Partners are the most undisciplined discipline in GTM

Summary
Jeff Ballard has spent more than 20 years building partner programs at companies so small his employee number was a single digit and so large it had letters in it. On The Growth Wizards Podcast he tells Tanner Green why partners are "the most undisciplined discipline" in go-to-market, why partner ramp is never one big delay but 15 small ones hiding in the white space between marketing, enablement, partner ops and sales, and why the first question in any partner program is about the customer, not the partner. He closes on the AI partner gap: vendors have an AI ambition, customers want an AI outcome, and partners are the bridge that decides whether it lands. For CEOs, CROs and CMOs who have a partner program on paper and not enough pipeline from it.

Chapters
00:00 Welcome and 20 years of partner programs
01:49 From marketing to partners at IBM Cloud
03:44 "Go grow partners" in a market that wanted AWS
05:06 Making a 100-year-old brand cool in cloud
08:06 Partners are the most undisciplined discipline
10:30 Who is your customer and where do they buy
12:53 15 little delays that stretch partner ramp
17:12 Partner experience is intentional design
21:06 What about partners? Baking partners into GTM
22:31 The AI partner gap and the last mile

Takeaways
- Partners are the most undisciplined discipline: every company names, staffs and owns them differently, so a partner problem has no obvious owner.
- Partner ramp is not one 6-month delay but 15 small ones, and the fix lives in the white space between marketing, enablement, partner ops and sales.
- Start with the customer, not the partner: who they are and where they want to buy decides which partners you need and what program each one needs.
- Partner experience is intentional design, the same discipline as customer experience, and good partner experience is what produces the revenue experience.
- Vendors have an AI ambition and customers want an AI outcome; partners are the bridge, the last mile for your AI and the first mile for the customer.

Connect with the Guest
Jeff Ballard LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffballard/
Company Website: https://kerrybodine.com

Sponsor
Growth Wizards is produced by Executive Media Network, the B2B podcast agency that turns one conversation into a month of content. Learn more at executivemedianetwork.com.

What is The Growth Wizards Podcast?

The Growth Wizards Podcast is the playbook for B2B GTM leaders who want smarter, repeatable ways to generate demand and build pipeline. Each episode breaks down how CEOs, CROs, and marketing execs drive growth — from top-of-funnel tactics and AI to thought leadership that converts.

Tanner Green (00:00)
All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Growth Wizards Podcast. Today I am excited to introduce Jeff Ballard on the show. Jeff, welcome.

Jeff Ballard (00:11)
Hey Tanner, thanks for having me on.

Tanner Green (00:15)
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you coming on. So without further ado, Jeff, I wanted to give the listeners a little bio on you, but I wanted you to do it instead because I think what better option to come from the source?

Jeff Ballard (00:29)
Well, thanks for that little twist. If there's any pop quiz, hopefully I can pass. It would be one to talk about myself. So I spent more than 20 years working across go-to-market alliances, partner development, partner programs, from companies large and small, from startups building their first ecosystem all the way through very large organizations that have considerable size ecosystems.

I like to say that I've been with companies so small that my employee number was in single digits, as well as companies large enough that my employee number was so big it had letters in it. So the common thread across all of those really has been figuring out how companies and partners work together to reach customers and create growth. And it was over that time that I became increasingly interested in the experience we're actually creating for the partner.

Companies invest heavily in the mechanics of their partner programs like tiers, incentives, enablement portals, MDF, but the experience surrounding all of that has enormous impact on whether they can actually perform. And that's ultimately what has led me to where I am today, connecting customer experience, partner experience very intentionally.

Tanner Green (01:49)
I love that. And so what led you down the partner route in the GTM side versus in some other channels like marketing or like sales?

Jeff Ballard (02:01)
Well, it's funny that you asked that. I've not always been in partners, always engaged with partners, but I've always been on the marketing side and started out general marketing, got into product marketing pretty significantly. That was a good chunk of my career, and then got into some business development types of activities in global accounts, as well as then industry marketing. So I had this full robust marketing experience, and by the time I got brought into a partner-specific role, I felt everything that I had done up to that point really mapped to helping a partner develop not only sales abilities around our product, but help them develop a practice. And that's where that go-to-market motion really became a thing for me as I started working with partners.

And at the time I was working for IBM, IBM Cloud, and I was responsible for growing the cloud partner ecosystem through distribution. And that was really the impetus or at least the starting point of what became that go-to-market focus and specifically a customer go-to-market focus with partners and helping them build that.

Tanner Green (03:25)
Hmm. So basically it all started with you kind of realizing, hey, we need to first of all, somebody came to you and said we need to get this strategy going. But with you it was like, hey, we need to help these people figure out how to do this themselves so that and then kind of this partnering came afterwards, really.

Jeff Ballard (03:44)
Yeah, and it would be nice to say that there was a forethought of you need to help partners build a business. My mandate was go grow partners. Great. How am I gonna grow partners?

Especially at that time, IBM Cloud was it was AWS obviously was the market. And then there were a few other random players, Google and Microsoft weren't in yet. So it was how do I help partners do something, sell IBM Cloud in a market where customers are really focused on AWS as the cloud option.

And that's where I started to see, well, if I can help them build a business, build a practice around this, that I think is where we'll find some traction.

And it absolutely did. As I started working with partners, one of the things that really stuck out is they're very well positioned for sales, they're well positioned for support. They're well positioned in the obviously in the back office kinds of things. But as far as marketing or taking something to market, they didn't have as much skill set. So that's where I saw the opportunity for vendors, in my case, it was IBM, to be able to help the partner build a go-to-market strategy around our product.

Tanner Green (05:06)
Yeah, I love that. And so in that big of a market, how do you differentiate yourself to other players in the space? And especially in an IBM world where it's kind of the known as Big Blue, and there's these there's these stigmas behind it. So how did you create that trust and credibility of new and modern age partnering and create that flywheel?

Jeff Ballard (05:32)
That is the exact challenge that I faced. And it was, you know, like I said, AWS was the market. Google and Microsoft had much better brand recognition in the cloud space, even though they hadn't launched their products yet. So it was really trying to struggle to say, how do we then take this 100-year-old brand and suddenly make it cool in cloud? And the thing that caught me was our point of differentiation was that literal hundred years of business. And so I thought I can pull different pieces and parts of our collective knowledge and share that with the partner in a constructive way that helps them take us and their offering to market. IBM has an organization not many people know about, even in IBM not many people know about the Institute of Business Value. This is an organization that is a research firm, the likes of a McKinsey and what have you. They're not studying IBM products, they're studying markets and trends. And that knowledge was phenomenal. So being able to bring that in and share that with partners and provide them the insights on where to go, how to go, and you know what to take to market was invaluable. And that was really the big thing for us.

Tanner Green (06:57)
So you used the experience and the aged wisdom of IBM to your advantage, which is awesome.

Jeff Ballard (07:04)
A hundred percent. And now, to also provide a little bit more of foundation for that, the focus initially was on IBM partners, because obviously they were already in the ecosystem. So we had a focus there. But it quickly started to expand as we were going through distribution. The distribution partners were participating and they were starting to bring partners in, which helped us expand our network. So yeah, that was absolutely the focus for it.

Tanner Green (07:34)
I love it. I think it's great. So, you know, as you've seen the channel from both extremes, like the big IBM, Symantec type companies, and with startups that are super small and it's like the first-ever deal that they've made, you know. There's like such a stark difference, walk me through what that looks like in a partner situation.

And how is it differentiate from the IBM you know giant?

Jeff Ballard (08:06)
Well, it's interesting. I mean, seeing all sides, I wish I could say both sides, but no, there's companies small, medium, and large, just like with anything else, and extra large, certainly.

And having been a part of all of those and working with partners, there's definitely a difference at the large scale. You've got programs that are in place, very well thought out, managed, maintained. There's a system and a process. Now that doesn't mean that it's all roses. There can be a lot of friction quite often. The other thing that I see in those large organizations, one thing I say, I say a lot.

My team gets tired of hearing me say it all the time, is partners are the most undisciplined discipline there is because one organization is going to treat partners in a certain way. They're going to call partners a different name. They're going to have different titles for the different people that are involved.

In some organizations, owning partners may sit in sales, others it may sit in marketing. In others it can be its own organization. So there can be a lot of complexity with those large sophisticated organizations. And so when I'm working with the smaller organizations, that's really the thing that I look to how can we help them either optimize a program that they already have in place or what they're already doing with partners. How can we help them optimize that? And then make sure that we have a foundation and a framework in place so that it can scale and grow with them, hopefully with fewer points of friction than they would have had otherwise.

Tanner Green (09:49)
So you're creating the framework in the smaller sides, and then on the bigger sides, you are trying to get through the framework as quickly as possible, right? And a in any corporate job, there's a lot of red tape that you to deal with, and those things can be a burden and can cause some issues, but they save you some time at the end of the day and maybe some big mistakes and things like that. But when you're creating the framework, do you look at some of the other ones where you're looking at like IBM's framework and kind of establishing that same process into these smaller companies or does it look totally different?

Jeff Ballard (10:30)
Actually what we do is we for us we start out with a model or a framework of what we know is success. And even before that, we take a very unique step when we're building out a partner, helping a company build out or optimize a partner program. Our first question is who is your customer? And the second question is where do they buy? Where do they want to buy?

Because that's really what shapes the partner program. Because now, when you understand what who the customer is and where and how they want to buy, you know which partners you need to bring in. Now you want to start to understand what type of program you need to build in order to make each of those partner types successful.

So we started at that very base foundation. And we actually have something called the PX architecture, partner experience architecture, where we've got five layers that we take a look at to make sure everything is in place as it should be, and how the company is lined up with that. And it all starts with that layer PX architecture starts with at the organizational layer.

It looks at the organization. What's that level of commitment? Executive all the way, you know, all the way up through executive ranks, as well as commitment across the organization. I've been in too many situations where you can be talking to a CRO who has one set of expectations around what partners should be doing and how well they're performing.

The CEO can be talking a different message, standing on stage, and he's talking something entirely different. And then you've got a CMO who's tasked with the various things that he or she are tasked with in terms of leads, MQLs, SQLs, all that kind of fun stuff. Now they have a yet a different perspective of partners.

So we like to make sure that across the organization and up and down the org chart, there's that organizational alignment and commitment. Not just to partners, but a customer first, partner next kind of philosophy, which is our philosophy, customer first, partner next. So we tend to look at that as helping to lay the foundation.

Tanner Green (12:53)
When you're building this with your team and everyone's involved and they're creating these different contributions to the partnership experience, how do you go from a 180-day ramp to under 90? And where does the time actually go for each of these employees and which part do companies, you know, have the most struggles and red tape or friction or things, where does that where does that usually lie?

Jeff Ballard (13:22)
So yeah, it's an interesting story of how we're able to do that.

Usually the problem isn't one giant six-month delay in the process. It's about you know 15 little different delays that all take place. You know, a partner signs the contract, then they wait two weeks for this for systems access. Once they get portal access, they're not quite sure how they navigate it. Training starts, but typically it's around product education, it's the technical training that happens.

They get certified, but there's not a first opportunity as of yet. They get marketing assets, but they're generic. And as I said, quite often these partners are not up-leveled in their marketing game. They've got it in every other aspect of the business. But when it comes to marketing, they're not quite to the same level that the vendor is. And you've got partner managers who say, great, you've gone through training, you've got the assets, go sell. But they haven't really been introduced to the whole sales organization yet. And then sales doesn't get engaged, nobody agrees on account ownership, an actual opportunity. That's where a whole lot of friction can happen.

So a lot of that, it doesn't just happen across full six months, but little by little they create that delay. So really the biggest part of shrinking that ramp time is to focus on the white space between the functions. You know, marketing owns one thing, enablement owns something else, partner ops owns another, sales owns yet another. Again, going back to that, the most undisciplined discipline in the world, right? If you have a sales problem, you go to the sales organization. You have a marketing issue, you go to marketing team. But if you have a partner problem, who do you go to?

Marketing, enablement, partner ops. So, you know, we start to look at that at those white spaces in between those functions. And what we look to change is, you know, how do we get them to the path to first value? And we want to make sure that at any point the partner understands what do I need to know, what do I need to do, who do I do it with, and what capability exactly is it I'm delivering.

And in that way, we're helping them get to that first customer opportunity and successful outcome a whole lot faster.

Tanner Green (15:50)
I've seen a lot of different partner initiatives before, and I've seen a few of them that have worked, a few a lot of them that haven't. And I feel like oftentimes there's somebody in the business, in the company that just tries to go and make these partnerships happen, right? And it kind of becomes the Wild West and what I'm hearing from you is you really have to reverse engineer the partnership aspect of what you're trying to do because when you go in blindfolded and empty-handed to a gunfight, you know, that's like it's not gonna work out too well. But if you prepare the right people and the right ideas and the right goals with the partnership, then it becomes a lot easier to just plug and play and have everyone create the roles and then you manage and you fix the, like you said, the handoffs, the white spaces, the miscommunications, those things as it goes along as you're building it. And so I really like that approach because a lot of the times I've seen people just start messaging and saying, hey, we'd like to partner. What does this look like? Well, we can do this. You kind of work with the partner in figuring out how it would work. But you kind of come in with a plan already and then you work backwards into how to make that become a reality.

Jeff Ballard (17:12)
Absolutely. You'll hear us talk a lot about partner experience. And what partner experience is, it's the intentional design of how that partner engages, interacts, and their experience with you. And it's having that intentionality as you build it out.

Kerry Bodine, who founded Bodine & Co., she's a former Forrester analyst, wrote the book Outside In, and she's one of the foremost authorities on customer experience. And it's in you know my work with her, conversations with her, and ultimately our seeing things very symbiotically that led us to come together. But that customer experience, as she helped to define it, is that intentionality of defining what the customer's experience is with your product. It's not about making happy customers, it's about getting the right customer outcomes and getting the types of NPS scores that are gonna tell you that you're doing really well. Customers are gonna refer you. That's all about customer experience. So taking that same approach and that same model and ideology to partners brings us to partner experience. And that's why when we come in and talk with somebody, you know, our first questions are about the customer. Then we want to understand what types of partners and what is it, what is it that they need. Because we believe delivering good partner experience is going to deliver good customer experience, which drives good customer outcome, which ultimately then leads to a good, as I cheekily say, revenue experience.

Tanner Green (18:54)
Yeah, I love that. And so you at Bodine, what you're doing is you're walking through your clients on how to create this experience, partner experience, what I just explained about reverse engineering, creating the plan, making sure that everything goes well. You are helping clients walk through that. Or you or are you doing the partnerships?

Jeff Ballard (19:12)
No, so we work with the companies to help them build out, optimize or accelerate their partner programs. But companies come to us at a variety of different levels. You know, somebody may come to us about we need to build out a partner program. And so we work with them to make sure that partner experience framework is built in to what they're doing.

Others come to us and say we've got a program in place, but we're not getting the performance that we are expecting. Or we're expecting massive growth, we're driving rapid growth, and we want this program to be able to scale and so not bog down as we do that growth. And those are places that we can bring in that partner experience as well. And then we've got another group. We worked recently with Zscaler, for example, on a partner advisory board, help them put together a program.

And that was not they have their own program in place, partner program. They have a very good structure, a lot of great resources, a great partner ecosystem. But in this one space, they wanted some support. And so we came in to help with that PX mind frame. We came in and helped them put together a partner advisory board program and a voice of the partner program.

Tanner Green (20:33)
Amazing. I love it. And you guys are just really teaching what I think is unique about what you're doing is nobody really thinks about how can I get assistance in the partnership realm. People it feels kind of like a myth, you know, there because there's go-to-market strategies and the cold outreach, the organic social marketing, but then like you said, there's this third world that people need to figure out on and it's more complicated than you might think. So I think it I think it's great what you guys are doing.

Jeff Ballard (21:06)
I'll add to that, a lot of times the other one of the other expressions that I have is borne out from years of sitting in conference rooms where somebody's laying out a product launch strategy, market expansion strategy, a new customer initiative, a new go-to-market strategy. Or maybe it's ways that they're gonna provide support and services. And invariably I'll sit through that presentation and at the end, I just go, what about partners? Because partners are typically can be an afterthought if it's if thought of at all. And so we come in to say, let's bake in partners into those programs. So many times go-to-market strategy is built by one set of resources, executives and other resources in the company, but it doesn't incorporate partners.

Right. They're focused on partner-led. They're focused on customer-led, product-led, things like that. And some may even say partner-led, but you know, for the bulk of them, they're not tying partners into the go-to-market strategy. And when I talk with companies, I ask, you know, you have a go-to-market strategy. How are you aligning your partners to that? What are you doing to introduce your partners to your strategy so that they can one, amplify it for you? And two, so they have a framework with which to be successful.

Tanner Green (22:31)
Well, Jeff, we're coming up in the end here. I wanted to get one of your one last thought from you. What is your strategy using AI in the partner side? Whether it's you working with your clients or your clients working with other partners, what does that look like? Because partner-led strategies are always human for sure. But where does AI play a part in this?

Jeff Ballard (22:52)
You know, it's funny. I mean, certainly with us, we're using it extensively to accelerate our research, do synthesis, analysis, content development, preparation, and any other kind of work that, you know, where we can increase the speed and breadth of what we're able to do. Yes, we do all of that. The key for us is combining that capability with the experienced human judgment. I always like to say it's book smart versus street smart, right?

You can have both.

Tanner Green (23:21)
I love that. I've never heard that before. That is so good.

Jeff Ballard (23:24)
And if you think about it, that's what AI is. It's book smart. It does not have the experience. And as you know, if sometimes it you can be book smart and that can lead you into trouble. You can get you're you can get yourself beat up. You know, so

Tanner Green (23:38)
Very true.

Jeff Ballard (23:39)
It's that book smart versus street smart. So that's the way that we approach it. Always having that experienced human judgment that comes along with the AI-infused efforts. But as far as AI and partners, one of the things that we're seeing is that AI is changing what customers expect and what partners have to do in order to be able to deliver against those expectations. And we're seeing vendors are putting AI into almost everything. They're putting it into their technology, and they're certainly putting it into their messaging if they're not putting it into their technology. So there's always that AI component because that's the big wave.

The question is whether the partners can actually turn that AI capability into a customer outcome. And that's what we call the AI partner gap. The vendor has an AI ambition, the customer has an AI outcome they're looking for, and partners are often the bridge between those two. Partner experience is what helps determine whether that bridge actually works.

A vendor may say, we've added AI to our product, but that's not really the be-all and end-all. And it's not just training the partner how to deliver that technology. It's about understanding what's the customer looking to achieve and what role does the partner play in that, and how can we help the partner succeed in delivering that AI outcome.

Now, as we sit here today, you look at a lot of the numbers and statistics of AI not getting out of pilots, not getting into production. You know, a few a while ago you were hearing 70, 80%. Now it's more like 60, 70% aren't coming out of production.

And one thing that we say is partners are the last mile in delivering your AI offering, but they're the first mile for the customer's journey. And so you have to be able to understand how to help those partners address that customer as they're taking the first steps, with specifically with your AI, but how that incorporates AI in general. Because if we're dropping AI into the technology and going into an enterprise, how does that AI affect regulatory security risk issues, around data governance? How does it around data cleanliness? How does it tie to other AI that's out there, shadow AI, if you will? So there's a whole lot around it that has to be taken into consideration all the way through change management and adoption of the technology.

Tanner Green (26:24)
Yeah, I love it. Well, Jeff, this has been awesome. I appreciate you coming on. I just love all of the partnership experience that you have, just spitting knowledge and truth all around this podcast. It's been tons of fun to listen to how to do it the right way, really frankly. And so I really appreciate you coming on. How can people go find you and connect with you?

Jeff Ballard (26:46)
Well, we are at kerrybodine.com. You can find us there. That's probably the best way to connect, to be able to connect up with us.

Tanner Green (26:56)
Okay. Awesome. I love it. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Jeff, and thanks for the listeners for tuning in.