How To Build Partner Messaging That Speaks To The Right Buyer With Kate DiLeo

Kate DiLeo (00:00):

A lot of times we think about messaging as being like, we do this and we do this and we can offer you this. Oh my gosh, there's this. Stop. Pause. Psychologically, we've got to hit the nail on the head first to go, I get what you're dealing with and I'm here to help solve for that. What is their massive pain?

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Tyler Calder  (00:20):

This is Get It, Together. The podcast where partnership and go- to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. All right. Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Get It, Together. I am super excited for this conversation because I think we're going to break away a little bit from our typical conversation, which is oftentimes anchored directly into partnerships. And today we're going to talk a litle bit about brand and why it's so critical as a partner leader to understand how can you take your corporate kind of brand narrative and apply it to your partner program in a really meaningful way. Today I'm chatting with Kate and I'm going to throw out a last name that I prefer, which is Kate Delo. Is that correct? Is that accurate or would you like

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Kate DiLeo (01:09):

To correct me on that one? You're super close, Tyler. It's DiLeo. Kate DiLeo.

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Tyler Calder  (01:13):

Oh,

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Kate DiLeo (01:14):

Okay. Thank you.

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Tyler Calder  (01:15):

Sorry. I'll keep that in mind. Not Delo.

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Kate DiLeo (01:18):

Not Delo. Okay. No.

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Tyler Calder  (01:19):

Perfect. We've gotten to know each other over, what, the past year or so now and we've had some really interesting conversations. Kate is a bestselling author. You're a solopreneur. You came up through sales

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Kate DiLeo (01:35):

And

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Tyler Calder  (01:35):

Then really shifted into brand and are the creator of the brand trifecta, which we're going to chat a little bit about today. What did I miss?

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Kate DiLeo (01:44):

Oh, I think that's the big stuff, my friend. I also weirdly had a background in linguistic anthropology. That was the plan, by the way, before the market crashed way back when and when I had to start my sales career. So I've always been in this area of language. This was

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Tyler Calder  (01:59):

The linguistic

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Kate DiLeo (02:01):

Market

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Tyler Calder  (02:01):

That crashed?

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Kate DiLeo (02:02):

The linguistic market that crashed actually knows more just the general economy. But I had a professor that was like, "That's so cute that you think you're going to buy the tenured position at some point in academia. It's not going to happen. You should probably leave and go pay off your undergraduate debt." And I was living at home, by the way, I just moved back and my Italian father was like, "Shoo, get a job. Go bye-bye." So off I went and long story short, I never became a professor that I thought I was going to be.

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Tyler Calder  (02:33):

There you go. Here

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Kate DiLeo (02:33):

We are.

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Tyler Calder  (02:35):

Let's start there. So you end up in sales, you're carrying a quota, you've called yourself an accidental brand strategist.

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Kate DiLeo (02:46):

100%.

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Tyler Calder  (02:47):

What did that look like? How did you get to where you are today?

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Kate DiLeo (02:50):

I think, okay, so for context, I'm 40. I graduated 2007 and for my undergraduate, that's when I wrapped undergraduate work and I then started graduate work when everything kind of crashed in 2008. But as an older millennial, you're coming out of school with, I think really at that time, a lot of us were just trying to make ends meet. We all had five roommates. We're just trying to pay bills and here I am. I'm just taking a sales job trying to cut my teeth in anything that I could. I really wasn't sure where to begin, but it's funny, my dad, a very seasoned entrepreneur, gave me some solid advice before I started college. He said, "Listen, I don't care what you study. I want you to enjoy your time in college, but there's three rules to live by. Number one, you never burn a bridge.

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(03:29):

Number two, you live and die by your Rolodex. And number three, you better know how to sell something." Now, this has been the best life advice I've ever had, by the way. We fast forward 20 some odd years later. But I say all that because I kind of kept that in the back of my brain and thought, why not take a sales job? And so I candidly took a very stupid sales job to cold call IT professionals and sell them $2,500 training classes, which you can imagine I was just setting myself up for success.That's theory smart for a green salesperson.

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Tyler Calder  (04:00):

Totally.

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Kate DiLeo (04:01):

Candidly, I kind of wiggled my way into branding though. Long story short, I had to make quota. All the sales scripts they gave me were terrible. They'd given me a database of 10,000 leads. I think at the time we had a brand new Eloqua marketing campaign. Our CRM was like SalesLogics was great. No automation. And here I am, I'm smiling and dialing 60 dials a day. That's what you did, sending out the emails. And very quickly I was like, "I'm going to be out of a job if I don't change something." So I just decided to throw up their scripts and test the waters of what I could say live in those calls to get an IT person to want to stay on the phone with me or reply to my email. And so I had no idea this was brand at the time, by the way.

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(04:46):

I simply just called these people up and said, "Hi, my name's Kate. I'm with such and such company. This is what we do. This is how we solve our problem and one, two, three, this is how we're different." And then I would shut up and it actually worked. Now an IT style failer, it's like the way that it worked is they would go, "I'm in the middle of a deployment, but can you send me an email? Click." Or, "You know what? Call me back in six months, click." There was no conversation with the buyer, but there was a breakthrough that happened because I was somehow getting to the point without realizing it, these core things that buyers actually wanted to know before they remotely cared about the offering and I didn't know it was brand. So I actually got recruited out of sales to go right pitch for the rest of the team.

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(05:27):

Then I got recruited into the marketing agency world of the glory days of marketing, 2011, 2012. And then worked in corporate for a number of years and started side hustling. So that side hustle became my full-time thing about seven years ago and I've worked with about 350 brands.

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Tyler Calder  (05:43):

Very cool. And so let's dive into the work that you're doing with these 350 brands or what you've learned. So I know you have your framework. Let's talk about that. Walk us through that.

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Kate DiLeo (05:55):

So the framework is very simple. It's very practical. And again, it was rooted in those early sales conversations that I learned. I had to cut my teeth. And a lot of us ensure in partnerships world too, this is often trial by fire. You're out there and you're really trying to understand and test and analyze what is it that's going to stick in that conversation to compel somebody to want to convert or take that next step. So the three big pieces of this brand trifecta model are, number one, a tagline that articulates, this is what we do. Number two, a value proposition statement that says, here's the pain that you're facing, here's how to solve that with us. And then number three, a set of three to five big bullets, the three five big ways that you're different better than the rest, differentiator statements. Now none of this is new under the sun for most people who've worked in sales or marketing.

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(06:45):

We all kind of court with these things. But for me, what I was starting to do was frame this up as an actual order of operations as a formulaic approach going, oh, hang on. When I actually hit these bullets in the right order, when I speak to these pieces of the brand promise in the right order, that's when there's the unlock where that buyer is actually self-selecting to want to go deeper in the conversation with me. So that became the impetus of creating something called that brand trifecta.

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Tyler Calder  (07:13):

Where are brands, especially B2B brands, typically screwing this up? What is the gap that you're seeing in the market that you're helping fix for folks? Is it just an inability to articulate these things that to your point we've all heard of differentiators a value prop. Is it like brands are getting in their own way and they're not speaking clear? What's the gap that you're helping?

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Kate DiLeo (07:37):

So I think there's a few ways I'm going to address this. I'm going to address this at the macro level for the business and then I want to address it on the partnership side. So I think at the macro level for the business, there's a couple big ways that I see this people going rogue where all of a sudden your brand is not creating conversations that convert like it should. And number one that I find is that sales and marketing are saying two completely different narratives and you're like, uh-huh. Okay. So what happens is marketing's like, yes, we're going to go build this brand narrative and it's gorgeous. And we've got a mission statement and a vision, oh, look at all of our content. And it's so beautiful. And we put it into the slide deck and sales is like, that is great, but that is completely impractical.

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(08:16):

It's not aligned to what we're actually saying on sales calls and what the voice of the customer is. And so we're going to continue down our path of seeing what we say on calls every single day because there's a massive disconnect. And what happens is then you've got one set of information out here that marketing is driving to get the buyer in and then there's not a consistency on the sales call of a repetition that buyers need to hear of repeating that same stuff at the top of the call to go, "Oh, yes, that sounds like what I saw. Perfect. I love that. Let's go deeper." So that's the first big disconnect where I see people go rogue. Bottom line, you cannot build brand in a box. Sales better be in the damn room. Second thing is I consistently see, especially in SaaS that it's very common that you've got a tagline, you've got a value proposition statement or positioning statement above the fold on your homepage.

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(09:05):

Yeah, partner stack of do. Cool. And then you go right into product details, features and benefits information. Here's the problem. Your buyer doesn't care about all the bells and whistles yet because you're giving them really compelling new information with a provocative tagline and a provocative value prop. And so the only way for the buyer to make sense and decipher that is to actually compare you against a category or a thing it already knows, a. K.a. Your competition. And so what we want to have brands do is not negate the power of the comparison moment. And so by having right below that fold, the top three big bullets of hire different and better than competitors, that is an unlock where your buyer goes, oh my gosh, yes, that does feel different. That does make sense. Now tell me how it works, what's included, what are the features, what are the benefits?

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(09:56):

And on websites, we immediately see that when you frame it that way, you have a much richer and a higher conversion rate that's going right into where you want it to go on product service pages. So those are the big ways. I have one final thing to mention about where are brands getting it wrong and that's on the partnership side. I know we're going to talk a litle bit about this today. It's extremely common that we want to have a partner program. We're like, yes, go, do it partner leaders. And yet we expect as an organization that they're supposed to roll out the exact same customer facing narrative that we've built and that's not going to cut it. One message is not enough to roll them all. And so we have a responsibility as an organization to create a mirrored message that speaks to the ultimate partner at the end of this of what's in it for them.

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(10:40):

And that's by far one of the biggest missing pieces we're seeing in today's landscape.

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Tyler Calder  (10:45):

This is going to be the meat of the conversation. So that's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation. For partner leaders and everybody listening, I think you all feel this, typically you're on an island, your mandate is to drive outsized impact, which is a way to say you're not getting a whole lot of resources.

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(11:08):

And so one of the resources you're not typically getting is a punch of support from the marketing team figuring out how do you take the top-down corporate narrative that you want to be pushing to market and translating that into something that's partner-friendly, something that is going to almost be a pseudo mission statement for your Oregon partnerships. You sort of mentioned that it's important that there is that nuance as a partner leader. It's not one message to rule them all. Let's start with why is it important that as a partner leader, you are aligned to the corporate narrative, but you've been able to sniff out the nuance that's really going to help you elevate your partner program and be attractive to potential partners. I mean, might sound obvious why it's important. Why is this important?

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Kate DiLeo (11:58):

Well, it's important because your buyer's different, right? Let's just talk brass tax here. Come on, guys. We have a different buyer that we're trying to bring in. And so for partner leaders, we are directly talking to who, Tyler? Who are you trying to sell?

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Tyler Calder  (12:13):

You're asking me?

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Kate DiLeo (12:14):

Yeah. Who are you trying to sell in a partner program?

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Tyler Calder  (12:17):

Well, at PartnerStack, I am trying to sell into the whole go- to-market because like every business we think big. Of course. That's who we're trying to sell into.

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Kate DiLeo (12:28):

Everybody's partner. Your partner. It's like Oprah, right? You get to school, you can get to school. Okay. Yeah. So I don't say that flippantly to be rude. Hear me out on this. But I think what's really important when we have a different ICP and we have to remember that partnerships is truly a different ICP, we've got to lock that in our brain. The bottom line heart pain that you solve as an organization for a partner and a partner program is different. It's nuanced compared to the end customer problem. What's in it for me? What are you doing for me? What's my burning platform? That's what brand is all about. So what that means then is that if I were to go to a homepage of a website that's speaking to the end customer and they've got this amazing tagline and value prop that's like, "Oh, Bob, here's the problem you're facing and here's how to solve it with us." And Bob's like, "Oh my God, you get me.

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(13:20):

" Chances are the friction point that hurter leaders are having is that if they throw that and if they say the exact same thing to a potential partner or somebody in their ecosystem, partner's like, "Yeah, that's great, but what about me? " And when you get that response, ding, ding, ding, that means there's a need for a separate nuanced kind of sister statements that have a value problem instead of differentiators that speak right to them. I

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Tyler Calder  (13:45):

Think that lands. You want to workshop it live with PartnerStack? Oh

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Kate DiLeo (13:48):

My goodness. Give people

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Tyler Calder  (13:49):

A taste of what this looks like. All

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Kate DiLeo (13:51):

Right. Why don't you pull up PartnerStack's website and let's go through, because Tyler, you hold the keys to this brand and you've done an amazing job. I want to know as we look at this, what your tagline is, what your value proposition statement is, what your differentiators are.

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Tyler Calder  (14:08):

You want me to share my screen?

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Kate DiLeo (14:09):

You want to

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Tyler Calder  (14:09):

Actually get into it, get into

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Kate DiLeo (14:10):

It? Yeah. Do you want to do it?

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Tyler Calder  (14:12):

Yeah, let's do it.

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Kate DiLeo (14:13):

All right, pull it up.

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Tyler Calder  (14:14):

This is the first time we've ever done a screen share as part of our podcast. Let's do it.

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Kate DiLeo (14:18):

All right. So immediately my brain goes, I see drive growth with B2B partnerships, kaboom. Now that is phrase, it's in your H1, your biggest headline there. So is that your tagline as a company?

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Tyler Calder  (14:32):

Sure. Yeah.

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Kate DiLeo (14:33):

It's the five to six words that state what you do. In D2B tagline, state what you do because that's the first question that a business asks when they're buying. Okay. Now the next thing down is a really strong call to action statement. It's hitting at the value proposition pretty strongly there. So it's stating scale partner revenue through high performing co-sell affiliate influencer and customer referrals on the only PRM with a network of partners. So if I look at that, it's pretty clear of who you're probably talking to. So now the question is, Tyler, what is the value prop to your partners? How do you guys phrase that?

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Tyler Calder  (15:13):

Can I give more context?

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Kate DiLeo (15:14):

100%.

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Tyler Calder  (15:15):

And really my purpose in giving context is to get free advice from you while we're live on a podcast. That's what I'm trying to achieve right

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Kate DiLeo (15:21):

Now. I love that. It's great.

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Tyler Calder  (15:23):

Yeah. No billable hours.

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Kate DiLeo (15:24):

No bill hours. I'll send you my bill later. Don't worry.

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Tyler Calder  (15:27):

Okay, perfect. I'll be candid. Here's the thing that I think we've struggled with at PartnerStack and we've decided to be really deliberate about how we approach this problem. So I'll start with the problem or the challenge I think is as a company that is still a startup on its way to a scale up. I don't know if we can be called a scale up now that we've been acquired by a massive organization, but let's say we're still trying to operate that way. We have two very distinct buyers. We sell to a traditional partner leader that is likely running a tech integration program, a reseller program, maybe like an agency referral co-sell program and they're looking to us as a PRM and they're looking for obvious use cases within a PRM. The other side is a marketing buyer and that marketing buyer looks to us as an affiliate network.

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(16:17):

They're both interested in driving revenue. They're both measured on their ability to drive pipeline and sourced revenue, but the way that they do it is quite different.

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(16:28):

These two teams, what we find, they don't talk to each other internally. And so what we've always struggled with is an overarching narrative that people actually buy. We've tried to evangelize, you should have a single platform to manage all of your indirect revenue, which is to say all of your partner types. But at the end of the day, somebody running an affiliate influencer creator program, now we've gotten into third party content activation to drive AI visibility. That's a different buyer from the affiliate buyer. That kind of group, typically in a lot of organizations, they're not talking to the PRM buyer, PRM buyer, not talking to the marketing buyer. And when we try to go high level with this one platform, all partner types, candidly, the C level I think cares that they like that vision, but when you get down to the day-to-day practitioner, they're just kind of like, "I don't give a shit.

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(17:17):

I just need to solve my very specific thing." So where I'm going with that is the decision we've made is if you know us as an affiliate platform and you're coming to us an affiliate platform, we're going to talk to you about affiliate. We'll try to see if we can provide value. If so, let's work together and then we'll try to expand. If they come in thinking of us as a PRM, then same thing. We'll sell you a PRM, try to provide value there and then see if we can expand. I think the challenge we've always had with our messaging is how to capture that in a hero image and hero copy. And then the same challenge with our partner program, if you want to partner with PartnerStack, what the hell are you partnering with PartnerStack four?

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Kate DiLeo (17:58):

Exactly.

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Tyler Calder  (18:00):

Yeah. That's where I find our challenge is. So I'll answer your question around how this translates to how we talk to partners is basically if you are providing ... So we mostly partner with agencies right now. If you are providing agency services managing a traditional partner program and there's a lot of consultancies popping up doing this, you can manage that on the back of PartnerStack. If you're managing an affiliate program, same thing, you can leverage PartnerStack to manage it. The value on the affiliate side is we're only truly the only B2B platform doing this. We have far more competition on the PRM side.

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Kate DiLeo (18:40):

Sure.

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Tyler Calder  (18:41):

So it's actually a relatively easy conversation on the affiliate side because we're the only entity. I think that makes you lazy because somebody can pop up and have a better narrative, a better pitch and steal it. But what I'd love to do is get far clearer for each of our personas on truly why we should be working together and the value that we can provide. And I'm not convinced that we're nailing that.

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Kate DiLeo (19:07):

Okay. So first off, you are primarily positioning yourself as a PRM when I come to your homepage. That is the category. You're like, we are locked and loaded in this category, but now there's been an evolution of the brand. That language doesn't land over here, right? This is also very common as you grow. It's very, very common as a platform expands where you're all of a sudden seeing that you've got these different wings of buyers. What's happening right now is the previous kind of core PR and messaging that you had, homepage messaging, as the platform capabilities have expanded, so has your audience expansion hit. So with that, what has to happen is more of a layered brand architecture. And the way that you do that is very simply by actually, and I love thinking about it through a website lenses, this is where you've got to actually have a top level brand trifecta that hits everybody at the business level.

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(19:57):

What are you solving at the business level homepage? And then you segment based on audience for marketers, for partner leaders, for bank, boom, boom, boom. And that starts to segment them into the content on your website. Now, when we get pretty complex, it's interesting because you also can have a solutions section on a website. This is very common. You're talking about all the phases of the partner lifecycle. Okay, I totally get that. But if you're finding that your buyers are so disparate based on what they're purchasing, one recommendation may be to think about an architecture that actually takes them to audience first and then how you serve that person throughout the lifecycle. So lifecycle sits right beneath it. And what that might do is weight them enough where they're like, "I'm going to self-select in that you get me and my burning platform with a value prop and differentiators.

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(20:50):

Now, what does the platform do across all the phases of the lifecycle?" And very often this missing layer of audience specific is where you can really strengthen and get a faster buy-in from those various audiences.

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Tyler Calder  (21:05):

Let's talk about the partner leader. So the partner leader, let's assume the brand at the corporate level has nailed the trifecta. Let's assume they nailed it. As a partner leader, what is the tactical work I should be going through to take that and I don't know if reposition is the right word, but you know what I mean? Reposition it for my audience.

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Kate DiLeo (21:28):

Translate that. As potential

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Tyler Calder  (21:29):

Partners.

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Kate DiLeo (21:29):

Yeah. Translate. The audience. Absolutely. Okay. So let's get into some nuts and bolts here of what could you do? You're like, "I'm going to listen to this today, Kate, and I'm going to go do it and apologize later to marketing. I'm going to go build the brand trifecta so that I can better sell." Right? Okay. Amazing. So I would just say that there's some buckets of work you could think about and this is what I do for any client and you can use Claude to help you with this. You can go through all your other documents marketing provided as some core inputs. I recommend you always leverage your own sales calls and transcripts for that. So inputs that I would tell you to look at is go find all the corporate brand docs, have Clot analyze the website messaging to pull out your value prop and differentiators, et cetera.

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(22:09):

Know your top five competitor websites that it's also going to need to analyze to pressure test whatever you write

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Tyler Calder  (22:15):

As a partner leader thinking about the competition, is it the same competition that I'd be thinking about if I was leading the full go- to-market direct sales? Do I think about competition differently?

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Kate DiLeo (22:28):

So it's tricky. It may or may not be. I mean, I know this sounds terrible to hear me out on this. Sometimes it could be. I always just want you to think about competition. Who's going to steal your person? Who's going to steal their time, their energy, their resources into wanting to commit to you? Oh, well, we've made a decision that we're going to just really focus on these three partnerships this year. Who are those people that are stealing that time and effort? That's your competition. You probably know them internally, right? So you're always bumping up against the same things and it could be in some direct competition. The other way to think about it is what are the objections you're constantly handling as a partner leader? "No, we're just going to manage this internally. We don't have the budget or the bandwidth. What is it that's in front of you?

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(23:10):

So look at your own sales call, transcripts, know the brand guidelines, pull those in, think about who your competition or major objections are. Then what you're going to do are two initial pieces that I want you to think about building and analyzing before you put pen to paper. Number one, you can have Claude take all of that and help you actually articulate a tone of voice system for the organizational brand. A tone of voice system is basically saying," This is how we sound, this is how we seem. We use this kind of language. We don't use this kind of language. So what you're doing is creating a cheat code for yourself so that if you're not this master writer, you're like, okay, I know it's always got to look and sound like this. "Cool. So you create this tone of voice system so that if the corporate brand customer facing is very serious and raw, well, you can't go be flashy just because your personality's flashy.

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(24:02):

It's not going to work, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing that you can do analyzing is actually have it do just a quick ICP or analysis of who your ideal partner profile is. What is that IPP? We want to think about who are you trying to really bring in, what are the criteria for those people and make sure that you presure tested and also not just what do they look like from a demographics standpoint, but I recommend you think about psychographics, who are the humans behind the category. And then you can actually prompt Claude to say," Articulate for me the bottom line heart pain of this IPP. What's the heart pain? "It does a great job doing it, by the way. So if you get those two buckets of work done, then you can kind of do this amazing thing where you can actually start to pen a paper to create what I call a mirror brand trifecta, similar structure and sentence length and everything down from the tagline to the value proposition statement to differentiators, you're going to flip it on its head.

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(24:59):

Side note, and listen, I'm a trained writer and I do this for a living. You can have Claude actually create a draft of this and then you're going to go back and wordsmith. So for years I did this all by hands. Now what I'm doing is I'm going to prompt for drafts, concept language, and then I'm going to refine and refine and refine with the client. But you can actually do this as a partner leader to come out with something that's completely sounds and seems like the corporate brand as it should, but is really geared at what are you solving for the partner?

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Tyler Calder  (25:28):

What's heart pain?

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Kate DiLeo (25:32):

Heart pain is the burning platform. What is the burning platform? What is the thing, the stick in the side, the thing that's keeping your partners up at night? Why do they actually need you? Not what do you do for them? So listen to the difference. A lot of times we think about messaging as being like, " We do this and we do this and we can offer you this. Oh my gosh, there's this. "Stop, pause. Psychologically, we got to hit the nail on the head first to go, " I get what you're dealing with and I'm here to help solve for that. What is their massive pain? Oh, by the way, how we can help you solve that is through this amazing platform called Partner Stack. And did you know that here are the core components that directly serve that for you? "So it's flipping that so that the product features actually sit right below that and it makes sense to somebody now versus just dumping a bunch of product information at them and they're like, " What am I supposed to do with that?

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Tyler Calder  (26:33):

"Do you want to workshop it again for PartnerStack as an

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Kate DiLeo (26:36):

Example? My bill is going way up through the rooftyler. That's fine.

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Tyler Calder  (26:39):

Now you're good. Great. That's all right.

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Kate DiLeo (26:40):

All right. Pull it up. I mean, because which part do you want to workshop? Would you like to workshop what you're saying for partners?

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Tyler Calder  (26:46):

Yeah.

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Kate DiLeo (26:47):

Let's do it.

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Tyler Calder  (26:48):

Can we just

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Kate DiLeo (26:48):

Talk

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Tyler Calder  (26:49):

Through it then? Yeah, we can just talk through it. And again, I think we can work on the overarching tagline and narrative, but generally I'll stick with we are one platform to manage all of your partner types, all of your indirect revenue. Let's just stick with that. I go and I'm trying to recruit a bunch of new ... I'll actually be very specific. I've alluded to this already. Part of what we're building on the affiliate side of our platform is the ability to activate third party content at scale for the purpose of improving AI visibility. So we know that third party content is a massive driver of citations. And so we're integrating with all of the AI platforms and you can import that citation data, identify what partners we're already working with in our network, get content placed, et cetera. That's a fast growing part of our business and it's a very interesting one.

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(27:41):

We don't currently work with any agencies that offer AI visibility as a service. And so there's two things that we want to do is one, there's probably agencies where this could be a service line for them. Can we help educate them and help bring them along for that ride if they're interested? The other is there's a bunch of agencies that are doing this. Let's go try to recruit them. Absolutely. To your point, what is in it for them? How should we think about translating that? How do we do it? What do we do? We help brands improve AI visibility through third party content. Why should an agency that I want to recruit care?

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Kate DiLeo (28:16):

Well, here's the questions I'd ask for us to kind of get to that moment. So if I'm in the shoes of that agency, I'm an agency and you're coming to me and you're like, " Hey, we've got this amazing component of the platform of third party visibility and everything else. "First off, you have to remember that the name of your brand is PartnerStack. So they're going to immediately go, " How does that have to do with PartnerStack? Hey, what do you mean? "So there's probably an angle that we have to go at this a little differently for somebody like yourself where you're going, " Okay, what's the reality? "As an agency, the reality is, Bob, your agency is built to do blank, not do blank. Or the reality is, Bob, your job is to da, da, da, da, not have to be in the weeds of managing partner datada.

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(29:01):

And that's where we come in. What is it that they're facing? Is it the fact that the complexity of managing this has become too much? Is it the fact that this is a net new blushing type of an environment where they're like, " I don't even know what this is and how to do this. Why is it so critical that they manage this differently?

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Tyler Calder  (29:20):

"And you're asking me to answer that?

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Kate DiLeo (29:21):

It's something to think about, but that actually is going to start to hit at the heart pain of going like, " I get you. You have this amazing agency. Your revenue is tied to this. You are running a thousand miles an hour to achieve what as an organization. And now you've got a set of complexities or ABC is happening that was not even on your radar six months ago, especially in the areas of managing influence with this. Stop spinning your wheels, stop doing that. You need to get something behind it that's going to help you just stay in your zone of excellence, and that's where we come in. "That's a different narrative then. And how we do that then is through the This and this and this and this and this and this and this. These use cases. I'm just broad stroking an example. But imagine that's where their head is at.

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(30:08):

We have to get inside of where their head's at as a business.

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Tyler Calder  (30:10):

As a partner leader, what should I be doing to get inside their heads?

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Kate DiLeo (30:14):

Everybody knows to do this that's listening to this because you're all really smart. But if it were me, I'd be really, really smart in asking the same silly, stupid questions on every call. What's keeping you up at night? What's driving you nuts? Okay, what is the most important problem you've got to solve in the next three months? Why is it so critical to solve that for you guys right now? What's getting in the way of your growth? What's getting in the way for your job? I started asking all these patterns going to start to emerge of what's really keeping them up at night. So I ask a lot of questions around that stuff and all of a sudden they'll tell you this is the issue. Hands down, they probably have 10 things they're going to describe and then at the heart of it I say, "So what's the biggest nuts you got to crack today?" And then I go, "And so why are we having this conversation?

‍

(31:03):

What's your assumption about why you need a PRM or a system? What brought you here?" Well, because ultimately I'm realizing that I need to ... They're going to give you language that you didn't even know you should use. That's where I actually get a lot of the meat for when a writing brand is, that kind of stuff. So to be honest with you, it's asking those questions to such an extent that I'm just poking the bear a little bit. Psychologically, you're doing some root cause analysis with them.

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Tyler Calder  (31:28):

Yeah. I love that. To your point, you said it, right? Everybody knows

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Kate DiLeo (31:32):

When

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Tyler Calder  (31:32):

You say it out loud.

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Kate DiLeo (31:33):

Yeah.

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Tyler Calder  (31:33):

Right? Yeah.

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Kate DiLeo (31:34):

You're probably already doing it, but are you noting it and are you noticing a pattern in what they're responding to? Are you documenting that? Are you actually going, "Oh, that's the juicy nugget." That every single time, nine out of 10 times, that's the thing.

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Tyler Calder  (31:48):

Yeah. And I think this is an important conversation to have because there's a few things that I've noticed. Again, it'll be kind of a generalization and maybe a sweeping criticism of partner leaders to a certain degree. I have seen so many partner programs orient the incentive to just be number of partners acquired.That is an incentive. How many new partners have I brought on board? And so now it becomes very transactional.

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Kate DiLeo (32:19):

And

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Tyler Calder  (32:19):

So the goal is to create these paper partnerships that probably don't actually drive any meaningful results. And so I think because of that, there is a lack of what you're talking about, which is like, no, actually have a conversation, do some discovery, really figure out what are the pain points for this potential partner. That's going to help you figure out how you can dovetail into that and provide some value and be a good partner to them.

‍

(32:47):

To your point though, the more conversations you have, the more patterns you're going to pull out. And the thing that I see a lot of partner teams not doing that sort of direct go- to-market teams are doing now is something else that you alluded to, which is you're likely recording all of these calls. Take those transcripts, dump them into whatever your AI platform of choice is and start to do some analysis on what are the patterns, what are the things that are standing out? How can that help inform your approach and your pitch as a partner leader?That's a big gap that I see on the partner side when in all likelihood that's happening in the organization already is just

‍

Kate DiLeo (33:30):

Happening on

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Tyler Calder  (33:31):

The direct sales and marketing side.

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Kate DiLeo (33:33):

It is. And it's a retraining of our brains in general. I think to go back to some basics here, I think we get really caught up in the art and science of the sale and closing the deal. But I think sometimes you got to go back and remember that at the end of the day, sales is humans talking to humans. So what's really critical is to get back to some basics here for all of us. And I say this to myself all the time. I'm like, hang on, am I really listening with the intent to understand what that pattern is? What am I really solving for them? Am I unlocking stuff that I didn't even recognize that needed to be unlocked? As a great though partner for you in a lot of this work, it's not like you have to go become some brand expert to do this.

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(34:10):

To your point, this is some basic analysis. I prompt Claude all the time. I'm sitting there like, "Okay, now go back and analyze these five calls. What did I say on that call that got the customer to jump in and agree?" Have you ever done that the other way? I ask every client of mine, I'm like, "Hang on. What is it that you say when you're describing and articulating the problem that if you say it a specific phrase or specific way they're like, they latch and they light up. They're like, oh, whenever I say this thing or this thing like ding, ding, ding. So I think sometimes we take for granted too what we're saying right and we've got to pull that data out because that starts to frame when we write to go, oh, I'm actually doing a really great job describing the problem or I did an awesome job describing one of the core differentiation points that partners loved.

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(34:56):

You're going to start to pattern match and you can start to put into these buckets like that's the core value prop. Oh, that one's differentiator number one. Yeah, that's number two. But once you get that data, it becomes kind of a fun exercise to realize this is all in front of you. You do not need to come up with pieces to create your own partner level branch trifecta from scratch. You have everything at your fingertips. It's about taking the time, few hours of analysis, doesn't have to be crazy, to get at what's really being said and what are you really hearing when you're talking to your ICP or your IPP.

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Tyler Calder  (35:30):

I like it. Speaking of AI, you've already mentioned a number of use cases. Let's run through them and make sure we didn't miss any. So one was, like we just talked about, potentially importing call transcripts.

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Kate DiLeo (35:43):

Absolutely.

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Tyler Calder  (35:44):

Pulling out the pattern. So that's sort of one. One was ingesting all of your existing brand work, narrative work, all of that and just kind of prompting over and over to help identify potential opportunities to translate into partner language.

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Kate DiLeo (36:03):

Yeah. Tone of voice system. That's a big one. Tone of system. I actually wanted to tell you, what is my tone of voice as the brand? What is PartnerStack's tone of voice? Describe it for me. Give it a name. I actually do this really funny thing where what I do is I ask, I actually like to give it a celebrity or public figure's name. So every brand, what we do and the reason we do this is because if I were to say, well, PartnerStack's tone of voice is totally Tyler Calder. You'd be like, who the hell is Tyler Calder? No one Tyler. But AI is not going to know you. What if I said your tone of voice is Matthew McConaughey or Oprah or Anderson Cooper. What we're trying to latch AI onto, by the way, and I've done this for 10 years so well before AI is you were to close your eyes and think about how somebody sounds.

‍

(36:45):

You know how Kevin Hart sounds, the comedian. You would know Ryan Reynolds. You would know of these different characters. And what that actually impacts in the world of language and writing and sales messaging and marketing copy are music. If there's rhythm sentence length, is it short?

‍

(37:02):

Is there an M Dash? The beloved or hated M Dash or is this long and serious? Are there commas and semi-ons? So interestingly enough, as a writer, this is the stuff that I have to kind of apply. For you guys, when you're creating this tone of voice system, you can take that every time then. You're like, "I got to create a three-part email campaign." Great. Well, guess what you have now? You have a ton of voice system that can also be infused for any partner content you develop. So it sounds and it seems like everything marketing will love you. They're going to love you and they're going to stay out of your way a little bit.

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Tyler Calder  (37:35):

Yeah. I like that tip around giving it a known persona. Yeah. We are early days at PartnerStack, we talked about the desire for our tone of voice to be like Indiana Jones.

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Kate DiLeo (37:48):

That's really fun.

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Tyler Calder  (37:50):

Kind of adventurous, but also a great guide, knows their way around, partnerships, all that fun stuff. We do all of this work as a partner leader. What do I do with this? I translate this into my emails you mentioned, pitch decks.

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Kate DiLeo (38:02):

Well, first of all, where on your website do you have landing pages and information that's for your partners? That's the number one place that should go, my friends. And it's so simple. This sounds stupid, but it's like, okay, your five to six word tagline for a partner, what do you do for them? That's like the H1 headline on the page on top of the cool image, Hero Shop. Maybe your subheadline is the value proposition statement that says, "The reality of your facing partner is this. Here's how to solve it with partner stack." And then right below it, your differentiators and then say, "No, look at all the amazing things and capability." That's it. That's it. You're putting it in the top third of the page, my friends. Where does it go next? It's the same thing I tell sales teams, front facing, customer facing. First three to five slides of your sales back.

‍

(38:49):

Top third of your one pagers. This is really simple application. What we're doing here is we're creating a consistency in order operations so that remember, people need to see or hear something about five to seven times for it to really click in glue. So by keeping it consistent at the top, I'm not telling you, Mr. Or Ms. Or other partner leader like, "Oh, I want you to rip and replace the entire way that you sell as a partner leader." No, no, no, no, no. What I am telling you is that once you build this, when you hit that in the first 15 to 30 seconds of your talk track and you just stay consistent, when you're consistent with the same language on the website and then in the materials you send out, oh my God, the magic starts to happen because it creates this consistency and this knowing of a prospect to glob onto it.

‍

(39:33):

And then when they have to share that information, by the way, with other stakeholders for buy-in, they're no longer asking the question, "What do you do and how do you solve my problem?" They're coming into the call going, "I love that, but it got this particular thing. What's it going to cost?"

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Tyler Calder  (39:47):

You have a ton of experience speaking on big stages, thousands of people. You're now standing in front of a thousand partner leaders and you're sending them off and suggesting if you have to focus on one thing tomorrow, here's what you need to focus on. What is that thing? What are you sending them off to accomplish over the next day or two?

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Kate DiLeo (40:11):

I think if I could even tell you just one thing to write, if you just wrote one damn thing, because I always say, "If you build it, they will come." Does anybody like older millennials get that reference, right? I tried to say that to a Gen Z the other day. They had no idea what I was talking about, Tyler. They don't know what's

‍

Tyler Calder  (40:27):

Happening in the world, let's

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Kate DiLeo (40:28):

Be honest. No, stop. But Field of Dreams. I remember the glory days of baseball movies. Okay, I digress. All right. So I would really tell you to focus on writing a value proposition statement that smacks your partners between the eyeballs a litle bit. Yes, I think you could think about points of differentiation that's probably pretty easy for you to frame up, but if you're going to spend some time doing something, I want you to think about how can I take the front facing value prop that goes to the end customer and go, if I had to turn that on its head and say, I'm speaking to you, Bob, now as a potential partner for us, the reality of what you're facing is, boom, I get you. Here's how to solve that with our organization. And you wrote those two statements together, you will really start to see a difference in the reaction of how people respond to that and their willingness to want to go deeper down into the content you provide or into that sales conversation.

‍

(41:14):

So that's the one thing.

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Tyler Calder  (41:15):

That is the one thing. I like it. I think there's a good place to wrap it. What

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Kate DiLeo (41:20):

Do you think? Sounds good. I think so too. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder  (41:22):

If folks want to get in touch with you, ask questions, talk about how you might be able to support them, how should they do that?

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Kate DiLeo (41:29):

I keep it pretty simple. Buy me on LinkedIn, Kate DiLeo, not Delo, D-I-L-E-O. And you can also check out my website, katedileo.com.

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Tyler Calder  (41:38):

Very cool. I would encourage people to do so. I know you have helped a number of organizations that I know and need help take their brands to the next level. So I would encourage people to check out your site, get in touch if they need some help. And Kate, thank you. Thank you so much.

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Kate DiLeo (41:54):

Thanks, Taylor.

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Tyler Calder  (41:56):

Thanks for listening to Get It, Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools at partnerstack.com/getitogether.