Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel
leaders share success strategies, best practices, and emerging
trends brought to you by StructuredWeb.
Here's your host, Stephen Kellam.
Welcome, everybody, to another
episode of ChannelWaves.
I'm your host, Stephen Kellam.
Very excited today to be talking partnerships, Partnership
Leaders with Asher Mathew, who is the co-
founder and CEO of Partnership Leaders.
Welcome, Asher. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
No, it's great.
Hey, look, congratulations for becoming
a partnership leaders member finally.
This is love.
Yes.
And thank you for finally showing me
the value and providing me value Partnership
Leaders so that I could join.
It's interesting, right?
I was talking to somebody else this week, right?
And in our history, we started working
with a company called Crossbeam, which I
think everybody should know, right?
And we did so much stuff with them
because Crossbeam needed us and we needed them.
And there was a very symbiotic relationship.
People for the longest time thought
we were the Crossbeams Community, right?
And then since then, Crossbeams have grown
up and they have much larger ambitions.
They have to go create a much larger company, right?
So they're focusing on partnerships, personas, but
also other go to market personas, right?
And then people like, I was on the
phone with somebody else and they were like,
hey, how's things at Crossbeam?
I'm like, what do you mean?
They're like, well, aren't you their community?
And I'm like, okay, let me explain to you what we do.
And not that there's anything wrong with that,
but I'm just like, it's so hard to
share information and just make it stick.
But the reason I share that is because
the primary value when we started was just
to help people understand how account mapping actually
works and why account mapping is great.
And then now where we are is we have 978 companies
on the network, if you want to call it that. Right?
And then 34% of them are SMBs, 33% of them are
mid market, and now 33% of them are like large enterprise.
Not to interrupt you, but I am going to interrupt you.
Yeah, that's okay for me, people
like me, that is the value.
This is the reason we're talking, I think. Fascinating.
We're going to talk about the
acceleration of all of this, right?
And that 33% of the enterprise and
the difference two years really makes. Yeah.
Thank you to you.
Thank you to, let's say, Heather Margolis.
And thank you to a few other people that
actually gave me this feedback in January, because I
clearly remember the feedback was, hey, look like Partnership
Leaders is supporting a lot of the emerging tech,
but what about the tech that needs transformation?
Because if partnerships is the future, then there's a lot
of other people that need to hear this message, too.
Right.
And it didn't quite click back then.
But then right from that, we started exploring what
would it take to serve the large enterprise. Right.
Like, we don't have a product for them, and then
we also don't want to just show up and say,
me, me, but rather actually find value for them.
And I feel like today we have that. Right.
And so I can go into detail of that.
But thank you for inspiring us.
And you were also there at Catalyst in Miami last year.
I've been there since the beginning. Exactly.
You've literally seen the whole journey.
So thank you for that. Yeah.
And look, I'm no visionary, that for sure, but I
recognize a good thing when I see it coming.
And I also recognize how quickly I
thought this was going to Intertwine.
And we met two years ago in Miami.
I thought a CPO was a Chief Product Officer. Right.
Okay, I'm dating myself.
I'm not really dating myself.
Four years ago, if you said CPO, what's a CPO? Yeah.
You would have said Chief Product Officer.
It's a Chief Product Officer. Right.
I still have a hard time writing it.
And, you know, what is the Chief Partnerships Officer?
So maybe here's what I really.
The question I want to ask is this is
incredibly disruptive and for the channel, is this an
opportunity or is this something to angst over?
But don't answer that, because I think yet, because
what I think we should go is a little
bit of Partnership Leaders, how it's evolved, and what
is a Chief Partnership Officer, and how does that
fit into this world where we're all seeking clarity?
And you got channel on one side,
you got ecosystems, you got alliances.
And they are just getting so intertwined, and people
are trying to figure out what's the difference?
What's the similarity?
I think most importantly, they're trying
to figure out where's the synergy?
What do I need to do to be a part of it? Yeah, totally.
So Partnership Leaders exists to elevate
partner teams around the world, and
we have four distinct offerings today.
We have a community which can be thought
of as a membership association or a network.
And we were born out of COVID So we built
virtual engagement first, and then we built in person experiences.
So that's one piece.
The second piece is market insights.
We have seven or eight reports done on topics like
the state of partner ops, the state of partner led
growth, which is focused on go to market teams.
We have the state of partner
experience, the state of co-sale.
How do you work with hyperscalers?
So that's another part of our group, right?
And then the third piece is experiences.
We have meetups that are running around the world.
We have our conference, Catalyst, which
had 700 people attend this year.
And then the last piece is we have education, right?
So we have self-serve education,
and we have cohort based education.
And these four pieces, in our humble
opinion, bring together tools that partner teams
can use to elevate themselves.
And a lot of partner people are really builders.
And so they want to build.
They want to go build partner
programs, they want to build companies.
So we created a company
that literally just supports them.
So if there was like, a platform for success
for partner teams, that's how we're positioning it, and
we'll add more features to support them.
So that's how we've been able to
take the most important things that create
value for members and put them together.
Okay, maybe you can start with what
is a CPO in this, right?
And remember, 95% of the audience that I reach
on a daily basis or that I'm connected with
define the channel as selling through versus selling with.
Once again, it's all starting to comingle.
But I think that's our one thing to emphasize
is Partnership Leaders is not creating any movement, right.
Like we are creating a platform
to support other people's movement, right?
So everything that's happening in the marketplace,
we are reading it, we have 1500
members in 42 different countries.
So we're grabbing information all the time, and
we're picking the things that logically make sense,
and then we're amplifying that, right?
So what we learned in the last two years,
specifically, actually, it started at Catalyst last year, right.
Is that partnerships impact across the
customer journey became important to realize.
And so whether it is the presales process, where I
believe most of the channel exists, or it's the post
sales process, which is where services and alliances exist, or
I know there are some definitions of channel which include
all of that, too, that's also okay, right?
But this new thing that came up, which was
technology integrations, which actually focused on the workflow of
users, that part of partnerships was even more underserved
than all the other parts of partnerships, which would
be channels and alliances, right?
And so we found ourselves as a home for them first.
And then at Catalyst, the whole conversation became
about serving the entire customer journey, and it
almost became, like a Chief Customer Officer role
for partnerships, because the customer success team also
serves the entire customer journey.
And in some companies, the CRO does that.
And so what we realized over the last year or
so is that there are three or four different types
of partnerships, and then there is now a world where
they all have to work together, whether they're selling together,
marketing together, serving together, or building together.
Right.
But what's missing is a leader
who can unify all of them.
And the reason why we believe that is
because on the direct business side, there is
a CRO who's responsible for unifying SMB, mid
market and enterprise sales. For us in partnerships,
I would say whether you're in the pre-sales process,
which is where a lot of channel companies exist, or
you're in the post-sales process, where the alliances exist,
or you're helping with the workflow, which is where technology
integrations exist, or you're building large strategic deals to grow
companies and provide leverage, there has to be talent that
exists out in the marketplace that is an expert in
all of them.
And so the stats are there are 152,000 CMOs, there
are 37,000 CROs, about 27,000 Chief Sales Officers, 10,000 Chief
Customer Officers, and I think less than 2000,
let's call it alliances, channels, or partnership
leaders that are senior at that level.
Well, okay, you say there's 2000.
How many of them were there four years ago?
I don't know.
I think no.
We were so young.
So this is a hobby, right?
This is a hobby that became something.
And then along the way, folks that are super
experienced, like yourself and Heather and Jay and a
number of people like Alan and stuff, you've all
helped us realize the different things that are important.
And so we have built this thing with you.
All right, again, we didn't build
this thing all by ourselves.
Actually, almost everything in Partnership Leaders is
built by somebody in our community.
And so it's a very
member driven, member built organization.
And now we're at a point where we are
creating some structure so we can elevate all of
those members to the goals that they want.
Look, I think it's a great opportunity when
you're talking to someone, and you and I
both, we've both been in sales, both been
in marketing, I've been a channel chief.
I've run alliances.
And I think the evolution was that
it was all going to come together.
There was a moment in my brain when it just went click.
Okay.
Does it really matter whether you're selling
with or whether you're selling through.
How does that sale work with the ultimate buyer? Right.
And how do we maximize and
make that as effective as possible?
That selling motion marketing, and actually
even the marketing motion too.
Because let me tell you, I was involved in alliances.
I was watching partnerships like seven or
eight years ago when you would have
two massive Fortune 100 companies selling together.
You could name maybe three of them
coming together, doing an offering, and the
worst thing they actually did was market.
And then at the end, on fulfillment and operations
side, we're not even talking about the challenges you
had in the sales side, but they couldn't market
their way out of a box with a message. Right.
So, I mean, it's been going on forever.
It just wasn't done very well. Yeah.
I've now been through four different startups and two
of them were acquired and one went public.
So I've kind of seen a lot of
the different iterations of a go to market. Right.
And so I feel like companies have been working on
co-selling and co-marketing with each other for a
while, but it still landed in this art zone, it
never landed in this science, and maybe it does in
larger organizations, but the vast majority of the SMB and mid
market just looked at it as this thought experiment and
never really put any structure around it.
And that's why you don't have a lot
of senior partner people in mid market companies.
Even companies that like a billion dollars
in revenue don't have Chief Partner Officers
or somebody that's aligning all of the
different partnering functions together.
And by the way, developer audiences
are also a channel of sorts.
Like you and I were talking when we met
for dinner a few weeks ago, where you have
a large company that has a consultants network, but
they also have an app store, and there's a
big opportunity to bring those two together.
But how many leaders exist that can
actually do that type of work?
I don't know.
I actually think there are a fair amount.
Look, I think you could have asked the
partners a long time ago in the channel
through sell partners how it would work.
And it was funny.
We were talking about this when I was
at 360ecosystems last week, and Chris was
there and we were talking about that.
This partnerships has been going
on forever at both levels.
At both the vendor side, they didn't very, like I said,
didn't do a great job on marketing and probably at the
end, but at the partner side, I was an MSP a
while ago, I partnered in 30% of my deals already.
This was ten years ago.
So it's been going on forever.
And we could have probably just asked the partners
in the channel, okay, what do we see?
Where's this thing going?
And I think both from the software side that you're
talking about and development and surely from, we have average
of four vendors in a deal or more. Right.
And then I'm working with two
other partners on my delivery.
By the way, the buyer was looking
at this over ten years ago.
Yeah, I know I'm on this podcast, so
I should be your interview, but I like
to do podcasts where it's a discussion, really.
Why hasn't there been a leader that
unifies all partnering functions in the past?
What does your data point say
or what's your experience say?
This is just my take, right.
And it's a discussion. We'll do this.
And maybe just a couple of points because nobody
wants to listen to a 45 minutes podcast.
We can literally take two on it.
Here's my take on it.
I think a couple of things.
I think the channel is very complex and I
think already the focus of a channel chief has
gotten so complex just in the channel itself. Right.
If you look at the evolution of that where, as I
said, ten, okay, maybe 15 years ago when I ran an
MSP, 30% of my deals were with someone else and I
could aggregate what I needed to pull together.
It wasn't that complex, right.
I just made it happen.
And then how people bought started to change.
And that whole idea of, am I MSP?
We were an MSP and we were ISV.
I mean, we sold 40% of our revenue was IP
that we put on top of things 15 years ago.
So all this started to get more complex
and I think the focus was here.
And then while the whole alliance piece was
trying to figure out how to get that
act together, here's what I don't think the
alliance act was together all that long ago.
Once again, having been involved, running an incentive company
with multiple Fortune 50 companies trying to sell something
together and being the incentive arm on that and
watching what they did from their marketing and how
they tried to pull the salespeople together and really
how they tried to do it at the end.
I watched 40% of the deals get
unwound at the end of the quarter.
This is on alliances because sales guys that
had a multimillion dollar quota weren't going to
wait for the other end to come around,
unwound the deal, sold it on their own. Okay.
So you got to fight through all that on the alliances.
You got channel getting very complex.
And I don't think it was until
the realization was a couple of things.
If the buyer is insisting on
this, it becomes more efficient.
And then I think organizations like yourself,
I don't know whether you're reactive or proactive.
I think you're proactively reactive, right?
You're listening and seeing.
And then you guys said, okay, we're going to
run with this and you guys can come along.
And I think you guys created, along
with the market conditions and everybody else,
an opportunity to pull this together.
And someone goes, ding.
All right, why doesn't this fit?
And then we could talk forever about corporate infrastructure
and how it makes sense and how you need
to streamline it and how eventually someone's going to
go, what do they have in common?
If there's a partnership, it doesn't matter.
What we're saying is we're dependent on a relationship
of trust with someone else to create a partner
experience that's going to drive the selling motion, that's
going to allow more sales wins.
I think I just set the whole reason exists, right? Yeah.
At the end of the day, it comes
down to sales velocity, at least for me. Right?
If the sales velocity is faster,
direct, let's just go direct.
If it's faster this way, let's go this way. Right?
I know a lot of leaders emphasize on
ASP and these other things, but for me,
it really comes down to sales velocity.
And so whichever way is faster, we should go do that.
Customer preference dictates that anyways then, right?
Yeah.
I think you got customer preference.
I think you got sales velocity.
I think you've got cost of sale. Right?
Let's just be really frank.
If it was just as cost effective to
sell direct as it was to sell through
the channel, the channel wouldn't exist.
No one wants to add complexity to a sale unless
there is a cost benefit analysis, totally, to it, right?
So I think it's velocity, but I think you just
got to be able to do it cost effectively.
Yeah, agreed.
So you gave the enterprise,
let's call it perspective, right?
I think in the mid market and the SMB,
what happened is you have leaders, but the leaders
did not have the operational infrastructure supporting them.
So they're running around justifying their existence
when they should be working on moving
investment from ad hoc to programmatic.
And so there was no operational layer like the notion
of partner operations that exist in large enterprise companies does
not exist in mid market and SMB, and the tech stack
isn't there for them to do it.
Look, the reason again, we're in the enterprise space
is because they've been able to have the resources
to create a tech stack that allows them to
automate everything so that they can go focus on
other things versus creating a spreadsheet and trying to
drive someone's ROI or metrics across that, right?
And I think that's been the big challenge in
the mid market and the SMB, which
I think created an opportunity for people to come
along, there's both sides to it, right?
I would say the SMB and the mid
market were more flexible because people were less worried about
what they can't do and more worried about put there
to solve problems and less red tape.
So what happened is if you double click
on that, right, so the partner leader then
goes and does multiple experiments when there's no
red tape, right, because they're not focused on
repeatability and rigor, they're focused on revenue, right,
because they're like, go do this, right?
And so what happens is you have 17
different partner types enter the company and then
the organization feels the burden of supporting them.
It would be the same thing as for a startup.
2000 PLG customers came in, SMB customers
and five large enterprise came in, right?
They would feel the burden of supporting them, right?
So that then, along with the startup trying to understand,
it's like go to market fit and then trying to
understand how to scale creates a lot of executive friction.
And then when executive friction happens, if you
are a board or a CEO, your first
intuition is to remove the friction.
And so you're going to have your
sales and market leaders there because you
absolutely need them, definitely at that stage.
That's why we did the state of partner operations as
a research report, because we said, look, if you don't
invest in operations, you will always be as a partner
leader, always be thought of as an experiment person, because
you just don't have enough time for stakeholder alignment, which
should be 50% of your time.
But we should be getting past that pretty soon, right?
Once again, I don't think Partnership
L eaders exist just to exist.
I think there is something very much something
said, no one wants to be reactionary, but
I do think it started as well.
There's a negative reactionary.
Like someone comes too late and there's
a positive reactionary and someone witnessed something
and got on it, right?
So I think it's the positive side of it.
I think the question is, how do you make it?
Was it moved to proactive, which finally gets to what
we were going to start the whole podcast on.
Totally, which is great, by the way.
So I want a clip.
So I need a clip.
I need 20 seconds.
What's a CPO? Yeah.
So a Chief Partner Officer for
us right now is somebody that
understands all partner motions, including marketplaces.
Okay.
And that's a big enough job to have a C suite role.
And I also believe this is going to evolve, right.
Because when the CRO role started,
it became this all encompassing role.
It was like a rigid definition that all revenue
functions and marketing and customer success and everything that's
a customer is going to be there. Right.
And what happened then was it was just that
CMOs were more brand focused than demand focused.
And so it just made sense to put the
SDR team and the demand function underneath the CRO.
But then over time, you've seen the
CMOs become extremely demand focused and start
taking ownership of pricing and packaging. Right.
And so you have this resurgence of CMOs. Right.
And so I think that's what's going to
happen with the Chief Partner Officer as well.
There's going to be a consolidation of the
different routes to market, as we call them. Right.
And then from there there's going to be specialization.
And so we'll have to see.
But today my definition is someone that understands
and owns all partner motions, including marketplaces, and
then we'll see how it evolves.
It's so interesting and fascinating for me because I
actually lived this right, where I was a channel
chief and then owned alliances at the same time.
So back then, being a channel chief and owning alliance,
no one was calling me a Chief Partnership Officer because
once again, CPO was a Chief Product Officer.
So I've actually walked in those
shoes for a little bit.
It's a pretty, pretty fascinating role.
So how do channel chiefs now
today, how should they view this?
How should they look at a CPO?
Should they want to be a CPO?
How does it fit in on an org chart?
Like, really just get down to
the brass tacks of it, right?
What's the opportunity?
How do you get there?
And do you want it? Yeah, totally.
And so it's interesting, we're
about to launch two reports.
One is literally called the Chief Partner Officer.
It actually goes into exactly this.
And I'll share some information, but
it actually goes into this topic. Right.
And we're also about to launch the
State of Partner Ecosystem, or Platform Ecosystem.
Sorry, exactly.
The State of Platform Ecosystems
with our friends at HubSpot. Right.
And so the reason why both of these reports
exist is to actually show that in some companies,
the channel chiefs actually do own all partner functions.
Right.
But in many companies, they don't, in a number
of companies, actually own a part of the channel.
They don't even own all of the
channel traditionally what we call the channel. Right.
The question then becomes that if you were
to elevate yourself to then create a larger
organization that is responsible for all partner motions,
then can you effectively create a bigger impact?
Because all of partnering is managed by one. Right?
So that means there could be 30
different partner programs, 20 different incentive plans,
four different regions, five different geographies.
All the things that we have to do on the direct
side, they have to be done on the indirect side, too.
Right?
I believe there's an opportunity to do that also.
What we have seen is not all of
those, or maybe a majority of those.
I think that's what the data says.
Channel chiefs report to the CEO.
And so we believe there's an opportunity where this
group can elevate themselves and start sitting in the
C suite organization and actually build the business.
Because if you really think about it, you
go all the way to almost all.
Every partner person that I've met, every good partner
person I've met, they have two things, right?
They're connectors and they're builders, but they don't
sit at this table where other connectors and
builders or senior connectors and builders sit.
So I think they have the traits and they have
the experience, and they just haven't taken that step.
So I'm not an expert in this today.
We're building expertise as we're going, right?
So the next body of work that we have to
do is why haven't the current leaders taken that step?
Or why haven't the CEOs looked
at this much more closely? Right.
I'm sure there were reasons in the past, and there's
current reasons to go look at this, but maybe now
is the time to actually do it right again, like
I said, we are not creating any movement.
We're just picking the things that are happening
in the marketplace and then taking steps logically
to support every type of partner leader.
So do you see this accelerated?
I was going to ask you the
standard ending question of any podcast.
So, Asher, what does this look like in two years? Right?
And part of it is you guys are reactionary,
but I'm sure you have your own thoughts because
you're reactionary, but even in that, you're seeing the
trajectory and the acceleration of all these conversations.
So my perspective is going to look very different in
two years, and the CEO's ears are perking up.
Here's what I think is going to happen is
because this is going to become standard nomenclature.
And from Forrester to Catalyst,
everybody's talking about this, right?
There are T-shirts at Catalyst that said CPO now.
It's close to becoming a meme.
Then it is.
I say this is analogous to AI
and that it's not going anywhere.
It is only going to accelerate.
And there's some great truths out there, and
there's some non truths out there, too.
And everybody's trying to figure
out what's the direction.
And I think, most importantly, so many people are
trying to figure out, where do I contribute?
How do I contribute, and how
do I actually not be reactionary?
I think that's going to be the key, right?
How do I take everything I know?
How do I leverage people and resources like yourself, and
then how do I build my career on this, right?
I think that's the interesting side of it.
So I'm an opportunist.
I see it as just a massive opportunity for everybody.
And I would say, to answer your question specifically,
I don't actually know where it'll go, right.
Because the market changes, and we've
seen market changes pretty quickly.
But what I do know is that our members
are working to upskill themselves to be able to
take this opportunity if it became available.
Now all of us have to come
together and drive this industry change.
But when that happens, we do need leaders that
are ready to take advantage of those opportunities.
Because in the mid market, right, like, if you look
at companies at 100 million in ARR, to, like, 1
billion in ARR, there's about 225,000 companies in there.
Let's just say 2000 of them needed CPOs.
I don't believe 2000 CPOs exist today.
Again, that just may be me, but
I don't believe that they exist today.
So even if you got 2000 CPOs, which is
kind of the promise we made at Catalyst with
our friends from Workspan, would be a great achievement,
because ten years ago, the 10,000 Chief Customer Officers
did not exist. Four years ago. Right.
So, once again, I think this is moving pretty fast.
Okay.
So, once again, thank you for joining us, Asher.
It sounds like you've got a couple of
very cool pieces of content coming out.
What's the best way to get connected with you?
What's the best way to
get connected with Partnership Leaders?
Yeah, the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn.
It's Asher Mathew, and the best way to
connect with Partnership Leaders, also through LinkedIn.
Just go to our LinkedIn company page.
It's also called Partnership Leaders.
And you can follow us.
And then as you feel motivated to take the next
step in up leveling yourself and elevating yourself and your
team, then you can apply to be a member.
And we'd love to build this with you. One last thing.
You guys do a lot of events.
You guys bring people together.
When's your next event?
So our next event is on November 14.
It's actually in San Francisco.
And then after that, we have an event in
December in Austin to basically close the year out.
And then we'll kick the year
off at ImpartnerCon in February.
We announced earlier this week that we're actually
building Impartnercon with Impartner, which is something
that, again, no community has ever done before. Right.
But we believe that we need to provide a lot
of connection points for all of us to meet, and
then we build deeper relationships, and then we build and
put those relationships into action, and then we elevate ourselves.
Fantastic.
So again, Asher, thank you for joining us.
Listeners and viewers, thank you for joining us.
Everybody. Have a great day.