Bryan Williams on the Four Cs of Revenue Driving Partnerships

Bryan Williams (00:00):

There is no rational reason that any of people's partners are going to work with him at all if it doesn't help them make money, if it doesn't drive leads awareness, if they have capacity, if it doesn't align with that. And we jokingly say, "You need to understand your partners and you need to move up there. Give a shit meter."

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Tyler Calder  (00:18):

In this episode of Get It Together, I sit down and chat with one of my favorite Aussies, Bryan Williams, who is the founder of Hockey Stick Advisory and a really great partner of PartnerStack. They are doing incredible work in APAC and beyond. And in this conversation, we talk about his journey into partnerships, how he started in a sales role and realized, "Hey, you know what? My job is a whole lot easier if I start to bring partners into the loop." And he took it upon himself to just go ahead and do that. And then that led him to leading partnerships in various senior roles at companies like Xero before he went off and started Hockey Stick Advisory. We talk a lot about what goes into a predictable partner program. We talk about his four Cs that you need to really focus on when you think about what makes a good partner and whether or not there's going to be high potential there.

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(01:15):

Those Cs being customer capacity committed and capability. Listen to the whole thing to get into what that means exactly because it's going to be worth your time. Enjoy.

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Tyler Calder  (01:51):

Bryan, welcome to the show. How are you?

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Bryan Williams (01:53):

Thanks Ty. Great to be here and chat all things partnerships today. My morning, your afternoon, right?

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Tyler Calder  (01:58):

That's right. Exactly. Yeah, we made the timing work. I want to go to your origin. I'm calling it your origin story. You're out there knocking on doors, cold calling, "This sucks. I don't want to do this. I think there's a better way. I'm reading and teaching myself about what this referral motion can look like." You start to get some partners through the door. I'm fully making an assumption that through that is where you learned how to talk about this internally, how to get buy-in. And correct me if I'm wrong, I'm fully picturing a moment in time where you go to somebody internally like, "Hey, so guess what? I know I was supposed to be cold calling all of these people. I was doing that, but I think I found a better way. Here's what that looks like." What did that moment look like where all of a sudden you opened up the box and said, "Hey, surprise, look at this cool motion that I've created.

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(02:49):

Let's formalize it." What did that look like? Because I think that, again, I'm assuming, but I think that's going to lead us down a path of how you've built your perspective for hockey stick and the advisory you're bringing to customers. But what was that moment when you unveiled this thing that you had done?

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Bryan Williams (03:05):

I remember quite clearly. It was presenting to the leadership team of, "Hey, we can make 200 calls a day. We can keep finding lists and scraping that. From 200 calls, we're going to get through to 10 people. We're going to book about four meetings. That's going to be for next week and the week after. From those four meetings, we're going to close two or three, and for an ACV, that's going to look about blah. Alternatively, we can co-sponsor events, we can get people the right people in the room. We can build a referral strategy for everyone that you do talk to of those top four. And I'm going to bake that in and build a systematic process where from those top four, we're going to get three referrals on average from it. And from those four, we're going to get 12 referrals from it and already high quality and down the journey for it.

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(03:46):

And so we're building a motion that every part of BD drives forwards around it. Now that second model requires no calling around it and less CapEx and less team member costs for it. And so over the course of a year, we've got a sustainable business model without you having to employ people at this much cost, and we're actually going to build this systematic process here to be able to drive that and run that forward going. It's going to develop into a program of how we operate as a business and be able to grow towards it because your business objectives is to grow the business here, but your current model is to go employ a lot more people and put people in the slot machine and call everyone nonstop. And the pickup rates are only five and 10%, or is this highly efficient one where every meeting produces an extra three business opportunities downstream we go that?

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(04:33):

How does that sound?

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Tyler Calder  (04:34):

Yeah, that's cool. And so what you just said to me answers something that we just talked about, which was that shift from curiosity to commitment. Is what you just said not the conversation that people need to be having even today?

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Bryan Williams (04:52):

I think so, because it's not activity and noise that's going to drive outcomes. It's not, oh, I attended this event, I went to this. It doesn't measure up. And from the marketing perspective, which you know so well, every CMO I know has got a limited budget and you're thinking, what buckets do I put in to get the return? And it's a case of, well, do I invest it in paid ads? Do I invest it in events and sponsorship? Do I invest it in driving the ecosystem to be able to drive the MQLs around it? And so it must be commercially led because if you don't drive that and state your case and validate it, then you're not going to get the investment for say, Hey, I need some budget for these events or for this activity or I need some systems and processes and we need the technology to drive it forward because it's a missing gap.

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(05:40):

So you've got to state your case and understand the metrics in terms of getting to the outcome. And I think what's unfortunate in the industry right now is that we know that most people who lead partnership functions are given a number and it's usually like percentage of revenue or a dollar amount.This is your number, go do. And we also know that most people in partnerships role is responsible to be able to actually drive and deliver on that outcomes for that. And it's a gap that people aren't speaking that language around the outputs they're going to do and the activity and also the time it's going to take to ramp up and grow that. If that's not the case, then you're going to remain under invested, you're going to be frustrated.This is where people leave or they say, oh, this place sucks so they didn't get the buy-in for it.

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(06:25):

They get fired because they didn't deliver because they didn't communicate that back up in terms of what's required to do it.

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Tyler Calder  (06:31):

Presumably through this, you have seen and learned what a good partnership looks like and what a poor partnership looks like. And nobody intends to get into a poor partnership like on paper, I'm sure it looks great and then it doesn't fulfill what your expectations maybe were. We'd love to hear what you've learned to help identify as early on as possible what good versus poor might look like.

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Bryan Williams (07:00):

So Tal, I worked at Xero Accounting Software down here in APAC, managed the partners from about a hundred partners through to about 1200, being through that growth journey myself. And during that era, I saw companies do it good, bad, and ugly per se. Some companies were more mature in their partner maturity or how they would go about it, but it was a case of every week the next upcoming startup would be, "Hey, can you send an email out to your 10,000 hair and beauty customers? Can you sponsor our event tomorrow?" My favorite one is, "Can we have a meeting tomorrow because I've got to speak to my US bosses and I just want to say that we're talking to Xero." That was the one. It was I think a standout moment with no substance or material for it. And then others were, "We're going to go run these series of events.

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(07:44):

We're inviting all our customers. We'd like you to invite some as well. Let's co-sponsor and build that together. We're here to help your sales team hit their targets and you're targeting these firms. We feel that if we can have a better together narrative, we can solve more problems with your partners and we can be a value add to your sales team and solve a problem that you don't have to do." Others were, "We've built this amazing trade and construction technology application. You don't have to build that. Let's build this better together narrative. There's these trade specific trade shows that we're looking to do. Let's stand up landing pages, assets, our sales teams will talk about your offering. Let's do it on your sides and then round it." And so I had this unique lens that I didn't have this singular view of how partnerships operate in our organization.

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(08:28):

I had an ecosystem wide view, which is for this perspective that you talk about around, well, how do companies establish partnerships and crawl, walk, run and grow them? And if we know they're more efficient, better leads around, how do we build that into a more meaningful driver of revenue and growth for us over the medium to long term? How do we move it from a series A investor slide deck with logos of like, yes, we're chatting to Microsoft, everyone as well, to actually substance that lands in the P&L?

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Tyler Calder  (09:02):

I sort of want to ask this question simply because I like the movie Field of Dreams. I've heard you describe a Field of Dreams approach to partner programs. What does that mean?

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Bryan Williams (09:11):

It means a few things. Often the C-suite, the board, oh, why don't we go partner with Insert, the biggest company they can think of? I know someone who I worked with a long time ago who works there, chat to them tomorrow. Fire hose of customers is imminent from them. So this expectation that's wild to happen. Then sometimes it's often, well, we need a PRM. We'll just roll it out. It's going to be incredible. And then they just nearly install it and then, hang on, our partners, what do you mean our partner? We've got this amazing software. What do you mean our partners aren't just... Where's all our customers coming through? Our leads should be just flowing through. We've got this amazing technology for it. They just leave there sitting there. And then what happens is this ripple effect of month one, two, three, where there's CRO and the head of sales and then CEO's like, why isn't partnerships contributing?

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(10:02):

We've got a partner manager now. We've got this technology. This is all failing. This is what's going on. What does that look like? The Field of Dreams analogy is that there's hopes that we just build it and they will come. When we kick off work, we always start with an exec half day workshop. What is partnerships here? What is it not? We've obviously got a view. The marketing person says, oh, we want more leads. The salesperson says we want business tomorrow. The product person, we don't want to build everything. The CEO just says, we just want it to work. The field of dreams is too common in partnerships because it's built on hope and a partnership pipe dream in reality, but it's not grounded in anything of what's in it for your partner while they remotely work with you.

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Tyler Calder  (10:48):

How do we shift from hope if you build it in a nerd of a movie, I should clarify, the quote is in fact, if you build it, he will come. There you go. Just to throw that out there because everybody assumes if you build it, they will come. It still fits. It still works with what we're talking about.

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Bryan Williams (11:09):

I think so.

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Tyler Calder  (11:09):

How do we shift from hope that they'll come to predictability that the right partners, the right revenue, the right outcomes will follow?

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Bryan Williams (11:22):

I think it's one of the most major missed things in partnerships today and why partnerships fails to materialize the results of what the business wants. Firstly, we know, like we said at the start of this quarter, most partnerships targets are given percentage amount of revenue or dollar amount, go do. But then from there, if that's the top-down target is process of looking at the bottom up around how are we going to get there? And we operate a partner operators forum down here in APAC where we get the heads of partnerships all together and we share learnings and insights monthly and get together for dinners and help each other win and thrive. And to answer it from our perspective at hockey stick as part of our partnership framework, the second pillar is validate. And it's this validating part which is often missed. And what that means is simply put is understanding your partner's business.

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(12:15):

All these partners that you want to work with, how do they sell? How do they make money? What is their team size? What is their capacity? We look across the metrics of capacity, commitment, what mutual customers, capability as well being a big one. Companies often want partnerships to start firing tomorrow and they want to activate immediately through partner marketing events and just get leads. But there is no rational reason that any of people's partners are going to work with them at all if it doesn't help them make money, if it doesn't drive leads awareness, if they have capacity, if it doesn't align with that. We jokingly say, you need to understand your partners and you need to move up there, give a shit meter in terms of you need to understand how you plug in. The language that Jamie Bain's been speaking this year around what is the role of partners right along the customer journey?

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(13:09):

Well, if a partner early on is not providing services and solutions at the right stage of what you want, awareness and consideration, then they're not going to materially drive that. So you need to look right across your portfolio and we need to go validate, understand their business. And only at that stage should you then have an updated partner value proposition and then a partner program which is actually fit for purpose. Whereas too many companies go build these partner programs on post-it notes and pat themselves on the back, gold, silver, bronze, 5%, 10%, 20%. They haven't even considered how their partner's business operates. And what they do is they just waste years and time and energy and noise and partnerships doesn't deliver, which sets the expectations back up to management that it's, oh, this partnerships thing doesn't deliver. However, if you understand your partner's business, how they make money, and a question I always ask the companies we're working with, picture your top three partners.

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(14:14):

If we work with them, what percentage of their revenue is going to come from working with us today? We've all seen the stats of for every dollar AWS, Salesforce, Atlassian earns up the surrounding ecosystems that earn seven or $8 around it. If the partners you want to work with don't materially generate a percentage, a growing percentage of their revenue from working with and around you in the surrounding ecosystem, then you've got a top-down plan with no substance below the line to actually produce a bottom-up plan to be able to do it. And that bottom-up plan validate assessment should really show we have enough partners to coverage and to hit our target today and let's triple down on it. Let's 10X with our top three to five partners, which are still I think is important to go harder at. Or we have no chance to hit our targets based on our assessment of our partner.

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(15:11):

We need to go recruit partners and do it immediately with a really strong partner value proposition to get their attention and grow into that. There's such a misconception in market that this step is just not undertaken and you can't have a chance to hit your big targets of the percentage of dollar amount you're doing it if you not have partners which are literally on the journey right along the customer journey and then grow into that. It's a common theme we see far and wide and we spend a lot of time on it deliberately to get it right.

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Tyler Calder  (15:42):

This is Get It Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. What got you to this point?

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Bryan Williams (15:53):

Like I said, no one's born in partnerships. No one's done the bachelor of partnerships, the master of partnerships, the MBA of partnerships. It's people have walked in, had an opportunity to sales, marketing, customer success, to enter an organization or transfer into a partnerships role and go with, and that's absolutely my case. My story into partnerships was when I was in the outbound sales role, 2008 era out in Europe and then in the Middle East for a period of time whereby I had an outbound role. It was commission only. It was banging the phones all day trying to get through to book meetings in the early stage of my career. I cracked a nut and built a referral strategy and I built out a bit of a partner program and I went from making 200 calls a day as the success metric in booking meetings to nearly building an inbound engine with and through partners to drive it.

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(16:46):

The whole business kind of stopped and went, hang on a minute, that seems like it works a lot more. Ever since then throughout my career, I've had this lean towards partnerships because I think even at an organizational level, there's always this light bulb moment where it's like, "Hey, these partners contributed X, Y, Z, whether it's services, solutions, referrals, top of funnel, co-marketing, OPM, using other people's money, where it gets it going." Nearly four and a half years ago now I set up Hockey Stick Advisory because I saw a gap in the market of how do companies establish repeatable, dependable partnership motions alongside product-led, sales-led, MQLs to go with, and that's what we've been doing ever since.

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Tyler Calder  (17:35):

And so I didn't even know this part of your story. So in that sales role, was this you taking it upon yourself? You saw this like, "Oh shoot, this is interesting. This becomes a little bit easier if I'm not the one just banging on doors and making a couple hundred calls a day." That was solely you, you weren't tasked with that?

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Bryan Williams (17:52):

Yeah, it was, because the success metric was meetings booked, meetings held, go arrange effectively business development to drive it forward. I think I spoke to someone down here in APAC yesterday afternoon, pilot of the really good partnership operators are truly entrepreneurs within their own organization. We're often starved for resources. The harsh reality is today is they still remain to the side within a business unit and go do, go drive is partnership success. You got this figure it out mentality of how do I get to the outcome? For me in that early role, it was a case of this calling the phone nonstop is really inefficient, kind of just sucks, to be honest. There's got to be an easy way. I took it upon myself to... I think I went on board every referral book I could find, every partner program of its early stage era for what it could be.

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(18:42):

I built a system of how do we drive referrals back into the business for top of the funnel for it? No surprises, even though those early days, the referrals were high quality, they didn't churn, they were far down the funnel, there were easier conversations of what we all know is true today, right?

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Tyler Calder  (19:02):

So you do this on your own, you get these partners going, these partners are driving referrals. Are those partners being compensated?

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Bryan Williams (19:09):

It depends is the answer. It depends on the model and what the business looks like. We've got a team of eight today across Sydney and Melbourne, and we're working with companies on really solving two problems, Tyler. Number one is those who have funded, got product market fit, they've got an existing go-to-market motions and they're curious around partnerships, and that's where we'll come in with our partnership framework and build the capabilities. We'll look at where to play, how to win, what even is partnerships? Make sure the whole leadership team understands what it is. A common opening conversation from the head of sales is nearly always, "Oh yeah, we want a lot of leads or business from partners next week and I don't have time to talk to them and we've got a revenue gap. Can you close that immediately?" That remains a common theme. And then right up into the big established companies who have got advanced ecosystems are looking to go from good to great, and that's typically around how can they drive increased partner sourced revenue as percentage of their total revenue.

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(20:11):

Sometimes it's around how do we protect our existing book of business with and through partners? If we can get partners in right along the customer journey, that means we don't have to build out a bigger sales team or we know that we're going to have lower churn and higher NPS and what does that look like and what is the role of partners? I think this year we've seen Jamie Bain talk a lot around the role of partners right along the customer journey and there's this transition in flight in market of moving from the transaction at the point of sale of this commission transaction, send us leads and we'll give you a click down the track to what if we introduce partners right early on around it and that would be a better experience, but what do we do? How do we remunerate partners? What's in it for them?

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(20:56):

There's this opportunity of partnerships really growing up in a AI enabled go-to-market world. The theme that we keep saying in conversations down here, Tyler, is we're seeing boards and C-suite and tech founders partner curious, but there's still a lot of education remains around the how to, which is what we are coming to solve for.

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Tyler Calder  (21:19):

The partner curious line I think is one that I've chatted to a number of people about, and I certainly do think it resonates and it resonates because it's true. Why is it that there is curiosity versus commitment when commitment comes so easily for other types of investments to leaders that are responsible for that allocation of resources?

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Bryan Williams (21:47):

I think the curiosity comes from CROs under pressure to hit their target number. I think some of the stats, CRO lasts 17 to 24 months depending on where you read it right now and they're like, "Can this fill a gap right now?" They're looking at their existing CapEx of people in their operating system. Most SaaS businesses today are built on a dependable playbook, Winning by Design or whatever you want to call it, of SDR, BDR, AE, account manager, so there's a slot machine model for it. The unit economics for partnerships, although we all know they close faster, they're bigger, they stay longer, they're better quality, we don't have to pay as much CapEx, there's all these benefits, that model on the how to on the commitment is largely understood from revenue leaders today.

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(22:38):

To have a defensible model which a CFO can understand, a lot of companies can't answer that right now because it's outside their norm of how they operate today. A lot of the conversations we have and what we've been building over, especially this year, is actually to be able to speak the language of the CFO that they understand the economics. Because if we can't do that, they're not going to commit to it because if a CRO or CFO and the CEO's like, "I want the outcome," and the CFO's like, "Well, how does this make sense? When do I get ROI?" The CRO's under immense pressure. For them to understand the investment and the commitment around what's actually required to stand up a partnership function which produces a line of sight to the ROI takes a lot of education and a lot of whether whiteboard conversations or it's a lot of explaining and how others operate before you can even get that commitment to lock in.

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(23:33):

A common theme for companies we've worked with along the way, Tyler, it's where a leader has been in a partner-led organization before, it's significantly easier to get that commitment because they know the outcome of the promised land per se of what partnerships can deliver. As an industry, we need to rise the tide that partnerships can speak to a number and a model which a CFO can get behind to unlock investment.

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Tyler Calder  (23:57):

Yeah, I think that's all fair, and I think we'll dig into that a little bit more. The give a shit meter, I agree with that completely. I think most people listening would. Very tactically, what are the things that you need to make sure that you understand about your partners or potential partners to help you move that give a shit meter up?

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Bryan Williams (24:18):

I think we assess it across the four Cs, as we call it. Do we have mutual customers? Is this so much more than a marketing and brand noise event that you've got attention of marketing person? We're just spraying stuff out into that. Are we solving problems together through our customer lens, which all partnerships should start with? What is their capacity? There's nothing worse than the best partner. Oh, if only this partner and they're like, "We're under-resourced. We can't chat to this. This amazing. Come talk to us two quarters away. It's not going to materially drive any impact." Are they committed? What is their stakeholders on their side? What does that look like? You've got a great company you want to partner with and they're already just ticking along. We're not really in a growth mindset. We're not looking for new partners. They could be great that you're just trying, you're wasting time and energy.

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(25:01):

Do they have capability? So many companies talk about this partner enablement or I produce this assert and this slide deck and this motion. We've got this LMS and we've got this point system, which a partner on the other side does not give a shit about nor understand, nor are they partner certified around it. And so we look at a bit of a quadrant view of how do your partners below the fold, stack up with across those assessments to say, where should we place our bets? We've got limited time and resources to go after partners to hit our target. That partner's incredible, but they're under-resourced for the next two quarters. We're just not going to get there. We spoke with a client last week who proudly said, "Oh, we're talking to this massive partner. They're so excited and got the C-suite and everyone really excited." I was like, "Okay, well, how many partners do they have?" "Oh, like 200.

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(25:50):

"I'm like," Okay, well, why would they spend time and energy with you? ""Oh, we can't get more meetings, but they spoke with 200 partners." I'm like, "Why are we talking excited that just because you've had a meeting with them, but there's no substance and you don't really understand their business, and you're in the back catalog page four of their marketplace, there's nothing going to come from this. How can you report this back to the board that there's anything material?" And so it needs to be a granular assessment of their business around what it looks like. It boils down to who are your partners that's driving them revenue and looking at the metric or like, well, how do we have to out trump or provide some value above some of your partners? Example, Tyler, it doesn't work in the Shopify ecosystem with a partner and they're hitting up all the Shopify agencies and like, "Hey, work with us." So do you understand how they make money with and through Shopify today and what does that look like on a monthly services, revenue, retainers, new builds, new programs of work, new scope to be able to fulfill that?

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(26:50):

So you need to understand how you're slotting around that. Are you going to be 5%, 10%, 20% of their revenue and growth? How do you be super easy and frictionless for it? If you don't crack that nut internally to be able to be baked in as a part of that for it, then you're going to waste another whole year turning up at Shopify events, trying to knock on the door, outbound campaigns, noise. It's not going to materialize. So understand your partner's partners and what they offer back to the ones that you want to go after, work on those four Cs around stack ranking around it. Then you've finally got a plan around like, okay, well, I've got this revenue target or percentage of partner source revenue I've got to hit. These are the partners I'm going to do. To be able to present that back to a leadership team and say, "Hey, this is our partner coverage today.

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(27:35):

We actually need more resources to go recruit or we need MVF or SPIF. We need market leaning to help us to get their buy-in." You've suddenly got a pragmatic grounded plan in the same way that on the sales side, they would say, "We need this many leads, this many phone calls, this much activity, this much closure rate for a CRO to hit the target." And so we're moving it towards its own independent P&L nearly within the broader go-to-market plan, but a CFO can understand the likelihood of what partnerships is going to land based on something that they can understand. In the past, we do a lot of whiteboard exercise with a CFO, and I love the argument because I know that if we can land and make sure they understand the metrics, in some cases that's released four more headcount in partnerships or 12 more headcount in partnerships because they know they need to invest to set up next year's growth as well and they can't afford not to.

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Tyler Calder  (28:28):

Just to say back the four Cs.

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Bryan Williams (28:30):

Customer, capability, commitment, capacity, fourth one. There we go.

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Tyler Calder  (28:35):

Got it. Okay. So of those four Cs, I'm always curious, you're talking to a potential partner, you identify that there's a gap, and let's say a sizable gap with at least one of the Cs. Is that partnership dead or do you nurture it? What does that look like? How do you use the four Cs as an evaluation tool?

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Bryan Williams (28:58):

Yeah, so we've got a framework where we can weight accordingly which one's most important to us, which gives a rounded score and going out and looking at our partners. We start off with looking at the top five or 10, and what's interesting is Tyler, is that we're in a fortune position that we look at a lot of breadth right across all these ecosystems, a lot of partner plays, and everyone says the 80 / 20 rule. I can see from experience, it's 90 / 10, sometimes 95, five. Even those who have got partner motions going, and I know of some who are doing 30 million in partnerships and it's all from nearly 25 million, that's from one partner. Sometimes those instances is like, "Well, we've got a risk here with this partner. We need to grow out and spread this risk with and through others." So what we're trying to establish here is where are we going to place our bets?

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(29:47):

Where are we going to replace our time, resources, and the energy and effort to drive that through? And so through this assessment that we go through, we know that we've either got two levers, and this is the same with HubSpot and Shopify region and those with advanced ecosystem. We've got this big hairy target with pressure to hit it. Do we double down, triple down with existing partners or do we go recruit more or do we try and get those who go from zero to one that are interested around it to produce? And from a partnerships function, that's the leverage you've got to be able to drive the outcome for it. And if you look at the resources you've got to be able to get there, there's choices to be made. In the same way in a marketing budget, you're like, "Well, where am I going to place my bets to drive MQLs or awareness at the top of funnel two?"

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Tyler Calder  (30:34):

We go through that exercise. We are at the point where, and I'm making an assumption now, we're going through that exercise to identify net new partners, not necessarily an existing base. So we got these net new partners. We have validated that they could be good partners. No guarantee, but we validated as best we can. First question is how do we identify the right place for that partner to drive impact? And where the question comes from is some of what we've talked about and alluded to, but haven't spoken to directly, which is partners can help through the entire customer journey. They can influence so many metrics that are critical to the business. How do you identify what partners should support what part of that life cycle?

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Bryan Williams (31:19):

I think I'd probably take a step back from a leadership level, what role do we want partnerships to play? And through our line entry phases like, okay, we want it for top of leader funnel, maybe for churn or NPS. And so we know that. And so when we go for the assessment, we're looking for partners to play that role. This is what we want partners to do. And once we understand their business model, we understand how they fit in around it where these synergies lie. So you could have a partner who might be great for awareness and top of funnel and wants to do all this stuff and noisy activity and let's do podcasts and advance and you're like, hang on a minue, we've got a bit of a churn problem. We actually need these sort of partners to jump in and service our accounts, so we're going to place our bets there.

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(31:58):

So once we're clear as an organization around what is the role of partnerships based on our resources today and our team, where we're going to point shoot. So if the leadership understands that's great. There's a company in Sydney we're doing some work with and they're going again to partnerships and the leader there is going like, this is what partnerships is today. We need them to drive top and middle of the funnel. That's where we're focused. It can do all this other stuff, but that's what we're going to do. So once we're at that stage and we have validated and we've been through the four Cs, now's the time to actually, how do we grow that? And rather than have this backdated old partner program model for it, it's an updated partner value proposition. This is what's in it for you, partner. This is our mutual success plan with a forward-looking plans of these are the things that we're going to do together rather than a retrospective QBR, which is a backdated slide deck of stuff which may or may not have happened, this is all the stuff.

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(32:59):

So therefore we know what the role of the partner is, we understand their business model, we understand what they care about. We're able to go back to the drawing board as an organization and go like, okay, I think we need to do all these activities going forward with our partners to get to the outcome that we want. If we can get to the outcome that we want, then we can drive the bottom up results to be able to hit the targets of what we've been allocated towards. Because then we'll start to move the needle forward. We've got partners going in the same direction downstream with us who are able to grow alongside us and drive the outcomes which we want. And also for them, they know what they get and how they make money with and through us and alongside us. And so there actually is a true partnership moving forward.

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Tyler Calder  (33:43):

I think it's really important to underscore how important the first thing you said was, which is understand what's a priority for the business and then point partnerships at that. When you say it out loud, it sounds obvious. Well, of course, what's the alternative? The alternative is what you see a lot of partner leaders do, which is point them at whatever they're most comfortable with. And so I've always viewed it as the curse of the playbook, and it's true for every role, not just partnerships, is you get your job, your new job based on what your historical wins have been. For me in marketing, typically I'm going to get hired into my next job based on what I did in my previous job. My instinct is do the same thing. That's what got me hired. And I find with partner leaders, it's the same. My last role, I very much focused on an agency referral model.

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(34:39):

I'm going to do that again versus, well, no, no, this is what we actually need to point partnerships at for the benefit of the business. I think that's obviously critical to ensure you're speaking the language of the business, which we kind of talked about at the beginning. And then towards the end of what you were just mentioning where we're getting into predictable activation of those partners, I love the idea of a forward-looking success plan. Beyond that, what else is critical to driving activation within your partner base?

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Bryan Williams (35:13):

It doesn't have to be remuneration of partner commissions around it. There's a whole myriad of non-financial activities that you can do with and through your partners. A lot of it partner marketing led for it. And we've built some capability on top of PartnerStack to be able to rapidly... The problem we sort of see faces, we get this partner buy-in and the partners, "Oh, I love working with insert company. Oh, we talk about you all the time." You're like, "Okay, well measure it. Show us. Show us how to do that." And so the activation piece to be able to build that predictable motion is we realize there's a gap in market to actually provide that frictionless capability to be able to answer that because you put all this effort into getting these partners going, then how can you easily do a case study with them? How can you easily run an event?

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(36:03):

How can you stand up a webinar with that? How can you do a mutual success plan with them really easily? How do you actually take this intent where you're trying to recruit, enable, and activate partners and get faster to the result of what you want to do? Because going back to our field of dreams analogy, your goal is these partners should be an extension of your sales team, which you're not directly paying for, but you need to activate. And so from a systems perspective and technology, you can't just expect that the leads are just going to flow in, but you need to make it really easy. And there's a headline we always lead with companies we're working with is how can you be the easiest partner to work with? Oh, I love working with insert company. Oh, they've already stood up this. They've done that.

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(36:50):

They've provided this copy for it. They've got this event going with us, this webinar. They're really frictionless ABC. And so you're making it very easy for them to make money with and through you and understand what it is and isn't. And it's not necessarily providing a fire hose of leads back to them either. It's actually, there's a true partnership by name and nature where you're in it together, you've got clear expectations around what each of you is doing, what you both get out of it, to be able to drive the activity with the goal to be able to provide, like you said, well, this many MQLs every month. Well, what can partnerships contribute of whatever the role of partnerships is? And then not only know that it's predictable over a month or a quarter, but it's also growing too.

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Tyler Calder  (37:31):

I got three more questions for you as we start to wrap up. Number one, and this happens all the time, which is why I want to make sure I get this question in. You are working with a leadership team, let's just say CEO in particular. They are putting downward pressure to drive results now. How do you balance that? How do you balance short-term impact, which from my perspective is a necessity to keep the seat with the runway that a partnerships program needs to really flourish.

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Bryan Williams (38:03):

So I think it's critical that the whole leadership team, not just the CEO, is on the same page around what partnerships is and isn't. We've built out some tooling where we look at the partnership revenue gap opportunity back against industry benchmarks, and we've got our own growing proprietary data around how does APAC perform? So for companies, the CEO can just put in very simply, this is at what partnerships are contributing today, this is what the benchmarks, what is the gap? If you're doing 10 million, you're at one, should be doing 30%. There's $2 million of partnerships you should be doing right now, it's not. But the complimentary report to that, which is actually more important, is what is our partner readiness and making sure that the C-suite understand that. It's critical like, okay, well exec buy-in, do we have to program the processes? Do we have the right data, the technology layers for that?

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(38:51):

Are we even set up for success? I always say back to the leadership team to say, yeah, it was like, well, you don't just put a salesperson in tomorrow and then just expect leads to fire.You've got a CRM, you've got sales ops, rev ops, you've got teams around it. There's a funnel and a process. You've got a system for it. And partnerships is not just over the side of the fence where you just expect the same results for it. And so there's this high level education piece that it's not just a CEO, it's that the CFO, the head of product, the marketing, everyone understands what it is and isn't. They also understand that partnerships can accelerate the company's strategy, but it still needs a system to be able to build that out for it. It's not partnership pipe dream, which we say a lot, but it's not going to function that way.

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(39:38):

And I nearly managed back to the CEO and say, if you don't set this up for success as a function, you are going to have to talk back to the board that partnerships failed and it's not going to deliver and you're not going to hit the number of the growth aspirations of investors back to the company and communicate around it. And the core reason is because the factors that's required to actually stand up a partnership function which works, you've never set it up for success. And you're going to say in 12 months time, partnerships didn't work or failed or you're going to blame the person and fire them or make a change for it. But the reality was it was never set up for success and it was never going to deliver the results because of the lack of understanding and alignment across the business around what is actually required and understanding the partner's business and growing up with it.

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(40:26):

And it's much easier from our perspective of the external help and eyes to be able to say that to a C-suite. And I think for someone in seat to be able to say that aggressively and candidly, it's a harder conversation that's probably not said enough, but you've got to stand behind your number and leap of faith, but understand it for a commercial metric to be able to nail that. Because if you can nail that and show where it could get to, then you've got so much more chances to get the investment you need to be able to set up that success and drive forward.

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Tyler Calder  (40:54):

You are hosting Accelerate, which is I believe your first annual conference around all things partnerships. So for those listening, we record in advance, but surprise, this is actually launching the day of the conference. This episode is actually going to go live on the 28th. So let's talk about why are you hosting this? Why was this an important thing to do? And then I've seen the agenda, I know what the program looks like, it's very AI heavy. What are your expectations for AI in partnerships? And knowing that it's literally running as people are listening to this podcast, what are people missing? Why should they have been there to hear from folks like you and all the other great speakers that you have at the event, and why should they be thinking about coming next year?

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Bryan Williams (41:49):

I think right now there's changing go to market in front of our eyes. Every week it's changing. It's the same for sales led motions, marketing and partnerships. And so the playbook, which existed a few years ago is already obsolete right now. And so right across the board, it's critical to remain current and to embrace AI and understand how others are using it and harnessing it to be able to go faster to reach the outcomes. What's amazing is we've had a presenter recently for a partner operator forum who've built their own harness, the whole nearly their own operating system, AI power. So it feels like they've got a team of five or six, but it's just a system that they've actually built to be able to go forward. The start of a call, we talked about my initial journey and how I had to be nearly an entrepreneur and go understand and figure this out as a better way to achieve the targets and I found out through partnerships.

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(42:39):

Right now, an AI enabled partnership operator, and I'm seeing the role of partnerships. People still making the trust for relationships. They still understand perspective, insights around it, and AI can be used below the iceberg to go faster and be more impactful and do other things. But everyone's learning in live real time. And so what we've done is we've curated and got all the best and the leading partnership operators across APAC together to learn and grow together to create a rising tide for next year. And my goal for the event is that I want everyone to walk out and have the tools and systems and knowledge and insights that they can get the investment, they can get more resources, they can get more actual buy-in from their businesses. And if we can do that, then people are going to get promoted and jobs are going to get more created and we're going to rise the tide of what the impact of partnerships is alongside product led and sales led and the marketing side of the business.

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(43:37):

And I think we're really armed to do that. And that's the objective I want at the end of the day, and that's what I want to see in market next year and know what we're building for next year's event too.

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Tyler Calder  (43:45):

I love it. And I'm certain there'll be some pretty incredible recaps coming out of the event. Last one, how can folks get in touch with you? I know you personally, I'm sure people would love to chat with you. I also know the hockey stick site has a ton of free tooling that people can tap into. Where should folks go?

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Bryan Williams (44:02):

Beyond our website, which we're providing resources across LinkedIn, we're very active there of advocating what's required for the industry. So LinkedIn or across our website, reach out. Use our tools, check out our partner readiness, our partner revenue gap calculator, and let's all drive forward partnership success to the potential of what we know it could be.

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Tyler Calder  (44:23):

I love it. Bryan, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Really, really looking forward to how you continue to help drive this space forward.

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Bryan Williams (44:30):

Thanks, Tyler. It's been awesome chat. All

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Tyler Calder  (44:31):

Right. Take care 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 at partnerstack.com/getitogether.