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Serial entrepreneurs Justin Gray and Josh Wagner combine decades of B2B and GTM expertise with unwavering honesty on The GTM Cheat Code Podcast. Episodes feature interviews with investors, founders and true experts who reveal the pragmatic approaches and ideas (read: ‘cheats’) they’ve employed over the years to side-step failure, create opportunity, break down barriers and ultimately beat the game.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: the cheat code. I'm joined once again by Mr. Josh Wagner. Josh?
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: What is happening,
everyone?
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: live from the reconfigured podcast studio. Josh?
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Oh, dude, it's great in here. You should come check it out.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Well, I'm, uh, about 10 feet away, so I may just do that after this call. So, again, we've got another great guest, uh, joining us here this week. This is a twofer. We've actually recorded multiple podcasts this week, which is always good. Um, so, Rob is joining us. Rob's a top voice on LinkedIn. He's a co co founder and board member over at Oplidit.
Uh, uh, you don't have to pronounce this for me again. You just pronounced it and I've
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Optilizer.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Thank
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Optalize.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: I don't even know why. And, and of course the CEO over at Superglue. So, uh, Rob Rebels, welcome to the show.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Thank you so much for having
me.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: So, you know, as we were kind of discussing prior, we get right into things here.
So, the show is called The Cheat Code for a reason. I'd love to hear yours as it relates to partnerships.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: You know, like there are a lot of answers, obviously, lots of things. Uh, but I, um, I like to, I think we should focus on something slightly more controversial.
Uh, I think the cheat code is automation.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: tell folks a little bit what Superglue does, because I think that will probably You know, lead us into some detail on why that answer is what it
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: And I keep this short, but ultimately what Superglue does is we help partner teams automate recurring processes, workflows, and help guide them through a co sell process. Both the partner teams as well as their sales teams as well as their partners. And just create a more scalable co sell as well as partner engagement motion.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Which makes sense. And it is refreshing, frankly, because there's so many tools on the market that frankly, in my opinion, just compare lists. Um,
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: you know, the number one question that we always get certainly from founders and their teams as we're trying to coax them into a partner led go to market motion is, you know, what do we do next?
And certainly the default is not what we consider to be best practice. So like, I guess, what prompted that, that direction? And, and what do you see, you know, successful teams automating?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah, so, uh, I'm going to take you back to 2019 I'm, uh, I'm actually, I'm back then I still lived in Berlin, uh, you know, November, it's, it's dark, cold outside. I'm sitting, I'm sitting in, uh, you know, in the office with my, with my co founder and we talk about go to market, right? We talk through different functions, we talk about our sales team.
We just implemented a new sales methodology. We're talking about sales enablement and how our sales team is like. Becoming more and more productive, more and more predictable in terms of what they do. Uh, we'll go to marketing, obviously like using marketing automation tools. We've got the news data. We've got the customer journey all figured out.
Everything, you know, is running more and more smoothly. And we've, we've got a systematic process of engaging our leads, turning into prospects and just supporting, uh, supporting the sales team, et cetera. Everything is aligned and we
get to partnerships and.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: like everything.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: a playbook, right? Yeah, it's a playbook. And the interesting thing is that you hire a marketer, they know exactly what to do.
Uh, and we get to partnerships and that year, our biggest tech partner had made us tech partner of the year, like huge success, partners drive 50 percent of our leads, 70 percent of our revenue, um,
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: percent
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: sure.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: revenue through partners at that time.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And we kind of stumbled, to be honest, we kind of stumbled, uh, kind of into this, right?
Like, uh, I mean, we made it work over the years, but, um, and I try to ascribe what we do and how we can become better, like how we, you know, how we engage with partners. Uh, and I, I'm struggling, right? Like I'm just sitting there. I'm on one hand, we have all of this success. On the other hand, I don't have a playbook, right?
Like I, I don't know, Which tools we could use, like how we can, how we can make this even more predictable and scale further if we don't want to hire more and more
partner managers, right? Like that's, that's what we did to that point. We're like, just kept throwing people at the problem, which works, but, uh, it gets difficult, right?
Especially with increasing goals and growing ecosystems.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: difficult to
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: that was really the moment. Huh? Yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Partner Manager, whatever you want to call them, is entrepreneurial, right? Like they need to be entrepreneurial, they need to kind of figure it out. And you know, frankly, that's kind of like saying, you know, go hire a unicorn.
Because if we could all find entrepreneurial employees, we wouldn't have any problems with management and, and all the things that we struggle with on a daily basis. So as you said, not tenable. Um, and so how did you kind of, how'd you establish that initial playbook?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Well, so I, uh, and by the way, I love that point. I think that, oh, we need entrepreneurs. I think that's just an excuse. Maybe in the early days, right? In the early days for every go to market function, you need an entrepreneur, right? Like same for marketing. You need a, we used to call them growth hackers, right?
Like these people who identify opportunities, do stuff, but at some point in time you'd like, You know, you need to have a playbook and you bring in more and more people and it's a process, it's a structure, kind of what needs to be done. Uh, so I just sat down and I just started to, I mean, Optiz is a Mate company, so we work with a lot of, um, or we work with a lot of, um, Back then when I was involved, right, um, SIs, and I've done a lot of customer journey mapping going through the process of kind of figuring out like what are the key touch points to activate customers, how to build loyalty programs, just, you know, Kind of thought about what we did there and try to adjust it to partnerships where Obviously you have different stakeholders different interests but it's I think there's a lot there a lot of similarities between a loyalty program where you You have somebody you have some relationship with maybe they bought from you and you try to To activate them turn turn them into fans make them, you know, kind of Get them excited about your brand to buy again and again and again, and I think with partnerships is similar So I kind of I kind of drew that out.
I built You Uh, the, the, you know, high level kind of, I draw the touch points, the interactions, the stuff that works. And we just, over time turns it, that into a process, use automation here and there, you kind of try to tweak, um, or mark tech stack, try to use our sales engagement tech and just try to make the whole process more scalable.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: you know, what was, I think it's interesting about the traditional partner technologies out there to Justin's point is it's list sharing and things like that. And it's heavily reliant on the partner. To take action. And that's not something that you can count on for the most part, right?
What it sounds like you're trying to do is create some repeatability in those relationship touch points that you need to have with whatever the individual is on the other side, whether it's another seller or another CS person, whatever that may be. Is that a fair assessment of what you're trying to accomplish here?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Absolutely. I think we're kind of. Maybe we're lazy or maybe it's just kind of where partner tech kind of first, um, first was used. Like if you look at PRMs and there's a lot of value in PRMs, but the idea of Telling somebody, hey, uh, go to, go to this portal, get excited, train yourself, submit your leads.
If you want updates, you know, like get your updates in the portal and don't bother me, right? And then we're, then we have these, yeah, we have account mapping tools. Awesome, right? We have overlaps, but now we, we push that data to Salesforce and now we tell our AEs, hey, by the way, Besides everything else you're doing and all of these new gadgets you have, use this widget, look for this field, engage with this person, that person, versus figuring out how we, how we can use that data and use kind of our insights and be more proactive.
Like, hey, partner, you need an update or here's something that's really valuable for you right now and just turn it around and create a more partner centric experience versus Implementing a bunch of tech and hoping these, these people will take off, you know, do our jobs.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Well, as someone who sold through partners for probably 20 years, I'm curious, you know, you always get stuck in what's right in front of you, right? Oh, there's a deal. This guy, this, this partner's hot. I'm going to spend time with them, this and that. But you forget about little things, right? So what have you found are the high value activities that you're automating that people may not even be thinking about?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: So I would say like, that's a good point. Like this partner's hot. Sometimes it's even, it's worse than that. It's like, I really like this partner or like this person in my partner org. Right. Might even not even be the amazing partner with big opportunities or this person is just really annoying. So I'm going to give them attention, right?
Cause they bombard me with emails. Uh, in terms of the, I think one of the things we've seen, so a couple of touch points that are really easy to implement. Um, the thing that gets me really excited is, um. are the workflows where rather than tell, you know, our AEs, Hey, there's a new overlap, um, figure out what to do with it.
Where we actually start with the, the issues that our AEs have. We look at our sales funnel. You look at the, the deals that are for instance, stuck in the sales process. Then we identify the partner who can help, right? Like we have an overlap with this partner, this partner sourced it, this partner has a relationship, like we have that data, right? and then we engage the AE and see like, Hey, do, looks like you have pro, like you're in trouble. It looks like here are the partners that could help you. Do you want help? So we don't force the, the AE to your workflow or tell them, give them users information like, you know, push information, the Slack channel and just tell them, have you overlap We tell 'em like, you, you have an issue. We have a solution. Um, do you want help? And they click yes or no. And that triggers kind of the process of them getting introduced and followups. That really, uh, we've implemented that with an organization where they have hundreds of AEs without any enablement of the AEs.
We just activated it and the AEs love it because we're no longer telling them to change their workflow or that their workflow sucks, right? When we tell them, uh, we become a service provider. Versus somebody who preaches that the future is all about ecosystems, etc.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Yeah. I mean, AEs are lazy, right? They don't want to do any new work, but I'm curious about the data mapping on the back end of that. How much of a challenge do you run into corporate bureaucracy, IT, Salesforce admins who are hoarding their kingdom, you know, all those sorts of things.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: So we, um, the way we built the tool, so the challenge for that workflow is what you need to do is you need to merge deal data with, um, with partner data. Like the account mapping tools, they just give you, I don't want to like, you know, go too much into details, but they attach, for instance, a custom object to the partner account, but we want like, we want this on the, on the deal level.
So what we do is we basically merge those, like that data, bring it into one trigger and then into one workflow where we can access all the data. So what we had to do is build Superglue so that we can kind of, Superglue can kind of start, for instance, for this workflow in the deal, go find the, where, how we attach partners, where fields, objects, and within the partner identified right stakeholders, uh, so just a different type of trigger and workflow.
And, um, the way we've built it, it was. Technical duration takes 15 minutes. It's really straightforward. Uh, we can deal with any data structure. The, so we don't, and we don't really need ref ops because we can then just, you know, work with any data structure and build a workflow. The challenge, however, is helping the partner teams identify the right workflows, understand what data they can use, what workarounds they have, and just, you know, set those up.
Because in marketing, right, I, when I used to say Martech, um, You have a marketing, uh, your marketing team, you give them your tech, they know what to do. They know you give them marketing automation solution. They know for loyalty program, which use cases to implement and partnerships. We don't have that legacy and you don't have people who have that background to think about structures and processes and automation in that way.
So you really got to take, I mean, we have blueprints in the tool, but you got to take people by the hand and help them figure out what they should focus
on.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: what's interesting about that is, you know, everyone talks about how partnerships is a long game, right? Like, this isn't going to be like a tomorrow,
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah,
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: you know, immediacy type situation. But, it seems as though you could almost create this like, hey, these are the initial milestones that we're going to, you know, Accomplished that are going to lead to value, i.
e. like what, what data do I have to put into the system for a partner to be fully onboarded? And then, you know, with that data, I'm going to be able to, to mine opportunity from within, you know, all of those connected systems and so on. So have you found that like partner managers are actually utilizing this to better understand the information they need to glean from partners?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: yeah, yeah, it really, I mean, one of the challenges and we've built workarounds to deal with that. One of the challenges is like when we start, even with like big sophisticated partner teams is that partner data is a lot messier than, you know, sales
data where, you know, your sales team gets, yeah, every week somebody, somebody kicks their butt if they, if the, you know, the close date and this and that, and the stage isn't, you Probably in there if you don't use this that framework so part of the process kind of figuring out like what do you have and How do we deal with unclean data?
And what what can you do with data? I'd like I've seen a lot of companies like with spreadsheets where Questions like why do you track the pattern activation status in a spreadsheet and on a Salesforce? I Mean obviously you might not get ref ops resources, but if you You Even if you don't implement automations, like you need a source of truth, like it's just not acceptable that you have this and this spreadsheet, you have this and that spreadsheet.
You have some stuff in Salesforce. Uh, in some cases people aren't even, you know, synchronized their emails into Salesforce, which means, you know, partner manager leaves, somebody takes over there, no idea what happened in the past. So to some extent, you, you have to help people kind of understand, uh, what needs to be done.
If you, um, if you don't, if you have everything in spreadsheets, I've seen it. I've seen massive organizations that just have like a spreadsheet where they track everything where, where you just have to tell them, Hey, this is before you think about tech, you got to clean up your data. You can't like, there is no automation tool that can properly work off a spreadsheet that's manually maintained.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: You've mentioned RevOps a couple of times and you've made reference to marketing automation. So, you know, marketing automation was a new category sometime ago, and that category spun off what we're calling RevOps people, right? Those careers didn't exist. Before that category was created. And obviously we've all heard of the, the partner connective, you know, list sharing and whatnot, but this seems new to me.
Are you category creating? Are you creating new jobs where people are going to have to understand how to use partner tech? Like what, what's the program here?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: yeah, I think it's a, it's a new category. What we've seen, so we don't, when, when people, when we talk, when I talk to companies, we don't compete with like an existing tool that they replace, uh, but with manual processes and there's a lot of, and that creates a lot of obviously opportunity, but also challenges because. There is this fear in partnerships, right? It's kind of like, I don't know if you remember like 10, 15 years ago when we introduced sales engagement tools, right? And every AE is like, Oh no, like what I do is so unique and different and I can't use a template for this and that. And we had to kind of force them into a new way of thinking.
Or we had to prove value and then everything changed. And if you, probably if you hire an AE today and you're like, no, you get your Gmail account, you get Salesforce, they would probably quit their job.
Um, literally
I mean, we've kind of overdone it too. bring their Yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: you know, sales engagement tool into, you know, an earlier organization. I've seen that happen tons of times.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, so tell me, yeah, we're building, uh, we're thinking about that category. What you have is you have siloed workflows, right? So you have, uh, you know, Crossbeam has workflows for their data, but they only, you know, they focus on their data. So what do you do with the partners? You don't use Crossbeam with, but Reveal or, uh, That you don't use any type of account mapping tool with.
So we have siloed workflows that are kind of being introduced by the data tools. Um, the, the vision that we have is to build the engagement layer on top and to go from, I mean, broader vision, like automation, but we're thinking about AI agents already, right? Like what are the tasks that can be taken over by, you know, by a machine ultimately, right?
Like do I, in every. There are lots of interactions, like my tier 3 partners, like a lot of the long tail relationships I have with, uh, you know, the hundreds of AEs and one of my top partners that I would normally neglect. Are there better ways, are there ways how we can complement humans with, uh, with machines and where we can create like better experiences?
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: was going to say, I'm maybe going to take this at a different direction than normal, but now I'm super curious. How are you going to market and, and where are you seeing success? Like what's your ICP look like? Like give me a little bit of flavor of that.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah, good question. The, uh, I mean, we leverage partnerships as well. So for instance, right. With, with Reveal, Crossbeam, PRMs. Uh, I have to say that I believe that partnerships become really powerful. Like the, like with scale, right? Like I don't feel like, you know, we're an early stage company.
So like 30, 30 percent of our leads come from partners. 30% 30, 40 percent. Um, we do a lot of like, it's a lot about thought leadership, that plays a huge role. I'm very active, like you said, on LinkedIn, kind of. You know, nobody's Googling us. So I think nobody's like, Oh, I need a partner engagement software, uh, or partner automation, uh, platforms.
So it's really about like raising awareness, kind of telling people how we think about this stuff and introducing new ways of thinking about partnerships. Uh, and then we do code outreach. Like, uh, that's definitely a channel as well. Code outreach events play an important role.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: I'm just curious where, where are you finding the most
traction? Like what size companies stage?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: partnerships partnerships referral, definitely partnerships referral. If I look at the performance of the different channels. Um, it's definitely partnerships, referrals, uh, we're seeing more and more of that and we have to be quite frank over time. You know, when we, when we started Super Glue, a lot of people very, uh, reluctant like, I have a PM, why do I need this tool?
And we've built the features, build the stories, kind of figured out how we complimentary. I always, uh, you know, like I said, I have a MarTech background. I understand loyalty programs, and I always tell people it's like if you're an e-commerce vendor. You have a website and you need to optimize that website.
That's your portal. That's a destination where you engage people and then you need to create a loyalty program around it. That's us. And if you look at what's the PRMs, their capabilities when it comes to the engagement and you really dive in and if you talk to people what they actually do and what they're able to do it's very narrow, right?
It's very limited what's possible.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: you know, you mentioned kind of the optimized use case to even implementing any of this automation. So maybe that is the, um, uh, the Greenfield, uh, example here, but I'm curious, like, What's the most impressive result that you've seen as a result of automation and kind of leveraging this mentality?
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: there are lots of things that we've seen that work really well. What I, what really gets me excited is when we get AEs to work with partners without enablement, without harassing them, 17 workshops. And then, then, you know, they do this stuff and then, you know, Two months down the road, they ignore it.
So that gets me really excited. Internal enablement case that I described. Uh, the other thing that I've seen that like drives almost instant results is, you know, very often when we connect to people's, Salesforce instances, we look at the last activity date for all the contacts attached to their partner accounts.
And usually they haven't talked to 80 percent of the contacts, right? The people, people bring us into deals. in at least half a year, normally 9 to 12 months. So 80 percent of the people in your ecosystem don't know about you anymore. Like these people do, like, you know, if you're in a big company, like you do two lunch and learns a week, you've forgotten about the guy you talked to six, nine, 12 months ago.
So it's very easy to base, set up these, set up alerts, segment them to some extent, right? Like based on the partner type, partner tier, their job role. And just alert the partner manager, be like, Hey, we can talk to this guy. Here is a pre drafted workflow to engage. It's very simple stuff, but that stuff works really well.
All of a sudden you, you know, these people feel value, right? Like you're checking in with them. If it feels very human and very often people, like one of them will be like, Oh, I just talked to somebody last week. We should probably bring you guys in. I've totally forgot
about you. So there are these low hanging fruits in terms of engagement. And then, you know, like all of the touch points along the life cycle, Setting those up isn't that complex. I, we're probably going to release this case study as soon where we have two part, it's a, it's a bit of an exception, right? Like normally we work with bigger partner teams, but in this case we have a two person partner team that has a very good process, right?
A good ecosystem. They do a lot of stuff with SAP and they, within 10 weeks, they, uh, increased the amount of people that they engage with by 800, like 800 additional people that are engaged, like, and we're not talking about bombarding them with a, you know, Partner Newsletter usually we We just had this discussion with the customer of ours that has they have three times higher engagement rates for our notifications our engagement of their Partners versus the partner marketing, which is surprising because Superglue messages are triggered by they always come from partner managers inboxes So if I send you an email versus you get an email from a tool or just generic partners at superglue You're more likely to ignore it.
If the email I send you is very relevant very references previous interactions It's obvious, right? It's the stuff we know from cold emailing as well. So It's just um, I think we need to that's the the secret like you know You need to create scale, but you still need to create like very personal experiences or something that feels very personal, right?
It's just
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: All right.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: loyalty programs. The most, um, the most powerful loyalty, uh, program touch point is usually a birthday mailing. I just say happy birthday. Uh, here's your discount
code. It's easy to, it's easy to automate. Alright, I asked somebody what's your birthday, let's send an email, but it is incredibly powerful because it feels Very relevant.
If I get that email, I'm like, Oh man, they thought about me. That's so nice. Like in this discount code. And so you, you know, it's, it's very thoughtful of them. And I go buy that stuff. It's usually the most powerful campaign and it's similar with, you can implement similar stuff with partnerships.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Well, you're going to have to do me a favor and name one of your automations, the shaking the tree campaign, because that's a, that's what we used to do, right? Like, Oh shit, pipelines low.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah, We need to go call 15 partners. Cause I haven't talked to them in six weeks. So yeah, do me a favor, name one of them, the shaking the tree campaign and put
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: trademark Josh Wagner on it.
That'd be great.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: the challenge, right? Like, how do you eat the elephant when you've got You know, once you've gotten to scale and you've gotten, you know, tons of partners that AEs could engage with and you're aware of who you should be talking to, but like, there's only so many hours in the day.
And to your point, like, it seems like the best way to, to foster that understanding, that alignment, that awareness is just by reaching out. And that's what people just fail to do. It's that shiny object syndrome where, you know, I'm working these three deals that are partner enabled, but I should be touching base with these other 40 partners.
Um, that, you know, haven't heard from me in a long time. So like that, I can see the value of that, that automation, that always on, uh, type approach, certainly as triggered by, you know, relevant happenings, relevant events.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Cause the thing is like down the road, right, you have an overlap or you need somebody in the deal. You haven't talked to them in nine months. And it feels kind of
shitty. It's that person, right, that only reaches out When they need something.
I have these people like that. I know when I get an email from them or like a, you know, a text message, they always want something. And if they would, in between asking me for something, if they would just stay in touch, like, hey, here's what's happening, right? Like, um, nothing fancy, right? But if they would stay in touch, I would be a lot more willing to help them. But if every nine months I hear from them and they have a request, um, it just doesn't feel
right.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: I'm just thinking about the one scenario that like, I always beat A's, uh, over the head with, which is if, you know, like thinks about, like, do we have exclusivity within certain channels and like, how do, how do I balance. It's, you know, multiple partnerships that do the exact same thing. I'm just thinking of the value there of a trigger where it's like, if you find someone's unhappy with, you know, provider A, like, why aren't you making that intro?
Like try and remediate it. But if it's something that can't be overcome, like, why aren't you making that intro over to partner B that could potentially solve for those, those challenges and so on. So just again, like recording that data, putting it in the system, you know, they need X functionality. It's not provided by this partner, but this partner does like, why not make that intro?
Is that. the whole give to get mentality.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: I really like that. And by the way, we have, I mean, I always like to talk about the, the co sell process, right? Like helping the AEs close deals, but you can do this. This is kind of more of a customer success case where, right? We look at, we look at customers and, um, for example, seeing stuff goes similar direction, right?
Where people. Look at the renewal date and three months before the renewal date The the customer success person gets a notification like hey, by the way a there's a renewal coming up and b We have this partner that's really close with them. Um might be I don't know an SI
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Yeah.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Should we kind of check in how happy they really are with us?
Like should we you know, make sure that when a renewal comes up we have somebody on our side and we have all the relevant intel so So yeah, you can use all of that You Information. You got to merge, right? Like that's the thing. You got to merge, uh, your first party data with second party overlap data, for instance.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Partner party data. I love it. Because to your point, like,
wouldn't you take advantage of those other perspectives, right? Like, certainly if you've got someone like an SI or a consultant involved, like, that's, that's who's solving, you know, big P problems within those customer
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: are, if you're a software provider, you've got a very myopic, you know, Understanding of what's actually going on within that organization.
So leveraging that insight is critical.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: And these people actually know what's happening in these
organizations, right? Like the SI actually understands and yeah, like what you said, right? Like they have a broader picture. They, they have a different type of relationship. You're a customer success person just because you do a check in call every two months, uh, or email here and there.
It's just not the same.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Totally agree.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: I think even just understanding that ecosystem at a deeper level, right? Like there could be an SI in there that's the key holder, but there could be 15 integration partners as well. And I think that is one of the gaps is we always talk about this holistic approach and surrounding them and this and that, but it's hard to really know all of that. And if you have a, if there is a way to structure and pull those data points in together, even if you don't use all of it, it does give you a better understanding of that account and what they're doing and,
and things like that. So I think it's a, it's a pretty big win.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: data structure that allows that visibility, right? Like I've seen so many organizations that only think about partner attachment and involvement at the deal level.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah,
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: At the opportunity, yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: exploring
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: yeah,
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: standpoint or from a customer success standpoint?
Just who else
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: And, you know, that will open up new doors for both partnerships as well as, you know, the health of that ultimate account.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: about, uh, you know, when things go right. Any interesting partner horror stories to share with us? Like, where
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: I have a personal horror story. So when I built our partner program, like in my previous role, um, I, I tried to do everything at once, right? Like I was like one of these guys who rather than focus on one type of partner, nailing it, scaling it, and then, you know, adding additional partner types, et cetera, I tried to do everything.
And I think the biggest mistake I made was like white labeling with these white label partnerships before we, before we had anything figured out. So we had to, I mean, the effort that went into obviously enabling the platform for white labeling training, we wasted, I think in total, like 12 months. And I don't even want to, you know, like I think two people, two deaths on the thing.
Like it was just like crazy effort.
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Yeah.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: revenue. We generated zero revenue from, from that white label experiment. And then you like, you have sunk costs, right? You committed, you build this thing and we kept dragging that out, took another year. So, um, yeah, I would, I would say that's my personal horror story.
So I'm very, uh, you know, whenever people talk about white labeling, cause it sounds so
awesome, right? Like, it's
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Like,
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: somebody else says my stuff.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: a massive market presence. Why can't they just attach our
josh-wagner_12_05-07-2024_100535: Yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: we've talked about on the show before, like if, if you're having trouble enabling your internal sales team, you know, an external sales team is just going to, you know, compound that by, you know, orders of magnitude.
So it's
definitely a maturity first requirement
So terms of, as we kind of wrap up here, like we talked a lot about superglue, like what, where can people go to learn more about yourself, the, the organization? And, and I think more than anything, you know, obviously we mentioned you're super active on LinkedIn, like just the concept of, of what automation can do, I think would be super interesting.
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah. So I try to, so I write a newsletter and I try to talk, I'll be very tactical. You know, it's always, it's always tempting to talk about features and the great product you're building, but I try to, like in our newsletter on our blog, uh, blog, uh, on LinkedIn, I try to be Technical and kind of share our view, like our insights.
And then, you know, you might try to replicate some of that stuff without a tech, um, a bias, right? I think with stronger solution, but yes, you know, like it really depends on what you try to achieve. Uh, I think it's a mindset,
um, like having an automation mindset and. I did a survey recently where I asked people like, are partnerships an art or a science?
And I think it was like 50 50. So 50 percent of partner teams still think this is a science, sorry, it's an art, right? Like, so it's, what does that mean? Um, means that they don't think that automation is, is an opportunity. Don't think that this is like a data driven job, et cetera. So, uh, I try to share that perspective and kind of the insights, the things we learn, like the things that we realized.
It works, it doesn't work.
So yeah.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: just on that topic, what are you seeing folks, are more and more folks coming to you with like KPIs that they want to see as a result of your product? Because I feel like that's sometimes the tipping point where it's like We know what we want to measure whereas like even five years ago I don't think anyone really knew what to measure in partnerships other than sourced Revenue like people would say
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Yeah. And people used to argue, right? They're like, we influence everything and you can't measure it because we make everything better. And like, that doesn't really, uh, you know, resonate anymore. Um, so very often we have different types of conversations. We have conversations where people are just like, feel overwhelmed and are just like, Too much.
And we don't know, just overall, like we're just, we know there is a problem, but we don't know exactly that. We have others like, Hey, we need to like, you know, we need to increase these KPIs. Tell me about like how we, how you can help us achieve these goals. Uh, and then we have others that, you know, that played around with different tools.
We have that a lot, right? Like people that played around with tools that I kind of already know that. They've done their homework and now they're just figuring out the right solution. Um, so it's, it's kind of, it's kind of a mix. Um, I wish, or I try to, that's what we do in our like onboarding process. We try to like be systematic about like, what are the KPIs we need to drive?
Because. First of all, first you think about your goals, then you think about what you currently do and your gaps and kind of, you know, uh, you know, what, what, what, what it means for these goals that you think about data and what, you know, what is foundation, and then you need to think about automation. So, um, we've made that mistake where we didn't have that conversation about goals and KPIs and just made assumptions.
And then you end up with the wrong, uh, the wrong focus.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think, you know, the market as a whole feels like it's continuing to move in the right direction, which is always a positive. And, you know, Rob, I think, you know, your, your perspective here has been super valuable. So again, thanks for
rob-rebholz_1_05-07-2024_110535: Thank you.
justin-gray_9_05-07-2024_100535: today. You can definitely check Rob out on LinkedIn, Rob, Rob Rebholtz, and check out Super Glue.
Again, no, no incentive, no reward on our side. Just think it's a super interesting concept and really enjoyed the topic of automation. Again, if you're tuning in for the first time, please give us a like and a subscribe. We put this thing out on each Tuesday, tuned in for new episodes coming live. For Mr.
Wagner and myself, thanks again for joining us on the Cheat Code.