Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 090 - Partnescore - 7 Predictors of Partnership Success

Transcript

090 - Partnescore - 7 Predictors of Partnership Success · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of our channel and partnerships on a weekly basis.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: My name is Efe and I'll be your host in this episode.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: I'm excited to announce our special guests Owen McKee and Dave Ward from Partners4IO.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: How are you guys doing?
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: We're good.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: We're good, effie, great to see you, as always, looking forward to an enjoyable chat right Exploring all the new things that are happening in the channel.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's definitely an exciting time to be in the channel and, for those who are uninitiated, could you give us an introduction?
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Who are you guys?
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Why should we be listening to you?
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Owen, do you want to go first?
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, actually it's probably better for David to go first.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: David's the founder and CEO of the company.
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: Perfect, I'm Dave Ward.
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: I'm excited to be here.
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: I'm founder and CEO of Partnerscore.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: So Partnerscore is a tech platform.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: We provide a constant rating for the strength of a business partnership.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: So really looking at the humans in the relationship and understanding what's not working and what is working well within a partnership.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Just worth mentioning, we founded the company in 2020 right during covid, actually, when communication was pretty strained between businesses, and we came up with a new method to measure this in real time and really start to bring together the different people within partnerships.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: So I'm excited to talk to you a little bit more about sort of the human relationship today I'm looking forward to it oven yeah, from my perspective, um, if you know, I've been around the channel for for a long time.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Um worked with a whole host of different technologies based here in the US and I'm helping David and the PartnerScore team bring PartnerScore to the US, getting those initial introductions and really taking the technology to a broader audience.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: I think there's a gap and I know we'll talk about it a little bit further in the podcast about how technologies are becoming more aligned and this reliance on intermingling and solidifying partners' tech stacks, and I'm helping the guys with that.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: So excited to be here, I love the podcast format and I think you guys do a great job.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you, I appreciate it.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: I think when we first had a chat, owen, I was kind of amazed by the things that you're doing, because you're bringing a new way of measuring the success of partnerships, because I think traditionally the partnership success was measured by three metrics.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: So looking at the revenue figures, doing quarterly business reviews and customer satisfaction surveys are also known as CSAT for short.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: But so you argue that this is not the complete picture, so there's a problem with this approach.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Maybe could you give us an explanation of where does this approach lag?
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, david.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: I mean, david, you've got that chapter and verse.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: I'm happy to jump in on that.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I mean, first of all, those three things you mentioned.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: They all have a really important role to play.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: So you know, revenue figures, quarterly business reviews, csat they're all really great things to measure.
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: But they only really work when you've got quite simplistic relationships and not too many of them, because actually you need to understand what's going on with the people that exist.
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: And when you've got a small setup, you can do that.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: You can get in touch with people regularly and you can actually understand what's going on.
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: But the real challenge comes when you start to scale either a partnership and they become more complicated and you start to bring in more individuals within that partnership, or you start to build more partners and suddenly the number of people that you need to touch on a regular basis to understand them grows exponentially and it becomes really difficult for a partner manager and also the partner leadership you know the channel chief to stay connected to what's going on on the ground.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: So we advocate measuring the relationship, the partner score, and we also see this as the leading indicator, which is the other critical aspect of this.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: So if you look at things like revenue, you know quarterly reviews and CSAT surveys.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: They're all lagging indicators.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: If you start to see your revenue figures have declined, you've already experienced the problem and it's a problem that you would have liked to have known about before you experienced it.
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: So what you find really?
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: With something like a partner score where you're tracking in real time, you know the human aspects of it, you're on top of whether that relationship's succeeding or not and if it starts to decline you can get in there early and fix it.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: Before that you have a hit on your P&L.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: You have to be data-centric In today's world.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: If you don't have data, then you're blind.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: And essentially what Partner Score are doing is they're giving you a greater depth on that data, they're testing that sentiment and they're broadening the contact within the partner relationship because they I mean you know this that the conventional relationship is a one-to-one.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: It's the channel partner manager that's in contact with the salespeople or salesperson within that partner environment.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: Broadening that sentiment actually identifies and qualifies some of the risk that you have in that relationship, not just the revenue, I mean all of the facets of what is going on in that business today.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: So, whether that's marketing, whether that's finance, you're touching all of these stakeholders within the partner environment.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: So revenue, of course, is critical, but sustaining the revenue and sustaining the relationship is existential in that program.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: And so because you're broadening the contact level that enables you to identify risk at an early stage and because and I don't know whether David mentioned that PartnerScore is quite unique in that from a communications vehicle, partner Score is quite unique in that from a communications vehicle it's doing all the basic things but it's in always-on environment, so the partner is able to make comments throughout that scorecard.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: So it's not your classic annual partner survey that no one really likes doing and people pay a little bit of lip service to it.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: You get it it's a 27-page document and you fill it in 20 minutes before it's due to due to be returned.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: This is providing a communication vehicle and I think that's the strength of it.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: It's a identification of risk, always on communication and really should be leveraged as a strong asset within partner relationships themselves yeah, one thing d Dave said that really resonated with me.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: I think that sometimes the people that stay up in it like that are positioned high up in the hierarchy in the channel.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: They may not always have, they may not always be aware of what's going on in the channel, especially when working with distributors and you work with hundreds of thousands of partners.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: Then the people who are making the decision or who are implementing the tools they don't necessarily have insights into the little nuances or the things that may be going wrong.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: And I think that's one of the things that Partnerscore provides that information to those people who are making decisions within a channel organization.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: So we kind of talked about the problem with the traditional way of measuring partnership success and as a solution to this, you guys came up with seven predictors of partnership success.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: So could you please tell us the story behind how these predictors came to life?
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, I mean to the seven predictors.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: They're really like the secret source behind Partnerscore's ability to track, so I'll give you a flavor for what they are.
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: So the communication things like commitment, credibility, mutual interest, social bonding.
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: So, looking at the people connection, things like conflict and cooperation.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: There's more information on our website if you do want to understand a little bit more about what they do.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: But there's seven different aspects of a human relationship as part of the business relationship that we can measure, and the creation of those actually goes back about 15 years ago when there was a piece of work done an academic piece of work actually initially, and it was done to try to understand what really drives predictability within partnerships.
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: Work was that the human relationship that exists between two companies is the leading indicator and the future success predictor for performance, and that's really powerful because if you know that, then you obviously want to build a stronger relationship.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: And as part of that same piece of work, the academic that looked into that, investigated this, also produced a way to measure it and it was a really complicated tool to start with, actually measuring 23 different attributes, lots of different measurements, and it was the kind of tool that you would run once a year and you would do a very in-depth study across your very large partner program and you'd understand what kind of technologies you might want to invest in.
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: You know where your focus areas might be to to really improve the performance.
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: Um, we wanted to take this within the current world, you know, 15 years on.
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: We wanted to build a real, real-time solution, something that was always on and something that could be tracked, so you could provide um a subset of this information to a partner manager or a channel chief regularly and they could actually act on it before it was too late.
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: And so we did a further piece of research and we looked at the 23 attributes and we managed to bring it down to seven.
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: And these are the seven things, the seven attributes of success predictors that you need to measure to get a feel for the whole human relationship that exists between the two companies.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: So those are the seven things that you'll see across our website and across our platform, and those are the things that are updated every day to give a partner manager and a channel chief kind of the information that they need yeah, that's very interesting, I love it, and maybe it's going to be a bit of a personal question and you know you may not have a specific answer to it, but out of those seven predictors, uh, which may also be good to to repeat one more time because I already forgot them, but I I'm my personal question to you is that which one do you think is the most important to you personally, or which one do you think is vendors or partners are struggling with the most?
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: yeah, so okay.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: So the seven I'll repeat them again, just because I did rather free those rather quickly.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: Um, so you've got commitment, so is the partner committed to to the vendor, essentially, um, communication.
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: You've got credibility, which would be you know, does the partner follow through all the things that they say they're going to do?
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: Mutual interest this is all about the strength of the commercial relationship that exists between two companies.
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: So are they both making money and do they see it as a fair and balanced relationship?
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: Um, you've got social bonding, so this would be does the account teams really provide the support that that they need to the other partner?
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: Um, and then you've got the last two, which are conflict and cooperation.
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: And so conflict kind of says what it is on the tin, and then cooperation is all about joint planning activities.
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: If I had to pick one for me personally, I would pick conflict.
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: And the reason that I would pick conflict is you know, there's a new world emerging within partnerships.
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: There's lots of talk about near bounds.
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: Conflict is there's a new world emerging within partnerships, there's lots of talk about near bounds and there's lots of complexity that comes with that.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: So you know, we're looking at, you know, the existing kind of channel structure.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: The simple channel structure of a reseller buying from a vendor is becoming much more complicated.
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: You know, you've got people that are influencing that transaction.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: Now there's more competition, so the roles are changing and actually what you really need to understand is, at a relationship level, are those roles and those partners helping each other or are they kind of jarring against each other?
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: So I would personally pick conflict, jarring against each other.
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: So I would personally pick conflict.
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: Um, but I would also like to say that in reality, um, no two, from our experience, no two businesses have one.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: You know, they all have a different depending on where they are in the journey, that the nature of um, the business that they are, the industry that they're in, they will all have a different marker at a different point in time.
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: Um, and they'll have more than one and those markers, a combination of markers, might help them understand what's going on.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: Um, and this might be a combination of markers that actually help them invest and track their investments in things like new technology and capability.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: So, um, slightly simpler view of that Effie.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: I think for me the most important one is the one that suddenly changes.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: So because you're in an always-on, the moment that you identify a significant change, and it doesn't matter which of the success pointers it is, that's a call to action.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: So that's where that priority lies.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: I mean, david's absolutely right, you know the conflict side of things is very important, but as a communication vehicle, because you're providing this in an always-on environment, the moment you see that change, that's a call to action, not just for the channel account manager or the partner account manager.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: It's a call to action for the business, because it could be someone in your internal finance team that you know we can talk about war stories, right, but you know someone in finance not getting rebates done, processed on time.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: That's an existential part of a business's cash flow and we know cash is king.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: So the partner relationship from a sales perspective can be great, but if finance aren't satisfied, then that's a risk to your relationship as a business.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: And so being able to provide that, I think because you're getting lead indicators, that's what's important.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: So today it could be factor A, tomorrow it's factor B, depends upon what I'm seeing in terms of change.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I fully agree.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: I get your point there, I think, because the good thing about measuring these predictors is that you can immediately see if there's a sudden change, and that's the thing that channel leaders and channel organizations should be focusing on.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: For my next question, I would like to learn a little bit more about how Partnerscore builds trust in partnerships and detects trouble before it's too late, and for this question, I would also maybe like to hear if you have any success stories, maybe with a specific vendor, that you could share with us.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah sure, stories, maybe with a specific vendor that, uh, that you could share with us?
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah sure, I mean, I think you know trust in partnerships is obviously it's something that I think is of growing value.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: You know it's always been high value, but I think there's.
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: You know, you look at stuff like the near-bound manifesto, you know, written recently by jared fuller.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: You know trust is the new data and you look at that and you think it's totally right, because you're in an environment now where you're being bombarded with data on prospects.
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: You know you've got the tools to go after them.
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: There's lots of noise and so naturally it comes back to which relationships, which partnerships, are going to drive the strongest wins based on trusted recommendations.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: So you know, I totally, um, totally buy, uh that manifesto, trusted new data.
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: I think it's spot on.
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: Um, we talk about, you know, partner score and being able to detect trouble before it's too late.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: Um, because it gives you a real-time view on the strength of the relationship.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: So we've talked a little bit on this call today about leading indicators and lagging indicators.
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: Well, the relationship being the leading indicator, it gives you the forewarning to understand exactly where there might be challenges and so you can fix those before it's too late.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: And the second thing that we do actually at partner score is we collect the information from partnership teams and the individuals that are important to those teams and we also serve it straight back.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: So we bring the information in, we build the metrics, we build a scorecard and then we serve that scorecard in real time straight back to the audience that participated in a kind of group format.
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: And so what that does is it allows a team, a partner team of two companies, not just one.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: So now the partners, both sides of the partnership, are getting access to this information and they're able to see it and therefore they can contribute and collaborate on the and they're able to see it and therefore they can contribute and collaborate on the information they're seeing.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: And that's how you kind of help uh, you help build that trust, um, before you have an impact to your pnl.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: So that's kind of how we, how we do it.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's also kind of similar to our approach in ChenX as well.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: I think you measure success on an overall level of a partnership and what we do here is we basically look at the leading marketing metrics from a partnership, for example, how well that partner's end users, how well their audience is resonating with the messaging from a specific vendor.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: How is that content being seen by their audience.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: So I think there's a lot of value to be seen there.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: The thing is, I feel like we track a lot of data but we don't necessarily know what to do with the data.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: I think that there's a lot of data everywhere, but then when it comes to actually analyzing it and coming up with actual outcomes and decisions, I think there's a lot of lack within the channel.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: I think that also there's a lot of talk about it recently as well, with the 360 insights, the ecosystem play, how we're becoming more integrated and making sure that the solutions within a channel space are not siloed, but they're integrated.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: The data is flowing between one another and I think Canon also has this map of all the technology in the channel space and there's tools like TCMA, incentive solutions, the PRMs, the traditional partner portals and Partner Score and ChenX also.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: We are both in this space as well.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: So as my last question before I let you guys go, I would like you to hear how you see Partner Score fitting as a part of an integrated solution within the channel partnership space.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: I'll start that off, david, and then you can wrap that up.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: I think you made some great points.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: If you're right, the marketplace is changing.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: Everything is data-centric.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: The challenge that I think organizations have today very similar to what you've just talked about is which is the data that's important, which is the piece that matters, and how do you get to that information.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: So if I'm looking at channel data management, I've got to make preparations for QBRs, I've got to drive incentives across that business.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: There's risk associated with all of that if the data is inaccurate.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: So, constantly, what you're looking at is to identify the right piece of data and make sure that that is accurate, and I think that's essentially what we're looking at is to identify the right piece of data and make sure that that is accurate, and I think that's essentially what we're doing.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: And that's the initiative I think people like 360 have taken and it's great to be part of that ecosystem to look at that and say all of these pieces matter, but it's getting that aligned and delivering that in such a way that it's meaningful to both sides both sides right, both parties.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: It's got to be meaningful for the partner and it has to be meaningful and consumable within the business to drive, cause, effect, impact and to deliver, ultimately, a positive partner experience, because if you don't have a positive partner experience, guess what?
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: They'll find another vendor that they work with.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: That is a positive experience.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: Um so, david, I mean over to you to wrap that up yeah, no, I think.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think, um, yeah, you're spot on with that really.
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think with with partner score.
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: You know we very much see ourselves as part of an integrated um solution.
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: I think, um, there's not many, not really any other solution.
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: That's exactly what we do, so we're kind of very complementary.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Alongside things, other tracking solutions, you know, other metrics and sources of information, so bringing that all together is really really important for us.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: So we're kind of keen to be part of the sort of best of breed type approach that 360 insights are taking and you know we're happy to be, be part of, be involved with that um.
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: But um, yeah, I think you know the other aspect really is thinking that the relationship and the human element, it runs across all technology, um, and technology has a big impact on that.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: So if you're thinking about bringing in you know different solutions, different solutions.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: You might be using Chanix for your marketing automation.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: You know 360 insights for your portal, maybe Superglue to enhance your partner engagement strategy.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: You want to know that all those systems in a connected way are working and actually a good way to do that is to understand whether the relationship is being improved or whether there are challenges around the relationship, across that connected stack, and I think that's something that's becoming quite difficult to do, and something like a partner score can provide that constant sort of check.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: You know, check to make sure that things are working.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: So monitor and check, uh, based on the relationship.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: Um, that's all I'd add really to that.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: So, uh, yeah, thank you I think that you need to think about that.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: In body terms, the first thing in cases of emergency that your first responders or medical staff do is they test the pulse.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: They test to see if there's a pulse and effectively that's what partner score are doing on a constant basis is testing the pulse of that.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: Is it doing what it should be doing?
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: And if not, what do we need to do from a corrective or a proactive perspective?
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: Getting ahead of that curve is very important.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: You know we live in a dynamic world today and this harmonization of technologies, I think is the future.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: We've seen that North Star.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: We're not quite there yet, but I think as an industry, we need to keep focusing on the evolution of technology and leveraging it to the full.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: And that's not one platform, that's multiple platforms harmonized to deliver that right result.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you for that.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: And us being a channel podcast and being in the partnerships, what we like to do to ask our guests to give us a referral.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: So what we like to ask our guests is to invite the next guest on the podcast.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys have anyone in mind or have you thought about it, but who do you think would be a great guest on the partnerships, on the old podcast?
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: actually, you know, david and I were talking about this yesterday and again.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: This, this speaks to this concept of leveraging the strength of different platforms, different technologies, and I think someone that we are very keen to work with is Gary Morris from Successful Channels.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: I've spoken with Gary and he'd be delighted to be a future guest.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: I think what they're doing from an automation perspective leveraging data, automation of business plans, qbrs, et cetera, of business plans, qbrs, et cetera absolutely becomes central to taking that next step of the relationship and the sentiment aspect of things to deliver key metrics and business performance.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: So I think he would be a great guest for you.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: Well, if you're listening, gary, I'm coming to get you, I'll send you a message and that's going to, I'm telling you on his case.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: Ste, it's gonna.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: I'm telling you on your way alright, perfect.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: Well, thanks so much, owen and Dave.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: I'm really excited about what you guys are doing at Partnerscore and I'm excited to see you grow.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: I will leave your guys to all our audience.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: I will leave Owen and Dave their LinkedIn on the description.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: If you want to reach out to them, if you want to learn more about partner score, uh, please do so.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Uh, and thank you thanks thank you.