Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 068 - Aaron Howerton of Samsara - Mastering the fusion of Partner Operations and Business Growth

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068 - Aaron Howerton of Samsara - Mastering the fusion of Partner Operations and Business Growth · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to partnerships and raffle the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships 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 Chenix, and I'm here today with Aaron Howard on senior program manager, partner operations and experience at Sam Sarah and the person who runs the parker ops partner, including the job board, but also recording a podcast on a weekly basis.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Aaron, how are you doing today?
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: I'm well, Rick.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: It's good to see you.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Thanks for letting me join you today.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, likewise I'm excited.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: I've been yeah, I just told you I've been following your content for a long time already and I know a lot about what you write is very relevant to vendors and partners I'm speaking to on a daily basis.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: So I'm excited for, for what's to come.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate hearing that for sure.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: I definitely think you've got the most robust intro for me so far.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: I don't it's weird to like work full time and have this other stuff to do, but it all it all becomes pretty salient for me in terms of it all kind of aligns and it's always good to hear right as somebody I feel like sometimes I throw things into the ether of, like the social world for LinkedIn and it's nice to hear that it lands somewhere with someone in any capacity.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: So yeah, love to hear that.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: Maybe for listeners who are, who are new to new hair, like could you maybe share a bit more like how did you get into partnerships and what brought you to to your current journey?
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so professionally I started in partnerships about five or six years ago.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: But to go back, and I could tell you that my first job was partner enablement and I came out of 10 years of working in SAS as kind of a generalist.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: I hadn't.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Some people get into a role and they just like I'm CS and they stay in CS until they become like a director type thing.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: That that was not me.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: I've worked in database management, I've been in customer success, I've been implementations, onboarding, help with marketing teams.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: I was a certified product owner for a couple years.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: So I bring a generalist background into partner operations and I feel like that has really given me an advantage because when I come into these roles I can talk with most of these teams in their language.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: I know kind of what their priorities are, I know what they're after and I'm constantly just translating partnership needs for these teams.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Within partnerships, though, started with enablement.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: That company had a big PRM project that was kind of going sideways.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: I just volunteered, raised my hand to take that on, got that PRM in line, did operations for them, cross partnerships and sales for three or four years in a variety of projects and Salesforce and otherwise.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Then I left and went to another company 6 cents was there for about 10 months till they had layoffs, and I was at last year and for about 10 months until I got my current role, at some sorrow, where I'm working now as a program manager over partner operations and experience, and what's interesting about that is that I'm on the program team, so I'm not independently like 100% responsible for running operations.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I am in a strategic role.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: My job is to really bring all of our projects across all of our programs together and help drive those into the business through our go to market systems teams or sales ops teams or whatever the teams we might have to work with to get change made, to improve the partner experience and improve how we operate.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's super interesting.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Actually and that's also one of the things that that really triggers me always want to reach your content around that partner operation because I need.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: I see that more and more and more companies start to talk about it, but there's also quite the wide definition of what partner operations actually is.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: But I actually like, like your vision on that.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: Could you share a bit more like, what is partner operations to you and and why is it so critical?
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: So I want to back up for just a second that you mentioned.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Everybody has a different definition.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: That's actually why I started my job board.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: I was collecting these jobs because as I saw partner operations, partner operations, partner experience, I saw these roles they are all different and I started collecting them and then that's why I turned that public and started to share that with my other friends that I've meeting in the partner operation space.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Partner operations is all over the map and and people might put partnership related work into that bucket because they've got they need a deal desk member.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: You know, specifically for partner operations, or we have a problem with our.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Our deal reg is broken.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: We want to.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Really the thing that drives a lot of partner operational hires is oh, we need deal reg.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: We signed a contract for a PRM.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Now we're going to go get somebody to come manage the PRM, like it's an afterthought, it's a backup, it's oh no, we didn't realize kind of approach.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: For me, partner operations is much.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: It's much more holistic and you already seen this too in your space.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: I know you and I've talked about like what is a PRM, what is not a PRM, and all these words with those stuff around and programs it's.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: It all has a various meeting just depending on the company.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: So you have to understand your taxonomy with where you're at.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: But for me, partnerships is the broadest sense of the word.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: Partner operations for me represents all of the work that I might do for a variety of stakeholders.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: So it very much could be and I'll say channel, even though I know channel is also a big umbrella like direct is actually a channel of sales toward revenue.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Don't be offended.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Direct, I'm not saying you are channel.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Historically, channel means resellers, though right.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: So like partner operations in a reseller network, and that's been around for 30, 40 years.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: There's lots of people with deep experience in that space.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Partner operations for technology, partner program that looks different, that's new.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: That's managing integrations, that's working between product teams, that's maybe pushing for better in-app access to integrations and marketplace features, right, completely different.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Same thing for your OEM or your service partners.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: All of these different types of programs have different, slightly nuanced rhythms that you might need from an operational standpoint.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: For me, all those fall under partner operations and now I get to be in a role for partner experience, and the way I define partner experience is I have three stakeholders at least, which is the partners themselves, the partner managers.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: They have an experience managing partners and our customers have that experience when they come to buy from partners or when they engage with partners excuse me, or when they get engaged with partners.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: So for me I paid as broad a stroke as possible because in my experience, the work that I could do for partner operations it's.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: It's a big one, it's huge, it's cross functional, it allows me to work with people all across the company and that's what really keeps me invested and keeps me interested yeah, I really like that and I think that's indeed also immediately where the complexity comes with now, like with the growing need as well, I think, for partner operation, because the yeah, partner ecosystem is getting more complex and we come from a world where it was mainly channel resellers that evolved into all different types of like reselling partners value added resellers, managed service provider system integrators, then now we also indeed have the ISV partnerships, the tech partnerships, like I really see, indeed like how do you make sure that you build a partner program but then everyone has like their own different needs?
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: Like how do you approach that imbalance in terms of like, on one hand, you want skill in your partner program, but on the other hand, you know that different type of partners have different needs?
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: 100% right and you already see that and what you guys do.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: It's your next right.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: The needs of different customers and different programs and kind of what they're trying to achieve they may vary.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day, we're all chasing revenue.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: That's the core of it.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: And when I go into the operation side and I posted about this yesterday, you've seen me post about this a lot, I think you and I've talked about this a lot Is that I'm not I'm not like anti PRM, I'm not anti technology, I'm just pro foundations.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people start to build programs and we start to run forward in the sales rhythms and it's not until somebody comes along and says away, wait, wait, wait.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: How do we know you're helping us?
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: How do we know you're making money?
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: How do we know it's a positive impact?
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Well, now we have to chase attribution.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: We chase attribution that becomes deal read.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: So we start to turn on deal read.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Now You've got a sales organization on one side with a functional foundational system for the CRM partner operation on the other side with nothing in place trying to plug into that CRM, and in the middle is this concept of what I consider to be program management.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: That just doesn't really exist.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: It's in spreadsheets or email or slack channels, and so for me, that's the foundational work.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Right, when I get into companies, that's the first thing that I'm looking for is what have you done to manage your programs effectively?
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: How have you set that up for scale?
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: What programs do you have?
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: What's your taxonomy like?
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: That's a super boring word.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: I don't ever hear anybody in partnerships say taxonomy, except for myself and my operational friends.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: But that's just the structure of your programs.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: What programs tied to what programs?
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Which ones can they be in and not being others, you know how they exclusive to each other.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Those things have to be sorted out in my, in my opinion, like in a systematic way, so that you have that foundation for all the growth you want to do.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: And I imagine that you could tell me from your perspective, right, I imagine that the challenge that you come into in terms of segmentation within the system how do we build it?
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: How do we make sure each partner gets the experience that they need?
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: We have to define these things.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: We can't do it.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the word foundation is perfect for foundations is perfect for it, and I think that's also where a lot of companies are sometimes missing the boat, because they keep extending it to keep postponing actually working on the project or working on the foundations.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: And the longer you wait, the more legacy you get.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: And now, like I'm working with a lot of very enterprise, very heavy, like thousands of partners, 10 thousands of channel partners, but, you just see, everyone is like, yeah, we need to do a data project, because it's a mess right now and it will take one and a half years.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: And Okay, yeah, I built so much legacy that right now, indeed, you're in this ginormous project that you first need to get through before you can get to the rest of like.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: What do you see there and what?
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: What's your experience with handling those type of roadblocks?
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I think it's comforting in a way from an operational perspective.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: It's comforting to hear that you, in the pursuit of your own company, with what you do at nx that you're, you encounter this, even enterprise companies.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: You're kind of getting in and seeing like, oh, your partnership stuff is my words here, not yours is a bit of a train wreck, right it's.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: It's kind of all over the place and process and systems are maybe everywhere and then, yeah, you've got this data work.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: For me it starts with those foundations.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: This is why I think the partner, ops, is a strategic role.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: You'll see me advocate for this for my industry.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: I had a conversation with my current manager literally like a couple of weeks ago.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: She was like, well, what's your, what do you want to do in five years?
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: I was like I think I want to do work that doesn't exist yet in five years because this concept of one, the role I'm in now, the reason I jumped to sims are after being at last year and for just a few months really 10 months Was the role in the way they structured it is very unique in the industry.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: I've been pulling jobs on the board for months, never seen anybody putting an ops and experience manager together this way in the program side.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: So I like their view.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: It kind of aligns with my view of what the role could be and I'm getting to experiment with that, but it's a strategic role and so you'll see me advocate for that higher early, higher, faster.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: If you want to address these problems you need you need ops support early in your program development.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: I'm a big fan.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Right now, mark O'Pollis tells a great story about this and one of the things that I like about his story I think it's like point 15 in this article that he had on cross beam is like Higher partner ops as number two, that that was his first full time hire after himself was an operational person to help drive all that cross functional work that needs to.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: You have to get the foundation.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: So that's my answer I get.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: If you're too late, if you're where you're at, then yeah, you have to slow down.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: You have to do your year and a half long data project, maybe get some help sorting out what matters and what doesn't, maybe also recognize less matters than you think it does.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Right, we want to.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Everything is important, everyone is unique, special, different, but maybe we're not.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: That's another thing.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: I'm beat beat that drum a little bit is.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Your program may not be as special as you think it is.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Let's just get your course stuff in so you can get to running.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a very valid point.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: I think from that perspective, you're touching upon something interesting in terms of, indeed, like, what is the right moment to bring in Park operation and also, how does that role evolve while your channel or your parking ecosystem is scaling as well?
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: I think, maybe first touching on your comment around having it as number two, I fully agree there.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: I actually speak to a lot of people who are building either channel partnerships or more on the product side Of partnerships, and usually that can also be a bit aligned between the enablement role and the operation side of it, because that's usually what you need very quickly, like your partners will never get to know your product as good as you do.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: So that's the role.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: That's the role I think in the beginning, like I'm very much from a channel background.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: So there we say we just hire a load of camps and then we're gonna make sure that we're skilled like that and they are very good at sales and the rest will sort itself out.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: But that's just what you see.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: That doesn't work that way and it doesn't matter whether you're building tech partnerships or channel.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: You really need that, that person indeed, and I also understand like the leaders were speaking to, of course, yeah, but I only have this amount of resource.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: I need to decide where Am I going to invest.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: But I'm fully on board with you.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: If you can get like a hybrid operation slash enablement person as your second hire, that will make such a big difference because you work on your foundations from day one, or at least close to it 100%.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: So, even even back to what you're saying, right, your first program, hire that partner leader that you hire to come in and actually execute, build or promote internally.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: I mean lots and lots of partnership people.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: I don't I don't know that I've found anybody yet so far that just started their first job in partnerships.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: In partnerships it was an internal transfer, I might be.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: I came in from an enablement perspective.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: My only background was training and development, the ability to take content and deliver it, whatever the content is.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: That was unusual.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Most people transfer in.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: So I think even that first program lead, what are their ops background, what's their chops, what's their mentality?
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: But they're at if you're hiring.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: So if you're looking to hire one right now, I would be asking those questions great, like what are your thoughts around?
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Is operational process, things like that, because that first program lead will set that tone From there.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: I absolutely agree you need that enablement component, but most of us people are used to that.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Because enablement may be in the company.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Maybe we get some resources, is kind of like marketing, like you get partner marketing and that's another early resource that tends to show up.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: But it's a person in the marketing team that's either splitting their time, like you know, twenty five, seventy five toward fifty, fifty, they eventually become full time.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Maybe they know about partner marketing, maybe they have no idea, and now that partner leaders trading that person.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: So I think enablements kind of baked into most of the operational people I know.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: It's just baked into what we do.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: We're building a process, we're building a thing.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: We're gonna have to show you how it works.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: So we might not be the best at it all the time, but I've yet to find an operational person that doesn't have at least some capability Toward enablement and Jesse and I will talk about that frequently, jesse shipment that enablement and operations kind of go hand in hand in terms of delivery, working through things.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: And I'm always thrilled To have a dedicated enablement resource because it lets me continue to focus on the operational side and give up.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: You know, half the goal I've planned is really we built it great.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Now we have to teach people.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: Now we have to support it.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Now we need content like that's a lot of work, man.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: Also, big recommendation from my side If you want to dive deep into like enablement et cetera.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: I really like your podcast together with Jesse on that as well to really indeed understand how do you enable, not just externally to your partners, but also internally, because it works both ways right 100%.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Thank you for the plug.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I do another podcast with Jesse in Adam Pash called Literal Scratch and we talk about.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: If you've listened to it you know it's a very random, it's a very casual podcast and we meet weekly but we'll cover.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: We cover issues like that and that's part of why the three of us are there is.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: I'm kind of covering like the ops and internal project strategy Jesse's on the enablement side, kind of the marketing side, and then Adam's that program lead.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: So we feel like we represent the gamut of what skills a lot of partnership programs need and that lets us have interesting conversations, at least for us, we enjoy it, so we'll keep doing it, whether you guys show up or not.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: And we have quite some channel sales partner, marketing leaders, head of partnerships etc.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: Listening to this podcast.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: If they are thinking about hiring a partner ops person, like what kind of character traits or skills would you say they need to look out for interview for, for example?
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Ooh, that's a fun question.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: I think that's a fun question because I think it depends on your program.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day you have to know strategically what programs matter to you and then decide on the scope of the role.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Right, if you go look at a lot of roles like kind of I don't know, there's an internal hierarchy like specialist up to manager comma.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Like you know, there's a lot of architecture into even company hierarchies.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: But when you're hiring your ops role, think about what it is you want.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: I think you've earlier.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: You really want to go strategic on that role.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: So you want somebody with a varied background.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: You want a good problem solver.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Don't worry so much about what programs they might really be aware of.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Ask them about the problems they've solved, how they solve those problems.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: So I'm looking for somebody that the problem solver that's going to be highly cross functional, right?
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: What do you know about other departments?
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: How well do you know customers successful?
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: What's a sales project you've done successfully in the past?
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: Because that's what an early hire is really doing For me.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: If I'm coming in early at a company as a partner operations manager, my job is not to do things myself necessarily I've got to go get the buy in.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: I've got to go help CS ops and sales ops and or Rev ops right.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: I've got to educate these other groups on how they're already connected to partnerships and the way that we need to collaborate together.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: So for me, partner operations even late stage, like even right now, it's in sorrow.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: A lot of what I'm doing is I've got some projects and building out some requirements, but it's me going and finding all the stakeholders that need to contribute because, hey, this is going to hit the website and it's going to hit the partner portal and we need to get content updated here and then we have a Salesforce process updated here and then we need to get programmatic alignment over here.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: Like, I don't get to do any of this in a vacuum.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Partner ops doesn't exist on its own unless it's a really, really specific role.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: At a large company like Atlassian, they've got a large channel ops team.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: It's led by some really great people.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: There's some phenomenal people on that team and they get down into it and there's definitely some operational rhythms that are maintained by headcount right, and that's not ideal.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: That's not what everybody wants, but at some point you need it.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: So I hope I answered your question.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: If you, it depends on where you're at.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: If you're early stage, I think you want more of a strategic leader, more of a cross functional leader, someone who knows more about the companies as a whole and how companies operate.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: As you grow, you might look more specific.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: Right, I'm looking for somebody who's a powerhouse and agency, because we've got a strong agency program.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Our program manager needs more of that day to day support and we want to give you I think it's what I'm seeing right now, what I do like your partner operations, but your program is specific as agency.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: We want you to focus entirely on improving and enhancing our agency rhythm because of X value, we want to get that extra value out of that 80%.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: That's not active kind of thing or whatever it is.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: So I think it does change.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: But this is also why I keep the job board.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: If you're wondering, like, what does a job look like for partner operations?
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: I've got the job board now partner ops, partnercom and you can hit job board and you can see all these roles that I've been collecting over the past 10 months and how other people are writing it, and it's all over the map.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a great recommendation because indeed it really depends on what type of program you're building, and then there's definitely a lot to learn in terms of how other companies are constructing that.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: And do a little bit of research, like if you see job opening like that, like what type of program is their main revenue driver, are they mainly focused on?
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: And I would have compared to your own program.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: But I think that's also definitely the advice I would give to the listeners there.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah well, in your experience too, right Like you're doing a lot of implementations around channel tech.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Very clearly, how often are you coming across like, oh well, they have a dedicated partner operations person.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Is that normal in your experience?
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Is that abnormal?
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: What are those people look like in your from what you see?
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: I think so, like I said, we're coming heavily from the channel side.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: There we see that they often call it the partner program manager.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: In general, we do see that a lot of the companies have it, but it indeed really depends per channel, like what their like character traits are or what type of role they have.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: I think in general, they are the tech stack owners.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: That's what I see a lot in terms of in the in the enterprise, also very heavily involved in data and making sure we do the right analysis based on our, on the, on the actual revenue and based on the partner and the partner segmentation, etc.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: I think up until now, that's what I've mainly very much yeah, and those roles don't exist.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: I think they're.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: They're few and far between.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: It's like going all the way back to my manager asked me where I want to be.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: I was pretty honest with her.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: I was like the space for partner operations it's not really well defined.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: Channel ops, that's more well defined because channel again, right or wrong, linguistically channel means reseller for a lot of people.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: So if you say channel, they're immediately thinking reseller, you're thinking distribution and all that.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: So it just depends on kind of where you want to be and what you're after.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: But for me I want that higher level strategic role and I think they're going to be coming.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: I'm excited about this current time.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Right, it's part of why I do what I do is that I'm meeting a lot of people that are in this weird middle space for partner operations and we want to grow.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: But when you go look at the roles, very, very few director level roles, no C level roles dedicated to partner operations.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know if there will be or should be.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: I just know that we, some of us, wanted to see that the larger partner strategy table so that when the program leads says, oh, we want to build a new program, ayz, we're there to raise the flag and to say great, let's look at the foundation, let's see how we get there, so that we can actually hit there and scale when we want to.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: I think scales.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: A big part of this is you can tell me more about what you see.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: That's part of what your tech is supposed to help with.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: To write like better structure, better organization, better management, better scale.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: But without a foundation you can't scale.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: Without that underlying structure, you can't go anywhere.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: I think one of the thing that One of the things that I find very interesting is what I see within almost all the enterprise companies we're working with, is that the tech partner program and the channel partner program is very siloed, so that it's like they do have a robust program for both but there's very little Connection between them.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: Like I'm super curious, what role do you see for partner operations there to bring those two worlds together?
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: Because that's where I see the ultimate opportunity.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: If you manage to scale your tech partnerships through your combined channel, that's the ultimate network effect.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: I think you're probably right it that.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Actually it makes me think of my first job when I was doing partner enablement.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: I was in the US, was very specific to you as partners and traveling and just focused on resell partners.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: And then, as I got into partners more more broadly around operations, I started reaching out to people in the company.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: Typically when I set a meeting with somebody, our service partners were managed by the service team.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: Our technology partners were had a like a program type manager, kind of in product right and those partners overlapped as resale partners.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: But the two-year point there wasn't a lot of connection between that approach.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: So they had a account, a channel account manager, doing their channel sales and Maybe had one person managing all the technology partners At the company on the technology side, helping them get visibility into product, and that was more about like management.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very disconnected in some ways, but that's not how I see it.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: I see all of these as in related to your point.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: These are in related relationships.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: If there's a whole argument, whole argument in the, at least Trying to figure out how to say this delicately in the operational space, I can get into a really deep argument with people about single account versus dual account structure in your CRM.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Now, this is a very boring conversation, rick.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Be very honest, right?
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Do we have one account that's a customer and partner, or one of two accounts, customer and partner and I'm sure you've seen both and you have to deal with both from a data integration standpoint on your side.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: And my concern is always like, if I have a customer that's a partner, then being a partner is more important Because the customer is their revenue and, yes, customer is king.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: I get it customers revenue but that partner is a complex relationship that adds a whole another window of revenue on the other side.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: So if you landed an account and you don't know that's a partner, I kind of have a problem.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: Same thing if you landed a partner account and you can see that they're a reseller but you don't know they have a technology solution that's concerning.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: I want all that to be visible in the system.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: So I definitely think there needs to be a more integrated approach to how we view partnerships within systems.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: I don't care how you structure it within your teams, but that comes back down to enablement and everything else, like the reason people don't know about all the technology partners is maybe because you've siloed your programs.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: So your your VP of partnerships.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: I've seen this too right.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: Your VP of partnerships is really focused maybe on channel, but you have installation partners, you got service partners, you got technology partners, maybe some OEM partners, but those are all over here.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: They don't they don't contribute direct revenue, source revenue, so we're not really going to focus on it as much.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: And now you get into the attribution concept like who, how do we attribute?
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: How do we do sourced?
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: And then where do we give them space in the PRM?
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: Like, how often do you see companies show up and be like, hey, we really want to give our technology partners a space in the PRM to do anything.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: I don't see that often.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: If they're doing deals, cool, they can do deal regs.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: But if they're just helping with technology, do we have visibility?
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: Probably not.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: That's been my experience.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: No, I fully agree there.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: I think that's one of the things that companies are struggling with most.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: And then I come back to your foundations.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: It's how do we properly segment our whole partner base and make sure we give them the right experience?
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: Based on the partner segmentation and maybe I saw an interesting post from you today about how important your CRM is in partnerships what are some of the things you would advise to people?
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: Listening in terms of what are the most important things within your CRM to track, based on your partnership, both on the parking level, but then also tying the deals back to the partners.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: Well, to be fair, I started in data.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: I think that was a big win for me.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: I came out of college with a political science degree, no background in software, and they hired me to be a database analyst.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: I don't know why, probably I was cheap, so I learned SQL, I learned data, so I've always come back to data.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: It's been incredibly useful to me in all of my different industries and I think it's the same here.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: Go back to your partner program.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: What data matters to your company?
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: I could be.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: You know, try it and say everything.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: It all matters, but it does.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: It all matters.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: But specifically, if you have a program, what is important about the program?
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: Right, Are they enrolled in the program?
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: Are they enabled on the program?
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: Are they doing any?
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Are there any sort of sales incentives contract?
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: We're going to call it?
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: They're tied to that program.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: I want all of that kind of data points to live in the system because once it's in the CRM and again, there's so many ways to approach this company state they take all different kinds of approaches.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you have seen them all in what you do, because you're trying to sort those out and make them make sense in your system.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: But if you don't have the data in the system, I can't automate it, I can't build process around it.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: We can't move quickly because somebody has to stop right.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: If you don't have your contract terms, for example, baked into your CRM and some sort of structure whether it's a program or a contract or a custom object, I don't care If it's not in there and I want to add a partner to a deal, I can't automatically process commissions or rebates or discounts because I don't have the data.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Somebody has to put that in.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: And so anytime you introduce that manual need, that's when you start to slow down scale.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: I think that's where companies, to me, tend to get it wrong.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: Deal regs is when they first start to think about it.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: Now we're rushing to deal regs because we've already signed a contract with a PRM vendor and we're already paying for it and we've promised our partners a delivery date, but we haven't done any structural analysis to see how long it's going to be.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: And then, to your point, oh, we have a year and a half a day to clean up before we can even really become valuable.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: And it all feels like a misstep, but I think it's just like any other tool or system, right?
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: People grab about Salesforce, people grab about HubSpot, people grab about any system that they don't invest in and they say that system's no good.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Well, if you don't invest in it, of course it's going to be no good, right?
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: It's like it's a wasted investment.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: It's kind of on you to do the same thing, yeah 100%.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: I think that's really critical.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: It's like reverse engineer what you want to measure eventually.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: So really think of it again at the end of a quarter or at the end of a year.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: What are the type of things we want to measure?
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: We want to see what program brought success and then, indeed, within that program, what partners actually are certified, enabled, et cetera, to the fullest.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: Because those are usually the type of analysis you want to do, and that's why I fully agree with you your CRM is critical and should be central to everything, because you can just simply do most advanced reporting based on your CRM Like.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: You can't do that with the PRM, not with any type of like.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: It needs to be in your CRM because that's when you can go really deep into your data.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: And that's why you also really need those type of data points per partner, per deal, et cetera.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: Because at the end of the quarter, you want to find out what programs are most successful, what regions are most successful, why are they more successful than others, et cetera.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: That's the type of in-depth analysis you want and that's where I also believe why partner operations is so critical and strategic.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Those are the insights you need as a revenue leader, whether you're in tech partnerships or channel sales.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: Those are the type of data points you need to gear your whole team and organization towards the end goal and the performance you want to drive.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: And you can't do that if you haven't properly set up your CRM, with the right segmentation, with the right of data attribution there.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this one of my big revelations this year and I think this is just personal growth and mindset growth is as I've been writing for partner operations over the past year, which is really when I started writing.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: I've been doing the work for a while but I just started putting it out there.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: I was writing originally for partnership leaders.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: I want to help you do ABCD.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: When I finally realized in the past few months is that my audience is not partnership leaders, it's not even other partner operations, it's CROs.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: It's the people who have to actually write the check for partnerships, because partnership don't get the same budget.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: They work there Good partnership leaders at least that I've seen they work the strategic investment for their program into other teams.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: So, yep, I have a partner marketing role, but that's on the marketing budget and they're full time on the marketing and they got a dotted line to me in partner marketing.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: They're doing the same thing in RevOps.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: It's one way for them to grow the team without increasing the partnership budget, which makes it easier to justify partnerships, on paper at least.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: But I also think there's value in that that if you bring in a partner operations late and you've got them in a again, is it a systems operation person Because they're going to own the tech stack and do the configuration?
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Is it a RevOps partner person who's going to manage all the reporting and the analytics and make sure that RevOps deal tracking and quoting?
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: Those are different skill sets.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Those are different roles and different interests.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: So what are you hiring for?
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: But when you get down to it, if you don't have that foundation, if you don't know what you want to track per program and don't have that key data available, it makes everything hard.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Thinking about what you do, for example, I imagine that your go-live times.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: You're having a sales process you go through, you get somebody invested, now we have to do the project and send it out.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: I imagine those go-live times are significantly impacted by that quality and that's not always something you're going to know in the sales process.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: Right, that's not.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: That doesn't always come up and I would have a hard time if I'm you Like.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to be like, oh yeah, well, your sales, your data is horrible, so let's wait a year and a half you tell me.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: I imagine that comes up.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: A lot is a challenge for what you're trying to do and it slows down your ability to get people to or not.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you're 100% right.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: I think it's a little bit the chicken and egg story, because also, like, if you that's at least how I see it, and I'm a little bit biased, of course, there but you also do really need yeah, you need to be honest here, but, like, you need that information.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: That's just for me.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: Like every time, every sales conversation or customer conversation I'm in, partner segmentation is always left, right and center, so we are always talking about how do we make sure that we get the most complete and detailed understanding as possible from your partner.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: That's the type of information we want to collect and that's the type of information we use within our system, but also the type of information we push to your CRM.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: But definitely, if that basis of, like the current partner base is not properly set up, then there's a lot of work to do to get it to the right level and then it definitely can take longer.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: And that makes that, makes your effort more consultive, 100% right, and that's not necessarily what you're being paid for either.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: I found this.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: I had to adjust a mentality to go back and apologize to some of my friends even recently in the industry, because I I'm not being in sales.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: It's been easy.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: It's easy to judge salespeople when you're not a salesperson, right, and I've been at a couple of different instances where I'm just like baffled that the contract even sold because the vendor should have looked in and said, hey, you guys aren't ready, and it's just been.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: It's been frustrating, right, but as I've gotten to know the industry more, as I get to understand this more, another, another revelation from you over the past couple years is you know, as a vendor, if you're trying to grow your business and somebody shows up and says, hey, we're ready for you, we want to buy your features, it's not really your job to stop and be like, okay, well, tell me about your corporate architecture, show me your, show me your channel architecture and let's make sure you're ready for me, like that would be a step above and beyond and that's not what you get paid for.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: So I also imagine that's hard for your company because if you get in yep, we absolutely have to line this out and your revenues tied to that.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: You want them to be successful, but that's also not what you're in business for, in my opinion.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: You know a single parent that is, but companies don't realize they need that help until they're in that mix, and I think there's that.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: That's just a gap, you know, in terms of experience.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: I don't quite know how to fix it yet, but I think about that as well too.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: Like there's some little ground there.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: You gotta be ready to go get those systems.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: There's gotta be ways to achieve that, because it hurts you, it hurts them, it hurts your relationship.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: You know, if they don't want to listen, if they don't agree or if they're not willing to make the changes, that can jeopardize your entire launch and maybe nothing you can do about it.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you're completely right there.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: I think it needed so critical to have the foundations in place, but on the other hand, it's also so critical because almost all partnerships or channel related roles are very quarterly driven and therefore usually those are the type of projects that get the prioritized quickly and before you know it, you're three that three years further down the line.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: You still don't have your foundations in place and then you're really not going to get your long term growth goals, like I've seen a time and time again.
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: In every like, we're all in hyper skill environments, almost all of us.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: In terms of the growth ambitions, we have the type of targets we get from the market, from the investors, and if you don't prioritize that now, then maybe you'll hit this year but you'll miss next year, and that's the thing you need to prevent.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so you had an episode on the 30th of October I think I'm not sure the exact date was about this 80, talk about this 80, 20.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the idea, like you know, like, and I think about that I'm building that Pareto principle, that idea into my current planning.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: Where I'm at now is you have a big thanks to hot not who's a friend of mine from my infields days introducing this idea of get no touch, low touch and high touch, enablement content training with the training approach, right and typically, you know, by driving toward that 20% of your partner generating 80% of your revenue.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: And you've got to keep those folks going.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: They need a higher touch experience.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: But what I really liked about what you guys called out on that prior episode is you can't just ignore the 80% of your partners.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: They're there for a reason.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: They're there to do business.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: That's where your next partners come from, that's where your performance comes from.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: And when I think about what I'm going to build operationally, what I want to make sure is those 20% are solid and well taken care of.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: And I want my channel account managers, if they're going to do any manual work, it should be in the service of those 20%, those white glove experience for the high value partners are really performing.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: And then the 80% is where I want to try to focus on automation and engagement and those levers.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: But you have to start and lock down that 20%, I think, to get to that 80% growth.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: But absolutely to your point, what you just said right if you only focused on the 20% and all of your manual effort that you run as a company is in support of the 20%, you will never open up the door to that 80% because you don't have time, you don't have capacity, you don't have resources.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: That's what I hear all the time right now, and you have seen this in the market right, companies are still making massive cuts and if you think about why, my opinion is that's a scale problem.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: The pandemic showed up.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: People were ready to buy software to accelerate their growth toward a remote company in a way that nobody expected, and all these companies that I feel like have gone up and then had to go back down.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: They're being impacted by an inability to scale.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: The only way they could scale to meet the demand was to hire people.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: That made it crazy, that made salaries crazy, that made a really great time as an employee to go get a nice bump and then is demand leveled out, which we all should have expected it to do right after two or three years.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: Now we don't need all the people because we don't have all the physical demand for manual work.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: That's a scale problem.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: They weren't ready for scale.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: Then it's cost people their jobs.
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: Now Hopefully we're slowing down and thinking more intentionally about that.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: I think all that's related.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: Like that's another thing.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: I think all that's related.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: Exactly what you're saying.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: You got to be ready to grow what is time to grow, but you've got a plan for that growth Build a hundred percent, get the foundations right.
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: I think that's a beautiful way to work towards the closure of of this episode.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: I learned a lot today, aaron.
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: I'm sure our listeners did too.
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: If our listeners would like to find out more about you, where can they best find you or listen to you?
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: Go find me on LinkedIn.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: That's the best place for me.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: That's where you'll find a lot of my content.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: I'll post there frequently.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: You can find me through partner ops partner dot com.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: It's a little bit tongue in cheek, like everybody's talking about everything's part of this partner that I'm like.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: Well, I have two partners in my name partner ops partner.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: I'm there, I'm writing, I'm happy to talk anytime, especially for job seekers.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: I try to carve out a little bit of time if you're open to work and you're looking to get into this field, or you want to just connect with somebody happy to reach out and have a conversation just to encourage you, because it's a tough time in that place to.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: But yeah, to our map.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Love that.
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for being on the podcast today and talk soon.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you very much for having me appreciate it, appreciate what you do.