Openness is one of Mews’ five core values. Not just openness to ideas, but to others. In my role as VP of Strategic Partnerships, this is particularly pertinent.
A modern, game-changing business like Mews can’t achieve its full potential on its own. It takes other, like-minded partners to enable truly remarkable experiences for our customers. My aim over the coming months and years is to grow Mews’ Partnerships team into a formidable force, putting robust processes in place for our continued growth.
Before I get into how we plan to do that, it might be a good idea to define who we mean when we talk about partners. Mews is a complex beast that connects to many different businesses in areas, but they broadly fit into these categories:
- Integration partners available on Mews Marketplace
- Soft brands and management collectives
- Consultants (both large GSIs and smaller, boutique consultancies)
- Global technical providers such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Stripe
Each of these partner types have different needs, but they all require and deserve attention. We’re already working hard to ensure our continued success, so that we can forge and improve lasting relationships. Our three main goals are:
- Help our partners grow to reach their (and our) maximum potential
- Provide our customers with the best choice of hospitality integrations
- Create a market-leading partner program with marketing and promotional activities
Putting scalable processes in place
In order to truly reenergize our partnerships program, we need to be honest about how we’ve been doing over the last couple of years. And despite building some really strong relationships as well as the industry’s biggest integration marketplace, we know we could be doing better.
Mews has scaled rapidly – and continues to do so – and I’m excited that we now have the opportunity to put better defined, scalable processes in place when it comes to partnerships. Part of that is building out a larger Partnerships team that touches multiple departments (from customer success to marketing to legal), and hiring has already begun.
Growing the Partnerships team
In the last two years, Mews has hired around 400 people. That’s phenomenal growth and its important the new-look Partnership team also bulks up.
This month, I was joined by our new Partner Operations Manager, Maarten America, who’ll be working very closely with colleagues in our BizOps, Legal, Finance, Marketing and Sales teams to ensure we have thorough processes in place like pipeline reporting and contract agreements. In the past, we lacked some of the resource necessary to really work on these processes simply because we were so busy, but by investing in the team all of our partners are going to feel exponential benefits as we’re able to provide more time and attention.
Damien Cazabonne, one of our new Partner Sales Managers, joined at the same time as Maarten, and his focus will be on working with our integration partners. We’ve also been joined by Anne-Laure Charmensat who will be focusing on our soft brand and consultancy partners.
Another key hire will be a Partner Marketing Manager to help with the all-important task of creating and running a Partner Marketing program to support all of our different partners. And as we move forwards, we’ll be looking to grow out the team in the US. In other words, the team will keep growing.
An exciting future
There are plenty of smaller, practical steps that we’ll be taking too, like building out Mews Marketplace to include more information so that hoteliers can make more informed choices. We recognize that there's more we could do so to support our very valuable marketplace partners, and we're looking at ways to acknowledge that and offer better support.
Ultimately, we believe that Mews is the future of hospitality, and we want to get the word out to as many hoteliers as possible, while working with solutions and people that think the same way as we do.
I can’t wait to meet more of our partners in person, and our team are ready to start really accelerating our Partner engagements. Stay tuned for more announcements soon regarding our Partner Program improvements.
If you’d like to become an integration partner and be featured on Mews Marketplace for thousands of hoteliers to see, fill in the form at the bottom of the Mews Marketplace page.
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