The sheer number of innovative technologies and products emerging in the IT world every year is staggering. If you're a best-of-breed solution provider that already holds elite certifications with high-profile vendors, many of the vendors behind those emerging products are probably vying for your attention every day.

So selecting strategic partners that complement your company's existing services and solutions without cannibalizing existing relationships can be daunting, unless your company has a specific process in place.

"The pitches that come in totally cold don't usually make it," said Glen Jodoin, vice president of marketing and operations for GreenPages Technology Solutions, a $130 million national integrator and consulting firm in Kittery, Maine. "Usually it's someone we're aware of, and someone who gets aggressive about forging a relationship."

What are some tricks elite solution providers use to keep this process more manageable? ITbestofbreed.com spoke with GreenPages and high-profile cloud services integrator CloudSherpas (Google's top Enterprise Partner for the past three years running) for their perspective. Here are three common themes:

1. Validate the marketplace proactively

At GreenPages, the company's technologists within each of its main business pratices are responsible for staying on top of both existing vendor partners and any new players that are competitive or complementary.

They create fluid lists of companies and products that seem intriguing, which are shared with the company's business development team. That way, if one of those vendors reaches out to the company, they have a sense of how to respond. It is very rare that a new technology vendor catches GreenPages off-guard, Jodoin said.

"They will stay [on the list] until one of us decides that it's not a good fit," Jodoin said.

Likewise, each of Cloud Sherpas's three primary business practices – which hinge on its relationships with Google, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow – closely watches the ecosystem of related applications and platforms that can help it strengthen those relationships.

It relies both on its customer interaction, and on information shared with those strategic partners, to identify potential new partners, said Doug Shepard, president of the Cloud Sherpas Google business unit. "They are coming to use with validation from Google or clients," he said.

For example, Cloud Sherpas actively sought relationships with security technologies that complement Google Apps. That led to partnerships with CloudLock, a compliance and data protection solution for SaaS platforms; and Okta or OneLogin, which provide identity management and single sign-on capabilities.

2. Test-drive often

Both GreenPages and Cloud Sherpas encourage their technology specialists to try out as many promising new products that make sense, with an eye toward how quickly they could be integrated with existing solutions. "You can expect us to test everything thoroughly," Shepard said.

If those teams don't feel like something is a good fit, no amount of marketing will get them on an approved partner list. and it can save a lot of time in the upfront screening process.

"I am not signing up anyone without their blessing, it comes from the technologists first," Jodoin echoed. "It doesn't fall into one of our buckets, I'm not even taking the call."