6 Things Partner Managers are Missing in Their Lunch & Learn Sessions
Agencies are fed up with boring lunch & learns given to them by their tech partners.
In particular, Shopify agencies have told me they are a waste of time.
What causes an agency to loathe lunch & learns is not the lunch & learn itself. But how their tech partners go about presenting one to the agency.
In 16 months I spent over 185 hours talking with and presenting to agency partners at Loop Returns.
During that time, my agency partners told me I presented one of the best lunch & learn sessions their teams have ever had from a tech partner. These sessions would typically range from 5 to 45 people.
And yes, agencies have referred me to their enterprise clients right after my presentations.
But expecting a new agency partner to refer you their clients immediately shouldn’t be the intent of your lunch & learn presentation.
Rather your intent should be to use the lunch & learn as a strategic bridge to establish trust and credibility with each agency account manager.
If you can do that, then agency account managers will want to invite you into their conversations with their clients.
So here are 6 principles I use when presenting a lunch & learn that have helped me drive over $3M in pipeline.
1. Tell a story about your industry that teaches the audience something
I've seen too many lunch & learns start off where the partner manager talks too much about their app and all of the merchants that use it.
Yes, agencies want to know that merchants use your product and that you're not two Freds in a shed. Or two Karens in a condo.
But you should first focus your lunch & learn’s content on the agency and their clients. You need to teach the agency something new about what their clients are struggling with that the agency can have an impact on.
And by teaching first, you earn the right to talk about your company and software later in your session.
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.
In today's world of Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and Tiktok, your lunch & learn slides need to have a quick, varying rhythm. Attention spans are short. And the ability to keep your audience engaged will depend on the tempo you create within your presentation.
No audience wants to read a "slideument.” A slide should not look like a full-page written document.
The audience should be focusing on what you’re saying during the presentation. Don’t increase their cognitive overload by making them decide if they should read the slide or listen to you.
Putting too many words and ideas on one slide is just laziness on the presenter's part.
4. Introduce your company and product with the smoking gun approach
The smoking gun approach is THE way to use transparent market research to teach why your product is best for your partner’s customers.
All strategic partner managers should have this tool in their GTM partner playbook.
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.
Partner managers should see themselves 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.
This would always create laughter and a buzz in the zoom chat with my agency partners.
And 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. Which helped us cement the power of Loop in the account manager’s mind. And it would help drive 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. 🥳
If this article was forwarded to you by your friend/colleague, feel free to join this conversation by subscribing below.