What partnerships look like at HighCohesion

We don't have a partner programme. There are no tiers, no application forms, no gold or silver badges. We've never been interested in that model.

You see a lot of revenue share and kickback schemes in the SaaS and ecommerce world. They serve a commercial purpose, but we've always questioned whether you get genuine results from them beyond chasing money. We're not a company that's chasing the highest commission. We're here to provide the best solution and build long-term partnerships with our customers and we treat our partners the same.

So instead of a structured programme, our process is deliberately informal.

Most of our partnerships begin through word of mouth. Someone in our network meets a company they think is doing something interesting. That might happen at an event, through a shared customer, or just because someone's heard good things and reaches out.

From there it's pretty casual. We'll have a conversation, get a sense of what they do and how they work, and see if there's a natural fit. There's no criteria checklist. It's more a case of: do we rate your product? Do we get on well with your team? Is there a genuine overlap in the brands we work with or the problems we solve?

If there's something there, we'll set up a session between our tech teams to understand how everything works, and then we keep the conversation going. If we don't love the product or the offering isn't right, we’ll always be honest. Some partnerships make more sense later down the line, so we like to keep the doors open.

The most important part of any partnership for us is the connection between our engineering and solution design team, and our partner's technical team.

Our engineers are the people doing the work every day, so that relationship needs to go deeper than API documentation. We need to understand how a partner's platform actually behaves in practice, what its limitations are, and how to work around the rough edges. And they need the same understanding of ours.

At a technical level, give us sandbox access and share code examples. It's the kind of detail you'd never get from a sales demo. Some of our solution designers sit in on those sessions too, especially the ones with more technical backgrounds who are naturally curious about how things are built.

These aren't lunch and learns. I've never loved that format (I don't think people should be learning on their lunch break). These are proper working sessions with a clear purpose.

The partnerships that work best aren't ones that only come alive when there's a customer project to deliver. They exist regardless.

We put informal but regular catch-ups in the diary with our key partners. The frequency depends on the relationship. If a partner releases features quarterly, we'll sync quarterly. If we have a lot of shared customers, maybe every six weeks makes more sense. It's not rigid. It just needs to be consistent enough that both sides stay current.

A quick "have you got five minutes?" tends to be more productive for us than a scheduled quarterly review with an agenda nobody's prepared. We're not a formal group of people, and those informal touchpoints work better than structured check-ins.

Some of our strongest partnerships don't involve any shared customers at all. We work closely with Centra, for example. We host events together, we're planning dinners, and we've co-hosted at industry events. But right now we don't have a single joint customer. We just really rate what they do, and they feel the same about us.

That probably says more about how we think about partnerships than anything else. It's not just about who our customers are using, it's about who we believe in.

We’ve done this long enough to know that this also eventually yields commercial results. But instead of being fleeting, they tend to have real lasting value.

We want to work with companies that care about their customers' experience. Not just their product, but the way they deliver it. We're not just an implementation partner, we offer a real account management service alongside the technical work. So when we partner with someone, we need to know they hold themselves to a similar standard.

We also look for people who are willing to do things together without needing a commercial incentive to show up. The easiest partnerships are the ones where someone says "we've got budget, you've got budget, let's do something interesting." A willingness to try things, whether that's a co-hosted dinner or a day event, goes a long way. We're not spending tens of thousands of pounds. We're hosting a dinner. Everyone's going to have a good time. The real value is what comes out of it afterwards.

On a project, our customers work with a solution designer from our side and a partner manager from whichever vendor is involved. The brand holds the contracts with each provider directly, but behind the scenes we're working closely with our partner's team to make sure everything comes together.

When we know a partner well, things move faster. We can answer questions without raising a support ticket and flag potential issues before they become real problems. So, when something does go wrong, there's a shared Slack channel, a quick call, and a fix.

That's the part customers feel the most, even if they don't always see what's driving it.

If you're a vendor, platform, agency, or consultancy and you think there's a natural fit, the best thing to do is reach out. Drop us a message through the website, connect with Aran or me on LinkedIn, or come say hello at an event. That's how every good partnership we've got started.