Senior Manager / Director, Strategic Partnerships

About EZO

EZO is a leading provider of B2B SaaS solutions that help businesses around the world track, manage, and optimize their essential assets. Our powerful, cloud-based platform empowers organizations to improve efficiency, ensure compliance, and make smarter, data-driven decisions. We are a fast-growing, innovative company with a passion for solving complex problems for our global customer base.

The Opportunity

EZO is at a pivotal moment. We have strong products and meaningful partner relationships (Zendesk, Jira, Square, Avalara, Intuit, and others), but our partnership function needs a complete strategic reset. We are looking for a seasoned partnerships leader who has previously built and scaled a B2B SaaS partner program from the ground up to come in, define the vision, and build the engine.

This is not an optimization role. Our current partnerships team has operated too tactically – focused on activities rather than outcomes, without a clear framework for strategic, one-to-many engagement. We need someone who can scope the entire program, establish the right operating model, and educate our leadership team on how a world-class partner ecosystem should function.

The right leader will draw a clear line between one-to-one partner sales (owned by our sales team) and the one-to-many strategic partnership motions this role will own: marketplace presence, co-marketing, technology integrations, partner enablement, and ecosystem development.

What You Will Do

Build the Partnership Program From the Ground Up

• Conduct a full assessment of the current partnership landscape, existing relationships, and gaps. Scope the entire program and present a clear roadmap to leadership.
• Develop, execute, and refine a comprehensive partnership strategy aligned with EZO’s corporate objectives, with clear distinctions between partnership-led strategic motions and direct sales motions.
• Design and implement a tiered partner program with defined benefits, requirements, rules of engagement, and measurable KPIs.
• Identify and prioritize high-value partner verticals including MSPs, VARs, System Integrators, and strategic technology partners (ITSM, ERP, payment gateways, security platforms).

Fix and Scale Our Marketplace Presence

• Audit and revamp our presence on key marketplaces (Jira Marketplace, Zendesk Marketplace, etc.) where we currently underperform despite strong product-market fit.
• Develop marketplace-specific strategies to drive discovery, installs, and conversion – moving beyond passive listings to active ecosystem engagement.
• Own the relationship and strategy for high-priority technology partners like Zendesk, leveraging existing contacts to accelerate engagement.

Partner Recruitment, Onboarding, and Enablement

• Actively source, recruit, and onboard new strategic partners aligned with our ICP and targeted verticals.
• Build a world-class enablement program: training materials, sales collateral, certification processes, and co-selling playbooks.
• Collaborate with marketing to create and execute co-marketing campaigns, webinars, bundled offers, and joint events that generate measurable pipeline.

Mentor and Build the Team

• Provide hands-on mentorship to existing team members who have potential but lack partnership-specific experience. Develop their skills and establish career paths within the partnerships function.
• Define clear roles and responsibilities within the team, eliminating ambiguity and the “activity-happy” culture in favor of outcome-driven execution.
• Hire additional team members as needed as the program matures and demands grow.

Cross-Functional Collaboration and Leadership Education

• Work closely with the direct sales team to manage channel conflict and foster co-sell motions – ensuring partnership activities complement rather than compete with direct sales.
• Collaborate with product and engineering to identify and drive key technology integrations that create mutual customer value.
• Educate the VP of Marketing and executive team on how a mature partner program functions – what good looks like, what metrics matter, and how to make investment decisions.
• Provide regular performance reports and strategic recommendations using CRM data (HubSpot) with full pipeline integrity.

What You’ll Bring

Required Qualifications

• Proven track record of building a B2B SaaS partner program from scratch – not just managing an existing one. You have personally scoped, launched, and scaled a partner ecosystem.
• 5+ years of experience in partnerships, business development, or channel management in a B2B SaaS environment.
• 4+ years of direct experience building and managing a channel or strategic alliance program, with measurable partner-sourced revenue outcomes.
• Experience working with technology marketplaces (Jira, Zendesk, Atlassian, or similar ecosystems).
• Demonstrated ability to distinguish and operationalize the difference between one-to-one partner sales and one-to-many strategic partnership engagement.
• Strong mentorship and people-development skills – you build teams, not just programs.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with the ability to educate executive stakeholders who may be new to mature partnership models.
• Self-starter who can operate independently in a fast-paced, dynamic environment without waiting for direction.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in IT Asset Management (ITAM), IT Service Management (ITSM), or Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software.
• Proficiency with HubSpot or similar enterprise-grade CRM.
• Familiarity with AI tools and willingness to integrate them into partner workflows.
• MBA or advanced degree.