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name: partnership-eval
description: "Evaluate a partnership opportunity with a go/no-go recommendation and a negotiation brief — before you've wasted three months on discovery calls."

/partnership-eval

Optimism bias kills BD productivity. Partnerships that were always going to fail — because of incentive misalignment, because the partner's sales team won't carry your product, because the customer overlap was never real — consume 3-6 months of relationship building before the truth becomes undeniable. This skill surfaces the structural problems in meeting 1, so you invest in partnerships that can actually work.

Mutual Fit Test — what each party brings and what each party needs:

Partner:

• What does the partner get from this deal? (Revenue, distribution, product gap fill, competitive defense — be specific)
• What does the partner's team actually care about? (Their AEs' quota, their CPO's roadmap, their CFO's margins)
• What competing priorities does the partner have that will deprioritize this?

You:

• What do you get from this deal? (Leads, distribution, product capability, brand)
• What are you giving up? (Revenue share, exclusivity, engineering resources, sales distraction)
• What does success look like in 12 months — specifically, not aspirationally?

Mutual fit test: If you removed the revenue from this deal, would both parties still want the relationship? If no — that's a transactional deal, not a partnership. Transactional deals need different structures.

Value Creation Mechanisms — top 3:

For each mechanism: what creates the value, who captures it, and what has to happen for it to materialize?

• e.g., "Co-sell motion: partner AEs refer us into accounts they're already in. Value creation requires training 40 AEs and a spiff structure. Probability of consistent execution: low without a dedicated partner manager on their side."

Opportunity Sizing

• Customer overlap: how many of their customers are your ICP, and how many of yours are theirs?
• Pipeline impact: what's the realistic number of deals this generates in year 1? Show the math.
• Revenue impact: best case, base case, and downside — with the assumption that changes each scenario
• Cost to capture: engineering hours, partner manager headcount, revenue share, joint marketing

Incentive Misalignments — name these before they become problems:

• Does the partner's direct sales team compete with this partnership in any segment?
• Is the partner simultaneously building a feature that makes part of your product redundant?
• Are you both selling to the same buyer at the same time? Who gets credit?
• What happens if you both grow — does this partnership become less strategically important for them?
• What are the exit clauses, and which party has more leverage at renewal?

Negotiation Brief — 5-7 points ranked by importance:

For each point: your opening position, your walk-away point, and what you'll trade it for.

• e.g., "Exclusivity in vertical X: oppose exclusivity broadly, acceptable for 12 months in a defined vertical in exchange for MDF commitment of "

Deal-Killers — surface these in meeting 1:

• Which terms, if not agreed, make this structurally unworkable?
• Ask: "If we can't agree on [X], does this partnership make sense?" — do this before you've invested in a term sheet.

Rules

1. If you can't quantify the opportunity, you don't understand it well enough to negotiate it.
2. Incentive misalignments discovered in due diligence are features. The same misalignments discovered after signing are disasters.
3. Deal-killers must be surfaced in meeting 1, not month 3. Delaying painful questions is not politeness — it's waste.
4. Revenue share structures should be modeled at 3x the optimistic case. Who benefits when this goes well, and is that still fair?
5. One-sided partnerships — where one party has no good reason to prioritize the relationship — will fail regardless of goodwill at signing.

The output of this skill is a go/no-go memo and a negotiation brief: the 5 points to negotiate, your position on each, and the 2 deal-killers to surface before you draft a term sheet.