TL;DR — Most partnership programmes produce press releases, not revenue. The ones that work share three characteristics: commercial alignment, executive sponsorship, and a shared pipeline metric. If your partnership doesn't have all three, it's a photo opportunity.

Why most partnerships fail

I've watched this play out dozens of times. Two companies announce a "strategic partnership" with a joint press release, logos on each other's websites, maybe a webinar. The BD person who brokered it gets a pat on the back. Six months later, nothing has happened. The BD person has moved on — literally, to another company — and no one can quite remember what the partnership was supposed to achieve.

The problem is always the same. No one owns the commercial outcome.

Partnerships get signed with fanfare and die in silence. There's no shared commercial target, no joint pipeline metric, no executive who wakes up thinking about whether this thing is working. Activity happens — a co-branded PDF here, a speaking slot there — but activity without accountability is just theatre.

From experience

I once helped broker a partnership between a mid-market SaaS company and one of the Big Four. On paper, perfect. Complementary capabilities, overlapping customer base, enthusiastic sponsors on both sides. We got the MoU signed in eight weeks. Then nothing. For months. The problem? Both companies assigned it to BD managers who had twelve other partnerships to "manage." No one had a number attached to the deal. No one's bonus depended on pipeline coming through. It became a line item on a slide deck that got reviewed quarterly and ignored daily. That taught me more about partnerships than any deal that actually worked.

The three characteristics of partnerships that generate revenue

Every partnership I've seen generate real pipeline — not MQLs, not "brand awareness," actual pipeline with money attached — shares three things.

Commercial alignment. Both sides make money. Not theoretically. Not "in the long term." Right now, from this partnership, both companies have a clear path to revenue. If you can't articulate how your partner makes money from the arrangement, you don't have a partnership. You have a favour.

Executive sponsorship. Not BD managers. Not partnership leads. An executive — someone with P&L responsibility — who treats the partnership as part of their business plan. When a CRO or MD has the partnership pipeline number in their quarterly review, things move. When it's delegated to someone three levels down, it doesn't.

A shared pipeline metric. One number that both sides report against. Not separate metrics that vaguely relate to each other. One pipeline figure, jointly owned, reviewed regularly. The moment you have two separate dashboards tracking two different versions of success, you've lost.

The Dell & Atos example

Dell and Atos were 30-year rivals. Different cultures, overlapping customers, decades of competitive history. The kind of partnership that makes rational strategic sense but feels impossible in practice.

What made it work was brutal commercial clarity from day one. We didn't start with a press release or a joint vision statement. We started with a shared pipeline target: $3.5 billion in incremental pipeline, jointly owned. Every major account had a named lead from each side. Every quarterly review included both teams in the same room, looking at the same numbers.

The executive sponsorship was genuine. Not a name on a steering committee who dialled in once a quarter. Senior leaders who had staked their reputation on the partnership delivering. When blockers appeared — and they always do, especially between former competitors — there was someone senior enough to clear them.

It wasn't smooth. Thirty years of rivalry doesn't evaporate because someone signs an agreement. But the commercial architecture forced alignment even when the cultures resisted it. That's what good partnership design does — it makes collaboration the path of least resistance.

The Shell stakeholder engagement

Partnerships aren't always about signing deals with other technology companies. Sometimes the most valuable partnerships are about access — getting into rooms that are otherwise closed to you.

On the Shell Prelude FLNG project — a $19 billion floating LNG facility — we built a stakeholder engagement programme across 36 countries. The competitive bid was essentially closed. The relationships we built with government stakeholders, local partners, and community leaders across those markets didn't just support the bid. They unlocked it. They turned a closed process into one where our client had a seat at the table.

That's what strategic relationships do at their best. They don't just generate pipeline in a CRM. They open doors that aren't visible from the outside.

From experience

There was a specific moment in a partnership negotiation — a technology alliance for a client in the AI space — where the deal nearly collapsed. Both sides were stuck on go-to-market terms. Who leads the sale. Who owns the customer relationship. Standard partnership friction. The breakthrough came when I stopped talking about the partnership structure and asked the partner's VP a different question: "What would make this a career-defining deal for you personally?" His answer had nothing to do with the commercial terms we'd been arguing about. He wanted access to a specific market vertical where my client had deep relationships. We restructured the whole deal around that. Signed within three weeks. Sometimes the real value proposition isn't in the deck.

How to evaluate whether a partnership is worth pursuing

Most partnerships aren't worth pursuing. That's not cynicism — it's maths. The time and executive attention required to make a strategic partnership work is enormous. If you're going to invest that, you need to be honest about whether this particular partnership will pay off.

Here's how I evaluate it:

If a partnership fails two of those four, I'd recommend not pursuing it. Your time is better spent on the partnerships that clear all four — and there are usually fewer of those than you think.

The bottom line

Strategic partnerships can be transformative. The Dell & Atos deal generated $3.5 billion in pipeline. The Shell programme helped win a $19 billion project. These aren't marginal outcomes.

But the gap between partnerships that transform and partnerships that waste everyone's time is entirely about structure. Commercial alignment, executive sponsorship, shared metrics. Get those right and the partnership has a chance. Get them wrong — or skip them in the rush to announce — and you'll produce a press release, a webinar, and nothing else.

If you're a Series B or C tech company thinking about partnerships, start by being honest about whether you're ready to invest the executive attention required. Half-committed partnerships don't produce half the results. They produce none.