Tactics for Scaling Technology Partner Marketing and Attribution Tracking

In this discussion, Sonal Uban, Director of Marketing for Technology Alliances at Fortinet, speaks with Liz Garcia, Community Manager of the SaaS Ecosystem Alliance. The conversation covers how to build and scale technology partnerships, the skills required for alliance marketing success, frameworks for evaluating partnership compatibility, and strategies for co-marketing that drive measurable business outcomes.

Skills That Drive Success in Alliance Marketing

Sonal began her career at a startup before transitioning to Fortinet, a global leader in cybersecurity services. She notes that while larger organizations require more awareness of organizational hierarchy and longer lead times for decisions, the core skills transfer across company sizes. The most important capabilities for alliance marketing professionals include:

Communication and soft skills are the number one reason for success in alliance roles. Any alliance marketing person has to be very good at people skills, business skills, and relationship skills. These are the three things you bring to any role involving alliances.

She emphasizes that alliance professionals must be both diplomats and analysts—skilled at aligning interests between organizations while listening carefully to understand partner priorities and connect the dots between business objectives. Financial acumen and negotiation skills also play critical roles, as alliance marketers constantly work to balance what each party contributes and receives.

Where Alliances Marketing Sits in the Organization

At Fortinet, the alliances team reports to the CMO rather than sales, which Sonal describes as a deliberate strategic choice. The team functions as facilitators who bring technical, marketing, and business stakeholders together from both internal and external organizations. They own what Fortinet calls the "open ecosystem"—a community of technology partners—from both development and marketing perspectives.

Alliances marketing is really a facilitating role. You're facilitating something to enable sales to bring the internal stakeholders and external stakeholders together.

When evaluating new partnerships, the technical stakeholders and product owners are the first team to engage. They validate whether solutions are compatible and define the use cases that benefit mutual customers. Only after technical validation does the team define the marketing approach and go-to-market strategy.

A Framework for Evaluating Technology Partnerships

Sonal outlines four key criteria for assessing whether a partnership makes strategic sense:

Solution Compatibility: The first consideration is whether the partner's product and innovation complement Fortinet's offerings. The technical teams assess how quickly a partner can scale an integration and whether it delivers meaningful value to customers.

Business and Cultural Alignment: Partners must seek complementary outcomes from the relationship. While goals may differ, both parties should stand to gain something meaningful.

Market and Category Leadership: Fortinet prioritizes partnerships with category leaders who enjoy strong market recognition and penetration. Key questions include whether customers recognize the partner, whether they operate in complementary markets, and whether they reach similar or complementary audiences.

Depth of Collaboration: This criterion Sonal considers most important. Both parties must demonstrate genuine commitment to the partnership.

How committed is the partner to our relationship? You don't want to be the only one committed to the partnership. Sometimes with very big partners you can feel like you're putting in all the effort and not really getting the same recognition or commitment back.

Advice for Smaller Companies Seeking Larger Partners

For smaller companies pursuing partnerships with larger organizations, Sonal recommends patience and strategic positioning:

Take ownership, be the driver of that partnership. Don't be impatient about getting the most out of the big company. Take your time to prove your worth, show them what you got. Then start to build that relationship and become hungry at an appropriate time.

Rather than immediately asking for joint webinars after completing an integration, smaller partners should offer to take the lead on driving attendance and promotion. Positioning requests as "Can you provide a speaker while we handle the logistics?" makes it easier for larger companies to participate. Understanding the larger partner's frameworks, KPIs, and challenges enables smarter engagement during the partnership's early stages.

Building Internal Awareness Before External Marketing

Sonal emphasizes that internal education must precede external marketing campaigns. At Fortinet, tactics for building internal awareness include newsletters to the sales team, internal webinars featuring partner speakers, and inviting partners to speak at industry events in Fortinet's booth.

You don't want customers approaching your sales force about solutions they have no idea about. Start building awareness internally, then externally.

She outlines a progression for partnership marketing: awareness, demand generation, conversion, and lifetime value measurement. Many companies skip straight to demand generation without establishing internal awareness—an approach she considers a significant mistake.

Tracking Attribution and Partnership Value

For measuring partnership performance, Sonal describes two primary approaches that have scaled effectively:

CRM Attribution: Creating campaign IDs within Salesforce and tagging campaigns to all partners involved enables tracking lead progress over time. A co-marketing campaign from 2020 that results in a closed opportunity in 2022 can be attributed to the correct partnership source.

WorkSpan: Fortinet began using this ecosystem management tool to pull lead data attributed to specific partners and track partnership value in terms of revenue and MQLs. The tool also allows partners to register deals and request support, strengthening the working relationship.

I've been at startups where we've done attribution in an Excel sheet. As you scale, you realize you have to have a better process—more systematic and streamlined.

Key metrics include tracking how influential partners are in sales opportunities, whether customers already own partner products (making the integration an influential factor), and whether joint messaging reaches new divisions or accounts previously unreachable.

Underutilized Co-Marketing and Affiliate Strategies

Sonal identifies co-marketing and affiliate marketing as significantly underutilized approaches:

Think bigger. Think ecosystem. Think alliances. Bring more complementary solutions to the customer. Instead of addressing one pain point with one solution, bring voices together to give customers a more holistic view.

For affiliate marketing, she recommends that larger companies develop co-branded assets like webpages and white papers, then arm partners with tracking URLs and let them drive traffic to those resources. This approach enables smaller partners to co-market without significant budget investments.

She shares a recent success story involving a joint white paper with a partner, distributed through TechTarget's content marketing services. The ABM approach targeted 300 specific accounts that neither company could reach independently—demonstrating the power of shared voice and concerted effort in ecosystem marketing.

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