How to Build Your Partner Ecosystem

In 2019, I joined a company most of the ecosystem didn't trust yet.

I was coming from ad-tech and ecosystem-led agencies, Sokrati, then ADA (also known as AdParlor), so I knew exactly how little brand equity Branch had in the market. Worse, I knew why. Branch had acquired a company called TUNE, but only for its people and its business. Every customer and partner had to migrate to Branch by a fixed date, and that migration broke things. Even the people who did know Branch mostly resented the disruption it caused their businesses.

So I inherited a problem with two distinct halves: build a brand in a market that didn't know us, and put out a fire in the accounts that did.

Part One: Stabilize: Dampening the Fire

My first move was almost embarrassingly simple: a recurring health update, sent to every customer, agency, and partner we'd transitioned from TUNE to Branch. Each one covered three things:

1. 1.Account notes for the agency
2. 2.Agency-specific insights
3. 3.Clear next steps

That alone did two jobs at once. It gave agency leads a real escalation path instead of a black box, and it got them curious about what else was coming from Branch, curiosity that, in more than one case, turned into new business.

The agency could tell the difference between a company managing optics and one that actually wanted to grow with them. That's what dampens a fire, and, if you're lucky, occasionally turns up a small diamond along the way.

By the end of it, I'd built real relationships with agencies and partners I'd never worked with before: Affle, InMobi, M&C Saatchi, Pivotroots. People I hadn't known a year earlier were now people I could call friends.

Part Two: Activate: Building the Ecosystem

With the fire dampened, the real job started: turning a personal network into an actual ecosystem.

Agency people churn constantly: they move from agency to agency more often than almost any function I've seen. That worked in my favor. Even though I'd only worked at two agencies myself, my career had left me with connections across at least ten agencies spanning India and Southeast Asia. And ADA, my second stint, operated across six markets in SEA, which meant my personal network already roughly matched Branch's focus markets, before I'd done anything deliberate about it.

The question was how to activate it. Two moves did most of the work.

The first was a leadership roadshow, an intense trip across five countries in two weeks with my manager at the time, meeting some of the largest agency heads and CEOs in the region. We went through Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Jakarta. Its value wasn't only external: internally, it gave leadership real confidence in the region, and it opened a CXO-level line into these agencies that would have taken years to build organically.

The second was a certified partner program, something that could scale in a way one person's network never could. We ran two: CPP for ad networks, CSP for media agencies. Both paired hands-on enablement with a QBR cadence, so the relationship had rhythm, not just a one-time training day. A team of four to five people, pulled from CSM, Support, and Partnerships, ran the actual enablement sessions at partner offices.

Every time we certified a partner, we published a LinkedIn post recognizing them publicly. It cost us almost nothing, and it did three things at once: recognized the partner, told the market Branch was active in the region, and quietly built momentum for the next agency thinking about signing up.

A personal network doesn't scale. A program does: the roadshow opened doors, but the certification program is what turned those doors into a repeatable engine.

Between CPP and CSP, we touched 50 partners in two quarters. And the effect compounded from there: the QBR cadence kept running long after the formal programs ended, and we kept fielding inbound requests from agencies wanting to get certified. In year one alone, the program generated $3M in pipeline across the region: several of those deals were competitive wins where we displaced the incumbent outright.

The Framework: Stabilize. Activate. Amplify.

Strip away Branch, TUNE, and the specific geography, and what's left is a sequence I'd use again anywhere: rebuild trust before you try to scale anything, turn your network into a program instead of a favor bank, and make every win public so it compounds.

The Takeaway: Where This Leaves You

None of this was one big swing. It was two disciplines, run in sequence: repair the trust that had broken, then build a system that could compound trust at scale without needing me in the room.

The health updates put out the immediate fire. The roadshow and the certification programs turned a personal network into a machine that kept generating pipeline years after I'd stopped thinking about it daily.

If you're inheriting a partner ecosystem mid-disruption, or building one from nothing, that's the order I'd follow: stabilize first, activate deliberately, amplify loudly. Everything you scale later sits on the trust you rebuild first.