How PartnerOps Turns Strategy Into Revenue with Antonio Caridad

Antonio Caridad (00:00):

I think partner ops is growing. I think it's going to be an integral part of rev ops going forward in this world where you need a true not only operator, but you need an architect of everything, of how partnerships will work. One of the things that we all know is, partnerships are becoming much more and more critical. The moment that a buyer decides that they want to buy 70% of their buying process is already done. And a lot of those buying processes start with a referral.

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Tyler Calder (00:31):

This is Get It Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they they've built and scaled. All right. Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Get It Together Today I am joined by Antonio, sometimes known as the partner ops guide, and I'm super excited for this conversation because I think OPS is an absolute unlock for the potential partnerships. Antonio, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

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Antonio Caridad (01:08):

Thanks for having me, Tyler. Very excited to be here. You and I have been chatting a lot lately and yeah, let's get this

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Tyler Calder (01:15):

Going. Alright, let's dive in. How about we start with a little introduction, tell the folks about yourself, what are you up to?

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Antonio Caridad (01:23):

Sure thing. So I'm Antonio. I am a partnership guy, but I was not a partnership guy. I'm an engineer by trade and so I worked in telecom for many years and it was about 15 ish years ago that IBM hired me and threw me into the world of partnerships and never looked back, right? So I've been in the partner leader seat, I've managed ecosystems and these days I find myself more on the ops and strategy side. So currently I am the senior director of global revenue operations and strategy at a company called LogicMonitor. I just started here and I'm very excited to be here.

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Tyler Calder (02:02):

Awesome. And not from Toronto, but a huge Toronto Blue Jays fan. We share that. I'm a comment as well.

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Antonio Caridad (02:09):

I used to live in Canada, so I'm very partial to the Canadian teams and so I'm a Blue Jays fan, I'm a Canucks fan, so yeah. Awesome. Love it. Alright,

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Tyler Calder (02:17):

Let's dive right in. So a lot of what we're going to chat through today is on the ops side of the house. I came across, I think in end interview you've done recently where you really hammered the point partner ops is how the strategy becomes real. Let's unpack that a little bit. What does that mean? Why is execution at the ops level so important, so critical?

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Antonio Caridad (02:42):

That's a good question and the reality is that ops on the partnership side is something that gets either forgotten or neglected. One thing that is common across the industry is that sales will always have sales ops from the very beginning, right? If you're mature enough, if your company's mature enough where revenue is being produced by multiple departments in the organization, not only sales but marketing is producing revenue, customer success is producing revenue, et cetera, et cetera, you might be mature enough to have rev ops to basically bring that all together and align, right? But the one thing that is common across the industry is other teams either being siloed or in an island bending upward themselves and trying to do everything themselves. When that's the case, you don't have enough hours in the day. You're the partner leader and you need to do a multitude of things.

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(03:33):

But mainly you want your partner managers and your team spending 80, 90% of your time with partners driving pipeline, driving revenue, uncovering opportunities between co-sell motions, et cetera, et cetera. And guess what? Everything else around operations, which is alignment, channel neutrality, efficiencies, process strategy, et cetera, tends to fall through the cracks or you are actually in the weeds doing process, cleaning up your CRM, inputting opportunities, doing all of that, and then the rest falls off. And so one side has to give, right? And that's where a lot of teams tend to not be successful because they forget about the offsite and how important this is not only to that foundation, but also to scale.

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Tyler Calder (04:24):

Let's dig into this. So let's start with maturity, because you mentioned maturity on the sales side, on the CS side, what are the signals that somebody in partnerships should be looking for that suggests, you know what, I really need some dedicated ops support. Maybe I have nothing right now. Maybe I have a little bit through our centralized rev ops team, but I need more.

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Antonio Caridad (04:48):

That's a great question and I am not off the mindset that you need a dedicated full-time partner ops person right off the bat. No, but you do need support and the signals start coming across when you have bad data hygiene and your data is not measuring up to what you're doing. So either you have bad data hygiene or you don't have the data until you're finding yourself more and more and more in those conversations with your leadership where you have a great story to tell, but you don't have the data to back it up. And so you get a tagged ass, the hus and chugs person or the stakes and shakes person because you don't have the data. That's one thing. The second thing is when your partner experience starts suffering because you're doing things so ad hoc and so let's try to get through this with one partner, but then the next is different and then the next is different, that nothing is scalable and nothing is repeatable.

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(05:47):

And so when you work with a partner and you are taking too long to accept the registration or they're having issues working with your, or you're trying to do account mapping and you just don't have the tooling for that and you're stuck in spreadsheets and things like that, that's another signal. Another signal is when you're trying to work cross-functionally with other departments within the organization, and guess what? You use a completely different tech stack. You're in a tech stack, they're not communicating. You have different data. You show up to meetings with your CEO and you say something and somebody raises their hand is like, I have other data. I don't buy that. That's incorrect and things like that. And so when you're having that conflict internally, when you're having that kind of lack of clarity and data and results that allow you to say, this is what we've done and how we're measuring impact and when your partner experience how you work externally with your partners is suffering, those are three clear signals and I think a lot of teams are suffering from that.

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Tyler Calder (06:48):

So we got three signals. We got data, hygiene, partner experience, and the third, would you categorize it sort cross-functional stack? I say I

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Antonio Caridad (06:58):

Would say alignment,

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Tyler Calder (06:59):

Conflict, yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the data piece. I think what you were alluding to was effectively your impact on pipeline on revenue. That's the lagging indicator, which I think is a critical one. What other data points are we talking about? So

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Antonio Caridad (07:15):

It's multiple things. It starts with attribution. How are you going to be able to measure the impact that partners are having within your full bow tie right from start to finish? And that starts with what are the signals that you're going to try to measure to understand how partners are impacting, right? Because you might be at a level where you're only measuring single point and it might be first touch or last touch, and is that correct? No, because last touch, the lead could have come through a webinar, but guess what? The partner brought the customer to the webinar and you're just measuring last touch and you completely for forgot about the partner, but it's the opposite side of the customer brought the partner to the webinar. You measure that, but you don't touch the webinar until marketing gets completely squeezed out. So I think it starts with attribution.

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(08:04):

It moves into other pieces of data or data like qualification. Whenever you have an opportunity or a deal come in that has a partner involved that is sourced by a partner, is it qualified and how are you converting? How are you measuring that conversion of that qualification against the end where maybe because a partner is qualifying so well for you, your CAC has reduced, right? And there are a piece of data. How are you reducing CAC on the front end with partners? And then you start getting into what you were talking about and that is pipeline, partner source, pipeline partner influence pipeline, what are your win rates? How's the pipeline progressing in your speed to deal? So you can start understanding like, hey, partners are really good at moving our opportunities from stage one to stage five, and there's some partners that might be even better at different stages.

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(08:58):

This partner is really good at stage two and not doing demos or doing proof of concept. This partner is really good at closing each onto and how that pipeline is progressing and all the progressing stages to understand how they're making you better. Or some partners in some cases might make you worse and then it'll end weighing revenue. But truly does it end with revenue? No. And this is where a lot of partner teams tend to forget, which is a life cycle because then you start getting into retention and how are partners impacting the accounts growth? So it's not only the new business, but it's the account growth and upsells and expansions and let's call it platform stickiness. And then it's a RR, so a RR and NRR. So in that journey around how are partners helping you, how are they helping you with churn? How are they helping you with retention? How are they helping you with lifetime value and lifetime value against CAC and so on, so forth. So I don't think that there is a set of metrics that I can say this is what's going to help you. I think every company is in a different stage and every company has different goals, and you need to understand from a company standpoint, what are the metrics that matter, revenue, NRR, pipe, et cetera, et cetera, to then go into each department and work with them to impact their goals. Does that make sense?

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Tyler Calder (10:25):

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned partner experience. Let's talk about that. One of the examples you gave was just speed to respond to a deal as an example. What else is there? What else can ops help with when it

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Antonio Caridad (10:40):

Comes to that partner

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Tyler Calder (10:41):

Experience?

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Antonio Caridad (10:42):

Multiple things. So it starts with your tech stack. Are you stuck in spreadsheets doing account mapping and spreadsheets? Are you stuck in jumping on calls with partners and taking notes or with customers jumping on a call with a customer and later in time looking at your notes and trying to understand if there's a partner that fits into the equation based on all the customer's needs, right? That's how a partner can help you in those things. Then there's a partner experience in the sense of everybody has a portal and all that, but the reality is that we all know that nobody wants to log into a portal and do a deal registration. So how are you getting around that? How are you working with your partner to make that experience

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Tyler Calder (11:26):

The

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Antonio Caridad (11:26):

Best and the easiest for your partner to be able to provide you information about potential leads, about potential opportunities, but in a way that A doesn't require you to get on a phone call every single time. B doesn't require them to log on into a potential portal and do what every single other vendor in the world assessing them to do and so on and so forth. Do you have Slack integrations, do have tools to be able to ski through emails and basically capture the information, put it in your CRM and so on and so forth? So I think it starts there with the tooling and the tech stack. It moves into processes. How easy or how hard is it to do business If a partner is wanting to do business with you and you say, okay, let's sign an agreement, and you come up and give them an agreement that's 35 pages, a partial vomit on you and say like, what the hell?

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(12:19):

This is supposed to be simple because now this is going to turn into a negotiation and so on and so forth. And I'm not saying negotiations are bad, but this should be simple. You should have easy ways of doing click and accept contracting with simple contracts that are very clear and very standard and all of that. Then also partner operations can help with making sure that you're not just signing paper partnerships. And by paper partnerships, I mean the vanity metric that a lot of new partner people fall into, which is they walk into their CEO's office and they say like, Hey, I signed a hundred partners last month, and their CEO is like, okay, I don't care. What are they doing? And then the partner manager is like, let me get back to you on that, right? So making sure that you have the frameworks and the processes necessary there to, it's not only signing an agreement, it's making sure that you have SLAs, that you have MOUs, that you have goals, that you have targets, and that you can track against all of that so that you can have monthly or quarterly reviews with your partner where each party keeps each other accountable.

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(13:29):

So it's not only you keeping your partner accountable, they're keeping you accountable. Guess what? They also have to walk into their CEO's office and say, I am doing this and cure that results because it's opportunity cost. So I think partner operations can help you with a lot of that, with the governance of all of that, and then behind the scenes with ensuring that the systems and tools are set up for you to be capturing the right information at the right time and have the data whenever you need it. So if you get called on to your C'S office tomorrow and you need to show results, Hey, I have a set of dashboards that are automatic that are live that you can use to know these were my bookings last quarter, these are my bookings quarter to date, this is my pipeline, these are my win rates, this is my attainment, et cetera, et cetera, right on time. If you try to do this by yourself while you're also trying to be out there selling and hitting your target, it's impossible.

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Tyler Calder (14:28):

There's a lot there. And there's one thing that kept popping up into my head as you were speaking, which is everything that you just said. In my experience, if a company has a rev ops team, they're doing a lot of this, but they're only doing it for their direct team, and none of that work is getting repurposed for the partnerships org.

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(14:51):

Correct? In a lot of cases, not even for the CS org. I guess my question is what's up with that? What's your perspective? Why will companies go through all of the effort to do what you just said, which is what I think a modern rev ops org, that's what they should be doing. Far more strategic than just CRM administration, but then it oftentimes ends with the direct motion. How come? What do people need to hear to convince them, Hey, you know what? Let's spend a little bit more time and let's make sure this is company-wide, go to market wide.

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Antonio Caridad (15:23):

I think it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg situation. I think a lot of companies are like, okay, I want to try this partnership thing, but it can experiment and I'm going to throw maybe X, Y, Z amount of dollars at it. And when they hire a partner leader, that partner leader has limited budget, big targets to hit probably not a lot of patience behind him, and what do they do? They need to hire somebody that is going to help them get those targets, what's going to keep them in and an operations person while strategic is not going to be a quota bearing and a quota caring person. So it's a little bit of that situation, but it's also the fact that companies still use partnerships as an experiment. They don't fully understand them or try to understand them. And so the funding is not there to say like, okay, you need to have this kind of support.

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(16:16):

And especially because a lot of times the partner leader has no say or influence or little influence in the rev ops organization. I am of the mindset that partner ops should not sit siloed in its own separate partnerships team. It should be under rev ops because it needs to be part of the full engine, right? Partner ops needs to be aligned with sales ops, with customer success ops, and with marketing ops under the rev ops umbrella to ensure that a tools are working together and seamlessly. B, you have a single source of truth. You don't have pieces of truth here, pieces of truth there. It's a single source of truth where everybody feeds off and where you have alignment. So whenever customer success is going to try to measure partner data, they work with partner ops to basically create that or have that available. Same with sales and all of those things. And so that's why I'm saying that's why sir, earlier I'm of the mindset that maybe you start with a partial person or a half person within the rev ops team that handles partner ops and then you grow from there. And that partner ops team has to grow within rev ops supported by partnerships with a dotted line to the partner leader and all of that, but within rev ops and not siloed on its own because that's when you get forgot.

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Tyler Calder (17:37):

I agree with that wholeheartedly. Somebody that's coming into a new role as a partner leader, to your point, probably not any influence with the Rev ops team. If there is a rev ops team, how would you recommend that partner leader self-serve to begin with? Because presumably it's going to take a little bit of time to get any resources, even if it's limited resources from the rev ops team. So what can that partner leader do for themselves to make sure that they're painting a picture for the org around the type of impact they're having? Do what you mentioned without letting too many things fall through the cracks, and then how does that translate into getting buy-in and support from the rev ops team to take on some of that work?

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Antonio Caridad (18:20):

Great question. The first thing that I would do and that I've done is go and just listen, understand, go and work with your customer success leader. Go and work with those sales leaders and go and work with those marketing leaders and understand their goals. What are their goals? And instead of trying to come and just say like, Hey, I have this flashy idea for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, come with the mindset of I'm trying to help you and I'm going to try to help you by doing this. And that is marketing is trying to run an event and they're trying to bring X, y, Z amount of registrations to that event. Hey, I have a partner that can partner with us that can reduce the costs of that event and that has their own customer base, which happens to be part of our total addressable market and in ICP, and that can drive registrations to us, right?

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(19:21):

So CAC reduction and ROI goes up sales. Hey, I can prove to you that because that I have all this data behind me and I would love to put a test or a pilot with you to try to gather this data where I can show you that with a partner, we can close deal faster, our close rates are going to be higher, and guess what? Your deal size is going to be larger, and that means that more you seller, you can move from deal to deal faster. You don't have to be as hands-on in that deal because a partner is helping and is involved in this. Your win rates are higher. And then because deal sizes are bigger, guess what? You retire a quarter faster and you're able to get your accelerators and your attainment much faster. I'm going to take a page out of a friend of mine, Victoria Flynn, that always says pitch water, not innovation when they're on fire. And so basically you're trying to help them hit their goals and make them the winners, make them the champions, make them the guys that are the success and with you behind the scenes. So that's how you build champions by proving and showing them this is how this can help you. And then behind the scenes, you already have the data because of the successes to do this, right? So find yourself a way to help those other teams without saying, I'm the star here. No, make them the stars. I think that certainly lands

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Tyler Calder (20:51):

For me when I look at our most successful customers at Partners Stack, the partner leader on the other end has done an incredible job helping prop up other functions, helping them exceed their targets, helping them shine internally. A little bit of a thankless job in that regard. But good orgs, I think notice that type of leadership and how critical of a glue role within go to market partnerships can be when done well. And I think to your point earlier, especially if they have some ops support to really uncork their potential, all of that launches, which is awesome.

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Antonio Caridad (21:32):

I forgot to touch on the op upside, but the reality is that as you help other teams hit their goals, that's what Rev ops is trying to do, right? The case is there. The case is there for you to go to rev ops and say like, Hey, let me run this pilot. Let me run this experiment with a couple of AEs or three AEs where I can try to show you this industry stats and their industry stats behind you saying when a partner is involved, your deal size is going to grow when a partner is involved or when rates are going to go up, when our partner is involved, our pipe progression is going to move faster and our speed close is going to be faster. And so rev ops is trying to do that. And when you allowed for you to be the grease to that wheel, rev ops is not going to say no. Rev ops is going to be totally up for it because you're not trying to pitch much more work to them. You're trying to help them also do what they're supposed to do.

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Tyler Calder (22:25):

I like it. I've heard you say in the past that without having the support of ops as a partner leader, your partner program can kind of just become this collection of favors. What does that mean?

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Antonio Caridad (22:39):

It means that without support, a little bit of what I was saying earlier is that you're left with a wide amount of tasks and processes and things that need to happen from efficiencies, from proper contracting, lack of data, et cetera, et cetera. And what that ties into is basically you are going to be creating or be running a partner program with not a lot of good results, or maybe you have the results, but you're not able to prove them. Why? Because once again, you might not have the data to prove that ever since we implemented the partner program, this is what is happening. If you have a normal peer partner program, the typical rocks or metals or whatever, this is how partners that progress in tiers, this is how we're seeing ROI, and this is how we're seeing impact across the organization and those kind of partners.

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(23:41):

But also you don't have the data to show to when you sign a new partner. When you're trying to reactivate a partnership, you don't have a lot to back yourself up to go into that conversation with your partner and say like, look, I can show you that partners that go all in with us and do proper joint marketing planning and join sales planning, and we do proper enablement on both sides because I need to understand your business as much as you need to understand mine. It cannot just be like, here are my courses, here's my certifications. Go and take them and magical, you're going to do things if you don't have the data, you don't have everything to back up that conversation. A partner is going to be like, so you're asking me to spend all of this time, all of these resources without a lot of guarantees.

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(24:29):

What guarantees me that you're not going to just run away or forget about me because you have bigger partners and so on and so forth. It's a little bit of that. It's also the fact that when you don't have the proper mechanisms to understand what's working and what's not able to push the right buttons and pull the right levers at the right time, so you're just working blindly. And so part of that might be the fact that you're just signing partners that should not be your partners because you don't have a proper and established IPP ideal partner profile, and so you're just going by stealing. So I think this partner is good, and I think this partner, just because they're a flashy logo, is going to be a good partner for us. Guess what? If you don't have a properly established IPP, you're not going to know.

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(25:18):

And at the tail end of it, you might find out that, okay, you got lucky and maybe this turned into a good, great partnership, but more likely than not, you're going to find out that you just wasted resources, you wasted time and you wasted a bunch of things, a bunch of the patients that your leadership has on you on a partnership that never turned into anything. Why? Because you just went through by feelings again, because you don't have the proper foundation, the proper processes, the proper way to measure all of that. And so that is what I mean that when you don't have this fully established, it just becomes you asking for favors and asking for, Hey, time and asking for this will come to fruition, but without actually proving it. Does that make sense?

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Tyler Calder (26:07):

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's great. And at the top of that, you mentioned, and I'm going to shift a little bit, you mentioned tiering as an example. I know in the past we've talked about how if you're going to have tiers, because what I'll also say is from my experience, I look at a lot of our customers that have very complex tiering in place, and when you step back for a second, probably not necessary, but let's assume it is, and you're going to have your standard tiers. I know we've talked about not nailing that or doing in an unclear way can be a disaster. How on the op side do you think about tiering, wrapping a process around that, bringing visibility to it, using that as a lever to drive success?

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Antonio Caridad (26:56):

I don't know that I have a silver bullet for this because obviously in the last couple of years we're seeing a lot more programs around point structures rather than tiers and accumulating points that get you to certain benefit levels and things like that. The reality is that we're seeing a shift with the implementation of more AI and tooling. I think tier programs and point programs are even though are the standards. I don't think they are the groundbreakers right now, right? We're starting to see a little bit of a shift, but the important thing there is that you align your benefits, be it tiers, be it points or whatever, based on these emotion that the partner is doing, be it reselling, be it co-selling, be it marketplaces, be it referral, be it affiliates. I think when you align things to type of partners, you get into trouble because these days companies are evolving so fast that you have partners that might be a multitude of things.

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(28:00):

You have partners that if you try to encapsulate an SI or an MSP, that M MS P might shift and might become an si. It's not going to happen overnight, but it might happen. They might do two things at once. Same with the GSIs. They might do multiple things at once and the GSM might be also be managing services and might be delivering and might be doing a bunch of things, and then there's GSIs that do completely different things. There's a whole waterfall of the end to end buying process of a customer where different GSIs are in different places from a consultative standpoint all the way to delivering, and in the middle you have implementation. The partner is going to turn around and say like, well, I'm also doing this and well, I'm also doing that. And now you have a partner that is in three different boxes and you're trying to measure three different things.

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(28:47):

How am I going to measure that, right? And so I'm more of a mindset of like you build your program around the motion and yeah, you can start with tiers, you can start with points. Just make it simple. Just make it easily digestible for a partner to understand where and how do I get from point A to point B to point C to point Z. Also, for them to be able to track that through your PRM through whatever tooling you have, you need to have dashboards that allow them to know at this point in time, here is where you are and based on these deals, this is where you can be. If you close all of these opportunities or we close them together, here's where you can be. Because remember, when a partner works with you, it's opportunity cost. What that means is that they are doing something with you at the expense of not doing something else that could pay them off bigger. Your counterpart in your partner is going to have to stand up in front of their leadership and prove that all of this time that they're involved in working with you is turning into X, Y, Z dollars, XY, ZROI. If they're not able to do that, they're going to walk away, and so you need to have the proper systems, the proper tooling, the proper metrics in place for them to also have that conversation. It's not only you, it's them as well.

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Tyler Calder (30:11):

I think what you just said is one of the most critical things that I've heard somebody say in a long time, and I want to dig into it, which is partners don't want to be boxed in anymore. They don't want to be defined as a type of partner. They want to be more defined by the multitude of outcomes that they can drive for folks, and so to call somebody, you listed all the names, right? To call somebody a reseller, to call somebody a tech partner, to call somebody an affiliate, to call somebody. Any number of the acronyms that we love in our space more and more just does a disservice to the value that they provide. Big question, how do you operationalize that? How do you make it so a partner can drive a number of outcomes and be appropriately compensated for that value?

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Antonio Caridad (31:08):

I don't know that I have a great answer. The reality is that you have to pick a lane as a team, as a department, as a company, you have to pick a lane, but you cannot just try to go and boil the ocean. If you go and try to boil the ocean, you're going to find yourself doing everything and not accomplishing anything. And so I think you have to start somewhere and iterate. You cannot start from perfection because you're never going to get it. I use this phrase q often, which is, it's a quote from Winston Churchill and its perfection is the enemy of progress, and so you need to have incremental gain, so you need to start somewhere, and that somewhere might be a couple of ways or two or three ways of sale. Hey, I'm going to do resell, I'm going to do affiliate and I'm going to do co-sell through tech partners, and you're going to start working towards, this should be the process, but a process is never set in stone.

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(32:00):

Just like your program, it has never set it and forget it. Do you need to keep iterating? You're going to find edge cases, you're going to find branches where maybe this resale program and this co-sell program and this affiliate program meets, and at that point, that's where you say like, okay, as a partner maybe you can do all of these things and we're going to accumulate this towards your goals and benefits and all of that, right? That's why I think some companies are effectively moving more from tiering to points because this way you can accumulate points in a multitude of ways that get you to a certain level and don't encapsulate you, you're a gold partner, no, it's here. You have this amount of benefits because you've done this and this. You've hit different ways of making of accumulating points that allow you to get to a certain level of benefits, and it's depending on what you're doing that maybe you get those benefits.

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(32:56):

If you are reselling or doing managed services, that's where you get maybe frontend discounts, right? If you were doing a referral, that's where you get a rev share or you get frontend team and things like that, but it's by accumulating those points that get you there. You need to start somewhere, take a lane, not a lot of lanes, pick a few or a lane and then go from there and iterate, iterate, iterate. Always keep yourself building dynamic things because it will never be set and forget it. Build dynamic for something that can change and make the rest of your team understand that this is an evolution, that this is going to keep evolving and growing and it's just I'm not aiming to build a rocketship right at the start. I'm aiming to build R that moves and then upgrading that card reel my lid.

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Tyler Calder (33:46):

Alright, the partner stack, we use tiers and candidly I think we probably overcomplicate our own tiering methodology, and so as you're speaking, what I'm thinking in my head is the typical tiers, like what we have and what I see a lot of our customers have the tiers alone box partners into a single definition of partner type, so that's one challenge. Or maybe you put them in maybe not tiers, but groups depending on the language that you use and how you operate, but either way you're sort of drawing a line around a definition of a partner type in a lot of those scenarios. The point system is kind of interesting because now you can reward points based on the various types of outcomes any one partner can drive and the accumulation of the points, you decide what that does in terms of do they move through tiers, they get different benefits, perks, whatever it might be. Is that part of the suggestion of the point system is it allows you to open up a little bit and kind of reward and acknowledge the different levers a partner can pull for you? Or did I misunderstand? You're

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Antonio Caridad (34:47):

Absolutely right. One thing I want to make sure that I say is that I'm not opposed to tiers. It depends on your maturity, your programs, what you're doing. If you're purely doing resale and referral tier might be super effective for you and that's fine, but yeah, with the points, I think either you can set them up to, as you accumulate points, you fall into a certain, again, maybe a box, but also maybe as you accumulate points, you redeem those points for different things. Think about airline mileage and reward systems. You can redeem those points for different things. Maybe at a certain level you have a certain level of status which basically puts you in a box, but then you have the points to spend towards some things, right? Like these points, I can spend them on MDX, these points can spend them on joint events. These points, I can spend them towards sponsoring something and things like that. And so I think the point system opens you up towards, as you said, towards more things. You can create a very complicated thing real fast, which you don't want to, but it allows you to have a little bit more flexibility and allows the partner to maybe have a little bit more say on what they want their benefits to be.

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Tyler Calder (36:08):

Got it. Okay. Very cool. Last question is prediction time, partner ops, the next decade, what does it look like?

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Antonio Caridad (36:16):

Partner ops, the next decade, what does it look like? I think partner ops is growing. I think the amount of partner ops roles that I've seen this year compared to last years has been incredible, but I think it's going to be on integral part of ops going forward in the next decade. And one of the things that we all know is the evolution of rev ops to May db, go-to market engineers, rev ops. I think that's where partnerships and partner ops are going to land in this world where you need a true not only operator, but you need an architect of everything, of how partnerships will work. One of the things that we all know is outbound is not working the way that it used to. It's redefining itself. Same with inbound. One of the things that we all know is that partnerships are becoming much more and more critical, right?

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(37:07):

Because buyers, the moment that a customer decides that they want to buy 70% of their buying process is already done. And a lot of those buying processes start with Jay McBain always talks about the 28 moments in a buyer's journey and how alone your company can only touch and influence maybe four or five, which means that you're leaving 23 to 24 moments out there that are being influenced by other people and those other people are potential partners. And if you don't take advantage of that, guess what? Your competitors are going to take advantage of that, right? So partnerships are becoming more and more important. I talk to more and more go to market leaders, CS, customer success, CEOs that truly want to understand this side and truly want to unlock it, but as you know, one of the big things about partnerships is that you lose a lot of the control that you have compared to sales or marketing or customer success, and that's what I think breaks a lot of go-to-market leaders out. And so I think the more partnerships becomes a bigger thing, the more go-to-market leaders out there see partnerships as integral to their strategy as a whole, the more partner ops will be of extreme importance within rev ops.

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Tyler Calder (38:21):

Hard to argue with that. Antonio, thank you for the time. How can folks reach out and connect

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Antonio Caridad (38:28):

If they so choose to? So you can find me on LinkedIn as Antonio Carida, and yeah, if anybody needs help, anybody ever wants to chat, feel free to connect with me, send me a dm, and I'm more than happy to get on a call and have a conversation about this. Awesome. Antonio, thank you so much. Appreciate the time. Thank you for having me, Tyler.

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Tyler Calder (38:46):

All right, take care. Thanks for listening to get it together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools@partnerstack.com slash get it together.