Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 073 - Laura Padilla - How to Build a Channel Program from Scratch

Transcript

073 - Laura Padilla - How to Build a Channel Program from Scratch · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries around channel and partnerships on a weekly basis.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: My name is Alex Whitford.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channex.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: I'm very excited this week to welcome our special guest, Laura.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Laura, how are you doing?
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Hi, alex, nice to see you again.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I'm excited to be here.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you for inviting me.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to have you on.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Look, I'm.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Obviously we've crossed paths at Zoom, but you've had quite the career before that.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Love it if you could walk us through what you've done and where you've been.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Awesome, yeah.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: So Alex and I worked together at Zoom on this part of the channel team there for four years, helped to take the company public and grow that team from about four when I started to I think we were a little over 340 people or so after we left, so huge spike.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Before that I was at a company called Nutanix and I ran technology alliances there.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Before that I was at Box and helped build their channel strategy and model, and before that I was at Riverbed, which I was both in the technology alliances team and the channel team at Riverbed as well.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: So kind of a mix of infrastructure companies and SaaS companies as well and so long history of being in tech and really being part of disruptive technology, which is what I've always been interested in doing.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: I was going to say there's some heavy-hitted names there in terms of disruptive technology Riverbed, zoom, box, nutanix all in their own way really helped carve out a really particular place in the tech space.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: That must have been a fun journey and fun companies to be a part of.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, super fun and great people.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: I always feel like those types of companies always attract really smart driven people, and so I've had so many amazing colleagues I've learned from over the years too.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: And so building a channel program completely from scratch at Box.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: You've developed lots of benefits pricing models, incentives.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: What were your biggest learnings through building such a complicated process?
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Well, I think in general and, alex, I'm sure you know this well aligning with sales is probably the most important thing and making sure that you're aligned with the sales leadership and everything from where does direct sales interact and the channel starts and stops.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: I think really having that discussion, mapping that over the customer journey, is super important, right?
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Because I think that's where in every company I've been at, that's where the issue is.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: If you don't map the customer journey and say, okay, where do we insert partners and at what point do we want them to start getting involved, and having clarity around that, you run into a lot of problems in the field and hopefully you're aligned on that as well with the direct sales team.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: So at Box again, they were a completely direct organization.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: When I joined, channel was a brand new thing that they wanted to do.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: I own programs and operations as part of that, and so really how to just start, and it was the first time I had built a channel program from scratch as well.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: So I spent a lot of time with leaders that I respected within the channel, asked them how they would do that.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: I think my naivety a little bit was also helpful, since I was really young and new at doing that and not knowing that SaaS that channel and SaaS was also very new and I kept getting advice like no one's done this before Laura, you shouldn't take that job.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Like you know, you're just going to fail at it because you know nobody can do channel and SaaS because of the operational issues.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Provisioning it's not like a hardware business where the distributor is just taking something and shipping it, which is the old model.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: Delivering software in a SaaS model was pretty novel in the channel at the time and so from there I took some of the things that people were doing in traditional models, you know, like the discount model and so forth and deal registration and all those things that are traditional to the channel business.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: We did have some of that and the reason why we were doing specifically like deal registration is we want to just have visibility into what was coming in and because also the direct team there was it was all direct also helping push alignment with the direct sellers so that a deal would come in, they would see it, they'd have to review it, they'd have to engage with the channel partner and so forth.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: So we had MDF.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: We started doing some marketing development funds.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: We were in the process of building a partner portal, but everything was manual, everything was just on a word doc, you know, being sent in and so forth, but I would say the number one thing was really alignment with sales, especially with a direct heavy company, and making sure you're aligned with the sales team, understanding where the channel starts and stops and then eventually being able to figure out, you know, do you want to have a channel heavy portion of the business that you're driving towards?
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: And so I would say you know those things are probably the most important and some of those aren't new to the channel leaders who are listening today.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: But I can't emphasize enough how just making sure the customer journey is mapped against the channel one.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: I'm smirking as you say.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: I'm sure that's not something new to a lot of our listeners.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: I know I've had that fight previously in my career.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: There's listeners smiling now because that's their job.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: Basically they're having that fight.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: You touched on something really interesting how much of the business should come from channel.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: We're hearing Microsoft, google, aws talking about 100% of business being partner sourced or partner supported.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: In your vision, in your world, is there a right number and for, or is there?
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: How do you go through that process to understand how much of a business we should be working to be in channel supported at least?
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: I think that really depends a lot on every company and the business they're running.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: The technology they have.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: We're in an interesting place right now in technology, with AI in general is so new.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: It's disrupting everything.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: I mean it's equivalent to when the internet came around right, you could think about that and when people were going from on-prem into the cloud and how disruptive that was, and we saw so many channel companies either go under if they weren't innovating right or companies having to completely change their sales model because of the cloud.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: And so I think we're going through a similar process right now with AI.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: So I think that channels and partners are going to be even more important than they ever were because of it.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: And so if I were starting a company today, I would probably just start integrating partnership from the beginning of the journey, and I know there is different phases now that I'm in the VC world.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: About product market fit you can't really help a third party sell your product if you don't have product market fit yet.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: So I don't know if there's a role there.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: They could probably be consultants and help advise you as to how you reach certain markets and talk to certain customers as you're going through that exploration of product market fit.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: So I would say, pass that, and once you're starting to gain some momentum with customers, it's only going to be accelerated if you put it into the DNA from the beginning.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: I just got off the phone, for example, with one of our companies and they were talking about Laura, we're thinking about just sending all of SMB to the channel.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: What do you think about that?
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: How do I do that?
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: And my answer was first, we should financially model it and make sure that it makes a lot of sense.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: How many customers do you have today through in that category of SMB?
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: What does it look like every quarter?
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: How many are you closing?
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: What does the ACV look like?
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: And then we were also talking about, well, what do we want channel partners to do?
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: And there's several motions you could think about, but the two big buckets would be selling which is on their paper or services delivery right or both.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: And so then we were actually talking about what would the makeup of their ideal partner look like, what capabilities we want them to do?
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: And then, yeah, the goal would be eventually their whole SMB would go through 100%, be partner-led and driven.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: And so those are the kinds of discussions I would say you should be thinking about.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Are there segments you want to go through at first?
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: But the biggest takeaway, I think, is that, because everything is being disrupted right now, I talk to CIOs almost daily and they're very confused, right, how do I do this?
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: What LLM models do I use?
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Do I do AI today or not?
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Do I buy an AI application company or do I just build the stuff myself?
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: And who are they going to ask?
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: They're going to ask partners a lot of the time for this to come in and consult and help them deliver these services.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: So I do think the role of partners today is going to be even more critical than it was in the past.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the point I'd layer over the top of that as well.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: We've seen a and maybe I'm being slightly biased with my British hat on, but we've always seen a big shift towards channel.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: Once you start to enter Amir and APAC, right, I think it's a more channel and partnerships led business.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: Multiple taxation, multiple legal, multiple language adds complexity and it drives a requirement to have their channel.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: And I think what's really interesting is, while AI is obviously going to speed up and especially generative AI is going to speed up creation of content that people and people dynamic becomes is still required, and so I think we're going to see and we're experiencing it.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: You're going to see a leaning out of direct go to market motion as you can replace some of that functionality with AI, but then you're still required to have those personal relationships because once product and price is evened out, we start to buy from people and so the businesses that do that extremely well.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: Microsoft is obviously front of mind, given the open AI piece and having the largest channel in the world.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: How you start to fuse those two pieces together, microsoft's going to be very interesting how they explore that.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: Their co-pilot solution, which is embedded into Office 365, that's being layered into the biggest channel in the world.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: How those two pieces come together, it's going to be an interesting watch over the next couple of years.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, and I actually think right now is a really fun time to be in the partnerships world, if I'm being honest, because there's so much being generated right now.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: People are really excited to be a part of that and, like I said, customers are just asking for help.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: They don't know where to start 100%, and so you were responsible for partner ops programs and BD within the channel team at Zoom during the pandemic and we both experienced sort of the biggest tailwind of all time, I think.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: How do you handle and maintain sanity such a massive spike in demand and request from partners?
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Well, I don't know if we tried.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: I mean, there were days that I'm not going to lie, we're really really hard and I'd get on Zoom with my team members, lots of tiers, lots of people really upset just because the massive amount of volume that we had to just handle overnight that we were not ready for and couldn't do, and so so we had leadership meetings just with my direct team almost daily during that time period Just to get feedback what's going on, how's everybody doing, how are people handling things?
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: And just the number one thing we talked about was focus and prioritization.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: We needed to make sure that the things that were the most important we were gonna take care of and we couldn't take care of everything and so some things we did have to let go.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: And unfortunately, there were times during that period where people were really upset at us customers, partners because we weren't being responsive and it was just because of volume.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: To put things in perspective, the company grew like 360% over that time period, but the channel we grew over 700%.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: So we were almost double what the direct side was doing during that time period.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: And it was interesting because myself and the CRO at the time he was shocked because he said I thought the opposite was gonna happen, because people just want their licenses right away, go direct to Zoom, cut out the partner, do what they need to do, and it was the opposite.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: People were looking even more towards their partners to be able to help them implement the service, think through how they wanted to move to hybrid, provide them consultation on what that model should look like, and I think we're gonna see something similar with AI.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Why I've been saying that as well.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I think prioritization, focus, making sure you're really and also checking in on people.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: We were very good about, well, trying to tell people turn off your laptop, go to sleep, get some sleep, do what you need to do, make sure you're okay and focusing on the people aspect of it was really important too.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's interesting that you sort of pulled the two pieces together around AI and COVID.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: I think that's why I'm so bullish around the channels going to win, because we saw a global pandemic.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Business critical communication had to happen while people were working from home, and even then people were slowing down and saying, hang on a second, let's make sure we're running this through the people that we trust.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: There's lots of communication out there around or there's lots of fear happening at the moment, so we need to go back to what we know, which is we trust partners.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: We trust our partners, we trust our team.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: They've been supporting us for years and so we didn't see that huge spike or that outside spike in the direct go-to-market motion.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: We saw the outside spike in the channel go-to-market motion because when push comes to shove, I'm going to go where I trust, and AI is, in some areas, as scary new, innovative as what happened through COVID, and so people are going to fall back on what they know, and that's the people that they've had those long-term relationships with.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: That's right, I completely agree.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: And so to shift space slightly away from channel but more to alliances.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: You built two technology alliance programs, one at Riverbed and one at Nutanix.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: We at Chanix are seeing alliances and channels merge.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: Alliance strategy and channel strategy has almost been separate and one was happening in a separate go-to-market motion, built, I think, in a perfect world.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: If you were building it from scratch, you'd have alliances coming together and then a unified channel strategy happening between alliances underneath.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: How do you see that world coming together?
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: I would say, the calls I get the most around leadership calls is this hey, we want to merge alliances and channel.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: You have that background Right now.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: We have different leaders.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: It's not working.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: How do we merge it?
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: It's because of the advent of the platform, a platform story.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: So when you think about how do you open up your product to be more extensible, to have APIs and SDKs and everything that comes with that, you can't look at these things in silo anymore, especially with AI now too, and when you're thinking around how do I accelerate revenue with my product or products, there are companies and partners and the partners also, I think that have DNA that are a bit more technical and services related are also gonna win versus those that just sell the vanilla solution that's there today, because customers don't want that anymore.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Like they're going to say like, if we look at Zoom, they're gonna say, oh, okay, I want my licenses for the meetings product, but hey, you know what I'm also thinking about?
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: The video engine and using the SDK for some other internal applications that I wanna build and customize that and I wanna integrate all those things and make sure they talk to each other, and so just having those types of conversations.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: You need channel leaders today who are also somewhat technical and understand the products and understand the value proposition and how customers are using your product in a whole solution sense and what those use cases look like, and then you'll build your revenue models and your channel models according to what how the customers are using it.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: So absolutely and that's also a discussion I would have to channel leaders today and I kind of don't like this word channel for that reason because I think it has this connotation of like the old school kind of partner executive that only does kind of one thing.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: But I would say that you know, make sure you're very close to the product teams today and understand.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: You know what they're building, what they're doing and why.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: You know product management is your friend, not just spending time with the revenue organization.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: You have to really understand what's being built and why and who are the partners that you're gonna need to spend time with, both from an integration point of view as well as a selling motion.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: My sort of hypothesis for how I'm what roles will become more important as alliance and channel come together.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: And the role that's front of mind for me is marketing.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Because we can take that very unique, customized message that, if we take Zoom as the example, okay, everyone understands the meeting product, that's fine.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: But hey, HSBC have deployed it like this, whereas you know, Coca-Cola have deployed it like this.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: And here's the real intricate detail.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: Marketing is how you take those stories out to the masses and almost shortcut channel enablement.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: Right, Because what you do is you go straight to the end user with a message and say this is the art for the possible, and then those more tech savvy partners are the ones that are able to really deliver that value.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: How do you see marketing playing a role in confusing alliances and channels together?
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's super critical and important because marketing, the core of marketing, is understanding your audience.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: That's it, that's the bottom line of what marketing is all about.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: And so in the channel world, you have kind of two audiences that you have to think about the actual end user, who's consuming the product and what they're doing, and the partners who have to position it and actually also sell their services or what value they provide along the way as well.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: In bottom line, everything is marketing.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: How you understand how it's being consumed and how it's going to be delivered are just super important.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Especially today, in the world again of AI and how everything's being disrupted, learning to provide the right value through the right messaging that's going to resonate with people is even more critical.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: The other piece as well.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Right, I think that there is a huge difference between hey, here is the product integration story and here is the demand.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: I think one of the things that Zoom taught me better than anything is you can have the world's best constructed or world's worst constructed channel program.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: If the end users demand it, it will come right.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: And so why I think it's so important for marketing is hey, it's great that we've got these two logos together on a banner.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Who cares it's?
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: What is the message that's creating the demand at the end user level, that then the channel wake up and say okay, we should really be heavily investing in this messaging.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you have, but I have.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: I've worked at really small startups where the product did not take off and the product was not well adopted, the message didn't resonate, for whatever reason, and it's really hard to do your job on the partnership front and do good at it if you don't have that.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And so, yeah, everything you said is absolutely true.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, the product in and of itself has to resonate for us to be able to layer on top the acceleration that we'll be able to do through a channel effort for sure.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: Earlier in the podcast we touched on product market fit.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: We're sort of evangelizing channel market fit or partner market fit, which is at the beginning.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: You're building a really, really minuscule, deep channel, but you're not going broad Once you've got that first inclination of like okay, this is starting to work with three or four partners in the US, or maybe even 10, 20, 100.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: And now we need to scale this global.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: One of the continuous topics that we see at partnerships unraveled is how the hell do you really scale a channel?
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: How do you really take it broad?
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: I'd love to get your input on how you think that can be done successfully.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, first of all, again aligning with what the company strategy is, because it's a funny chicken and egg thing here on the channel, because if you move too fast on the channel, on the channel piece of it, and you don't have the resources, the support of the company, sometimes I've been in situations where they expect oh, I'm just going to assign a bunch of partners in India and they should be giving me $100 million in revenue within a year just because I signed them up.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: It's like no, you have to support them, have resources, have training, have people on the ground as well, to be able to support their efforts, to let them grow, and so being able again to have internal alignment, but then be able to say we're going to focus on these areas for the year.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: Here are the markets we're going to go big in and here's how we're going to invest in those markets.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: And having that clarity and that plan is the primary thing you have to do.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: Once you do that, I do think the people part is really important, and what I mean by that is, if I want to go into England, I know that if I hired Alex, he knows all the right partners and has all the right relationships and we can quickly get this set up.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: So I do think having the right people that you hire, who understand the market you're trying to go into, and those partners also, will get you there a lot faster than if you don't have that today.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: And I talk about people a lot in some of these talks that I have too, because the bottom line is, if you don't have the right people in your organization who understand these partners and the skillset but also are nimble and have the right culture, so at Zoom or at Box, if you're at a high growth startup, you have to have people that are OK with chaos and are constantly problem solving or figuring things out.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Oh, this didn't work.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Ok, I'm going to pivot now and move to something else being flexible, who are risk takers as well, and OK with not everything turning out all the time, and as leaders also.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: I would say that you have to also support your people to let them try things out and fail sometimes within guardrails, of course, but then pivoting and doing that as well.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: And so, to answer a question around, scale is one is the core of it is having the right strategy and plan.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: That's just at the core.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: So deciding these are the markets.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: Here's what we want to do, layering on the investments on top of that.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: I always say that operations are such an unsung hero within the channel, and I would say at Zoom, which Alex knows was super painful, it was the number one thing that I think inhibited our growth was just our operational model was not there to support channel, it was a direct model and we were considered kind of a second thought until we were proving ourselves.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: And once we got there, it was almost like we were taking off so fast.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: We were at least a year or two behind the direct operational piece and that was very painful.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: And so I would say the operational piece is super important, because an absolute can inhibit growth if you don't have the right operational model, support what partners are trying to do and your internal teams.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: And then third would be the right people to go out and recruit the right partners.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: And so I mean what I described as Nirvana.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: Nobody gets all three of those things at the same time.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: If you're not able to do that, then you should be able to scale this in a positive way.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: The one thing that I'd sort of add to that the two sides.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: You're right.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: The first piece is people are your brand.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: You can invest in everything, but once you get into the channel, it doesn't matter how good your brand is.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: Your brand is my face right At the end of the day, it's who's walking the floor, it's who's coming in Is, if I screw you on a deal, hey, that's it.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter how much investment this in, you are just the brand that screwed me on the deal.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: So so, as far as I'm concerned, that's who you are for all time, and so you've got to be so precise with who you hire, who is going to be the face of your company, because if you get that bit right, then you're in a.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: You're in a good spot, you're in a pretty good spot.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: You're going to meet the most companies just by making those critical hires.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: The thing that I always find interesting over the top, let's use your hundred million in India Forever correcting people's opinions that you don't just sign partners and and hey, it works.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: For me, the most underutilized motion is opportunity creation.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: I really see over the next few years that it's great.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: Sign those partners and then create opportunities with them and having a sales and marketing motion together where they really understand.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: Are we breaking into new customers?
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: Are we signing into existing customers?
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: Is there an attachment play?
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: How are we creating those opportunities and giving them demand generation content that allows them to turn that on at scale?
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: I think that's the only way that you can really go wide.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: Right, oh, completely 100%.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Because I think around at zoom how we went from four people to 300.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: And then grew it double what the direct team was doing over cove.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: It was really the team.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: It was all of you know.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: You are part of that team, you and everybody else.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: There is no way that if we didn't have the right people there who had the right relationships, knew what they were doing and has a strong team, that we would have been able to do that.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, 100%, and I think that rapid growth gave me a few gray hairs and it was an unbelievable experience.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: I think it's.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: It's stressful, painful and enjoy us right, because you get some of those biggest wins.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: I think I I've always been a big believer you build your reputation through the bad times, not the good right.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: When everything's easy, breezy, everyone looks like a genius, but we had to play a bit crafty and and and you know, do things a little bit smart to get the wins where we could get them.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: And I know I've got relationships, they partners and end users who are thankful for the hard work that the team Went through to make that happen, because I think we're all fighting with fire.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: At that point it was.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: It was complicated and good fun.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, agree and then, laura you were just talking before the podcast actually started about how you're helping businesses build their sort of first understanding of how to build a partnership model.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: I'd love you to give you the opportunity to talk about the work that you're doing.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so, yeah, I was talking to Alex about this, so I've now moved into the VC side of the business.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: I work for a company called Sapphire Ventures and we're a broad stage investment firm.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: That means we come in past the stage of product market fit, so about 10 million in ARR and above is where we start investing, so like a series B or C and so forth.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: And, yeah, I spent a lot of my time with our founders and CROs and partnership leaders on how do I build a partner model, what do I do, how do I begin this process, and so A lot of it is really me asking questions about what are you trying to do?
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: What are your objectives?
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: What do you need right?
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: Are you looking for partners for more pipeline?
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: Do you need services delivery from them?
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: Are you looking for them to get you into markets that you're not in today?
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: What is the expectation for partners to do?
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: And really understanding that, first of all, and then second, is well, what level of investment are you willing to make?
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: Right, you know, and is our sales teams on board about working closely with partners?
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: How are we going to send them in the right way?
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: How are we going to build an engagement model so that they know when to bring a partner in or not and, you know, make it a process that everybody has agreed to.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: And so so, yeah, I was telling Alex that you know I had gotten off the phone with a partner leader about building their SMB business, and before that I'm speaking to another company, an AI company actually that we work with that, helping them build out their services delivery model as well through partners.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: They right now have a PS organization.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: It's not scaling and saying how do I do this in a cost effective way?
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: And I said, well, it has to be through partners.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: You know, if you look at what service now and Salesforce are doing, you know 80, 90 percent of all of their business are partner touches and there's a reason for that, because it's massive scale that they're, that they're giving now.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: And so this company you know I've been spending time with them around what is a services delivery model look like, you know, and so talking to them around different types of options around.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: You know partner delivered, which is partners do everything scope of work, deliver the services themselves, price and everything versus partner outsourced is what I call, which is the company will outsource to the third party the actual work, but they're going to do the billing and the scope of work and collect and pay the partner on the on the back end and then going through the other models that the company is going through.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: But but yeah, it's been actually really exciting to be able to talk through a lot talk with founders and companies around what they're trying to do and accomplish with partnerships and then walk them through a matrix of different options and then say, well, you know, here's the customer journey again and what are you trying to do and where can we insert partners to maximize the effect?
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: Look, I think for me, I'm a I'm a business nerd, I'm a channel nerd and I'm a partnerships nerd.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: And I think the way that you can the level of complexity is to understand, hey, what is just partnerships and the different flavors that that means for each business, and that's a really insightful piece.
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: Right To understand that there is an enormous difference between a services led organization versus, hey, we need, we need pipeline, right and just that.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: The.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: That one different channel is all that one different nuance.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: You're going to build wildly different programs, wildly different channels, higher different size teams, different specialists, and so you being able to guide businesses through those nuanced decisions is going to be critical to that long term success.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and like the discussion I was having with one of the partner leaders this week when they were saying, well, you know, we want to build sender SMB to to certain partners.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: We have these boutique partners that we were thinking about sending them to, and I said, okay, well, do they have they ever sold a SAS product?
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: No, do they have CRM systems, billing systems that can handle a SAS business?
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: Probably not.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: I said I wouldn't do it so because it's super complicated from a billion operations point of view.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: And so having just helping them think through what is the ideal partner profile you know what are the things that we need to make sure that capabilities partners have to make sure it's successful is also interesting.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: Because I think, alex, I think we take for granted this stuff is just part of our vocabulary every day, that we just ask these questions and figure this out.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: And through this process, it's been interesting to me to see, oh, wow, this isn't like an innate thing, like I think of it as easy.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: I'm probably not saying anything new to people, but people who have not, you know, lived in this world, it isn't to them, and so the things that we actually just have them think through, they'll say go wow, I never thought about that.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: You're right.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: Like I can't sign that partner.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: This is going to completely ruin the sales process.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, you have to really think through these things.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: And what's so important there, and I think this is the thing that people consistently underestimate with partnerships, you can put nine months of work at hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, into getting partners live and then find out, oh my God, their CRM wasn't set up properly.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: And then you've just burnt that money, right, you've burnt that time, you've burnt that money, you've burnt that investment, and so having that understanding ahead of investing that time is going to be critical, especially when you're at 10 million ARR and you want to get to 30 in one year, right?
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: That's an incredibly difficult thing to do and you can't make those mistakes.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: Well, and you don't want to have building illegal issues later when they can't track, you know, upsells or renewals or collect the money appropriately, and then and then we had a lot of that stuff in Zoom.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: You know too, and that was one of the things that I learned being burned so much and not making some of those correct choices at the beginning is being able to tell people here are the mistakes I made that I wouldn't do again.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: I'm sharing them with you, so you don't make them.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: Look, laura, that's been wonderfully insightful in a true partnerships model.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: You're now a partner of the podcast and we are always asked our guests to almost invite the next guest on.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: So who do you have in mind and who would be an amazing guest to have on the next episode of partnerships Unraveled?
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: So one of my mentors and someone that I look up to, who I think it was like the Godfather of partnerships in the Valley, is Avinish Sahay.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: I was on his podcast.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: He built the App Exchange at Salesforce and was the partner leader at ServiceNow, went to Google Cloud for a while and always picking his brain on things and you know asking him for advice and he's just has so much wisdom so he should come on.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: Amazing.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: Thank you, laura.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: It's been an absolute pleasure and I hope our listeners have enjoyed this episode of partnerships Unraveled and we look forward to next week.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: Thanks, then.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: Thank you.