Dear C-Suite, We Need to Talk About Your Silos

Call them silos, buckets, islands, or just departments—the fragmented groups you have managing your partnerships have got to go. The more you scale and diversify your partnership program across affiliates, influencers, brand-to-brand relationships and other allies, the faster your revenue can grow. But to scale effectively, you need to get everyone on the same page, […]

William Hamer-Jones

Call them silos, buckets, islands, or just departments—the fragmented groups you have managing your partnerships have got to go.

The more you scale and diversify your partnership program across affiliates, influencers, brand-to-brand relationships and other allies, the faster your revenue can grow. But to scale effectively, you need to get everyone on the same page, working in harmony and with full transparency. 

Why you need to break down those silos 

When one partnership department isn’t aware of another’s relationships, there’s potential for multiple teams to be in touch with the same partner and pursue different—and even conflicting—revenue opportunities. 

Or, what if two teams do ally themselves with the same partner? Partnerships need to be continuously evaluated for performance and contribution to the overall plan and to overall revenue. If a partner is accomplishing its goals for the B2B team but falling short for the affiliate team, both of those teams need to be aware.  

This issue is exacerbated with influencers in social media channels. Because the majority of these partners operate within Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, campaign information has to be extracted from these walled gardens. The result is that the influencer team has its own set of data that doesn’t correlate with the performance data other teams have, making it hard to assess program-wide success.

Finally, pricing and payments can also fall victim to misaligned partnership management, with affiliate teams paying their partners $30 CPAs while business development offers $5. 

Get it together

A unified, transparent approach leads to better cohesion across your partnership program, introducing new efficiencies while eliminating ownership squabbles and inconsistent policies. 

The easiest way to achieve this is to unite team members and consolidate partnerships onto a single technology platform to automate the partnership life cycle, including payments, attribution, accreditation, and reporting. Unified reporting lets your team optimize relationships with their partners, whether those are influencers, affiliates, or B2B partnerships, and it lets partnership managers and others spend more time on strategy and less on the admin groundwork. 

How fuboTV did it

Live-streaming service fuboTV knows what silo-free partnerships look like—they have been key to growth for this ever-evolving, innovation-focused company (watch the video above). When they expanded their outlook from traditional affiliate marketing to a full-fledged, integrated0. partnership program, where they took a more “business development” approach, they were able to:

  • Reach niche audiences that are difficult to reach in other channels. Impact Partnership Automation allowed fuboTV to focus on nurturing and optimizing relationships without micromanaging at the campaign level. 
  • Customize approach. All partners have different needs, different strategies, and different leadership teams to report to, so one glove does not fit all. With Impact, they were able to create different size gloves and unlock the potential with each partner.  
  • Automate tedious tasks. Impact took care of fuboTV’s tracking, payouts, customer terms of any sort—automatically, for all different types of partnerships.  

When all your partner teams share information and you have one system to capture all contracts, interactions, historic performance, and payouts for all partnership types, you’ll finally be able to optimize your program for maximum growth.

To learn more about unification via automation, check out our ebook, Silos Are for Farms, Not Partnerships. Or talk to a growth specialist in person—email us at sales@impact.com and we’ll set it up. 

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