(My personal experience is that these partnerships never live up to their hype, but my feeling is that one time out of a hundred they give the company a huge boost.)
I've been in about five of these "corp dev" conversations (low N, but nonzero), and every single one started with an entreaty of "you should partner with us", which very quickly dissolved as it became clear they were solely interested in an acquisition.
My experience too is that most partnerships are only valuable for social proof. Often nothing much else happens, maybe one or two customer connections. At the same time with some partnerships there is a risk of brand dilution. If you are letting someone re-sell or bundle, there's a risk that they might downplay your brand in favor of theirs and sort of appropriate your brand equity.
These sorts of things do sometimes make me feel out of my depth as I try to put on biz-dev shoes as someone who's primarily technical.
0) Press-release and a few links on a website: Basically worthless.
1) Sales-team integration: you train the partners sales force, they get quota retirement (somehow, this can be complicated), this has some great customer outcome -- you give them margin on re-selling/kickbacks/discounts/whatever to get access to their sales/marketing machines, making it worth their time/effort.
If you're working with content licensing (i.e Spotify, Netflix), product integration (more common in b2b SaaS), marketplace supplier relationships with major partners (say if Airbnb wanted to offer Mariott rooms on their platform), etc. than partnerships are important.
It's really safe to assume that anyone with a "Corporate Development" title at any reasonably sized technology company spends all day evaluating and executing acquisitions. Don't go in thinking that you're about to have a partnership conversation.