Sean Lane 0:00
Sean, Hey everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies and hyper growth. My name is Sean Lane. It's pretty interesting the pattern that I've seen again and again for how operators end up prioritizing their internal customers. Sales is usually the loudest voice, and they usually need the most help, so they get the most attention, especially when ops reports into sales as well CS and post sale teams at early stage, companies aren't ever as high on the priority list as the new logo acquisition team, so they usually don't get nearly as much love as they should, until starts to rear its ugly head. Marketing somewhere in between, usually and sometimes there can be a little bit more self sufficient, and then way over there in the corner, shrouded in mystery and held together with duct tape and spit, is your partner team, sometimes affectionately referred to as the wild wild west partner programs at fast growing tech companies usually will abide by their own set of rules, and I don't really get why. So I wanted to talk to someone who spends all day thinking about how to make partner teams more successful. That someone is Greg Portnoy, co founder and CEO of EULAR, the home base for partnership teams. In addition to starting EULA two years ago, Greg has led partnership teams at four different companies, so he's seen the full spectrum of what works and what doesn't. In our conversation, we talk about why partner teams don't get any love from rev ops. We cover why measuring partner influence isn't the silver bullet that most teams think it is, and how partner teams and partner ops can tag team to run experiments together. So start though I asked Greg why he thinks that partner teams get the least amount of love from ops.

Greg Portnoy 2:02
Oh, man, there's a number of reasons for that. It really varies by organization the balance of this but one, partnerships generally gets a minimal, or maybe less than it should, amount of love and attention from like the GTM and the C suite and everybody in general, right? So if you just think about the trickle down of that, and ops just kind of doing the things that they see as, like, core priorities for the business, they're like, well, people don't really seem to care that much about partnerships or prioritize it. So I'm not going to either. That's part of it, for sure. Another part of it is like, look, ops aren't magicians. They have to have some level of direction or instruction or guidance on kind of what needs to be done. And so if they haven't ever built ops for partnerships before, which the vast majority of ops folks have not, they would look to the partner leader, the partnerships team, for some guidance. The challenge with that is that a lot of partnerships teams are not that process oriented as they should be. They don't have good foundations of process, and they don't have good best practices or frameworks from which they want to operate. So because of that, it's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing, where if Ops is like we'd love to help you if the partnerships team can't give them good guidance on what that actually looks like and what they need them to build. They're going to be like, Okay, this is too ambiguous. I'm going to go do something that I feel more comfortable doing, that I can actually like. Because ultimately, look, ops are just employees, like anybody else. They need to show results. And if they're just out here kind of trying to create something out of a lump of clay, you know, they may choose to go a path more traveled. And

Sean Lane 3:44
I think the first thing you said is super interesting, right? When you don't have that kind of, like, either sponsor at the C suite level or someone who is kind of holding the partner organization accountable to a particular set of metrics, then absent those metrics, then you really start to, like, kind of choose your own adventure and figure out a different way. So, like, what do you typically see as kind of the pitfalls that people fall into in that environment where they're like, Okay, I know I want to instrument, or, you know, measure the impact that my team is making in some way, but I don't really know how,

Greg Portnoy 4:20
from the ops perspective or the partnerships perspective both, yeah, so look, I was very lucky. My first VP of partnerships was very data driven and process oriented, so this is actually just the way I learned to do partnerships. I didn't come up with this. I didn't see multiple options and say, like, this is the right way. This is the way I was taught. And it worked. And so I kept doing it. And so as part of that, you realize, or I should say, I realize now that I have been building Euler, and I have a much broader view into, you know, dozens, if not hundreds, of partner programs, not just the ones that I'm building, is that partnerships right now is viewed largely as kind. Kind of this ambiguous, unpredictable, amorphous thing. It means different things for different businesses at different stages in different sectors, and that's not specific enough for the C suite or anybody else to really kind of buy into. And so what needs to happen is that partnerships can be much more predictable. Look, at the end of the day, can't be as predictable as sales, because you have an external variable, which is the partner. And you can't always predict what the partner is going to do, right? But you can get close and you can create structure around it. So managing partnerships like you manage sales in a lot of ways. You know, a lot of partner teams don't actually manage a partner pipeline. They don't have a separate pipeline for partner, like acquisition, onboarding, activation, enablement, so on and so forth, to see how the partner is kind of like moving through their both acquisition and activation and enablement and basically just life cycle flow, right? So, understanding, Hey, okay, just if we're trying to do some back of the napkin kind of math, Hey, okay, well, we need to hit a million dollar number this quarter. And each partner, on average, can do X amount of revenue, which means we need, you know, a million divided by X amount of partners. And therefore to activate 10% of the partners, we need 10x the partners in the pipeline, right? And you can create a funnel. You know, these numbers, again, are slightly less predictable than in sales, but you can get there. And so creating that process of predictability and structure from the very beginning, and then figuring out. And here's really where the challenge becomes. And this is why partner Ops is really, really tough. The biggest challenge is that partnerships, unlike sales, unlike marketing, they are non linear relationships, right? You meet a partner, you sign a partner, then you have to train a partner. That person leaves, and you have to train someone else, and then they send you a customer, but it's a different kind of customer. Then you have to train them on this other thing, and then maybe you're not sending them enough business. And over here you're doing a co marketing activity, and over here you're doing co selling, and this one's a referral, and that one's an integration. I mean, there are just so many different ways that you can work with both one partner and multiple partners, and tracking and measuring all of that is incredibly difficult, which is why we built EULAR. But back to your question. I know I've gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole here, but the whole idea is that everything as much as humanly possible in partnerships, the entire life cycle, and every stage of the life cycle should be tracked and measured, and then you should try to optimize it where you can. And the only way you can do that, I call partnerships experimentation. The only way you can do that is by running experiments right and understanding like, Okay, we have a hypothesis that we can drive this number from this many partners of this type. So we're going to go and test that hypothesis for a quarter and see how many partners do we think we can go from initial conversation to activated partner? What's that ratio? And then how many deals can each partner, how much revenue can each activate a partner drive in a quarter? It's another experiment, and I'm going to try this with agencies and system integrators and technology referral partners and affiliates. Right? It's all just experimentation, but most partner teams are very unstructured in all of this. So if they come to ops and say, Hey, I need you to do something for me, if they can't come to you with at least a clear idea of what that experiment looks like. How are you supposed to create a framework and a process from which they can successfully run, track and measure that?

Sean Lane 8:30
Greg is a partner guy, after my own heart. He says partnerships is experimentation. He says every stage of the partnership lifecycle should be measured. And he says that partner teams with a lack of clarity around what they're testing, are the ones who find themselves adrift when it comes to a clear, coherent strategy. And look, I don't envy partner folks. Running effective partner teams is so hard, as Greg mentioned, you get less love from the C suite. You're trying to prove that these non linear relationships will someday bear fruit, and oftentimes the time horizons to realize that yield can be long, which is why I think Greg's first partner, leader in his career, clearly had such an impact on the way he goes about his work, and why so many of us are the products of the leaders that we either had or didn't have earlier in our careers. I wanted to dig into what made that leader so impactful, and what Greg took away about the quote, right way to run a partner

Unknown Speaker 9:33
org. It was

Greg Portnoy 9:35
about being, again, data driven. So what happens most of the time is a C suite member or a head of sales, or somebody hears about partnerships, or they see a competitor, hey, our competitors got a big partner ecosystem. They're driving, you know, 25% of their top line from partnerships. Like, we should go do that. So they're like, we also want 25% and if you know we're doing. Ten million in revenue. We think we should get $2.5 million of revenue in the first year from partnerships. Now let me decide all that in a vacuum, and then go hire a partner leader and say, Hey, Mr. Partner leader, welcome to the company. Here's your $2.5 million number. And then the partner leader is just scrambling, trying to, like, grasp at straws, throwing as much stuff at the wall as humanly possible to see what sticks. And this all happens in a very unstructured way. The correct way to do it is basically say, Okay, what do we believe is possible to achieve? What is that goal? Let's find somewhere to meet in the middle between, like, what you know the CRO wants and what is even moderately realistic. Let's set that number. And let's back out of that again. Based on that, we need x revenue from partners, which means this many partners, which means this many conversations, which means this many deals, like so on and so forth. It's really not that complicated, but you have to have some sort of like a mathematical equation behind it, right? And so a lot of folks, they come at it from a purely like, let's just throw a bunch of stuff into the funnel, and let's like, see what happens, and then if we're not getting enough, let's just, like, sign up more partners, or let's increase our rev share, or something like that. It's very unscientific, and what's

Sean Lane 11:14
your recommendation on the right way to count that stuff? Right? Because certainly it differs depending on the type of partner model you have, whether it's referral or reseller or some sort of affiliate program, right? But, like, I've been in those meetings where you're sitting there, like, Okay, what's the definition of partner sourced? What's the definition of partner influenced, right? And people haggle over that stuff all day, like, what is the right way? If the $2.5 million number that you just mentioned is the number, how do we count that, right? What should we put in that $2.5 million

Greg Portnoy 11:43
bucket? Yeah, that's a great question. So while I love partner influence, and I think that there's a lot of businesses that get a lot of value from partner influence, I don't think that that's a flagship metric that partnerships should hang their hat on, right? I think that that's very much a icing on the cake, kind of a metric, and I don't think it's one depending on the level of complexity of your business, especially as you go up market, bigger deals, more enterprise. Influence really does play a role, and this depends on whether it's service influence and integration influence or just a recommendation influence. There's different levels, but let's put that one aside for a minute. So if we're talking about sourced revenue, sourced revenue, in my mind, is an opportunity. It doesn't matter where a lead comes from. In the age of Apollo and clay and zoom info and all this stuff, everyone has every single prospect they could ever possibly go after as a lead in their CRM I think lead source is pretty pointless at this point. I think the source that matters is opportunity source, right? Who actually got an active opportunity going here? And this may have been a customer that multiple SDRs have reached out to, and that came to a marketing event and so on and so forth. And if we're being honest, if you look at the data, we're talking about like 28 on average, touch points for someone to convert for like, B to B, SAS, right? Like, it's no one thing that did it. But if a partner is the one that got them to actually start an active sales cycle, an active opportunity with you, that's partner sourced. In my mind, that's really the only thing that matters. Like, if they came to a marketing event and they're like, All right, let's have this conversation. That's a marketing opportunity source. If an SDR reached out to them, and they said, All right, I'm ready to take a demo. Let's have this conversation. That's, you know, outbound, right? But if a partner makes that referral, or tells them to come to you, and they come and they say, Yeah, this partner just told me about you, you know, or the partner is doing another deal with them, and they bring you into the deal, or something like that. Like, if this opportunity exists because of that partner,

Speaker 1 13:39
that's partner source. Got it, got it all right.

Sean Lane 13:43
So like, if we continue to work our way kind of down the funnel from that moment right, the next thing that that partner leader is going to go to their ops team and say is, I need a way for folks to be able to submit leads. I need a way to be able to track referral agreements. I need a way to be able to have the visibility you were talking about before, into the open pipeline that, like, our team isn't really working, the partner is not gonna, like, give us updates on in our CRM. Like, all of that is what's gonna come next from the partnerships teams going to their ops partners. And I think, like, you know, there's a crawl, walk, run your way towards, you know, best in class. And I know you guys are also solving some of those problems at Euler. But like, what is the right way to start to think about kind of the end users as partners, and the end users as the other internal folks on your team, right? Because for me as an operator, I have to consider the experiences of both of those groups.

Greg Portnoy 14:44
Yep, absolutely. So I'll start with the internal stakeholders first, because that's a much easier thing for you to tackle. The partner experience is something obviously you need something like a Euler for but internally, again, the idea is that if. Or let's just use sales for an example. If your SDRs or your AES, they have a structure within the CRM, or within the tools that are integrated into the CRM to effectively track like they have a number. And partner manager should have a number. In my opinion, they have a number, and they should be tracking against that number. And let's just say you're using sales, you're using Salesforce as a CRM, just because Salesforce is so malleable, and that's the one that I've built pretty powerful things in. They have a number, they have a partner portfolio, they should be able to, like, track and measure a lot of that in the CRM. I believe that the CRM should be the source of truth for everything, partner, account related, customer account related, customer opportunity related, right? And so being able to show being able for a partner manager and a partnerships team on the whole to track their again, pipeline of partners, to be able to track the pipeline of deals associated with those partners and that could be sourced, that could be influenced, and to be able to easily see whether either in Euler or in or in like a Salesforce or a HubSpot to be able to see, like, Okay, how are we tracking against that number? Again, partnerships teams are not used to being held accountable, as they should be to these things, and that's partially because they haven't been held accountable a lot, but also they just haven't had the mechanism by which to do that. Because, again, if you're just scrambling to hit your number, like, for the same reason, salespeople don't enter stuff in Salesforce, and those are pretty simple. Again, linear relationships, relatively partnerships teams certainly don't, because they're just scrambling to hit their number. So all of this reporting and process and tracking always falls to the bottom of the priority list. And so if sales ops can help set that up and help set up like accountability and tracking mechanisms in the CRM for partnership teams, because we haven't really talked about this yet. But before you implement something like a Euler, for example, like you mentioned, crawl, walk, run, I believe the first system of record that partnership should be using is the CRM. The next is probably spreadsheets, because there's things that the CRM taps out on with regards to partner relationship management pretty quickly. But then use spreadsheets. Then once you have partner market fit, you know your ideal partner profile, you have traction with partnerships, you see results coming in, and you're like, Okay, we need to pour fuel on this fire. You will hit operational constraints of operating out of spreadsheets pretty darn quickly, right? That's when you implement a tool like a Euler, where you're like, hey, we need something that's built for partner operations. We need something that's built to simultaneously create amazing efficiency and tracking for our internal partnerships team and external visibility and engagement for the partner that's where you bolt that on. But even when I talk about Euler, we talk about as a partnerships wrapper around the CRM. The CRM still needs to be the core. And you may or may not be surprised to hear that a lot of the partnerships teams we talk to and in general do not have the CRM as their kind of like core operating system.

Sean Lane 17:52
First, no, I'm not surprised by that at all. Second, isn't it interesting the way that Greg talks about how partnership teams historically haven't been held accountable to the right things. He talks to more partner teams than just about anyone, and he's basically saying that the expectations internally for a direct sales team and a partner team are very different, and we as operators, I think, feed into that. We're so laser focused on running all of our direct teams, routines and rhythms out of our CRM and our other sources of truth. Yet I think because of maybe the non linear nature of partnerships, we struggle to extend this same rigor to our partner teams, or maybe their contribution just isn't big enough to warrant our attention. It's a vicious cycle, if you think about it, it's kind of ironic, because ops teams and partner teams actually have a lot in common. We're both trying to provide value to a broader organization, yet the perception of our teams might not always be that of a value add. We should be pushing together in the same direction. So I wanted to know how Greg helps partner teams both provide value and manage how they are perceived by other internal stakeholders. Yeah, not surprising. The thing that I think is interesting about that right, is the standards are very different internally in organizations, between the direct teams you were talking about and the partner teams, right, where you know, the direct team is 100% going to be running their pipeline, management and forecasting routines out of well, if it's not the CRM, it's a tool that's powered by the CRM, right? And then, you know, for all the reasons we've talked about, the partner team might be a little different. I also think that that probably has a negative impact on the relationship that partner teams have with their other internal peers, right? I think a very strong similarity between ops teams and partner teams is we're all managing the perception that other folks internally have of our team, right? My job as an ops leader is to make sure that everybody else in the organization who I work with sees the value that my team provides. Clients, and that is something that they come to us for, because they see value in it, right? And you can tell if they're coming to you, they see value. If they're not, they don't, right? And I think partner teams are the exact same way. And so like when you're working with folks, how do you help them to kind of bring these stakeholders along? Because again, if your direct team sees value in what your partner team does. They're going to be coming to you all the time. But what I see more often is like the partner team like pulling as hard as they can to try and get other people in the organization to pay attention to what they're doing, as opposed to the other way around. Is that what you've seen as well, one

Greg Portnoy 20:35
of the biggest challenges in partnerships is that internal perception issue, yeah, and it's something that, again, I see as a big gap for a lot of partnerships teams, this one is not because they don't know they need to do it. It's honestly because, again, they have other things that they're prioritizing above, and understandably, like hitting their number but one of the biggest challenges is communicating internally and partnering internally as much as you're partnering externally, because again, you would assume that the people you work with at the same company, you're all rowing in the same direction. You've all got the same goals. You've all got the same level. It's kind of a respect for each other and stuff. But, but look, sales people are sales people, and everybody is kind of like, focused on their own goals and focus. And so when you go to a partner, you're essentially assuming like, Hey, you're an external business. You have your own business to run. You have your own goals, you have your own motivations, and I'm asking you to do something for me, but in doing so, I am also sharing in some way, how this will be beneficial to you, and you generally try to lead with that second part, because otherwise, how are you going to convince somebody outside of your company that doesn't owe you anything to do something for you? They need to know what's in it for them. So them. And yet, partner teams often go to their internal teams and skip that piece and assume like, well, I don't need to tell you what's in it for you, because we work at the same company, and therefore, like, you're somewhat obligated to do so. And the fact of the matter is, that's just not true most of the time. And so you have to treat the people in your own company honestly, as a safe bet, just the same as you would treat somebody externally like, here's what partnerships is, here's what it can do for you. Here's what it has done for you, know, Jimmy and Jane on the team, and here's what little bit of something I would need from you in order for me to help drive that success or value for you internally, whether you're marketing, whether you're sales, whether you're ops, whether you're product, whoever it is, and so again, you can't do I keep coming back to this, but again, because partnership teams are so brutally deficient in both process and data, you can't do that without process and data. If you don't have data, you can't say hey. So let me just tell you guys that our acquisition costs through partnerships are X percent lower, our sales cycles are X percent faster, our win rates are X percent higher, our ACV is this much higher. Our marketing reach is this much broader. Our customer lifetime value is this much like you can go to every single team, our product adoption is this much higher if they're using 123, integrations. These are real metrics that are almost always better with partnerships. And if you go to each of these teams and show them how you're making them more successful in their goals through partners, that's a very different conversation than just being like, hey product, why aren't you getting somebody on for this integration call? Or, hey sales, why did you, like, circumvent this partner on this deal? Or, hey marketing, why didn't we invite a partner to co sponsor with us? It's you really have to do that work internally, and you really have to do it in a very kind of, like, data driven in your face. You could go it alone, or you could be more successful if you go with partners, kind of a way,

Sean Lane 23:41
and I think you need to clear out any other potential, like exits from that ideal path, right? And so, like, I completely agree with you. If you're coming to the table with higher win rate, higher ASP, then there is very little reason for a sales team to say, I don't want to incorporate that in my process. However, if there's something in your comp plan that disincentivizes that relationship, or says, you know, you will make more when you don't have to, you know, include the partner or something, right? Like, that's what I mean by like, off ramps from the path that you're trying to describe. And so I think also looking around corners a little bit as a partner leader and an ops leader to say, All right, we're not seeing the type of kind of partner attach rate or kind of interactions between the partner and direct teams that we would expect. Like, why is that happening? And I think looking at comp is a great starting point to figure out. Like, is there anything that we're doing to either incentivize this behavior or disincentivize this behavior?

Greg Portnoy 24:38
Absolutely. Look, the people you need to work with which are most likely going to be sales or customer success or account management, those are the most coin operated people in the business, right? If you're not pulling those levers to help it succeed, then someone else is pulling those levers to prohibit the success, right? And that's a really good point. And the thing you bring up, like, goes back to that, that executive alignment, you know, like. The Sales Director isn't making that call that's above their pay grade. That's a CRO that's a CEO. That might be a board level conversation, and that's why I always kind of also very much evangelize for that executive alignment, to get that from the top down. Because again, if everyone's swinging in the same direction, you'll go so much further, so much faster. For

Sean Lane 25:20
those of you taking notes like me, now is a great time to write down any potential friction points in the relationship between your partner team and the rest of the business. Is it comp? Is it internal politics? Is it misalignment on strategy? Does someone on your board make a disparaging comment about your partner team? As Greg says it's all about figuring out how you can get to where you want to go faster. So in that spirit, let's dig into some of those experiments that Greg alluded to earlier. These experiments aren't easy to pull off, and you as a partner operator, need to be an adept cross functional steward of your own experiments in order to pull them off and ultimately get people to care about your thing. So what are those experiments that people should be running? Here's Greg, it

Greg Portnoy 26:09
really can be around any and every part of the partner lifecycle. So it could be an experiment around partner acquisition and doing outbound to prospective partners. I mean, it depends on, you know, if you're a small fish in a big pond, big fish, small pond, sort of situation. But it could be around partner acquisition, it could be around partner enablement, training and certification. It can be around just even, like in partner incentivization, Hey, are we doing a spiff like, Hey, we're going to pay 100 bucks for every qualified demo. Are we just doing a rev share? Is that going directly to the company, or is that going to the rep, for example, at the partner one of the and we've built this into Euler, not trying to plug it, but we are plugging holes. But like one of the biggest glaring gaps in partnerships is that partner managers don't have client relationships. Sales reps do account reps or CSMs do yet the way that these relationships work is you have client facing teams all funneling down into a partner manager who talk to each other. So if someone over here wants something, they have to go to the partner manager who goes to their other partner the other partners, partner manager who goes to a salesperson or account manager. And then it's a very inefficient process, right? So one, allowing those folks to talk to each other, number one, and enabling them and getting them their information they need without having that bottleneck of the partner managers. But the other one is like, well, what if we actually gave an incentive directly to the client facing teams at the partner and said, Hey, you guys are the MVPs, kind of the unsung heroes of partnerships, because you're introducing us to your clients. We're introducing you to our clients. We're co selling together. We're co marketing together, and yet, you're totally cut out of the process unless someone's either tapping you on the shoulder asking for something or patting you on the back to say thank you. But neither of those things can be cashed, so maybe you incentivize those folks directly. That's another type of experiment, of like, what if we gave that spiff? Hey, the rep share goes to the business, but the spiff goes to the rep. What if you run an experiment about, like, co marketing with a partner and see, hey, did we by bringing in this partner? Sure we had to share the list with them. But how much bigger did our reach get on this webinar or this in person event, or what have you? Obviously, there's the ones we talked about around like, Hey, did this? Shorten the sales cycle, increase our ASP, increase our win rate, things like that. I mean, those are super, super easy, and it's really about, how do we it's really about running experiments, about how do we improve the partner experience, and how do we improve the outcomes from partnering, right? And the two things are linked, but I think that a lot of times, businesses will focus on just the outcomes piece, and they don't really think about the partner experience. And it's exciting to see partnerships gaining a broader adoption or broader conversation now, because that means partnering is becoming more competitive. More companies are trying to partner with each other, and if you have multiple companies of the same type trying to partner with you, you're going to partner with the one that creates the best partner experience, and that just gives you the most value for the value you're giving them, and that just encourages better practices and better experimentation. But I'm sorry, I'll say one more thing in the experimentation, like when a new partner program is starting, they're like, Okay, where do I start? How do I know who to partner with? And I basically tell them. I'm like, Okay, look at your customer. Look at the value ecosystem around them. Figure out you know where you fit in that value ecosystem of vendors, who's directly to your left in the decision making kind of flow, who's directly to your right, who are the ones that you can work naturally with either other products or services, businesses that you can naturally send each other business. Okay, pick three to five types of businesses around your customer. Then pick three to five companies within that type of business. And usually I say go like, small, medium, large, and then go run experiments with each of those. Get a few of each of those types and run experiments. And you'll. Start to see like, oh, very easy to partner with these types of companies. We were already sending each other referrals in the first month, and they're super bought in. And we have a Chinese menu of value that we can provide to a partner, and they have a menu of value they can provide to us, and what they have to offer we want, and what we have to offer they want. And this partnership just really took off, and it was low hanging fruit. And then you have the I want to go partner with Deloitte and Ernst and Young the GSIs that everybody partners with because their account list is so sexy, and that takes 12 to 24 months to get any movement with one of those companies, if you'll ever get it at all. And that's the kind of experimentation I'm talking about. Is you just don't know what's going to work in partnerships unless you've built this exact type of partner programming, this exact sector for another competitive company, right? But the likelihood of that is small.

Sean Lane 30:47
What the right time horizon is for those experiments, right? Like you just mentioned, kind of the big players in terms of, hey, it might take a year to two years. Lot of places aren't going to have the patience for that unless, to your point, that's something that they've very specifically done with that type of partner and that type of industry before. And then there's also, like the people on the ground who are doing the work for all that time, who are trying to prove that the the seeds they're watering are actually going to turn into something at some point, right? So like, one, how do you set the right time horizon to know whether those experiments are going to pay off. And then two, how do you message and talk about it internally and still hold people accountable to like, the steps in between that you know inevitably are going to be required in order for this thing to be worth so much more in year 234,

Greg Portnoy 31:35
absolutely. Yeah. So I mean that goes back to that entire concept of around like, that executive alignment and then internal alignment again, this doesn't work. Or I should say it very, very rarely works, unless you just got lucky where the executive team went and just set a number and set a timeline in which they would like that number to happen, and then essentially just gave it to the partner leader that they brought on. And then this person's just kind of like scrambling and starting behind the eight ball versus, you know, coming in and having a thoughtful dialog about it and say, Okay, what are we trying to achieve here? Why are we trying to achieve it? How do we believe this can be achieved? Okay, let's put together a strategy that has numbers and timelines. I do think partnerships teams do need to be more comfortable committing to outcomes, I will say that, but let's just say that that's the case. And you come up with this strategy, and then you go and you have that conversation internally with those stakeholders and say, Hey, these are the outcomes we believe that we can achieve. This is the timeline in which we believe we can achieve them, and these are the resources that are going to be necessary to do that. Is everybody good with that, Mr. Sales leader, are you good with that marketing leader? You good with that CEO board member? Are you guys good with this? Okay, this is what we're committing to. Everyone has agreed that. This is the strategy, this is the timeline, this is the resources. All right, let's go execute that. Shouldn't take more than a month, maybe two or three, if this is a really complicated business, and the partner leader needs to, like, ramp up to that, right? But it shouldn't take very long to build and agree upon that strategy, and then you can go execute, versus, again, trying to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. If you have a plan, sure you will deviate from the plan, but you have to have a plan, and just a lot of partner leaders don't get the latitude to go in with that plan, and to have that internal discussion and to agree on those outcomes and those timelines. Partner

Sean Lane 33:25
leaders, did you catch that get comfortable committing to outcomes and senior leaders? Did you hear that stick to the time horizon that you all agreed to so your partner folks can go execute only when both of these things take place, will the true potential of partner teams be realized? Now, I also think that for all the compelling reasons that Greg has outlined for why partner teams are getting more attention right now, another key ingredient is that there are new and better technologies available for partner teams to leverage. You've got better product usage insights, better orchestration between integrations these create more and more opportunities for creativity when it comes to triggers and actions that companies can take with their partners. So this is how I'd make my bets for my experiments, leveraging these product based triggers, and then I'd coordinate all of the necessary folks around executing those plates. Turns out that's what Greg is seeing within his work with Euler customers. I was

Greg Portnoy 34:29
speaking to a partner leader recently at a big B to B tech company, and they said that when a customer is using one of their integrations, the ASP is typically 50% higher. When they're using two integrations, the ASP is typically 100% higher, and it kind of went up from there. And it's not because they charge more to use the integrations, but it means the customer is that much more engaged with their product. They're planning to use it in a much more advanced way, right? Plus it also makes your product sticky. The. Reason that companies build integrations is because they want these systems that are doing different things to come together to create a cohesive experience, workflow, solution, whatever data set, which means that these things are filling gaps for each other. And it means that if you're using something that is integrated with some other things you're using, that product is then stickier. So you're very, very right. Like integrations are a huge, huge benefit to that. And it kind of comes back to that importance of that strategic conversation where most businesses, and most, let's just call it, functional area leaders, they really just kind of see, like their area, right? Sales sees sales. Marketing sees marketing. Product sees product Customer Success sees customer success. Sure they talk to each other, sure they have, like, their executive leadership team meetings and so on and so forth, but like they're focused. I mean, you know, the average tenure of a revenue executive in tech is like, 18 months or something. You don't want to blame them for having that myopic focus, to some extent. But I think the interesting thing is that partnerships isn't just like a revenue function, it's an entire business strategy. We've literally talked about how it touches every single team within the business and can help uplift every single team within the business. So if you have that strategic conversation early on, and it becomes very, very clear at the highest levels of the business decision making pyramid that partnerships is going to raise all ships within the business. That's a very different conversation, right? I want to help folks

Sean Lane 36:31
connect like that strategic initiative to like the tactical ways that then they would actually pull that off, right? So let's assume you figure out that with integration a, your net retention rate goes up by a certain amount, right? And so then the goal, if I'm a good ops person, I'm gonna sit there and say, Okay, I want to go from having 10% of our customer base with integration a to 20% of our customer base with integration a by the end of next quarter. And so if I'm sitting there with that, like, how do you then take that and say, All right, what do I need to do tactically within your organization

Speaker 1 37:11
to reach that goal? Yeah, so this is

Greg Portnoy 37:15
where it all comes back to the ops. This is where it all comes back to setting up the CRM for success again, as great as Euler is, EULAR is a partnerships operating system and data analytics platform, but CRM, Salesforce, HubSpot, that's going to be your ultimate source of truth for all of this information. So if you as an ops person, are there to support the partnerships team and create the relevant fields, for example. So I'll just give you a very specific example of how I did this when I was building the partner program at attentive This was before crossbeam was really like a big thing, the account mapping software. And so when we would bring on partners, we would have them give us their customer list and we would share ours. We would then enrich that list. I would have my sales ops team upload that list to the CRM based on that we knew which of our customer tiers, or potential customer tiers, each of these prospects fell into, we would associate a tier to them, and therefore like an assumed value. And we would then be able to look into any prospect account or any customer account, and see which partners they were working with. And then from there, you can obviously go find new deals or get help on existing opportunities, things like that. But then we would also track what integrations they were using, to your point, and we would have a field of like, you know, just the integrations. I think the max that anybody was ever using at that time was, like, three. So we had three fields, and then from there, like, again, it's just data capture. If you have that information, and you build in the structure that makes it, like, relatively scalable to collect that data from there, building reports in the CRM is old hat for ops folks, so it's really just figuring out, like, again, it goes back to that strategic conversation. If you know all the ways the partnerships can impact the business, then you really just think about, how can we track that in the CRM in a scalable, structured way? And then from there, it's just reporting on

Sean Lane 39:02
it. Before we go, at the end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of

Speaker 1 39:10
questions. Ready? Here we go.

Sean Lane 39:13
Best book you've read in the last six months?

Greg Portnoy 39:16
Ooh, best book I've read in the last six months. I got this book called hidden genius at a conference, and it's a book where this this woman, went and, like, either spoke to or read about, like some of the most successful people in history, and pulled out like little excerpts and found, like, the common threads between what made them successful or what made them exceptional. So it was pretty interesting. Cool. I haven't heard that

Sean Lane 39:43
one. I have to put it on the list. Normally, I would ask your favorite part about working in ops. I'm gonna ask you your favorite part about working with ops.

Greg Portnoy 39:50
I mean, Ops is foundational to scaling any kind of a go to market function. Ultimately, like, again, I didn't know what. Ops was until I had my first partner manager role where I learned how to do partnerships. But already there, we had a partner ops person there, and so I just learned how to do it with ops. And then when I've been at places without ops, I see how absolutely painful it is. And now that we sell two partnerships teams, like one of our processes is is like we talk to the partnerships team and then we talk to the ops team like you can't buy EULAR without us speaking to your ops team. And the companies that don't have ops support, it's just such a world of difference in how well their data is structured, how well their CRM is set up, how easily or not easily, they're able to scale. And so I think Ops is absolutely table stakes, critical, and so I very much have always had a healthy love and appreciation for ops folks.

Sean Lane 40:47
Flip Side, least favorite part about working with ops,

Greg Portnoy 40:52
I don't know where to back to your question of lane like, Where can people learn? Ops people learn like, partnerships, best practices. I don't know where ops people learn like they're not like the regular best practices. Definitely encountered some that are just a little bit too creative. And there's some like, some companies we talk to don't use leads, some companies don't use opportunities. Some companies don't use accounts. Some companies focus on the contact record. I mean, we've seen so maybe not as much as you, but we've seen a lot of crazy stuff in the CRM. And so I think my least favorite thing is, like, when they set it up in a unnecessarily complex way, or they're like, super enamored with custom objects, which you and I both know, create this, like, web of this house of cards right inside of the CRM, architecturally. So I think the least favorite thing is when they think that they just know everything and they set things up, maybe not in a optimal way,

Unknown Speaker 41:47
simplicity.

Sean Lane 41:49
No, that's such a good answer because, you know, it's not just for folks like you who might be trying to then sell to them. It's every single one of their stakeholders, right? And by the way, like that person's not going to be there forever, and so whoever comes after them is going to have to inherit to have to inherit that like, creative mess of like, novel solutions. Most of these problems have been solved somewhere else, and those are perfectly fine solutions to use. All right, someone who impacted you getting to the job you have

Greg Portnoy 42:14
today. Somebody who impacted me getting to the job I have today. God, I mean, the job I have today is running a software company. So I mean, honestly, like my first VP of partnerships, guy named Ryan Merton. He's the one that gave me my first shot at partnerships. He's the one that taught me what partnerships was. He's the one that kind of made me fall in love with partnerships. I could imagine if I had someone that wasn't as good as him and didn't enable me to be as successful as I was, and to really understand, like, the True Potential and value of partnerships. I may have not have gone down that career path over a decade ago, which would not have led me to basically realizing, like, hey, the way that we've been building, it's not common, and I want to build a solution that helps all partner teams operate in this elevated way to just be more successful. So

Unknown Speaker 43:06
probably Ryan.

Sean Lane 43:07
Shout out, Ryan. All right. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday. Oh, God,

Greg Portnoy 43:13
I don't know if I would necessarily

Unknown Speaker 43:14
recommend it. No,

Greg Portnoy 43:16
look, I would say, make the leap like I thought that I was capable of and would like to start my own business and run my own company for a long, long time before I did it, probably since I was, like, 18 or something, maybe even sooner, and it took me a really, really long time to just make the leap and to see that it is something that I'm Both good at but also really, really enjoy. And look, if I had started sooner, there's a very good chance I would have failed and not have been successful like we are now. I think the success that we're seeing now is based on this experiences I've had. But I would say, just take the leap. Believe in yourself, and the worst thing you can do is fail, and then fail fast and but you'll figure out, like, even if you fail, you'll figure out if you were invigorated and excited about, you know, kind of being your own boss and building something.

Sean Lane 44:11
Thanks so much to Greg for being on this week's episode of operations. And shout out Dave link, his co founder, for making the intro. If you like what you heard from Greg today. Make sure you're subscribed to our show so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you learned something from Greg today or from any of our guests, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, six star reviews only. All right, that's going to do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.