Platform partnerships are a mainstay of IT services sales and consulting. Building the right...
Your strategy for big tech platforms should adapt based on whether a partner is emerging, scaling, or fully established. Here’s how to use each stage more effectively to get clients for tech services.
1. Emerging Platforms
Emerging platforms are often looking for lighthouse wins — those big, beautiful logos of well-established and instantly recognizable major clients that add credibility to a young startup or a brand-new technology. These early-adopter use cases validate their solution in the market.
This is where your tech services company comes in. Your services help them prove the validity of their platform. As a bonus for you, emerging platforms often don’t have large partner ecosystems yet so you can stand out more easily.
How to Make It Work
- Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment: The technology is entirely new and it’s up to you to demonstrate its potential. You can capitalize on the “wow” factor of new tech with bold, sophisticated projects that showcase both your capability and their platform’s potential.
- Co-create References: You can deepen the partnership by developing customer success stories and contributing technical whitepapers to quickly establish yourself as an authority within the ecosystem. Because emerging platforms are often starting from scratch, your contributions are likely to find much more visibility than they otherwise would.
Tip:
The customers also want to showcase their work and joint presentations is a great way to get approval for testimonials from the client’s legal department. -
Go Bowling: No, we don’t mean the game (though you can do that too). We’re referring to the Bowling Alley strategy outlined by Geoffrey Moore in his book “Inside The Tornado”. Focus on a specific niche or vertical (i.e., “pins” in the bowling alley) within this ecosystem, win there, and then expand outward.
2. Scaling Platforms
Partners in the scaling phase are transitioning into hypergrowth. Their priorities are land-grab growth to capture as much market share as they can, and increasing their platform stickiness to hold on to the customers they acquire. They want proof that their technology can drive widespread adoption, not just niche cases.
When your IT services company helps a platform provider scale by driving migrations and building vertical-specific solutions, you not only generate revenue but also strengthen your role in their ecosystem. This helps you get clients for your tech services via co-sell and referral models.
How to Make It Work
- Bring In More People: At this point in the platform’s maturity, there’s wider public recognition of their technology and greater demand. You can help meet that demand. Offer migration/consolidation services to move customers from legacy systems into the partner’s platform. These big projects drive revenue for both you and your partner, while deepening your relationship.
- Build Blueprints: Create repeatable blueprints for specific industries or use-cases. Use these to replicate your early success across adjacent verticals while ramping up your own delivery processes.
- Track Impact Metrics: As your partner matures, they will formalize their partner program structure, establish co-sell frameworks, and increase their expectations as the partner ecosystem grows more saturated. Make sure you’re ready for it. Track your IT services company’s performance in terms of customer adoption, ROI, and technical success even before they require it. And remember to have regular cadences with your partner stakeholders to share this information too.
3. Established Platforms
When working with large, mature platforms, your value lies in the net-new customers you can bring in and in being able to deliver high-quality execution. These platforms already have broad reach, but they have a well-developed, often overcrowded, consulting partner ecosystem.
Breaking into and standing out in bigger partner ecosystems is a challenge but it can be well worth the effort. Aligning with established platform providers helps you tap into mature go-to-market motions while higher value co-sells and deeply integrated service offerings help you grow tech services more sustainably and predictably.
How to Make It Work
- Specialize in Underserved Niches: Even big tech platforms have gaps. If you can own a niche (industry vertical, region, or use case) that’s not well served, you can be their go-to partner there.
- Credential Up: Focus on gaining advanced certifications, competencies, or designations to differentiate your firm in a teeming ecosystem and highlight your credibility.
- Stability at Scale: You need to scale up your deployments to be relevant to the platform provider. You need to bring in large new customers and repidly scale their deployment of the technology. But the large customers are generally more cautious. So you need to have well-developed processes for ensuring stability and security as you scale customer deployments.
But Does It Work For You? Measuring Partnership Success
To ensure your partner strategy is contributing to growth, you need to track metrics that tie directly to finding IT consulting clients and scaling your IT services company through the partnership. Some KPIs that can help you do that are:
Pipeline Metrics
- Sourced opportunities: Leads that originate via the partner ecosystem.
- Influenced deals: Opportunities where the partner’s involvement (co-sell, referral, joint content) played a role in closing.
Delivery Metrics
- Utilization: How much of your delivery capacity is being used on partner-influenced work.
- Time-to-value: How quickly customers onboard and realize value on joint projects.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Feedback from customers on joint engagements.
Marketing Metrics
- MDF (Market Development Fund) usage rate: How much of the allocated MDF is used
- Cost per opportunity (CPO) and conversion rate: Assess how efficient your co-marketing plays are
Capability Metrics
- Certifications attained: Track designations, competencies, or partner badges.
- Competency maintenance: Track whether you’re renewing or upgrading your credentials regularly
Wrapping Up
Strategic partnerships with big tech platform providers should be a central part of your strategy. But aligning your efforts to each partner’s maturity — whether emerging, scaling, or established — will help you deploy the right strategies, measure the correct KPIs, and deepen the partnership effectively.
Instead of relying passively on referrals, such alignment helps you actively build a structured, intentional approach to your tech partnership that feeds your pipeline, strengthens your brand, and lets you scale IT services in a way that’s repeatable and measurable.
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