Partnership Growth through Segmentation & GTM

I was the Partnership Development Manager at Greater Europe Mission (GEM), an organization that sends Christian missionaries to Europe. GEM operated in a B2B2C model: churches and pastors were its organizational partners, while congregations and individual supporters became the people who participated in or funded short- and long-term missions.

The partner development team was trying to connect with more churches so GEM could reach more congregations, but the department had been a revolving door and lacked a durable account-engagement strategy. Existing partnerships were concentrated with one VP, and our view of the partner base was a messy spreadsheet. The trigger was a change in financial systems which gave us access to all the churches accounting knew about. Through this we started a segmentation project with 1,639 records by giving, geography, and engagement. The analysis showed that GEM’s addressable ICP pool was 96% larger than previously understood, making the immediate challenge to set a department strategy to win these stale partners

GEM needed to improve church engagement by building a partner development function that could reach more churches, their congregations, and prospective short- and long-term mission participants. My responsibility was to help build the department’s partnership strategy from the ground up: define the ideal church profile, segment the partner universe, create a multi-threaded account-engagement and moves-management framework, and turn that strategy into outreach, trips, and events.

The work was constrained by ambiguous goals, a history of turnover, and the absence of a durable strategic account-engagement system. I developed key parts of the strategy, presented it to GEM’s president and executive team, and led much of the one-to-one marketing and business development for a flagship pastor event that occupied roughly six months of the year. Success meant expanding the addressable church pool and growing flagship-event attendance from its baseline of 19 pastors, creating more opportunities to build lasting church and congregational partnerships.