Defining Ideal Partners for Tech Growth with HubSpot’s Kelly Sarabyn

Kelly Sarabyn (00:00):

Before you externalize a program is to start building that framework internally. Start having a more data-driven, mature framework for how you're ranking your partners and what the value is and get internal buy-in across these functions. So when you go to make it partner facing, it already has a certain amount of backing and maturity internally.

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Tyler Calder (00:20):

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. In today's episode of Get It, Together, I talk with Kelly Sarabyn, the director of technology partnership, HubSpot, and we get into all things. You guessed it, technology partnerships. We talk about various frameworks that you can use to think through how to operationalize this type of program. We talk a little bit about how to measure, how to enable. We talk about AI. We talk about all of the fun things. So I hope you enjoy. This is one episode where, especially if you're leaning into technology partnerships, you want to bust out the pen, the notepad, take a bunch of notes. There's a lot to take away. Enjoy.

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Chloe (01:10):

Every year we put together the Women in SaaS report, offering fresh data and perspectives on what it's really like to build a career as a woman in this industry. The 2026 findings highlight both progress and ongoing gaps with more women leading in key SaaS areas. To dive deeper into the data and the impactful work women are doing, check out the full report at partnerstack.com.

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Tyler Calder (01:32):

Welcome everybody to another episode of Get It, Together. Today, I am super excited to be chatting with Kelly Sarabyn, Director of Technology Partnerships at HubSpot. Kelly, you have spent years building and scaling SaaS partnership programs. I am super excited for the conversation. How are you doing?

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Kelly Sarabyn (01:53):

I'm doing well. Enjoying the middle of the week Tuesday. Excited to chat with you.

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Tyler Calder (01:58):

All right. Awesome. Nothing like a Tuesday for a podcast recording, right? That's my favorite

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Kelly Sarabyn (02:04):

Day. It's kind of one of those middle days that nobody really has much to say about.

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Tyler Calder (02:08):

I love it.

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Kelly Sarabyn (02:09):

We'll make it special with our podcast.

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Tyler Calder (02:11):

Perfect. Amazing. I always like to start with a little bit of an origin story with the guest, just get a sense of what got you here. So tell us about that. What did that career journey look like that brought you to HubSpot?

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Kelly Sarabyn (02:24):

Yeah, happy to. So I definitely have many building blocks within my career. I started out in the law, doing constitutional law, writing a lot of different articles on free speech, 14th Amendment. And then later I decided to pivot into brand storytelling. So at Core, very much a researcher and a writer. Just love ideas, love communicating through writing. And so this was a branding agency that focuses on developing that core brand story for businesses, not the visual story. And so was able to work with a lot of B2B technology companies through that process and really got exposed to the whole industry of tech and really fell in love with the energy and the innovation. And from there, I ended up switching to run marketing at an early stage startup. Loved the branding because you learn about all these different industries, but I wanted to go really deep on one company and kind of see all the work through to the end.

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(03:22):

And that company was called Pandium and it was selling an embedded iPaaS. And so we were selling into technology partnerships, product and engineering. And my approach to that was very much a content led. So I did a lot of reports. I interviewed a ton of industry leaders. And that's where I ended up connecting through those interviews who became my boss at HubSpot at the time, Scott Brinker. And basically moved over from marketing to the persona to becoming the persona that I had been marketing to. And so when I started here, a key part of the job was to partner marketing to the partner ecosystem. So still continuing to get that messaging out, but just from a different point of view of like, as HubSpot, how do we acquire new partners? How do we gauge at scale or other partners? And then really just built out the program and enablement from there and kind of ended up running the technology partnerships team.

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Tyler Calder (04:18):

That is a fun journey. That's

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Kelly Sarabyn (04:20):

Cool. I enjoyed it.

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Tyler Calder (04:21):

Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I wasn't aware of the legal part of your background. That's cool.

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Kelly Sarabyn (04:27):

Feel free to read my law few articles. They're like 120 pages each. I'm sure you'd be very interested.

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Tyler Calder (04:32):

Check it out.

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Kelly Sarabyn (04:34):

Kidding.

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Tyler Calder (04:36):

I mean, let's be honest, I might use ChatGPT to summarize it for me.

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Kelly Sarabyn (04:40):

That's true. That would work. That would only take five minutes. You'd be like, Kelly, loved your article.

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Tyler Calder (04:45):

Yeah, exactly. I like it. I like to level set on language, just so the audience is kind of on the same page as us. When you talk about technology partners, what does that mean? What's a technology partner? How does it differ from other types of partnerships? Might sound simple, but let's start there to make sure we're talking the same thing.

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Kelly Sarabyn (05:05):

No, it's a great question. And we recently relaunched our technology partner program at HubSpot. And when I had started here until that point, which was earlier this year in 2026, we had been calling them app partners. And so I think as we know in partnerships, the terms get very confusing. I think technology partnerships, I've heard them, ISV partners is a very common word to use for it. I also hear product partnerships, even platform partnerships. So for me, technology partnerships are partnerships that are based on a connection between two companies, products, and that can look a lot of different ways. Obviously in the software industry, the most typical way we see is HubSpot integrates with Gong, right? And there's an integration out of the box that is a product of itself, whether it's free or not, that customers can just use. And so that's basically the formation of the technology part of the partnership.

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(05:58):

And so I think that's a critical component of it that makes it different from the channel partners, right? The partners that are doing agency services, solution engineering or system integration, a very different relationship than when you're connecting these two products, because it obviously puts another whole component to the relationship, which is you need to have the product team, the engineering resources to make sure those are good customer experiences. And I will say when I was at Pandium, one of the interesting things, I talked to so many different technology partner teams and it was definitely a key blocker of not having enough developer resources. So you'd have partnerships that made a lot of sense from the customer point of view and from a go- to-market perspective, but a lot of teams were blocked and being able to get a good integration built. And so now in the era of AI, it's interesting because engineers can build faster than ever.

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(06:52):

And with MCP, this should become easier. So it can unlock, I would say, a lot more on the go- to-market side as that becomes less of a blocker.

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Tyler Calder (07:02):

Let's just dive right into what needs to be true in an organization for them to even think about starting the technology partnership program. What's that criteria internally somebody should be looking at to say, "Yeah, you know what? I think we're ready." And I want to dive right in there because I think part of what you just said is likely part of the answer is do you actually have resources, that type of thing. But what else should folks be thinking about as they're internally discussing, "Hey, you know what? Maybe we should take this step."

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Kelly Sarabyn (07:32):

Yeah. I think to get to the point of starting a program, you want to have something that's repeatable and scalable. So does it need to already be scaled out, but you need to have a motion that is repeatable and scalable because when you first start engaging in technology partnerships and really any partnerships, you usually have maybe one or two partner managers, you have a handful of partners. You're really trying to figure out what is your IPP and what does that look like and what benefit are we going to derive for the partners and for our own business? And as long as you are at that level of scale, there's no reason to introduce a program like it would be over indexing on what you're currently doing in the market. But once you get to a point where you have a really nailed down IPP and you understand what do partner businesses look like, what are their goals?

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(08:21):

Who would I go after to scale this? And you have enough resources to support that scale. So thinking multiple partner managers have a capacity and a book. Another indicator too is often if you have a lot of inbound demand, that's sort of something that you want to manage and optimize even if you can't be high touch. Programs really come in to add value, not just to support the partner managers, but also to drive value where you can't have a super high touch experience, right? That's the kind of the structure of the program creates that alignment. I will say too, is think a lot about internal alignment because the dual values of having a program is not just that it can give clarity and a clear pathway to partners and to how they can invest more into your ecosystem and what they will get back. It also aligns internal functions to say like, "Hey, here's our top partners." So like marketing team, sales team, product team, these are the partners we should be investing.

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(09:25):

They're driving the most value for the business. So I think one way to approach it that is really valuable is before you externalize a program is to start building that framework internally, right? Start having a more data-driven, mature framework for how you're ranking your partners and what the value is and get internal buy-in across these functions. So when you go to make it partner facing, it already has a certain amount of backing and maturity internally because that's what you need. The last thing you want to do is launch a program and then you can't deliver on the benefits you promised or you actually don't have any benefits because only the partner team is on board, which is not very effective. So those are the things that I would look to.

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Tyler Calder (10:04):

There's a couple things you touched on there that I'd love to go into a bit. So one is IPP. Curious what your process has looked like historically to define your ideal partner profile. And I ask that because I've heard so many different approaches. I'm curious what yours might look like.

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Kelly Sarabyn (10:24):

Yeah. I think the cool thing now in the era of AI is that market research is easier than ever. Even like two to three years ago, it was very laborious and took a long time. But I think one data point you certainly want to collect is understand what are your competitors' ecosystems look like? What is working for them? What are their IPPs? And this works particularly well if you have a competitor that's more mature than you and farther along and but yet has a similar ICP. And so I think that's certainly one data point to look at. I think you also want to start using a Crossbeam tool or at least account mapping manually in order to understand what are the overlaps for different types of businesses. And that can give you insights that you didn't necessarily expect, right? Because you have market data, but then when you actually look under the hood, where are you seeing the highest penetration, the most shared customers?

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(11:18):

Another thing I would recommend doing is scraping your Gong instance or whatever it is you use for call reporting to understand what are your prospects asking for? What are your customers asking for? Who are they mentioning organically? Because there should be organic demand for your IPP. It doesn't need to be every customer's asking, but if nobody's asking and nobody's talking about it organically, that's probably a huge red flag that you're not on track. Certainly you want to look to both like review sites, want to look at industry reports, understand your product. In the case of technology partnerships, like really do an analysis of what are the product feature gaps in your product. So that's another thing you can turn into your own internal data through CS or Gong and understand, hey, what is that gap that prospects and customers are like, "Ooh, you don't have this.

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(12:05):

I'm trying to accomplish why." And that can give you a product category that you want to look into the landscape and say, "Hey, which partner fills this? " And the same thing with the agency side too, right? What are customers saying their struggles are? Is it implementation? Then you probably need more implementation partners, right? Is it something very technical? And so you need system integrators or are they struggling? I'm giving examples from my own ecosystem is are they struggling to execute on say digital ad campaigns? Then maybe you need digital agencies. So I'd say collecting all that kind of primary source and market data and really analyzing it. And then from there, I do think you want to have a hypothesis and then you really put that to work. So go after partners. And I would say too is like, don't just go after what you think is your IPP, broaden it a little bit, like things that are reasonable.

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(12:57):

So you can basically check the data because the data's not always the whole story. And I think what you want to do is run through these different partnerships, try to activate them, really make the investment, and then that's going to give you some real on the ground information as to whether this is going to be fruitful. And I think you just have to go through that step. And once you do, then you can put that back and modify your IPP accordingly.

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Tyler Calder (13:22):

I love all of that. One of the things that you touched on was call recording, which I think is so underutilized in most organizations or at least folks that I chat with. For the sake of identifying potential technology partners, is it as simple as looking at your call transcript and identifying ... I mean, let's use us as an example, PartnerStacks, an app partner, technology partner of HubSpot. Is it as simple as setting up trackers to identify anytime somebody is asking questions around, "Hey, HubSpot, we're launching a partner program. Do you have any partner functionality or do you recommend any tooling to act as a PRMS that we could integrate with? " Is that the type of tracker you're looking for or is it a little bit different?

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Kelly Sarabyn (14:07):

There's two separate components. One is absolutely, exactly. When you're doing the research component, just searching the instance for those type of queries, and it could be, are they naming your competitors? Are they naming PartnerStack the brand? But to your point, are they deeming the core problem that you solve?

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(14:25):

And one thing really cool that we've just launched at HubSpot internally is we have a team that's basically analyzing our Gong instance in real time, essentially, as well as the emails. And they're looking for when somebody identifies a key white space whole, like for example, someone has 5,000 SKUs and they're going to need a CPQ solution, right? HubSpot has a CPQ, but they're not going to cover that instance of it. And then the AI is basically recommending on the deal record in our CRM, you should look at DealHub CPQ. Here's a way to connect, here's a piece of enablement. And so that real-time information is uber valuable to reps because as we know, reps already have a ton on their plate understanding the core product. And so if you have hundreds of technology partners that couldn't come up on a deal, being able to hear it in real time that, "Hey, we're flagging your prospect mentioned this on the call, you should look into this.

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(15:28):

" So I think that's something more and more companies are going to be able to do with AI.

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Tyler Calder (15:33):

Awesome. Yeah, I love that. That certainly simplifies things for the rep. If you can help elevate what the potential opportunity is that they could bring to the table. In that instance, are you also leveraging AI to help enable the rep? So to your point, maybe a rep has a thousand pieces of tech that in any given scenario they might be able to recommend and bring to their customer. You're leveraging transcripts, emails to identify potential opportunity. You're saying, "Hey, rep, you might want to look into partner X, Y, Z." Beyond the recommendation, are you also enabling them in that moment around, here's the joint value prop, here's how to speak to it, all of that as well?

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Kelly Sarabyn (16:11):

Yeah. I think the AI does some of that on its own. So it has intelligence to be able to do it, but we've also fed it the key one sheet for every single partner that's being scanned for essentially. So the rep can just click on it and then they can see what's the value here, quick and easy, who do the industries this partner sells into, what company size is, and that kind of information that they would want to have before recommending to a prospect, but quick and easy. So yeah, I think it's on two fronts, the AI itself, articulating the value, but then also providing that validated one sheet that's gone through the partner team, through the partner to make sure they have the real information we know they need.

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Tyler Calder (16:52):

Very cool. Yeah, super, super powerful. That leads to another question that I think is certainly worth asking. If a listener, somebody listening right now is a technology partner with a company like a HubSpot, so kind of same size scope, what do you recommend they should do to stand out and get the attention of a HubSpot AE or like I said, a similar size company, similar size scope where they have so many different incentives for what they should be selling, what they're comped on, they're familiar with some tech partners, not others. What would you recommend to somebody who's trying to figure out, how do I really engage with Salesforce the size of HubSpots?

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Kelly Sarabyn (17:33):

The first thing you have to do is really understand the different teams, who do they sell to, what size businesses, what is the value prop, right? What is that key white space? And you have to articulate it very quickly. I think one thing I've seen in market just in general where people mess up is they kind of reach out to reps and just do their generic pitch of their product because it's their product and they have that dialed, right? But you really got to rephrase it. You really have to focus it very heavily on the platform and then you're the point solution into that platform and think of it as, "Hey, the rep is selling. Why might this block their deal and kind of have that mentality of it really put the other side first?" Building relationships does go a long way. You need that story down, Pat.

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(18:19):

And then I think the other thing is you have to really be a good partner. I had one of our partners who's amazing at co-selling articulate it this way, they would always concede on any individual deal to preserve the bigger relationship, right? Because if you think about the relationship with the reps over time, if there is a good JVP there, they could send you lots of deals. So on any individual deal, it's not worth getting in a dispute or trying to quote take over the deal because you see a way forward for yourself, for example, but maybe at the cost of how the deal's flowing for the rep. So I feel like taking that next step of building the relationship once you do make that connection, like keeping in touch, following up. If you guys close a big deal together, like sending something nice just to say, "Hey, that was great.

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(19:07):

Want to stay in touch with you? " And then keeping track on your side, like who are the friendly reps? Who are the champions? Who are the influencers that I can build out? It's definitely a lift, but I think it's worth it if you can nail it. But I think it all comes down to having the right JVP.

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Tyler Calder (19:22):

Talking about building a JVP, a joint value prop, I know this is something that HubSpot through your ... It's the accelerator program, right? Am I naming it correctly?

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Kelly Sarabyn (19:31):

The Partner Growth Accelerator.

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Tyler Calder (19:33):

Partner Growth Accelerator. I know you talk a lot about the importance of having a JVP. Could you talk a little bit about how you recommend folks come together to build that JVP? Again, sounds maybe like a simple question, but I find a lot of people, they struggle to put process around how to build a JVP with their partners.

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Kelly Sarabyn (19:54):

Yeah, I think the ... And the partner Growth Accelerator is a program that we built that connects a technology partner with a HubSpot solutions partner and they go through a live cohort to basically build a co-marketing campaign at the end, they submit it and they can get HubSpot MDF. But one of the early classes within this cohort experience is how do you build your joint value prop, right? And I think there's a lot of frameworks out there, and I think to your point, even having a framework, I think there's a number of different ones that would work well, but being more strategic and focused about it instead of just trying to freewheel, you're usually going to get a better result. But I think starting with the core principle of who's the hero of our story, the same thing you would do for your own brand, right?

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(20:38):

But it might be a different hero. For example, your primary POC might be you sell to CMOs, but maybe you have a suite of products and you're connecting with one partner where you're really then going after the CRO or the VP of sales. And so really understanding how your products connect together, and this is the same thing if it's product and services, right? If you're an ABM tool, for example, around HubSpot, and then we have RSI or an agency who specializes in ABM, that becomes their story of like, how do we empower marketers and sellers to do the world-class ABM? And so I think making sure you understand your target audience, like who is the persona that you're trying to pitch to is really important. And then basically aligning really clearly on how do your products together or your products and services make this person's life significantly better in a way that comes to feel like a must have and has a good emotional arc to it.

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(21:40):

And I think looking at what are they doing without your combined tools, what do they unlock when they use your combined tools? What's the emotion behind it? What's the urgency behind it? I think that's how you want to approach it. And you can find these frameworks on. And I mean, HubSpot's produce a lot of these templates, so partners can just fill it in. But I think that's the core process that you want to walk through.

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Tyler Calder (22:03):

I want to shift to something you mentioned earlier, just the importance of, especially with technology partnerships, working cross functionally. What does that look like in terms of sequencing? Who should you be making sure you have a really tight relationship with first internally? Who's the most critical? Where does it go after that? I know you mentioned a few functions already between engineering, marketing, sales, but where do you kind of kick off that internal alignment?

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Kelly Sarabyn (22:30):

I think product and engineering is first. It's table stakes for technology partnerships, right? And that could be look a couple different ways. Maybe you are the one that needs to build the integration. So just as a general, usually the smaller fish in the relationship is the one that builds the integration, right? There's obviously exceptions, but that's like the general thing. So you're going to need resources for that, but you're also going to need APIs, right? And that enables people to build to you. And it's very common for product orgs to be incredibly myopically focused on their own product versus how would other people connect. And I think it's just an ownership mentality of like, "Here, I came to this company to build X." The integration and API team is usually not the sexiest role that people try to jump into, but you really do have to start there because at the end of the day, SaaS companies make for great go- to-market partners, but if it's built around a crappy product experience and you're directing customers to that, it's not going to work well.

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(23:33):

And it's actually going to cause a lot of backlash, essentially, bad reviews, customer complaints. So I think you have to start with product and engineering, and you have to really have a good story around why is this going to drive more usage of your core product? Why is it going to drive more revenue out of that product? Because that's what products cares about and the engineering to support it. So I would start there and get that alignment and then go to the more go- to-market teams because once you have a good product, the next question becomes, well, how can we source, influence revenue together, drive upsells and really leverage our joint resources to expand each of our customer bases? Yeah,

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Tyler Calder (24:16):

That makes sense. Have you ever seen situations where ... A little bit of a leading question, and I'll tell you my perspective in a second. Have you seen companies start with co-marketing to validate market demand and then shift back to the engineering team to actually bring the integration to life? I

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Kelly Sarabyn (24:36):

Have seen it, and I do think that can work in the sense that you can have a co-marketing relationship that's not based on an integration, but rather based on a broader story, because at the end of the day, if it's two software companies, for example, you might have really strong brands that align with each other, like your brand sentiments are similar, the brand vibe is similar. You have great marketing teams that could collaborate together, top of funnel, thought leadership. I think what you absolutely need is the same persona that you're targeting, right? So that's table stakes, that you have that motion on both sides, otherwise it doesn't work very well. But if you have that, you can certainly go to market around it. And then to your point, I think it can actually be a vehicle for testing whether or not there's interest from prospects and customers around this.

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(25:25):

And whether when you bring that to market, they start asking those questions like, "This is a cool story, but can I use these two products together?" Because that will be prompted naturally if you're going to market with another SaaS company. So yeah, I think that makes sense. The only thing I would flag is if it is a really strong partnership where there is high potential for integration and basically it's integration customers would want, here's a scenario you don't want to walk into. You go to market really splashy, you get a lot of interest, you're trying to do top of funnel, but then customers and prospects start asking like, "What about the integration? You did all this stuff together. I came and expected you would have this integration," and then they're disappointed and you don't have the product resources to back up the go- to-market. So I would caveat with that, but I think it's pretty easy to go to market in a lighter way that you don't end up setting the wrong expectation and you do get info.

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(26:19):

Is that your take too?

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Tyler Calder (26:20):

Yeah, that was where my leading question was going.

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Kelly Sarabyn (26:24):

Well, I'm glad we agree. All the debates are always fun.

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Tyler Calder (26:28):

Yeah. I have a tendency personally to default to what's the easiest thing just to get out of market. And so I can easily talk myself into, "Oh, let's just do some co-marketing stuff and then let's see what happens." But to your point, what very quickly can happen is this sounds great. I'm so glad that you folks are integrating. This is going to be incredible. Can I see it? It's like, oh no, we don't. No, there's nothing. You're setting the wrong expectation if you go to market a certain way together and you don't have the product in the background. So like I said, I think it's easy to co-market with anybody really, but if you don't think through the potential expectations you're setting in the market, then it can be a pretty poor experience.

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Kelly Sarabyn (27:13):

Yeah, that makes sense. I think

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Tyler Calder (27:14):

Aligned. I'd love to talk about tech a little bit. Is there anything that you believe is critical from a tech standpoint to really accelerate the impact of a tech partnership program?

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Kelly Sarabyn (27:28):

Oh, tech in terms of internal tooling that you're using?

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(27:32):

Yeah. Yeah. I think when you hit a certain scale, you certainly need something, you need some kind of partner portal. And I think obviously there's a lot of great products in marketing where you can buy it off the shelf. Some people build it. But you need some way that partners can connect with you and that you're enabling them and that you're giving them the information they need when they need it because otherwise it's really not scalable. And so I think that's one tech that once you get to a certain stage, you absolutely need to figure out. I think from the tech side, you often need to have a marketplace, which is a huge, huge lift, honestly, to build out in a way where it's valuable to the customer, it's valuable to the partners. I think now there's so many AI tools you want to be figuring out how to leverage that on your stack as well to drive both internal efficiency for partner managers and the partner teams, and then also just in the partner experience, right?

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(28:32):

Delivering enablement in real time, providing resources that they can easily customize, using AI to answer basic questions. One thing we've done at HubSpot is we have a long tail email alias for all of our tech partners because not everyone has a partner manager. And historically, we had a human who was answering all the questions and we trained Breeze because we had years of this being answered and it's able to take 90% of the questions and then we have someone who a human can then step in and it saves a ton of time and the partner gets what they needed.

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Tyler Calder (29:04):

Oh, I love that. That's awesome. You mentioned account mapping as well.

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Kelly Sarabyn (29:08):

Yes.

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Tyler Calder (29:09):

Would you throw that in as relatively critical?

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Kelly Sarabyn (29:12):

I would say that's critical because I think for both the IPP research and understanding what your partners, the opportunity is, but then also if you want to do any kind of co-sell or co-marketing, it would be a huge miss not to be account mapping. So I would put that as a critical part of the stack.

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Tyler Calder (29:30):

I would certainly agree with that. One of the things that you mentioned early on as well was, and you don't need to divulge too much, whatever might be proprietary to HubSpot, but you mentioned how you think about tiering and ranking partners to help prioritize. Any advice that you would give to people that are thinking about that? They've gotten to the scale where now it's candidly, you can't necessarily treat every partner the exact same as much as you'd love to. You got to put some prioritization in place. Is it as simple as just looking at revenue impact? Is there other criteria, potential revenue impact? What do you think or recommend people should be thinking about when they go down this path?

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Kelly Sarabyn (30:11):

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think the key is to make sure you're internally aligned. And I think this is a key thing in partnerships is where do you have the buy-in? Where do you have the support? Because the reality is all partner types, but even just speaking of technology partners, they add value to the entire customer journey. They can source deals for you, they can influence the deals, help you close those deals, and then they can drive customer value usage and retention. And so in an ideal world, like in the abstract, you want to have your metrics capturing that value and kind of ranking it accordingly. And the program we launched earlier this year, we have influenced revenue metrics, which would include source, but it's just rolled up to one number. And then we also have a metric for customer value, which for us is attached ARR.

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(30:57):

So that's the amount of HubSpot revenue attached to the integration that the partner built being installed on our customer's portals. So all the customers that have the integration installed, the revenue they're paying HubSpot would roll up to the partners attached to ARR. And I think one thing I'll flag about that is that's not a perfect measure of customer value, right? Because the reality is some integrations are much deeper and much more impactful than others, and attached to our metric doesn't fully capture that. But when you get to scale, you need to kind of balance simplicity, like ease to understand and ease to operationalize, and also the visibility you have at scale. So if you don't have a good way to really programmatically say, here's the depth of the integrations and we can rank that at scale, then you will need to go for a metric that's a little bit looser.

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(31:51):

And I think that's okay, right? Because don't let Perfect be the enemy of the good. And also you don't want to get too complex. It's interesting for anyone who's followed Salesforce's program the last couple of years, for 10 plus years, they had a very complex point system where you got points across multiple different buckets and then the point got you and I will think one of four different tiers. They really just completely simplified it down. I think they're very focused on revenue and like AI capabilities. It's just something to consider is that trade off between accuracy and simplicity as you do. But then I think the other thing is make sure the criteria that you're setting not only aligns internally so you have buy-in for whatever you're trying to drive, but also make sure the partner's goals align with what you're doing. So if I'm measuring them on influenced revenue, but they don't have any goals that are aligned with that, it's not going to work, right?

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(32:49):

So make sure you have a really key understanding of how they measure the value of the partnership.

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Tyler Calder (32:55):

No, absolutely. So one of the first questions that we try to get to the heart of whenever we're partnering with folks is just, let's define what success looks like for you. And for us, sounds so simple, but if you don't have an understanding of that and alignment around it, then I mean, it's not going to go anywhere.

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Kelly Sarabyn (33:12):

Yeah. And I think it's a misstep. I agree with you. It is so simple and it seems obvious when we talk about it, but you often see people in the field and partly is probably they're just trying to move quickly, they're impact driven, right? They're trying to meet their goals and they don't do it. I remember interviewing someone who had gotten an award for how they had set up their partner program and the way they had KPI and the partner managers was on meeting the partner's revenue goals. Now obviously it was structurally connected to outcomes for the other company, but I thought that was interesting because it was a kind of a top down, making sure that this component didn't get lost. So I've always thought that was really smart if you have a way to do that without getting too complex to say, "Hey, you're also on the hook for the partner achieving their goals."

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Tyler Calder (33:58):

Yeah. Well, that's really cool. Talking about measurement, how do you think about just general measurement of success for a tech partner program?

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Kelly Sarabyn (34:05):

It's definitely can be a challenge to make the case, get good data. I think everyone kind of agrees across the company on the value of source revenue and creating demand. When you get into influenced revenue, it definitely gets a lot more disputed. And it's not just for partnerships, it's also for marketing, right? Marketing is always in that battle of different forms of influence. Hey, the field events, what's the influence of a webinar versus an ebook versus a field event? And so you really have to get buy-in conceptually that makes sure your leadership understand the value that you're driving and then the metric that you're using to judge success. And so I think you want to have those, when you build a program, you definitely want to have those core north stars. Are you trying to drive customer attention? Are you trying to drive net new revenue?

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(34:54):

And is that through sourced or is that through influence? And then I think the other thing from a program perspective, you're going to look to other indicators of success in terms of like, is this program driving more value out of the long tail of partners? Is it actually changing their productivity? Is it helping to attract new partners? A good program should attract new partners because it should offer a pathway to success for them and clarity. And so I think that's another thing you want to look at. And then also efficiency, like operational efficiency, right? A key part of a program and the operations behind it is that it makes the partner experience easier and the internal resources, it's more scalable, so it's not as manual. And then of course, I think another thing you can look at is partner satisfaction, and that's with the partners, like your IPP in particular, right?

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(35:45):

Make sure that they're having a good experience and that they're satisfied. So those are some of the different indicators I would look to when trying to evaluate, is this the right program? Is this program being successful?

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Tyler Calder (35:57):

Yeah, I think that's very fair. A question that popped in my head as we've been talking is this idea of build versus partner. So when it comes to tech partnerships, in some cases, you're looking to partner because you need to fill potentially a gap in your own product or platform. How would you recommend people think through that? Do we just build it internally or do we go find a really good partner that's already built this?

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Kelly Sarabyn (36:23):

Yeah, I think it's a great question and definitely something you want to have an internal framework for. I think in terms of how you think about that decision in favor of build, is this reflective of your core capabilities and like the core thing your product has set out to do? Is it filling key functionality for your ICP and really directly within your wheelhouse of your product scope? And if that is all yes, then that's going to really heavily say you should probably build and own this feature because when you think about building a partner, it's not a moment in time, it's over time, right? So if it's a core to the customer experience of the rest of your product and what they're trying to accomplish with your product, then you want to own that. You want to make sure you can iterate on it. You want to get the direct customer feedback.

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(37:13):

I would say on the opposite side, if you have something that is incredibly specialized and complex and outside of your core functionality or wheelhouse, you do not want to build that. You want to have a partner. And well, but I will say this too, right? You also need to, when you think about this decision, what are the partners available? Is there a partner that you believe in and trust and could have an ongoing, almost co-build relationship with over time? Because if the answer is no, if all is kind of weak, then you might have to assess, well, should we make this a core competency? Should we build into this space? But if there is very strong partners that are way farther along than you could ever be, how well funded are they? How robust is their product? Because the reality is you can build something, but if there's something in market that's 500 times ahead of what you're going to build, then certainly your more upmarket customers are going to want to continue to use that anyway.

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(38:15):

So they're going to be drawn to the integration and not your "down market" version of what somebody has spent say 10 years and $500 million to build out. So I would definitely think that assessing who the partners are, how complex their product is would be like a key factor in the decision as well.

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Tyler Calder (38:34):

I think that's a great breakdown of how to think about it. I think that's a really good playbook. We're going to wind down. Big question. You can go any direction you want with it. I'm going to have two big questions in a row. First one, you've seen, I think it's fair to say a pretty solid, and you've led a pretty solid evolution of the HubSpot tech partner program. Big learnings, things that you think are worth passing on to other folks, and you can take that in any direction.

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Kelly Sarabyn (39:03):

I think internal alignment is essential. And I will say I wouldn't underestimate the time that it takes. HubSpot is like a 9,000 person company, so it's going to take longer than if you have 1,500 people. But I think at any size company, it's also just about that true buy-in and alignment. So I think make sure ... And I think everybody knows that on paper, but similar to what we were talking about earlier about considering the partner goals, I think it's often underestimated to do it well, right? Because what you don't want is superficial alignment. So when you think about like, "Hey, what are the marketing benefits we're going to offer in this program?" And really it's just very superficial, lightweight, nothing that's going to drive real value or revenue for either side.That's not where you want to land. So that's where the depth of the alignment is key and making sure you have that stability.

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(39:51):

So I think that's one learning. I think the other learning is, as I was saying earlier, really grappling with the trade-off between simplicity, accuracy, the data that you have today, and don't get bogged down and looking for the perfect data. And I would extend that to the program itself.You're not going to get the program, especially right now, the way the market is moving so quickly, you need to move fast and you need to roll things out. And I think right now, companies are very understanding that almost so many things right now are a V1. So many things are like, "This is the framework we're rolling with. Let's operationalize. Let's be agile." I think that's just the prevailing view in market. So I'd say don't take too much time when you can get something out that is going to drive the right behaviors and then you can iterate as you go.

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(40:39):

And the same breadth of that is obviously don't roll out things that you are promising and they're huge and you don't feel like you can deliver because that's going to create a very bad experience, but you can start pulled back and just have a more lightweight framework.

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Tyler Calder (40:55):

I love it. Next big question. We've already talked about AI a little bit. Any predictions for AI and partnerships over the next, I mean, geez, next six months, 12 months?

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Kelly Sarabyn (41:08):

Yeah. I mean, personally, I think this is a super exciting time to be in partnerships, all partnerships. But from the tech partner side, what's super exciting about it is I think the software and platforms and tech stack is really being reshuffled. And so the workflows and the data and who owns the data and who owns the UI of experiences, right? Salesforce just released their headless product and they're like, "Hey, use us headless where you have all ... The UI is different." This is a time of rapid change in how people use different softwares together, how they interlock. And so I think the partner role is key because as always, ecosystems win. Products can never beat platforms because platforms are, in terms of the customer value that they're driving, because they're bringing together a whole suite of products and that's what empowers the customer. And so getting in on that now is going to be a partner play, right?

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(42:03):

Making sure that your partners are building with you and in the same direction because everyone's building faster than ever. So if your partners are going this way and you're going this way, it's going to be bad. And when everybody's kind of reshuffling, it's like, who's going to become the new center of gravity? And a lot of that is going to be the glue between these companies of saying like, "Hey, build to our data models. Hey, let your data flow into our product and how the monetization around that is changing." So yeah, I think AI is going to be a very exciting time to be in partnerships.

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Tyler Calder (42:35):

That feels pretty bang on. I like it. Thank you so much for the conversation. It feels like it flew by. How can folks get in touch with you if they want to follow up on anything?

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Kelly Sarabyn (42:46):

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you're in partnerships, I'll automatically connect. If you're not, just shoot me a note as to why you're connecting and I'll connect with you too.

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Tyler Calder (42:55):

Perfect. I love that. Awesome. Well, Kelly, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I think people are going to walk away with a ton here, so thank you. Thank you so much.

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Kelly Sarabyn (43:04):

Thank you for having me.

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Tyler Calder (43:05):

All right, take care. 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.