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Over 50% of SaaS companies say partnerships are a top revenue driver, but the path to success isn’t always clear.
On this show, we unpack the real stories behind the programs driving revenue growth, straight from the people who’ve built them.
From early missteps to pivotal moments, each guest breaks down how their strategy evolved, what actually worked, and the lessons that stuck. We’re getting tactical, walking through the exact playbooks they’ve used to turn partnerships into a predictable, repeatable revenue stream you can learn from.
Whether you're evolving a partner program or building one from scratch, Get it, Together delivers the clarity and practical insight you need to move fast and get it right. Instead of asking "where do I start?" or “what’s next?”, you’ll be saying "let's run this back."
Practical, honest, and occasionally spicy, this is the podcast that helps GTM teams build partnership programs that are built to last.
Cory Snyder (00:00):
Get as much data as you possibly can. We know who our partners are, what they're selling, who they're selling to, who else they're partnered with, which allows me to expand. If I have a bunch of partners that are CallRail partners with Mike, great. I'm going to go reach out to Mike. I'm going to say we should partner because a lot of my partners, your partners. So I think a lot of times we don't think outside the box of who has our customer slash partner. We do the regular way of just hunting or internal things versus saying, let's think outside the box.
Tyler Calder (00:30):
This is Get It, Together. The podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they built and scaled. Everyone says partnerships are the future of growth, but few talk about how hard they are to scale. And few talk about how despite that difficulty, you can in fact scale it on a shorter time horizon than perhaps some folks like to think. In this episode, I sit down with Corey Snyder, who is absolutely a veteran partnership leader who has helped teams at Infusionsoft, now Keep, at Sendoso, at Teamwork. And he has done a phenomenal job turning messy, unpredictable partner programs into real revenue engines. And he's done it in a way that scales relatively quickly, drives towards impact on a short time horizon. And we talk about why that is so important, why it is critical to move fast, to get buy-in from sales at the outset, and proving partner impact with the right mix of leading and lagging indicators along the way. Enjoy. Alright. Hello everybody. Welcome back to Get It, Together. Today I am with Mr. Corey Snyder, once upon a time, the partner Stack Crown partner leader of the year, incredible track record at companies like Infusionsoft now, keap, ActiveCampaign, Maropost, Sendoso, Teamwork. And Mr. Snyder, I want to talk a little bit about what you're up to now. How about you keep that introduction going?
Cory Snyder (02:07):
Yeah, thanks. Appreciate you having me on. Obviously. So I decided to, I don't know if it was a mid-career crisis, but I did pivot historically over the last 12, 13 plus years. I've been in tech MarTech SaaS and I was like, I want what the other side's, like I worked for a company called Outbound Funnel, which is an agency recently acquired by a company called 2X, who's a larger MarTech, a marketing agency. We're more on the rev ops side of the house and we focused more on the tech and making sure that everything works and talks and all that kind of good stuff. So I run the partnerships there and helps build the sales function as well. So yeah.
Tyler Calder (02:42):
Alright, let's start right there. So partnerships and sales.
Cory Snyder (02:47):
Yeah.
Tyler Calder (02:48):
Why isn't that more common? I mean, if
Cory Snyder (02:51):
You want my just straight answer. Straight answer, yeah. I'll probably get some flack for this. But keep in mind I came from a sales background, sells easy as far as systematically, and looking at it from a marketing lead to MQL to SAO or whatever you want to call it, right? All the way through the pipeline, it's conversion rates and percentages. It's super easy to be like, okay, we're at a point where we need to hire an SDR. Partnerships just not that easy in the sense of how you scale them now, why aren't they together? I think most of 'em are together. I think there's a bit of ROE if you want to throw it out there, rules of engagement that happened. Although I can tell you over the past 10 plus years, the ROE has been really small and minuscule factors, yet we hype it up in the ecosystem for whatever reason around attribution and everything.
(03:42):
And I don't run into it that often and I work in the SMB side all the way to the enterprise side. I think the more partner leaders and executives can help build out sales, I think the better, right? Because in my opinion, you're setting the foundation correctly. My entire sales team knows why partners are important. My entire sales team knows who our partners are, what our partners deliver, and they know everything about it because we built it together. That's obviously a loaded part of the whole thing of how do you get internal buy-in? How do you get internal buy-in from sales teams? Well, the problem is you're kind of coming in in a way, depending on your partner program saying, I'm going to get the leads before you do. I'm going to get the customers before you do. At least that's how the market says it. I'd ask everybody that listens to this. How many are Wes have you seen in the last 10 years? Maybe eight. So that's my 2 cents on the sales thing. It's easy to scale a sales team, and again, you may get some crap for it, but I came from sales and I've done it.
Tyler Calder (04:40):
So you came from sales. Why the jump over to partnerships? What was that history?
Cory Snyder (04:44):
I'm not sure it was intentional in all reality. It was more of, I've always been very competitive, always been driven by bettering myself and positioning my family in a better financial situation. And I also continued to have kids. It's a forcing function to have to go make more money. So when I was at Infusionsoft, my entire career started where I actually did collections first, which in my opinion, doing collections and having to have to break down those walls and it's a completely different sell, right? So I think that helped me in my sales career. But I got in into working for Infusionsoft. There were about 10 million in revenue. I think it was the six sales rep. And at that point we started scaling salespeople. And previously I worked for University of Phoenix. I was the number one for four years on the West coast out of a hundred fifty, a hundred twenty five account executives.
(05:33):
And I realized, okay, I do like this. I'm good at this. But there's got to be more than just conversion rates. There's got to be more than just like, oh, Corey gets 200 leads and he converts 'em at 30%. How do we get to 35 to 40 to 50%? Or how do I generate more revenue? So what I started looking at is I started looking at my leads that were coming in and what's the conversion rate tool and then my one call closing. So I started seeing some anomalies in that data basically set that said, this is coming from this person, this URL. Great, I'm going to reach out to that URL and find out who the heck they're. So I started reaching out to these URLs, IE affiliates, and I started building relationships with them. And then I started claiming about 30 different relationships that ended up just feeding me directly and I closed their leads at way higher percentage, which means I made them way more money. And then I did that for about two years on the sales team, and they walked in and said, Hey, do you want to start a partner team? Do you want to replicate what you're doing? And I said, sure. And that was about in 2010, 2012 and never looked back since.
Tyler Calder (06:39):
Nice, okay. I've heard that a couple times from some partner leaders that are really driving significant impact in their orgs, folks that I certainly respect quite a bit, that quite a few of them, they started in sales and realized like, oh shoot, these partners are really helping me. And then it just keeps going and going and going to the point where it's like, Hey, can you lead this thing? I like that journey. You mentioned on the sales side, it can be easy, and I think what you're really referring to is the model, kind of the financial model of sales. It can be relatively linear in nature. How does that translate to partnerships? What you're alluding to is it's different, it's harder, but presumably there is some model that you would think about as you think about growing partnerships. What does that look like and how does it differ from sales?
Cory Snyder (07:27):
I'm not sure anybody's figured it out. If somebody else figured it out, I'd love to know and put it to the test. But I think there's so many variables that go into it, especially if you start looking at agencies and resellers. They're their own business. They don't have to sell your stuff, right?
(07:40):
If you look at affiliates, they're all variable right Now. The thing with sales and with partnerships, you can look at it from very similar scopes as far as it's a lead. You can call it an MQL or a PQL partner, qualified lead, whatever you want to call it. You can look at it from that perspective as far as the semantics is concerned, which is what I'm talking about when I say sales is easy to scale, the more leads you get in, the more reps you need and dah, dah, dah. It's just not that easy. With partnerships, you have different partner types, affiliates, tech agencies, resellers, ISVs, you name it. So that is the issue in the partnership world is how do you actually define that? We also have this saying, it's like, oh, it takes six months to see revenue from an agency or reseller.
(08:19):
I disagree. It depends on how you go and hunt your partners and how you scale your partners and how you onboard your partners. But I think sales has done a really good job of saying, this is how you, for the most part, do it. From a lead to an MQL, it's 15% from an MQL to opportunity. At SAO, it's 20% from an SAO or whatever to a customer it's 30%. We just can't do that in sales. You can do it by partner program. Once you've scaled it and you've got some learnings in place and you have some momentum and you can see, okay, maybe from a cohort perspective, all of our agencies are converting at about 30%, right? But when you look at each individual, perfect example, you might recruit a partner that is the perfect, perfect partner profile, totally aligns with your number one partner producing and they will do nothing. And that is partnerships right there. That's the difficult part in partnerships is that you may have somebody that doesn't look like the perfect fit and they're going to crush it and you may have somebody that looks like the perfect fit and they don't do anything. That's what I mean by the difference in sales and partnerships is it's just a little bit harder to kind of look at those semantics as far as conversion rates are concerned as the customer journey progresses.
Tyler Calder (09:30):
Yeah, I think that's fair. I want to come back to that in a second. That idea of a, you have some partners that maybe you're really struggling to activate. Some are kind of almost self activating and running on their own. Before we get to that though, one of the reasons I was really excited to have you on, and we've talked about this a bunch, you've talked about it launching fast and you just mentioned it, co-sell partners, resellers, you'll hear a lot of people say it takes X amount of time. Again, I think what you were alluding to was I think you could probably get them to move a little bit faster. And I'll just say this because I hear it all the time from partner leaders, it's going to take me 18 months, maybe 24 months to get this thing going. And the reality is, especially in SaaS now, you probably don't have that much time to see it through. Somebody's going to come through the door and say, what are we doing? What do you mean? We're a year in and we're not seeing anything time for a change. You've always had this perspective of we can move way faster. How do you do that? How do you get something from zero to one in a timeframe that is significantly faster than your peers? Candidly,
Cory Snyder (10:37):
I just put something out there in all transparency, I've been doing it long enough. So I guess the benefit there is I've been doing it long enough that I can get 75, 80% out of the way there and I could launch something. But the way I articulate it internally too is if I'm starting a new program, I'll let 'em know we have a solid guess on who our IPP is. So we're going to double down on it, and what we're going to do is we're going to do the website. We're going to make it super simple. We're going to build out a doc. That's our pitch deck that our partner acquisitions are going to go, we're going to scrape all of our competitors partner pages and we're going to hunt their partners to get some really good insights and everything else. Let's be honest. If they're already a partner with one of our competitors, they've already done all the hard work and taught them and educated them on that.
(11:16):
So when we get them, that gap is now dramatically shortened how we look at how they're acquired as far as during the acquisition process, how do we get pipeline ready before they even talk to a partner manager all the way down to also what's the entire flow inside the door? What's their experience? I think we completely underestimate the experience we put our partners through. When I was at Teamwork.com, she could only recruit five partners because there was so many manual tasks. So even if I loaded it up with 50, 60, a hundred opportunities at least for it, she just couldn't do it. So we looked at the entire process, we flipped it. At that time, it didn't enough. We used PartnerStack. The problem is they weren't using PartnerStack properly, they were using DocuSign and then they were sending them a link to sign up as a partner.
(12:02):
So we'd have a closed one partner. They signed DocuSign, but they would never go into PartnerStack. So we completely flipped the switch and said, great, you want to be a partner? Go into PartnerStack. Then they sign the agreement, they then push all of that information and close ones the deal. It automatically creates a task for our people in engineering to create sandbox accounts for 'em. All of this was manually done. It automatically sent the onboarding information to automatically introduce the partner manager. We literally streamlined the entire process to a point that when we have 40 partners, when I walked in the door over a course of a year and we did 43 new partners in the first quarter, I was there, and the reason for that is, one, you have an idea, go after it, get as much data as you possibly can.
(12:46):
We went from 10 questions to 30 questions or 25 questions on our application process. We know who our partners are, what they're selling, who they're selling to, who else they're partnered with, which allows me to expand. If I have a bunch of partners that are CallRail partners with Mike, great, I'm going to go reach out to Mike. I'm going to say we should partner because a lot of my partners, your partners, but how do we expand? So I think a lot of times we don't think outside the box of who has our customer slash partner. We do the regular way of just hunting or internal things versus saying, let's think outside the box. So that's the way I look at is how can I look at leading, lagging indicators and how do I articulate that to my executive team when I build a new program? Leading indicator, partner acquisition. Lagging indicator, pipeline. Six months in, leading indicator, revenue. Lagging indicator—or whatever you want to call it, right?
(13:36):
You can look at it either way, but the point is that the leading indicator is always going to be we're seeing progress, but you can't just be revenue, revenue, revenue. You have to let 'em know the build is a build. But if I came in, I said I need 18 months, they'd be like, great, we'll find somebody else because that's what I would do. You were telling me Teamwork.com, we probably cost 850K a year, the four people that were working. Within three months. I asked my CFO one question, how much is my team costing the company? He said this much. I said, thanks. My goal was to see and articulate how quickly I could get to profitability on my team. And the problem is I don't think we think about it that way as a lot of the partner executives, because to me that's a protection act as well. If I can get to profitability, am I less likely to get laid off potentially, although I ended up getting laid off anyways. That's partly because I love the pain of working for companies, sell 40 million in revenue. That's just the world.
Tyler Calder (14:34):
So you mentioned at the top of that, you just put stuff out there. What do you mean when you say that? What does that look like? You start a new gig, you are either looking to scale an existing program or start a new one. What does that mean? You just put some stuff out there.
Cory Snyder (14:49):
If it's a new program and there ways for companies to make service revenue off of what we're doing, a launch agency program, just put together a couple benefits, get it out there, start hitting the market. Hey, by the way, we have this. If I could talk to the marketing team into do a press release, we'll do a press release, right? All get a partner first. I'll have that partner do a testimonial in that press release. So that's one way of just saying, let's get it out there. Every company should have a customer referral affiliate program. If you can show me a reason why not, I would love to, but there should be no reason why you don't have evangelists out there just with tracking links out there. Just spitting your word
Tyler Calder (15:26):
To touch on that for a second. So a customer ambassador program and affiliate program, is that something you as a partner leader, you've historically wrapped your arms around or has marketing owned it, somebody else owned it?
Cory Snyder (15:38):
So that's a good question. So there's been times where I've given it to marketing. Usually I'll own the affiliate program and there are some conflicts usually when there's a customer referral and affiliate program. So you really have to build that relationship because that affiliate program or that customer referral program is normally owned by marketing. Historically, I've owned it. Then I've gotten to a point where it was like, it doesn't make sense now financially it doesn't make sense. We're making 5% margins paying everybody on this. Let's move it over to marketing. It's built, it's running. You guys hire one person to manage it and you'll be fine, which is what we did at ActiveCampaign. It worked out great. But yeah, that's usually the way that I do it is I'll help build it and then I'll either pass it on once it's built or I'll continue to manage it. It's just not a very profitable program because the affiliate leads go to sales. So you're paying the partner manager, the partner leader now sale, SDR, AE, and all the way up. It's just not your profitable program, but it gives you traction, it gives you exposure. So there's some benefits.
Tyler Calder (16:32):
Even that what you're saying right now, your mind is very clearly in the economics of it, and so you're looking at that and saying, Hey, what's best for the business? Even though it might help me and my team and my number, I might make a little bit more cash economically doesn't make sense to the business if this stays in a core partnership team, correct me if I'm wrong, you're saying now I got to pay the partner leader, like the director of vp, they're going to get their cut. I got to pay the channel manager, the lead's going to go to sales, so then I got to pay the sales person. I got to pay. So you're saying, hey, move it over to marketing and treat it like another funnel, another lead source where the sales team is still going to get their cut, but you're not diluting it further by having it kind of comped through the partner org as well.
Cory Snyder (17:18):
Correct. Yeah. And then that looks good on you because you're looking at it from a company's lens of profitability and EBITDA and all that kind of good stuff. And also this partially it's just like, do I want to manage an affiliate program? There's that piece too because if you have three programs that you're running, it's like, which one do you think you'd like to give your interest to or your direction to? And so historically I've liked to help build the affiliate programs, but it's not my passion, and so I'll either hire somebody to take over that and run it full time or I'll pass it into marketing and support them with one of my headcount. That's what we did. Active campaign. I literally had one of my headcount, Erica, she's awesome. She went over and she went into marketing and she ran that program. She crushed it.
Tyler Calder (17:58):
Nice. Very cool.
Cory Snyder (17:59):
The margins went…
Tyler Calder (18:02):
Right. Sure. Maybe let's stay on the margin topic for a second. Where do you see that conversation kind of at the CFO level and the CFO looks at a partner org and is looking at that and saying, okay, cool, we're paying out the partner, we're paying out the channel leadership, we're paying out probably the CRO, and then we're paying out the channel manager themselves. Do you find yourselves in conversations having to rationalize that, having to talk through the other benefits of partnerships or it doesn't really come up that much?
Cory Snyder (18:34):
It hasn't really come up that much for me. The only time it does, if we're launching something new and we look at margins, we look at percentages, what can we pay? What should we pay? What does that look like? And actually map out what our margins might be. But at some of the places that I work for, our agency program is 76% margins. And the reason for that is because you also have to look at cost of acquisition. So arguably we're cutting out the entire marketing arm or a portion of the marketing arm because the partners, if it's an agency program, marketing's not doing anything. We are helping them drive. We are helping them focus. We might have some co-marketing pieces that are pretty limited, but don't take a ton of time. But for the most part, it doesn't come up that often. I'm usually the one that brings it up saying, okay, what are we at?
(19:19):
What are our numbers look like? And this is what I do with ActiveCampaign. I was like, where do we sit? As far as the team was concerned, they actually didn't know. They weren't even looking at it to that depth. So there's pros and cons there. It's like when you have a gym membership and you haven't used it for 10 months, if somebody calls and says, Hey, we haven't seen you in 10 months. You're like, oh yeah, please cancel that. It's kind like that dangerous place. They're like, oh, now they know. But if you're looking at it from a perspective of we're generating this much money and I know how much my team is worth and I know what acceleration looks like or expansion looks like, and I know what churn looks like or whatever, then you can kind of get an idea. They'd be like, oh, we're profitable.
(19:57):
So I'm going to go ahead and ask the question. So there's insight. So they know I'm asking, and so they know and I know what my margins are as far as profitability, and then I'm going to ask the next question, which is how do we compare to the rest of the organization? And then you realize, oh crap, we are the most profitable team. And then you don't scream it from the rooftops. What a lot of us like to do, we're the most profitable, dah, dah, dah. And now you piss off everybody, including marketing versus slowly being like, oh, so if I understand this correctly, hey, by the way, did you know that the profitability of the partners is like this? I didn't know that. I wonder if there's a way that we could do more. Maybe there's a way we could reduce profitability to increase our revenues. And you start looking at it from that perspective. You get creative on your conversations with your different leaders and different people. And so it's less of patting myself on the back and more of a, how do we help you? How do I reduce my margins so I can help you guys grow or whatever. So now you have this working together mindset, and then all of a sudden everybody's talking about the fact that your team's, the highest margined unit in the company.
Tyler Calder (21:03):
Some of our customers, a lot of partner leaders, they find themselves in a conversation with the CFO where the CFO is starting to look at, oh my goodness, how much cash is going out the door on every deal? And so what they start to look at is the commission component of cost only, and they say, wow, look at how much we pay for a partner source lead versus a direct lead. It's two x, whatever the number is. But then I think you nailed it. It's like, well, no, take a step back and let's look at the actual cost to acquire across that entire journey. And in most cases, the CAC is going to be less, and that's even before you start to take into account typically maybe a slightly higher a CV. The deals are going to close a little bit faster, they're going to be stickier, so lifetime value is stronger. I think you sort of nailed it. When you look at things holistically, that's the CFO conversation to have, correct?
Cory Snyder (21:56):
Yep. And you can't go into The other thing we like to do on the partnership side of the house is, oh, we save customers. We save revenue. I'm telling you right now, that doesn't save your job. You got to go generate revenue. Now if you're throwing it together as part of a conglomerate of here's how much revenue that we generated, here's how much revenue we saved, here's how much dah, dah, and you just make it part of your conversation versus trying to cover your ass because you didn't hit your number. That's not a great way of doing it either. But I would agree with you. I think you have to be like, hold on, let's look at the full picture. How long are these customers staying on with this historically? What's their acceleration on an expansion too? So I noticed a big one was that we might have an active campaign.
(22:38):
We brought in small deals, partially that was because they were resellers and we gave away 30% plus on every deal, which is partially the reason why I hate reseller programs is the semantics from the beginning look horrible. And selfishly, I don't like that our expansion rate was so much more aggressive, but nobody was looking at it because nobody's asking 'em questions. It was like, okay, yes, we are selling here because partners sell what customers need. Sales, historically sales, what customers will need in six months. So we started looking at that and you could see a massive expansion rate happening in three to four months and quickly, we were outpacing the size of the deal on sales and so on and so forth, but nobody's asking the questions. And so we have to think it and it's not from, again, cover your ass. It's from a, I need to understand my business. I need to understand the next 12 months. I need to understand what happens after 12 months. I need to understand the entire scope of what is going on in my business from a revenue perspective, from a chart, from a contraction, from a, you name it. Cool.
Tyler Calder (23:34):
Back to launching fast. So one of the things we've talked about is this idea of volume versus precision and the role that plays in launching fast, and you talked about a little bit, right? People will focus early days of a program making sure that they've totally nailed their ideal partner profile, they're going out in market and they're only going after those folks. I think there's validity to that, but can certainly slow things down versus I think what I heard you say, which is, Hey, we have a pretty good idea. Let's just get out there. Let's cast a little bit of a wide net. Let's validate. Can you try to chat through that philosophy a little bit?
Cory Snyder (24:13):
Yeah, and to be clear, I don't have an issue with people being precise. I do have an issue with them saying it's going to take 18 months to be precise. That's where I struggle, is my goal is to generate revenue as fast as I possibly can. So I do look at it from a precision standpoint as well, but I also look at it from a, maybe I'm wrong. I've been doing this for 13 plus years. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the ecosystems change, maybe in this specific partner program, resellers not could be the thing, but affiliates are going to crush it or trusted advisors are going to crush it or strategic part is they're going to crush it. So I try to look at it from that perspective of like 75% of the way. I know I'm going to go hard on every program, so it's irrelevant of only I'm going to do this only on this program and this program.
(24:54):
I'm going to go hard as far as recruiting as many people as I possibly can, especially on a new program or a young program because I have to, if it's a young program, I arguably have to flip the mindset of the executive team because it's probably been going on for a year and there's zero results. So I don't have a choice to be like, we're going to go after quantity and I'm going to spend the next six months brothering these people up and we'll see our first deal in six months. Now, I'll also add that historically, the quantity to quality conversation see really successful in the SMB men market space, right? Tons of agencies out there, tons of partners out there that can generate revenue for you as well as for themselves, which is arguably the biggest thing. If they can generate revenue and they can see a way to service revenue, they're going to sell the crap out of your stuff.
(25:36):
My mindset is very clear. It is. I need data. I'm making some decisions based on my history and me doing this for a long time, but I need to make decisions based on data. I want to know who they're partnering with, how they're partnering, what product, what tools they need to be successful, who are their customers and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. What verticals or industries are they selling into? I want to know as much as I possibly can so I can make an educated decision on how to take that from 75% to 85% to 95%. But during this time, during this course of the next six months of me acquiring quantity, I am focusing my team to dial in the quality. So within the next six months, we have now started to flip our mindset or flip who we work with and talk to quantity.
(26:21):
So it's not this black and white, which I think a lot of us look at. It's very much the gray area, and I think that's where all the money is made in partnerships, this gray area. It's in the sense of it's not this or this. It's technically both, but you just do 'em in different timelines. You do 'em in different ways. It's like when you think of yes, commission, no commission, right? The big argument there is like, oh, commission doesn't make a difference. It absolutely makes a difference. It makes a difference When you talk about the fact that they get 30% and it makes a difference when they actually start paying for a headcount in the middle. You're right, it doesn't do anything. Hey, you're going to get 30% if you sell the deal. I don't care. But as soon as it covers a headcount, I can tell you now I can line up with a bunch of agencies that are like, yes.
(27:01):
As soon as it covered and started paying for John, I was in, I started doubling down on that relationship. So it's the same concept is that I'm going to go after as much as I possibly can, partially because I want data. Well, mostly because I want data, because now when I talk to the executive team, I can say, this is why we're doing it. Executive team was like, why would we go and recruit a bunch of partners? You know what you're doing? Basically. I'm like, yeah, I do, but the market's different. We don't know. Do you know who they're partner with? What integrations that they're representing? Do you know anything outside of just the semantics? No. How would you go on a partner right now if you were asked to? And they're like, I don't know. I'm like, exactly. So we need the data around where we should go the next six months, the next 12 months, the next 18 months.
(27:50):
And so that's the reason why I do the quality to quantity, because I eventually get to quality and I focus on that, but I'm dialing in my IPP the entire time and it's very intentional, and that's how I'm articulating that to the leadership team. And every quarter I'm reporting number of partners and how it matches our IPP and I'm reporting how do the deals from the partners, how do they match our ICP and then how are the IPP partners matching to our ICP all the way through, and so now I can actually make those decisions and I can actually have that conversation.
Tyler Calder (28:24):
When you say you're going out there, you're trying to collect data, that's part of the benefit of going a little bit wider, collecting the data learning is that the data that you're referring to is how many partners have we recruited that fit our IPP of those, which ones are driving the right type of ICP into our funnel? Is it different data?
Cory Snyder (28:43):
Yeah, you just can't have that data unless you actually collect the data, right? So that's my point. In the partnership application, I ask 25 bit 30 questions, and if partners like that's too much. I'm like, great, go partner somewhere else. If you can't figure out 25 questions that are going to make our program better for you, that's fine. Go partner somewhere else. But I ask 'em again, I'm asking them who else are they partner with? What's their tech stack? I'm asking 'em how many employees they have. I'm asking them, how many employees are the ICP? What verticals are their ICP in? How much are they selling on services on average to their ICP as much as I could? I'm selfishly asking as much as I possibly can outside of what are your kids' names, right? Everything else I want to know. And though I do ask 'em at the very end, a fun question, which is, what are your hobbies? And that is just selfishly, when I was at Sendo, I would randomly send partners gifts, whether they generated revenue or anything, it didn't matter. One of our tech partners, he had a dog named Rocket, and so I sent him a rocket dog toy, just something fun to be like that. And one, it helped our relationship, but it didn't mean anything to revenue. It was just this small recognition, I can tell you generated revenue.
Tyler Calder (29:53):
Do you still do that?
Cory Snyder (29:55):
Yeah, yeah. Yep. As much as the company has, no problem.
Tyler Calder (30:01):
You need budget and all that fun stuff. Yeah.
(30:03):
Yeah. I love that. I think that is a forgotten element in go to market is that idea of delight, whatever you want to call it. I was at the Pavilion Go to Market Summit and they had the dude who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality read that book. I've heard of it. Yeah, I've not read it yet. Yeah, definitely worth a read. But listening to him talk, it reminded me of exactly what you just mentioned of, hey, if you really get to know your customers, your prospects, your partners, it just kind of opens up this world to be creative in how you show that you know them, you understand them, you're connected to them. So love to hear that you're doing that with partners. That's cool. I like it.
Cory Snyder (30:44):
And they remember it every time they see it. I had a partner that we did a competition and a partner won a run AIx. I mean, it was probably eight years later, and he sent me a random message I think on Instagram and was like, I still use this thing and I still think of you guys every day that I use it. And I'm like, that's cool as hell. I don't work for that company anymore. It was at Infusionsoft, but still, it's like I'm at the forefront of their minds. And so I'm always thinking, what are the ways that we have a partner named in flu two that we just started having conversations with? And I'm like, guess what? And he's like, what? I said, Steven, check this out, dude. And I went and grabbed the succulent from two years ago that is sitting on my counter, right by my window sill by my sink, and he's like, no way. He wasn't there at the time. He took a picture of it and sent his marketing team. They're like, I know exactly what that meant was that's hilarious. And I'm like, I even got the hand sanitizer if you want to see that. Clearly I'm a hoarder. But yeah.
Tyler Calder (31:36):
That's awesome. I love it. That's great. Part of this idea of volume is recruitment. What's your approach? How do you scale out partner recruitment, not just impact, but also the purpose of learning and trying to validate some of your assumptions around IPP?
Cory Snyder (31:53):
Yeah, so on the affiliate side, historically I'll stick to something like you guys have a directory and a network. I'll tap into that network. I've done it a couple times where you guys will send out an email and I'll sponsor that email to get us some exposure. And that's worked out really well as far as that's concerned. Affiliates are needed in the haystack, and as long as you know that and you walk into that, then you're like, okay, I might have 10,000, 5,000 affiliates. Then maybe a couple of 'em are active. That's just the world of affiliates. I think there's a lot of 'em out there trying to make some things work. Shoot, I've done it. I've been in affiliate before and tried to do it myself. And so I'm just this low little guy that doesn't have an audience, so it doesn't really get traction.
(32:31):
So that one is more of just, just get it out there, create the program, promote it here and there, get some exposure and try to get some traction, and then make sure that you're providing them a monthly set of marketing materials that they can go to market with. So make it easy for 'em, right? As far as agencies and resellers, that's probably the most fun in my opinion because a lot of it has to do with a little bit of timing. But the first thing I do is I look at who are all of our competitors, and I look to see if they have a partner directory life, and I pay a guy 35 bucks on Fiverr to scrape it, and then we enrich it, and then I manually reach out to them one by one by one. I'm not going to ruin my domain by just blasting people, but I'll reach out to them, Hey, yes, this is a one-off email and I'll do a 2, 300, 400 people.
(33:17):
And that's how we scaled Teamwork.com's partner program from 40 partners to 250 in 10 months as we looked at all of our competitors. And then on top of that, obviously we went and found our other ones. As we were collecting data, we started realizing other tech stacks they were using, and I started reaching out to those tech stacks saying, is there an overlap that we could do? Can you send an email out to your partners and be like, Hey, you should check out this and I'm willing to send out an email on your behalf for my partners. So we did some of that co-marketing, which I'd be surprised if you hear a lot of people talking about that because you don't know that because you're not collecting that data point. So that's one way that we did it with Teamwork.com. And by the way, we were generating new opportunities at Teamwork.com before they talked to the partner manager, because at the acquisition, he was talking about registering your deals.
(34:05):
Hey, do you have anybody currently that needs a solution like this? Yes. Well, as soon as you get in the door with PartnerStack, register them right away just in case they happen to talk to somebody internally. Boom, we were Jada rating revenue so fast. It was ridiculous. And that's partially because the competitors had already done all of our hard work. They had already educated them on project management, they already dialed them in as far as all that hard work is concerned. That's what takes six months. When you take somebody that doesn't know anything about your product at the industry and now you're training them up, that's what takes six months. So don't do that. Well do that, but also mitigate your risk by hunting other people that you don't have to do that with. And then on tech partners, tech partners is the same thing.
(34:46):
The difference there is I'm listening to calls, the customer calls, and I'm starting to hear what tech stacks they're using. And so we'll use a tool like Gong and I'll set up the trackers and then those trackers will trigger me anytime one of those integration or tech is mentioned or whatever may be the word that I'm wanting to track. And then I'll listen to that call and those are the partners I'm hunting, and so I'm using internal data and internal stuff to get me where I need to be. That's so much faster versus saying, this sounds like a good idea. And so that's how I go hard and fast at this. And then I also get my team involved because I don't want them thinking like, oh, cor just telling us what to do. I'm like, what do you think? What should we do? And so now it's their program. So now when we go hard and it's heavy and difficult work, they're building something on their own, that's for them too. And so that's just part of what we do as far as that's concerned. That's how we mentally go through it is just who as our customers, but we're already getting a ton of data. Why use the internal stuff versus guessing? So yeah.
Tyler Calder (35:42):
Cool. Nice. I got a couple more questions here. One is related to what you were just talking about. So competitive conquesting, let's call it. You go out and you figure out what partners are working with your key competitors, you go out and recruit them, to your point, really helps to shorten that learning curve that they might have, but presumably they already have a relationship with those competitors. They're probably, there's some intrinsic bias built in there. How are you activating them if they're already so integrated with some of your competitors?
Cory Snyder (36:15):
Yeah, so that's actually the fun part, right? Because all you need is one customer, you need one opportunity to co-sell with them and to change that equation. But we focus heavily on people. Our people that I hire are rock stars and let's be honest, partners partner with people for too many reasons, product and people. Yes, there's a commission in revenue format, and that's not why they partner with you. And I also think that's a confusing thing in the market is like, oh, they'll partner is because of all the money. No, no, no. They partner with you because of people and product. They then continue to sell your product because of the revenue source that is available to 'em. But I have a lot of people that are agencies that are friends of mine that have generated zero revenue for me. They're cool people, they're awesome.
(37:00):
We stay in touch and that's fine with me because they'll promote us here and there, how we basically change the narrative. Part of that is that data that I collect, but we get to know each partner, who are you? Why did you get in business? And you start getting to know them and you start using your sales mindset of I'm going to understand exactly who they are, why they got into business, why they're currently doing this, why do they continue the pain every single day? What gets 'em up in the morning? What are they struggling with? What are their customers struggling with? And I'm going to get to know that partner inside and out. And what that does is if I did that with you, Tyler, and we've had conversations where I just was asking you about everything, your golf game, whatever it may be, and right there it tells me, Hey, Corey's interested in who I am and what I do.
(37:43):
This isn't a transaction and we live in such a transactional world that I want my people to change that with those partners. And we have flipped partners a hundred times over in the sense of they're deep in this one product and now they're sending us business. Or I could tell you, we work with Gong at Outbound Funnel and I compete with other partners to get business. And I had one guy, an account executive that called me and said, Corey, can I just give you all of my deals? And I said, sure. He was like, I just like the way you guys work. That is the reason. It's how you work, how you treat people, but if your product is shit is not going to help, you can only do so much. And so that's all part of the equation. But yeah, that's the way that we look at it is like, let's just get us in the door. I know we're good people. I know we have a great product and I know I can find ways to make you money. And usually that works really, really well.
Tyler Calder (38:37):
I like it. Last question. It's a forward looking one because we got to talk about AI and partnerships. Where is all this going? What would you love to see out of AI as it relates to your core role? And you can take that in any direction.
Cory Snyder (38:54):
Yeah, it's a good question. I think all of us are thinking about it and all of us are leveraging and using it. And I'm in the process of building an AI tool for partnerships. So look out for that later down the road. And I think there's areas that it works absolutely beautifully in. I think there's a lot of people that like, oh, AI is going to replace this. It's going to replace this. It very well may replace portions of it, but because partners are so relational and it's less transactional now on the affiliate side, a hundred percent, I would say there's a really good chance that you could completely automate that with AI. You could get an idea of what's your ICP, right? And all that kind of good stuff. I think AI has a massive balance there. I think there's massive benefit for that in onboarding and enablement, 100%.
(39:36):
I think you could probably automate with AI, 90% of your onboarding that entire, they just signed as a partner. No onboard them. I think you should almost a hundred percent replace that. And maybe at the end you have your partner manager close up the gap on that. All your enablement stuff, I think should be AI as well. Use AI to understand the learnings of what your partners are doing, how they're working, how they're moving, how they're doing all that stuff. And you roll that into your enablement stuff. Could it help in partner acquisition? Absolutely. Could you leverage it to find the right partners outside of hunting your competitors? Could you look at a different angle and see how you could use it to dial in who you should be acquiring? Yes, but I think it's going to replace partnership world. Absolutely not. Because people care to partner with people.
(40:19):
And that is the thing is they don't always want to talk to an AI. They eventually want to talk to human. Oh, it's going to get so good that they won't even know, tell you right now, it's probably not going to get there. Based on what I've seen, even that new robot that got launched, I was like, 20 K, I'm broke, but maybe I'd try to buy it. But then I saw a video of it, putting two dishes, two glasses in, the dishwashers took five minutes. We're not there yet, folks, but do I think you should be leveraging? Absolutely. I use AI every day. I'm on chat, GPT and other tools every single day to help me write emails to understand my language. We went deep. We talked for an hour six months ago on deep data, AI and everything else, and how you're using it, leveraging, and how quickly you've been able to move some things.
(41:08):
On the marketing side, I'm looking at it from the same perspective on mine. It's like, what am I missing? And I'm also asking you, what am I missing in my partner program? Is there something I'm not seeing is happening in the market? And so I'm trying to look at it from a perspective of maybe it's got some weird knowledge points out there that I just don't know about. And so I'm trying to play with the scheme a little bit on what are you seeing that's making moves, what's coming up and down throughout the market. Number one is rev ops. Rev Ops is blowing up right now. Great. We're rev ops agency, so on. But from a partner manager or reseller and agency perspective, do you guys think about ops agencies or are you thinking about marketing agencies? So it's all of that kind of stuff. So yeah, long ramble, but that's kind of the way I look at the AI area.
Tyler Calder (41:52):
Yeah, nice. I like it and appreciate it. If folks want to get in touch, how might they do so?
Cory Snyder (41:59):
LinkedIn is going to be the best way to hit me up. And if I can help, I've offered many times and I know a couple other people do this, I'm happy to jump on the call for half an hour and help you just walk through your strategy, what you're dealing with, what you're going through, how to talk to your board, how to talk to executives, all that kind of good stuff. So happy to help in any way that I can progress the partnership world, the ecosystem as it stands. I think there's tons of growth and opportunity.
Tyler Calder (42:24):
Awesome. Well, Mr. Snyder, thank you for the time. Appreciate it.
Cory Snyder (42:29):
Thank you for having me on.
Tyler Calder (42:31):
All right, take care. Bye everyone. Thanks for listening to Get It, Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools a PartnerStack.com slash Get It, Together.