Pipeline from Partners Will Grow If Marketers Fix This

Partner programs can drive 30-40% of pipeline for B2B SaaS companies.

But here's the hard truth marketers: if your first partner enablement sessions are just feature pitches, you're crippling your pipeline potential before it starts.

Your gut reaction to revisit your lunch and learn enablement may not seem like a top priority right now.

But weak foundations lead to weak referrals. And you can’t afford to leave over a third of your potential pipeline on the table.

In 16 months building Loop Returns' agency program, I developed an approach that drove over $3M in pipeline by transforming standard lunch & learns into strategic teaching sessions.

While my experience comes from ecommerce, these principles work across B2B sectors where partner enablement matters.

Here are 6 principles that will help you turn routine partner presentations into trust-building opportunities.

1. Tell a story about your industry that teaches the audience something

Most lunch & learns fail in the first five minutes. Why? Partner managers lead with product features and customer logos.

Trust isn't built by proving your company exists. It's built by helping partners solve their clients' problems.

At Loop Returns, I shared data on how returns impact customer lifetime value.

This gave agencies immediate value they could take to their clients.

Look for opportunities to make your partner's existing business more valuable.

What market insights can you share that help them win with their current clients?

Teach that first. Then you'll earn the right to talk about your product later.

2. Focus on THE ONE feature to be remembered

People forget 70% of what you tell them within 24 hours.

So don't overload your presentation with every product feature under the sun.

The goal of the lunch & learn is to teach your partner one thing. Not make them a product expert on a thirty minute call.

You need to beat the drum of the one feature which will amplify the significance of why your product exists in the market.

If you feature cram in one presentation, it subconsciously communicates to your partner that your company doesn't have a strong opinion in the market on how to help their clients.

Successful B2B software companies have an opinion in their industry for why they exist.

When you don't have an opinion, you can't influence a movement. People, including software buyers, want to be a part of movements in their careers.

Besides, there are plenty of opportunities to talk about all the other value driving features of your product in your future partner check-in calls, 1x1 enablement sessions, and your personal email updates.

Teaching and using partner enablement content should be sprinkled effectively throughout the relationship.

Because your partnership is an ongoing relationship. Not a one-night fling.

So don't feature dump because people will forget.

3. Make the presentation fast-paced. And with few words on your slides.

Attention spans are short.

TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have trained your audience to expect quick, engaging content.

Your lunch & learn slides need to match that rhythm.

Ever seen a presentation where every slide looks like a Word Doc?

That's a "slideument" - when presenters dump paragraphs of text onto slides instead of crafting a visual story.

Putting too many words and ideas on one slide is just laziness on the presenter's part.

Don't make your audience choose between reading dense slides and listening to you.

Great slides support your story. Bad slides compete with it. Keep it simple.

4. Introduce your company and product with the smoking gun approach

Most tech companies pitch features to partners.

Smart GTM teams use a smoking gun instead - a concept I learned from Chet Holmes' book called "The Ultimate Sales Machine."

A smoking gun uses carefully curated market data to teach and reset your audience's buying criteria towards your product over the competition.

This approach allows you to differentiate your partner program while delivering real value.

While at Loop Returns, I analyzed return data from 3,000 brands to identify our smoking gun: how returns directly impact customer lifetime value.

This insight helped agencies prove to their clients how strategic return policies could reduce refunds while driving exchanges and repeat purchases.

This type of market insight is exactly what agencies need to build their credibility.

Enterprise brands choose agencies who have clear points of view on solving business challenges.

When you arm agencies with compelling market insights, you help them build and validate these perspectives with clients.

5. Ask 1 to 3 group questions to the audience during your session

It's too easy for partners to get distracted with a slack message or text message during a lunch & learn.

So to counter that, try changing the pace of your talk by getting the audience involved.

However, asking your audience "Do you have any questions before I continue to the next slide?" is not a question.

For example, I would ask them to share their viewpoint on the market data you've curated from your ecosystem or from the data insights of your mutual customer base.

Asking for the viewpoint of your audience transforms the lunch & learn from a TedTalk into a collaborative discussion of experts sharing their opinions as if they were having a drink at a bar.

When people feel they are contributing to a discussion, it improves their engagement.

And they leave the conversation feeling they received and gave value.

That's the type of win-win you're looking for in a lunch and learn.

6. Create a surprise and delight experience that plays off the narrative of your product

Most partner lunch & learn presentations lack audience engagement and energy out of the gates.

To overcome that, you should see yourself as a DJ at a party.

You want to introduce a fun and energizing start to your presentation to get the audience movin' and groovin'.

Increasing your audience's energy will influence their motivation to focus on what you're presenting. So start off with a banger.

At Loop, I started my presentation off with a spin-the-wheel game where I would randomly choose one person in the audience to receive a free pair of Allbirds shoes.

But the catch was that I would send them the shoes in the wrong size.

Whoever won the shoes would get them delivered to their house and then have to log into Allbird's customer return portal, powered by Loop, so that they could use the software to exchange the shoes for their correct size.

This allowed the partner to experience Loop "in the wild'' as a consumer.

This approach would always create laughter and a buzz in the zoom chat with my agency partners.

It helped us cement the power of Loop in the account manager's mind and drove word-of-mouth promotion of Loop within that agency.

Every tech partner can recreate this experience in their lunch & learn.

It just requires a little creative thinking to get the party started.