Getting Partner-Committed in 2026 with Jason Yarborough

Jason Yarborough (00:00):

Lots of people have partner programs and they're just kind of holding their hand out, just waiting for partners to deliver to them before they begin to create something that's more supportive for the partner. First as a partner supportive or committed leader team program, they're building the ecosystem to be a win for the partner to be a part of your program, which is tough for a lot of people who cause it is a brand new function and it can be a bit of an experiment, but if you truly believe in it, then it's not so much of an experiment as much as it is an investment.

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Tyler Calder (00:28):

This is Get It Together, the podcast where partnership and go- to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they built and scaled. Hello, everybody. In this episode of Get It Together, I chat with Jason Yarborough, who most folks call Yarby about how to make the transition from being simply partner curious to partner supportive or partner committed. And within that, we walk through his three eyes framework of introductions, intel and influence, and how you can leverage that framework to really kind of pull the whole go- to-market together and rally behind partnerships and really integrate it in your revenue engine. And then we talk a bit about Arcadia, which is the community and event series that he has co-founded. Check it out, get out your notebooks. Lots of great takeaways. Enjoy. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Get It Together. Today I am with Jason Yarborough, affectionately known as Yarby to most.

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(01:39):

Hello, hello. Jason. Well, welcome, sir. I am super excited to have this conversation. For those that don't know you, pretty incredible background, partnerships at Drift, Terminus, PFL, now Knak, and also co-founder of Arcadia, which we'll talk a little bit about later. Anything I should add in there? What don't people know about you?

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(02:02):

Oh, wow. What people don't know about me? I've had four careers. I actually have a degree in theology. In high school, I was the mascot, been a motivational speaker, a full-time sales rep, a marketer. I've started a couple of different companies. At one point in time, I owned a record label, so I've done a lot of different things, which I think actually makes me the perfect generalist to be a partner leader because I believe all the best partner leaders are generalists, not so much people who are specific in one certain area.

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(02:29):

Let's start there. Why is that? Because you do hear a lot of people talk about that. As a partner leader, you're wearing multiple hats. And so presumably being a generalist lends itself to that. How come? What is unique about being a partner leader that requires that kind of diversity and background?

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Jason Yarborough (02:45):

Well, first off, I'm going to say if you're a partner leader and haven't read Range, great book. Talks a lot about that. But to answer your question, I think the partner leader sits in between so many functions. We're having to facilitate and navigate so many conversations typically between sales, product, marketing, CS, C-suite, every now and then the board. So you've got to have that ability to diversify the conversation and kind of mold or meld to the team that you're talking to. When I talk to the product team here at Knak, it's a completely different conversation than I'm having with the sales team. I spent a lot of time with our ops team. I think because I'm such a generalist and I've got a diversified background, I've been a full-time sales rep, I've been a full-time marketer. I can speak the language of each of those departments.

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(03:27):

I've learned to translate problems in different languages. And I think without a diversified background, I'd have had a lot harder time figuring that out coming into the role. My very first role in partnerships was running agency or SI programs, whatever you want to call it. And I had come from an agency world at that time, moved into that world, began to work more into the tech side, the Adobe and Salesforce side. But it was an easy transition for me because I was able to be nimble and move quickly across those roles just due to the diversification of my experiences.

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Tyler Calder (03:56):

Nice. Yeah, I think that all lands. And Range, David Epstein.

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Jason Yarborough (04:01):

Epstein. Range. Highly recommend the book. It's a great read.

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Tyler Calder (04:03):

Agreed. I think it's worth checking out. I want to get into the meat of our conversation. And there's two things that I really want to chat about. So one is you've often talked about making this shift from being partner curious to sort of partner committed. And then the other piece is you've talked about the three eyes, Intel Intros, influence. I want to talk about those two things. Great things to talk about. Perfect. Let's talk about being partner curious. What is that? And is that a bad thing? Is that just something to be aware of as a starting point? Where did you come up with that framing?

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Jason Yarborough (04:40):

I wouldn't say it's necessarily a bad thing. It's something to be aware of if you're moving into a new company or role and partner curious can lead to great things such as partner supportive or committed. The way I define partner curious to make it super simple is that they're kind of, "Hey, we need to have a partner program because lots of people have partner programs. They're just kind of holding their hand out, just waiting for partner to deliver to them before they begin to create something that's more supportive for the partner." Instead of making it a win for the partner to partner with your company, they're waiting to see what the partner can deliver and do versus a partner supportive or committed leader, team, program. They're building the ecosystem to be a win for the partner to be a part of your program. Supportive out the gate is they're going to resource it, they're going to staff it.

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(05:24):

They're not going to treat it like a side project or a quest. It's going to be something that from they get, they're going to understand plays massive long-term benefits and they're going to treat it as any other function within the company, which is tough for a lot of people who cause it is a brand new function and it can be a bit of an experiment, but if you truly believe in it, then it's not so much of an experiment as much as it is an investment.

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Tyler Calder (05:43):

Any examples in your background, whether it be with Terminus, Drift, PFL, where you came in, you saw the signs very obviously sort of in that curiosity stage and you made the shift?

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Jason Yarborough (05:56):

Yeah, I would say Terminus is a really good example. They'd had a partner leader in the seat before and the program had done like a 135K, so they were kind of curious to see what it could do. The guy that brought me in, Brian Wade, he was very supportive. And then I got moved over to the CRO who was more curious to see what it could be for the company. But at that time we had kind of put some stuff in motion and we were starting to build the program. Brian Wade had challenged myself and my teammate Caitlin to build this into a million dollar program over the next year. So we started to really learn and see how the program has taken shape, what the agencies wanted out of a partnership with Terminus. We began to build it in that way. But also along the way, we got a lot of questions from the CRO, even though the numbers were going up, up and up, to the point where I learned a lot about how to communicate that curiosity to become more supportive.

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(06:45):

And that was really where I learned, I started to kind of frame this partner curious versus supportive concept just based purely off those two leaders and how they kind of viewed partnerships and how they supported them versus wanted to see the results before they supported them. And so it was quite the juxtaposition there. But it was a good challenge to me to learn how to better communicate it, how to position it and how to frame it up. I started to build out pathways, like the path to value for our partners, what that looked like so the leadership could understand it so the leadership could embrace it and began to build all this material out so I could help take them from that stage of curious to supportive. Because I do believe that it is somewhat on the leader to help take that curiosity too supportive.

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(07:21):

And I've talked about this before in the past, I think on LinkedIn is that I would say most CROs aren't coming up in the world of partnerships to this stage. Maybe CROs that are becoming CROs right now, but CROs five years ago, they weren't coming up in the world of the modern partnership ecosystem. They may have come up in reseller programs, VARs, MSPs and all that. But I think today's modern referral ecosystem, tech partners, agency partners and how we're working with them on that stage, they're not familiar with that motion. So yeah, they could be a little curious and it could be on us to help lead them down that path. And I think it was a really good lesson for me to really begin to challenge myself like, all right, where am I missing the mark and how I can take this from curious to supportive with this particular CRO?

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(08:00):

Because yeah, the chief product officer who hired me knew it. He saw it. He'd built a company doing it before. He was like, "You do your thing. This is what I want the numbers I want to see." We had positive growth trajectory the whole way through. We did make it a million dollar program in the first year, which we were very proud of and had a lot of success and took a lot of that into the next roles that I began to roll through and kind of use that experience to look at the company, the leader I was going to work with and for and use a lot of those conversations throughout my interview process.

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Tyler Calder (08:27):

In all of that, what are some of the things that you found leaders, let's say a CRO needs to hear or understand to help them make that shift from partner curious to partner supportive? Are there common gaps that you find need to be bridged?

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Jason Yarborough (08:44):

Yeah, I think just about every CRO wants to know like, how are we going to drive revenue? What does that path look like from identifying a new partner to getting them to the point of becoming a revenue generating partner? And you can lay those steps out pretty clearly, pretty plainly. You can also understand, are you CRO going to give this time to nurture? Are you going to give us the ability to crawl, walk, run? You can begin to generate pipeline within the first 90 days. There's a lot of folks out there talk about and you can begin to bring a lot of partners on, but that doesn't always work for every place you go and build into. Place I'm at now is a smaller company, relatively unknown in a lot of the worlds that I play in. So for me, it was about going out and how do we build that awareness?

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(09:26):

How do we begin to show partners who we are and what we're capable of and how we can begin to build into their business, their workflow, how do we become a stop point in one of their gaps, like how they build emails, how they provide solutions and services for customers. And then at Drift, it was a little bit different. Had a really great well-known brand already. Reputable can kind of come in and show them like, "Hey, this is how we become a part of your workflow." I remember we got in with Accenture at Drift, which had not been done before. We began to run some pilots with them and showed them the kind of what could be possible, what they could and should be doing. They came back and they were like, "Yep, we see the opportunity here. We want to get you into these next two accounts." So it's really just about showing the leader, the CRO, CMO, COO, whoever, what is that path to value to getting that partner successful?

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(10:09):

And I've got decks, frameworks. I'm happy to share if anybody wants to reach out and see what those look like. I've used them at three stops now and they've all been well-received and utilized.

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Tyler Calder (10:18):

I know one of the things that a lot of folks I chat with, a lot of our customers at PartnerStack that are earlier stage, they struggle with something that you just touched on, which is partners don't know who they are. It's not necessarily a well-known brand. How did you approach that with Knak? How do you knock on someone's door when they don't know who they are and start to build that relationship to the point where it does become a fruitful partnership?

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Jason Yarborough (10:40):

I think there's two ways. One is you kind of come into a company like Knak with some previous relationship. I've got a lot of existing relationships with agencies. I've been doing this for a long time, so I can bring those alongside. But in this particular instance, I'll talk about one that I didn't know and has now become a really good relationship for us. One of our integration partners, our tech partners, I would ask them, and this is a common practice I've done everywhere. So I'll talk to our tech partners and say, "Hey, what agencies are you working with that we should begin thinking about? " I'm going to tell a little bit of a long story to get to your answer. What does our integration ecosystem look like? Great. Here's eight points on this little orbit that I've created. It could be CRM, marketing automation platform, sales engagement platform, whatever it might be, right?

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(11:20):

Find yours. And then I'll go find those tech partners that actually want to engage and want to do some work together. We've got some good overlap in customers. We're targeting the same ICP and that they're interested in doing some partnership stuff with us. So in this case, I went to Movable Ink and I said, "Hey, who are you working with? Who are some of your best agencies that we should know? Because what I want to build here is an ecosystem of integration partners, this case, Movable Ink, Iterable, few others on their line. And I want to find those agencies that are doing work for all those guys, at least three of them, so that I know they can build a solution that drives that time to first value for all of our customers that much faster." So Movable Ink named off a few different agencies and I went and reached out to a couple of them and I asked Movable Ink.

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(11:58):

I was like, "Hey, can you make an intro to them as well so that I can have that warm intro into a partner or agency?" And they introduced us to one called Bold Orange, who I've since developed a great relationship with and they're building really good solutions and products for a lot of that integration ecosystem for us like Movable, Braze and a few others. So it makes total sense. And so we started to talk, started to look at accounts, started to share who we're in talks with that they're currently working with and like, yeah, this kind of makes sense for us to look at your solution. Let's get some training, some enablement, show the team. Then they were interested enough to go through our academy training. And then I spent some time with them at, I think three conferences last year, and that was super helpful in taking on the relationship to the next level.

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(12:40):

Now they're fully certified. We're working, I think, three accounts together at the current moment. So it's been a very fruitful relationship that I just learned from doing the partner thing through our partners. And I think you can always find those diamonds in the rough, either through your integrations or through who your customers are already working with.

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Tyler Calder (12:57):

Yeah, I love that. I see so many people starting from literal scratch when, hey, you get out there, talk to some folks, see from a technology standpoint, who are they using, who should you be integrating with as a starting point? And then from there, once you get those partnerships rolling, what agencies are they working with? There's a little bit of a snowball effect, but I find a lot of people just make it way too hard on themselves.

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Jason Yarborough (13:20):

Very much so. Yeah. I spend too much time in the guest work and in the weeds when they're not looking at the data. There's a lot of partner data within your customer data. Who are the integrations? What are the most utilized integrations or the integrations that actually drive revenue and impact and expansion? Who are some of those top customers already working with? Look at the data, export the contacts within your accounts and see which of the email addresses don't align to the company name. Is there an email address in there that's an agency? Okay, great. Reach out to them. They know your product already, apparently.

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Tyler Calder (13:47):

Yeah. Cool. I love that. I want to move into talking about the three eyes because I think to a certain degree we've probably danced around it a little bit. You've talked about surface level, what seems like a fairly straightforward framework of Intel Intro's influence. Maybe let's start, where did the three eyes come from? What was the insight that helped you develop this framework and really lean into it? And then let's go one by one starting with Intel.

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Jason Yarborough (14:14):

Sure. So I want to take full credit for it. This was a nearbound principle from my days at Reveal. And something that we began to come up with as we're talking to customers or other partner leaders around what exactly it is you should be doing and how to summarize that so succinctly that the go- to-market teams can really truly understand it. And it became super helpful for me when I left Reveal to go service Reveal customers as a agency to really help these go- to-market teams best understand like, "Hey, what exactly is it you should be looking for and quote unquote asking for when you're working with partners." And it's something that I'm using today as I build a program at Knak. And those three eyes are intros, intel and influence. And if you think about it, if you're in partnerships when you're working with a partner, there's three things you're trying to get here.

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(14:58):

It's like a warm intro to an account, maybe a prospect, someone you've kind of been dancing around, maybe trying to get some intel. What's the procurement process look like? What is RevOps building right now? What is our marketing strategy? And then there's influence. You've got that open deal. You want some real true influence on how you can more effectively and efficiently close this deal. And so those are the three eyes that I take with me everywhere I go.

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Tyler Calder (15:20):

Talking about intros, how do you effectively get an intro? It might seem like a simple question, but again, it's one of those things that I find for whatever reason people struggle with to a certain degree.

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Jason Yarborough (15:32):

The obvious answer is to go to those places where you have the most relationship and trust built. I've spent a lot of time currently building trust with a few of our integration partners, spending time with their teams. And I'll even say too, I'll speak to the Drift days when we were really close with 6sense and I got really close with the enterprise sellers where we spent a lot of our time. And it got to the point where I got to know those guys so well, spent so much time with them, enabling them, training them, providing them with material, helping them out, that I was able to get them to build a slide directly into their pitch decks. So that's one way of getting them to make an intro, like sharing your integration, sharing your technology without you even asking, right? That's the ultimate utopian glory land, getting that level of trust and relationship with them.

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(16:15):

Right now, I'm teaching my team is like, all right, I'm spending all of my time with the movable links, the intervals, the brazes of the world, and I'm doing my due diligence to get to know this team. So I want my team, my sellers to reach out and make an ask like, "Hey, I'm working X account. Here's what we know to be true about them." Right now, a good example is a big tax company out there. They help you file your taxes and tax seasons coming up. And so we know the amount of emails that they send, we know what their emails look like. And so we can go to this partner and say, "Hey, we think this two letter company could be a great customer of ours. We know these emails are happening and tax season is upon us. We like to talk to them about how they're building their emails and creating them on the fly and to be more efficiently and get them to market faster." I think the trust, a company with the context and the reason for the ask is super helpful in getting another seller or account owner to make an intro for you.

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(17:03):

The one things I have found is like, "Hey, I'd like to get an introduction to Apple." We want to get them as a customer. We have 50 partners in ecosystem. They all want to get introductions to Apple. Why are you different here? So making a clear, direct ask around why this intro matters. And I think too, the reason I asked my account owners to be very strategic with their ask and not just blasting partners with everything. It's because they're not going to be able to introduce us to everybody. So we want to be very strategic and succinct with who we're asking about who. So if you're going to go to a Braze and make an ask, let's make sure we know exactly why we're asking and how we're going to ask. And I'm seeing that make a huge difference in getting support. And it may be one of those things too, like we see a lot that we make and ask about, "Hey, we're working with this account.

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(17:47):

We'd love to talk to the account owner about this." And I encourage my team to always start by getting some intel. If it works out to get an intro, that's great. You've knocked out two of the three eyes. But if you just get intel, I think you're better equipped and better armed going into a deal than you were before that call. And I would say 60, 70% of the time we'll get an intro to an account that'll come up, whether it's in a QBR or the next meeting, they'll bring us up. I just had a partner ask that, "Can you provide us with a one sheet that we can provide in our next strategic session with the customer?" So we spent a couple of calls with this partner and got to the point where they're like, "All right, yes, an intro makes sense." And I think an intro you have to be patient with because that's just the holy grail.

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Tyler Calder (18:27):

Yeah, I like that. So to say it back, there has to be an element of trust that's been built before you start asking for intros, which I think sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but we see it all the time where it's like new partner and then just start immediately blasting them with asks. It's like, "Hey, we did some account mapping. I see there's an overlap with these 10 accounts. Can you make some intros to all 10?" It's like, "Who are you? " "What do you mean? What? "So there's no trust or relationship that's been built. And then once you have that, the ask should be specific with context. So here's why we're asking, here's ... Yeah. Okay, cool. And then on the Intel front, you mentioned some of the intel you're looking for, things like procurement, like what that process looks like.

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(19:13):

What else are you looking for from an Intel standpoint?

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Jason Yarborough (19:16):

I think any information that can change how you run a deal, have an opportunity move through the funnel. I think good intel changes who you talk to. It changes when you engage and how you position yourself. You're going to better understand what technology they're using to currently build the thing you're trying to sell them, how they're solving the problem that you're trying to help them solve. We had a really good instance recently where it was a large shoe company. They were interested in chatting, but we didn't know much about how their current structure was, what they were doing. We learned they had a lot of in- house custom-built solutions, which proposes a challenge for anybody trying to sell technology, but they were very interested in how our product worked, how we integrated with these other technologies. And then all of a sudden they just went quiet.

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(19:56):

We had no idea what was going on. They wouldn't reply to anything. So we started to check around a partner with a partners like, " Hey, have you talked to this team so and so? "And they're like, " Oh yeah, they got laid off. "That's very important information. That's very important intel to have. And so that from there, it changes like, okay, this is how you're reaching out. And so you can go to the partner and say," Okay, well, are you talking to somebody else on that team that we might should know because we've had three conversations, here's what they were interested in and how we can continue to help them. And so it kind of helps us get back into the deal. Or you learn all sorts of information around the ability to accelerate a deal cycle, right? Maybe you're too low in the hierarchy of who you're talking to, but a partner can introduce you to the CMO or a CRO and help you kind of accelerate that deal.

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(20:38):

And there's a reason that partner deals close at about a 40% faster rate than a deal that you've outbounded through cold calling or whatever it might be because you're getting access to the right people. You're getting in there much faster through the trust and relationship that your partner already has with that account. So any of that Intel that they can share with you and the intel they can share with their customer only helps you move that deal so much faster. And the more you can teach your team that, the better off it's going to position your partner program internally.

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Tyler Calder (21:06):

Have you operationalized this in any way using tooling workflows or is it more like really just practicing the motion, getting the team kind of comfortable and confident?

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Jason Yarborough (21:19):

At Driftwood did a really good job, I think, of operationalizing this and really building a great workflow in. Myself and Andy Cochran who on the team worked with our ops team really closely to build out the partner intro request process that we had natively built inside of Salesforce. So our ops team, we told them, "Here's what we want to do. " We wanted to operationalize how they are prospecting into accounts and how they are making the ask to the partners. So using Crossbeam and a seller would get into Salesforce, our partner, PartnerStack worked with our prospect Fortinet, right? And the seller could hit this partnership request, is a good intro function inside of Salesforce that would pop up a pop-up box that says, "Okay, who's the account? This is the account. Partner is this partner. What's the ask? What do you need? What's the ultimate goal out of this?

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(22:07):

" And so it would hit submit and it would shoot some of that information along with the context out into a shared Slack channel with the partner, and the partner in that Select channel would therefore respond, introduce us to the account owner, and the process would pick up there with the accounts owner of the partner. And I think that when Andy and I rolled that out, took us about six to nine months to really get it to really pick up steam. But once it picked up, we began to see an increase of partner revenue, Gulfwords of 500% over the next 18 months. And so when we began to operationalize, put the power in their hands to be able to do this instead of us having to go around and work with 40 to 50 sellers, that thing began to steamroll and pick up a lot of speed.

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(22:46):

And so beginning to teach them out the gate, it's like, okay, the context looks like this, intros, intel, or influence. They have a better understanding of what they're going to the partner to ask and why the need to ask is so important.

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Tyler Calder (22:58):

And that we haven't talked a lot about influence. What does that mean in this context?

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Jason Yarborough (23:03):

Yeah. And I think that's often the most misunderstood, especially outside of the world of partner leaders. I've had it called fluffy, squishy. It doesn't count, but I think real influence is real, to put it mildly. I've seen a lot of accounts where we've opened the door, we've got the initial conversation, especially in the enterprise world where I'm spend a lot of time these days, you open the door to a large financial industry. Chances are they're working with a very strategic partner like a GSI. They might have some interest, but they're like, "Yeah, well, we have an agency or a partner that does a lot of this work for us. So you're going to have to run this through our agency partner." And so when the agency partner comes in and looks, they kind of, "Yeah, well, we've got this under control," but the more you begin to work with them and show them, they're more like, "Oh yeah, this is absolutely necessary and helpful." Matter of fact, financial institution, you need this product, you need to pay for it, you need to set it up and we'll run on the back end for you.

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(23:56):

So that's one example. But I think real influence actually drives the progress of what you're doing forward. Maybe you've got an account that's a very competitive deal. It's an open opportunity, but it's very competitive. Partner goes to that account says, "Hey, we understand you're talking to both X and Y. They're both partners of ours, or maybe we're both aware of both of them, but want to let you know that we have a great integration with this company, works in real time, works like this. We work with them because of these three things. So this is probably the one you would think about choosing if you're really serious about how you use our product." And there's a lot of deals that I've been involved in that have been very influential to closing that would not have happened without a partner. We just closed a large deal here at KKnakk that would not have happened without a partner and it happened within 90 days only because of the partner.

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(24:42):

And so when a partner comes along on those terms and helps the account understand why this is necessary, powerful, and you should do it, that is influence. I don't really consider influence if I'm like, "Oh, we heard you're talking to so- and-so, we gave them a good word." There is some levels of influence that can be fluffy or squishy. And I think a lot of programs probably lean too heavily on that. But for me, I'm looking for that influence that is really, truly either moving the deal forward or causing the deal to close. It removes the friction so that dealers can close themselves, right?

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Tyler Calder (25:09):

So deals can close themselves. I think that's-

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Jason Yarborough (25:12):

That's what we all want.

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Tyler Calder (25:14):

That's what we all want. I love that. Have you ever been in a spot where being able to quantify influence, like almost score your partner base based on the type of influence they might have within a specific industry or just general influence? Is it more you work with these folks so often you know where to bring them in, where not to. And I suppose where I'm going with the question is with the rise of AI, I see just about every conversation go down the path of how can I just put a number towards something? How can I score the account? How can I score the partner? How can I have a data point that directs me what to do with this thing? Have you ever been in a spot where you've done something like that? Or is it, like I said, you get to a point where you've worked with these folks so much, there is such trust and understanding within the relationship that you just know when to pull them in.

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Jason Yarborough (26:09):

For me, I think it's more the latter, but I've often toyed around with the idea of how to rank this influence, especially right now as I'm building a brand new program, how can we rank influence around like, "Hey, these guys just showed up in the account, gave us some influence. Doesn't really count towards attribution, but it kind of shows some level of activity that the partner is involved." Just for my clear understanding of where our partners are showing up and maybe not necessarily moving the deals, but I have enough data to show that on a new program, I've got these partners showing up in these sort of capacities. That helps me understand which types of partner to work with. And on the same front, when we were at, I guess every stop, anytime we ran a webinar, some sort of co-marketing deal, there was this level of co-marketing influence, but it all kind of fell up under the influence bucket.

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(26:50):

And I always wanted to be separate around this is co-marketing influence and this is co-sell influence. And I think it's really good to categorize it too and to kind of know how effectively our partners showing up in which capacity because it drifted a lot of what we saw once we built the co-marketing function into all the offers that Drift would run. And while I was there, we saw a massive increase in influence revenue of that. And the marketing team was stoked and thrilled to be having this level of registration, sign up closed deals and revenue being driven from their webinars now. But it all fell up under this one influence bucket. I was like, man, it'd be so great to see this split up, this split up and this split up and these different ways of how influence actually matters. And especially around right now when I'm working with all these GSIs, how is their level of influence showing up?

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(27:37):

How do we stack rank that versus like, do we have to paper through the GSI? Are they the ones that are driving this thing forward after we've opened the door kind of thing and whatnot so that I can have a clear understanding of which of these GSIs are doing more and which space. But I think it's a good practice to implement if you have the ability to do so.

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Tyler Calder (27:55):

I really love your comment around co-sell versus co-marketing type of influence, because I agree. I think there's a different way to look at that and a different way to evaluate it and the outcomes that you're looking for are a little bit different. And people try to measure everything the same way, I think just leads to poor decision-making. I think it reminds me a lot of marketing attribution, ight?

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(28:17):

People try to use a standard attribution model for all of their marketing, and that leads down the path of you kind of optimize towards the lowest common denominator, the thing that is driving last click attribution, let's say, right? Giving 100% of the credit to a thing that probably doesn't deserve 100% of the credit. And then you stop doing all of the stuff that is maybe actually filling up your funnel as an example. It's a little bit more first touch, but it's not getting any credit. So for me, I've always been of the mind, what is the outcome that we're looking for out of this investment? In this case, it's a co-marketing investment or a co-sell relationship. We should measure it based on that intended outcome, not kind of a blended approach.

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Jason Yarborough (28:58):

We eventually got there at Drift. It was an uphill battle, to say the least, to be able to get there to where it was all like, okay, yep, all right, we see what you're driving now and we see the work you're doing and why this is so good for us. Before I came on, Drift didn't really bring partners into webinars and these offers, they caught it and they put something in the market. So we started to do that as an experiment and it was so successful and worked so well that everything they did included a partner to the point now I was like, I would like to see some of this attribution being attributed to my team and those numbers reporting to us because we are bringing the partner in and you are driving these levels of numbers only because of the partner. And so we were able to say like, "All right, yep, we're all going to get credit for it here.

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(29:34):

It counts as influence to the partner team, but also towards the marketing team." We were able to work that out, but I was lucky in that scenario that they were able to share that and not fight too much about it.

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Tyler Calder (29:43):

Yeah. I mean, it's easy to say, but the more organizations can think like a single team kind of single target, the better, much easier said than done. Let's talk about Arcadia. Let's talk about it. What's going on? What is it? What does the word mean? Where do bears It's coming to play. What's going on in 2026?

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Jason Yarborough (30:07):

Yeah, so when I left Reveal, I was fortunate enough and that Simon, CEO at the time, was like, "Hey, I was starting to build out some services model for the company and what it can look like to provide services for our customers." And they were like, "We don't want to be a services house. Would you be interested in going out and being a consultant for us?" And I said, "Absolutely." So they sent me off the door with a few customers, which was very nice and gracious. And so at that time I was like, "Well, I've got to have a business now. What am I going to name this thing? What am I going to call it? " So I was working out one morning and the song came on and it was something Arcadia. And I was like, "Yeah, what does this word mean?" It didn't really have a clear understanding of what the actual term meant.

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(30:42):

Look it up and it meant harmony and that idyllic version of natural splendor. And so really thought about it. And the work that I did at Drift, Terminus PFL was really trying to establish harmony between the whole go- to-market function. Going back to that generalist conversation, I'm trying to establish harmony between the sales, marketing, CS, et cetera, and how they're utilizing partner data strategy and tactics. So I started to build this company. I was like, all right, I'm going to help existing partner programs better understand how to build, scale and operationalize through partner data strategy and tactics. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to help the partner leader go in and help train the sales function, the marketing function and everything and how they can become more collaborative and how they can work together and operationalize all the stuff that we were just talking about.

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(31:24):

And so Arcadia became the name of the company because it meant harmony. Alongside of that, because at that time I was an entrepreneur and I could just ... I had time. Let's do some things. I've got an extensive events background. Going back to that journalist conversation again, I spent six years running a conference, the first ever social media conference back in the day. Sam, my wife also has an extensive events background. We're like, "It'd be fun to post our own conference one of these days." And they were going to talk like, "Well, how fun would it be to do it here in Bozeman, Montana because no one ever does a conference here." And we've talked to a lot of people that are like, "Oh man, wish we had a reason to come to Montana. If you ever do anything, let us know. " And so I took them up.

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(32:02):

I was like, "All right, we're going to do something here in Bozeman, Montana." So we decided to do it in the most Bozeman, Montana way possible and make it a glamping experience. So everybody sleeps in glamping tents. The whole event is outdoors under the stars and the big sky here in Montana. We lean heavily on experiences and relationship building because again, Arcadia means harmony. And we want you to find that in your own life and the work you do, the life you live and the careers that you're building and driving towards. And our thing is we believe better people are better leaders. So we want to create a space for leaders to safely and bravely invest in themselves to become that best version of themself. And we believe that brings harmony into the work you do, the family you're leading, the friendships you're creating, relationships you're creating, et cetera.

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(32:46):

And so Arcadia became this events company. We're getting ready to host our third event here in Bozeman this summer. And then the events were going so well. People were having really, I think monumental experiences. We've gotten a lot of feedback on how we've helped people change the outlook of their career and their life, et cetera, and people wanted more of it. So we started to think about how we could make this into a community that would gather once a month. So we built this online community that we're calling the Arcadia Constellation because together we make this one whole big picture. And again, going back to my principles of Arcadia, the attendee, the member, whatever you want to call it, is a leader that's across the go- to-market function. So you have to be a director level or above to attend and be a member. And we are looking for people in revenue and in the sales function, in the marketing function, CS, partnerships.

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(33:33):

We want to bring that whole conversation together around how we build organizations that thrive as one function, how we collaborate the best instead of trying to do it in siloed ways. And we can only do that through making one big, huge, beautiful picture of both the work you're doing and the life you're creating.

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Tyler Calder (33:50):

Nice. That's awesome. Where can people find out more? Where the bear came from.

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Jason Yarborough (33:55):

 So if you go to bearcadia.com, you'll find out more information. But when Sam and I were trying to figure out what the domain was going to be, it's kind of hard to find something Arcadia. So I was like, in my mind, I wanted people to be great, be harmonious, Be Arcadia. And that's my signature was be great, Be Arcadia in all my emails. So if you look at that domain, it looks like Bear Acadia. So I was like, man, let's really just start to mess with some people. We were thinking about what the design should look like, what the colors, logo. And I was like, I'd love to have a bear as the logo because A, it's the natural splendor piece of it, like the outdoors, the whole thing we're doing outside here in Montana, really lean into that aspect of things.

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(34:33):

But also the best part of it is I really mess with people. So when they say Bear Acadia, I kind of know out the gate you haven't really done your due diligence to find out who we are, what we do, so you're kind of disqualified if you're reaching out to us cold. And so if you can see here on my pen, the Arcadia, the Bear, little fact about the Bear, the nose is the A to Arcadia. And the whole thing is created by Sam. This is a custom font created by Sam, a bear created by Sam. And all the design and creative is done by my beautiful wife.

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Tyler Calder (35:05):

Nice. That's amazing. And I would certainly encourage people to check it out. Have you officially announced the event this summer?

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Jason Yarborough (35:14):

It's been announced inside of the community, inside the constellation. Last year we celebrated your birthday at Arcadia. This year we'll be celebrating my birthday at Arcadia. That'll be the end of July.

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Tyler Calder (35:26):

I can certainly vouch for the experience. This will be my third year and it's an experience like no other. So I'd absolutely encourage people to check it out.

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Jason Yarborough (35:34):

Yeah, I think it's going to be fun this year. We've changed locations. We've got some new vendors and new place, a little more remote this year with actually in the mountains, which is going to be fun next to a much bigger, more fishable creek. So that's going to be fun and got some good hiking nearby and all sorts of fun stuff that we're going to be able to do on this new location.

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Tyler Calder (35:53):

Awesome. Very cool. Well, we're looking forward to it. Thank you for the conversation. Good, sir. Absolutely. This was great.

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Jason Yarborough (36:00):

Thanks for having me. I'm glad we got to do this together.

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Tyler Calder (36:02):

How can people find you if they have any questions?

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Jason Yarborough (36:05):

LinkedIn is probably best. Jason Yarborough, linkedin.com/n/yarby, pretty much Yarby anywhere. So shoot me a DM. If you have any questions, want to see any materials that I've built. I'm pretty much a free open book. I've shared a lot of my stuff over the years and happy to keep doing so.

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Tyler Calder (36:20):

Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Good to have you. Yeah, great to be here. Be great. Bye everyone. Thanks for listening to Get It, Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app. And get more proven tips and tools at partnerstack.com/getittogether.