How to attract and retain top digital agency solutions partners w/ Blend Commerce

Welcome back partnerships people! Alex Glenn here, your host of Make Them Famous - the only podcast bringing you true insights from both sides of the partnership equation. Today’s episodes comes to you because of a linkedin post from the founder of a top ecommerce agency stressing the importance of incentivizing partners for retention - not just referrals. I’m privileged to be able to interview Adam Pearce, CEO of Blend Commerce, and his co-founder and CVO Peter Gardner who posted to linkedin and caught my attention. These two operate a killer fast-growing Shopify Plus agency focused on customer experience design with notable partners - Klaviyo, Octane Ai, and Gorgias. Peter and Adam receive 6-10 partnership requests per day. So, we aim this episode on finding out what they will reply and spend valuable resources on, as well as: The genesis of their current best partnerships What about those make them the best If you cannot bring referrals, what can you bring that’s valuable How Adam and Peter interpret a new tech outreach for partnership from cold outreach What’s critical for tech teams to understand when reaching out to a new agency Why they doubled down on Shopify Plus certification recently What resource allocations went into that, a similar Difference between a low-referral-frequency thought leader expert implementation agency and a high-referral shop that does a ton of quick business and can be a pure referral partner Value of going deeper into an accreditation / certification with a tech platform Risks included for the agency when deciding When to sign contracts, and when you should A must listen for any partner team having trouble with outreach or enablement of service provider partners... Resources: Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts. Reveal - A free account mapping solution. ‍Partnerhub - for finding and managing your partnerships. ‍ ‍