127 - The Nearbound Moment is Here: Don’t Overcomplicate Execution
What is up PartnerUp!
Today we’re bringing you interviews live from the Catalyst Media Booth. Jared and Isaac sit down with Michelle Eatherton (Vice President Global Partner Strategy at Hubspot), Michael Cole (SVP of Marketing at Everflow), Alexis Petrichos (Director of Strategic Partnerships and Ecosystem Marketing at Chili Piper), Bryan Williams (CEO at Hockey Stick Advisory), Melissa Blatt (Founder and CEO at indipop), Mike Davis (CRO at InVisory), and Vaughn Mordecai (Senior Vice President Partner and Business Development at Mindmatrix).
Each guest brings perspective on their company's current Nearbound perspective. From Everflow’s successful referral strategy to navigating the Salesforce app exchange, tune in to understand key takeaways from the Catalyst conference.
Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.
Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people.
You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.
P.S. If you want the Nearbound Sales Blueprint that just dropped, head over to https://nearbound.com to get it entirely for FREE.
P.P.S. If you haven’t heard, we just dropped the news on the largest event in partnerships history is BACK… and bigger. The historic PL[X] Summit for 2023 is now the Nearbound Summit. Register, again, 100% FOR FREE over at https://nearboundsummit.com and get your FREE event workbook while supplies last.
SUBSCRIBE & LISTEN ON:
Or literally, anywhere you get your podcasts. Seriously. Ask Alexa: “Alexa, play "PartnerUp the Partnerships Podcast” and magic…
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Isaac Morehouse 0:00
Hey what is up partner up, thrilled to bring you this super special episode. Bunch of live conversations we had at catalysts in Denver. The partnership leaders event that was bigger better than previous years amazing energy. We sat down with a live podcast booth there, we did our best to sound proof. We had some Plexiglas in a crowded and loud space. I think we did a great job. Shout out to Adam Mola for engineering the sound even when we had some hiccups, but sat down with a bunch of people who were at the event, I think we have 678 conversations, and really getting a pulse for what's going on right now in the world of partnerships. It is, to quote Dickens the best of times, and the worst of times, markets tough. But the opportunity for partner people has never been stronger and there was a real palpable energy near bound is in the air revenue leaders are listening to partner leaders, maybe for the first time or more than they ever have at least. And we had some great combo so excited for you to check it out. Dive into these conversations and hey, near bounce summit.com Do not miss the penultimate event of the year. For anybody interested in changing the way we go to market and driving results by tapping into those buyers trust near bounce summit.com going to be incredible. If you join us for the pls summit last year. Everything we experienced then and more near bounce summit.com Register now. Get your workbooks, get everything lined up. Let's go enjoy the episode. Michelle, here we go. We bumped in
Jared Fuller 1:43
India here and I am like the biggest, you know, orange fanboy in the world. So HubSpot leading partner strategy over there. And there's been some conversations at catalyst 23, where you brought up Greg Serafin from EY, yeah. And he had this concept that I think he's helping shape some of these conversations right now, I'd love for you to unpack what that was.
Michelle Eatherton 2:05
Yeah, I was so excited in that session to hear Greg use the words, the concept of big P partner, a little P partner. I use it all the time internally at HubSpot, when I'm trying to find the words to explain what I mean about that bigger ecosystem and how it all plays together. And I think in the industry, today, we're all trying to figure out how to make the big P come together. And we can talk a little bit about what my definition of that is, which could be different than either of yours. And I think that also ties into Dorothy Copeland from stripes, conversation around, it's on all of us to define it. And it's like the exciting and difficult part in all of this. This is that we all have the different definitions on but yes, the big P concept has been super interesting to me at this conference. And it's something I think about a lot as I think about HubSpot strategy, while we're moving up market as a company,
Jared Fuller 2:53
right? I think the when we were chatting earlier, I was giving all these anecdotes of where I saw like emergent innovation from the HubSpot, you know, ecosystem, so to speak, just people kind of going off the rails and being like, I want to help people this way through partnerships, and then all of a sudden that becoming this incredible thing. But then all of a sudden you reach this kind of like size and scale. And you're like well wait a second. Is that what is the plan? Right? How do we make this all work together? Because I think HubSpot objectively, I mean, this is my opinion. So I can say whatever I want. There's never been a better company in the planet that's helped companies grow, right? And actually build everything around that. But it's a very different conversation when you're talking about a company's already grown a little bit. And like there's this next phase. Yep. So that strategy of like, growing up together, grown up as industry leader, never missed an earnings. How was that started to, you know, influence, let's say conversations that you're having, not just about the big P, but actually the other departments? Like are they? How does that start to factor into this? Because I feel like it's there's the big P the ecosystem design within the interface internally as well. I'm curious, which one do you think is the harder nut to crack?
Michelle Eatherton 4:06
Yeah, I think yeah, no, I mean, you bring up a good point. Like, I think when I look at HubSpot, the journey that we've been on, and I think, you know, the how we've gotten to where we are won't necessarily everything won't apply to how we get to where we want to be, there's still some amazing things that we'll continue to do and will support so many different partners in the ecosystem and all different shapes and sizes. But when we start thinking about our movement up market, and what that means for our customers needs, and then in turn, what do they need from our partners, we have, you know, lots of great partners in our ecosystem that are growing up with us and making the trip and are serving those needs. And we need to start bringing on partners that are already entrenched in HubSpot definition of up market, we need to convince them to build practices. They're already well established with other technology partners and how do we convince them to build practices and I think when I think about the upmarket customer needs They aren't necessarily looking for a CRM or a marketing automation tool, they're looking for a holistic solution that helps them with their digital transformation as a business so they can grow. That's a different conversation, and how do we make sure that our partners in our ecosystem are able to drive that. And so I think it's everything from, you know, the education and enablement of our solutions partners, but then they need to come to the table with AP partners, they need to then leverage the strategic alliances with the AWS is and the hyperscalers. In order to bring an entire solution to that that customer that's asking for it.
Isaac Morehouse 5:34
I love just that recognition. Like, they're not looking for x, right, whatever this prod, they're looking for that entire stack. And that has to be from the beginning. Like we have to think about everything beyond just our slices of that. Yeah, we got to be wrapped up in all of those other pieces. Yep, that's, that's, for at that level, like going up market like that? I mean, what is the like? What's the process of trying to figure out because you're gonna have different people who are competing with each other? Yeah. How are you trying to sort of play that game? Like, can you partner with everyone? Are you? Are you getting really specific and getting exclusive at different layers of that stack? How are you approaching that?
Michelle Eatherton 6:12
Yeah, no, I think, you know, we've had interesting conversations today at the conference around quality and quantity and which one is more important? And it's a very nuanced answer. I think the answer, unfortunately, is it's a bit of both, I would definitely, yeah, I would say definitively though, that we are building and will continue to build an ecosystem that has a place for smaller partners, to larger partners, like that's not changing, we still have a massive, massive Small Business and the small am of the medium sized space, there are tons of partners that will continue to be very relevant and very important to that space, that some of our partners that touch our up market, our definition about market, which would be up to 2000 employees, you wouldn't get the time a day from some of those partners, they they wouldn't focus on the small business. So I think the beauty of where HubSpot is at is we've figured out, you know, by and large, the Small Biz medium space, now we're moving into like a little bit bigger medium space, up to 2000 employees, there's going to be room all along the way. And we'll serve and help help with help our customers with that with lots of different partners. There's some
Jared Fuller 7:21
there's, there's something to be said for. I've seen a good chunk of startups not I don't think necessarily a company at HubSpot size. And we're in a different match maturity phase of SAS go up market, and almost a failure every single. One of the things that I think they lose at their core is they lose things like innovation or like a little bit of that speed, while also maintaining that maturity. And what I what I've been seeing has been very interesting, like on the front line of what's happening on the HubSpot flop, these little agencies or ISPs or developers developing solutions that are very point specifically for to help them land up market clients. And like that, to me has been like, whoa, why? Why did that all of a sudden start happening? And it's like, well, there was this economic kind of a correction from, you know, a little bit too much capital in the market. And I'm noticing innovation happening that seems to be just in alignment with your vision, which is kind of crazy to think about, like your mission of being able to figure out that strategy is also can be bolstered by that frontline. Like, hey, it's an agency like a happily or whatever, building these things that are more, you know, up market needs. Like what they just launched around. It looks like data quality. Yeah, it's very much in need of not a tiny business. Yep. All right, a much more mature company. Yep.
Michelle Eatherton 8:44
No, I and I think this all feeds back in, then to the big P partner vision, it's, it's not just that we should do it. Because internally, it'll be nice. It's actually what our customers are demanding. And it's a huge opportunity for our partners to grow. I love the story, you know, Connor and the team at up to date and happily like love their story, that's partners that have grown up in our ecosystem that have figured out ways to expand there's continued opportunity for the partners already in our ecosystem and do it. And then there's an opportunity for us to bring in already established ISPs already established s eyes that will layer on top of it. So it's definitely not a forsaking what we've already built to bring in new. It's both and I think, you know, you talked about the failure of moving up market to I think the thing that I love about HubSpot, and the strategy around it is we're pretty definitive about what we mean by it. And we're pretty definitive about what we exclude from it. You could you could spend a lot of time you know, spending cycles on customers that are just not they may be up market but they're too big, their knees are too complex. I think we've done a really good job of being clear about what we mean by up market and, and kind of staying in the space that we know we can delight customers as opposed to trying to cover everything.
Isaac Morehouse 9:57
I love it. I love it. The customer pulling the plug Are up market and the partner helping to pull you up market? Hey, Michelle, this has been absolutely awesome. Awesome. Thanks for sitting down with it. Yeah,
Michelle Eatherton 10:05
thanks. Appreciate it.
Isaac Morehouse 10:06
So we're at the near bound.com media booth and a big near bound is about working with people your buyers trust, to bring influence Intel intros into the into the buying process. But people who buy our shots like who is that? It's a lot of different groups. It's not just at partners or agency partners. It's other customers. It's there's a whole group, and Michael from everflo, you were just telling me that you guys have like exploded this year, because you cracked referrals. And that's something that in b2b, if you talk about referrals, there's kind of this like, and that's like a b2c thing. Yeah, we try we have a referral program, it just kind of sits over there and doesn't really do much. So what's missing? What are people missing in b2b when it comes to referrals?
Michael Cole 10:52
Yeah, I mean, like, first off, like, why referrals in the first place, like, who understands your product the best, it's the customers that already use your product, they understand how it helped them, like they are the best people are telling your story, because it solves their pain points. And they know, I mean, we all go to the same conferences, we all know our industry peers, it's very easy for them to be like, actually, you know what you the same problem as me, like we're buddies, we hang out at conferences, you should try this product too. So like, in the general concept, it makes perfect sense. But the the sort of thing that like we really cracked it was that we started, we switch our payment structure at the beginning of the year from like paying 10% of rev share, to paying like to 50 on the lead 500 on the like qualified prospect, and 1000 on the customer
Isaac Morehouse 11:36
and feel it's a lower bar. And it's a quicker time to payment Exactly. Because I've been a part of this before where it's like, oh, our referral program, you get a percentage. And that's like a significant amount of money. But then the sales cycle takes forever, it was slow. And you and you don't have transparency, often as a referrer. You're like, Okay, I made this connection. Did anything ever happen? It's been three months. I never heard anything. Yeah. So I like this idea. So you're paying out for the lead straight away. Yep. And as a, as a customer and b2b that the pushback I always feel hear from people and I sort of intuitively myself is like, there's so much trust involved. I don't want to feel like I'm out there. shilling products. So I can get a 250 Check. How like, have you found that to be a problem or people hesitant to refer.
Michael Cole 12:18
So I was a little worried about that the first place and like, I think 70% of our customers just refer us business. And there's no money involved, okay, you don't care about the program, et cetera, et cetera. But the 30% that do care. It's like a game, when they see that money racking up and like, they're like, Oh, 3000 $4,000. And especially like any year, like, smaller side, or like anyone who has like some independence where like they are getting that money directly, you're getting a 4000 extra paycheck for making a couple of referrals to your friends. Super easy. And then like, we had a few partners that send us nothing. And now they sent us like 10 customers in a single month. Like, you only need a few of those to really amplify everything. And it's just like, it becomes a game to them.
Jared Fuller 12:57
I'm sitting here thinking because I remember talking to you when he told me you guys were launching this. And I didn't have a strong opinion. Either way. I was just like, interesting. And what I'm hearing from you is like, oh, shoot, it worked insanely well. Yeah. And I'm not sure that I've actually heard of a program that's doing that. Yeah, like that. It almost seems novel. I'm curious how that kind of stage gating right through the process. That initial, let's say referral? How much more likely are they to be influenced? Like so like? What's the kind of like waterfall or funnel look like, from initial referral to let's say, close one opti? Are you getting multiple touchpoints from some of these people, whereas before, you might have only got like, one point of influence, hey, you should really check out ever flow, boom, you know, like, Hey, here's this thing, but then he should really check out ever flow. And then they have a reason to touch base. And maybe a reason for let's say, a seller to reach back out to maybe influence that person to come back in because there's another 500 bucks or 1000 bucks, have you seen that part of it play out?
Michael Cole 13:57
I feel like it's more like with referrals, so much of his inertia, like we've all had the part where it's like, they're like, oh, I should send this over to you, and you just never get around to it. So like anything you can do to make it as low friction to make that referral and make the money up front makes a huge difference. But I mean, I came from the affiliate marketing world. So I've dealt with a lot of affiliate programs and lead gen programs where there's like a ton of fraud. So when we were launching this, I'm like, I'm going to be spending every month like going through banning partners, like removing BS leads. And we actually like we had like a budget set for this amount. And we went three times over the budget in the first month. And we've continued to go over the budget, not because we're getting so many leads, but because almost every lead becomes a customer because in this situation, like they're basically opening the Rolodex to me like, who can benefit from this and the like. The other surprising referral partner that we didn't expect is that there are some companies that benefit from working with companies that use ever flow. So there'll be like, hey, in order to work with me, in these cases, like these are like publishers so they're like traffic sources, services. He like, in order for me to send traffic and to send leads to you, I need you to have a reliable platform. So you need to sign up forever flow. So now after single like potential like Brandon advertisement wants to work with them, they're being like ever flows in the middle, you set that up, then I'll start promoting you.
Jared Fuller 15:15
We definitely have something to talk about after this.
Michael Cole 15:19
But it's like it was unexpected how much it created momentum by doing it.
Jared Fuller 15:23
I have another question because I feel like partner hacker, I've definitely done some hacky things that I have got my hand slapped on by some big companies. Yeah, who are you paying? Are you paying the company? Are you paying them?
Isaac Morehouse 15:34
That's what I was gonna ask.
Michael Cole 15:37
Whoever they say like, we
Jared Fuller 15:39
don't add whatever into account. Yeah,
Michael Cole 15:40
they put in their own information. Don't Ask, Don't Tell, like so that's not necessarily
Jared Fuller 15:45
tied to let's say, their login of their everflo account, it is a
Michael Cole 15:49
well, they would they would create a separate partner account for themselves. If they're doing that a lot of times, like they have a site agency that they're signing up for. Sometimes it's the company themselves, again, like it is, I think a lot of it ends up being more about gamification or anything like it is the exciting bit of log into the platform, see that you set five leads, three of them are prospects and two of them are customers and seeing like a healthy, like paycheck waiting there, that's like exciting. And so a lot of these companies like the money is really not as important as the fact that they know it's a lot.
Jared Fuller 16:19
And it's impossible to do that. Really like if it's going to my company, and I work at a moderately sized company where I'm not, you know, generating enough dollars from that. I feel so disconnected from that like payout. In fact, I might feel dirty about it, like, Hey, I'm like getting this other person and getting these dollars to put into my company that's like, Yeah, whatever. So I have to imagine where those checks are being deposited. And I think there's only really a risk is if you're programmatically, you know, targeting, let's say a publicly listed company, and not issuing them a 1099. If they get over like 600 bucks, exactly. But like, if they get over that, I'm assuming your your program takes care of those dollars or whatever. Yeah,
Michael Cole 17:01
I mean, you always have to have the paperwork anyway, for any sort of payment like this, you have to have all the tax compliant docs, etc. Like, we just try and make it as easy as possible. It's like, okay, you want to get paid, put in your payment information at this point, to whatever is getting paid. And I mean, like, we have tech partners that pay us like 30 40,000 A quarter, which, like, that's a nice bonus for like a company too. So like, payments to companies is also advantaged like that just becomes like, it's like having another customer
Isaac Morehouse 17:29
do you find has that been a part of the conversation, if you're talking to a customer, trying to get them to purchase everflo For them to be able to get budget has ever come into play? Where it's like, hey, look, it's gonna cost us this much. But we might be able to recoup some of that, if we're actually referring some if we're gonna bring some of our, you know, some of our partners or customers on is that come into play or not? Are those totally separate? Yeah, we have
Michael Cole 17:52
not had any problems with that. The one that's been really interesting is we just did a conference last month. And like, we had our sales guys, and we had like our like, aggressive sales guy, like going into random people and be like, Oh, hey, have you heard about everflo? And they're like, Oh, I'm already everflo customer. He's like, Oh, that's awesome. Do you want to have a referral program. So that's the other piece of this is that when we instituted this, we started building new referral loops, like the sales team now nurtures their own relationships, when they close a customer is really happy. We have it so that any leads that they get from that customer goes directly to that salesperson. So now they're also incentivized, like, not just close but nurture relationships done. See us the same way.
Isaac Morehouse 18:30
It's really, so you could potentially go to people and be like, hey, look, you're already you're sitting on some potential payouts here. Yeah. Why don't you just look at sitting here waiting in your account? Why don't you sign up for the program?
Michael Cole 18:41
Exactly. Like that's a good thing about tracking first because like, they may not care. They're like, Oh, yeah, whatever to infinity hours. I don't care. But they log in and there's like, $4,000 in their platform, they're like, Okay, how do I, how do I go to in our finance team to get this?
Isaac Morehouse 18:53
It's like that time back in, you know, the elder days where you log into some weird crypto wallet. Oh, wow, that thing my friend sent me his work. So final final question for you here. As we look into the future of you know, where this stuff is evolving, like the role of influence on the buying cycle. It's so much more than what's currently trackable. So I'm wondering, with a program like this, it seems fairly straightforward. If especially if I want to get the payout. I'm going to make sure I log that this deal came from me, and then you probably have to do some checking to like you have some rules, or some backup check. They already about to close and all that kind of stuff to come from another source. Yeah. But what do you see like, as you kind of think about, is there a way to measure or to like, pull in some of the more nebulous, because that's where a lot of it happens is not on the trackable stuff. So maybe somebody is already in your sales cycle. Yeah, but a conversation with a customer that didn't get logged, like, are you thinking about ways to expand what can be measured that currently can't be?
Jared Fuller 19:57
I'll give you a baby. Here's it. I'll make that your question more. explicit. Imagine a sales rep discovers that a customer that's not ever in the referral program is the one that mentioned that to them. And that's why they signed up for a demo. Yep. Right. So in that situation there is this dark social thing happening. Like, could you bring that back into the loop? Like, how are you getting those offline things to potentially come in? Have you thought about that yet?
Michael Cole 20:18
Yeah. So I think these are two separate things. So in answer your question, Jared, basically, we have it that any salesperson, when they talk to someone, they say like, Oh, it came from referral, they will literally fill in HubSpot. Like I filled for like the name of the person if they're not already signed up as an overflow partner. And then as soon as it is like, we have a Zapier automation, that will just automatically add it to our platform in everflo. So they're now a partner there, and then our partner rep will reach out and start nurturing that relationship. So every single referral partner, we're trying to build more relationship with them to take it to the next level. So everyone's
Jared Fuller 20:50
looking to put the flywheel back in. Yeah, even if it comes from an offline kind of
Michael Cole 20:56
Yep. So that's yours. For the influence side, I'll say two things. So one, like I talked about, like, you really need to have your attribution for everything in the same place. Because anything that's like thought leader influence, a lot of times it's top of funnel, they're not ready to buy, it's going to take like, several weeks, you like we said all those the first touch attribution, if they send that user for the first time, I want to make sure that they are not overridden by like, our Google ads, or by like our other channels, like I want to say like, okay, for next 30 days, I don't care what other partners were involved, I don't care about any stuff, I want to give this influencer a shot at winning, because most of you, like you hear about 30 Day expiration on that, yeah, if you've only heard about ever, for the first time, you're not gonna immediately go to our website and sign up for a demo, you're gonna want to do your research, you might want to talk to your communities. So that's the first part. And then like, I'd say, like, you want to do more signals before just to lead to so like visiting pages, like webinars. And the ideal is that as soon as that user signs up with an email, if you can track that back to the partner, you now have just so much insight towards like, okay, they sign for a webinar on week one, and then three weeks later, they sign up for a demo requests, like you want to build it, like tie those together and be like, this partner deserves credit. Because like, who cares that someone else actually drove that lead? Like, I want to make this partner send me more stuff, I need to build this relationship like, yeah, just sort of like, like, relationship reward. It's so
Isaac Morehouse 22:17
interesting. I've stumbled into like little elements, you're way, way farther ahead. You got this dialed in. It's really cool. But we're, we've we've done some, like joint marketing with people, some events, let's say, and we'll have a UTM. And like, there's maybe a call to action, the man Oh, gotta click on this link, and you're gonna have full of people. But then later over the next couple of weeks in our How did you hear about us forum? People, way more people two or three times as many. Yeah, well mention the event, then people who click the link. And what's cool is to go back to that person to the event where they'll be like, Hey, check this out. Yeah, here's, here's these 710 people, whatever. And like that that moment, and it's like when you come to people and say, Hey, you should sign up for our program, because you're already referring people to us. Did you realize how much impact you're already having? That's like the cool moment. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Like, we have that in the opposite with partner hacker. We went through a couple of vendors, and we're like, hey, we just realized we've mentioned you to like, 10 people. We should do something together. You know,
Jared Fuller 23:12
100% Michael, that was like the rapid fire like, boom, boom, boom. And, yeah. Catalyst. 23. We're here live partnership leaders. On to the next one.
Michael Cole 23:23
Thanks, guys. All right. Perfect.
Jared Fuller 23:25
All right. What is up partner up, we're back live the second full session of the day a catalyst 23. We're here at the near bound.com media booth with one of the hottest companies in the hottest programs in partnership spiciest
Isaac Morehouse 23:36
pun intended.
Jared Fuller 23:39
Alexis from chili pepper. What's up my man?
Alexis Petrichos 23:42
Well, I'm super excited to be with you here. Talking about partnerships for sure. Yeah, incredibly happy. I've been working, watching also your journeys into the policies world and, you know, good job and what you've done up to now. And that makes me even more excited to talk about,
Isaac Morehouse 23:55
you've been watching me just stumbled through not knowing what the hell is going on. Exactly. So let's let's talk a little bit about your journey, because you were mentioning that you got a funny one too. Yeah, you came from you came from sales and development, sales development. You were an SDR. And then you said since you've transitioned to partnerships, you've been having a bunch of SDRs kind of hit you up on LinkedIn and be like, Hey, tell me about this. Is this is this like, the new thing that people are interested in? Like getting burned out as an SDR and looking for what's next? Actually, the
Alexis Petrichos 24:25
story is even even more weird in a way because I live in Athens in Greece, which is not probably the hottest place for the tech world and especially partnerships. I don't know. Have you ever heard like automate any other partner professional
Jared Fuller 24:36
mouse? No, you are the one there are one of you.
Alexis Petrichos 24:40
Exactly. So the good thing is that I got into tech by working in a Greek based company called workable it's an applicant tracking system, but it was in sales then moved into chili Piper running the SDR team anemia was the first one doing sales anemia. And three months after that, I remember we had a VP of policy back then that she had posted the role for a partner manager. It always excited me as a term partnerships. And the company was at such at such a growth trajectory that people were being promoted super quickly. But there was a need for that within the org. So I applied for that I made the big presentation talking about high value partnerships, like new integrations when thinking about our strategy and that the executive leadership liked it. And I got promoted to partner manager. And then as soon as I stepped into the role, the VP parted ways with the company three days after that. So suddenly, I was the only one doing partners with zero.
Isaac Morehouse 25:34
So So you said you made this big presentation on like your view of partnerships? Have you gone back and looked at that presentation? What do you think of it now? Knowing what you know?
Alexis Petrichos 25:44
That's an incredible question. Yeah, I've looked at it. And I was, well, first of all, it was all about integrations. So integration strategy, I never talked about sanel. And even though in the beginning was doing a bit of both, I ended up running our Technology Partnerships department. So I guess, from the beginning, that's what I was more interested into. Obviously, I had suggested we go into the recruitment scheduling part. It never happened. I'm glad it never did. But yeah, I guess the lesson that I take when I look at that is that I was always interested in that product, slash partnership, slash, like all that overlay model that we're running right now in syllabi. And that's what excited me from the first day,
Jared Fuller 26:23
what's, um, what's typically so common about these things that that work is whenever you have a, like, a passion for the thing that you're doing. So the fact that like, you started with the integration partnerships, right, and like, even if your theses weren't right, that you go out of your way to like, come up with a, you know, a plan, so to speak. And that excited you to put in some after hours work. Talk to us a little bit about why integrations kind of like was the thing that precipitated that for you coming from sales development, you know, that might not be the most intuitive thing. But why was that attractive to you, coming from sales dev into the partnerships role?
Alexis Petrichos 27:03
Yeah. So when it was workable, I had an inbound SDR role for quite a while, meaning I was taking about 10 to 15 discovery calls per day. And many of these prospects that were coming in, you know, workable is a recruitment software. And they might be looking for an HR as for example, like an HR shop or a payroll software. And this was a very common case, because the market out there is not always as educated as we're expecting it to be. And I had to establish some channels of communication between workable and these partners back then, because I wanted to serve the customer, right? Like when they were calling, I wanted to be helpful. And, you know, I knew that workable, couldn't do everything. We were not an HRA, as we were not the payroll system, but there were partners out there we connected to, and it was very happy to redirect these people that were coming in to these partners. So that's how the first most you know, like, the first understanding of what partnerships mean came?
Isaac Morehouse 27:54
What What made you happy to redirect them to those partners? Like, what was the sort of incentive for you just really caring about solving their problems? It sounds
Alexis Petrichos 28:02
weird, but that was like, I mean, that was somebody and I wanted to be helpful and like, guide them the right way and show them, like, help them on what they're looking for. That's literally
Jared Fuller 28:13
that's the thesis of partnering Right? Great partner, people are the best at helping right yeah, helping others get to where they need to go. So let's, let's look at where it's at. Now. I mean, you're in a very different phase, kind of, of your trajectory, you have like an overlay model, which I've kind of talked about as being like, I remember the moment vividly at first time, I heard that term, I'm actually going to talk about it tomorrow in my presentation. That's when pika puja, I kept on talking to him about channel. And he's like, stop saying channel, I'm not talking about channel, I'm talking about an overlay model. And I was like, What the fuck is an overlay model? No, it's like, that's how little in 2000 in like 17, all of SAS really thought about partnerships was like, it's this silent business thing. Talk to me about being in a startup growth company where like, that's kind of been the thing, so to speak, from, you know, jumpstart, what have you learned that you feel like you're not seeing out in the rest of the market?
Alexis Petrichos 29:04
Well, in the beginning, we absolutely knew nothing about policy. So for quite a while we're trying to tackle and bring growth through partner channels, but looking at it in the traditional way. So I've been through all this motion of like begging my partners out there, hey, like, look at these lists. Can you introduce us to some of these accounts, like I've done the
Jared Fuller 29:23
power source grind, like, value from partner? Yeah, have
Alexis Petrichos 29:27
their own 2% conversion on these cold introductions, so they weren't really working for us. And I was, like, you mentioned like, I was trying to think I was already thinking of that model where we use partner data through Crosby Moore reveal, you know, these these kinds of tools, which I was aware of back then off, and I was trying to think of how we're going to use this data, put it within our motions somehow and use our army of SDRs in a way in a more targeted way. So using partner data to make our cold outbound agencies much more targeted and relevant. I think being relevant is a key When you're doing outbound, which is probably more closely to what we would call near bound, yes is called outbound. But that was our key back then. And then I saw one of your posts, I think, where you talked about overlay, I got this word and was like, this is exactly like that's we're talking about an overlay. So I used the terminology. Few months before I saw it on your boss, like, not the terminology, but more about the concept. Our executive leadership liked it, and we started trialing it, we saw that the cadences that were powered up by partner data were performing at approximately 10%. So that means we're converting one out of the 10 accounts we're targeting, imagine that one of your targeting 150 accounts per SDR, like, they just started performing super well. And then we just made it a part of our plan. And like our go to market if you call it this way, and then you know, slowly started getting into marketing into our events function, pretty much every function that we have right now,
Jared Fuller 30:58
there was this collision very naturally, from what I've seen organically, on social that seems like community and partnerships and marketing. There's this kind of like blend, that seems like you're doing a little bit of all of that in chili Piper, talk to me about how you, you kind of naturally went to marketing on the marketing side, how those things are kind of working together today.
Alexis Petrichos 31:16
Yeah, so first of all, right now in syllabi, but I'm also leading our events, function and parts of our marketing as well, including community and the work we're doing with our community, I think it goes back to the word relevant, again, we're trying to be relevant to our customer, to our prospects and customers and whatever entity out there or like, you know, or an event, for example, whatever entity or event or something that's happening out there that will make chili Piper more relevant to a prospect, we want to use a win to leverage it within our motions. So that's kind of how we'll work on that. And you know, sometimes it's an integration partner, sometimes it's just a community partner. Sometimes it's a customer that wants to give us a introduction, or like somebody that fears about somebody that could be more interested in
Jared Fuller 32:02
like a customer, like, for example, would you do something, let's say, I'm assuming panda doc and chili pepper, we don't have an integration. But I would assume that that might be a good like community partner to do an event with a particular persona,
Alexis Petrichos 32:14
before we run webinars with them, specifically, these these companies. So if you look at our past events, you're gonna see that we're running them with quite a few companies, co sponsoring them, and you know, 50% of them are not even our partners. So we want to be friendly to companies out there that our models align, or visions align, or executively, the receiver is close to each other, we're, or our ICP looks like, looks like so, yeah,
Isaac Morehouse 32:39
this is near bound, because what you're doing is you're expanding not just formal partners that you integrate with, but the definition of who you are working with partnering with, formally or less formally, who surrounds my buyer and has influence on them. And like when you start with that question, and then of course, a lot of those people, you are formally partnering with our integration partners within that makes it even easier. But I love that I also love that you mentioned, you know, running outbound, and you said like, well, you might call that nearby. But that's such a great point to pause on. Because continuing to run your outbound and inbound strategies that's necessary, you have to keep doing that. But what you pointed to is those outbound plays get more effective when you layer on the Intel, the intros the influence from partners, and you add the nearby island layer onto those strategies. So it's not like a replacement. For those, it's the thing that's going to elevate them increase their effectiveness. And it's just like, it's just surrounds the whole the whole motion because it because
Jared Fuller 33:36
that's to me, I don't figure these things out by like writing them down, I figure them out by going and having fights with CMOs and CROs. Like that's my, that's my pastime is like, go go in and why can't these people understand it? Because I've been in each of their shoes. And I've always thought that partnerships was the superpower. But like, only reserved for those like elite that got it versus, you know, others. And in these conversations, what I've realized, like, you know, drift was a great example like drift and Gong, we did a bunch of stuff together, right? Two of the biggest brand names that exploded into the scene. What did drifting Gong do together? Literally nothing. There's no integration, and there's no like, there's no anything but it was just drifting Gong were always together. And it was like, if I had thought about that, strictly from the perspective of my remit as the head of partnerships, that drift, that would have never happened. Right. And that's where Dave Gearhart would have never cared like, like, Hey, I have like seven partners, and they're all agencies that no one gives a f about. Digi would have been like, I could care less, right? But it's like, oh, Gong, heck yeah, let's do stuff with Gong, right. Like partnerships, people, you know, this is like proof right here. If you start thinking differently overlay, you can get much broader than just, you know, formal integration or service partners and even widen the aperture customers. Right?
Alexis Petrichos 34:57
Absolutely. You just think need to define a bit on the iniciative you want to run with each other? So it depends, you know, you wouldn't, for example, I wouldn't power up a cold outbound campaign with messaging coming from I don't know, a customer, yes, a community, yes. But like a random tech company that just aligns with our vision, probably no, it's not relevant. But I would 100% run an event with them, I would, for sure, like build an invite list together and like invite people that we both care for, as we're talking the same ICP, so you just need to be a bit more strategic on what you want to do with them. But you can absolutely do a million things with pretty much every entity out there, whatever they are, like who you are, we can work together. That's the thing like we can amplify our goal by working with each other. That's that's what I would say,
Jared Fuller 35:43
Have you bridge the gap over to get started in sales? I think marketing is probably where you've had, at least from the outside looking in. I've seen what seems to be an oversized impact from like a pretty scrappy team. I mean, hey, Partner Programs, scrappy team scrappy people doing scrappy stuff? Have you breached it over into the success or get curious?
Alexis Petrichos 36:03
Yes, I still carry though. Some, like, I know we can do more with the CCO CSR. It's like our path for growth, were we gonna be more proactive about it. I'm trying to build some models to be proactive around setting up integrations and like doing things like that there is this path to growth, like if I had to pick one department, like we could do more with it would be CES. That's that's
Jared Fuller 36:28
I haven't asked this question explicitly. But I kind of want to there's all this talk right now in the market, you know, like retention is the new revenue and bla bla bla bla bla bla, and I still have not seen the organization that has like truly focused on that retention, you know, net retention, upsell, renewal play with partners, and even integration partners. I'm curious, just for your honest assessment of like, especially in this market, not necessarily even for chili Piper, but why isn't that necessarily the priority that you we think it would be?
Alexis Petrichos 37:03
Yeah, so first of all, we we separate AMS and CSM sincerely, Piper. So that means that C as the CS team is responsible for retention, while AMS are responsible for expansion and cross sell, which is extremely crucial for chilipepper as we have a suite of products and products. So when we when it comes to the CS team, yes, like we haven't established exactly models that show us how integrations, impact retention rates. That's what we're trying to get into right now. But when it comes to the AEM team, partners are such a core part of our aim team strategy, we're using partner data to empower cross sales. We've run campaigns like we do all that we've established things like the partner vouchers, for example, where like a partner of ours gives you a voucher to one of our customers or prospects to buy one of our tools at a lower cost. And is extremely important for us because we don't offer discounts. And that is three thing like we've never offered discounts in our career in our company history. We just offer these partner vouchers as a back to the partner, which they can offer back to their customers or prospects to get to buy chili pepper at a lower cost. So it's more like a partner that will have like a sense of place like that we're working with. So our aim team is all part of our sales team. And yes, they're using putting data
Jared Fuller 38:20
in that CSV. org is like, hey, aware, understand there's FAQs on how to set up the integrations or whatever right there's directory. Final question for me. I know I've been driving this one Isaac while I'm blocking you out over though dude. Roll with it is on the CSI. I'm curious, do you have product or integration activation data in CRM for the CSM is to see is that in there? Like, hey, this integration is active or this integration is not active is that in CRM yet or no?
Alexis Petrichos 38:47
For certain integrations? Yes, but the way our product works, some of the integrations wouldn't even be like actually, like, it's not easy to control how they're being activated, we're always pushing to find out ways to capture this data. Partner account mapping tools are helpful in that. So we're seeing at least that it just reduces the number of accounts that are relevant to that. So we're able to go into and like check who and find out ways to check that out. But again, this is these are part for growth, like that's where we need like, it's my goal for for the next quarter is in 2024 to find out ways to impact or understand the impact of retention from from partnership.
Isaac Morehouse 39:27
It's so interesting, you just said reduces the amount of accounts that are relevant. That's the part whether it's working with the sales team, the marketing team, the success team, I think a lot of partnerships, people are focusing on building out our partner network getting as many partners as we can, you know, getting them on boarded and all that. What really matters internally is actually the opposite of that is like can you give me the smallest if you're working with your sales team, they want to know like, what's the one partner I should talk to about this account? What are what are the two or three rather than here's this huge list here are all the partners so like reducing the scope getting some of the signals and Bing, you know, again, we talked about this a lodger like actually drive results, drive revenue driver attention with one partner with two partners, so much better than building a massive program where you're like doing a bunch of activities, but not really driving results, but dozens of partners. Just as a as an interesting point, I
Alexis Petrichos 40:20
think they keep them for growth is being relevant. I'll say it once like yeah, and partnerships help you be relevant. Like
Isaac Morehouse 40:25
that's relevant conversation we've had just keep talking about being relevant.
Alexis Petrichos 40:30
But I would say that, like, for example, we're being bombarded with like, such generic content, like cold, like, it almost makes me angry thinking of my inbox right now. So I miss like a good email that points me to an integration that I haven't used yet, like with a with a tool that I'm using or something I missed that I'm not receiving, like really relevant emails, and that's drives me nuts. You know, that's what I'm trying to do with our STRS make them more relevant. And it's a key for growth, I guess, also on the ad level, also on every every every part of our sales and marketing team needs that for your events. Yes.
Jared Fuller 41:03
It's incredible how, how much like even in your biggest partnerships, whenever you take a look at that ces data, and you're like, I probably won't throw off specifics, just so I don't hurt anyone's feelings. But whenever I was looking at originally finally got my hands on the data for let's say, like a drift in a Marketo. Just speaking from firsthand experience. I knew how many customers that we had done through the partnership. And we're talking over 1000. And then I looked at the integration activation. And I was like, That can't be right. It has to be broken. Like they can't be that low. That's impossible. Why would they? Why would they even bought it without this? That's the whole reason they even came to us. And that was literally a referral from a Marketo CSM. How could that integration not be active and go talk to that CSM and like like, obviously, there's always an excuse, there's a reason. So like going into those conversations was actually really eye opening for me. Because, you know, it's five, six months in, right. And then I go have that conversation with the CSM and be like, That was literally a referral from a Marketo CSM. Why isn't this connected? And they're like, actually, they're having these massive ops problems or doing this other thing. So they the customers actually telling the CSM that they can integrate right now. So I'm like, Well, have you tried reaching out to the Marketo CSM? No. Instant, you like, oh, actually, that's what they meant. Like, you had three people talking past each other, making up excuses not to integrate for the very reason why they bought it. It was just remarkable to me. I'm like, okay, CS org, please prioritize these, like, reach out to like, building that CSCs connection. Ended up being something that I feel like there's, you know, it's definitely a growth lever. But getting yourself out of that conversation.
Isaac Morehouse 42:53
Yeah, so I was gonna say, how do you how do you? How do you make that where you're not the bottleneck anymore?
Jared Fuller 43:00
SSMS Yes, yes, is actually probably the easiest connection to make a counter intuitively, right? So like, you're always trying to prioritize, you know, the AE. And like E into, you know, one of your partners customers. That's actually a little bit messy. Right? We all know that's a little messy. You technically, you probably should get permission from the partner manager over at your partner, right? Like, you don't want you're just at like cold emailing like an account manager
Isaac Morehouse 43:22
or whatever. It's like a department manager, department manager to at
Jared Fuller 43:25
least like partner manager to partner manager and then getting permission to Yeah, hey, is this an am though is this account CSM? Or any who has the most intelligent and are we aligned? And then you find out like, okay, the CSM just got assigned, you know, two weeks ago, so they have no history or context on the account. Actually CSM to CSM is actually probably the easiest. And it's something that I don't know, you're bound success. We come in soon. But yeah, yeah,
Alexis Petrichos 43:51
I would say that the goal there were being reactive without so when you hear a customer saying, Hey, I'm looking into this integration, yeah, like we'll have a mutual side with our partner, like the CSM would write down, hey, who's up who's on the other column, and they would cooperate together and work in that the goal here for partner leaders is to make the whole that whole function being proactive. So we can reach out proactively and like suggest using integration so and then also capture data around retention. That's where we're, we're trying to get right now. And it's hard to operationalize this model. It's hard like you and I don't think that good text like exists on that not on the partner account mapping front, but mostly on understanding the adoption of integrations. And maybe if you're using like an
Jared Fuller 44:36
exactly activated exhaust, then you're talking about all the different ways you can integrate so data, right versus like a seatmates thing versus there's there's multiple different ways and integration can be activated exactly, and can be harder to track. I think. A good one to look into actually is Ashley Taylor when she was clear, but she launched finally a pretty interesting way where they could actually track some of the stuff offline And, but also look into that. I feel like that's an answer that not everyone has from the product side, you know, how do you build your integrations in a way where you they are trackable?
Alexis Petrichos 45:09
Yeah, exactly. And if you're looking, but the thing there is that the product needs to have been built in this way from day one. And you're when you're coming in as a product leader, when the company has already raised, SUSE, are there. People, would you go back, change the whole core part of the product to be able to? So you want to make it able to give you adoption data? It's very hard. And what other tools are pitching on that is user connector? Use Zapier are us. But this is not scalable. You just You just
Jared Fuller 45:39
challenged me to find an answer. So I can come back to you like hey, yeah, got it been answered.
Isaac Morehouse 45:44
This has been so so fun to hear just in this, what 2030 minutes, like suck proof of what we say all the time. Partnerships, people are entrepreneurs, because you're like, come from sales. Here's how I work with sales. Oh, here's how I'm working with marketing. Here's how I'm working with success. I mean, you just covered your like entire your entire
Jared Fuller 46:01
world. And Alexa, tell us about the partnerships boss that you had that was really giving you the playbook and did all of this for you. It wasn't what it was just like I call it fit bow. So like sometimes, that's when seven people on my team kind of go oh shit fit fo it just means figure it the fuck out. Yeah, so they'll ask me a question. I'm like, fitful. I don't know. Yeah, like figure it the fuck out? Yeah. So
Alexis Petrichos 46:23
it's such an essential skill for the tech world. Like, we shouldn't be checking for the viewing interviews, like? You know, I guess, if that's the question, what I wanted, I was always thirsty for knowledge. And I needed to somehow survive in my role. I just got appointed manager role, and it survived, right. And the way I did, it was just, you know, looking at the resources out there, like the blogs that existed partnership leaders, like we're a Catholic, at least the community had been extremely helpful for me. And somehow, after a while, it just clicked and like we started working. That's how I will explain to that. You mentioned the intrapreneurial mindset before in all my keynotes, what I always say, when people ask, you know, how Why do you get into bonuses? What do partnerships need as a skill set, I always say you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset. You don't need to care about the short term goals of like sealing a deal or like signing, I don't know that you need to view everything long term, you need to have an understanding a multi cross departmental understanding you need to know, not only know but also be curious around products. Yes. Sales Marketing, like you. You're like a founder within start. Yes, in a way. Yeah. So and that's what makes it exciting, right. That's what makes us happy to be partnership leaders.
Jared Fuller 47:34
There was a saying that my mentor, whenever I was a panda doc, early on. Matt Cameron told me, he's like, on how to train first time managers. And it's very applicable. I've used this in several partnerships, conversations. Because you get people to come up from like an SDR or an AE or whatever. And sometimes in a company that's growing fast, it's like the executive team, you know, it's like the man like, Oh, they're making they are making these decisions, you know, the man the company. And he's like, congratulations, you are now the man. Right? And so many people, like I even hear that with people that I kind of respected. I've seen some cool things, and that are partnership leaders, then they still talk as if they're not the man, I'm like, No, that's your company is much as any other person there. Otherwise, you should probably leave. You know, like, it's gonna be hard if you don't have that mindset,
Alexis Petrichos 48:26
for sure. And I need to give the credit to our executive team for that, because first of all, we're gonna lean on him. Yeah. And we're all getting first of all options. So you're being automatically part of the success like you care about the company. But besides that, it wasn't easy for them also to trust like an SDR to go in lead, and like, get a team going, like lead different functions of the team right now. It's incredible. So I want to give the credit to the leadership for trusting me, obviously, to do that. And I wish like partner leaders out there that are capable and there are a lot of them, get that trust from their executive management. I wish I see that more out there. I was lucky enough to have Nickelodeon running the company and like trusting me fully to go out there fuck up and learn.
Isaac Morehouse 49:08
That's a great, that's a great place to end it.
Jared Fuller 49:11
Alexis, appreciate you coming by catalyst 23. Many conversations here. We'll be reporting more live reading about DACA got more coming. We'll see you next time. Thank you for having me. All right. Good stuff, man. Man, that was perfect.
Isaac Morehouse 49:22
So So here's the here's a good place to start. I have had this Vegemite sitting here, as we've recorded sessions. And it's made no sense. But now it's all tying together. This is like, what are they called Chekhov's gun. You know, you have like a gun in the scene at the beginning of a play. And you have to come back by the end and explain this said this was the teaser. So Brian, gifted me this Vegemite. And maybe that's a good place to cert unique to your market. AIPAC. What's going on in your marketplace when it comes to the world of partnerships?
Bryan Williams 49:55
Yeah, well, beyond Vegemite as it is lots of good things going on. back. And if I think fast forward to today, where we chatted August last year, before I headed out to last year's catalyst, there's been a lot of continued momentum in APAC, and the region typically rolls about six months behind the North American market. So what I mean by that is layoffs, right access to capital, revenue, that's available, trends, picking up partner tech, what's coming through. So there's a bit of a lag effect to go with it. But as per the sort of global slowdown, companies getting sharper. So they're looking more and more around, how do they be efficient with their capital spend? What can your teams do, and downsize? You know, there's been a couple 100,000 people lead off in Australia, in particular, where I'm based on based in Melbourne, Australia. But equally, I was at the tech Council summit, which is an organization which has been going a few years now has over 100 ad tech companies of the biggest companies in Australia in attendance. And one of the quotes from from that summit was that for every one layoff, there was actually 20 rolls going. So there's a lot of growth right across the region. And that's in quantum computing, and, you know, LLM in terms of the technologies we spend to use and adopted, there is a growth coming through around it. But it's being more intentional, more deliberate than ever before.
Isaac Morehouse 51:17
Does that have implications for a partnership strategy? Like, doing more with less? That means we got to tap into partners more like is that people say that? Is that playing out? Do you see like, any, you know, do you have any? I don't know, examples or data around that.
Bryan Williams 51:33
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's trending up, you know, traditional. I mean, you guys talk about it over time, the traditional models have built out a massive headcount and a massive team, and just keep adding layers to it, and even banging the phones without being approach or producing more content in a crowded noisy market. It's not working, right. So some of the conversations I'm having with CEOs or CMOS is, well, how do we figure out this partnership thing? How can we retrain some of our sales team members? Do we have to hire for it now? How can we get some of the promised land that we know from the benefits of what partnerships can be? So I do feel like there is a bit of a, it's a bit of a timing, now it's in the market. And as it was a time for opportunities to capitalize on it.
Jared Fuller 52:11
I think there's a great weight to the moment that we're in. And I'm curious if you if you share that weight, you know, fast forward a year, it seems like a couple of years. Yeah, it actually kind of like a couple of years. It's kind of crazy, because this word didn't exist last year, that shirt didn't exist last year. Yeah. You know, there's there's been some momentum there was partner hacker wasn't a part of reveal. There's, there's an increased kind of speed. But there's also a sense of like responsibility, because there's more momentum. But there's also more like, I don't know, I've called it going from opportunity to a responsibility. It's like shit, we really have to help these people. Where have you been closest to like, Okay, here's the unlocks that we're seeing across things slowing down, more efficient spend. And, like the first aha moment, like the the ROI the value, like, okay, we can do something like this. What would have been like the the breakthroughs for you and the kind of that period? In APAC? I have kind of my own opinions. But like, I'd love to hear what you've been seeing on the front line.
Bryan Williams 53:14
Yeah. So like chatting to a CEO, cmo level? It's, it's a few basic questions, which gets the aha moment. And I think we were chatting about this just yesterday, things like, specifically for you as a business, what percentage of the partners sourced revenue equal today? for it? So the answer is typically, I'm not sure. I actually don't know how to do it. They know they need to figure it out. But they don't know how, I don't know.
Jared Fuller 53:40
So there's some commitment to like interest, but like where to start, like the crawl Walk Run to us know, that's kind of happening there. So that's, is that where you've been spending most your time then kind of like with hockey stick?
Bryan Williams 53:51
Yeah, yeah, I feel I'm able to best deploy my market intelligence insights, strategic approach, best practices from events like this and global events, leading partnership leaders, AIPAC, and finding all those insights from right across the region. What's going on? To sort of say, alright, well, what how does this apply to the organization that I'm sort of chatting to? And, and simply put, companies no partnerships are thing. Like we said before, they can't rely on existing channels, they need to figure out how to do it. And it's very simple questions like, why would a partner refer you? Silence? Well, because of our products, I know that stuff like why would they prefer you? What what are you offering them? And so actually starting at some very elementary, like we're chatting yesterday, Jared, is the question of, what is the type of spend right now for you that you're committing towards working with your partners right now? Oh, we haven't done it at all. But you want your partner source attached to that, right, like, so. kicks off the conversation.
Isaac Morehouse 54:51
So I want to talk about building as we mentioned, hockey stick didn't exist last time we talked a year ago. What's been your process From getting that off the ground like, initially, what gave you kind of the impetus and the courage to say it's time to go do this? Yeah. And then how have you kind of built that in the last year?
Bryan Williams 55:08
Yeah. Previously, my role is zero. We're a little ecosystem team across the region, I'd have hundreds of partners reach out just trying to tack onto the brand and try and say, hey, I want to do something or young, upcoming partner managers. And their approach was always just limited. It was like, hey, we'll accept your codebase. And I want something for you. I want to say I'm talking to you, I don't really know what to do. And so it's always an opportunity to sort of say, educate like, this is what best practice is based on 500 conversations. Right? And then from there, the lockdowns in Melbourne, we're on base went on forever, I started doing some consulting, I know most of VCs down in the region offers an opportunity to sort of go educate, because as we know, you can do a marketing degree. You can do sales training, where do you learn partnerships, you've ever been an operator, you collaborating in the community, or you're trailblazing and figuring it out? Right? So there's plenty of whitespace there to sort of go after it and grow. So in terms of how I've deployed myself, and I very intentionally want to build my own partnership strategy, and surround myself with the right types of customers, the watering holes, as Jay said, for the millionth time earlier correctly, so and I've really deployed that around a bit. I'm accessing all the touch points, where the decision makers are, where partnerships are in happening, and put myself at the center of those conversations. You're living in market and I'm leaving Inmarsat? Yeah. Jeremy talked about running the partnership Leaders Group going, like, no one should know the market better than someone who's living in it as much as you are. I
Isaac Morehouse 56:31
love that. Yeah.
Jared Fuller 56:33
Here's an interesting question. I feel like most of the conversations that you and I have had Brian had been centered on you know, we'll call it like APAC native tech. I'm curious to what degree you've been involved in or seen expansion. So you know, there is a focus on for your state based companies or even EU based companies where a gotta get you know, smaller, wiser, more focused, do more with less as the infamous saying, where regional expansion to AIPAC might be something is that something that you've been looking at as like, a lever, not a lever, like a pack expansion, something that I feel like pretty much every CRO, once you have demand, they're like, you put a local boot on the ground where you can put one they're gonna fail, right? You know, you kind of need to put a pod well, then you kind of need a leader. Are there people trying to figure out the partner presence is they expand or look at AIPAC? I'm curious if you how you've been seeing that.
Bryan Williams 57:30
I love the way you framed it up. I literally just walked offstage presenting on that exact topic. And I've got a whole expanded package I can share for you in the link notes. Oh, stuff. Right. Okay. So thank you. Yeah, yeah. So about half the companies I've been working with have been international from year one, right. From Europe, right. From New Zealand, coming into Australia. I advised in New Zealand trade enterprise, which is companies expanding into Australia. It's US companies trying to expand into Australia with the playbook. How do they go about it? What how do they localize? Do they need a localized regional product, which partners that they work with either going working with agencies s eyes GSI is what's the playbook around it? How to do it properly? Is it culturally different? What products things do we need? So it's quite a common thing, right land and expand land expand through partners, you're going to go build out a massive headcount and hope for the best and expand it. So in the session, we just spoke through the approach to doing wrong is just a roll out of North American playbook into a pack and just hope for the best. A lot of companies do that. And especially my zero tenure used to become laughable at how many of them would sort of claw back after a few years of wasted efforts, despite them having good time flying around the country. And all the benefits are great people eating delicious bread like it's right. It's yeah.
Jared Fuller 58:39
What's the key to cracking open a new region since you kind of you've seen that? Is it? Is it really landing that beachhead? Is that the three like what what is the tying back to earlier when you're saying, hey, CEOs are receptive? I think I think you said this in a podcast, which was great, which was problem aware solution weary. Yeah. Right. So like they're here, but like, where do I start? So if you're looking at the AIPAC model, what's your kind of advice on that? Like, what's that first milestone that when to go? Okay, now you have something in place? Yeah.
Bryan Williams 59:10
Interestingly, quite commonly, you know, the bigger companies all aim for a loss leader company logo to sort of get in market and sort of, say we have presence or have one from North America, which they can expand and grow around, then from there, but the best model in market is to if you are going to put boots on the ground, do it where your best partners are going to be moving next door, move into the same office, right, get next door, get close to them, they're gonna be you're surrounded, they're the ones that you're gonna be able to surround with that one talking to your exact customers who you want to work with and get close to them. And then from there start to grow into it. Apex typically follows after an expansion into Europe, right? It's the next frontier, you might have some partners, you might have some green shoots, like you said, then it's a case of, alright, well, how do we expand that footprint? It typically makes up about 10 to 15% of global revenue from companies I see but it's the highest highest growth market. So a lot of North American companies also test and learn a lot of marketing efforts down there. Because it's commonly got the highest penetration per capita for adoption of their product. So even the likes of intuit or PayPal in the past have run campaigns, ads marketing stuff down there, if it works down there, let's run it North America.
Isaac Morehouse 1:00:20
So slightly different question. When you're talking with CEOs, CMOs, what are they saying? That's different from what partner people are saying when you're talking with them? And like, where are they? Because I just see this a lot of partnerships. People are like, they don't get it. And the you know, execs are like, what are these partnership people do? What like, where are you seeing them not aligned? And what is your what's your, I don't know, idea to bridge that those conversations, like
Bryan Williams 1:00:49
what it takes to grow out of partnership function? Like we need to do partnerships, like how do we do it? Like, how do we resource it? What can you kind of think, like, what is the first year? How are we going to grow into it, where it actually starts to drive partner source revenue around to go about it. Most of them, if it's a CRO, they don't care about partner influence they want, they want revenue, they might be slowing up, they might be getting pressure from the board. They're like, Alright, how do we grow into this and actually bring it into a thing. So commonly, they don't confess to know the answers, they just know, they need to have it work. But what doesn't work is when they grab their top sales leader, they throw him into partnerships with no education. A year later, that person leaves gets fired, it doesn't work out. And we've seen that way too much. Right. It's interesting.
Jared Fuller 1:01:30
I'm curious, where if you're looking at that, that big, that big logo, that big thing, like typically, where I see AIPAC come in? Is you're looking for that, you know, the beachhead kind of to your point, where is, uh, where are you seeing people utilizing local presence through partners. So for example, like something that I might say to you, Hey, Brian, naturally, we're going to have people sign up from the APAC region. If you don't have people signing up, so to speak, or just like natural organic, you're not targeting AIPAC. I'm not doing anything there. But there is some, hey, handweavers, it seems like a no brainer to immediately find one person to serve that, from a partnerships perspective, like go put it put it elsewhere, has anyone been looking at that from a from like, hey, we have this, let's say volume, or this lead flow or this interest. And what we really want to do is give it to someone. But it seems like such a no brainer to approach that that direction, versus figuring it out the other way, like, almost like a hunting approach. If you have any semblance of inbound, I would have to presume that you might have some international likes kind of signups. Have you seen anyone like kind of take that leap to go, Hey, pack, we're just gonna go put this inside of a partner will give you the leads.
Bryan Williams 1:02:46
Yeah. So that's a common approach around it, the thing that people have to watch out for is, if you're going to give to someone, they're already going to have existing team, we've existing training on something else, we have existing capacity problems to go around it. So it's got to be a case. And I go through an exercise where like, who your partners, partners, what are they actually doing an offering right now together? Because if you're gonna come in at the top and say, Hey, sell my stuff, please push it out to all your channel, your distraction to whatever existing machines or if
Jared Fuller 1:03:16
you know, we're gonna give you let's say, the leaves at the segment. Hey, like, we got, like, you know, 15, whatever, per month, whatever, we're gonna give that to you. Yeah. You got to understand that your partners partners, yeah, how they build their business. And then all of a sudden, you need to get really good at probably service.
Bryan Williams 1:03:30
Yeah, you don't train? Yeah. And I was chatting to someone just earlier, just just either here. And they said, they tried that approach. And they gave it to him. But it wasn't high enough priority on the list. So they ended up canceling those contracts. And I put direct people on the ground that try and build those components, because there wasn't compelling enough for those partners to actually go deploy it. Right. So you think sir, it was a full Shopify agencies, if it's a HubSpot agency, or whatever it is, they got existing motions with History Channel developed around it around it. So it's got to be pretty attractive to try and unlock it. Right. So that's where it comes back to? What are you offering these partners? Why would they push and promote you over other components? How do you make it really easy? How do you make it frictionless around it? It's around a lot of enablement as part of the value proposition around what you're pushing forward. So if you're gonna push into a new region, you've you've got to consider this stuff. When we're talking on stage just before you got it. You gotta it's gotta be hyper local. You know, if you're going to follow the sun, you got to expand different markets. There's a different flavor on the different markets.
Jared Fuller 1:04:26
What degree from like the zero practice versus today, there's, there's been a thread I've been pulling and writing and talking about a lot, which is, if you're going to be the best partnership leader entrepreneur as possible, you really need to be tying your value to how you help your customers get from the purchase decision, to you know, their ROI, their value, which means services are essential, because let's be honest, well, it's getting more complex. SAS is typically if you're talking b2b, go to markets not getting bought, sold deployed in this You know, plg perfect motion. In fact, people sign up and it's like, Oh, we got a new account. But then nothing happened. Like there's no activation. At zero. There were because I vividly remember this. I remember seeing and talking to accountants that were using panda doc, that we're acquiring other accounting firms. They're building practices around zero, right. And there was some service for the software that was being built. Are you seeing, let's say, service or practice development? Where is that coming from? I feel like that's been outsourced so many, like to the CS. Org. But as a partner professional, you better be able to know end to end how these things get delivered if or partner with your service. Org, right. In order for them to build a so W. Yeah. How have you been helping people kind of navigate that? You know, that space? Because most partner people haven't services firm or an agency?
Bryan Williams 1:05:51
Yeah, I think it actually comes down to my view around service design of what it actually looks like, for a customer. It's actually fundamentally workflows, right? Like what comes before your offering, what comes afterwards, like in a zero example, you're gonna have Data Automation to get receipts in. So you got a rich file, and you want to take signatures or something, right. And then it's reporting out the back end to go with it. And so what I see people and companies are trying to expand their partnerships that they operate with, they're not taking that into consideration. Now, luckily enough, who's who's left and right of me now, like, oh, we might be able to share account mapping data, but like, you're starting the journey. I'm downstream way over here, we might have some account crossover. But the benefits of us of what we can solve for an integration together, how strong is that? Now guess what no surprises integrations, which are closest together, always doing the best for also got the best MPs and all the benefits, no churn, all that sort of stuff is a better to give a narrative to go with it. So long way to answer your question, but I think it comes back to the workflows, the service design on your customers and mapping partners closer to that.
Jared Fuller 1:06:50
Because if you have if you have the franchise playbook, so to speak, okay, here's how the fries are cut, you know, the oven goes here, you know, Coke machine goes here, burgers cut this way, you know, it's much easier to have that and put that in the first partner. And I've always felt that like the service organization for, like, international expansion is a great forcing function to bring Hey, see us and service org partner team, we have to come together on this. Yeah, because I can't go services. And you can't go build local presence and do this. Because guess what, everyone there that just because they're there, they've never built services, but it's actually this really great forcing function to make your probably program better. And my opinion is always should always embed, you know, partnerships inside your services. Org, right. As a part of it. I saw you
Isaac Morehouse 1:07:33
know, no, I know, I was, I was gonna take it a totally different direction. Okay, so I want three predictions for one year from now. Yeah.
Bryan Williams 1:07:44
Oh, no. We're talking AIPAC? Are we talking?
Isaac Morehouse 1:07:48
Your pick? Okay, three predictions, three things that you feel pretty good, like predictions, you feel pretty confident?
Bryan Williams 1:07:53
I think the rise of partnerships and near bound more broadly is going to continue to rise to
Isaac Morehouse 1:07:58
the surface. Do you have any? Like, would you put a number on with some kind of quantification on that?
Bryan Williams 1:08:02
I'm gonna say we talk again, in two years time, I'm gonna say like, 30 to 40% rise, okay. And the reason why I say that is right now, every company in tech globally, is now a better more efficient company when they were 12 months, two years ago. Now, sure, some might drop off who were took on way too much funding, but never actually operating. We've intent, never actually saying actually, how do we go to market? Who to who's the trust? Where does that come from? And that's only going to get better? So our whole environment, our whole industry is just level stepped up? Yeah, that's definitely going to happen. The next trend to give me three,
Isaac Morehouse 1:08:36
or yeah, let's see if we can see we come up with three, three is always a good number,
Bryan Williams 1:08:40
politic, in general, he's going to ride the wave. So we're gonna be a tailwind of better businesses to come through. So I feel the innovation and the attention on this space needs to be enabled through this space. I feel what a component which is going to be the unlock, and lots of ways is partner ops. And I say that because in lots of ways what we're building, like at the point, the last one, it's actually tech stacks, it's workflows. But effectively, it's plumbing.
Isaac Morehouse 1:09:05
Just like, does that just live in rev ops? Or do you think there's like a distinct partner ops role?
Bryan Williams 1:09:13
The rise of the CRM and setting it up properly? How do account mapping tools come through? And what does that look like? Now? What is the playbook? What plugs in and around it? What does that mean for salespeople? Or for marketing teams? What does that mean for marketing, budgets forecasting, to go downstream, it needs to actually be the next level of sort of having a more operate, you know, a more efficient organization to actually sort it in house. So I think people in partner ops, there's a bit of a time shine upcoming.
Isaac Morehouse 1:09:39
I like that. I'm,
Jared Fuller 1:09:41
I'm thinking because if you go data up versus workflow down, so the first job of the partnerships person I think, we finally like arrived at an answer at this event this year, which is, you know, it's to be be the closest to the customer and understanding who your customers doing business with, right? Oh, yeah. So that exercise starts at the market first. And then you go, okay? These are the people that have these relationships, these are the accounts like that should affect marketing. There's definitely like a marketing component for where the data comes up from Reb ops, so to speak, then there's on the sales side, there's on the success side. I feel like progress can be made one at a time. So like, I could go have a sales ops conversation. But when it comes to marketing or success, those are actually different under revenue operations. And partner operations seems like it should be an overlay to each of those other individual things. I'm not actually even aware of someone that I feel like has got their hands around the way, you know, from Hey, I think I have the maturity model in my head. Oh, yeah. Right. At the end account assignment. Yeah. You're using market data? Yeah. So like you're using like, Hey, here's, here's all the people that surround my customer. This is our Tam. Yeah. Or, you know, total addressable market? Yeah. So binning marketing ops, these are the accounts that go into the list. And then it's prioritized with intent, and let's say partner data, and then they're assigned to sales based on proximity, geo all those things. I still haven't seen anyone do that, because that partner ops person would have to be able to do it at marketing and sales success. So I mean, maybe it is revenue, you know, ops. I mean, maybe it's, I don't know, it's an interesting business. So I guess we got to solve that in the next year
Bryan Williams 1:11:30
for you. Just felt like you had a whiteboard day. I just feel like you've mapped it all out. It's, it's good. But it's I think it's always a challenge.
Jared Fuller 1:11:36
But I think there's also the opportunity. That's right, yeah, to help your organization figure out what we just laid out. So I think people are going to try and figure that
Isaac Morehouse 1:11:44
question with anything when you envision Oh, yeah, this is how it all makes sense, then you always have to ask the why hasn't? Why haven't I seen that yet? Yeah. What what is it that's making? If that sounds like it makes sense? Maybe there's something I'm missing where it doesn't? Or maybe there's just a block? Or there's something that's currently getting in the way? Why has that not the
Bryan Williams 1:12:00
evolution still continuing like a lot of the upcoming tech still evolving and the skill set to be able to manage around it? Right, so who's actually got a CRM humming to the capabilities of what it actually does right now. But if it comes back to like, Alright, my organization's success looks like I want to take part in source revenue to 40 or 50%. I have resources accordingly with the team, how do they go about it? How can I help them more and provide the right accounts to be able to get up to there, a lot of organization is going to get stuck, they're not gonna be able to achieve the promised land of what they aim to do if they don't fix that module ahead. So those workflows wherever it isn't a CRM, if it's in a marketing success, the sales probably overlay question is, you know, if partnerships is a strategy and an influence influences every department, then it all needs to level up continued. But now we're building on a base of better businesses than we had a few years ago when money was cheap or free, right? Yep.
Jared Fuller 1:12:49
Yep. Yeah. Because otherwise, I mean, how are you acquiring these accounts and reaching out to them? You know, I think we were making an increasingly more clear business case about how nearby and partnerships etc, can impact each of these departments. But what's kind of interesting is, I don't know that I've, like a partner ops person, all the ones that I know I, they're all in big companies with channels. They all have channels. So like snowflake, for example, like one of my former Sales Operations Manager, once a snowflake ended up running partner ops, but it's like, that's definitely abstracted from revenue ops. And then I don't know of any partner leaders that are former ops people. Yeah. I feel like that's a skill set like we have. So it's like the melting pot of sass as they call it using a an American analogy. Yeah. So to speak. Right. Like no one's born in partnerships. We all find it found ourselves. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Um, who's found their selves here from the opposite party? Like maybe Chris Lavoie? Yeah. Aaron? Aaron Aaron Howerton? Yeah. And what would that look like? And that's actually maybe the interesting conversation to have. Maybe that's the next thread is, where's that going to be solved? Is it going to be solved by someone coming into a big company? And figuring out and layering it Reb ops marketing sales success auto? Or is it going to be solved by a Chris or an airway? Aaron, and that being built from day one, so to speak? Yeah, I think it's an interesting one.
Bryan Williams 1:14:10
We need to go build a company from day one for the perfect stack, right? We just roll out efficiently scale to the moon, because
Jared Fuller 1:14:19
if you build it from day one, there's no ops. That's right. There's like, Yeah, do it later, then it's kind of like what is the right things? I
Bryan Williams 1:14:26
think I'm in it probably, as organizations get going. They hire their first ops person more generally, a fixing various components. Look at Salesforce, it's like one of the only Tech where when it gets going, they hire someone to fix it. Like, oh, it doesn't change. Like I said, I've eight years ago, and like, I don't know, right. So wherever that touch point is, but how are you actually helping and enabling your partnerships, team members and your partners to set up for success to be able to hit the promised land of what you're doing and to be at increased value to them as well.
Jared Fuller 1:14:59
So you You heard it here. First, his recommendation was to bribe your revenue office manager. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, there's got to be some way to unlock this. But I love that prediction, because it's definitely something that needs to be solved by the next year. Where are we gonna end up in one year from now? Like, what's gonna?
Isaac Morehouse 1:15:14
I mean, we you call it 30 to 40%. uptick in, in partner activity?
Bryan Williams 1:15:20
That's right. So maybe build on top of some of that data. You've been sending me my way? Yeah, absolutely.
Jared Fuller 1:15:25
Yeah. Get some near bound, certified cat like Academy stuff going on with Brian. been fun.
Isaac Morehouse 1:15:32
Love it, man. All the way over. Yeah. Smuggling the Vegemite through customs. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if they like that into the US illegally. No,
Bryan Williams 1:15:40
it's pretty good stuff. The US economy doing my bit, right?
Isaac Morehouse 1:15:44
That's right. That's right. Yeah. increasing international trade relations. I love it.
Jared Fuller 1:15:49
Amazing. All right. We'll see y'all next time. All right, thanks, guys. It's
Melissa Blatt 1:15:51
a march of 2020. And started it from my own personal challenge. When I left the corporate world to go out on my own. I went into, you know, the marketplace. And I'm like, these plans are so expensive. And I don't want any $1,000 deductible. And I know I'm not alone, there's tons of self employed fractional people that we make up actually a third of the workforce. And we pay three times the race. And so I said, if I find a solution for myself, I'm going to share it with an entire population. And I
Isaac Morehouse 1:16:19
can you talk a lot about like this future as slowly people have become sort of me Incorporated, right, like whether or not more and more people are doing fractional work, or doing 1099. But even if you're not, if you're technically a W two employee, it's just become so much more the case that you kind of own your own brand, your own reputation, your sort of human capital, you're kind of operand that is temporarily working under another company. And as we looked at, like, the future were more and more, more and more decentralization in terms of people kind of coming together to work on sort of projects or companies, but then like dispersing in that world, partnerships become every become even more crucial. So I think you're kind of on the forefront of that with this marketplace for healthcare. For people who are self employed, like just giving your what is your vision of the future, like, how much further are we going to go down, this sort of means making meaningful, so much
Melissa Blatt 1:17:19
changing in the environment of even for a W two, you can be working for a company that doesn't even provide health care, you're not even on your own, but they're not providing health care. They're, we're now in this digital nomad where half computer you can work anywhere. And a lot of people in this has happened during the pandemic, you could see people were working remotely, you know, six weeks in a different location. And so having a healthcare that's portable, makes a big difference, so that you don't have to worry about your benefits going state to state. But what I really see in the next 10 years is a flip of 20% will actually be employees of a company and you're going to be contracting out at person.
Jared Fuller 1:18:00
There's a there's a couple of things that have from an industry perspective perspective that I'm mildly aware of. So like nays, the National Association for the self employed. So like, back in the day, whenever our I had an LLC, and I had my first handful of, you know, like contractors that, you know, maybe you could call them employees, but like we were loosely associated, couldn't afford a health care plan. So we had to go through a buyer's group. Tell me a little bit about how the Marketplace is helping, like are you thought about that utilizing a way to help bring cost down, like, the net effect of a marketplace should be that you do have some semblance of buying power, and I felt like buyers groups were like, kind of started to go that direction, you know, like there's something there but at the same time, I feel like it missed its promise. How does the marketplace help? Let's say bring that net cost down or at a factory right
Melissa Blatt 1:18:50
on Yeah, it should be. So with numbers you should be able to bring it down at the cost down but we also offer a special promo so our dental and vision is 55% off retail when you come through nd pop. So that is that's a difference
Jared Fuller 1:19:04
in this because of your buying power, you start to accumulate more and more she
Melissa Blatt 1:19:07
ated and said okay, this is the population and this is you know, when they come through us, this is what they get. So we have different promos that we offer. But we have our main thing is major medical and hospitalization plans we have six plans that you can choose from and yes we have several that are exclusive that you will not find on another website you're going to find it through MD comm
Jared Fuller 1:19:28
so if I started an LLC today, and I'm like, Hey, I have a family and I need to have health care. Like technically I could go to you know a major provider and try to sign up something directly I have a company you know some some you have to have two people but it's like okay dependent wife and need, right. If I go to you, typically what kind of cost saving in my looking at
Melissa Blatt 1:19:50
for families up to 70% on the monthly and then we don't have a deductible of one that's 6000 Most the average will pay 3000 in a calendar year. She's really different than traditional.
Jared Fuller 1:20:01
Okay? And the reason why I'm getting there is, how are you getting the volume of people? So I have to imagine that, you know, let's say, a grocery chain or something that's like using temp employees or whatever, how are you getting more and more eyeballs here, because I'm assuming you're not just doing, you know, we're sitting here in partnership Leaders Conference, you're not just spending ad dollars to acquire, you know, net new things,
Melissa Blatt 1:20:21
no, through a referral partnerships we are building and word of mouth is is, you know, once that community is very insulated, where you know, one person one freelancer or a fractional, you know, cmo finds out about something, they talk about it. We have, you know, people really stay on our plans, which is amazing, like three years, which the industry average is 18 months to stay on a standard plan. But our plans are a little different than traditional insurance. So it's not apples to apples, these are cost shares. So essentially, you are joining a already a built in group.
Jared Fuller 1:20:55
So is that there is that community like aspect with the buyer group like aspect, but with the discovery layer, and I think a more modern approach, because buyers groups are, I don't know, once I've gone through, it's seems like hey, that was 20 years ago, this is more like the modern approach to getting many of the same benefits that network effects. You
Melissa Blatt 1:21:13
know, I think also, there is an element of we match you, there's a lot of buyers analysis paralysis, like you, you have too many plans in front of you, and you don't even know what to look for the fine print, many people don't read it anymore, and a lot is in there. And that's how you ended up with a $25,000 sprained ankle because you didn't know what was in your in your plan. So one thing that we do is we have three questions on our website that you go through, and we match you with two of the best plans on our site. So there are hundreds of options in in these, you know, different marketplaces. But we're not an algorithm, we just didn't source what's already on the internet, we build relationships, what
Isaac Morehouse 1:21:52
what I love about what you're doing is like this perfect blend of independence going solo, but not doing it alone, like going solo together. And I think that's where the future is. It's in partnerships, more and more independence among the nodes, but a richer and more robust network and stronger connections between those nodes. Two
Jared Fuller 1:22:14
quick, rapid fire quick questions. When you started. Was partnerships part of your main thesis? Yes or No? No? No. Okay. So today, why are you at this conference? I'm
Melissa Blatt 1:22:24
because it is now it is. Yeah,
Jared Fuller 1:22:27
it was the unlock for you. What was the inside where you're like I need to see is the one
Melissa Blatt 1:22:31
by one. And by the way, a lot of healthcare go for the big groups. And that was never my intent. My intent was to go for the people just like me the 1099 the, you know, the WTS that worked for these companies. We are we were between a rock and a hard place. We have the hardest time and this is a top pain point of someone trying to go out on their own and have ice I was going for Yeah, business to consumer. And it was really b2b to see that I found bingo. Very Oh, you're like that a smiley. Yeah. But that was
Jared Fuller 1:23:02
that was that was the unlock is that you could go to a company that had a network of contractors and be able to say, Hey, you're not providing them any value. But through us, you can have something that other contract, companies wouldn't connect them. Oh, boom, there's a referral partnership baked right in.
Melissa Blatt 1:23:18
It's not only on the front end, helping to provide that value. By the way we offer these benefits they work in all 50 states. It is if you if they're you know exiting the company Cobra can be it's very expensive. Just make everyone go to sleep right now. Is your everything your company is paying for your health care. Now you get the same plan. But guess what? Who's responsible for that payment you're paying 100% 100% Plus to 2% admin. A lot of people after they lose their job at their company is not paying for that for a few months. At least. They can't afford it.
Jared Fuller 1:23:54
Oh, I didn't say I didn't cover I was like, just cross the fingers. Kind of whatever I'm so thank you so much for stopping by. nd prof
Melissa Blatt 1:24:03
Yeah, I n di p o p.co. And thank you guys so much. It was really great meeting you.
Jared Fuller 1:24:08
Well, you heard it live here at catalyst 23 partnership leaders, partner lead, everything is taken over the world. Even healthcare marketplaces, unexpected places.
Mike Davis 1:24:20
It's the same ol same ol it's just like doing good fundamentals and going with fewer partners rather than more partners and leaning in to the ones that you can help and empathizing with them to understand like why they would care to work with you.
Jared Fuller 1:24:39
That's actually interesting, because it's counterintuitive to some messaging that's out in the market right now. Where I feel like a lot of partnerships, leaders have shiny object syndrome, and more and more and more and more and more. And it's like, well, you have those 300 Partners, which ones are your most successful and what can be replicated and they have these I call them Popo partners on paper only. Yeah, you know, it's like, they're so what? What would you say is the fundamentals? What do you think? Are those fundamentals for nailing like, Hey, don't worry about having 500 partners, like you better get five, and then you can worry about the next 50, or whatever what fundamentals stick out to you is like, Hey, here's the table stakes that if you're not doing this, you're going to change your game.
Mike Davis 1:25:21
Totally. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest piece is like, looking backwards to go forwards and start to document like, the reason that partnerships professionals right now are getting laid off. A lot like I'm taking a lot of calls with people who are looking for work, unfortunately, is because we have we as a practice have done a poor job documenting our track record of success and documenting revenue. And so what does that mean? What can we actually do about it? And how does it get back to the fundamentals? It's asking every single customer that you're working with, about who the key partners are from a technology and a system integrator perspective. So I'll give you an example. We're working with just sub $10 million, Salesforce AppExchange ISP, and they were showing that they're getting a lot of deals from their AppExchange listing. But they took a month and asked every single customer and customer on the first call that they did, they had about 40 Something first calls over 25 of them. So more than 50% of them actually heard about them from a system integrator partner. And so they did not ask that question. It showed up through marketing attribution is like a direct lead from the AppExchange. But it was actually originating from an SI
Jared Fuller 1:26:55
dark social Chris Walker, the ghost of Chris Walker strikes again. Yeah, that's true. True. That's a relevant partner message and people like that's whenever I started seeing Chris go viral. I'm like, fast Parker, like, that's why you need to ask these questions you have to ask ask them in the marketing level signup forms, you need to ask them on the sales calls. And that was my favorite thing about like, a Gong was listening to Gong calls and sending it filters to agency, or partner or whatever. And it was such an unlock for me. And in fact, my Adobe Alliance, rep Justin, shout out, ex partner up, you know, good, good, good friend, he drove over $5 million in sales, by listening for the word Adobe, or Marketo. On gone calls it connecting the dots, right? So as you know, like, just simple like, listen to the customer, documenting it, you know, that first principle, it's like, Duh, yeah,
Mike Davis 1:27:49
right. And then lean into the ones that show up the most. So like, yeah, your example with Adobe. While that's a pretty clear path to lean into Adobe for this ISP that uncovered like their size, it wasn't all one Si. But it gave him a shortlist of people that were actually giving them business. And so it shined a light on where they should lean into. And then he take it the next step. And so actually, this is something that partnership professionals need to do a better job at. And it's tracking at the partner level, but then at the individual at that partner, because if you're partnering with 100 person consulting firm, that's a good point. And the same two people are bringing you all your deals, it's like, okay, cool, like, send them a gift, send them some swag, but then leverage that relationship to get through a team meeting. Because two becomes four individuals, four becomes a and start to like, but you can't do that unless you're tracking at the fundamental level, which partner which individual,
Isaac Morehouse 1:28:54
we talk all the time about, that we've moved from the house economy, to the WHO economy, where buyers are not asking, How do I solve this? They're asking who can help me and they're looking at people they trust? And who? That's a personal question. I mean, yeah, sometimes it's a company, but it's usually a person at that company. And that's such a good point. It's like, get to that next step to go beyond just which partner but like, who, who over that partner. And I love that you said before, gay partner, people need to do a better job of showing revenue that they're driving, and then focusing on who is the customer listening to write. So like, instead of starting with, like, how many partners can I have? How many partners on paper only pose and then you know, how can I structure this program? It's like, what are my customers already telling? What are they telling me backwards? At the at the company, but at the at the individual level? And which of those people are actually resulting in deal revenue?
Jared Fuller 1:29:52
You just You just hit me in the face with something. I've had a number of conversations that I am actually a very be offended by now.
Isaac Morehouse 1:30:02
For some of them with me, I'm
Jared Fuller 1:30:04
very, very lucky that this person was even in the partnerships profession. So you're about to get really mad at me if you've asked this question before, where I've had partner leaders like, Hey, we're trying to figure out our ideal partner profile. And what a cool shit question your ideal partner profile is, who your customers work with means what that means is you as a partner person, you're abstracted away from your customers. And as a partner first, if you don't understand your customer, I'm sorry, you don't have a job that
Isaac Morehouse 1:30:32
you should know more about what customers are saying on those sales calls and those sales calls it anyone else.
Jared Fuller 1:30:38
It's a red herring question. If you if you're it's like a it's like a company that ICP hops. It's like, it's like a product. I'm hammers looking for nails. Yeah, product, what's my product? It's like, you don't understand your customer. You understand your product, right? And it's like a partner professional. Like I understand my partner program. But you understand the customer? Yeah, right. Like just so simple fundamentals. You're right.
Mike Davis 1:30:59
Yeah. And like ideal partner profile. It's sexy. Like, it's a sexy chair. And we took it from ICP, like, that's all well and good. But like, it's always forward looking to your point. And it's like, no, just go in the rearview mirror, you have all this customer data, work with your sales team, and start to show them Hey, tell me who you are. So customers are already working with from a partnership perspective. And I will go out and do the legwork. But I need you to ask this question I need you to understand, pick your tech stack, pick your SI Partner, but I need you to ask that question. So you can focus me on where to partner
Jared Fuller 1:31:38
IPv should only come into the equation, whatever you're doing partner development for, let's say building solutions on top of, let's say, a platform. And you're like, Okay, I'm trying to do partner development, because you know, we have some HR use cases, or we have some sales tech, and we have an API, and we actually are doing that. And I've seen, like the rise of Twilio, there was partner development, trying to get people to build on them, etc. That makes sense. But I don't think that's what most party leaders mean, whenever we're having this conversation, I think you just hit the nail on the head, go become an expert around your customer, and then work with those put W's on the board. If you can't put W's on the board, with the partners and the people that your customers trust, you don't have a job. And that's
Mike Davis 1:32:25
it but then, but then what I'll say about the IPP is it does become important and only after you look backwards, use the empirical evidence from your customers who they trust individuals of who they trust, because then you do want to expand so you want to expand to more people that your existing partners, but then you do want to find lookalikes. So start it once you go backwards, do the fundamental.
Isaac Morehouse 1:32:49
So maybe there's partners that are not being mentioned. Because there are customers that you're not talking to or potential customers, right. So like, if you want to expand it guy I see. So there is a place for that. But let it start from who the customers are already mentioning. Yeah.
Jared Fuller 1:33:06
We hopped way, way past what you're talking about. Yeah. But for being there. So for instance, instead of more partners, more growth, more growth. It's like how about we make sure that the marketing team understands, hey, here's the 360 view of our customer, here's who they're working with today, our install base, we're doing this, this, this and this, which means we need to get to what level of success CEO how much revenue you want from partners. Now, here's our here's our customer, here's the 360 here's the partners, we're going to work with not other ones, only these we the 30% partner contribution that means 30% of all marketing activities with these partners only that means 30% of sales, like get that nailed. But then you then you have the engine that you could replicate, but like what a what a piercingly clear way to like think about that to like, nail it this way first, then the look alikes become exponentially easier. Totally you have bought in from your marketing team, your CES, your sales, and a much better understanding of your customer. I was you still being hyped?
Mike Davis 1:34:03
I love it. That's amazing. That's amazing. You and I have never met. So that's basically
Isaac Morehouse 1:34:11
what gives me a so you're working with like these hyperscalers. Right, like that's kind of your
Mike Davis 1:34:19
and Salesforce and ServiceNow but Azure and AWS. Yeah, what's different
Isaac Morehouse 1:34:23
in that world? Then, you know, sort of your traditional partnerships. Yeah, like what's, what are the what are the few things that are just going to be unique to that where you gotta you got to play a little differently.
Mike Davis 1:34:36
I mean, a lot of the fundamentals jeezum like all fundamentals today, but all about fundamentals, speak with, like, industry alignment, relevant materials that are aware of the ecosystem that you're selling into all of that matters. And all of that is required. it's table stakes to get there. What's different about the hyperscalers so you have like AWS So in Azure, and I in GCP, and snowflake and data, bricks, and all of these are different from Salesforce and ServiceNow, and SAP and Oracle, because the company itself doesn't have to build like a technical integration that enhances CRM, you don't need to like to build an integration, you just need to drive consumption. And so that's the difference like, and If and it's a procurement vehicle for a lot of folks and share, you're giving up a few points if they procure through the Azure or AWS Marketplace. But if your back end is built on one of those hyper scalar platforms, you shouldn't be listed. Because it's super easy to get listed. We can advisory my company a plug, I can help with that. But like, you can do it, it's easy. But then it's all about the cosell materials. It's about enabling your sales team to ask the question, Hey, do you have a committed spend on AWS? Do you have a committed spend on Azure? Why don't we procure that and you think about this year with the economy of it is like CIOs last year when they were committing their spend, do you think they're tracking above or below that committed spend, given where we're at with the economy like they're tracking below it. So go find some already allocated budget dollars and, and buy and spend it on your app.
Jared Fuller 1:36:29
So the two things then is like on the, let's say, platforms versus hyperscalers. And platform could be like, you know, CRM, you know, or whatever, whatever else it is, you have to drop, you have to build something that is, you know, integrates or has some value add or some co innovation or facilitate some use case, where's the hyper scalar, you're driving consumption? I think at the hyper scalar it's, it's it's a very standard play. And you have to be able to drive more and more and more consumption to get closer and closer and closer to more cosell, but at minimum, you can help your AES navigate procurement, you speed up your process a little bit. On the platform side, I when I heard you say, whenever we were kind of talking in the open up the show, I heard you say something around that it's not just about for example, let's say you're an ISV, trying to work a Salesforce rep, it's going, you know, kind of indirect to the ecosystem through like an SI or a consultant in the Salesforce ecosystem. And I feel like so many people, whenever they're working, Salesforce, tried to go direct, and it's like, well, that's the AppExchange game. And if you just play the straight up AppExchange game, there's very strict rules. And it takes a lot of money to win. And that means a lot of installs, which means it's a chicken in the egg problem. Have you in the App Exchange game, if you're not paying Salesforce enough money to drive the insult? So what you think outside agency consultant on the sideline is the best path for the platform play?
Mike Davis 1:37:52
Honestly, I'm gonna give you an answer of it depends. And it depends based on average deal size, like it depends on
Jared Fuller 1:38:00
average deal size could be you get a million dollar deal, and then all of a sudden, it becomes very important, Salesforce real quick, right?
Mike Davis 1:38:04
5000 A OB like that aren't gonna care. Another thing that matters for the SI agency play is the complexity of the integration. If your implementation of the combined solution takes an hour to do well, OSI is care about two things. They care about bigger sounds, and they care about bigger sounds. And so if you're not driving bigger sounds like it's gonna be a pretty short conversation. And so there's really three pillars that go to market for Salesforce ISPs. And CRM platform is always like ServiceNow, as well. You have the system integrators, you have the direct account executives and sales engineers, and then you have the customers. And depending on your market, depending on your complexity, depending on the percentage of net revenue, you're driving for the marketplace, he depends on where you should wait your bets. But most of that most ISPs should be hitting all three. Just like you only have so many hours in the day. So where do you place your bets?
Jared Fuller 1:39:11
It's bingo. That was that was a amazing clip right there. Like that was a lot of fun. A lot of fun, awesome catalyst 23
Isaac Morehouse 1:39:21
Not many people can get Jared more hype than he can get himself. That's good.
Jared Fuller 1:39:28
No, I mean, first principles approach is we do this you know, all the time, Isaac and I, and like to have someone sit down and be like fundamentals is perhaps the most boring way to start a conversation. No, seriously, though, but in in a place where a profession that probably lacks, let's be honest, a lot of fundamentals. And like, you know, you know, what your CRO is gonna appreciate your CEO is gonna appreciate right now, if you listen to this is like, if you were to get like, hey, you know, we're gonna nail the fundamentals. You see or would be like, that's the first thing you said to me about partnerships. You know, especially in this market, we're gonna
Mike Davis 1:40:05
narrow down, we're gonna focus, we're gonna get really dialed in, and we're gonna do
Jared Fuller 1:40:10
fewer things where do fewer things with a higher output? They'd be like, What did you do with the last partner leader? And who's here now? Great one. Amazing. Where can people find you?
Mike Davis 1:40:22
So I'm on LinkedIn all the time. Mike Davis advisory, based out here in Denver, Colorado, grew up on the east coast, but definitely embrace my mountain vibe out here. And yeah, so hit me up on LinkedIn.
Jared Fuller 1:40:38
All right. All right. What is up partner up? We're live catalyst 2023. And we're here at the near bound.com. Media booth. And Isaac bond. Great to have you here. Incredible, incredible conference. I'm actually genuinely like, this is where the energy is right now.
Isaac Morehouse 1:40:57
Oh, it's amazing. I mean, last year, I was at catalyst. And it was like, I didn't feel like 300 400 people. And it was like, 600 or
Jared Fuller 1:41:04
so this feels about like, maybe double
Isaac Morehouse 1:41:06
from what I saw. And it also just feels like a, like a level up. So like, last year, it felt like a group of people who were like, wait a minute, are we are we kind of legit nah, like, maybe we're here. This is a thing this year, it feels like there's a little more maturity. People are like, no the moments here. This is real. We've gotten momentum. It's been really interesting to see that. So
Jared Fuller 1:41:26
there's like real pain and there's real progress. But there's real, let's say optimism based on let's say challenge. You speak a lot about this. The shared struggle. Yeah. Right. There's actually been a shared struggle the past year, whereas before, if you've been in partnerships, you can often just feel like I'm alone. It was
Isaac Morehouse 1:41:42
a lonely struggle. Yeah, yeah. But what was interesting, so this would be a great, great tie invalid is people in this sort of SAS partnership world. They're like, Oh, we're all alone, struggling. Now we're finally, you know, found other people. Everyone who has been in the channel world is like, what are you talking about? You've been here forever. Like, why this isn't new, you know?
Vaughn Mordecai 1:42:03
So it's interesting, I actually seem to think I might have found my people. Right, right. You know, in other industries, you end up with these associations and different groups and you and you've got this network of people that you interact with every time you show up. And right. This is the first time I actually felt like, oh, there's my person. And there's my person. I found my people. It's so strange.
Jared Fuller 1:42:25
You know what, you actually just brought up something very interesting. So the thing that I never understood about how to let's say, leverage a channel event, right, or community or watering hole is Jay who was catching up with last night, so we got Jay here, Jake McBain is those events are almost always explicitly around a specific industry, right in the content. And everything in the programming around it is about a specific industry, but not about the profession. So even though it might be you know, hey, it's the MSP conference, it's actually technically the MSP conference for that it thing that's like, really specific right here, but not how to be a better, let's say, Partner Manager, you're growing MSPs?
Vaughn Mordecai 1:43:03
Yeah. And those MSPs don't always know the other MSPs are the people, right? You've got one company that you work with, so that one company is there to meet with the seven people that they actually interact with? And those seven don't know, the seven next door? It totally
Isaac Morehouse 1:43:19
is. I've been talking to people yesterday and today. And I mean, people who are running a retail partners program for Shopify, I'm talking to people who are running health care marketplace. The differences I was thinking, what is the what's the common thread besides just the word partner in people's titles? What's the common thread, and it really comes back to it's easy to forget, this is weird as that sounds. But scenario shot always says the only reason we do partnerships is because customers want it because it's valuable to customers creates value for customers when we partner up. And that's like, figuring out that your customers get more value when you partner, whether that's for width for integrations, whether that's for distribution, whether that's greater services, like just coming back to that simple realization, that customer is the one thing that brings us here. And that's the thing, talking with you guys at mind matrix, we started to do a bunch of stuff together and digging into the way you operate and work with your customers. I don't think I've run across anybody in this space who's quite as customer obsessed and customer centric. And I love that it's so much like, it's not just like we're coming with this theory that partnerships should go this way that you should manage your partnerships this way, you should run your tech stack this way. It's like, get in the weeds, get in the trenches with the customer, and kind of go bottom up. I just I love that. I think it's like reminding us that that's why we're here at the end of the day.
Vaughn Mordecai 1:44:42
Yeah, partnerships make sense. But the partners don't always have. It's not like they're walking into a pre canned environment, right? So you've got to kind of understand what it is that they're experiencing and how to how to kind of move forward with those experiences that make them successful rather than saying, No get back into the box, get back into the box.
Jared Fuller 1:45:00
Right. And there's this. There's this mindset that I think emanates from SAS, typically, that. I mean, let's be honest, what's the probably dominant, let's call it go to market strategy and b2b SaaS today. Its product lead growth. And sorry, Kyle from OpenView, and all the people that evangelize this. The challenge with that is that product lead growth, they assume is based on the customer needs and demands. Product, lead growth is nothing more than having a free plan. Let's be perfectly honest. Of course, you can stack everything up on top of it, model it, et cetera, et cetera. But I think what it does is it puts the product at the center of the conversation, right? So like, what are we building? And how do we optimize our funnel for maximizing our revenue? And I think that's all fair. And well, in a world where there's not 220,000, SAS vendors, right, like, that's all that was great. But now, it's kind of table stakes. Like if you don't have a free plan as a SAS, you know, kind of product that selling into that space, you know, whatever. And I think what, what shocked me is I've been on this hunt, to try and make sense of what Jamie pain talks about, right? Or other channel thought leaders. And I'm like, I've just never been in the distribution space, right? Like, I've never worked with a Dell, or Lenovo I've worked with like an HP but I'm HP Enterprise as HPE. Right. So more on the tech side, less on the manufacturing, the distribution, the storage, the marketing, all of those things with this, these the MSPs. And the thing that shocked me about mine matrix was, oh, my gosh, like the product actually is built around the customer. But what do I mean by that? There wasn't a box that you were trying to force people into. Right you were doing is you were going, let's help you accomplish your objectives with your partners, no matter what. And then it's you build based on that, which is a lot of work. And counterintuitive to SAS, normally, it's like, no, no, we need to optimize and go this direction and make it yes, it's you went the opposite direction, no charge for services, if there is customization, you're like, don't charge for services, help them, build them what they need. And I feel like the customer is really at the center of a lot of these things versus the product.
Vaughn Mordecai 1:47:07
You know, it's interesting, actually, I'll get into conversations with potential clients. And one of the first comments that we actually make is, you've got a bunch of stuff that really works well as it currently stands. Don't rip that out. You know, let's, let's figure out how to make that work well with the other things that you're working on, so that the experience is seamless across the board, as opposed to forcing us to have to address the seamless experience. And when you do that, they're like, oh, yeah, it would be nice if I didn't have to rip that out and recreate that entire process. Saves time saves them a lot of anxiety, actually, it's helping them it's, it's
Jared Fuller 1:47:48
understanding their objectives, and walking with them on their journey on where they're trying to go. Which it's so easy to lose sight of. And every great company has this, you know, first principle, put the customer at the center of everything, you know, we do, like, we look at, you know, Amazon's mission statement, the most customer obsessed company in the world, like so it sounds trite. And yet, I'm in b2b SaaS for so long. And it's rare that I actually see that happen. And that was something that was really stood out to me that I think the partnerships profession can take from kind of like channel and the way that these industries have been built up. It's like, these are role models from the past these, there's 76% of world trade indirect, like, there's a lot for us to learn about what already works, and not assume that we're the ones that have all the answers. The customer has the answers, we just have to help them get there.
Vaughn Mordecai 1:48:39
Yeah. And the reason that they have avoid doing that is because it's harder to predict, right? It's when you when you get into companies that have to have some sort of human element to the whole thing. Humans are unpredictable. You know, we like different things. We have different characteristics. They're things that make us happy things that make us sad, and trying to kind of meet all those needs at once isn't out, it's sometimes it's messy.
Jared Fuller 1:49:06
It's very hard to run a company with people. We're not running them with AI bots yet. But what's strange is that like, oh, yeah, but we're gonna build this system. And we use these weird words. Isaac, you're the metaphor man, like, you know, building engines. Yeah, right. Yeah, like these weird, like automation, you know, type of things. And the reality is, is no matter how much AI we put into our software, our AI is AI the user. Right? So like the end users, the human? Well,
Isaac Morehouse 1:49:31
it's so interesting. So I know, there's this huge incentives for venture backed companies in particular, to figure out like, what is the scalable way? What's the lowest possible cost, we can have to acquire and retain customers, and like, they're all make sense on paper, but sometimes it gets so crazy, and they get caught up in trends. I know somebody who was running a Fintech startup. And they were like, you know, they wanted to automate as much as they possibly could with some machine learning and all this stuff. And they got to a point where or the accuracy was like 90%. But for accounting, if it's not 100 or 90, it's basically not. So they would that last 10%, they have like an offshore team, incredibly low cost effective was lower cost than their initial model was gonna be trying to build in the software. And they're like, hey, this actually works. And it's scalable, and just requires this little layer a few minutes auctions, and the investors were like, no, we want to keep spending money trying to figure out how to get that last 10%. And I was like, It's not good for the role to maybe if you crack that it's huge. But the odds that you don't crack it are really high. And you could actually have a great business with a great exit, maybe not as big but that, that push to be like, saw that once and for all with like, the infinitely scalable solution, which oftentimes just isn't there. Yeah. And I'm really curious how this unfold as we move into this world of like near bound market, where more people realize what do you call it dark social or influence, or buyers are looking to those they trust, they're not getting hit is effectively with outbound inbound. And everybody's like, how do you measure and attribute this, there's kind of two camps, the one camp that's like, we have to come up with a solution that can perfectly track all of the influence and measure it for this new world of Nirvana, which I don't think is ever going to be possible. But it's like if you want to, but then there's the camp that's like, Let's get closer than we are today. Yeah, figure out some ways to get veteran tent data and veteran influence measurement, but it's not 100%. You know,
Vaughn Mordecai 1:51:20
you let you look at the guys that are doing machine learning. And they'll tell you that best. The real pessimists will tell you that it's 60%. The guys that are more optimistic, say, Well, yeah, you can get to 70 or 80%. It's never above that. And so what about that remaining? 20%? Are you okay with just walking away from it? I mean, as it as it stands right now, either you're you've got two choices, you spend time and definitely trying to solve it, which likely won't come for a really long period of time. Or suddenly there's a human involved. Yep. It's just the problem is, is it's not good for the multiples. Yeah. I mean,
Jared Fuller 1:51:59
there's a perception that it's not good to the multiples. Yeah, I've just been rallying against it. I might pull this up in a little bit, because I'm certain that our conversations are with you, Vaughn and Kevin and Harvinder. And the team probably sparked this LinkedIn posts for me. But what I've seen is something so, so interesting, it's that 100 Christmas is a theory that I have, I'm not sure that I've heard it anywhere 100% of the enterprise value of the company happens from after they become a customer to where they realized ROI. 100% of the enterprise value. So what happens whenever the goalposts becomes, let's say, automating everything into like this customer journey, what you lose is the insight of on that value. Yep. Right, you really truly do lose the insight on that value. Now, you might be like, Oh, but the Brian Dell, for example of how they do that sidekick and the email open. They're like, Oh, I can email tracking now. And that happened in seconds. It's like that aha moment, increase conversions. And obviously, HubSpot is doing very well in CRM. So there's something to be said for that. But replicating that now it's like, okay, we've we've fixed, you know, email open rates. Well, and here's what more than comes into
Isaac Morehouse 1:53:12
play. Right? It's like, coming look at HubSpot amazing company doing really well. Who is who is responsible for getting the maximum value to their customers. It's not just the product. It's their ecosystem of service partners, right? It's human being Yeah. And if you've
Vaughn Mordecai 1:53:31
been on the other end of that, actually, this all this automation does, is it, it shows you when someone's raising their hand, right, that shows you when you have to act, it's not replacing the act. And the faster that you can understand when someone's raising their hand, the better you can address their needs. As soon as as soon as you can kind of figure out the differences between those two things, it becomes a heck of a lot easier.
Isaac Morehouse 1:53:58
I love seed investor, Mike Maples one time. He said, The the whole thing was like AI technology, people being like humans versus AI. He's like, Ironman. That's what we're trying to bid Ironman. Everyone have their own personal Ironman suit? What is Ironman? It's this wonderful combination of human and technology. Yeah, you don't overwrite or get rid of the human component. You actually give it more tools and enhance it and let it be even more and better at what it wants to be already. And I love that. Yeah, like that. Yeah,
Jared Fuller 1:54:34
there's um, there's something interesting about what I what I've tended to see in the channel space. And I, I'd love your opinion on this bond is, especially in my majors, y'all have done something that I thought was so counterintuitive, and I hadn't heard before is that y'all do 100% free services. Yeah, right. And like that's a commitment and it just sounds so backwards. There sounds
Isaac Morehouse 1:54:58
crazy. It sounds completely backwards. round for 25 years and you survived. Yes. Right.
Jared Fuller 1:55:04
And, you know, profitable companies endured, right. And I think that enduring component is all of a sudden, much more important, like, hey, let's not take this thing to zero. You know, like, you know, our good friends, Justin Bray and Josh Wagner, formerly of ship paradigm, I started in revenue capital, I've actually been in some deals, like kind of looking and seeing and trying to triangulate. And one of their theses actually is like a three to 5x, multiple, not 100x, right? They're consistent, you know, good deals, and sustainability, long term things. And that service mindset that goes back to that enterprise value, right, 100% of that is between buying and realizing it. And then the customization building for the customer. Meaning you have to every single one's a little bit different. That sounds so backwards, but like in this market Zig, when other people are zagging. Yeah, the best example that I can think of, it's a phenomenal book is Tony Shay's book, the CEO of Zappos, you know, the shoe company that the Amazon, they famously had things like their customer support team would do anything. So you could like call them an order pizza. Yeah. And they would like to get you a pizza. And that kind of customer obsession and love is like, that's the thing that I feel like has been missing and what people are reacting to from the AI world. It's like, yeah, the techs great. Like, let's keep getting more AI, let's keep getting more of these things. What I'd love for you to comment on a little bit, Vaughn is like, how have you seen that play out in terms of the people? Like, I feel like a lot of companies I go and talk to, I'm talking to 40 people that have knowledge of 40 different things, right? Like they only know about marketing, they only know about selling to that specific segment, they only know about supporting that specific customer. But if everyone has to serve the customer, do you feel like in your business? How are you going about that? How do people put the customer at the center of everything, that service mindset? Does that create more educated, empathetic employees?
Vaughn Mordecai 1:56:59
Yeah, I think I think it actually does, I mean, that from the very beginning, you're really your conversation centered around something different than that, it would be it's not centered as much around an internal KPI. Yeah, it's about them. It's about them. That's exactly right. You're understanding Well, where do you exist today? Currently? Where do you want to be? Yeah, and how do we take the stuff that we do and make that happen? And, you know, I don't know that our people are ordering pizzas for others. You know, but I can see that actually happening if it if it really came down to it. So it's a, it's curious, actually, but it's, it's, it's good business for us. You know, and, and the one thing though, that it does force you to do is build a product that kicks butt, right, because on the one hand, you want to give away support and serve, you know, unlimited support and services. But on the other hand, you don't want that to go south on you. So you've got so you've you, you've built something that sort of really meaningful that solves their problems, to reduce the amount of time they actually have to have that happen, and then support them like crazy when they do happen, because it's super meaningful when it comes up.
Jared Fuller 1:58:11
Because the ROI on that is it the LTV is the thing that's missing from that calculation, the people that you're more maniacally focused on helping and putting those service dollars into, that's an investment. Yeah, right. There's a, there's a CapEx associated with that. But those customers in the long run, they need to be more successful, if everyone's focused on helping them get where they want to go. Yeah. And it's not focused on an internal activation metric, or whatever KPI of the week, you know, the exact slide deck comes up with it's this counterintuitive thing that I feel like that can be the remit of what a partnership leader, I mean, read the partnership leaders, catalysts, only three conference should be is that you should be the forcing function to pull your company closer to your customer objectives, and not just use your voice, but use the voice of the people that surround that account, who they're already working with. And bring your executives into that and go, This is what we need to solve for. Not this thing we've been spending all week, you know, 20 hours in meetings on Yeah, it's where the customer actually is.
Vaughn Mordecai 1:59:13
Yeah, yeah, I'd agree with that. The
Isaac Morehouse 1:59:17
I'm trying to get high level metaphors here. I can't help myself. But I went to the Botanical Gardens yesterday with my family before this thing started. And they actually had this little plaque and said like ecosystems need partnerships or something like that. It was about all the animals and stuff. But when you think about the role of someone in partnerships, who uses various ecosystems, ecosystems, when you think about an ecosystem, it has an irreducible level of complexity. If you try to approach it and say, oh, okay, well, I just want to all I want to do is like, make this one kind of plant grow and only focus on this one kind of plant. And that's it myopically focused on that it'll either not work or it will kill everything else, right? You have to like zoom out and think about this. It's really complex interplay of all these insects and all these other plants that you didn't even know he'll had an impact on the other things that ecosystem. And what got me thinking about in the squid. And when we dove in, which was my matrix, this is what I really like sparked my mind. And we wrote about it. Partner hacker recently busted that a lot of SaaS companies, they look at complexity, and they're like, Oh, we want to turn complexity into simplicity. And that's not always the right thing to do. Like, an ecosystem. Again, though, its strength. And its resilience is its complexity, has so many different types of people involved, you got all these different types of partners with all these different incentives, when they're when they're driving, it's like, it's a beautiful thing. And so rather than responding to complexity with like, trying to take one tiny slice of it, and just focus on that, focusing, like responding to complexity with with care and attention, instead of simplicity, right, like just a hammer that's looking for an owl everywhere. And like, that's where you get this, because complexity can be chaos. But it can be the Kevin order, if you walk into a garden, it's orderly, and extremely
Jared Fuller 2:01:09
modular. There's different things feeding different.
Isaac Morehouse 2:01:13
Complexity together. For sure, can't complexity can also be chaotic. But simplicity is not the solution to something like an ecosystem. Now,
Vaughn Mordecai 2:01:22
it's funny we actually, with with the work that we've been doing with you guys, and particularly with reveal we, we have started to view the world in terms of what that public ecosystem looks like, and what the private ecosystem looks like. And those two things, and each sort of operating independently of each other, but then they sort of overlap at moments. And when you start to look at how you service, the industry overall on the public side of things, those are all really obvious, right? Yeah. But then when you get behind the scenes, there are all these like little biopic type of ecosystems going on within that, that need to be served by platforms like ours. So you're exposed, but you expose that to the folks that need it. But then don't expose it in areas that it doesn't need to be exposed. How
Isaac Morehouse 2:02:11
would you define private versus public repo system? I love this. This is really, really cool frameworks. Yeah, it's
Vaughn Mordecai 2:02:16
so on the public ecosystem side of things. You've got all these vendors, I mean, the SAS providers, the the SPX, providers, guys, you know, and they're all working together. And they're sitting on these platforms, like reveal where they're, where they'll they work with each other, and you're looking for the shared opportunities, right? Well, once that happens, and they get behind the scenes, and they start doing the deals together, that stuff all disappears. Yeah. But it still has to manage from behind the scenes. And a lot of times, it happens on platforms like ours, what happens if you're the partner that needs to do a deal in an adjacent city where you don't end up with a stack? Right? How do you how do you serve us that? How do you serve us that vendor and all the needs of that vendor when you don't cover everything that maybe they need, but you but you cover 75% of it? Well, you still have to understand what that private ecosystem would look like. And it never makes its way into the more public space where the vendors and the SAS flies
Jared Fuller 2:03:16
can say, I have a question for you about your gardening experience tied to this, Isaiah. So you were there with your wife and kids? Were there some plants that your wife liked more than others? Absolutely. Right. So like, not all partners are equal? Yeah. Right. So we're a little bit prettier. And
Isaac Morehouse 2:03:32
my and my kid loved the carnivorous plants.
Jared Fuller 2:03:35
Right? Totally. And I bet if you treated, let's say, the most beautiful or need something like big, maybe you could name one. I'm really terrible at plants that you liked or good or something. Okay, great. So if you treated the orchid the same as the venus flytrap, do you think either one would survive the Master? No. So then why did we treat every partner the same? Yeah. And that was kind of the thing that that was an unlock for me is like your remit as a partnership leader is to undertake, obviously, not all partners are equal. And their objectives are not always the same. And you are much better served to your company, to make sure that you're focusing on the customer and serving what they need, but also the partner in what they need. And being able to build to that so that way, it's most effective for them. And not just, you know, your program, but like, that's what kind of amazed me is that you can actually do things multiple levels down to where you have your portal and how you're helping grow your garden. But then that patch over there, that's the orchids that's managed and run differently that that patch over there with a carnivorous plant section. Instead of this, you know, GMO garden, you know, field of one type of, you know, grain. That's, you know, Roundup, there's nothing in the soil, and then Oh, there's one like little disease, the entire thing's gone.
Vaughn Mordecai 2:04:51
You've got and you've got scheduled sprinkler systems, right? Yeah. And you've got all this automation that sort of encourages those things to happen, but at some On Point, humans gonna have to go in there and go, oh, there's a we'd better clock that, you know,
Jared Fuller 2:05:06
well and the risk is exponential, right? So ecosystems are stable, they're resilient if you're serving the needs of all of these partners with their needs. And something happens in the industry that shakes up that maybe takes out a certain component of the ecosystem, like that garden is going to be much more stable than that field of wheat. That's like one genetic, it's literally one seed one DNA, something happens, the whole thing could go to five. Yeah. And you have a lot more resiliency inside of these accounts. I mean, that's the way that I think it was the Bessemer Bessemer Venture Partners. They're seated filed last year. And they were talking about why every SAS company to weather the storm needs to lead with indirect partnerships and filling that need, because of the resiliency and the stability, right? That diversity was something to embrace. So maybe it's that even to use a more recent buzzword is like, the diversity is something to embrace it when it comes to how you serve your partners. Versus, hey, we built the ultimate thing for partners. We don't partners hate partners don't hate portals, I think I'm gonna go back on that statement. What Carter's hate is your report. Right, and they hate they each time, you know, there's 100 versions of war porn, but what about there's meaning if it's what they want?
Vaughn Mordecai 2:06:24
Yeah, they may like you think about before they actually have the ability to before Amazon was listening to you. And you, you know, you say the word carabiner. And suddenly, like, this climbing weapon shows up like, yeah, it used to be that you'd be like, Why are they feeding me this thing? That makes no sense. I am never going to be, you know, a Cadillac driver. So why is Cadillac advertising TV? Well, it's all about segmentation. Right? And if you're not going in, and you're producing these unique environments, for the different types of partners, and the unique ways to interact for different people that interact in those systems, you're going back to the 90s, when you're just serving up Cadillacs to 17 year old
Jared Fuller 2:07:08
that's like marketing automation. One on one, you just you just made all of partnerships, extremely simple to every marketing leader out there. It's like, do we send the same email to every customer? Or every prospect No, you segment right, you get them all different. And I think it's so silly that in a lot of ways, partnerships, we build these experiences in a way that are one size fits all. And the reality is, is that's just not the way that we want
Vaughn Mordecai 2:07:31
to be treated. I met a guy yesterday actually, that had started doing some work around that just what you're saying he was creating prompts that on Earth different things that mattered to the partnerships and it was all going through. It wasn't the the two traditional, you know, generative AIS, that he had locked on to another one that most people had heard of, but it gave him the ability to build pathways within the within those prompts that sort of followed a really specific thread as it as it kind of moved along. It was generating the things that you needed, but it was entirely prompt driven and guided as opposed to be asking you it was it was him asking his client and I thought that's really that's really intuitive, actually. And so it's funny to see that pop up today. But you can see where it would have like that. If people have the time and the energy to build out what that beads.
Isaac Morehouse 2:08:24
It's it's jazz. It's a combination of some bounded structure with improvisation.
Jared Fuller 2:08:33
I love that. Amazing, amazing. Well, this is the first one that we're knocking out fun. Thank you so much for stopping by. nirvana.com media booth, partner hacker Isaiah, we're your catalyst 23 partnership leaders. Second event. Partner up peace out next time.
