How to Build a CFO-Proof Partner Model

Brian Jambor (00:00):

I think partner programs are going to go away. I think the era of the partner program where you have these silver, gold, platinum, tinfoil, aluminum tiers and if you do this much revenue, you get this much commission and whatever, and here's your MDF program and here's... I think these overly complex programs actually will eventually go away.

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Tyler Calder (00:26):

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. If you've ever sat in a boardroom or you've been pulled into a meeting with your CFO trying to defend your partnership's plan, then this episode is for you. My guest today was Brian Jambor, head of partnerships at Synthesia, which is one of the hottest, fastest-growing companies in the world today. And what I love about Brian is he doesn't just treat partnerships like a potential cost center, which unfortunately is how it's viewed in many organizations. He very much runs his team and his org like an investment portfolio. He builds economic models and makes the case for ROI in a way that finance leaders just can't ignore. We are going to dig into how he builds his models, talks to his CFO. We are going to hear how AI is reshaping partner motions and we even talk about when to walk away from a partnership and how to have those tough conversations.

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(01:39):

I really love the model that he walked us through and Brian was gracious enough to share that model and you'll find that template in your show notes. Check out the model template after the fact and hit Brian up if you have any questions. Alright, hello everybody and welcome back to Get It, Together. Today's guest is Brian Jambor. I am very excited to be chatting with him. He is the head of partnerships over at Synthesia, which is just an absolute rocket ship of an organization right now, but we'll come back to that. Brian, I think it was what, two summers ago, we first met at the inaugural Arcadia leadership experience out in Montana.

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Brian Jambor (02:18):

I think you're right. I think it was two years ago that inaugural experience. We were all sitting in these tents in the middle of the Montana wilderness, maybe at sometimes questioning what we were doing on the middle of these tents in the middle of nowhere. But it was fun. Fun and character building. I would say both actually.

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Tyler Calder (02:37):

I would agree with that. No, I don't think I've ever admitted this publicly, but it's where I happened to get over my fear of spiders. Well, you didn't have much of a choice character building. Indeed.

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Brian Jambor (02:48):

Wow, I didn't know that. That's super cool.

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Tyler Calder (02:50):

Yes sir. It's also where I had my very first tomato. Never had a tomato before. Really?

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Brian Jambor (02:56):

Have you had a second tomato?

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Tyler Calder (02:57):

I could do without tomatoes. I dealt with it, got through it. What I'm excited to have you on because a couple years ago I was quite frequently on my soapbox about partnership leaders needing to improve their financial acumen, the way in which they speak the language of the business, which is predominantly a financial language. How do you go have a conversation with your CFO? How do you have a board level conversation and then you stood up and presented at Arcadia, this incredible viewpoint that you have and this model that you've used to have those conversations. That's what I'd love to get into today and why I'm so excited to have you. But before we get into that, I always love hearing people's career journeys. Where'd you start? How did you get into this partnership world?

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Brian Jambor (03:47):

I'll give you the non-LinkedIn version. I think that's maybe a little more interesting. The LinkedIn version's always everybody can go in and check out. So I ran a marketing agency as a G of a marketing agency for like five years and we were doing websites, mostly WordPress stuff in the real estate sector, but then my financial background came when I transitioned out of that. I got into financial consulting. I was a certified stockbroker, a financial advisor with Edward Jones Investments. I had a series seven and 66 securities license with the SEC, which is now FINRA in the States and I did that for about a year and a half. I joined in 2007 and then in February of 2008 in the US the financial markets crashed. And so in a career where you really are supposed to be good at timing for your customers, I picked the worst time to join, which probably a good signal that I should probably not be in that industry.

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(04:43):

But eventually I got into SaaS and I started software at a startup in Arizona called Infusionsoft. They're doing CRM, marketing automation stuff. I was on the sales floor at the time and then they had a role that opened up in partnerships and they wanted somebody to stand up a referral partner program. And so I did that expanded to leading their global partner program and ecosystem and then the rest is all on LinkedIn, but did essentially multiple launches with other companies in regards to standing up their partner programs usually from zero to one, which has been really exciting and rewarding.

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Tyler Calder (05:20):

Very cool. That's awesome. I didn't know about the agency time. That's cool. I've been having this conversation one recently with Katie over at ZoomInfo. We see a lot of agency folks make their way into partnerships it seems, which is cool. Maybe from your perspective, what do you chalk that up to? What did you take away from the agency experience that maybe you've ported over to partnerships?

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Brian Jambor (05:42):

I think that when you have that agency background, it creates a more well-rounded individual because you see not just in partnerships, a lot of times we see the sales side or the revenue generation side. We necessarily see a lot of the marketing side, maybe glimpses of it, but a lot of partnership. People really end up being in the revenue arm and they do the marketing arm. That agency background experience gives you that marketing perspective typically and allows you to just be really well-rounded. I think the other thing is when you're that well-rounded, you maybe get bored quickly doing one thing, and so partnerships is this really interesting environment where you get a little bit of marketing, a little bit of sales, a little bit of financial aspects and the operational aspects of the business, the product aspect of the business. And so it allows you to tap into that well-rounded skillset I think quite effectively.

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Tyler Calder (06:39):

Yeah, that's cool. I think I would agree with that. I want to get right into the financial side of things. Like I said, one of the things I was really blown away by at your presentation at Arcadia was your ability to really think through how do you model out your partner program? How do you think about headcount, ramp comp, everything end to end. Could you walk us through maybe how you came to discover how important that was? Was there a moment in time where you had that realization?

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Brian Jambor (07:10):

I distinctly remember I was working for Yodel at the time, which was a local marketing software company located in Manhattan. I just started within maybe a month or two or three. And so I was meeting with different executives across the business and I was able to book a lunch with the CFO. And so we went out to lunch and had a conversation with him and he said, well, what's the operating model for the way that you're going to do partnerships here? I said, what specifically are you asking? He said, I want to know. We've got the operating model for sales. I can tell you I can map immediately with sales. Hey, if we hire this person and this is their ramp time, this is their output, this is what their quota is going to be, and if they achieve target, then it should be X percentage of their on target earnings, et cetera.

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(08:02):

So I can do the same thing with CS. Most of the rules in business I can do that with what does that look like for partnerships? And in that moment I realized that I had never documented that to a degree that would resonate with a CFO or even VP of Finance. And so I started talking through it with a guy, his name was John, started talking through it with John and I said, this is what I've seen, John. Here are the inputs in terms of average number of partners that we would expect any one partner development manager to recruit over the course of a month. It normally takes the partners that amount of time to ramp and then partner manager gets involved and they can manage as many partners and here's the revenue output of those partners and all those things. And so then John challenged me, he said, well, could you put that into a model?

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(08:48):

Could you build that into a model where I can visibly see the head count that you need then to support the partnerships business based on the revenue that you're driving? And specifically around the value. One of the metrics that we were really driving around in the business was the return on sale, which is essentially your customer acquisition costs, your lifetime value ratio, and we need to be at a 3X ratio to have a good business unit. And so he said, I want to make sure your ROS is at 3X, and if it's not, how long it's going to take to get there? He said, that's important for me in terms of planning. And I said, John, I can do that no problem, but I'll be the first to admit, John, I'm not an Excel wizard. The way that the bulk of your team is in the finance org, right?

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(09:38):

You've seen these finance guys are, they just fly around the spreadsheet, all these massive formulas that it takes you five minutes just to read the formula, right? I said, John, could I get your partnership on that? If you would allocate somebody on your team to help me build that out in Excel or Google Sheets or whatever, then we can get something to you immediately, but I need somebody's help in designing it. He said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem if that's all you're asking for, no big deal at all. So that John allocated one of our financial analysts to me, and we sat together in a room for a couple of days and we mapped out all of the inputs that I've seen in terms of standing up a successful partner program. We were focused on recruiting agencies and then what the buildup would be to those inputs to create outputs that would affect the business, specifically revenue.

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Tyler Calder (10:33):

Perfect. I love that. And so I want to go back to something to call it out. So at that time, the CFO was basically suggesting, Hey, we're looking for a 3X return. Was that consistent across revenue generating functions?

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Brian Jambor (10:48):

So every revenue generating function was required to hit that 3.0 target. Now, that also included marketing functions. So like our marketing team who had an MQL to SQO target, those all had to be at a 3X return minimum. So it was across the business.

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Tyler Calder (11:07):

Yeah. Cool. Nice. And so early on, right out of the gate you have a CFO saying, Hey, we're talking revenue. There's got to be a return on it. Let's build the model. You said, great, let's do it. Need some help. They gave you the help. I think what's important there is you had a conversation with the CFO, you asked for some help. It seems like a pretty good starting point for a lot of partner leaders. Go have the conversation and if you need the help, ask for the help.

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Brian Jambor (11:34):

Yeah, sometimes I think partner leaders want to do it all themselves and they're scared of having the C-suite conversation.

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Tyler Calder (11:42):

Okay. Expand on that. Why do you think they're scared of having the C-suite conversation?

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Brian Jambor (11:46):

Yeah, I think they're scared of having the C-suite conversation because they're concerned that they're going to get challenged on things that they don't know the answer to and they're not confident or comfortable enough to saying, I don't know, but let's find out. I think a lot of it is, it goes back to confidence in feeling comfortable saying, I don't know. I don't know the answer right now, but here's what I propose we do to find out the answer, and this is how long it's going to take. This is the investment it's going to take to figure out that answer. And then we can make the business decision whether it's worth it or not to find out the answer. But I think people just inherently are uncomfortable with that type of conversation unless they've spent a moderate amount of time working with executives who usually don't know the answer to most of the things that challenges that they're faced with and are doing the same thing. How many times, Tyler, have you been in situations as the CMO saying, oh, I actually know a hundred percent of all the answers to all of the questions you're going to ask me? Or does we need to find out some things? Let's run some tests.

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Tyler Calder (12:46):

I think you're pretty bang on there. So you put the model together, then you get to work, start executing. How did things go? Were you immediately on track? Were you not? Were there things that you learned through that process of, Hey, it's on paper now. What does reality look like? How close were you?

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Brian Jambor (13:03):

I would say it was directionally accurate, but certainly needed to be optimized. I will say after I built the model with a financial analyst, there were a lot of conversations between me and the president of the company who was essentially acting as the COO, talking through what assumptions we made about that business specifically. Nobody had stood up partnerships in that business at any sort of scale. And so you're always making some assumptions based on experience. And so some of those assumptions were challenged. The runway that it would take to do certain things, whether it be to hire a new partner development manager or partner account manager, how much time it would take to ramp them or the time they would take to ramp a new partner before they started producing deals and how much enablement we would need to accelerate. That was certainly challenged. And so we made some adjustments based on some assumptions, and then there was this, I'll call it feedback loop that I had with not only the CFO, but the president of the company of, Hey, here's where we're at this quarter.

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(14:05):

Here's the assumptions that we made on the inputs. Here's what we're actually seeing in the field on the outputs, and based on that, I am going to make these adjustments to our inputs, which means that we're either going to accelerate our time to value or decelerate our time to value. But it became very scientific in the way that we approached the impact that we were going to make to the business, even down to when we were going to hire new headcount. So we would go to the output of the model and say, okay, well if we're running this revenue run rate in terms of partnerships, and that means we can't hire another partner manager until X, or else we're going to come in below a return on sale of three point, or we say, actually, we're comfortable with that as a business, go a little bit lower on that because we want to over index on output for a future quarter or quarters or whatever. But the business decisions became easier once everybody was aligned on the inputs and the outputs of the model.

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Tyler Calder (15:09):

I think that's critical to call out is having this type of model in front of you and being able to have a conversation around the assumptions being made, the inputs, the outputs. It does become a little bit more of a scientific type of conversation unless what do the kids say to these days? Vibes? No, I think something that you just said is really, really important, and I wanted to call it out what metric you're trying to hit that 3X metric, and I see a lot of folks across go-to market across all functions saying, oh, the team is feeling stretched. We need more headcount. We need some more folks. Without necessarily realizing, well, you bring on that additional cost and it's going to pull you down, and now you're kind of outside of that sweet spot that you need to be. You really do need to be thinking about how do you push yourself beyond, give yourself kind of the freedom to go make that higher, or to your point, everyone's crystal clear on what's the impact of making the decision to maybe hire a little bit ahead and the reasoning behind it, I think that's something that isn't oftentimes spoken about enough is those really important financial trade-off conversations.

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(16:23):

And so we're going to share this model. You're kind enough to say we could share this out after. Could you talk through some of the really important areas of the model, the things that you really spend some time on, making sure that your assumptions feel fairly sound? Let's chat through that a little bit.

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Brian Jambor (16:39):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the core inputs were mostly, and again, we were standing up an agency program where they were referring and reselling our software to their customers, but the core inputs were how many partners we were going to recruit a month, and then what percentage of those partners that we were going to recruit were going to be good, better, best. You can think about that as the Pareto principle and partnerships where 80 or 90% of your partners do nothing in the 10% are really the ones that move the needle. And so when you know that going in that every party recruits not going to hit home run. So building that into the model is a measure to balance out when you just have some partners that just, even though they fit the whole ICP of the ideal partner, or excuse me, the IPP, the ideal partner profile that you're recruiting for, they're not going to hit. So that was critical. The ramp time of those partners was critical, right? How long is it actually going to take them to understand our solution, promote it to their customers before they get that first win? So spend a lot of time working through those two specific things.

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Tyler Calder (17:47):

On the partner ramp, what was that conversation like with leadership? Did you get any pushback, Hey, why can't they ramp faster or did it feel pretty good out of the gate? I always find those nuances in the conversation can be tough?

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Brian Jambor (18:01):

Totally, because everybody's making assumptions in a new motion based on previous experience. And often what happens is the Hippo principle gets involved where you just default to the highest paid person's opinion. So yeah, there was a lot of dialogue and debate around it. Ultimately, what we did was baked it over a five month period in terms of the partner getting ramped, and then we put different weights against how ramped they would be in any given month once they got recruited. So month one not ramped at all. Maybe by month three there'll be, I'll call it 40% ramped, which means that we could allocate 40% of a new deal, so to speak, to any one given partner. Well, a fraction of a deal isn't a real deal at all, but we start talking about an ecosystem of partners that you're recruiting 3, 4, 5, 6 a month. Now suddenly the fractions actually matter.

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(18:59):

So you may get out of the course of three or four or five partners a month that you're recruiting. One of them will generate a deal in month one. So that's how we kind of balanced out the nuance there in terms of overall ramp rate, but it was really critical. And then the other thing that we incorporate into it was part of churn. We knew that not every part of it was going to stick around long term. And so we baked in a little bit of churn based on that good, better, best scenario on the type of partner that we had against our ideal partner profile.

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Tyler Calder (19:26):

Very cool. Love it. And then you had your inputs around actually your full-time employees, what their ramp would look like. Anything worth calling out there as a learning as you started to drop those in?

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Brian Jambor (19:39):

We spent a lot of time figuring out modeling their compensation around their ramp rate production rates against the ramp rate of the partner, the how many partners they would recruit, and we tied all of that into this ROS metric of 3.0, right. And so we got to the point where we would say, Hey, I may want another partner development manager to recruit more partners in Q4, but the model shows that if I do that, I'm going to drop below my ROS of 3.0 and I won't be able to hire that person based on what the forecast says until actually Q1. And so then we make a business case of, Hey, if we accelerate this and bring this role in sooner, well then this is how it's going to impact the output in Q1 because now they're going to be a little bit farther around. But it allowed us to again, have those conversations and make those trade-offs where we needed to in a really effective manner. You just run the numbers and say, okay, well can we accept that as a business in terms of investment versus long-term gain?

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Tyler Calder (20:43):

Nice. And how often were you reviewing this internally, whether it was with the CFO, just yourself? What did that look like?

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Brian Jambor (20:51):

Yeah, I mean, I would look at it monthly. So every month we'd close, I'd go back and update the model and make sure that we had it, the latest data in there. But with the executive team on a quarterly basis, every quarter we go in and look at it and reflect and okay, what do we need to make some additional investments? Where do we need to hold off a little bit because our assumptions were wrong, maybe we weren't recruiting the number of partners that we thought we were going to recruit. And that's something becomes evident in the model. And then we say, okay, well, is it the person that we hired? Is it the messaging that we're going to market with? Is it the ideal partner profile? And then we just really dig in with first principles, thinking to figure out where the gap was, fix it, and then go from there.

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Tyler Calder (21:29):

I love that. That's great. Any assumptions that were initially made that in hindsight, you think, oh, of course you are starting with an assumption. It is a thought on a piece of paper until it becomes real. And I find a lot of people are freaked out by making assumptions. Everybody talks about how important that is. Of course, that is important. But what I see is a lot of people paralyzed by the fact that, well, I don't have enough data to have a hundred percent certainty that my inputs into the model are accurate. And so I find just sharing, no, we threw some assumptions down, they were wrong, and it was fine because it helped us tweak. And any learnings there around what felt like maybe an obvious assumption that ended up being off the mark that you had to tweak and what that looked like?

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Brian Jambor (22:21):

Yeah, we had a product that we rolled out in the auto segment and the partners that we recruited. So we built a partner profile around that, and the partners that we recruited, the vast majority of 'em fell into this lower tier, not good, not better, not best, good, mediocre long time to ramp hardly any production from them. And at the same time, we had two other industries that were in the dental industry and the chiropractic industry, the dental industry specifically, almost every partner that we recruited in the ramp times were two to three months rather than five months. Their output was like two to 3X some of these other segments. And so we decided to actually divest, if you will, from a partnership standpoint. All of the other industries other than the dental industry that we were doing so well with that we had such a really good insight into the value we're bringing to the partner.

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(23:18):

The partner had really good insight into the value they were bringing to the customer, and that caused us to have a lower output in the model because these other industries, just the partners in those industries weren't performing as well. Our solution wasn't as competitive, but other solutions in that specific industry, a number of different reasons. So we made some assumptions there and they were wrong. But as with any good thing that you are doing, what you do is you do a retro on it and say, here's the assumptions that we made. They were wrong. This is why we made those assumptions, they were wrong. Here's what we're going to do to fix it. And we implemented that. But that was an executive conversation. I will say at the time, I was really concerned about that conversation that I had to have because our numbers sucked at that time. And I was like, I know why and I know that we're going to fix it. But having to go back and say, well, team, we were wrong, and here's why we're wrong and why our impact of this quarter is going to be lower than what we committed to sorry's, what we're doing to fix it. Those are never fun conversations, but you learn from 'em. So start what you can, and then you go from there.

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Tyler Calder (24:27):

Not a fun conversation. They never are like me, probably didn't sleep the night before. Just playing it over and over and over through your head, all the different ways it could work out. How did it go though? What was the reception?

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Brian Jambor (24:39):

It actually went really well. I got immediate backing from the president of the company to, yeah, don't focus on those industries anymore. Abandoned all of the enablement that you created for all those. The team had a little bit of a heartache over it because of all of the resourcing we put around those two industries specifically. But we re-architected the team. Everybody doubled back down on the core industry that we're doing really well in the ex executive team though, said, oh, okay, makes sense. How fast can you pivot? Ready go? Yeah, right. So it ended up being a good conversation, but to your point, you don't sleep the night before. You think about the million different questions that could be asked from each individual that really well and how they'd ask it. Yeah, you gameplay the whole thing several hours before the conversation elements.

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Tyler Calder (25:30):

Yeah, no, I love that. And I think it's important to recognize everybody has that first meeting where they've never necessarily been in that position before. They're speaking to the scary C-suite who is put up on this pedestal, and you think it's going to be something out of a TV show or movie where it's just stereotypical, I'm going to get destroyed and ripped apart. And I mean maybe you will be, but generally in my experience, it goes exactly how you suggested. But it only goes that way if you're going in prepared very quickly. In my experience, you get buy-in support. Where it falls apart is you don't go in prepared, right? You don't go in, it's like, oh shit, well that didn't work. It's like, well, what assumptions did you make? It's like, well, I don't know. And so I think again, to emphasize just how important the prep is that you put into the model, the inputs, the outputs, the assumptions. I think that is what enables you to have those really productive senior level conversations.

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Brian Jambor (26:31):

I think it comes back down to trust. Can somebody trust that your numbers and know your business? And if they feel confident that your numbers know your business, then you can be given leeway to make mistakes and then pivot and iterate. But to your point, if you're not prepared, if you don't know your numbers, if you don't know your business, then the trust gets broken. And executives typically start to question whether you're the right person.

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Tyler Calder (26:57):

I think you're bang on. I talk about this, I teach at a university here in Canada, and the last lecture that I give is about trust and why marketers. There's a stat relatively recent stat, it's like 83% of CEOs do not trust their marketing leaders. That's an alarming stat. It very much aligns with why marketing leaders last on average less than a couple years. But it comes down to what you just said. I don't think my marketing leader understands their business, understands their numbers. When I ask them how something's performing, it's always, let me get back to you. If a campaign fail, it's like an oopsies. And sometimes you see the same parallels with partnership leaders around that trust. And so I think at the most senior level, especially the CEO, CFO, that trust comes from exactly what you just suggested, your business, your numbers. You can have an adult conversation about something maybe not working and what you're going to do about it.

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(27:54):

So I'm excited to get your model in people's hands. I think it'll help a lot of folks. You mentioned something a couple minutes ago about predicting the ramp of partners and predicting churn and some partnerships don't work out. You and I had a conversation about sometimes having to have hard conversations with partners of yours and talking about, Hey, you know what? Maybe we got to scale this thing down or maybe we got to end the partnership completely. I'd like to tap into that a little bit because I find, again, talking with a lot of our customers, one of the hardest things is to walk away from a partnership. Partnership. People, we don't like to do that. That doesn't feel good. How do you make those decisions? How do you look at something and say, okay, you know what? Either I'm going to invest more heavily or I'm going to have to divest and have an uncomfortable conversation. Maybe walk away from this.

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Brian Jambor (28:44):

I think that you have to get really intentional around the ROI of each partnership and how closely aligned it is to the ICP that you're going after to the business problems that you're solving or the business challenges that your go-to-market team is facing. The tighter those correlations are and the higher the odds it's going to be a successful partnership. But the biggest challenge that I see partnership people run into is there's a little bit of this bright shiny object syndrome of, oh, so-and-so wants to partner with me and I can partner with them and I can partner with this other person, and that would be really great, and a CEO wants me to go partner with this other company. That could be a really cool thing. And next thing you know, just start chasing all of these partnerships that don't have a really tight return for the business because they don't solve the problems that your customers need solved or your sales or CS team needs solved, and it not aligned to your really, really tightly to your current ICP, not some future ICP based on a feature that products get a release or an industry that products going to suddenly explore go into 8, 10, 12 months from now.

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(30:01):

I think it's really challenging. I think partnership professionals sometimes deal with a lot of demand and feel uncomfortable saying no, because partnerships is also relationship game, and you never know who you're going to meet today that may be at the right company, at the right time in a future role that you're going to have to work with, where you're going to have to say, Hey, remember how I completely avoided you at the last company that I was at, even though you wanted something from me? Well, guess what? The tables are turned and now I actually need something from you. Is that okay? I think that's where it stems from actually.

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Tyler Calder (30:40):

Yeah, no, very fair. Very fair. In practice, how would you approach that conversation with a potential partner where you got to have that hard conversation, you're going to think about unwinding the partnership. Any tips for folks that are listening and thinking, Brian's right, I got to go have a couple hard conversations.

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Brian Jambor (31:03):

With maybe even people that I'd consider as friends.

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Tyler Calder (31:06):

Right? Yeah.

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Brian Jambor (31:08):

Right?

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Tyler Calder (31:08):

Exactly.

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Brian Jambor (31:10):

And if we don't have this partnership where I am also providing maybe unequivocal reciprocal value, more value than they're providing me, they're not going to be able hit their number and that's going to affect their actual paycheck and their livelihood, and these things get really intense for most of those conversations. If they're, I'll call it material in nature, large partnership, strategic partnership, somebody for a long time. I actually really think you need to get on a flight and have those conversations. I think you need to actually look the individual dead in the eye and say, Hey, we need to talk about this partnership that we have. Be upfront, instantly, don't beat around the bush and say we need to unwind it and then pause for a moment, let that sink in, and then go into the why. Here are the reasons why it's not working, because the ROI isn't there.

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(32:02):

We've got other priorities. We've shifted our model, or you've shifted yours or you're now competitive and you weren't competitive before. All of those things. But I think you need to rip the bandaid off. I think you need to face to face, rip the bandaid off, and then you can go into the times that I've had to do that. They haven't been great conversations from everybody's smiling and having fun point of view, of course, but they're reasonable conversations and most people at the end of the day are reasonable and they understand that business decisions have to be made and your ability to make them is critical to the success of your ecosystem and what you're trying to achieve.

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Tyler Calder (32:45):

Yeah, I think that's great. The face-to-face piece, jump on a plane, go see them. Let's be honest. I think we've lost a little bit of that, the face-to-face over the past five years or so, and just how important it is, especially when you're going to have those big material conversations as you call 'em.

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Brian Jambor (33:00):

I could tell you don't put it off. I had made the mistake of putting off a partnership that I had to unwind for over two quarters. This is a couple of years ago, and the pain that caused for the organization was material. When it actually became time to unwind it, it was way worse than it could have been if I just immediately acted when I knew immediately that it wasn't going to work out.

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Tyler Calder (33:24):

Interesting. Why did waiting make the pain that much more material?

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Brian Jambor (33:30):

It was a partner that had suddenly become very competitive to the company that I was at, and they were starting to recruit the same partners that we had, but to resell only their solution and not ours, and they got way more traction by being in our ecosystem in those motions than they would've if we just immediately cut ties and said, you know what? We can't have you as a partner anymore. These are the reasons why.

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Tyler Calder (33:56):

Yeah, no, I think that's another good, great, fantastic piece of advice. I mean, this is true for almost any tough decision. The longer you wait, the harder it's going to be and the more material, the negative kind of consequences of waiting are going to be. I want to shift to where you're at now. It's an absolute rocket shift. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Synthesia?

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Brian Jambor (34:16):

Synthesia? It's the fastest rocket that I've ever ridden on. So Synthesia is an AI video and learning company. We generate AI videos. We're known for our very realistic AI avatars, and where it's utilized is mostly in the learning and development space where you have individuals that have to train either employees or customers, mostly employees on whether it be compliance topics or whether it be new products and features that you're rolling out. Your training team typically has to produce a lot of this content and they need the individuals receiving the content to actually consume it and remember it. And what we found is that most people these days, I don't know about you, but most people these days don't like to read, right? Everybody wants to watch a video or they want to listen to podcasts like this one, hopefully, right? And so you're left with creating video and normally creating a video training is very expensive, and so we come in, we can do it at scale in a very engaging way using very realistic avatars, whether it be our actors and actresses that we've hired, or you can have your own likeness turn into an avatar.

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(35:31):

We do that to the highest degree of compliance and security. So right now, over 70% of the Fortune 100 are customers. A lot of that's because we really index heavy on security compliance control synesthesia at a very, very, very high level from a rocket ship standpoint. Just I can say this because we announced it publicly, we recently passed the a hundred million ARR mark, and we're continuing to grow and over about a hundred percent year over year, which in the software space is very rare air to breathe. I can tell you that all of our foundational metrics that you would think of when you start thinking about AI solutions, so like what's your net revenue retention? What's your rule of 40? What's your magic number? I can't disclose what those are publicly, but I can tell you that everything that we're doing is literally best in class across the board in terms of every SaaS metric that you can think of measuring. So we're solving different problems over here. My problem isn't finding partners. My problem is saying no more frequently to focus on the initiatives, partner initiatives that are really going to help our team accelerate deals. It's a very different world, but very exciting.

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Tyler Calder (36:51):

So do you have a Brian avatar that's going out there and saying no to all the folks? You have a Brian avatar having the heart, no conversations now.

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Brian Jambor (37:00):

That's a good idea. I don't have a Brian avatar that says no yet. I usually have those conversations face-to-face through Zoom when I have to, but I do have a Brian avatar that coaches new partners on all the things that they need to know from an enablement and the training and coaching standpoint that's on autopilot. I do have a Brian avatar that is sent out to partners and recap meetings, Hey, here's what we talked about. Here's your current reality. Here's what a partnership with us would look like, and here's how we would measure that and the benefits.

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Tyler Calder (37:33):

Very cool. Let's talk about that. Is that predominantly how you're using it yourself within partnerships today? Are there other use cases?

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Brian Jambor (37:42):

Yeah, I use it for every partner conversation that I have. I use it for prospecting new partners, sending messages on LinkedIn with chief product officers of different companies that I need to work with or whatever. I'm using my avatar in a video personalized to them with their name and their company and the details and what I'm proposing high level. So all the prospecting on utilizing my avatar. Once we have those conversations, summarizing the conversation, bridging what we talked about into next steps, all of that recap is being sent to them in an email with a video in that email. That's my avatar going through that, branded to them and everything. All of our partner onboarding incorporates video and avatars, and we talk to partners about how to do certain things and our ecosystem, how to access certain resources. So we use it a lot of different ways. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (38:35):

That's very cool, very exciting. Where do you see partnerships going in the age of AI and the age of avatars? If you had to think about, okay, it's 2030, I'm starting a net new program again, do you think that world is going to look like?

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Brian Jambor (38:53):

I truly believe you will see more partnership individuals operating from a more is less principle, less is more. I mean, right? So you'll have smaller partnership teams that are creating more impact because they're utilizing artificial intelligence automation tools. It allows them to multiply their efforts at scale where they couldn't previously. So these organizations have hundreds or thousands of partnership people. Some of the people they say, man, if I could just get two more people on my team, I'd be doing really good. But I truly believe that partnership leaders are going to be asking for less headcount in the future and they're going to be asking for more AI tools instead, which reduces their operational expense to manage their ecosystem, which makes their contribution metrics look incredible to the business. And that's always been a challenge. I think in the past of one, there hasn't been clear metrics that partnership people have shared with the business on exactly their impact, but two, that impact hasn't looked as good as other business units potentially.

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(40:04):

It's resource intense typically from a personnel standpoint, but I think that's going to get flipped on its head. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, this is going to be a little bit of a controversial take, but I think partner programs are going to go away. I think the era of the partner program where you have these silver, gold, platinum, tinfoil, aluminum tiers, and if you do this much revenue, you get this much commission and whatever, and here's your MDF program and here's, I think these overly complex programs actually will eventually go away. And I think that businesses in a world where your company doesn't need 200, 300, a thousand, 10,000 people to get similar outputs, we'll start to actually focus more on, I'll call it go-to-market acceleration motions that unlock commercial success, then they will these overly comprehensive and complex distribution programs.

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Tyler Calder (41:10):

I think that's a whole other podcast episode leaving us with a banger of a take. No, I like it. I like it. What are the signals or signposts that you're seeing that leads you to make that claim?

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Brian Jambor (41:24):

I just see a lot of partnership people doing way more than they could before with less. But I also see executives who have gotten really jaded by this whole concept of, I'm going to stand up a partner program and we're going to have all these tiers and these levels and we're going to have all these ecosystem will be super, super wide. There was the era where partnerships was the really hot thing and it was, oh, you don't have a partner ecosystem. You've got to have a partner ecosystem. You need to increase your distribution through third party channels. That's super important. And I think a lot of businesses tried that, and you can make the argument that it was under invested. You can make the argument that the timing wasn't right. The business tried to do it too early. There's a lot of arguments for why it maybe did or didn't work, but I think you're starting to get a lot of executives that are becoming really skeptical around partner program's ability to impact commercial success and that partnership leaders are starting to get really wise to what actually moves the needle and what's just organizational fluff, like how many of those one sheets do your partners really actually read?

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(42:38):

And when they read those one sheets, how many more MQLs, SQLs, whatever you're tracking, partner referrals, do you get from that from the partner? Have you tangibly seen an uptick in partner productivity and effectiveness for a specific asset that you've deployed to the field? And by how much? I think in a world where if partners are really curious about the aspects of your business that they need to know how to pitch to the customer, they can query their own favorite LLM model and get briefed and up to speed as much as you could brief them. And so if you suddenly don't need to do enablement because the partner has access to all of the contacts that you could provide around it at a PhD level of intellectual knowledge, I guess we don't need to do enablement anymore now, and you start to really break down all the little aspects that you put together that encompass a partner program, a lot of those things start to go away. It's a hot take, spicy cake. There's a lot of really big, really complex partner programs out there, formal programs out there. And I'm not saying it's going to all go away tomorrow, but I would be surprised if you start to see people focusing more on partner motions tied to commercial success than you would partner programs.

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Tyler Calder (43:58):

Yeah, no, I love it. I think there is a need for simplification to speak to just how overly complex some of these programs have become. There is a lot there in what you just said that I think really emphasizes the importance for folks across all of go-to-market to be in the trenches, hands-on testing, experimenting with all of the different AI tooling that's available, thinking about various workflows that they can build. How can they take the thing that they're doing manually today and they do it a hundred times a month? How do you automate that? How do you take that off your plate and move on and do kind of higher value, higher impact things? And candidly, if you're not doing that, you're probably going to end up being left behind. So I think there's a lot of importance in what you just said. I got one last question as we wrap up to bring it back to the financial side of things. What's the biggest mistake you see partner leaders make when trying to chat to their CFO work with their CFO, and how do you flip that into a strength, into an opportunity?

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Brian Jambor (45:02):

The biggest mistake I see is not knowing the numbers, not getting into the details of the business, to know what the numbers of the business are and be able to speak about the business in a comprehensive way. What does an MQL cost the business? Are your partners going to be generating Partner Qualified Leads? Okay, how's that cost compared to the cost of our marketing team generating a Marketing Qualified Lead? Do you know what the conversion rate is from MQL to SQL? Based on that, what's your target for partner leads that then get converted partner qualified opportunities? Yeah, going into those conversations blind without understanding the business, I found has been a pretty big gap that I've seen in some partnership leaders.

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Tyler Calder (45:43):

And is that a function of curiosity?

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Brian Jambor (45:46):

I think it's deeper than that though actually, Tyler, I think what it is, it's being confident, abandoning all of your legacy knowledge that you have around partnerships and operating from a first principles perspective around the business, how the business works, and then how partnerships could actually accelerate commercial success in that business. But you've got to be really confident abandoning all of the domain knowledge that you have and asking questions as if you know nothing, you don't. Then you'll end up making assumptions, which means you won't ask the right questions, which typically will lead you to not getting the right answers.

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Tyler Calder (46:28):

I love it. I think that's a great place to end. I thank you for your time, sir.

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Brian Jambor (46:33):

Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me on. It's very kind of you.

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Tyler Calder (46:36):

How can folks get ahold of you if they so choose?

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Brian Jambor (46:40):

Yeah, just reach out to me on LinkedIn, check me out on LinkedIn. More than happy to engage with you.

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Tyler Calder (46:45):

Cool. Brian, thank you very much, and hopefully your inbox isn't completely flooded because I think this was an incredibly valuable conversation and I'm sure people are going to want to follow up. So thank you.

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Brian Jambor (46:56):

Well, thank you. Appreciate you having me on, Tyler. Thanks.

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Tyler Calder (46:59):

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/get-it-together.

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