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How do I implement my go-to-market strategy with my Cloud Partners? How do I get buy-in from my executives, sales team, and others in my organization? How can I get the right attention from the Cloud Providers?
Questions like these, and many more, arise when you’re trying to build relationships with the Cloud Providers and accelerate your revenue journey through the cloud. Welcome to ‘Unlock Cloud Go-to-Market,’ the series where hosts Erin Figer and Patrick Riley share the essential stages of the Cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize, and grow your company’s revenue through the cloud. They’ve helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs of their Cloud GTM motion, and in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the people who have put them into place. Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future. And the future is now.
Asher Mathew [00:00:00]:
Go and search, building a go-to-market with a cloud provider, and I'm sure that you guys have tons of content out there. And then also talk to other people who have gone through this journey. That's actually the most important one because they'll get like, awareness of, like, how do we get this thing done?
Patrick Riley [00:00:16]:
Welcome to Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market, the podcast where we deliver actionable insights from ISVs, partners, thought leaders and cloud providers to help you launch, scale and succeed in your cloud go-to-market journey. Whether you're building your first motion, fine tuning your strategy, or aiming to maximize revenue, this show brings you the stories, strategies and lessons learned from the people driving innovation in the cloud ecosystem. Each episode cuts through the noise with candid conversations and proven tactics that you can apply right away, because the future of cloud B2B success is here and the time to unlock it is now. Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Unlock Cloud Go to Market. I'm Patrick Riley, today's host and joining me is very exciting. I've got two guests today. I've got John Jahnke, CEO of Tackle, and Asher Matthews, CEO of Partnership Leaders.
Patrick Riley [00:01:10]:
Welcome both. Hey Asher, for those that don't know you, can you introduce yourself and give a quick overview of Partnership Leaders and what you've been focused on recently?
Asher Mathew [00:01:19]:
So, hi everybody, this is Asher. I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Partnership Leaders, and today we are a services company focused on helping modern businesses build with partnerships. We've got three parts to our business today. We've got a research, advisory, training and talent arm. Because I keep getting questions around, what does good look like? So we were like, let's create that. We have a global events business now where we have two conferences. We have one in the US on May 30th 15th, and then we'll have another one in October 23rd, 24th in London. And then we have a bunch of like retail summits that that group does.
Asher Mathew [00:01:55]:
And then we have, I would say my favorite group, which is where the community lives. And so we have 2,000 members in 95 countries and we have a couple of podcasts similar to like what you guys are trying to do here with creating more media. And then we have an amazing, amazing, amazing resource library that those 2,000 people have helped create so that generations of partner professionals would not have difficulty finding a board deck or a budget planned Google sheet or a job description or what is where do I pay my reps and stuff. And so we've essentially created a services company that does those three things.
Patrick Riley [00:02:30]:
That's awesome. Thank you for teeing that up for us. So I know everybody's got a lot to say on this topic. You and John have spent a lot of time together over the last few years. There's been a ton of buzz around partnership evolutions with the clouds. Let me set the stage before we really dive into specifics. So we used to talk about partnerships as a add on to direct sales. Today it's definitely clear that they become more core revenue drivers.
Patrick Riley [00:02:58]:
Asher, from your perspective, what's driving that shift?
Asher Mathew [00:03:01]:
If you think about where partnerships have landed, you've had a group called product partnerships or tech partnerships, and they used to live in the product team. And then you had a group called Channels which used to live in the sales team. And then you have this channel marketing team that used to live in the marketing team. But then each one of them would do their own things and not talk to the other folks. And holistically there was no way to like manage this function. The latest thinking is to consolidate and bring the product partnerships team together and bring the go-to-market partnerships teams together to create a single function. And the reason why that exists is because when CEOs who are building modern businesses think about the buy, build and partner question, then they have a really solid organizational structure for the build portion. Larger companies have a pretty solid structure for the buyer function, which is where M&A comes from.
Asher Mathew [00:03:56]:
Right. But the partner function was a laggard for a couple reasons, right? Like there was a lot of, I would call enthusiasts in partnerships that were there to build relationships and you know, the traditional way of how we do things. But then there is a builder component of that persona that came into being over the last like six, seven years. And so Morgan companies have started basically saying, look, we need to really operationalize this partner thing that we're going to go do. And so we would like to now create a function that has its own P&L. And it starts with the product of partnerships, which is essentially starts at integrations, but could lead to a lot of other things and then flows all the way through to partner success and customer success. So that's essentially like along with the way it's telling you, like how we kind of landed to this point.
Asher Mathew [00:04:43]:
And the current examples are Cerebras, Avalara, ServiceNow, Factorial. Like all of these companies, I'm giving you both examples of mid market companies, SAP companies and enterprise companies who have essentially created a fully staff partner function.
Patrick Riley [00:04:57]:
John, from your perspective, you spent a lot of time in the legacy enterprise and you saw the Partnership, evolution, change. And then when you all started Tackle, you really saw the shift, especially in the last 12, 24 months, to thinking of partnerships not just in the traditional sense, but also the marketplaces. Can you give some quick thoughts on what you've seen there and what that's looking like today?
John Jahnke [00:05:21]:
I agree with everything Asher said. We're in the era of more software. It used to be like platforms, people use platforms and they used a handful of them. And then platforms started to get decomposed into like specialized platform capabilities. Now they're getting decomposing more into persona capabilities and AI will decompose that even more beyond personas into like job functions. So there's just like this massive explosion of software and all that software has to somehow work together and that's where really partnering comes together. Because very few things can deliver a full end to end experience without intersecting with something else. And this is like more of a product and startup lens.
John Jahnke [00:06:03]:
Do the partner answer. But I think the second part is really that go-to-market answer. And back in like the enterprise era, I grew up at EMC, spent a lot of time there. You know, partners were a bit later stage in the funnel or segments of markets that you allocated, but it had much less of that product context. And now like go-to-market, partners and product partnerships are starting to blend together and you're seeing more and more companies be born partner-led. And I think the clouds operate as a foundation for that. I see startups all the time saying, I'm going to build my company on a cloud platform and I'm going to build my distribution system on top of a cloud platform using their marketplace and then I'm going to build my partner ecosystem around that marketplace and cloud platform and then that continues to evolve into multi cloud as you try to meet buyers where they are. So there's this really interesting intersection between the evolution of go-to-market and the evolution of partnerships from a product and company perspective.
Asher Mathew [00:07:09]:
So yesterday I spent some time at this event that this company called ER and NASDAQ threw together. We were partners in, in IT with them, but the audience for that group were pretty much people who were either on boards or were interested in getting on boards. And private equity operators, right? They talk a little bit about like, hey, what are the new ways of going to market, right? Because everybody's pipeline is crap, right? Like it was very clear, right? And going to market through community was like one of the biggest topics. I mean, just think about that, right? Like in a group where 70 or 80 people that are sitting that are very, very high in their organizations are essentially talking about community, right? So that was one interesting part, right? But the next interesting part came out when we were talking about leveraging technology as an asset and we had Salesforce and AWS on stage with us.
Asher Mathew [00:07:58]:
But then I made this point about like, hey, your technology decision is actually your ecosystem decision. And then a lot more people ask questions about that because they never looked at it like that, right? And I'll give you another data point, right? I was on a call with a very prominent VC and I was trying to tell them like, hey, how can we like get your teams to learn more about partnerships and stuff? And what they were saying is like the state of like venture backed companies right now is product teams are building product that is not for the ICP. Sales teams are finding opportunities that are not in the ICP. Marketing teams are running campaigns.
Asher Mathew [00:08:29]:
So there's like this go-to-market misalignment was actually still a reality. But then what? I again went back to the same point of saying, hey, if you pick this technology, you're kind of married to the ecosystem. It was interesting for that conversation. But even in yesterday's conversation, the room did not understand the downstream ramifications of like building on Google Cloud, for example, and then not being able to take advantage of all the promos that AWS has, right? And so I feel like it's a relevant convo that we all need to like go have, but not as a partner convo, right? It's actually a business strategy convo.
John Jahnke [00:09:06]:
Yeah. I was talking to a CEO of a big public company and they were thinking about their product strategy for the clouds and they're trying to make a decision around their enterprise commitment. And this is a big decision. This is like a hundred million dollar decision. And they need to link their existing customers and their target customers to the decision about what cloud to run. Because they'd already made the decision not to run on all three. They're like, we're just going to focus on one. And this is an older vintage company, so it's making that decision.
John Jahnke [00:09:39]:
This truly was a business strategy and we've actually seen it. Like we've been doing a lot of work with cloud buyer intent data for years. And we started with the use case around helping sellers. And then sellers turned into marketers because they're like, well, where are the target customers that matter to this? Cloud marketers turned into product teams where they're like, well, what feature should I be building for what cloud based upon who we think our ideal customers Are that turned into RevOps? Like how do I build territories for these? And that turns into corporate strategy where it's like I got to decide do I go multi cloud, what products go multi cloud, when do we do it? How big are commitments, how much of our markets aligned to these things? Does that change by industry, industry by geo by segment?
Asher Mathew [00:10:18]:
I didn't necessarily get this whole cloud go-to-market concept until yesterday. I mean you kind of get it because you're like, oh, okay, you know what tax come up with this cool, let's go support it and stuff like that. But when we had this conversation in that room and especially with the VC conversation, and then we're like, okay, like these things are related and if you're going to go and build on the cloud, then you have to market and sell with the clouds. Like this is like a whole built out piece, right? So it really became real because these are like large companies sitting in the room. Another interesting thing that happened like last year, our friends at BCG connected me with this guy called Mickey McManus who's essentially one of the top advisors that they have on staff who speaks to like Fortune 50 teams, right? And then Mickey was like, look, you really need to spend enough time like designing your own business because everybody just starts to go build stuff and sell stuff and market stuff. But like the design is where all this stuff breaks down. And obviously that was like a, like a tutoring to be to basically like think about our own stuff, right? But I took away that like even when these partnership leaders are chartered with like solving the partner problem, they kind of need to go back to the design of the system. And that's not OKRs.
Asher Mathew [00:11:27]:
That's actually like, where are we playing? Why are we playing? How are we playing it? And that essentially is go-to-market.
John Jahnke [00:11:32]:
And most partner leaders are not in the room.
Asher Mathew [00:11:37]:
Yeah, yeah, totally.
John Jahnke [00:11:38]:
You're the biggest evangelist for the chief partner officer in the world.
Asher Mathew [00:11:41]:
Yeah, totally. 100%
John Jahnke [00:11:44]:
Who that person engages with and how inside a company really shows the fingerprint of that company, are they a partner led company or not? Because those, those decisions do get made at the CEO, the head of product, the head of corporate strategy, the cto, they're really strategic decisions. And how do you earn the right to be there? And how do you come with intelligence that's unique and perspective that's unique that help them make better decisions for your customers
Asher Mathew [00:12:13]:
Or just in the language of what they're speaking? It's funny because I tested because I was there for about half a day so half the people I said use the word partner and the other half I used the word technology ecosystem. And all the people that I talked about technology ecosystem got it right away. And then when I was like, well, do you talk about partnerships on your board and stuff like that? They're like, nah, doesn't really come up, right? So when you say technology ecosystem, it's essentially the same people said it, right? The even more interesting one was at one conversation with somebody that essentially talked to me about how important a developer ecosystem is. And then towards the end of the conversation I was like, well, what do you call them, right? They're like, well, they're developers, you know, like they're actually your partners.
Asher Mathew [00:12:52]:
It's the nomenclature I think we can spend a lot of time on. But I think the key takeaway here is like for people to have a seat at the table or be included in the conversation, they need to talk about business strategy, which is Bible partner. They talk about ecosystem strategy, including risk and governance. They've talked about how partnerships can help win in the AI economy and platforms, which is where product partnerships really live. And then marketplaces, which is like a huge thing for you all.
John Jahnke [00:13:19]:
Yeah. I'm curious, as your business expands, you're addressing broader and broader partner leader personas. Like last year you had someone from the government talking about how they partner with people. I know we talked about JP Morgan and how they partner with people. And where does it break down? Like, because it does seem cross industry partner strategies, they probably have commonality from a framework standpoint, but a lot of uniqueness based upon the industry.
Asher Mathew [00:13:46]:
Last year we were spending a lot of time in just elevating the role and the person and educating them on what is a P and L look like or actually how do you put together a budget, you know, not even a P and L, because that's further down the. Like, here's a. Here's a budget that's defensible, right? And then what I realized is that was part of the problem. But the other part is primarily because of half of the CEOs came to Catalyst last year, is we should go educate them on their problems being solved through partnerships. And then once that's identified and it's marked as a problem that can be solved through partnerships, the funding and the resourcing happens automatically because they're not there to solution, right?
Asher Mathew [00:14:29]:
They're just saying, have we identified this problem that is being surfaced as an actual problem? So let's do root cause analysis, right? And then they'll say, who is the best suited to like go solve this problem. And if you don't have somebody on staff, how do we get that person on staff? We just give them the resources and create trust that they'll deliver.
John Jahnke [00:14:48]:
Yeah. And being able to connect the dots between gross net retention and product usage back to partners in a way that's like steel threaded. And the problem is, I think we've talked about this before, like it's the evolution multi touch attribution. Because partners just adds a whole nother layer of things. The better you get at associating back to the business metrics that matter to the CEO, the CRO, which ultimately does come down to growth and retention.
Asher Mathew [00:15:15]:
So this was a research project done by Benchmarket and they had I believe 286 or 300 participants, right? And they said we're going to see which attribution model first touch, last touch and multi touch do companies of different sizes adopt. At least the current data says that less than 5 million interesting in revenue. 44% of companies were using multi touch, which I thought was very interesting. And then 5 million to 20 million people. And the company has really started focusing on what they're calling inbound, which is really a demo request. And it's another flavor of first touch.
Asher Mathew [00:15:53]:
20 million to 50 million people were primarily last touch. 50 million to 100 million people were primarily first touch. And then over a hundred million, everybody was a multi touch. So no right or wrong answer. It just feels like people just need to pick something. And to me, like, because I've actually been in a company where this was a problem we're solving at Lean Data, the more interesting thing was what the journey was. Like, what did it take for somebody to actually ask for a demo or a meeting or something? It's more important to figure out versus the credit thing because like there's like 50 different ways to pay people.
John Jahnke [00:16:29]:
So it's so funny you talk about the journey because we've been thinking a lot about buyer's journeys and just how do buyers journeys change in a cloud go-to-market era? In the era where there's more people selling your software than ever before. Across all different partner types, there's more products than ever. There's more business models associated with products than ever. And there's more storefronts where you can represent all of your business models and your products to a variety of sellers to ultimately get in the hands of your buyers. But so funny, like the classic definition of buyer journey had very little about purchase. Like purchase was one little line in the Buyer journey definition, when in reality, like that purchase box has exploded into a hundred different ways you could get access to things. How does that continue to evolve in this era?
Patrick Riley [00:17:14]:
And one of the big things, I think, Asher, that we didn't directly come out and say, but you guys have been anecdotally talking about, is we're not talking about just resellers anymore. We're talking about those product partnerships, those service partnerships, those partnerships that align with that buyer journey that John just mentioned. So if you're trying to figure out how to go do this, look at how do your customers buy today, what do they usually buy your product, service, et cetera with. Use that to help you figure out who those partners make sense to be, whether it's the cloud provider or, you know, we've got a fantastic partnership with Salesforce now. Those are things that I think often fall to the wayside and people look at after they start to build product. It's like, actually, who else should be involved in this conversation?
Asher Mathew [00:17:58]:
Yeah, as you were talking about this, I was thinking about the thing that Salesloft and ZoomInfo is doing, which is essentially ISV resell. And up until like late last year, people were like, there's no way anybody's gonna do ISV resell. Because we did a few LinkedIn posts about it. And people were like, it's not a thing. And then the minute ZoomInfo and Salesloft did it, now there's other people that are talking in the marketplace or the other model to think about is platform companies like Canva taking some of their top app partners and just including it that in their subscription, which is another form of resell. Is that right? But it's just different resell than the what HPs of the world are doing, right, through CDWs and stuff.
John Jahnke [00:18:38]:
Because ultimately what you care about is getting the thing your user needs in their hands as easily as possible. This is where I think we see the evolution of storefronts coming in. So how can you just embed concepts of storefront in all the places where your users are engaging? So inside of your product, inside of your own storefront, at your website, at your point of content. And AWS started with some primitives around Buy now and free trial and request a private offer, which I think start to enable these capabilities and even the definition of resell, because you may be like, I don't care about the fee. Like, I don't want to make any money. I just want to give my user the thing they need to use my product well.
Patrick Riley [00:19:18]:
Asher, so I think when we look at this, that buyer's journey and we're kind of backing into that, partners are key to that for a lot of companies. Tackle. Oftentimes we talk about co sell a lot, but we usually talk about it with the cloud provider. However, a lot of times our customers are inserting a partner into that process. And I don't think we've talked about that quite enough. How do you see that process evolving? What are the, some of the key things that ISVs should be thinking about when they're, you know, your partner leaders are coming to the next conference and they're like, asher, tell me, I've got co sell down with the cloud provider, but now I'm inserting a reseller here, I'm inserting a partner. What's important for me to consider.
Asher Mathew [00:19:57]:
There was like two objects, right? I feel like in the CRM architecture that the large companies have created, there's the account object and then the opportunity object. And I feel like the opportunity object is where a lot more time needs to be spent. But because segmentation drives so much of, like, how campaigns are run, et cetera, et cetera, people spend more time on the account object, right? So I feel like there's more technology or rigor that's needed on all of these different elements or parties that can be influencing or working with this opportunity object. How do we get better at predicting the outcomes from there? And it'll be good to Patrick to hear your point of view and John's point of view on. I don't know if we've solved that today, right? Because there was this huge movement about like, tri party initiatives, even at companies like HubSpot, right? And then when you look at how they reported, they were like, oh, partner source is up, but that's not co sell. And then when they did try to do co sell, it didn't necessarily work the way that they thought about it. And then they had to go do other things to kind of, you know, accelerate the motion. So I'd be interested in caring about what you guys are seeing.
John Jahnke [00:21:04]:
So we've been thinking about how to create a channel partner signal that you look at an account object level to not only see propensity for cloud, but see propensity for channel, and even get all the way down to specificity around our other channel partners that this account have worked with successfully across the ecosystem. And I think there's a lot of other signals you could deliver. Like, I mean, the evolution of buyer signals. There's a ton happening in the industry Next think there's just so much more that a unique data set gives you the ability to train a model around. That's one of those areas because if you could just get more specific around that, it can help the marketer, it can help the seller. Further signals would even be from segmentation. Like if you think about the SME world like propensity to msp, like does this company work with an MSP or not? Should I make decisions about an msp go-to-market based upon a segment of accounts that I look at who I see, you know, massive propensity to msp. We're decomposing the buyer intent signals and further partner tips.
Asher Mathew [00:22:14]:
It's almost like 10 years ago there was a company Bombora came to the market with like this intent data which was just so revolutionary that marketers like fell in love with it. And then what happened is they actually started selling more to sales because like salespeople spend more time in the accounts searching for opportunities and then obviously our friends across being put in this account mapping thing. But I think you're onto something with like what are all those accounts actually telling you about their partner relationships? Not the overlap piece of it, but the signals. And that having built a data company myself isn't the same thing as overlap or underlap data. It's actually like all the third party data that exists in the marketplace and the second party data that these account overlaps can kill and your first party data all have to come together, you know. So it's essentially this may be heresy as I say it, but creating a Demand based or a 6 sense for partner teams like specifically that could end up as the product. But just getting the data is like really difficult.
John Jahnke [00:23:09]:
We think people will merge these signals together inside of their common RevOps platform. So Salesforce is the play where most of these tools meet. And if you can just integrate those signals together to be like 6sense by someone's in market and someone has a high channel intent, like what would the engagement model for those signals be? Because the engagement models for that may be route to channel partner which is different than just like send it to marketing to get to an SDR to figure out what these people want.
Patrick Riley [00:23:44]:
The key there will be though all that data is going to enable sellers within their CRM with an agentic AI or with this intelligence already there to help make those decisions on who to go work with. But I think from a partner leader perspective what we need to start evolving to more is the enablement of those partners. So how can the chief Partner officer, the alliances leaders, how can they help sellers? By making sure that all of those partners and resellers and so have you are enabled to understand, hey, this is how our buyers buy. Here's what they're looking at for you. Here are the things you need to know about our business. I think that's somewhere that's easily dropped as a priority because it's tough, it's hard to go, you know, if you've got 50 partners out the gate, you gotta go spend time with all those partners and all their sales teams and all their GEOs, enabling them on your product. So I think that's something also to consider.
Asher Mathew [00:24:36]:
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal just interviewed Bill McDermott from ServiceNow and just launched that last night. The core in there, the Bill said, was have the most prolific ecosystem standards. It's not enough just to have partners. You have to have partners that are well trained, that are committed to the brand, that stand for the same shared values and goals and they'll drive results. So it's almost like in a way Bill is basically saying, hey partner leaders, it's okay to have rigorous standards, but also to drive rigor. And these like large, large, large partner ecosystems that you have, if they go smaller but deeper, that's actually better.
John Jahnke [00:25:15]:
At least the way I think about it. There's all these different kind of layers of the go-to-market system that you integrate at different points in time and you're going to choose different one based upon your product, based upon your company go-to-market strategy. The most common would be start with direct, like sell direct, figure out segments of the market that make sense and then can you add channel to direct, like does that actually work for you? And then okay, do you have a product that has a predominance of product LED or you know, initiating at a free or free trial or how, how do you do some sort of product LED experience? Then you get to like international, like how does international fit in? When does that fit in? Then you get the SMB. When does SMB? They're almost like layers of the cake and everybody wants mall, but if you start with them all, you fail. You start with one and you don't add, you fail. It's not like there's the standard way to do it. And I think a lot of people look at Salesforce or ServiceNow or like the mega companies, Amazon and they're like, oh my God, we have to go do what they're doing when in reality you can't because you just don't have.
Asher Mathew [00:26:17]:
The gravity I think of, think of that as a how many CEOs are well versed in all the ways of go-to-market? Not experts, but well versed, right? Because to me, like that's actually an issue because this happens a lot, right, Where CEO number one goes to dinner with CEO number two and says, hey, what are you doing? And he's like, partnerships. And then CEO says, well, we should be doing partnerships. Come back and tell this team saying, hey, we should do partnerships. And the partnerships conversation starts, right? If we again go back to like the buy, build, partner piece and we had more rigorous education around just how does the partner conversation happen, right? There are probably a million blogs on how to build a product. There's probably a very select less blogs than that on how to buy a company. I'm sure they exist, right? But then the CEOs actually saying, well, how does the partner conversation happen? Like, where is the framework? For me, like, this is what I was kind of thinking about even in the event yesterday through the thinking, all these people know Bible Partner, they all told me that. But if I ask them like, hey, what's the framework that you use to have this conversation? And what's the process that you will then implement? Because they all talked about hiring amazing talent and developing rigor inside the organization and having an amazing culture. And then I'm like, apply all of that to the partner conversation.
Asher Mathew [00:27:36]:
And I don't know if it exists. Again, this was kind of my follow up for today to kind of go do some research on how do we give them that group this info. So that to me would be like the second part of the conversation after the can we get to a world where CEOs and founders are very well versed in just the different ways of go-to-market, you know.
Patrick Riley [00:27:57]:
Our alliances teams somewhat in the revop space. But usually the alliances folks are the ones who are coming to Tackle screaming that they need help with this, that and the other, but they don't have the budget a lot of times. And then they have to go convince the CEO and the CFO that this is a partnership they need to invest in, not just for us, but with the cloud providers. So it's a good question. How, how do you convince these folks that partnerships are worth investing in? You know, it's almost got to come from a CFO level of hey, here's the ROI that we're seeing over here and here's how that applies. You know, we've tried a couple things at Tackle and we've got some tools to help arm these folks. Have those conversations. But be curious, John, if you've got any insights.
Patrick Riley [00:28:39]:
Is there like a buddy, buddy group for CEOs to talk about how to get partnerships people to buy?
Asher Mathew [00:28:45]:
Millions, I would say.
John Jahnke [00:28:47]:
Partnerships are definitely part of the conversation, but not nearly as consistently as Asher saying like, and it really just comes down to the, the experience of the CEO and the CRO. Like, I actually think the CRO is the one where the rubber meets the road right now. And if you have a CRO who had experience with a high functioning partner system, then that's their expectation. Like this is the way our revenue system needs to work and I need to go enable these things to happen. And they're going to tell people to do that. Maybe they'll tell their head of partners or tell their how to revops, like, go figure out how to make these things happen. I do think those are two distinct veins of education that are required because distribution is where companies succeed and fail. That's why if you can't figure out how to unlock these layers, different layers of the game, you got to figure out how to unlock them and make them productive.
John Jahnke [00:29:36]:
But you got to do it at the right time and you have to have the right level of commitment. People like talk the talk, but they won't walk the walk from an investment standpoint where they're like, oh, I turned the partnership on and it didn't work. I didn't get anything. It's like, well, how long did you do it for? Did you dedicate anyone to it? Did you make this an executive priority? Did you incent your teams to accomplish it? Did you build an integrated product story where it's better together for your joint users to get better outcomes? Like that's a company wide thing that I don't think we have CEOs and CROs and chief product officers talking about.
Patrick Riley [00:30:07]:
Part of that, I think is Asher's CPO, this Chief Partner Officer idea. For anybody listening like that, that's probably a relatively new term. Can you talk about like how that ties to this conversation?
Asher Mathew [00:30:19]:
So what we found in enabling the 2000 members that we have, right? So we actually created a whole site called valueofpartnerships.com. It exists, right? Because we're like, so many people are going to search for this. We should just like create a page and when people go there, they can actually get a deck that they can use to actually have this conversation internally, right? It's the explain the value of partnerships call. It's not the how. How do I introduce partnerships into my company, right? This is More of like a reporting mechanism, right? What John and I think we're talking about is like, well, if somebody doesn't know, like how do we help them? And that's the core reason of why we shifted to building modern businesses through partnerships. Because that then addresses the other part of the problem. But one way to solve for it is to install the chief partner officer. But the thing is have a chief partner officer, which is a unified leader who has go-to-market partnerships and product partnerships all under one roof.
Asher Mathew [00:31:15]:
Meghan's would be an example. There's a number of them out there, right? Like Allan Jabra is an example. Like there's a number of these people that now that actually a thousand of them, very few companies can actually afford CPOs because all these people make over a million bucks in salary. So then you say, okay, well what do the mid market companies do? And then what do the SMBs do who are trying this stuff, right? And frankly, the CEO is a cpo. There's enough blogs out there that are saying the CEO is the owner of Go to Market for startups. Actually, I was just looking at Sangram's latest email. He says that again, right? And I'm sure he has 130,000 people that read his info. So if the CEO is like Chief go-to-market officer, then that person is also responsible for integrating partners or introducing partners for one.
Asher Mathew [00:32:02]:
So that's one part. The other part, Patrick, that you talked about, which is very interesting. Conventional wisdom will say that the CFOs care about ROI partnerships. We actually had Bill Ingram, who actually, I believe he was the CEO of Cricket Wireless. He took Avalara public, he's taken two other companies public. Like he's a recognized figure, right? Literally the first thing he said in this closed door session that we had was don't come to me to explain the roi. Come to me and show me how you've sized the business opportunity that we would then utilize partnerships to go Tackle. Because I know you are going to miss the first ROI metric out of the gate because nobody gets it right.
Asher Mathew [00:32:38]:
So I used to think the same way and say, okay, we need to go tell all these people the roi, et cetera, et cetera. We are the ROI guys. We know how to calculate ROI pretty quickly. That's not the problem. We just need to know, have you done your research? Is the research grounded? Meaning you're not reading five analyst reports and giving me a bunch of jargon? You have actually done the work, right? Then you have an informed hypothesis that you created from here, then you have a plan to test the hypothesis. So you can like build into demand versus just like building, building, building, and then try to figure out whether demand exists or doesn't exist. And then he laid all the steps out. And then after that I just started telling all of our members that like, hey, don't care about roi, just care about like the plan.
Asher Mathew [00:33:21]:
Is it a solid, grounded plan? And that is one of the enablers in the market to the stat that we then saw in Q4, where 73% of survey, the folks that we surveyed said that their partner strategy and the corporate strategy is aligned. Which means a number of people went out and did a lot of hard work to bring alignment. So I think there's two parts to this, right? One is some people definitely did the work. Others took a signal where the company said we are all in on partners and their skos and took it to mean that the strategies are aligned because they're not in the room, they wouldn't know. So then the question becomes like, how do we make that real now, right? So like the minute I saw that stat, I went to told anybody who would listen to me is make sure that your partnership metrics, whatever was agreed, is surfacing up in the dashboards that are going to your execs because that's what's coming next. Because people are going to say, I'm hard on this. This is great. It's awesome.
Asher Mathew [00:34:22]:
We've got these metrics that we aligned, the plan's built out great. And if the reporting isn't coming up frequently with some color commentary, then eventually they're going to be like, well, we tried it, it didn't work. It's not because it didn't work, it's just nobody reported it back.
Patrick Riley [00:34:37]:
I couldn't have pointed a better question. So we started about a year ago delivering a business plan to our alliance leaders panel leaders for the business justification for them to go take to their CFO on why Tackle why cloud go-to-market. And a lot of that was led with those, hey, we can tell you which cloud your prospects and your customers are sitting on today. We can tell you that based on these hundred customers, the growth you're going to see in your, you know, top line value metrics and we use that. And it's funny because a couple podcasts ago we were on with the CFO at Jamf and he was probably the hardest sale we ever had because he was taking us through that. Like, I want to see this, I want to see that. And once he, the alliance leader built out that business case and we presented it to him. He's like, okay, great, now just track these metrics so I can justify ROI down the road, just as you said, Asher. That's a great point to bring up, is that you have to have that and then you have to have a plan to go execute it. We can't just give you something and then nobody in the company figures out what they're going to do and nobody touches the plan.
Asher Mathew [00:35:41]:
I'm sure your product helps with this. I got a demo of Gong, right? And then they can clearly tell you which conversations. I mean, it's just a matter of tagging, right? Like, they're right. But the next iteration of this is an agent that can just run all this analysis for you, whichever form it is, right? The CFOs just want to know you are keeping an eye on this.
Asher Mathew [00:36:02]:
And that, I feel like, comes from rigor, right? But it also comes from a builder mentality, because the people that are builder mentality folks, they will go out and say, I built something. Did it actually do what I said it did? The connector mentality, which is what a lot of partner folks are and nothing wrong with it. That's how the role was designed, right. To get us to this point. They just value the connection and the frequency of the connection. The outcome is not connected to the person who or the number of times you meet the person you know, because that part is not necessarily a thing that the connector mentality or the connector persona excels at. Which, again, is okay as long as we all internalize that and say, manage the connectors this way and you have amazing partner leaders.
John Jahnke [00:36:46]:
I think we're in the early days of adoption of people understanding how to take advantage of this to win new customers, help their existing customers be more successful. And that, that's something we think about, like, how many reps actually use cloud go-to-market to land. Like, how many renewal reps use cloud, go-to-market in renewals in the best places. You're at like 20, 25%, which means, you know, the majority still aren't, even though some of these companies are putting up unbelievably massive numbers.
Patrick Riley [00:37:14]:
What's the next big evolution in partnerships? We talked a little bit about AI, we talked a little bit about automation. Maybe it's something else entirely. But where do you feel like this is headed?
Asher Mathew [00:37:25]:
I feel like we just need to go back to fundamentals and just do the things that work. And I know there's going to be lots of experimentation that takes place, but I feel like that's dangerous because companies are looking for short term revenue, as we all know, again. And so while the experimentation thing runs, which is great, it should, we should not lose sight of fundamentals and just make sure that we know exactly how to generate solid pipeline and build quality integrations that deliver on outcomes. Bring the two together and actually show this, like go-to-market. Because I don't know if people are connecting the dots inside their companies and saying, hey, we did this, this, this, this, and we got this, this pipeline and then that closed the deal. And then here's how it comes together.
John Jahnke [00:38:05]:
Building partner-driven businesses. Like, I really like that line and I do think that is the future that requires bigger evolution beyond even just chief partner officers. It requires touching all these personas, people understanding the measurement, being able to connect the dots end to end. With that comes a ton of complexity. You just think about the surface area of tooling required, like all the different pieces of the puzzle. You have to figure out how to connect together in order to tell that story. But I think that leads into this world of AI. Will there be AI disruption to the legacy platforms where people completely rethink these workflows to say, will Salesforce be AI-driven with AI-driven RevOps partners and their components, or will there be just a next generation platform that makes it easier? I think the next generation thing's hard to think about right now, but I'm sure people are trying.
Asher Mathew [00:38:58]:
Chief Partner Officer was like a 2024 thing. You know, we're already past that. Like they already exist. There are people who are working on it. They're like they're trying to get alignment with their executives to create the role, create the function, et cetera. And we have a thousand of them. It's already in motion. It's similar to like the CRO thing like that took place 15 years ago.
Asher Mathew [00:39:13]:
Dana Therrian, I think it was at IDC back then. And this lady basically created a Rev Ops concept, essentially, which really was like SalesOps and MarketingOps kind of coming together. And the core problem was SalesOps did not want to give an admin license to MarketingOps and MarketingOps did not want to give an admin license to Marketing Automation to SalesOps. That's how RevOps kind of became a thing. And all they did was just take certifications and become more expensive. And then after that the whole like territory planning and ICP managed like accounts and dynamic book building. Like all this thing happened after that. Even right now, Hayes is building GradientWorks, which is a company that does dynamic building, which is technically like 10 plus years after the introduction of the CRO role and the RevOps piece.
Asher Mathew [00:39:57]:
And so I feel like we're on this journey but what's really important is to deliver results.
John Jahnke [00:40:03]:
Today, CROs actually are multi component go-to-market leaders who are the intersection of where sales, customer success partners, sometimes marketing and RevOps all come together to deliver an experience that makes the most sense for the company and for their buyers. And I think that's the same thing. If we looked at the chief partner officers, how many of them have grown to that level of influence over the executive suite and the product strategy to be able to say here's the future. I think like there's probably a subset of those people who are there, but everybody else is in pursuit.
Asher Mathew [00:40:36]:
The concept that really CROs needed to land in their minds was of how did they become a forest ranger versus a firefighter. And that is actually a really hard transition. The ex-CRO of Demandbase actually used to talk about this a lot. The leaders need to like get into like forest ranger versus just constantly firefighting because you're not then working on this thing that we're trying to build. And that's essentially where CROs now are on all the modern ones. I mean if you look at CRO forums right now, they're talking about the same thing. They're like, how do I get out of the day to day forecast and then get into like a revenue optimization? Because we have to make really hard calls. We have to like fire some of our customers who are not giving us good revenue.
Asher Mathew [00:41:16]:
Like essentially that's where we are in the macro world in the CRO landscape, right in the CIO landscape there, there again kind of talking about like hey, we now are figuring back to events, but like which events match our ICP. Can we do like targeting to them? And then the partners, which partners do I go to first and then get them enabled and get them transacted and then who do I go to? 2nd and 3rd. And if you answer those questions, you are technically operating at a very different level in a company versus going to be partners for lunch.
Patrick Riley [00:41:44]:
What advice are you giving an ISV is just pulling at your coat. Asher, he said he or she's asking, hey, I need to figure out this partnership thing with the cloud providers. What's the number one thing I need to do?
Asher Mathew [00:41:56]:
Go and search like building a go-to-market with the cloud provider. And I'm sure that there's like you guys have tons of content out there and then also talk to Other people who have gone through this journey, that's actually the most important one because they'll get like the awareness of like, how do we get this thing done?
John Jahnke [00:42:11]:
Every year there's a new ISV who's going faster and every year there's a new ISV who's committing bigger. So we continue to push the envelope. So for whatever type of company you are and then look for people who are similar to you, don't look at what CrowdStrike does if you're a series a startup because it takes a long time to get there. But there's lots of startups who have had success in this motion. So I do think there's so much to learn. I think there's a lot of resources and intelligence in the market, in the community. I mean our partnership with Partnership Leaders have been great and there's just so many good people in that community. You have tons of different experience and everybody's here to help.
John Jahnke [00:42:45]:
That's the thing I love about partner people because for the most part everybody wants to help.
Patrick Riley [00:42:49]:
All right, you both are accessible. People don't have to go to their local CEO buddies club to have a conversation with you. So if anybody has follow up questions from listening to this episode, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. We'll put the links to both John and to Asher there. You can also join Partnership Leaders if you're so interested. Asher at the beginning talked about all their events coming up, so we'll add those to the comments in this as well so you can check that out.
John Jahnke [00:43:15]:
We'll both be a catalyst in Seattle.
Asher Mathew [00:43:17]:
100%. See you all in Seattle.
Patrick Riley [00:43:20]:
Well Asher, thank you so much for your time. John, you as well. You're both very busy, so thank you both for making time to talk to us and give everybody a lay of the land of partnerships in today's world. This was another episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market with Tackle. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market.
Patrick Riley [00:43:43]:
For more resources on executing your cloud go-to-market strategy, you can visit our website at tackle.io.