A day in the life of Partnerships Success

Who am I?

I’m Rachel and I’m a Partnership Success Manager at GoCardless. I focus on looking after and growing our existing partnerships - other businesses who offer GoCardless to their own customers.

That often means GoCardless has integrated with another software product. For example, I look after our partnership with Xero, which we’ve integrated with to enable small businesses to take Direct Debit payments via their Xero invoices.

I’d worked in partnerships for about six years before joining GoCardless, but always in the charity sector. So while this job is similar, GoCardless is a whole new environment for me.

What does my typical day look like?

Every day is different and there’s a real mix of internal and external work. I work with various teams including sales, marketing, product, support and our counterparts in external partnership teams...I’m probably forgetting someone.

Focus areas could include planning marketing activities, upskilling sales teams to promote GoCardless and working with product and engineering teams to develop our integrations and ensure new features are implemented. I also work with support and customer success to make sure our shared customers have a great experience and we respond to feedback.

For example, yesterday, I was out at a partner’s office in the morning for a session with one their sales teams. I introduced them to GoCardless and gave them a demo of our integration so they can talk about us with their customers in turn. Then it was on to meetings about marketing plans.

Back in London, I drafted collateral for the launch of a new partnership, caught up with a technical lead at one of our partners about a feature upgrade, updated our legal team on some ongoing contract discussions and together with a colleague prepared for a webinar we’re running.

We’re currently organising some drinks with a partner so I finished off the day looking up suitable rooftop bars, which rounded my day out nicely!

I think of the partnerships job as being a bit like an octopus (!) You sit in the middle and help join the dots, spot opportunities and help the partnership deliver for both companies.

The main focus of the job is growth - how we can grow the value of our partnerships- and this means working with lots of teams across GoCardless, which I love.

What do I enjoy most about working at GoCardless?

Partnerships is all about working with other teams. I’m lucky that GoCardless is packed with super smart people and we have a very collaborative culture. It makes coming to work both interesting and fun. I also really like how much accountability we’re given. Partnerships is a small - and growing- team, but important to the overall GoCardless strategy.

The pace is much faster than at the big charities where I used to work. At the moment, things are especially exciting as we’re planning how partners fit in with our international expansion goals.

What are some of the challenges in my daily work?

Juggling the different priorities can be challenging. My role is about driving growth, so it’s important to make sure I’m focusing on the right things right now, while also laying foundations for the future.

It’s easy to get sucked into less impactful activities day to day, especially if you don’t spend the time understanding what impact the available options could have. But I’m lucky to work with awesome people both inside and outside GoCardless to help me with that and keep the show on the road.