According to the latest data from global research and advisory firm Forrester, partnerships are expected to drive 70% of global B2B revenue this year. As the sector reaches a pivotal moment, Jon Mead saw an opportunity to leverage his 20 years of experience to build PartnerBridge, a platform designed to optimise partnership potential.
A US native now based in Edinburgh, Mead speaks exclusively to UKTN about the evolving partnership landscape, PartnerBridge’s capabilities, and the common misconceptions he’s aiming to challenge.
What inspired you to create PartnerBridge?
As I moved from tech support through various sales roles and then finally into partnerships, I saw every angle of how partner programmes do and don’t work. During that time, a growing number of people across my network reached out to understand how to launch a partner programme. I looked for existing technologies or the right experts to connect them with, but there was nowhere to turn – that’s what sparked the idea for PartnerBridge.
PartnerBridge provides what I couldn’t find: a way for businesses to understand their place within the ecosystem, identify which technologies or solutions firms they should collaborate with, and recognise what those partnerships mean for their end customers.
What led you to focus on early-stage and small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and how does your platform reduce the complexity of building and managing partner programmes for these resource-constrained teams?
Early-stage companies and SMBs are often best positioned to benefit from partner programmes, but they rarely have the resources to fund a dedicated partnerships team before those programmes start generating returns.
This creates a catch-22: they need experienced talent to design and launch a strategic programme, yet they also need resources to execute it. Most can afford one or the other, but not at the same time.
Our platform levels the playing field, giving these businesses a chance to compete with the more established – and better-funded – later-stage companies already in the market. It drives innovation across industries, ultimately delivering better outcomes for end customers.
When building PartnerBridge, I analysed the data and resource-intensive tasks that a partner manager or leader typically needs to handle to successfully go to market. I saw how much time was spent researching ecosystems, creating collateral and enablement resources, identifying the right contacts, and managing legal frameworks from scratch.
PartnerBridge automates that process, providing a flexible foundation that enables teams to scale programmes quickly and consistently.
“I built PartnerBridge because it is a tool I would have wanted when I started out. It is for partner people, by partner people”
PartnerBridge promises to streamline how businesses discover and activate partnerships. What makes your approach different from traditional partner management tools?
There are some excellent technologies available in the market, but our approach and data are what make us unique. We look at the ecosystem from which our client operates, including their maturity level and product mix, and we use an algorithmic method to recommend technology platforms or solutions firms (including services, systems integrators, resellers, affiliates) that they could work with.
Effectively, our technology maps out who a company should be working with and why based on a variety of metrics. This is to allow customers to have a strategic impact on their clients rather than acting as a tool on the shelf.
Many existing platforms focus on only one side of the ecosystem and matches are often limited to surface-level criteria such as location or industry. PartnerBridge takes a more intelligent, comprehensive approach. Our database includes nearly 40,000 solutions firms with detailed business profiles and over 15,000 technology platforms, both of which have different algorithms to offer the best recommendations for these two types of partners.
Competitors that match technology partners tend to do so in a static, Gartner grid–style format, while solutions-firm platforms are often pay-to-play marketplaces that prioritise sponsored listings and charge for genuine matches.
PartnerBridge is different. We offer comprehensive ecosystem matching across both technology and services free of charge. We believe that access to ecosystem intelligence shouldn’t be a privilege; it should be a standard. When every company can find the right partners, the entire industry grows stronger.
What are some of the most common misconceptions you see businesses have about building partnerships or ecosystems?
Everyone recognises the importance of partnerships. Several leading companies – such as Atlassian and HubSpot – have built their entire business models around them.
However, this understanding is often not reflected in how organisations prioritise their timelines. In my view, partnerships should be among the very first departments a company establishes – before sales, support, or even service teams because partnerships directly support, and can even act as extensions to these teams, helping them to succeed.
Typically, businesses only act once they notice a decline in lead generation, responding to the symptoms rather than addressing the root cause. Without a strong ecosystem from the start, they miss the foundational support that can turn a new venture into a sustainable success.
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