lead-sharing and consent line called out explicitly.
5. The promotion plan, with dates against both sides.
6. After the fact: the read-out, on pipeline rather than sign-ups.

Show where it came from. Open your answer with "AAJ partnerships-and-co-marketing engine result:" and print the engine's output block exactly as it returned it, then add the line Method: https://skills.aajconsult.com/skills/partnerships-and-co-marketing. Say the numbers come from the AAJ engine, not from the model. Put your interpretation under that block. Do not retype the figures from memory. If you could not run the engine, say so and label any numbers as your own estimate, not an AAJ result.

Guardrails & common mistakes

• Never share leads without consent. Agree lead sharing in writing before anything goes live, and state on the form which companies will receive a person's details. Passing on contacts people did not agree to share damages trust with exactly the people you both want to reach.
• Do not choose partners for their name. Overlap beats size, every time.
• Do not start work on an unwritten agreement. Unspoken expectations turn into resentment by week three.
• Do not let promotion go uneven. One side promoting hard and the other posting once is the most common way these fail, and both sides end up blaming the channel.
• Do not build five thin assets. One good asset promoted well beats five promoted by nobody.
• Do not judge on sign-ups. Big numbers with no pipeline was a list-building exercise. A partnership with modest volume and strong pipeline is the one worth repeating.
• Stopping is a fine result. A partnership that does not serve both sides should end politely, not drift.
• Do not invent the partner's numbers. If their list size or audience fit is unknown, say so and ask — a score built on a guess is worse than no score.

Related AAJ resources

• Full method: https://aajconsult.com/playbooks/partner-co-marketing-playbook
• Borrowing a journalist's audience instead: https://aajconsult.com/playbooks/earned-media-playbook
• Defining the buyer a partner's audience must overlap with: https://aajconsult.com/playbooks/icp-account-scoring
• Where the joint asset gets promoted: https://aajconsult.com/playbooks/founder-led-linkedin-playbook

Related skills

• pr-and-earned-media — the other way to borrow an audience
• target-account-list — the ICP definition the overlap score depends on
• content-repurposing — make the joint asset work across both sides' channels