Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 063 - Barrett King of New Breed - Building cutting-edge B2B tech partnerships

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063 - Barrett King of New Breed - Building cutting-edge B2B tech partnerships · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Park Ships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of Park Ships and Channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: My name is Rick van de Bosch and I'm the CEO and founder at ChenExed, and I'm here together with Barrett King, senior Director of Revenue at Newbreed, host of the Outcomes Podcast and former Senior Manager of Global Go To Market Strategy for the Park Ecosystem at HubSpot.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: How are you doing today, barrett?
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I'm fantastic man.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: I'm excited to have this conversation.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: That's a great intro.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: I think I should have more titles next time, but I think you cover most of the important ones at least.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: So thanks for having me.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Excellent, yeah, likewise, like we actually recorded the podcast prior to this but, then on your podcast and I highly enjoyed the conversation, so I'm really looking forward to today.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it'd be fun.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: I think we both have a lot to say about partnerships, so, at the risk of perhaps running too long, I'm eager to see what we come up with.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: This will be fun 100% and for our listeners, could you introduce yourself a bit more?
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Like, how did you get into partnerships?
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Like, where did your passion came from?
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Because I know you're very passionate about it.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, I'm curious to learn.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, I'm glad to yeah.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: So I have a non-traditional way of getting into B2B in general, let alone partnerships.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Over a decade ago which sounds weird to say, I am that old, but over a decade ago I graduate college and the economy was doing really, really poorly, jobs were fairly scarce, the housing market was starting to implode, and so I fell into restaurants because it was an interesting opportunity for me to go and do something people centric.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: I was working in front of the house, I was managing some teams and I was doing some hospitality management for them, and in that opportunity, interesting things started to happen, which is that I was tasked with figuring out how do we build brand awareness in the part of the city.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: The restaurant that I managed existed, and so, naturally, I went to the businesses that were nearby and I worked with their HR teams and with their sales and marketing teams, et cetera, to host events and bring their holiday parties and do their team building events and such, and I quickly figured out that partnerships was, as I look back now, what I started off with.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: I thought about what the customer wanted, which was a really curated menu and tasting experience and wine pairing and the things that you do in high quality restaurants.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: But they wanted this extra touch.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: They wanted to make it feel really personal.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: So I customized menus and I designed the rooms to look and feel like their business and I'd put a lot of energy and effort into that.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: I think about that as sort of the kickoff of my partnership experience.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Over the next couple of years I managed restaurants.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: I got into B2B tech thereafter, that's in the housing market crash, so that company imploded.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: None of it laid off almost all of us.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: I was in that bucket Back in restaurants for a short period of time and then I worked for a company, a startup, that was selling to the hospitality space restaurants and fast, casual and such and in that role, because they, two months in, let go of the head of sales and said you know, barrett, you're doing a good job, keep doing it I felt compelled to figure out other ways that I could gain leverage in terms of how I grew our revenue.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: I was the sales guy.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: There's only me.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: I like to say I was head of sales when I talk about it, but it was literally just me.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: How you start up life right.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: And so in that opportunity we were selling at 1.2 restaurants and what I figured out very quickly was that going to one off restaurant operators was really flipping hard.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: Like I had been on the receiving end of that, I knew how difficult it was to catch my own attention.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: There's no way I could do it at scale.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: So what I did is I went into the restaurant.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: There's like these organizations, these network groups, right and so I figured out that I could get to the individuals, or two of them, that ran the Massachusetts restaurant association and I got a meeting with them and I sat down and I said I want to add as much value as possible to your restaurant group.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: And the guy was like yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone says that what are you going to do.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: And I explained our product and our offering and whatnot.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: And he was intrigued.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: It was kind of innovative and okay, cool, what's in it for us?
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: And I said the most exceptional experience for your teams, you know, for your restaurants.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: I really just needed about the people.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: They cared most about their constituents and they said, cool, I'm going to get a friend, like if you can give it away to the team members for X amount of time and whatever else.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Then I struck up a partnership with them, again not realizing what I was doing.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: It was just sales to me, it was just building relationships.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: But I was developing those muscles.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: I took it to the National Restaurant Association.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: We gained a ton of reach.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: It helped our company grow more effectively and in hindsight it only worked because I developed partnerships.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: And then I joined HubSpot.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: This is like 2015 or so summer of 2015.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: And my first job was acquiring partners.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: I knew nothing about agencies other than I had a design degree professionally.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: That was my college background and then the company that I had been at had shared a co-working space with an agency.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: So I had talked to that owner a little bit and I had a little bit of exposure.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: And it was over the next eight and a half years that I spent at HubSpot that I got my real foundation of partnerships.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: I was in partner acquisition.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: I was the first head of sales training for partner, and so I get to build a whole program and scale that globally, training hundreds of employees.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: I got to bring partner back to the role of actually helping to support some of our top partners at HubSpot for years, helping them to package, price, sell and grow through the HubSpot ecosystem.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Then I became a corporate sales manager the first one to come from partner and move over that side of the business to bring the partner opportunity to a wider organizational level there and help us go up market at the time.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: And then the last role that I had what you touched on briefly was I was running some go-to-market strategy and working cross-functionally with a bunch of teams to figure out how HubSpot could work with partners larger and more global in terms of reach, but also figure out the best possible way to solve for their customers' needs.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: How do we work with the right types of businesses?
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: How do we scale an ecosystem?
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: So for me, my journey wasn't I want to be in partnerships it's actually never been that and leading up to today where I'm responsible for the revenue team at Newbreed, which is HubSpot's top partner.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: So it's an interesting full cycle moment for me in terms of looking at the other side of the coin.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Again, I still do partnership work here.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: I still work with my team to develop partnerships, but specifically I'm going to be working with HubSpot.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: I never said I want to do that professionally.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: It was never something that I've ever acknowledged, and so I look at it as an all sort of digress here and we can land the plane.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: But I look at it as taking that Lego mat.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: When we were kids that little green mat that you like built your house on.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: That Lego mat was when I graduated college and everyone has their Lego mat and some people have a couple of different Legos on that mat because they studied something very specific marketing or business or, you know, science or whatever right, I didn't.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: I was always a generalist.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: I was interested in a lot of things but nothing really pulled me in in college and professional education.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: So when I graduated I had all these Legos kind of scattered on my mat and it took me all those years I just described to you to figure out how to organize those Legos and put them into a concise, certainly, story, but a structure I could work from.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: So I have this sort of like pyramid now, if you will, on my mat and it's the culmination to the makeup, if you will, of all those different experiences that I've had that now feed into how I work in a partnership capacity in my professional.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: You know my role, my state right now.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: So you know again, I never said I want to be a partnerships guy.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: I just really appreciate relationships and people and I, I think in some ways fell in love with the idea that partnerships is about people helping people.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: That's just important to me, and so perhaps that's why I'm such a maniac and talk about all the time.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: I love to hear that and I think what's very interesting.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you experience the same, but I think in general partnerships, people are generalists, because you need to know about a lot of things so much and need to orchestrate the whole motion.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: You need to know about products, about marketing, about sales, about customer success, everything.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: So you almost need to be a generalist by nature to be to be in partnerships.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: I think you have to like the best.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: People are right to your point and I get asked the question a lot, especially right now.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: So when we're recording this, it's November, you know, mid November of 2023, right.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Whenever you're listening to this, just for frame of reference and so, like even my team and the teams that I speak with our customers over at New Breed, etc.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: They're always asking how do I think about my go to market for 24?
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: How do I get more effective, build a better go to market, certainly, acquire better customers, make them stickier, etc.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: And I always say what's your partnership motion?
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Right, it's like that's who I am.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: And so many of them are like, well, we got a marketing and a sales team.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, right, cool, that's great, glad you did the thing that's necessary to run a company, but what else did you do?
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: And so when I think about that journey, you know, to your point in terms of touching everything, product is the foundation, that's the basement, the foundation of your home.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: And then you build your floors on top of that, and what a lot of people do is they build a marketing first floor and a sales second floor and they never put a roof on it.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: They never build.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: You know some landscaping like they never finish the property, if you think about it in this example, because they don't bring in partnerships.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Partnerships should be the glue that brings everything together Because we touch marketing and sales and product with our partners in a, you know, in a perfect ecosystem to drive them.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: I think the highest, the most high value in terms of output, high value in terms of, like, low cac, better LTV, customer engagements, so the business can grow more effectively and vicariously, the customers can be better.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: So if you can't understand, go to market collectively.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: It's really hard to be an exceptional partnership leader.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: You could be an IC, but my encouragement would be like go and learn all you can across the organization because the more cross functional you are, the more multi-dimensional you are, the more successful you can be as a leader.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah 100%.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: What I also found really interesting in your story, and what I really heard is like a red thread throughout your career so far, is really being obsessed with the customer, the end user of your partners.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: When you were in the restaurant business, when you were really so focused on the associations and their members and what they find important, but also when you were at HubSpot building the ecosystem.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: I think there is also something special because that is really what will attract your partners, because if you are obsessed with their end users and with their customers, then almost automatically your goals align because you're together making the end user successful.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting because people always talk about better together stories.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: It's like a fun thing to say in partnerships If you actually believe it.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: When I was at HubSpot, I believed that the partners in fact, interestingly enough, I worked with Newbreed many, many, many years ago.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: They were HubSpot's number one partner forever.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: They are right now.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: In part, I was responsible for their growth and their ability to go and win in the ecosystem.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: I remember my earliest conversations with the CEO, who is now a colleague, but at the time was my partner.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: His name is Patrick Buttsko, a brilliant guy we always talked about.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: It was really like three things.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: One, how do we play the game together?
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: It's never about verse each other.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: It was always like how do we do the best possible things to play the game of partner, go to market?
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: That was alignment and that was support and that was energy.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: It was all good stuff.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: The second was how do we stay innovative for our customers?
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: It was never about let's sell more.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: It was never about to elevate in the ecosystem.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: It was always about how do we say innovative in our customers, which led to the third piece, the foundation, which was how do we keep that customer at the center of all that we do marketing, sales, cs, etc.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: The full life cycle.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Fast forward to today.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: I work at that company internally.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: We have a CRO, jonathan Berg brilliant guy came from a Wargate way and he too believes that we have a CFO.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: You know Danny Buttsko absolutely brilliant.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Same methodology.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: Taylor Forrest, our head of CS same methodology.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: We have all of these folks throughout the business that understand that the customer should be first.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: And so if you're a partnership leader and this is just who I am, it's ingrained in me at this point, it's in my blood if you don't focus on the customer first, then you're doing it wrong.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: But more important, if you don't put the customer as, like, the nucleus of what you do, so your decision making, all of your ideas, everything is about innovating, supporting and delivering the best possible outcome for that customer You're not going to win like and you're going to probably be pushed off of any opportunity you have over the long term, because it really is about the customer.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: And if you share that customer with another business ie partnership and you work on that together, then not only do you share the value, but you elevate, you multiply, you create leverage in those businesses to help that customer even more stickier, they're happier.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: All the things that happen because of it.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's such strength in getting such alignment within the company.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: Indeed, because I think a lot of people who are building their parking program or want to scale were very we're tending to very be very focused on the partner, which makes sense because those are the people we're most in contact with.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: But actually you can win parking short term, but if there's no long term value for the end user and the customer, then you will lose the end customers eventually and therefore your partners, because they want to grow together and if their value is not there for the end user, you're not growing together.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: So I really love that philosophy.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: It's interesting because it comes down to aligning your vectors.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: So Darmash, who's the CTO and co-founder of HubSpot, used to always say align your vectors.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: And I was young in my career when I started.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: I didn't really understand that in terms of perspective.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: I think he stole it from Elon Musk.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: I heard a rumor maybe Elon said it somewhere, whatever it is, somebody said it and it always came back to the idea that if your teams were rowing in the same direction, then the boat would move more effectively.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Right, if you picture like a rowboat, we can all understand that analogy.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: But more important is that if, while you're rowing, perhaps you drop a line on the water and behind you you tell like a little floaty right, like a little blow up thing, or whatever you want to call it, and on that is your customer.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: So now your teams are always bringing your customer along in that direction, always bringing that customer with you.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: And so the idea being that, instead of focusing on how do we make more money, how do we sell more software or service more customers, or whatever it is, how do we help our customer more effectively and how do we do that over the long term?
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: So we think about like mission vision today, innovate for tomorrow.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: You know all the fun things you hear in SaaS, in particular B2B SaaS, when you start to double down and say, but how do we do that at scale?
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: When you look at the partner component, like in terms of the bigger picture we're trying to draw here, the partner is closer to your customer.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: The partner owns their trust way before you ever will and way after you ever will right, and so really we should put the partner at the center, as you describe it, of our role and, in many ways, of the way that we interact with our customer.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Because if we're doing it right as leaders in B2B SaaS, we should be looking at the opportunity that sits in front of our customer and our ability to get more involved and drive more impact with that customer, which comes through not just doing a great job in our own company, like that's table stakes today, but looking for other businesses that are also helping that customer grow and scale and all the things that are important, and partnering with those organizations specifically to do that value delivery together.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think that's really when you put that partner in the center.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: That's where you drive the most value together.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Again, and I think prior to our conversation, we touched upon something interesting.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: You came with the term partner, market fit and I really liked it actually.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: Could you maybe elaborate a bit or how you would define partner market fit?
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: But then of course our listeners want to know how to find it and accelerate it.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, sure.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: No, I appreciate it.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think in some ways I like to think because this is my ego talking I like to think that I came up with this.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: I don't know that I did, but what I observed was that I got a lot of conversations early in my career of who are the right fit partners and before it became what's the right partner, go to market, which you hear more.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: So now depends on who you're talking to, but you hear more of that.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: It was always who are the partners, and I got frustrated with the idea that it was who and not specifically what do they do?
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: So it was like who are the businesses?
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: And all right, so fine, let's talk about partner market fits.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Keep it simple.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: When you engage with an organization, let's say you're, you know I always call it SaaS company A.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: We keep it simple, right, and you sell the customer a like really, really it's linear, it's straightforward values there.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Whatever you know that customer's already working with other businesses, like you would be, it would be silly to assume that they're not right.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: What you want to look for in your earliest customers you want to look for, you know, product market fit.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Let's make sure our product is delivering value and customers are buying and they can repeat by sure, fine.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: The second is let's look at the way that those customers are engaging with the product, because nine times out of 10, nine and a half times out of 10, I'd almost say 10 out of 10 for the most part, there are companies, providers and otherwise that are in some way touching that same interaction with your product.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Right there, like for HubSpot, is a great example.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Everyone knows this because it's a good use case in terms of it being an industry standard for a long you know a long time.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: They figured out that some of their most successful customers are working with marketing agencies to do the marketing work that their platform facilitated right Send emails, build blogs, develop websites.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: So what they did?
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: This guy, pete Caputa, brilliant ninja of a man, figured out through that observation and through a bunch of work that he could then go and say well, why don't we partner with these agencies to help them to better package, price seller software and then service our customer together?
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Let's go and do that together.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: It shouldn't be rocket science, as the B2B leader right now, to say who else is our customer currently working with?
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Are they touching our platform?
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Are they just simply another like company?
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: So do they provide some sort of an integration that helps the customer get more value?
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Do they do something that's completely different than what our actual platform facilitates?
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: However, they, too, are engaging with our buyer like they're delivering value period.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: That is early partner market fit.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: You define where those other companies are integrations, certainly, app based ecosystem opportunities, co-service, co-sell I should just say service and sell and look for those intersections where those businesses exist.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: You're going to guarantee it.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Like I would say if you don't find this, send me a message on LinkedIn and I will help you find this.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: Whoever's listening right, you're going to find that there's a pattern.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: It's probably that in your first 100 customers, 60% of them or whatever it is, 80% of them are working with this type of company.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Now you're trying to establish the type of partner market fit that you have, which is you're looking at type of businesses that are helping your customer.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: The next phase is to go and engage a few of them.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: So find the customers that are your happiest, your easiest to work with.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Have them introduce you to those partners or, excuse me, potential partners, those like businesses.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Get five of them, not 50.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Everyone wants to go and start their partner program immediately.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Right, ring the bell Like let's go.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, take a deep breath, don't do that.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Grab five, maybe seven.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Right, look for your early adopters.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Who's willing to work with your company and just break shit?
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: Who's willing to try and sell with you and screw it up?
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Who's willing to try and service with you and make a mistake?
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Fine, thank you.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Observe everything.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: I always describe the scientific method here.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Have your hypothesis If we work with this company, they will help us to sell or service or whatever better.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Right and frankly, service first is the best way to go to market.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Early partner market fit should not be how do we work with these companies to sell more of our software?
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: It should be how do we work with the companies that are helping to service our customer?
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Because that's the best way, certainly to increase retention all the things you'd expect in terms of KPIs but more specifically, to build foundational value for an ecosystem.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, you just throw in shit out there and hoping somebody sells it.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: It's silly, it doesn't work.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: And today, in today's market, you don't need people to go and say I want to work with you for 20%.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: You want them to work with you because they actually get benefit of working with your customer.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: So, to land the plan of my long statement here partner market fit early identifying in the like companies.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Second stage, obviously, is picking those folks that you should work with based on that criteria described and then running your experiments.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: The scientific method.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Your hypothesis is if I work with them, it would be better at this or that or otherwise.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Run the experiment, observe the experiment, iterate as you need to, and within six, nine, maybe 12 months, those five partners will have helped you build, and really built for you, the foundation of your partner ecosystem.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: And then what you do is you go get 25 the next half of the year and then the second half of that year you get another 25 and you programmatically scale to a point that is effective for a, frankly, for go-to-market needs.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: There is this methodology in partnerships that's lived for a long time.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Which is more is better, quality is better every time.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: And if you talk to any partnership leader, they'll tell you that 80% of all of their revenue comes from their top 20%.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: So stop spending time with the other 80%, optimize for the 20, which is what you can do early on, as I described, in being programmatic in developing partner market fit.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: You really need to scale your channel and your partnerships in the right way, and I'm fully on board with the piece about service, because indeed it does two things.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: On one hand, it's right now, in today's economy, the most important thing is customer retention and expansion.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: That's what everyone is looking at and that's exactly what you do with your service partners.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: You increase the usage and engagement on your product, you make sure that they get high net revenue, retention, more customer lifetime value, etc.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: And it's a great way to start a relationship with your partners, because you constantly have something to bring to them.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly, if you have acquired a new customer, you can let them do the service, etc.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: So that's how you build the relationship.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: And then, when you are ready within your partner program, to start resell or co-sell or whatever you want to do with in terms of selling there, then you always already have such a good bond with your partner that they are very willing to introduce you into their customer base because they already had a great experience with you.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: They'll do it for you.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: Like, more often than not, at that point of the evolution of the business, if you went service first, they're going to do it for you.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: They're going to all of a sudden say I got somebody I want to get in the software, great, let's do it.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: And it'll naturally develop that motion for you versus you trying to say let me go find a bunch of companies to sell our software for us.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: It doesn't work very well, absolutely.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: You said one sentence that I absolutely love.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: I think it should be marketing tagline Not who, but what do they do?
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I really like that, because always when we think about ideal partner profiles, stuff like that, we're in the who and we're demographics and stuff like that, but this is a very different way of looking at it.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Well, it's so whenever someone comes to me, this is a good a bit of a tangent relative to what we're talking about People.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: When I was really in my career, I didn't have a lot of support.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: I didn't have a lot of people that would like mentor me and support me and guide me growing up.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: So what I try and do now always this is just who I am as a person is I say yes, I'll take, I'll spend 30 minutes with anybody.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: I'll take 30 minutes and set it with anybody.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: And the advice that I give everyone when they say what kind of job do I want or kind of role do I want, really, really simple Kind of work do you want to do, who do you want to do it with and how do those two decisions impact the life you want to live around that role.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: The reason that's relevant here and I think about the partner identification exercise that you're running as you start to define partner market fit it's really important to ask the exact same three questions with a little twist right what kind of work should they do and who do I want to work with is equally valuable.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't change that meaning.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Do I want to spend my time with CEOs, heads of sales, like who are the people at that company?
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: That is the persona that closely aligns to, specifically, the third statement, which is and how do those two criteria set impact our customers?
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Because now you can say, I want to work with a, you know, b2b technology first agency that engages CMOs and CROs in our target audience, right, which is maybe B2B tech or manufacturing whatever, that understands that language, has expertise around it and can help us to speak their language and engage those customers in the way that they want to be worked with.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Like, that is a super specific persona and great identifying criteria set.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: And I started with what kind of work do they do?
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: B2b tech technology first agency?
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: So an SI, perhaps in some ways as well, and that was great.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: And then the second was who am I working with?
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: The team members that understand, right, who they can identify in terms of CRO, cmo those are our personas at our fake SaaS company we're describing from.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: So I think that's really important and, marketing aside, like people need to lean into that because it's the only way that we can go to market more effectively and we're putting, you know, the actual output itself, the outcome, at the center of what we do.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I really like this framework in terms of the questions to ask and I think it also perfectly.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: First of all, I think it's beautiful that you are doing that helping a lot of people and mentoring in such a way, but I think there's something big to learn for partner and channel account managers there as well.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: What if you would go to every conversation or every inbound you get with that mindset Like, okay, I'm just going to dedicate 30 minutes of my time to whomever partner I think is interesting or is reaching out to us, and this is the way I qualify them.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: I'm genuinely interested.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: I think qualifies maybe not even the right word You're genuinely interest, interested in those three questions in terms of which your partner, like how are they going to market and how can we bring that together towards the customer?
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: And therefore it is time very well spent, because afterwards you can quantify and qualify like is this the right fit partner to accelerate or to find partner market fit?
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: And therefore you get to like a very strong partner program in terms of how can we scale the parking program with the right fit partners and make sure that we don't lose partner market fit, because I think that's what I've seen happening sometimes as well, you had it, but you scale too fast afterwards.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: And then you lost it, so you need to refine it again.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: I talked to a lot of folks that say but I want to do what X company did, and I always just kind of chuckle and maybe again, this is my ego talking.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: But I always say you're smarter than that, Right.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: And I get the idea that, like emulation, and trying to do what someone else has done is the closest form of flattery and that's not untrue.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: But you got to be clear that that person, that business, that ecosystem was developed off of a specific moment in time and for a lot of the best, most successful ones, it's a lightning strike moment right place, right time, right observation, right partner right, market conditions, like I can say, right, a whole bunch here, right.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: But when you start to recognize that this is about people right, our businesses about people, partnerships is about human beings and it's about companies helping companies to help customers and it's all of the fun ways you like to describe proper go to market alignment the moment you're into that, conceptually you're not in a position where you're trying to sell instead of service, You're trying to it becomes an exercise in you know, my most favorite interactions, which is when we talk about the things that make us both happier and make us both win and help us both get to a better place.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: So if you're, you know, a partner manager, if you're a camera right now and you're listening to me talk like you should be going to your customer, your partner, and saying, how do you want to grow?
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: That was my favorite question.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: Like as an early cam, my peers always laugh and be like of course they want to grow and I'd say, yeah, but it's not about by how much and you know what, what your percentage of growth.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: I'd always say, what does growth mean to you?
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: How do you define the word growth?
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: I used to love the response because one partner would say, man, I want to have the biggest company ever in the history of companies.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: They'd be like cool, so we need to get some new revenue.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: I had one guy at work me at one point.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: He said I want to build a 200 person company in the town that I grew up in for three reasons.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: I want to put some infrastructure into a town that doesn't have a lot.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: I want to provide 200 jobs to people in a community that helped me get to where I am.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: And I want to kind of turn my nose up a little bit to folks that I couldn't do it here, Brilliant.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: That's a very different motivation, right.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: We make it about the partner themselves, their business, the outcomes they're looking for, and that's just.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: That's the fun moment, that's that lightning strike, energy ball that you get when you find those opportunities for interaction.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: It's a start with why, right From Simon Sinek, it's just in everything in life, it doesn't matter if you look at your personal life, you look at business.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: If you look at partnerships, it's a great way to state it.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: There was one question that I was wondering about.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: Because I think that's so interesting because first you've been 10 years at the site of building the partner program and now you're actually working at the solution provider, where you're on the receiving end of the partner program.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: I'm super curious, like, how do you experience it from that side?
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: And like, are there certain things or personal needs you notice right now in your current role where you're like, hey, this is where I should actually want more help or things could be different, etc.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: Or but also, of course, what is very good from the program?
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: Now you're on the receiving end.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: I think it's interesting because I have been fortunate to see both sides, to your point, the front end.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of assumptive behavior, I think, on both parties.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: It's odd actually.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: I sit in meetings sometimes now and I have to decide which hat I have on almost.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: Am I the software company thinker right now?
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Am I the solutions provider thinker?
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: Which brain am I using when you start to recognize that Fundamentally I think inherently programs are flawed because you're not aligned, because you don't have clear insight into what the other party is thinking.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Like I am this unicorn in that sense not to be self aggrandizing, but like I'm unique because I've seen both sides of the game and because of that, you know I can empathize with what both parties say.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: So when one party says we got to sell more and the other one says, but why?
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: I can argue that.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: When the other party says we got to service more and the other one says, but why?
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: I can argue that.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: I think what I've observed more than anything is that we need to be on both sides of the equation, as partner leaders and as partners, much more intentional around empathy and much more clear in our understanding of the value of why we're doing this work together.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Like it's very easy to make the assumption that because we sell stuff, because we service stuff and keep it at service value, but getting down to the very specific details of what matters to them, why do they care about this?
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: What actually is helping this partner or this SaaS company to be better?
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: And then, again at the core of it, listening to the customer more, like on both sides of the coin.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: I will openly say I don't think I ever listened to the customer enough and I don't think I ever could because I don't have time in a day I've got 40 things in my plate every minute.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: But when you start to say it really is about the customer, like we're not just here to build the business, we're here to solve problems and overcome challenges and build better outcomes and deliver growth and lifts and all the things that matter, and we keep that the center of it and then we study it.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: We got to be a student of the process and of the organizational interaction.
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: Again, I wish I had more time for this.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Like I think there's probably a whole career in studying programs, but I think ultimately my advice would be like, if you're a partner, leader, listening, be intentional about that Go, listen to your partners and don't just listen to hear words.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: Listen with the intent to understand, ask questions to get to the root of it.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Don't just send a little survey, like don't just have a one-on-one once a year, like be very clear about that.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: Your partners are going to tell you what your customers need.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: I would say talk to your customers more.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: The customers are going to tell you what your partners are doing well and what they're not doing well.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: Your partners are going to tell you what your software is lacking, what your services are lacking.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: Listen to them more and from the software side I think it's a little bit more humble.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Like I can tell you how they worked in software companies, that there's a little bit of ego that comes with building some cool shit.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: This product is awesome, it's going to change the world and like forget that.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: And maybe it did.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: That comes with a good example.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: And Bell Marketing was revolutionary and their platform was absolutely the catalyst for that.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: No, knock on it at all.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: But it's still just software and we have to remember that with that interaction, that the dollar that moves around between all of us, we have to be conscious of the why.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: To your point, we just sort of start to talk about a little bit.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: And so my guidance, my advice, my feedback, my experience would be everyone should start in league with empathy, everyone should listen more and talk less and everyone should really focus on why are we doing this every day.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: And if we can keep those three things in the front of our mind, I think we can have a better ecosystem, a better world perhaps a little bit, you know, a dreamer in that sense, but better overall, for sure.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: Absolutely love it.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: I think that's a great closure of this episode.
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: I learned a ton today, Barrett.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for sharing.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: If our listeners want to learn more about you, or maybe your podcast like what's the best place where they can find and connect with you.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: I'm a LinkedIn guy.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: It's been a great conversation and, like, for folks that want to continue it, go and connect with me on LinkedIn.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: I've got a pretty strong effort to post my own show every week.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: It shows up there.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: It's on YouTube, spotify, apple, all the places you'd expect it to be.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: But for me, that's where I can have a conversation, because professionals are there, partnership leaders are there.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: And don't be shy Like I mean this genuinely if you're new to the role, you want to get in the role or you've been at it for 30 years.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: I've talked to folks at all ends of that spectrum and had brilliant conversations.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: My show is called Outcomes.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: It's about conversations with operators that have been there, done the work and have a story to tell about it.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: It's very tactical and very specific.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: In that sense, I just really enjoy talking about this stuff.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: I'm glad I could share my story today and thanks for having me on.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: It's been great.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: Thanks very much.