Let’s imagine that your company has placed you in the role of Senior Manager of Partnership Operations. Great! But now you may find yourself wondering: what exactly is a senior manager? How is this new role any different from a regular managerial position? Besides taking on more responsibility, the senior manager will be in charge of new tasks across different teams. Keep reading to learn more about what you should expect when beginning your new role.
What is a Senior Manager?
As a senior manager in partnership operations, you wear many different hats throughout your time in the role. Most commonly, a senior manager is responsible for advising the partner leadership team in a company. Your job is to ensure that each member of the partnership team is meeting their daily, weekly and quarterly goals. Also, ensuring that any issues they run into get worked through quickly and effectively.
A senior manager will also work to directly support leaders of the global partnerships team in their tasks as well. This typically involves making sure that all operational tasks are executed in a timely manner and having a complete understanding of the best practices needed to grow the partnership program. As a senior manager, you may also find yourself working with your company’s Human Resources or Talent Acquisition teams in order to further scale the partnership teams.
The role’s Primary Tasks
The senior manager’s primary tasks will vary day-to-day, depending on the partner program’s current project timeline. This is great news if you find that you thrive in jobs where not every day looks the same, but it also requires you to have a high level of organization and time management. Depending on the company you work for, you may find yourself managing teams consisting of anywhere from five to fifty (or more) people. If each team member is part of a smaller team that’s working on projects for partners, lead generation, or marketing skills, then you will also need to keep track of those projects in order to help mitigate any setbacks and keep them on track.
Positions as a senior manager can also be incredibly data-driven. You will be responsible for monitoring the business insights and analytics produced by the partnership Go To Market strategy. The GTM is essentially a small-scale business plan that focuses directly on:
- Your products or services.
- The ideal customer profile.
- The kinds of businesses that would be best suited for your partnership program.
It’s best practice to cross-check analytics provided by the partner with data gathered from your operations team to ensure accuracy. By keeping up-to-date with these insights, you will be able to determine how beneficial your current partnerships are for the company, and make adjustments accordingly.
Other tasks of a senior manager include, but are not limited to:
- Establishing an understanding of external world class, best practises for partnership and alliance growth, with a particular focus on HR SAAS / HR Tech
- Acting as the coordination and centralisation point for wider deal generation and revenue operations activities that impact the partner and alliance organization
- Identifying opportunities to streamline processes, improve systems, gather data, enable and train; all with the overall purpose of building up profitable and efficient growth across the partner & alliance teams
- Working cross functionally across product, marketing, sales, customer success, finance and revenue operations groups
- Supporting the partnership and alliance leadership team with key business decisions, and executing the rollouts of global projects
Goals for a Senior Manager
As senior manager, you should have goals beyond just being successful in your role. By setting goals that are both measurable and achievable, you give yourself the opportunity to grow further into your role, learn new skills, and set yourself apart from others. A great example of a goal that you can set is to build strong relationships with other leaders. You can also assist in providing strategic and operational direction when needed. Strong relationships are the foundation of not just a successful senior manager, but a successful partnership program as a whole.
Senior managers should also make it a goal to implement cohesive GTM motions in order to exponentially increase revenue. This is best achieved through actively developing cross-functional processes and creating aligned revenue operations teams. When you have an effective cross-functional team, you lighten the load of GTM success across the entire organization. A good team ensures that every task is clearly assigned and completed. This means the marketing for a product or service is consistent with the brand identity and values, and there are fewer issues regarding lead time of project production.
Stepping into the role of senior manager in partnership operations can seem daunting. At Partnership Leaders, we believe that knowledge is power. Providing an accurate depiction of roles and responsibilities in the partnership sector is one of our top priorities.
Whether you’re looking to step into your first partnership role or increase your performance and move up in your company, the Partnerships Career Progression Playbook has everything you need to be successful in your field. Apply to join Partnership Leaders and gain access to one of the largest networks of partnership professionals. Also discover open Partner Manager roles on our job board.
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