Building Partnership Programs That Scale

Chris Lavoie (00:00):

Figure out what is the most valuable integration you have today. Once you know who that one candidate is, then you go deep. You build out GTM, you build out cohesion, you meet as many people as you can at that company. You bring the companies together, you do enablement, and then you try to test bringing that to market. And then just doing all of that with one partner gives you the exact playbook that you can replicate for number two, number three, number five, number 10. But you have to do it with one because if you can't do that with one, you sure as hell can't do that with 10.

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Tyler Calder (00:29):

This is Get It Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they build and scale. Hello everybody and welcome back to Get It Together, the PartnerStack podcast. For this episode, I had the pleasure of chatting with Chris Lavoie, founder of Partnership Mastermind and a leader who has built some of the most well-known tech partner programs out there at Gorgias and AfterShip. We talk about finding your first tech partner. We talk about how critical integrations are and who in the org should be identifying those integration opportunities, how to prioritize them. We talk about how important it is to avoid the trap of allowing your partner program to become a little bit too bloated. We talk comp plans, we talk about how important it is to own a real impactful revenue number and we talk making the move from IC to manager and what that looks like and all of the responsibility that comes with it. This was a very real open book conversation and if you want that blueprint for scaling a tech partnership motion that really does move the needle, this one is for you. So let's go get into it. Chris, how are you doing, man?

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Chris Lavoie (01:52):

I'm doing great man. Just trying to stay cool in the Toronto heat. 

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Tyler Calder (01:57):

Toronto heat, definitely. Chris, and one of the reasons I'm so excited to have you here today is you are the founder of Partnership Mastermind, which you have very recently gone full-time into. You are coming off of a head of global partnerships role at AfterShip, and then previous to that you built out the tech program, tech partner program over at Gorgias, which I know a couple programs there that people really look at as being best in breed. We are going to talk all things technology partnerships. We're going to try to go deep. I'd love to pick your brain on education and what you're trying to solve for and the gaps that you see in the space. But before we get into all of that, I'd love to start with maybe a simple question that it's a mythbusting question. If you could erase one myth about scaling a tech partner program, what would that be?

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Chris Lavoie (03:00):

Snap answer for me, which is the idea that you need to work with a large volume of partners, large being a relative term different for each company, but this concept that the principles of scale only are satisfied when you continuously increase the volume of total partners that you consider active. I think that's a total myth. I think one of the biggest benefits of tech partnerships ISV at Marketplace Strategy is compared to services agency and SI companies who have very small client portfolios that aren't refreshed and expanded that often technology companies have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers. So massive TAM presented to you. So the best play, and we'll get into it quite a bit, is to how can you penetrate as deeply as you can on a few really strategically aligned technology ISV vendor partners versus feeling like, okay, we got a little bit of traction with tech partner A onto B onto C, and then keep scaling from there. By far and away, one of the biggest things I see hold software companies back.

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Tyler Calder (04:04):

Interesting. Very cool. Maybe we can get into definition time a little bit just to make sure we're all on the same page as we keep rolling a tech partnership. What is that? And it might be a silly question, but I've heard people define different things as a tech partnership and they look quite different to you. What is a tech partnership?

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Chris Lavoie (04:24):

Yeah. No, not necessarily a question. I think it's important to get the vernacular down. The way I simply define tech partnerships is any straightforward partnership kind of activity between two technology companies, typically software companies. I think the key distinction to drill down is you can still have a tech partnership program or strategy and a single partnership, even if it's absent a pure say API based integration. I think it's still technically a tech partnership absent the integration, but I think when people really think about this term, I think they're specifically imagining an API based integration that is continuously upgraded and then leveraged to drive GTM activity.

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Tyler Calder (05:05):

Got it. I think that's great. So before we go further into really building out kind of the playbook for all things tech partnerships, which I'm excited to do, I'd like to take a step back a little bit and just talk about you and your journey because it's a pretty interesting one. You correct me if I'm wrong, but you grew up in a household of academics.

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Chris Lavoie (05:25):

Yep.

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Tyler Calder (05:26):

Thought maybe one day that would be you as well and still might be one day, but you ended up in partnerships, so you went pretty far academically, PhD in organic chemistry partnerships. What was that journey?

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Chris Lavoie (05:40):

I think the majority of people I've seen in partnerships all had very different journeys here, but a lot of people had some type of quarter or midlife crisis that diverted them into a totally different career trajectory. To keep it simple, that's basically what happened with me. I grew up very curious and passionate about learning and then that evolved into a passion for storytelling and I would learn something and then my default response was, okay, who can I turn around and talk to, share what I've just learned so that they can benefit from that knowledge and apply it in their lives. So I basically grew up thinking, okay, I'm going to be a teacher, like a high school math or science teacher. And then basically one of the biggest pivot points in my career and life was I enrolled into my undergrad as a math major.

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(06:26):

And then going into sophomore second year, my mom was begging me to take organic chemistry because she really thought I was going to be a medical doctor and she knew that in order to write the MCAT in second year, I needed to take organic chemistry just to be eligible. So she begged. So I said, okay, mom, I'll take organic chemistry, but I'm full fledged math major, so don't get any ideas. And then in second year, math was getting really boring just as chemistry was starting to get really exciting to me. And so one day I walked down to the registrar's office, switched majors to chemistry, ended up getting a research position, was then convinced to do a master's and then went into an early PhD program. And then from that point I'm like, okay, well I still want to teach, so I thought I'd become a professor, was able to get a fellowship at Caltech, California where a big bank theory is based and there is really where I had the quarter life crisis where I was like, okay, I feel like I'm going down this path that doesn't feel natural, doesn't feel right for me.

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(07:22):

I had this entrepreneurial side of me starting to show up in ways I didn't understand and I just felt like I needed to get into the business world. I just didn't know how. And so I literally, to finish this story, I outbound cold LinkedIn, dmed at least 50 people I could find on LinkedIn who had PhDs but had escaped so to speak the academic life and were in business positions and I just begged them to take a call with me, probably took 15 and I just basically asked 'em how they did it and they all kind of said it's hard, but consulting is a good landing pad. There's a lot of transferrable skills. Long story short, I got a consulting job to move from California to Toronto here and then classic who one of my best friends was Gorgias and then got me an interview for their tech partner role and that's it. Very cool. Let's start

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Tyler Calder (08:06):

There. You start at Gorgias, you start in tech partnerships. What did the first week months look like as you started to build that out?

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Chris Lavoie (08:16):

Yeah, I mean to be honest, first week and months certainly were terrifying. I had a lot of transferable skills, certainly I knew how to learn. I think one of the best things you learn completing a PhD is comfortable in high stakes stressful environments. It was publish or perish. So if you weren't publishing at least one to two scientific papers per year, you were a nobody and you certainly weren't advancing in your career. So I was comfortable in that type of environment. Now I didn't have a lot of the hard relevant skills. I didn't how to work out of a CRM, didn't work sales cycles, certainly didn't know anything about eCommerce partnerships, API tech. So the learning curve was super steep. I was reporting then to Philip Royu, currently CEO founder of Coneo, who is a great man, but a very intense operator who has super high expectations, put me on an immediate steep quota of $40,000 ARR sourced, closed one per month, zero ramp.

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(09:12):

So I didn't get any ramp. OTE, right? Just threw you right into the deep end. There was a couple existing, they had only a couple agency partner managers at the time who were doing well and there's a couple tech partners that were integrated with Gorgias that were naturally kind of sending some organic referrals. So that was Phil's signal of like, oh, we could turn this into an actual playbook if we hire somebody. So basically I got handed a couple existing integration partners, like two or three and he basically said, figure it out. So that was kind of my launch point and certainly was the steepest learning curve of my career I would say.

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Tyler Calder (09:43):

So I'll come back to how you figured it out in a second, but you touch on a couple things there that I think are pretty important. One is, to your point, learning. If you had to boil down the importance of not just building that muscle on how to learn, because I think everybody has that, right? You are forced to have it growing up, but then I find some people lose it, right? People forget how to learn and I find that's where folks stagnate. I think it's a critical thing to talk about because at adult learning is very different than learning as your brain is developing. What are your thoughts there? How do you think about that, especially with what you're doing now? How do you, let's start with you. How do you make sure that you're regularly learning? What does that look like?

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Chris Lavoie (10:38):

It is honestly a brilliant question. I think you could take this in so many directions. I'll try not to get too meta and philosophical here, but you phrased it in a way of people kind of forget how to learn. I think one of the biggest challenges is that as you get older, your ego starts to kind of take over a bit and you start to get this sense of, oh, I'm an expert. I kind of know what's what and how to do my job or whatnot. So you kind of just stop feeling this natural inclination to want to learn and upskill and develop, and then that happens with all of us. We kind of grow and then you hit a plateau because you feel like you don't need to keep climbing and then eventually you get motivated again, and then you'll do a little bit of climbing and inevitably it can lead you to pretty great places in your career such as yourself.

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(11:19):

The biggest hack that I know for myself, and I talk about it with my mom all the time, is I need to constantly be raising the bar of what I'm pursuing from a difficulty and significance perspective to myself. If you think of plotting that on an XY curve on the Y axis, it's how significant would it be for me to achieve these skills or achieve these outcomes? And on the X axis it's like how ambitious is it? And so for me, this is going to sound a little bit strange, but I actually struggle the most with success. If I'm really successful, my team is crushing it and making a ton of money. To be honest, those are periods where I'm experiencing the least amount of personal growth despite the fact that my bank account looks good, people are applauding me and my team. It's when my back's against the wall, when I'm in uncomfortable situations where I'm pursuing things that scare me but excite me. That is typically when I undergo the most intense and productive spouts of change. If you want to really keep upskilling and learning, you need to stay uncomfortable, if that makes sense, and keep pursuing things that are valuable, exciting to you, but ultimately will force you into situations that will help you grow, right? Because if you're not pursuing anything net new or we're more aggressive, then you're just going to stay.

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Tyler Calder (12:36):

And so are you actively seeking out those opportunities to keep pushing yourself?

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Chris Lavoie (12:44):

The last five years I was a full-time kind of operator starting off as a entry level IC, and then just at Gorgias was able to climb the ranks to senior IC, then team lead, and then to kind of director level, so to speak. Then got my first executive level position, and then I was like, that's great. And I saw a clear path to kind of climbing into the C-suite one day, which was exciting to me. But for me, I was like, I want to run my own business. I want control of my time and I also want to answer to nobody and I want to just completely focus on my vision for what I want to do. And so that was a huge leap for me, which I just kind of went full time on two months ago. And to be honest, that was the biggest challenge of my career, was actually getting my what together to do that.

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(13:26):

And it honestly took hiring an executive performance coach who I worked with for six months to really serve as my chief accountability officer to help me see my blind spots to help me stop making excuses. And ultimately I was able to do that. So that was the most recent example where I wanted to launch my business full time and kind of escape escaped a nine to five corporate life, and it put me into really uncomfortable situations where I had to work credibly hard, but ultimately I was able to make it work.

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Tyler Calder (13:52):

That executive coach fully funded by you out of pocket?

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Chris Lavoie (13:56):

Yeah, correct. Not cheap, as you can imagine. So I was a bit skeptical, but I said I kept making excuses, I kept pushing my timeline, kept saying, well, next quarter, next quarter, next quarter, I'm going to go full time. So I just said, I'm just going to let it rip. And sure enough, it was well worth it.

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Tyler Calder (14:10):

Nice. That's great. Going back to you figuring it out at Gorgias. So it sounds like you're thrown into the fire that you're giving a sourced revenue target. Let's talk about that for a second. Sourced versus influence, why sourced over influenced?

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Chris Lavoie (14:29):

And this is a controversial topic and my take on it is there's no perfect answer. Every company is slightly different. If you have long sales cycles and huge average contract values, then it's difficult to place a sourced quote on a partner manager or PAM or a CAM just because the turnover, the velocity isn't there to justify just purely sourced. I think for everyone else, I think source is the only way to do it, and that's kind maybe a contrarian view, I'll kind of die on that hill, but Phil, who kind of built this program and led us, his point was, Hey, look, right, why do AEs have the highest OTEs among kind GTM ICs? He's like, well, there's zero degrees of separation from their inputs to revenue hitting the company bank account. They close the deal, boom, money is in our bank account. So it's very easy to correlate their productivity to unit economics that the business cares about.

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(15:23):

And his view that I really subscribed to is every degree of separation. You can think of it as a funnel, every degree of separation upwards in the funnel that your KPIs in quota is from cold, hard cashing. The bank account just makes it that much more difficult to justify paying you more but also keeping you when things inevitably turn down. So he is like, if you want me to put you on an influence goal or even fluffier leads and deals added, no problem. You've got no defensibility and you've got much worse case to make when it justifies promos and bigger paychecks. So as intense as it was, and Gor is pretty famous for being so rigorous on the goal setting side, he's right, the results spoke for themselves, and I've always implemented close one sourced quotas, whether it's quarterly or monthly, doesn't matter. But I think you get the outcomes.

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(16:09):

And the last thing I'll say there is I see a lot of companies will have a hundred percent influence goal or even more upper funnel goals like, Hey, you need to add 10 SQLs this quarter, right? And the problem is it lets the partner manager off the hook of focusing and obsessing over the quality. And when they hand the deal off to AEs and those models, their job is done. Whereas if you own a close one quota, it really forces the partner manager to stay cooperative and helpful for the AE throughout the duration of a life cycle. Your job's not done just when you put it in the pipeline, can you keep partners engaged? Can you get Intel? Can you get influence, drive it to the finish line, and then the AEs and partner managers are fully aligned in the final thing is AEs have more respect and trust for partner managers because you're both owning the same quotas, right? There's no mismatch there.

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Tyler Calder (16:56):

And so your call plans were a hundred percent on source or did you have any other...

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Chris Lavoie (17:02):

Good question.

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Tyler Calder (17:03):

Pipeline influence? And where I'm going with that is I agree with everything that you just said, and I want to come back to why you think maybe more partner leaders, more companies aren't thinking that way. I think you nailed it. You want to keep them involved in the deal. You don't want to just have this over the fence mentality and then the partnership team walks away from it, but you also want to keep incentivizing them to be building their pipeline, being aware of what their entire funnel looks like. How did you balance that?

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Chris Lavoie (17:31):

So I'm a big proponent in every program, slightly different, but for me at least, I'm a big proponent of a hundred percent of your quota variable is contingent on close one source revenue. Most roles that I've managed were on 70-30 splits, not quite aggressive, like 50-50 splits for most AEs and SaaS, but I think 70 30 is pretty traditional for partner managers and then that 30% variable is the source revenue. That being said, I do reward influence, and I think there's a really smart and easy way to do that, which is if you can implement an influence playbook after a couple of months or a couple of quarters, you can understand the impact that influence is having on sales deals. So as an example, comparing apples to apples, if let's just say AEs request help on 50 deals in a quarter, if let's just say you influence 25 of those deals, so half of them, if for the cohort of deals that you successfully influence, they close 20% more often, then you can start to put some weighting and attribution around how valuable a single influence deal is.

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(18:30):

And then you can tie that back to compensation. So to put a picture on it, in my most recent post as head of partnerships at AfterShip, it was the 30% split, all a hundred percent source revenue. But if you were to successfully influence a deal, which had to be double confirmed by the AE. AEs were the final gatekeepers of approving influencer, not if you successfully influence a deal, you would get 5% of the deal amount if it converted to close one as just like a cash bonus. Effectively it didn't retire quota, so you could influence a million dollar deal. It doesn't retire your source quota, but I'm still giving you some type of an incentive to reward you, but not in a way that distracts you from what matters most, which is closing source pipeline. And then to answer your latter question, which is okay, how do you kind of balance that?

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(19:15):

That's where really simple to follow KPI dashboards and metric following is so important. It is really a management level responsibility. So I had these beautiful dashboards built up for my team that basically was constructed from top of funnel down where any partner manager on my team could log in and be like, okay, I've added this many leads this quarter, this many have converted into deals. This is how much active pipeline I have right now. My pipeline to quote a ratio is 2.2, which is a little bit under that three to four X that I'm looking for. So you can kind of see all the leading and lagging indicators and how they kind of connect towards one another knowing that it's all in service of what you really care about, which is close one pipeline.

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Tyler Calder (19:54):

I find, and that this is going to be a generalized sweeping statement, which isn't entirely accurate. I find a lot of, if not the majority of partner folks, they shy away from owning the number. They shy away from owning the source number. They would prefer to have an influence number. And to your point, when things get tough and jobs are on the line, it's a hard thing to defend. What advice would you give those folks? How do you give somebody the conviction to say, you know what? I'm going to own the number. I'll own a source number. Yeah, what would that look like if you had to talk to that person that's been hesitant?

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Chris Lavoie (20:31):

To be honest, that was me. Hopefully if this inspires people, that was definitely me. To give a real example, I was started off as tech partner manager IC, entry level partner manager, was able to, within four to six months, figure out how to start hitting my quota, got promoted to senior IC, which came with an increased quota, but still was able to start hitting that pretty consistently and then a pivotal point, whereas when I got promoted into management as a team lead around, I dunno, 10 months into my time at Gorgias and I had to make my first few hires and then I'm doing comp plan design and goal setting with Phil. I'll never forget sitting in the office and he's showing me what my new quota is going to be, and I was carrying a 0.5 quota kind of as a team lead slash player coach.

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(21:13):

And then I had a couple direct reports and I was like, whoa, if you add up our individual quotas, that's not the quota. You're giving me a bigger quota than the sum of each of our quotas. And he's like, yeah, that's how it works. When you start getting into higher levels. And I remember I gave him so much pushback and I was using irrational logic, but what it was, and he could see it was fear. I wanted it all. I wanted the bigger salary, the bigger paycheck, but I didn't want my goals to go up in a measured way. And he basically looked at me dead in the eye. He is like, look, he's like, you're ambitious. I love that. But if you want to keep climbing, you need to start owning bigger goals. And yes, it's scary and there is some downside because if you agree to a bigger goal, that's your denominator on your quota, which directly impacts your commissions.

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(21:54):

I'm not going to pretend like there's no downside. He's like, but you need to focus on the massive upside. He said founders, C-suites, VPs, they love when people just step up and say, you know what? Give me that big ass slice of pie. Really give it to me. I don't care. Everyone else is scared to take that piece of pie. Give it to me. I know I can gobble it up. Even if you only get 80 to 90% away to a huge goal, it looks a hell of a lot better than consistently doing 120, 130% of a tiny goal. And that might be counterintuitive and people might scoff at that, but I've lived that having been petrified to own bigger goals, leaned all the way in, and it was scary and then I'll never go back. So now it's like, give me the biggest goal.

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(22:34):

It forces the best behavior. It forces you to humble yourself, it forces you to learn what you need to learn. It forces you to work harder. So if it's inspiring at all for the audience, I was that person, but I tell my team all the time, I get so much pushback. One of the most intimidating things to do as a manager still to this day, and I'm sure Tyler, you've been through this, is presenting net new quota models with increased goals to your team. It's such an uncomfortable conversation and especially your top performers, they'll push back on it and you have to stay firm. The best way I know how to address that conversation is to speak from my experience and say, Hey, look, the more you own, the more you're going to be able to prove your impact and the more you're going to be able to earn and obviously justify climbing the ladder.

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Tyler Calder (23:14):

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. I think there's a bunch in there, and you're right, that conversation of having a chat with folks in your team where, hey, quota's going up, targets are going up. I think it's interesting. The one thing I'll say though is, and this actually shocked me, so I went through this a PartnerStack where I walked a bunch of folks through their new comp plans and I got a couple people comment that nobody had ever walked them through their plan before. And that actually I was like, what do you mean? I've been handed a letter and it's either sign or don't, but you know what happens if you don't? And so the fact that you're willing to sit down, I did it, I don't know if you did it one-on-one or the environment. Yeah, so I did it one-on-one an hour long, walk through the plan, walk through the business logic, walk through how it aligns with what my understanding of their career goals were, and it all worked out fine and we made some pretty significant changes to the plans. But it was funny, I went into it terrified. I don't think I actually slept the night before. It's tough. And then it's like you just talk to them though, just walk them through it. And that alone had a big impact.

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Chris Lavoie (24:35):

Yeah, I think that I appreciate the vulnerability there as well. And I think two things to add to that, to your already great points, which is one, having that conversation is great. I think reminding them of, Hey, we're in this together. I would always remind my team of that, look, I'm not on some slim down version of a quota model. My goals are actually not to compare Apple's origin, but my goals are steeper. Even if you all hit a hundred percent of quota, I don't hit a hundred percent of quota. I might hit 80%, right? There's a buffer that doesn't favor me. So reminding them of that I think really helps make them feel like you're in it together versus you're just giving them these unfair challenges. And I think the other thing which knowing you you're probably very similar is hyper transparency. I remember at AfterShip I was maybe six months in, I just quickly expanded the team pretty aggressively and then we were hitting our stride a little bit, but we needed to step on the gas.

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(25:23):

I needed to increase goals and there's a lot of pushback, understandably. And so I just said I took an hour and I really crunched the numbers and I sat everyone down in a workshop and I showed them basically our P&L of this profitability chart. I showed them a month over month breakdown of exactly how much our department was spending to the cent relative to how much we were bringing in. And I showed them that we're still in the red but improving. And I said, look, until we're in the green, why would our CFO, why would the CEO justify more headcount, more resources to fly all over the world to go to these events? Literally, I would point to people, would you invest in this chart? Would you invest more? And then they said no. It's like, okay, this new comp plan, if we're able to hit 90% consistently will get us into the green and unlock more investability of our program. So that was a really powerful breakthrough for me where I literally gave them a full glimpse into our actual P&L as a department, labor costs, tool costs, et cetera. And that was a big unlock for me.

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Tyler Calder (26:19):

Oh man, I love that. I think the transparency is key. I think the financial literacy is key. Understanding how to chat with the CFO speak the language of the business. And then something you said a little bit earlier just around kind of goal setting. I had this conversation with somebody last week where almost identical to what you just said, but I think it's important to reiterate from a career standpoint, I've always preferred to be yellow on a big target than green on a really small target.

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Chris Lavoie (26:52):

A hundred percent.

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Tyler Calder (26:54):

Your CEO isn't an idiot. Your CEO is going to look at it and be like, Hey, great. You're green on everything. You're not growing. I got this other person over here that's yellow, maybe even in the red, but the impact is that much bigger. That's what they were willing. Yeah, that is the word. It's not about just trying to show up as green on a chart somewhere. I think it's about the scope of impact that you're having. And not to go on a tangent, but it's one of the biggest issues I have with how people leverage OKRs in organizations. If you go back and actually look at how OKRs were meant to be built, they were meant to be literal moonshots. And yeah, if you only hit 60, 70%, but you're shooting for something big, you're looking pretty good. What I find with most organizations now is their OKRs are their base plan.

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Chris Lavoie (27:49):

Totally agree.

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Tyler Calder (27:50):

So it's the base plan, but then they take the principle of like, yeah, but 70% attainment is pretty good. It's like, no, it's 70% on a base plan. It's not good at all. You got to think a little bit bigger.

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Chris Lavoie (28:02):

I totally cosign with that. And you asked a question earlier which we didn't get into, which is like, why do you think certain partnership leaders or even other GTM leaders kind of set conservative more upper funnel compounds that they do? And I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think a lot of leaders, especially less experienced ones, they're designing comp plans to the bare minimum to hit a hundred percent. They design it in a way that's like, okay, we're going to hit a hundred percent on the dot, but they're not setting the goals high enough and then they don't hit that a hundred percent, which is actually less than it should have been in the first place. So let's just say they hit 90% of their goal. It's probably only 50 to 60% of what the CEO is actually hoping for.

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(28:42):

So they're designing these goals really conservatively the way they communicate to the team, changes of the behaviors where it's like, Hey, look, we're setting these goals. They are aggressive. You don't just tell your team, Hey, 78% is fine. You don't communicate it that way. But if you set the goals a little bit, ambitiously, you said the right word, impact, if you can go through a quarter and maybe you only hit 85%, but you can still so clear growth trends, clear impact on the business and everyone's still making enough money, that is a much, much better result to your point. So I think the way people design programs and goals and comp plans is overly conservative. They're trying to hedge, right? They're afraid of what it would look like to miss, which they will miss anyway, and it's much lower than the CEO was hoping for.

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Tyler Calder (29:25):

No, that's great. Let's get back to tech partnerships. As much as I love talking about this stuff, but I would love to just demystify tech partnerships a little bit more. So let's start with how do you know or how do you identify where you start? You got probably endless opportunity or at least perceived opportunity for where you could start your tech partner program. You already mentioned.

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Chris Lavoie (29:58):

Hey.

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Tyler Calder (29:59):

Start with a couple and make sure you knock those out of the water. How do you find the first couple though?

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Chris Lavoie (30:04):

Yeah, great question. So yeah, so I'll position my answer based on your average mid stage company, like sub 500 employees, so to speak, just to keep it simple because how you might approach this at a large company would be different. But let's just say you're at earlier stage company series A, series C, you might have some integrations in play already. The best place to start is literally find the one the most valuable integration, and I always coach people on how to identify the best partner by thinking about partner characteristics on an XY curve, a two by two matrix where on the Y axis it's what is the derived tangible value for shared customers between integration partners, right? So your point solution and another point solution. What is the derived provable and demonstratable value as evidenced by metrics, KPIs and case studies and testimonials? You obviously want to be as high up on that YA as you can.

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(30:58):

And then on the X axis, which is the secondary axis, is what's the accessible revenue opportunity, which is basically a percentage of TAM that you can realistically capture. You want to spend as much of your time as possible in that top right quadrant where there's great revenue opportunity, but most importantly there's huge value for your customers. To answer your question directly, the place to start is figure out what is the most valuable integration you have today. If you have 5, 10, 15, 20, doesn't matter. And the way you actually do that to get deep, there's a few ways you can do that. You can use leading indicators like usage. So one of my favorite metrics, and if this is complex, I'll try to make it simple, but let's just pick an integration. Let's just say Gorgias in Klaviyo, which has several thousand installs, the first number I look at is, okay, how many mutual customers do we have to begin with?

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(31:45):

And for Gorgias and Klaviyo probably 10,000, there's probably 10,000 Shopify merchants that use both Klaviyo and Gorgias. So that's mutual customer base. The next level down is, okay, what percentage of that 10,000 customers are actually using the integration actually have it installed, which is different, maybe 50% do. It's like, okay, so there's 5,000 of those customers that actually use both Klaviyo and Gorgias but are integrated, have integrated those connections. So I call that integration adoption rate, but then you can go a step further. It's like, okay, of those 5,000, which of those customers are regularly using it on a monthly basis and of that cohort who has the highest usage? That to me is the simplest way that most people should be able to get access to find your most valuable integrations, right? You're looking for integrations where you have the highest mutual integration adoption rate.

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(32:37):

So if you have a hundred customers, if 90 of them are using integration, that's a really strong proxy. Anything less than 50% I find tells you that it's not that valuable. And then within that 90%, which of those integrations has the highest actual usage as evidenced by API activity and API consumption? And then you actually go start talking to customers and customer facing reps at your company, right? Talk to AEs and say, Hey man, it seems like Klaviyo is coming up on every sales call. What does that talk track look like? Listen to gong calls and then go talk to your customer success managers and your support team and ask them how are customers asking questions about it? How are they actually using it? And then actually go talk to customers. This all takes time, but you can short track it with some data and then you'll start to realize what's the most valuable lever you have from a specific integration, and then I'll stop there.

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(33:26):

But basically once you know who that one candidate is, then you go deep, you build a GTM, you build a cohesion, you meet as many people as you can at that company. You bring the companies together, you do enablement, and then you try to test bringing that to market and then just doing all of that with one partner gives you the exact playbook that you can replicate for number two, number three, number five, number 10. But you have to do it with one because if you can't do that with one, you sure as hell can't do that with 10 because that's probably the simplest way I would describe it.

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Tyler Calder (33:52):

Very cool. What if I don't have a single integration?

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Chris Lavoie (33:55):

Great question. And this happens a lot at Gorgias. I was fortunate that there was literally four API based integrations in place, just enough, just enough to give me a little bit of a flirty start. But let's just propose that you don't have any integrations in place, but you have at least a mature enough API to be developed up against that. You got to at least have something like that or it's a different conversation. And let's just say your company is partner friendly, willing to invest into developing native integrations or at least enabling partners to develop them. So let's just use that as a prerequisite. What I describe, you still want to go through the same kind of motion. You don't have the benefit of data and evidence on existing integration usage, but you can go straight to the step of analyzing your customer's tech stacks to see what tools they use.

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(34:40):

That's a great starting point. So there's all kinds of great tools like BuiltWith, StoreLeads, Crossbeam, et cetera. You can figure out what point solutions your customers use. I don't care what industry or vertical you exist within. That's a great starting point. And then if you can holistically analyze, let's just say you have a thousand customers, you should be able to figure out and say the sentence like, oh, look at that. Over a thousand customers, the top five most utilized individual ISV or point solution apps are A, B, C, D, E. That's interesting right Now, let's actually via vis-a-vis our customer success team, our sales team, our product team, let's go digging into that to see which ones are actually most useful and important to our customers. And then okay, it's like, okay, this number one app A seems like it's the most important.

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(35:28):

It's the quintessential app used by our customers. It's the most complimentary use case wise for our own product. Now let's get connected with that potential tech partner between our product team and their product team to start scoping out what some use cases could look like. And then let's bring that to some potential VIP customers to get feedback from and then actually validate that with the proper beta. So this is a long way of saying reverse engineer it, lift up the hood of your most important ICP customers. What are some commonalities with respect to the point solutions and ISV apps that they use within their tech stack? Then start talking to customers to see if anything sticks in terms of which ones are most important to them, and then map out some use cases, talk to the product team on the other side and then ultimately get at least a beta version that your customers can test and then bring it to market.

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Tyler Calder (36:16):

Oh man, good stuff in there. The scenario that I have in my head is I'm a partner leader, let's say right now I'm heavily focused on agencies. It's a referral motion, and then I listen to this episode of the podcast and I think, Hey, you know what? We don't actually have anything tech related when it comes to partners. We have the prerequisites in place. We're API friendly. People can connect, but we don't actually have any real integrations. We don't have any tech partners today. Should I own that? Should I nudge product to try to own it? Should it be somebody else?

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Chris Lavoie (36:54):

Given the constraints and circumstances that you've put forth in this fictitious example, I think if I'm a partner leader brought into a net new rule and the circumstances are such that you described, I am definitely delegating and passing ownership as much as I can to product and customer success. Actually being very cooperative and invested in building a cadence, building relationships with those counterparts and kind of bringing my expertise to help guide them based on the previous example I just gave. But ultimately, I'm keeping my eyes on the promise I need to make the biggest possible impact in my first 90 days to build my credibility, to keep my job, to really start scaling the revenue acquisition channels that are within reach on the channel services side while still pushing the other ball down the field, which would be kind of that tech partner strategy.

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(37:41):

And then I would have some clear exit criteria such that when certain requirements are met in past, then I'll justify actually scaling resources. And I would say the big exit criteria for that is if the product team, if I help them get set it up and they ship a couple integrations by cooperating directly with partners and the customer success team is able to help drive some adoption and get some really positive signals, and I think customer success teams are a fantastic marketing vehicle for driving adoption for your existing customer base. Don't overlook that. That would be all I would need as a partner leader to say, okay, I'm going to go make my first tech partner manager hire, and they're going to now unlock the commercial side of this because you should never hire a tech partner manager to lead everything I just described, all the nuts bolts, maybe one in a hundred thousand tech partner managers could do that and pull it off. You can't bring them in until you've at least got at least one to two validated strong integrations that have strong TAMs and you have some adoption and proven valid value of that integration. And once you have that checkpoint giddy up, you can definitely start the hiring process.

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Tyler Calder (38:48):

Alright, so we've gone through all of that in either scenario, right? We've got integrations, you've done everything that you mentioned in terms of scoping out the opportunity or you've brought product and CS in to help maybe drive something net new, but you're at the point where you're really ready to commercialize it. What does that look like? What am I doing as a tech partner manager to drive that sourced revenue number?

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Chris Lavoie (39:14):

To buckle up for this one, and I'll try to speak clearly, but this is a playbook that I've polished for years and years. I'll try to start simply, but in most tech partnerships, the way you're going to unlock revenue, you can do it through marketing vehicles, productive like playbooks, content strategies, in-person events. Let's just park that on the side as a monetization vehicle within the confines of a tech partner program. Very valid, very successful. But let's just focus on referral engines and referral motions. How 90% of tech partnerships programs drive revenue is typically through referral motions. Co-selling happens sporadically, but not very much. So it's typically referral motion and it's important to make that clear because who literally refers you a deal, right? Does PartnerStack the company, call me up and say, ring, ring. Hello Mr. Lavoie, we have a lead for you? No, no, no.

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(40:04):

It's an individual, right? An employee at the partner company. Let's just focus on Gorgias and Klaviyo from Gorgias' perspective. Who at Klaviyo is going to refer me deals? It's individuals. Who are those individuals? They're customer facing employees can't stress this enough. So these are account executives on the sales side, launch engineers, solutions architects and customer success managers or account managers. It's customer facing reps. These are the people who hold the relationships and keys to those relationships with the actual customers in my ICP that I'm going after. So that is the most important thing to understand in referral relationships, people refer you deals, not companies. Customer facing reps are those people. So unless you're able to get access to them, enable and evangelize them, then you're not going to be able to stand this up. So we've got that clear. So then what's the next approach?

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(40:50):

You can do this in a very systematic data-driven way where per tech partner, you can literally scrape a list of every single one of their customer facing employees, especially nowadays with using ChatGPT or third party data enrichment tools like Apollo for an example where I could take Klaviyo and I know for a fact that Klaviyo has 600 give or take customer facing roles right now right around the world. So I build a list of them, I plug them into my CRM, whether it's HubSpot or Salesforce, and I build a literal funnel, a four stage funnel, no different than you would create a funnel for your marketing leads. I create a literal funnel for my partner, customer facing rep leads where the stages are prospect at the top, which means I know about you, but we've never talked, never engaged, super cold. The next stage is engaged.

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(41:41):

And so for my partner managers who are focused on say, Klaviyo, they're running really polished outreach via LinkedIn DMs, especially email can work as well or even Slack and the CTA there is, hey, just book a meeting with me. You might not know this, but we have a kick ass integration between our platforms used by 10,000 customers. Huge evidence that this is really successful. I would love to help you understand how you can leverage this to hit your KPIs faster, whether you're on sales or success. Boom, they book meetings, which is a beautiful thing, very easy to do. Now all of a sudden they're either graduate more middle funnel towards engaged, and then from there you want to get them to do what? Refer their first qualified lead. And then when they do that via automation, that's pretty straightforward to build out. They automatically escalate to the next lifecycle stage, which is what I call activated, which means they've at least source this one qualified deal.

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(42:29):

And then the final stage is the IP, which means they've sent us at least one close one deal. And so you can really take a funnel systematic approach to any given tech partner. And the beauty of tech partners is they have typically dozens or hundreds of these customer facing reps, a huge distinction from smaller boutique agencies or service or SI partners. And so you can literally systematically engage them and the goal is not to convert all 600 down to close one. If a tech partner manager on my team says, Hey Chris, over the last five, six months I've converted five VIPs from that initial 600. I say giddy up because now you've multiplied Klaviyo by five right now. It's not just one company can refer me a deal. I have five champions who can reliably source equality deals. That's a total game changer. And if you have five partners who have three to five VIPs, you're absolutely cooking and you've de-risked future stalling if one of those reps leaves the company. So that is by far and away the way I know how to drive revenue through tech partnerships.

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Tyler Calder (43:30):

Pretty solid. What are the signals that you look at to suggest you are ready to scale, you're ready to bring on some new partners? Again, to the point earlier, you want to make sure you nail the first couple, that you don't want it to just be a volume game where success is how many tech partners do I have, but it's actual impact of each individual tech partner. How do you know you're ready for scale?

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Chris Lavoie (43:58):

So the few different directions you can scale other by bringing on and targeting net new partners, and that's one kind of dimension of scaling. The other dimension is you actually have plenty enough partners existing, but you're one or two tech partner managers in C currently are overwhelmed, and so you can actually bring on a net new hire. Those are kind of two different lanes of scaling. But the first signal for me is just over productivity. It works. It's working for a select cohort of partners. You at least have one wrap hitting quota consistently at least two quarters in a row is something I would look for that kind of minimizes the variance and randomness of it all. That's a really strong signal. You have a rep hitting quota, you're continuously shipping and upgrading powerful integrations because that's a limiting constraint. Let's just say you have 10 strong integrations, or sorry, 10 strong integrations and you've kind of already kind of cook in with all of them, but you're not actually adding any net new integrations.

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(44:55):

Nothing else is kind of changing. Then you will hit a point of diminishing returns. That's not amenable to investing more resources, but if you have positive dynamics such that you are adding more integrations and really investing in driving adoption, improving the value of those vis-a-vis product and partner marketing and the customer base of your existing strong tech partners are expanding, right? Meaning Klaviyo is obviously growing like a rocket ship. So there there's just so much more juice on that sponge to keep squeezing. As long as those dynamics are healthy and you have productivity from your existing reps, that's all the signals I would need to step my foot on the gas.

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Tyler Calder (45:35):

Awesome, that's great. We're going to start to wind down here. I want to get to Partnership Mastermind and what you're doing there. Before we get into that, any closing notes for that tech partner leader? And you can take that anywhere you want, whether it's advice, things to watch out for in terms of what might derail them

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Chris Lavoie (45:59):

A hundred percent. Yeah, I mean I'll close off. I honestly sending a stern message to people, leaders, head of partnerships, VP partnerships and CROs and C-suites, and really just kind of challenge them to not leave your tech partner people on an island and not treat them like you would any other agency or SI or channel account manager. It is a totally different role because of the product complexity. There's already such a lag. If I hire an agency partner manager today, there's already such a lag in terms of when I'm going to expect revenue. They've got to go flirt and engage potential partners, convince them to sign, onboard them, get their first batch of leads, those leads will suck. Then they finally start to get good leads. So there's already a lag for the most transactional, simplest of partnerships. Add in, having to build a net new integration and drive adoption for that, you have to be disciplined and patient and understand what that life cycle looks like.

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(46:52):

So don't leave them on an island, surround them immediately with a squad, a formal internal team that consists of at least one product leader as a sponsor, a customer success leader as a sponsor who's going to be responsible for driving adoption. A strong marketing person who's going to ultimately package and tell the story of the value of this integration, enable them from day one with a team, and don't leave 'em on an island because I promise you, you'll never be successful if that's your approach. I don't care who you end up hiring as a tech partner manager.

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Tyler Calder (47:19):

I mean, I don't know if all of that will fit on a T-shirt, but I think if we can get it on there, we should print them out and ship 'em. Partnership Mastermind. What is it and what was the gap in the market that you saw that you wanted to fill?

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Chris Lavoie (47:32):

Yeah, absolutely. So Partnership Mastermind, it's the fortunate to say it's the number one coaching and training program in the world for early to mid stage partnership professionals. Our sweet spot offering, so to speak, is our mastermind bootcamp, which is a virtual guided eight week program where 18 to 20 students from around the world from different verticals join us for an intense eight week program. Each week we meet for an hour long lecture, which I switch between theory, real world examples, stirring conversation between students on a very specific topic. So it could be data informed decision making, it could be playbook building, it could be cross-functional collaboration. It could be co-selling and co-marketing. We have a Slack channel, a private community. I have a series of graduation requirements, challenges that they have to complete, and then I give them a bunch of free resources and some mentorship as well.

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(48:21):

And really it's simply put, the only thing that matters is do you exit this program having moved the needle on your number one growth area, which is different for everybody. And so it's evolved over the last two and a half years. We're in the middle of our 12th ever cohort, so we've had over 250 students from 22 countries come through our programs to date. And to answer your last question, the gap in the market, what I kept hearing consistently was that none of these practitioners, IC management level, were getting any form of tailored or relevant onboarding or ongoing training from their company. Even take a great company like HubSpot, you and I are both friends with lots of great friends at HubSpot, love HubSpot, one of the best ecosystem led companies in SaaS, full stop. But even them today, as it stands today, they don't have any tailored onboarding or ongoing training for any partnership hires, right?

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(49:09):

Some partner people at HubSpot report up to the product org, sell report up to the marketing work and all of them. If you're on the product team as a partnerships person, you literally go through the product onboarding experience. Can you imagine that right at HubSpot, not to put them on blast. So if amazing public companies that are ecosystem led, like HubSpot haven't really figured out how to provide curated, tailored, relevant training in the initial stages and ongoing for their partnership employees, just imagine how things look at your average series D, C, B and A or early stage startup company. It's just non-existent. So that was the gap in the market. I was able to capitalize on the fact that I just love to teach. I love to story tell, I love to help others level up. I know you do as well, Tyler. And so that was the gap in the market.

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(49:53):

I started doing one-on-ones, like to coach people, and I just had so much demand. I was like, well, I might as well just do this in a group environment, see how that works. And that was the best thing I did. Not just to scale the business, but also because the community that students were immediately forming in these groups was something I naively underestimated, right? Yes, they get a bunch of knowledge and training and skills for me, but they're immediately forming this personal peer advisory board of equivalent peers going through similar challenges that they stay connected with indefinitely. I've had students come in and become coworkers, start podcasts together, continuously stay in touch with one another. So yeah, that's partnership mastermind.

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Tyler Calder (50:33):

That's amazing. I love it. I think not only does the partnership space need it. But I also think from what I've seen is what education needs little bit more of. And so I think you're doing a really great service out there. Again, not just for partnership pros, but as an example for what education can be to drive the right type of growth and change in folks and work. Awesome stuff.

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Chris Lavoie (50:58):

I appreciate that.

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Tyler Calder (50:59):

Thank you for this. It was a fun conversation.

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Chris Lavoie (51:01):

I appreciate it man. Sorry for some of these long-winded answers, but can honestly talk with this stuff all day.

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Tyler Calder (51:06):

No, it's fantastic. I love it. I know you are a new dad. I'm sure your child is wondering what you're up to, so I'll let you get back to it. Really appreciate the time.

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Chris Lavoie (51:18):

Appreciate it, Tyler.

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Tyler Calder (51:18):

Alright, see you everybody. 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/getittogether.

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