How Partner Managers Can Activate the Salesforce Ecosystem

Sam Yarborough (00:00):

There's a lot of companies that are partner-curious, and so they'll hire somebody and be like, let's see if this works. And then they set that person up for failure because the sales team doesn't want to give 'em time of day. Marketing gives them no support and they have no partner integrations. And so just kind of understanding the needs for success and the why you want a partnership before you invest in this is so important.

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Tyler Calder (00:25):

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. Hello everyone and welcome to Get It, Together. If you are building inside the Salesforce ecosystem or thinking about it, this episode is required listening. I learned a ton and I had so much fun doing it. I had the great pleasure of sitting down with our guest, Sam Yarborough. She's the co-founder of Arcadia and one of the most experienced operators in cloud partnerships I have met. She was the chief growth officer at Invisory and the SVP of Partnerships at PFL.com where she truly built the playbook for succeeding within the Salesforce ecosystem. We get into everything: her journey from graphic design to leading partnerships at the highest levels, how to engage and activate Salesforce AEs. We talk the leading and lagging indicators you need to be monitoring as you get the revenue flywheel moving within that ecosystem. And of course, we talk about Arcadia and why she is all in on building it. I hope you enjoy.

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(01:39):

All right. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Get It, Together, our new podcast over here at PartnerStack. And I am thrilled to be joined by one of the sharpest operators in the partner space. Someone I've gotten to know past year, I think. Is that right, Sam? I think the past year.

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Sam Yarborough (02:01):

I think so, yeah.

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Tyler Calder (02:02):

I have always left any conversation we've had certainly having learned something, but also just having a ton of fun and I think we'll likely do the same today. So you just wrapped up your role as Chief Growth Officer for the Salesforce business at Invisory?

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Sam Yarborough (02:21):

Correct.

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Tyler Calder (02:21):

Previous to that, you're the SVP of Partnerships at PFL.com.

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Sam Yarborough (02:26):

Yep.

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Tyler Calder (02:26):

Previous to that, very interesting journey, which I'm going to come back to, so I'm not going to spoil that, but now you're all in on building Arcadia. You're the co-host of the Friends With Benefits podcast, one of my favorite listens, a podcast that certainly inspired us over here at PartnerStack to start this one. So thank you for being here. Did I miss anything? What's maybe a quirky fact we could toss in there?

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Sam Yarborough (02:51):

Oh, let's see. Quirky fact, I have a May minor in vocal performance. So many people don't know that one. I will not be singing today, but.

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Tyler Calder (03:00):

Okay, so you addressed the follow-up question pretty quickly, like you stopped it before I could ask. That's good.

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Sam Yarborough (03:07):

Shout out really quick because on our podcast we found this out about one of our guests and then we asked him to play the saxophone. Mason Crosby. We asked him to play the saxophone at the end, and he did, and he delivered. So after that, I have a little stage fright.

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Tyler Calder (03:21):

Oh, okay. I understand. I won't ask for any singing. I'd love to just dive right in. One of the things I always like to get right into is any misconceptions. What are maybe one or two of the big misconceptions that folks have about the Salesforce ecosystem, the things that maybe are actually setting themselves up for failure just because of that misconception?

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Sam Yarborough (03:45):

I love that you start there. I think it's such an important conversation to have for any ISV or partner leader that's considering Salesforce for sure, but any large major ecosystem. So Salesforce is for sure my bread and butter. We also helped with hyperscalers, so Azure, Google, AWS, and I think the misconceptions are the same across the board in that as a partner you would show up, you would become listed, whether that's on the AppExchange or the other marketplaces, and then you're ready to go, you're in the races and leads start flowing and business starts going, and that is absolutely not true. These ecosystems take a lot of time, resources, alignment, and so making sure that you understand why both internally, what's the strategy for entering these ecosystems, why it's important to your business, and then the overall alignment of resources and internal metrics, KPIs, et cetera, that are going to support that.

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Tyler Calder (04:47):

And so when somebody comes to Invisory and says, Hey, we're already part of the Salesforce ecosystem, we're already listed or we're thinking about it, what are they hoping to get out of that? What's the initial kind of catalyst of people thinking, Hey, you know what, I really, I got to get in there, I got to get listed. Whether that's with Salesforce, another hyperscaler, another cloud marketplace, what are they hoping to achieve? What are those outcomes?

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Sam Yarborough (05:12):

Yeah, so I think everybody mean, obviously this is a generalization, but I would say 90% of people enter these ecosystems with the goal of the Easy Pipeline. There's obviously a myriad of other benefits to going into these ecosystems. You can ride alongside the major brand of Salesforce, you get access to their 300,000 customers. You can leverage that brand to build more trust and just size to your brand. But all of those things are kind of secondary and tertiary to pipeline. So every partner comes into the ecosystems and wants revenue and pipeline quick. So that's a nice goal and I want that too. We all do, but the leading indicators and the work that it takes to get that pipeline, realistically, six months would be great. It's probably more like 12 to 18 until you're going to see that flywheel.

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Tyler Calder (06:04):

Got it. Folks have this impression that if I'm there, the rest will follow. Typical if you build it, they'll come to the mentality. What kind of level setting would happen when you were helping these orgs? What does that conversation look like? I've always thought about it as what it takes to be marketplace-ready, network-ready. Is that the starting point? Is just kind of walking through that? Is it something else?

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Sam Yarborough (06:30):

Yeah, I, I talk about this with a lot of partnerships, whether it's ecosystems or not marketplaces or not, but making sure that you understand the why and you have internal alignment across the board around that. Why we oftentimes would work with the partner leader and they have a very clear picture on why they want to be a Salesforce partner, but have they articulated that clearly up to the CRO, the CMO, the CEO, making sure that the executive team is aligned, understands the work ahead, but the value that's going to come from this and then what's required of each of their teams. So a lot of partner people are at it on their own to begin with. And I'm just going to say it flat out, if you're a team of one, you cannot manage more than one ecosystem effectively at least to start. So you better be very good at asking for internal resources and alignment.

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(07:25):

What are we doing? Why are we doing this? And is everybody on the same page? And then I think a lot of it is, I think that's overlooked a lot, but messaging, so just because you're listed on the AppExchange or a marketplace doesn't mean, as you said, you build it. They will come, you need to go out and activate the sales teams at Salesforce or whatever, and you need to understand all the different personas that you're going to be working up against. So you're going to have AEs obviously, but solution engineers are a part of that. RVPs, AVPs and all of those people care about something different. And so understanding your value prop to the market, to the end customer, but also to all those individual partner personas you're going to come up against so that you can start to build relationships and create a flywheel, which is not an overnight thing.

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Tyler Calder (08:11):

Not an overnight thing. When we're talking about being listed, what does that actually mean? Help people picture maybe what we're talking about if they've never been part of this world, they've never been exposed to it.

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Sam Yarborough (08:25):

Sure. So it's different for every ecosystem and there's a lot of companies like Invisory that can help you list for the hyperscalers. So basically you are available on their marketplace for purchase. So you have to make sure that from a product perspective you are aligned. There's a whole bunch of details that go into that from a procurement perspective and whatnot. For the hyperscalers, for Salesforce, the ideal stay is you have a managed package where you're native within Salesforce, you've gone through security review with them, and you now have a live listing on the AppExchange. The difference between Salesforce and the hyperscalers, just so everybody is clear, is on the Salesforce AppExchange, as of now, you cannot actively purchase an application. It's more of like a lead capture. So somebody comes to you and sees PartnerStack on the AppExchange, it's like a get it now button and then one of your sales team would follow up, whereas on the hyperscalers, you can just purchase right there, start procurement and move a lot faster.

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Tyler Calder (09:28):

The folks that buy through a marketplace or in the Salesforce instance, might show interest and submit themselves to have a sales conversation. Who are those folks? What is that persona? The type of company that will buy through a marketplace?

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Sam Yarborough (09:45):

Yeah. Okay. So again, Salesforce is a little bit different. So the personas, it depends on what your application does. A lot of personas find themselves on the AppExchange, whether it's a more technical admin, that's probably going to be the majority of the people that are searching that. But there's lots of different clouds within Salesforce. So some of them are marketers if they're working on Marketing Cloud or some of them are data engineers. It just depends. To be honest, the AppExchange is not the reason that you join the Salesforce partnership program, in my opinion. It's certainly an added value, but it's not going to be where you generate the most leads and find the most business.

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Tyler Calder (10:28):

What are folks joining for?

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Sam Yarborough (10:30):

So they're joining for access to the Salesforce customer list or customers rather. They're never going to give you a customer list, but that is all found and built through relationships with Salesforce sellers. So the AppExchange is absolutely a necessary and a step one, but it's not going to be the end-all-be-all after you have this, you got to understand what industry you're focused on. I think that's super important. If you go have a partnership with Salesforce, and for listeners, I'm doing air quotes, you're going to drown because Salesforce is so big. So you got to start smaller, and this doesn't mean you can never branch out of that, but choose an industry to start with because those sellers are then going to learn about you. They're going to tell their friends, they're going to tell their boss. It's going to just compound a lot faster and easier for you. And that's why you joined the Salesforce ecosystem because once you sell with a Salesforce AE, you offer them a great experience, not only for them by helping them reach quota, closing a deal faster, solving whitespace that they don't have in their product stack maybe, and then ultimately the end customer, that AE is going to come back to you time and time again if you did it right. And that's how the flywheel starts.

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Tyler Calder (11:45):

So that's the flywheel that you mentioned, and it sounds very relationship-based. Let's talk about that. Presumably it's pretty difficult to get in front of a Salesforce AE and get their attention and you mentioned you start somewhere, those that are doing it really, really well. What does that look like? How are they getting in front of the AEs? How are they getting that flywheel going? What can folks learn from that?

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Sam Yarborough (12:14):

Yeah, so great question. I think there's a lot of levels of maturity there. Let's start with someone who's maybe brand new. This is a brand new partnership that you're kicking to the ground. So the best place to start is with your current customers, joint customers. Salesforce, like most ecosystems, sells on wins. And so if you can start there, you're going to have a lot more success. So say that you have a few customers who are on Salesforce and using your application better yet, they're already using the integration. So you want to build a win stories with Salesforce calls about this, but here was the pain point of the customer before us. Here's how we solved it and here's how we make the Salesforce plus us better for the customer. And then you want to work with your Salesforce Partner Account Manager, PAM, to find out who the AE for that account is.

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(13:02):

And it's really just information sharing at that point of like, Hey, I know we have a joint customer in Coca-Cola. I wanted to just quickly share with you how we're helping them and who we're working with and maybe there's ways that we could figure out how to support them better. And once you get on the phone with this AE, you're going to share everything you know about this customer, who you're working with, what their pain points are, how you solved the problem for them. The more information you can give them, the more trust they're going to return to you obviously. And then you're going to just keep following up with relevant information. I like to reference the three i's all the time. So Intel, do you have Intel on the account? Maybe you saw Google alert about, I don't know, a new hire, an acquisition, whatever, an intro. Is there a new contact you can talk to or tell them about and then influence? This is the main point Tyler, that I think a lot of people miss is they come out the gates talking all about their solution, their ISV. The Salesforce AE gives a rat's ass about your ISV. They want to know how they're going to reach quota better, how they can provide a better solution for their customer and do it faster. And so if you can wrap the value of your ISV in that you're going to find more success.

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Tyler Calder (14:15):

Interesting. Let's go with that level of maturity. I'm new. I have a joint customer that I've identified, so that's a great starting point. I get in, I start chatting with that Salesforce rep on the other side. You mentioned the things that will get them interested. Are there things that completely derail that conversation or is that as simple as what you just said? If it's all about just you, it's probably not going to go anywhere. Are there any other small things that might just, they ghost you never really get the type of traction you're looking for?

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Sam Yarborough (14:49):

Oh, a hundred percent. They will ghost you more often than not. And so I think again, that you brought up earlier about coming back to that relationship piece. If you're not good to work with and you're a pain in the ass, then they have 5,000, 10,000 other ISV partners that are trying to get their attention. And so if you say you're going to do something, do it. Make it easier for them. Don't make them search for information about you. We always suggest, and I have done this in the past, but have your ISV ready, package ready to send for them so that they can immediately share it with their customer if they have to do any work to put you in front of their customer, not going to happen. So I think putting yourself in their shoes, thinking about where they're at with their quota, what's important to them and how you can make that easier is going to be the best. And then you're going to have to follow up maybe a few times because they're not going to react on this the first time.

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Tyler Calder (15:45):

So right now we're talking about person to person. Is there anything that the company, the ISV should be doing to make the job of that partner person a little bit easier in getting attention?

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Sam Yarborough (16:01):

Great. Great question. So product is obviously super important. How your product roadmap aligns with that of the ecosystem. So especially now, AI is a huge thing for everybody. And so Salesforce is pretty much solely focused on agent force. If your company doesn't have an AI narrative, then you're a product team. You guys need to at least figure out how you're talking about that or what the plan is because if you don't, you're going to be left behind. And so more high level, just how are you aligning your product roadmap to that of the cloud provider and that shows that you're invested and interested. Marketing, marketing is a huge, huge part of this as you know better than I do, but a lot of companies will assume like, oh, well we have a partner person, they'll deal with that in the Salesforce, all of them really, events are a huge part of this.

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(16:57):

This is where you meet the reps face to face. This is where you can have customer meetings. So how are you thinking about your event strategy aligned with your partners and what kind of co-marketing activations are you doing not only at events but throughout the year, webinars, newsletters, all the basics. And so those are huge things that need to be talked about. And then I think too, one that maybe is not so obvious, but what are the goals of the partner team and what metrics do the other departments have that align to that? Because if you've set the partner team with, I don't know, 50% sourced goal for the year and there's one person and they have no resources, that's not going to work. And so from the executive level down, maybe there's metrics around number of co-marketing events we do throughout the year or number of integrations built, whatever it is that aligns with your strategy. How can this be a company-wide initiative rather than the single partner person?

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Tyler Calder (17:54):

Is that common where it's a single partner person kind of taking on the burden and top down there's just an expectation, hey, make it work?

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Sam Yarborough (18:02):

Unfortunately, yes, and I think that's why I started with alignment when you asked me what you need to be marketplace-ready. I think that's agnostic to partner-ready. A lot of people, my husband coined this term. Maybe didn't coin it, but he uses it a lot. "Partner-curious." There was a lot of companies that are partner-curious and so they'll hire somebody and be like, let's see if this works. And then they set that person up for failure because the sales team doesn't want to give 'em time of day. Marketing gives them no support and they have no partner integrations. And so just kind of understanding the needs for success and the why you want to partnership before you invest in this is so important.

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Tyler Calder (18:43):

Nice. I want to go back to the AI piece for a second because I think that's a great point where you as the ISV wanting to partner into an ecosystem, in this case the Salesforce ecosystem, in almost every instance, you're going to have to have some kind of narrative that aligns with their objectives and their narrative. Where I'm ignorant is if I'm a Salesforce rep, can I retire quota on work with any ISV that I've partnered with? Or is it typically quarter to quarter that might change to like, Hey, I can only retire quota if it is an ISV that is in this vertical or has this AI first narrative?

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Sam Yarborough (19:26):

That's a great question. So I say this as of now because I feel like things are moving quickly. This has been the way this way for years in the Salesforce world. But I do think with Agent Force in the new pricing structure and everything around that, we are going to see changes in the next several quarters over the next several quarters I should say. But typically as a Salesforce ISV, your rev share back to Salesforce is 15% for every deal you sell that has Salesforce, and this could mean Salesforce helped you with the deal or not. If Salesforce is a part of the product that you sell, you owe them 15% back, which can be very daunting for a lot of ISVs. Conversely, the other marketplaces, I think it's 3% for Azure and AWS. So stark differences. And so that's another conversation you got to have internally. A lot of partner people will get so far down the road and then they'll tell CFO, CMO, whoever, CEO 15%, and that's a hard no. So I think understanding the value of that and why that's so important is a super, you need to have that in your back pocket and Salesforce will help you with that for sure. But you can look at it as, I would actually like this, your opinion on this, but some people look at it as a marketing cost. It brings your CAC down maybe if you're paying 15%, but the flywheel should take care of it.

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Tyler Calder (20:55):

Yeah, I mean that's how I would look at it is it's part of your cost to acquire, and then you just got to look at the economics of that. How does that stack up against the other acquisition channels? And I think there's probably a conversation to have where it's not like there's, I think, a larger benefit and opportunity to being in an ecosystem. And so maybe you give a little bit of leeway on how high that costs to acquire can go, or maybe you don't. But that's just where I think understanding the economics of the motion and going back to what we've talked a lot about over the past year is can you actually have that conversation with the CFO, if that's popping up as a surprise to me that says, as a partner leader, you're probably not consistently talking the language of the business, otherwise you would've known I got to get ahead of this one.

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Sam Yarborough (21:50):

For sure. And if you've talked about the value of the partnership up until this point and everybody's aligned, then hopefully that conversation is a lot easier rather than, I think we should build a partnership with Salesforce, but it's going to cost us 15% of all clients. Of course that's not going to land.

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Tyler Calder (22:07):

Yeah, definitely. I love all of that. I'd love to talk about all of this great insight and wisdom that you have. Your journey here has been, I think, a somewhat interesting one starting out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but starting out more on the brand and design side of things. How did you end up in partnerships?

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Sam Yarborough (22:29):

How did anybody end up in partnerships? You were right though. Yes, I have a degree in graphic design, which comes in handy when I don't have partner marketing resources. So things I did not foresee being helpful. So it started in actually advertising. I did billboards for many years. I was the creative director for a billboard shop in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I worked with customers like Dunkin' Donuts, who else? The American Heart Association and pretty big brand names, and then Joe's Plumbing down the street. So across the board, but I did everything. We learned how to write copy, we learned how to do the actual design. It was so fun. And so I really cherished that work. And then after that I realized that I wanted, every time a customer would come to me, I'd be like, okay, so how does this fit into your overall strategy and what's the other campaigns?

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(23:25):

And I was asking way more questions and it clicked to me that I want to understand more of the marketing side of this and the overall impact to the business that these campaigns are having. And so I went on my own and started a little marketing agency where we did social media emails. We did just full campaigns rather than just out of home, which was really fun. I learned a ton. I think that was actually a really pivotal time that set me up for partnerships. Well, because there was no one else, I had to go sell my own business. I had to write my own invoices, run my own books, do my own marketing, the whole shebang, which if you boil it down most time partnership people are doing all of that. And so that really set me up. Then I went into financial services for a while, which that's a story for another time.

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(24:14):

I can tell you about retirement products if you want, but then Jason, my husband took a job at PFL here in Bozeman, which was interesting. He actually applied for a marketing job and the person was like, have you heard of partnerships? And he was like, no. So he worked there for about three years and then got recruited to move to Terminus after that and left. And they were just like, who the heck are we going to replace you with? Because much similar to me, he was doing a ton of evangelism and marketing and had just a skillset that wasn't super normal for a partner person. And so they hired me and, Tyler, looking back, it's hilarious. I didn't know what partnerships were. I think about my first interview and I was like, I would've never hired me. No way. They were like, what's the first thing you're going to do to figure out what the strategy should be? And I was like, listen. So it was actually such a great experience though that obviously kicked us off into the partnership world. And it is funny to look at this because the partnership program that Jason left at PFL, not because it was bad, but I just was thinking about things differently. I just went a completely different direction than he did.

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Tyler Calder (25:31):

Oh, I love this. Let's get into this a little bit more.

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Sam Yarborough (25:34):

Talking about marital strife.

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Tyler Calder (25:35):

Yeah.

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Sam Yarborough (25:35):

No, just kidding. There was no strife. There were 30 partners at PFL and looking at the numbers, it wasn't clear to me that there was a consistency of where revenue was coming from or a strategy on where we should be focusing. So we had agency partners, which adjacent thrives in that world and had a lot of great agencies, and I couldn't really figure that out to be honest. It just wasn't clicking in my head. And then we had Salesforce, Marketo, Adobe now and who else do we have? And then a few ISV partners, tangental ISV partners, but I started to just notice a few bread front crumbs from Salesforce. And so I went to my executive team and this was actually the pitch. I was like, listen, I just had a conversation with a Salesforce AE and she loved what we can do for her customers.

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(26:25):

So she's hosting a webinar where she's bringing, I think it was like 29 of her customers, and I'm doing an enablement session for them, and she's a trusted resource. These people want to come to this. And my CEO looked at me and he goes, how long it takes a BDR to book 29 meetings? And that was kind of the impetus of this is going to get us there faster and it needs more resources. And so we did. We leaned in. By the time I left PFL, we had five on our partner team and 65% of revenue was coming directly from Salesforce.

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Tyler Calder (26:58):

Oh, wow.

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Sam Yarborough (26:59):

It's been a journey.

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Tyler Calder (27:00):

Yeah, 65% of revenue coming from Salesforce all started with that webinar?

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Sam Yarborough (27:06):

Pretty much. Yeah. Let me be fair.

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Tyler Calder (27:08):

Pretty good webinar.

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Sam Yarborough (27:10):

I got to give call out. What call? It's due. Java Roberts. If you don't know her, she's such a fabulous, excellent, so smart. She started the Salesforce partnership at PFL and then left and it just kind of died. And so it was a resuscitation. It was not a start from scratch.

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Tyler Calder (27:28):

Cool. And then from there joined... it was Invisory right after that.

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Sam Yarborough (27:33):

It was, yeah, so that was an interesting journey. I really kind of set this off was I needed a better way to track partnerships because I had so many conversations with Salesforce reps, I just couldn't keep track of it in a Google sheet. So I worked with an ops person who is just the best ever, and we built this tracking system for tracking individual Salesforce AEs within our CRM Salesforce, which accounts they owned, how active they were, who their RVP was. So basically I could open up my Salesforce every day as a partner manager and have a next best action of like, okay, I haven't talked to this AE in two weeks. Last time we talked it was just running a pipeline just like a sales team would do. And so Salesforce heard about this and they asked me to speak at one of their events and I showed this and Mike Davis, whose company was just acquired by Invisory, was in the audience or no, he was actually on the panel with me, cornered me after that and said, we need to hire you. And it took them about a year and then I finally went over to Invisory and that was that.

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Tyler Calder (28:41):

Very cool.

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Sam Yarborough (28:41):

It was quite a shift. Then I got to teach ISVs of all shapes and sizes, how to run successful partner programs and I learned just as much as they did, I hope. And it was quite a journey.

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Tyler Calder (28:51):

That's awesome. That's very cool. I love that. I love that story. You made a comment. I want to go back to something you said a couple minutes ago. You mentioned both you and Jason, maybe not a so-called normal skillset for partnerships. What do you mean by that? What is a normal set of skills that you see in partner leaders and what do you think needs to happen to round that skillset out? What are the things that maybe you were bringing to the table that were a great compliment to that so-called kind of normal skillset?

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Sam Yarborough (29:29):

Okay, so that's a great question. And when I say normal, I want to be clear. I'm talking about what that particular partner program was looking for because just as I talked about being a small business owner, I had to wear all hats, all partner people have to wear all hats, and I am very good. I think I am good at evangelism and building alliances internally and externally and kind of that relationship marketing part, sales even. Whereas there are certain partner programs, I think it's somebody who's super great on the product side and is a more technical leader. And so if I'm going to generalize this, I think that's just it. You need to be a generalist and be able to be comfortable with ambiguity, wear a lot of hats, and be able to articulate the value across many personas. And then there's going to be partner people that excel in one area over the other. And that's great because there is certain companies that need different skill sets.

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Tyler Calder (30:29):

That's all fair.

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Sam Yarborough (30:30):

But you asked what's the one skill? And you already referenced this, we've talked about this a lot. Know your strengths for sure and try to fill in skills that aren't as strong. But I think the biggest one is speaking the language of the business, which a lot of partner people don't have. And so that's an area we can all level up. I'm still leveling up on that.

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Tyler Calder (30:51):

And I know that idea of talking the language of the business for me, that usually skews a little bit towards the financial language of the business. It was a hot topic of conversation last year, ALX. So let's talk about that. What's Arcadia? Why take the leap and try to get in there and build?

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Sam Yarborough (31:11):

Yeah, so Arcadia is, we're so passionate about this. So it started as helping partner people and go-to-market leaders, find harmony, which is what Arcadia means in their programs, in their companies and be more effective. Jason and I have been in partnerships for years now and we've seen so many great people just not get it. There's just something there. And so Arcadia exists to help people build those internal alignment whatnot, figure out the tactics. We started Arcadia, which is Arcadia leadership experience last year. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being our title sponsor this year PartnerStack. And we're bringing out 75 go-to-market leaders. And our whole point is let's not create a silo. So we want CMOs and CROs and CEOs in the room as well as partner professionals so that we can help people learn to talk through the business because there are communities where partner leaders talk to partner leaders and we all feel like we're kings of the world in those rooms. But then you step out and you got to have the right resources to be effective there. So Arcadia exists to help partner leaders, but then one thing we found last year is that again, Arcadia means harmony and harmony for yourself is super important too, which is why Arcadia leadership experience is hosted in Montana at a glamping resort with pretty shitty cell service and not great internet so that people have a chance to unplug, truly build great relationships with the peers and kind of have a moment to disconnect and reconnect with themselves.

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Tyler Calder (32:46):

That was great. I loved it. I had a great time last year and expect the same this year for sure. So super, super happy that you and Jason are trying to build this out in the space. I think the community needs it. I think that's a thank you. I think that's a thank you for doing it. I have two closing questions.

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Sam Yarborough (33:09):

Alright, let's do it.

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Tyler Calder (33:10):

The first one, getting back to the Salesforce ecosystem where we can broaden it just to any ecosystem or any of the hyperscaler marketplaces and is talking to you, wants your advice, what are the things that you look at or the characteristics of a company of an ISV that suggests either they are a good fit right now or are not a good fit right now to even attempt to not just get listed but get listed and actually lean in and drive some value out of it?

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Sam Yarborough (33:43):

So I think first and foremost is well before you can even have the conversation product. So is your product aligned and do you either have the resources to build the listing slash integration or is that done? But probably even before that we talked about what is the value of this partnership to your company and are you aligned on that because it's going to take longer than you expect. It's going to take resources. And so if anybody on the executive team is kind of wishy-washy of why you're doing this, there's going to be a lot of hurdles where they say that's not producing, let's pull the resource. So that conversation needs to happen first. And then I think you need to figure out what the resourcing is. So again, if it's one person that's great, but you need to have a realistic expectation of the timeline and the value they're going to provide out the gate.

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Tyler Calder (34:29):

And is that one person doing this full time, is that one person, this is 50% of their role, what does that look like?

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Sam Yarborough (34:39):

I think it's take what you can get. So every program's different, but obviously the more resources you put in, the more you're going to get out. And I think that's the basis of partnerships. I think the other thing too is to understand leading indicators, and we did talk about this, but pipeline is not going to be the first thing you see. It's really not. And so understanding what those are, and it's going to be meetings booked with Salesforce AEs, account mapping done, looking at overlap of current customers and pipeline enablements. So all of those are going to come first and just making sure you're really clear on that so that you're not in Q1 being reprimanded for the lack of pipeline because it won't be there.

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Tyler Calder (35:18):

Right. Cool. I like it. The second question, quite different. Okay. Any advice for folks out there that might be thinking about making a career shift in the way that you did?

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Sam Yarborough (35:36):

That's a great question. Jason and I were actually just talking about this the other night as we've done this multiple times in our life and sometimes it was super intentional and other times it was just by happenstance. I think the major thing I would suggest is staying curious always and just like we're talking about learning the language of the business, learn the language of the trade. So ask questions that are open-ended, be good to work with, be a quick learner and that's how we've done it. But yeah, I mean you have to walk into the room and be very comfortable that you don't know everything and you're not the smartest person in the room anymore and that's okay. It actually could be to your benefit.

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Tyler Calder (36:18):

I love it. Yeah, I think curiosity is something that I see so many folks lose as they grow in their career, but then it's also the thing that seems most common amongst the folks that really keep going in their career, have big impact, can take on various types of projects, change roles, curiosity certainly seems to be that shared characteristic.

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Sam Yarborough (36:43):

Man. I think even especially now, even if you're not changing careers with AI coming into everything, if you weren't curious, you got to be careful because the world's changing and...

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Tyler Calder (36:54):

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, not to go too far down the AI path, but I think it's interesting, there's so many studies now coming out around AI and what it's doing to our brains and what it does to our ability to learn and stay curious, but I think it can actually be an ally in helping you relearn how to be curious if that seems to be something that maybe you've lost, use it as your little robotic buddy who's not going to judge you as you're asking questions that maybe you think I don't have the confidence to ask this in that room because I don't want to come across as maybe I feel a little bit silly. I think, yeah, getting comfortable just with that. And then I even think I've been doing this a little bit where I have calls recorded, I'll take the transcript and I'll dump it into ChatGPT and I'll say, Hey, hit me hard. Critique me. Where was I closed off? Where could I have been more curious? Where could I have asked better questions? What do you think my blind spots are? And I'll get back very good feedback.

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Sam Yarborough (37:59):

I love that.

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Tyler Calder (38:01):

And I think, yeah, at least for me it's been a cool use case just to make sure that I feel like I am not an old person stuck in my ways and I'm staying curious.

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Sam Yarborough (38:13):

For sure. And I think the coolest thing about AI is maybe not the first, but it's one of the first major tools where you can ask it how to use it better.

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Tyler Calder (38:21):

Yeah, that's a great point.

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Sam Yarborough (38:22):

And so if you're not sure about how to even use AI, open GPT and say, how can I use you effectively?

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Tyler Calder (38:28):

Yeah, no, you're bang on. I do that regularly where I sense myself getting frustrated with our robotic friend and like, Hey, listen, this isn't working for me. What you're spitting back, I don't agree. I don't like it. Can you just help me do this better?

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Sam Yarborough (38:49):

I had to tell mine to stop being so nice. It was really annoying. It was like that agreeable aunt at the dinner table that thinks you're perfect. And I was like, stop. So yeah, agreed. So stay curious and I think you're right. The tools we have available to us now are so powerful if you choose to use them correctly and what an exciting time.

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Tyler Calder (39:10):

Yeah, I love it. I agree. Well, thank you so much for the time today.

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Sam Yarborough (39:16):

Thank you.

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Tyler Calder (39:17):

I think we went on quite the journey. Where can folks learn more about Arcadia?

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Sam Yarborough (39:22):

Arcadialeadershipexperience.com. Just go to the website, follow myself, Sam Yarborough on LinkedIn and I talk about it a lot there. So would love to continue the conversation. And also Friends with Benefits. We talk about it a lot there too. Other partnership stuff.

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Tyler Calder (39:38):

Awesome. I love it. Thank you so much.

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Sam Yarborough (39:42):

Thank you. And thank you to the PartnerStack team, we appreciate you all immensely.

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Tyler Calder (39:46):

There you go. We'll leave it at that. A nice little PartnerStack plug.

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Sam Yarborough (39:50):

Thanks everybody.

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Tyler Calder (39:51):

Alright, 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.

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