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Welcome to Funnel Vision, Hosted by Mikael Dia, Founder & CEO of Funnelytics - a revolutionary marketing analytics software that allows marketers and business owners to map and track their sales and marketing campaigns visually.
We feature Marketing Agency Owners and Performance Marketers to highlight the tactics, tools and strategies they use to grow their own business and their clients.
Funnel Vision brings you 3 episodes every single week that aim to highlight the strategies used by successful agency owners and performance marketers in a 20 minute format.
Aside from their unique topic of the day, our guests always answer one big question:
What is your best growth tactic?
For more content, check out our YouTube page, newsletter or connect with Mikael Dia on LinkedIn!
[00:00:00] Mikael: What is going on, everybody? It is Mikhail here back with another Funnel Vision episode. I am very excited because today we get to dive into the world of partnerships and why partnerships are so important. Typically, partnerships are led by SaaS companies. It's at the end of the day, SaaS companies who really think about how do I create growth through strategic partnerships?
[00:00:28] Mikael: But this time we're going to talk about how we can create growth through strategic partnerships for our agencies. And I have none other than Alex Glenn here, the owner of Partner Hub, and he is here to talk all about partnerships. So first and foremost, Alex, thank you for being here.
[00:00:45] Alex: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:47] Alex: Partnership. So, agencies listening. I mean, if you're growing, if you've been in the game for a little while, you probably have partnership going on. Maybe you have an operation around it. Maybe not, but, we're going to talk about some things that you can do [00:01:00] to increase your revenue on top of partnerships.
[00:01:03] Mikael: Let's start with, our typical, we always start every episode like this. So, we're going to start you off putting you on the spot. What is your not so humble brag? What have you been able to achieve for clients? What have you been able to achieve for your business? In other words, like why should people care?
[00:01:17] Mikael: Why should people listen to you?
[00:01:19] Alex: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I've been through a number of different career paths. I started as an agency, went into SAS growth, back to consulting and helping SAS companies with their go to market strategy. And, started a community and a service where we were helping partnership teams and CEOs, founders, create this partnership growth engine.
[00:01:44] Alex: one of our community members actually posted something about, needing a place to operate this whole thing that they call partnerships. So that actually snowballed into what is now partner hub, which is actually a platform for finding, managing, [00:02:00] going to market with other companies. the two user types are agencies, like many of you listening and SAS companies like Funalytics.
[00:02:08] Alex: It works kind of like a dating app for partnerships. we've been building for the last three years and we're now up to, I think, 3000 or so users, 3000 companies, I should say. people are really enjoying it. They find it's something that they've never experienced before Honestly, it's a two sided marketplace, which are never easy to build.
[00:02:26] Mikael: I used to run a, not many people know this about me, but I used to have a language app where basically we would connect local language learners with local teachers.
[00:02:37] Mikael: So fundamentally partner hub is a marketplace between agencies and SAS companies, and what are you trying to connect?
[00:02:44] Mikael: What are you trying to do between the two? Like what's the, why as a SAS company, do I go there? And why as an agency, do I want to be on there?
[00:02:53] Alex: Yeah, growth, referrals, revenue, at the end of the day is what every one of our users is after. [00:03:00] some of our users, you know, maybe they're not in quite a growth stage and they just really want organization and management, but if I had to put a pie chart to it, it'd probably be 80 plus percent of our users are there to find referral partnership.
[00:03:13] Alex: then there are management features, of course, but the real value proposition that we bring to the table is. We will make sure to create value and, valuable features and valuable environment for top service providers, top digital agencies. And that way everybody involved is finding revenue driving partnerships
[00:03:33] Alex: If you're, if you've done partnerships before, most partnerships end up being a time suck and not really bearing much fruit. our job is to screen the companies, make sure that they have the ability to be a good partner and let the ones that are potential good partners for a number of different criteria in and then create features and create a matchmaking system, to enable those connections to [00:04:00] happen and facilitate what we call activating the partnership, which is like you and I chat today, we do a podcast.
[00:04:07] Alex: That's good. Co marketing. We meet each other. We post it to LinkedIn. Sure. There's some, branding stuff that gets done. Thought leadership stuff that gets done. That's not activating our partnership. Activating is like, okay, after this podcast, why don't we go have a call and go through our, shared pipelines and look at some of the deals that we're working and see if any of those could be good for Funnelytics and if so, let's get them into your funnel.
[00:04:31] Alex: Let's get you on a sales call. Let's figure out a way to introduce. And let's activate the partnership by bringing you revenue, So a lot of partnerships stay in that pre revenue kind of just, we don't really know if we even have any sort of, revenue from the actual partnership activity.
[00:04:48] Alex: we're trying to make sure that we can show you that this is what you did together, and this is what happened afterwards and give you more of the partners that can bring you those ideal customer profiles that you [00:05:00] want.
[00:05:01] Mikael: Okay, so tell me, just from your perspective, how do you differ between, you know, what's an affiliate?
[00:05:09] Mikael: What's a partner? What's a referral partner? What's a channel partner? Like, you know, you hear this term partner and all these different ways that people think about this. how would you kind of classify what it is that you do and how you help agents?
[00:05:26] Alex: Yeah. So in tough side, but the tough part stuff aspect about a two sided marketplace is you kind of have to be two different things at once.
[00:05:35] Alex: we're one thing to the SAS companies were another thing to the agencies. The end value proposition is there, but there's a bunch of things that need to happen for both sides in different ways in order to reach that end value proposition. And we kind of have to juggle both things at once, right?
[00:05:52] Alex: Problem. And the difficulty with two sided marketplace, but. You mentioned that nomenclature, some of the words in there that you're using, like channel partners, like [00:06:00] that, the backstory of channels, it really came from the hardware, the physical parts of a computer that needed to be built in order to work.
[00:06:08] Alex: so you'd create what Microsoft and Dell and Hewlett Packard would call a channel, which is, okay, well, if I need to go into a market like Latin America, we need actual people there that are trained up on selling our hardware and putting it together and then servicing it. You, there were days, I don't know if you remember, but there were days when you'd actually have to bring a computer.
[00:06:31] Alex: Who a radio, radio shack type of a shop and get it fixed or get a hard drive, put it in, or get something done to it. Like a car, totally there, there were those days, right? yeah, you could still get a computer fixed, but how many of us have brought a computer in to get fixed? Right. especially if you're Gen Z listening, you probably have no idea what I'm talking, but there were those days and that was the channel.
[00:06:54] Alex: But now, what happened was. And I, you know, I have a lot of, content in our [00:07:00] blog about this. but I think the name is, it doesn't make sense anymore. It is really it. So the word channel, channel partners is what they're called. now with SAS and software, software kind of adopted that, that, definition.
[00:07:14] Alex: And they, us, all of us, I believe, we just kind of kept the same definition. Which means like, okay, I need to go into a market again, any called a geography, fun analytics, you may want to go into Salesforce as a ecosystem. that's a market for you or HubSpot, maybe a little more relevant for you.
[00:07:34] Alex: You built this integration with HubSpot, you need to find more HubSpot users. You can do that with SEO, writing content about HubSpot and how to get more analytics done. You can do that with sales, having people just sell direct, or you can establish a indirect channel. and, those are agencies, typically service [00:08:00] providers.
[00:08:00] Alex: Sometimes the word reseller gets thrown in there. I think the days of reselling, I mean, it still happens a lot at your. call center systems and a lot of trucking companies that need like an OEMs for, automotive will have reselling going on active campaign kind of as a reselling channel, if you know, data box, they do have a little bit of a reselling channel, which is essentially a funnel Lytics.
[00:08:24] Alex: If I'm a reseller of funnel Lytics, I can buy 10 licenses at, a non pricing page price, a discounted price. And then, there's ways in which I can then distribute those licenses to my clients. I can give them away. I can sell them. I can sell them at a, margin. I can discount them.
[00:08:42] Alex: I can do whatever I want. That's kind of where reselling is with SaaS today. But most agencies that we talk to don't deal with reselling. They don't like the idea of having their credit card number on multiple SaaS. They like to just say, you know what, I'm going to build my services on top of Funalytics.
[00:08:58] Alex: And I'm going to [00:09:00] make my money off service revenue. And then if you're a funnel litics, if you're a SaaS company, you can say, okay, that's great. We want you to do that, but we're also going to add another incentive, maybe a commission, right? If you bring a big deal in. So that happens a lot too.
[00:09:14] Alex: What we like to say is it's either a partnership, meaning we're actually working together, or it's an affiliate relationship, which means I just went to some landing page and filled out a form and Funalytics sent me a trackable link and maybe a place I can log into to see if any of my customers have bought and request a commission check.
[00:09:39] Alex: that's an affiliate relationship. I never actually worked with Funalytics. we didn't co sell or co market or do anything like that. I'm an affiliate of Funalytics. So that still happens with SaaS. Of course, there's big affiliate ecosystems out there.
[00:09:52] Alex: but where we live is in true partnerships, which is you join partner hub, if you join our ecosystem, the purpose there is to [00:10:00] actually get on introductory calls. Meet each other, follow one of our strategies for first, let's do something together, then let's kind of capitalize on what we're doing together and find more lookalike, ICP audiences and definitely make referrals happen and continue this process of building a business out of this relationship.
[00:10:22] Alex: That's called a partnership. I think the new world of agencies, the new breeze, especially If you're selling into HubSpot, if you're selling into Shopify ecosystem, these new breed of agencies are really all about strategic services on top of an ecosystem and, working closely with not only the partner managers of that ecosystem, like your HubSpot partner manager, but also other agencies inside that ecosystem, as well as, of course, the, application that are integrated with that ecosystem, like Funalytics.
[00:10:55] Mikael: So you mentioned something, and we'll come back to this. You mentioned kind of different strategies, agencies can [00:11:00] use to, increase revenue through partnerships. And we'll dive into a little bit of those strategies and how agencies can actually utilize them. But before we do, walk me through a little bit about why you started Partner Hub.
[00:11:12] Mikael: Like, what was the, so you kind of mentioned you started an agency like most of us do, and then you decided SaaS is better, realizing that SaaS is just as hard and probably more challenging because you have to deal with developers and all that stuff. Then you went into consulting and consulting businesses on the partnership model, and then decided to start Partner Hub.
[00:11:34] Mikael: Walk me through a little bit of that journey, that thought process, like walk me through the timeline. And then what stage were you like, I need to build this tool called partner hub or this marketplace called partner hub.
[00:11:49] Alex: Yeah, definitely. the story of the community and somebody posting really did get the wheels sort of turning.
[00:11:55] Alex: I had consulted with marketplaces in my career with SAS. I had [00:12:00] also. worked as VP of growth for a couple of marketplaces. I had that experience and I knew essentially if you and I are working in different tools and different systems, we are going to have trouble working together in a partnership, go to market function, which is complex.
[00:12:19] Alex: So if I'm sitting over here in my ClickUp or Monday and my HubSpot account, and I'm planning and working with my team and we're doing our go to market and then we get on a call and we're like, you know what? Do a bunch of things together, right? Let's share audiences. Let's create content together.
[00:12:36] Alex: let's schedule stuff. Let's bring in other team members and, got people I want to refer you to. So I'll email those over and create threads everywhere that becomes chaos. If, especially if you're dealing with a lot of partners, which are users, one of our agencies has over 300 active partners.
[00:12:55] Alex: They have got. A database of, I think over 3000, but about 300 are [00:13:00] active, which is a huge, amount of things going on. Do you need a place to say, you know, here are the third parties that I'm working with, the other companies, here they all are.
[00:13:10] Alex: Okay. I can open that one up and see what I'm doing with this one and see what I'm doing with that one. And then refer business to this one. And at the same time, I may want to refer the same customer to five of my partners because it's my tech stack. I want to refer them to, to five of these technology partners that I have because they're a good fit for all of them.
[00:13:29] Alex: Then I need to track those referrals and make sure, see updates and what's going on, and then I need to quickly spin up conversations with these partners and see who the points of contact are. And then when someone loses their job and is no longer a partner manager, which happens a lot. I need to know who to reach out to.
[00:13:45] Alex: That's Partner Hub's main value proposition is just kind of who am I partnering with, where do I go to get more partners and what am I doing with these partners? So it was born out of that pain point of like, how do we create [00:14:00] something that both parties will use, but also, you know, you may partner with other tech and.
[00:14:05] Alex: Agencies will partner with other agencies. We enable that as well. how do we create something that's going to be awesome for you and your partners so that you can actually bring in more partners? and then when you bring in one of your partners, maybe that's a good partner for me.
[00:14:22] Alex: And that means a marketplace. That means, a place where I can actually filter out and see who in partner hub is. One of my ideal partner personas quickly reach out and hopefully they, like the idea of getting on an introductory call. And then if we form that connection, we've got tools that we can use to facilitate that go to market together, right?
[00:14:47] Mikael: Do you allow agencies to build a kind of directory with your software? Sure. Like, so can I have a front facing Funalytics, quote unquote, directory where all of my partners are listed [00:15:00] and people can search for them and all that stuff?
[00:15:03] Alex: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, yes, that is a feature. It's called partner directory. you can publish it at any time, turn it on or off, showcase some partners, disable others, use it to drive leads back to your partners, which means you're a good partner, which means they're going to want to send you leads.
[00:15:18] Alex: and the great thing about partner hub, we are more or less a CMS for partnerships, it's called a partner experience platform. So we have the ability to. Push landing pages up, we can create an entire website on top of partner hub.
[00:15:33] Alex: If you really want, you can have a fully private label version of partner hub. You can create your own hub for whatever ecosystem you're in. it's called the PXP framework that we have. So you can be in the main marketplace and be one of the users of partner hub. It's basically our, version of the framework, our branded version.
[00:15:54] Alex: but if you're a larger ecosystem and you have your own affinity, you have your own partners, you [00:16:00] can break off onto your own partner hub and have super admin privileges and decide what your, partners look like and what they're able to do. Interesting.
[00:16:10] Mikael: Okay, so let's dive into this.
[00:16:12] Mikael: Very few agencies really think about partnerships. as the main driving force of their business, they'll think of, referrals in a sense of like, you know, I did a good job for you. So send me a couple of referrals and it will be, you know, that will be kind of quote unquote the main thing.
[00:16:33] Mikael: So tell me a handful, you know, what are your top three column strategies an agency can really use to, increase their revenue from partnerships, not. Thinking of the traditional, like, I'm just going to ask my client to send me a referral.
[00:16:53] Alex: Yeah. So what are some of the things that are top agencies and SAS too?
[00:16:58] Alex: I mean, a lot of these strategies will be [00:17:00] used by both agencies and SAS, but, I'd say the top three things that both sides are doing to increase revenue from partnership, I'd say number one is starting with intention. too many times, I think like. You get on a call with an agency and you guys, you know, you both want to like each other.
[00:17:20] Alex: You both want the other to like you and you start making promises and throwing stuff out there and let's do this and let's do that. And I have this client for you and I have this customer for you. And, you can get into this and, you know, you kind of just leave the call super excited about the potential for the partnership, but there wasn't any real plan put into place.
[00:17:40] Alex: So we call this a partner memorandum. It's like any partnership in a company. You create a plan and you say, you know what, you're going to own this much. I'm going to own this much. And you're going to be this title and you're going to have these responsibilities. And I'm going to be this title, we even have templates for it and we productize this. So a lot of the stuff that we talk about [00:18:00] on our blog, there's an actual feature inside partner hub that allows you to take a strategy that we recommend. And execute it inside the product. the partnership memorandum is a perfect example of that.
[00:18:12] Alex: So you list out what personas you're aligning on going after together. what markets, what geographies, any limitations there? Like, you know, you may not be localized in Spanish, but I'm big in the Spanish market. So maybe our partnership is focused more on the English speaking markets, or Salesforce integration.
[00:18:32] Alex: I'm HubSpot and I'm a Salesforce partner. So I got a document, like we're working on the HubSpot stuff with you. If it's a Salesforce user, maybe I take them to a different, product. what specifically are we going to do for promotion? Where am I going to talk about you? When am I going to talk about you and what medium, what linked backlinks use?
[00:18:52] Alex: What am I going to tag in my posts? Really drill down, like what is our partnership? what the end goal is. Are there any KPIs [00:19:00] around that? what am I tracking? What are you tracking? So we have a template. It's Google doc and the article we'll probably put in the show note. We can do that. in that partner hub, it's part of the product.
[00:19:10] Alex: the next one is, land and expand strategy. Again, part of the product, we call it, the feature connections. It's really where if I partner with Funalytics, meaning I call it a partnership. it's just a connection inside partner hub. We don't really know what you guys are doing together. we just know you guys are connected and you're probably having your own stuff going on, but if you connect.
[00:19:31] Alex: With another user partner hub, and they have this turned on this feature turned on, you get to see their partner. So you say, okay, well, I'm partnered with Funalytics and Funalytics is in the HubSpot ecosystem. And I may be new to the HubSpot ecosystem, but Funalytics has been there for a couple of years
[00:19:48] Alex: Well, chances are Funalytics has more partners inside of the HubSpot ecosystem than I have. So then I can go to your profile and right on tab number one in your profile says connections. [00:20:00] I see everybody that you're also connected with inside partner hub. You can click on those profiles. I can review them.
[00:20:07] Alex: And if I feel like they would be a great partner of mine, I can click intro request and ask you to introduce me. So it's called land and expand because instead of you just going into an ecosystem, you know, as I'm going to find this person on this directory, and I'm going to go over to here and find someone else, What's a much better strategy. You find that one core partner inside of an ecosystem and get a good relationship established with them. And then ask them who else they're partnered with that they think you would be a good partner for and get those introduction because that what that does is it surrounds the customer.
[00:20:47] Alex: Meaning if. I partner with Funalytics and Funalytics has already partnered with this company over here. If I strike up a relationship with that other company, chances are Funalytics and that company have shared customers already. [00:21:00] Now I enter that world. And both of them are partners with me. They both know me.
[00:21:05] Alex: So if any of their customers, they'll go to Funalytics and say, I need, you know, HubSpot integration. Who do you know? And you'll say my name because I'm the HubSpot integration specialist that you're partnered with. And that may get them to reach out or ask for an intro. Maybe, maybe not. But if they go to that other partner and they say, who do you recommend?
[00:21:25] Alex: And they say me as well, chances are that customer is going to come my way, which is good for acquisition. It's even better for retention because once that customer says. I'm not really happy with Funalytics and I'm on a call with them. I can say, you know, I'm a solutions partner of Funalytics and let me help you.
[00:21:43] Alex: Let me make sure that you get this connected and set up correctly. And then maybe I'm not on the call. Maybe they're on the call with that third partner. And that third partner says the same thing. It's like, no, go to Alec. Alex can help you get the Funalytics set up working. And now Funalytics doesn't [00:22:00] lose a customer because of those two partners that they had.
[00:22:03] Alex: And that backs into the third strategy, which we call circles, right? A circle is where three or more partners are all in cahoots and working together on shared pipeline.
[00:22:19] Alex: But now let's all get together and say, what deals can we work together? And let's use our combined partnership to get after bigger deal. So Funalytics won't go upstream or go into a new market. Well, you're going to need partners that know each other to make sure it's all streamlined and really well executed.
[00:22:40] Alex: And we provide, the product for that, but you can do it without partner hub. You just make sure you align memorandum, you connect with partners of partner connections, and then you guys get together in this kind of group of co selling, motions and go to market motions and share resources [00:23:00] and make sure You're continually communicating well and executing on what you plan.
[00:23:06]
[00:23:06] Mikael: and all of that is facilitated in partner hub.
[00:23:10] Alex: Yes.
[00:23:10] Mikael: know,
[00:23:10] Alex: What's the phrase?
[00:23:11] Mikael: you walk the walk
[00:23:12] Alex: once we come up with a strategy, like the connection to one was recent, I was like, you know, land and expand strategy.
[00:23:17] Alex: I wrote an article about it. I was talking to my CTO. I was like, This needs to be something we allow users to do inside a partner. Why aren't we showing partners and allowing them to make intros and then putting those into groups and allowing them to share pipeline?
[00:23:32] Mikael: Yeah, that's great. honestly, we come to time here and it's been very interesting.
[00:23:38] Mikael: Cause again, most people don't think about growing their agency pipeline through partnerships. And partner hub was designed and built specifically to make that happen. So, Alex, where can people learn more about partner hub and about you?
[00:23:51] Alex: partner hub. app is the main website. There's links to all this stuff.
[00:23:56] Alex: if you look down below this, there's probably [00:24:00] some links down there. I'm active on LinkedIn. I don't do X through Twitter very much. I have a profile there, but I'm not really there. LinkedIn is all I have time for.
[00:24:09] Mikael: Me too, man.
[00:24:11] Alex: Yeah. And we have a giant Slack community too, where, you know, some people may not be ready for partner hub.
[00:24:16] Alex: I get it. You know, we've got partner hubs, hq. slack. com. You can join. If you're an agency, we have a whole channel, just agencies. If you're a SaaS, we have a whole channel just for SaaS. And then we have intros and job boards and stuff that you can, check out.
[00:24:31] Alex: We also host matchmaking events, speed networking events, where you meet partners every three minutes, you meet a new partner, and they're ecosystem specific. So we typically HubSpot, Speed Networking and Shopify Speed Networking.
[00:24:46] Mikael: Very interesting. Very Cool. well, Alex, thank you so much for sharing all this.
[00:24:50] Mikael: This has been very insightful and, yeah, everybody listening, you now have a new tactic to deploy, which is partners, appreciate your time.
[00:24:59] Alex: Thank [00:25:00] you for
[00:25:00] Mikael: having me.