How to Transition From Direct Sales to Partner-Led Growth

Jamie Benoit (00:00):

When you look at it at a macro lens, almost every time we give up a lead to a partner or transition a lead to a partner, we get deals tenfold from them because of what we did in that one case. It does pay off, but never lose sight of the big picture when you're giving up that little bit of margin on one individual deal.

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Tyler Calder  (00:22):

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. In this episode of Get It, Together, I sat down with Jamie Benoit, who leads business development and partnerships at Beauceron Security. And this was such a fun conversation because I have candidly don't think I've ever met a company that is as partner first and partner friendly as Beauceron is. And what Jamie has done over the past six years, going from an early go-to-market employee to taking on challenge after challenge, including making a shift from being primarily direct sales to almost exclusively partner first, while also breaking into the US as a Canadian company, breaking into a new vertical, being financial services, those transitions she's been able to knock down one by one, has learned a lot about how the playbook needs to evolve, and I think a lot of really incredible lessons learned for companies that are looking to be truly partner first.

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(01:38):

Hope you enjoy. Jamie leads business development. We're going to chat a little bit about what business development means for her in her role because it's super interesting. So maybe let's just start there. Jamie, what are you up to? What's going on over at Beauceron?

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Jamie Benoit (01:52):

Yeah, business development looks a little bit different for me than I think it does at lots of other companies. For us, it's definitely business development from the lens of growing the business and new business. But it's really been a more custom role, I would say, for me in terms of figuring out how to unlock new paths to market for us. So that's been something that's been really interesting. As I've joined the company, I've had the chance to flow through many different roles and functions and have been with the company pretty much since its very early days. So with my background and knowing the company so well and what we do, as we've run into new opportunities to grow in the market, that's been something that I've really taken on. So from an early stage, that was leading the go-to-market team and then turned into leading our partner recruitment initiatives and now has taken a little bit of a different turn as well in terms of growing our fraud prevention business, which is a new line of business for us.

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(02:57):

So yeah, not business development in the traditional sense. If you cold call me, it will almost never fit. And that's often something that I see, but it's sort of what business development means to us.

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Tyler Calder  (03:11):

You already touched on a little bit of your journey. I'd like to go a little bit deeper into that because to your point, you have been with the company for a while. You started relatively early on, I think in their go-to-market kind of maturation, and you've really helped steward that maturation right into their partner program now. What did that journey look like? Why was it that you were tasked with the partnership side of things? What I mean by that question is what is it that you were learning through the early stages of growing go-to-market that suggested, "Hey, you know what? What we're doing here, there's an interesting translation into partnerships." And what does it look like today? What does the partner program look like?

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Jamie Benoit (03:56):

Yeah, I actually started with the company in customer success, and we always say that's the best place to start in any role that you eventually go on to do because it's such an intimate experience in getting to know the customer base exactly how they use the product, the ins and outs of their cybersecurity programs and how this applies to it. And that gave me a really good foundation for where I would go from there. The interesting thing about customer success at the time that I joined the company is we'd only been in business for about two years, so it was really early. It was within the first sort of 10 to 12 people I think that had joined the company. So I was doing customer success, but I was also doing technical implementations, answering support tickets, sort of everything that you really take on when you're in the more startup phase of your journey.

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(04:50):

So I really got to do a little bit of everything. And not that we're not now, but we were still in the phase where you could just say, "Hey, can I work on this? And can I take on this project?" Product updates were, "Hey, my customer says we should do this. Can we do it today?" Kind of thing. So it was a little bit of a different experience. From customer success, I then had the opportunity to lead the sales team and work a little bit more in a direct selling capacity, which is an interesting transition into how we applied that to partnerships. I think that that experience was really beneficial in being able to teach partners how to sell the product because we've done it ourselves. And that's something that we can touch on a little bit later too, I'm sure. But then as I continued to grow, I went from managing the direct sales team to managing sales partnerships and customer success.

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(05:45):

So I really started to get a larger lens in what all of it looked like pulled together. From there, when we decided to put a bigger push into partner recruitment, I said, "Look, there's a lot of people that can manage within the company and manage people, but what I really think that I can do is actually solve that problem." And that's where I sort of took the first turn into some of these different pieces.

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Tyler Calder  (06:09):

The moment where the company decided to make that larger investment and push into partnerships, what was that decision based on? And I always like to give context on why I'm asking the question. I think that's a moment in time a lot of companies struggle with, making that bet to really lean into partnerships when you have a direct sales motion and maybe it's going well and it's very predictable. And this is going to sound terrible, but you own those salespeople and the motion that they run, it's not the same with partnerships. There's an element of trust that you really have to instill that they're going to run a motion that aligns with how you want to be going to market. So how did the company make that decision to lean heavier into your partnerships?

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Jamie Benoit (06:57):

We've always done both. So I think before I even joined, the idea was that we would actually be partnerships only. And I think that came from some of the more foundational team members' backgrounds and experience and the fact that they had done really well in that model. Like anything else, you get the one customer that isn't necessarily going to buy into that method, and we had to do a little bit of direct selling. We maintained our partner base from day one, but we did do both. And I think I had touched on this earlier. For me, doing direct sales even for a short period of time is really important in your ability to grow your partnership model because it teaches you how to sell the product, what that customer experience from a hands-on perspective looks like, what the whole customer lifestyle perspective looks like, how to support customers in that way.

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(07:58):

But we had had a really healthy partner base as well where we had maybe about 20 to 30 partners that were in our repertoire. What was really interesting for us was we did sort of slowly organically move into that model. So we started with partner first, I think is a way that a lot of people look at it where we were doing direct in partnerships, but looking at partners first from our go-to-market model before we transitioned completely into partnerships. The decision came, I think, from a lot of little things over time. Again, for us, it had always been there. Our leadership was always really supportive of it. Our board was really, really supportive of it, which I think was really foundational in making that switch. But it was also the pandemic, hiring challenges. There was a time where we couldn't hire account executives if we could beg, which was really one of the big reasons that we made the transition into this model.

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(09:04):

But we also just looked at what do we need to do in terms of growth and how are we going to get there? And it was never going to happen with this small sales team that we had. It needed to expand to a much larger scale, and that's when we made the decision to really make that transition.

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Tyler Calder  (09:22):

Oh, super interesting. So pandemic comes along, scaling through just brunt force, direct sales headcount was becoming challenging, not just because of the economics of it, but it was just even hard to hire folks. And so then the lens turned to partnerships and that as a way to scale more efficiently, presumably, and also to deal with the fact that hiring FTEs was maybe a little bit more challenging than expected. Is that a fair recap?

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Jamie Benoit (09:55):

Yeah, I would say that's fair. And I guess maybe more specifically something that I really missed was we were trying to grow and scale in a new market. And so we had done really well in Canada and all of our success had been in Canada. Most of our partner base and customer base was in Canada, but we were looking at growing in the US, and that was a really big shift for us in terms of how are we actually going to accomplish this and at the scale that we needed to accomplish it. And that's where a lot of that push to recruit more partners came from. I think at the same time, organically came that partner-only mentality because that's what it was going to take to recruit more partners. So it had both a bit of a shift and a change in our partnerships here in Canada, but then also was a big shift in change in how we would grow in the US.

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Tyler Calder  (10:53):

I mean, within that, I think you hit on basically all of the value props of partnership with the last one being moving into new GOs, new markets. Let's get right into that and get tactical into the playbook that you executed through that. So you're looking to continue to grow the business. Part of that is moving into the US, a new market where you don't necessarily have a footprint. How did you tackle that? That's a pretty big challenge to take on. What did that look like? How did you break into the new market? How did you identify which were the right partners to start recruiting? And then we'll get into what worked, what didn't work, all the lessons learned. But yeah, would love to just start and talk about that initial push into the US and recruiting new partners.

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Jamie Benoit (11:37):

Yeah, for sure. I think pretty early on, we identified what an ideal partner would look like for us. And not to say that we didn't stray from that, but we were clear on even though we will sign all sorts of different partners, what's ideal here? And that was step one. So for us, that meant the fastest path to growth is a partner that is already selling a similar solution to ours, that we can replace somebody that's maybe selling something that isn't taking a partner approach. So in our market, there are a lot of people doing similar things, but at the time there wasn't a lot of people that were doing it from a partner lens. So that was a pretty easy transition for us to say we're focused on partnerships, we're focused on the managed service provider market, and we're building our engine and our product around supporting that.

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(12:38):

That was a really nice transition into being refreshing, I would say. Once we really identified what type of partners we wanted to work with, we looked at where are they? So what type of events are they going to? We really rely very heavily on events for growing the business. We're still small, so we still have to be pretty strategic in terms of how we're leveraging marketing. So we started going to MSP events or channel partner events, things like that to recruit. And then you really start to hit the same events over and over again and run into the same people. There's a lot of legitimacy that has to be built when you're entering a new market. We were transitioning from the Canadian market where people were really familiar with us and our product and our services to no one knowing who we were. So it took a little time to build credibility and familiarity with people.

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(13:36):

One of the challenges that we ran into, not necessarily for ourselves, but was that people are not trusting of new companies entering the partnerships market. So there's a lot that you have to prove in terms of you can be a good partner and you have built your business around partner first mentality and stuff like that. So that's sort of how we started into the new market, and then we just put a really big push on partner recruitment and growing in that way.

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Tyler Calder  (14:07):

In terms of recruitment, especially recruitment in a new market where presumably there's probably a little bit more nuance than maybe what you're used to in Canada, what were those learnings? What worked well? What didn't? How did you get partners engaged that? And you correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to make a big assumption that they probably didn't know who you were, which I think is always a hard starting point. It's always much easier if they recognize you as a brand. So entering a new market, you don't necessarily have the same brand equity as you did in Canada. What did that motion look like?

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Jamie Benoit (14:43):

I think that, like I said, really focusing on the events was a big, big factor and building some repetition and making sure that people knew who we were. We were very clear on what problem we were solving and how we were going to do that. Something that was really important for us was showcasing that we could be a good partner. So one of our main competitors in this space doesn't focus on partnerships, but they do sign a lot of partners. And I think that made it really easy for us to showcase how we could be different in that way. So we were able to say and design our partnership program just around a lot of the feedback that people were giving based on here's some of the challenges that we're running into. So we really leaned into not so much how we were solving problems from a product perspective, but how we were going to solve some problems from an actual partnership perspective.

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Tyler Calder  (15:40):

What you just mentioned, maybe some of your competitors, they're just signing partners, but they're not necessarily thinking partner first. How does that manifest in your pitch? How do you show upfront that you're going to be more partner first? You're going to treat it more seriously. It's not just going to be this partner papership that you sign an agreement and all of a sudden it kind of dies and there's no real substance to it. How do you convince a partner that maybe has experienced that, that you're not going to be that? You're actually going to lean in appropriately?

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Jamie Benoit (16:17):

I think being really sure of who you are as a partner and being able to share that is really important. And that's something that we figured out pretty early on. Maybe it's the Canadian in us, but we were a little bit surprised at some of the feedback that people were giving in terms of what they were looking for felt really clear to us. So not going after a partner's renewals or really leaning into deal protection, having a really strong deal registration process, those are all things that were very standard for us, but became a really big value add as we continued to grow. And then things like deal routing, being able to route deals back to partners, implementing a partner tiering process, that's something that we had not had going into our recruitment push that we were able to build out and get people really excited about.

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(17:18):

Being very clear on the value that we had to add. So from a sales perspective, exactly what our sellers would be doing with you from a marketing perspective, what we would be doing with you to promote, can we do joint webinars together? Can we do collateral together or anything that's really conducive to promoting the partnership? And then also even from a support or a product management perspective, what did that relationship look like as well? I think, again, our pitch was not product-focused. It was all partner-focused in terms of how we were going to be that good partner. But that came from the foundation of having done it and being really, really clear on what we had to offer. So that helped us a lot as we grew.

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Tyler Calder  (18:04):

And so these new muscles that you were building internally, I guess a more business appropriate term would be systems versus muscles. It sounds like certainly partner recruitment was a motion that you were really building out and tiering your partners and getting a good sense of what that looked like. Presumably then it would shift into enabling those partners. What did that look like? Building what I would assume is an enablement motion that existed with your current partner base, but then evolving that for these new partners that are coming from a new geo, maybe there's some evolution to that enablement. How did you make sure those partners were kicking things off on the right foot?

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Jamie Benoit (18:57):

Yeah, it definitely did evolve over time. I think when we had a smaller partner base and our partner program was closed off to welcoming new partners, it was a little bit easier to train partners, to know them more intimately. We had everything from a couple of people partner teams that we were working with to very, very large organizations. So we had from that sense sort of gotten it all, but it was a lot easier to enable people when there were less. What we did was looked at the teams that we had. So we had a technical support team, we had an implementation team, we had a channel partner managers team, and looked at those roles and said, how can each one of those teams take on something related to recruitment that may be a shift from what they're doing today? So implementation may have been used to implementing customers directly.

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(19:57):

They were now implementing new partners and training them on the partner solutions. Same thing with technical support, providing more technical support to partners upfront so that they can then do that afterwards. So there was a big shift in how we enable people. I think you always take on more in the beginning to be able to scale more at the end. So it may be a lot of work upfront to train the partners on how to do all of these different things, but eventually once they're selling and growing, they'll then transition to doing those things themselves as well. The other thing that I think we never lost sight of was we can always help. And sometimes that might have been a little bit hard or more work to say, we can still support from a technical supports perspective. We can still assist with your implementations and things like that.

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(20:52):

But when you do that a lot early on in the beginning, again, those partners tend to learn a lot more from that and become more self-sustaining as they go. So the enablement was a big transition for us. And I think writing down and documenting the processes of how to enable each type of partner was very critical in making that happen as well. We were very sure not to turn partners away, but we did have to document how to support all the different types of partners as we onboarded too.

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Tyler Calder  (21:26):

As you were building this new motion into a new market, what broke? That's always where the best learning comes from.

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Jamie Benoit (21:36):

A lot of the enablement broke in a sense, I think. Not necessarily that it completely broke, but when we were running into challenges on how to scale, it was how are all of these different teams working together to support the same partner? There are just so many different aspects of supporting a partner than there is a customer. A customer might touch sales and then they're owned by customer success and they may talk to support here and there and they may deal with an implementation specialist. But when you're owning a partner rather than a customer, the partner needs access to each piece of your business, sometimes all at the same time, and you all have to work together and communicate. So I think that that was a really big learning curve for us just in terms of how do we do that with potentially up to 30 new partners at a time?

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(22:32):

How do we make sure that all of these partners are moving forward together and getting the support they need? Other things that I would say broke or changed were just different levels of insight and information. I think that's pretty common when you're looking at scaling your partner program where you may be used to having super intimate knowledge of what's going on in the pipeline and things like that. That data starts to change over time as you grow in your partner program. So that was something that we had to figure out. How do we either accept more risk or less insight or get the insight that we need based on how we're growing the program? I think those are sort of the two key things that are coming to mind for me, but I know that there's probably so many others that I'm just blocking out.

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Tyler Calder  (23:28):

We don't have to bring it back up. Keep it in the past. So timing-wise, this was all happening through the pandemic?

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Jamie Benoit (23:37):

It's an interesting timeline because like I said, we always had a push towards partnerships. Before we opened the recruitment funnel, we leaned into our existing partner base a lot. So I would say that really took flight during the pandemic. And then the partner recruitment opening started somewhere around 2023, 2024, where we started saying, "Okay, we have the capacity to take on more partners here. We really, like everyone, probably don't, but we will. We'll change the processes to make it work." So it was a little bit later than some others have made the push.

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Tyler Calder  (24:20):

How much runway did the company give before they really started to dig in and ask questions about whether or not this investment was paying off? And I asked the question because I know we're sitting outside of the pandemic right now, but I think the pandemic really put a spotlight on partnerships. A ton of people rushed into it, and then a lot of businesses pulled back because they weren't seeing a return in six months, three months. The expectation for a return was a relatively short window, maybe two quarters. And you still see some of that outside of the pandemic, people jump into partnerships and then they pull back because maybe they didn't see the traction that they expected in the first quarter or two. I get the sense in chatting with you that there was so much conviction that you were going to lean into partnerships, you are going to leverage that as your core strategy for breaking into the US.

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(25:20):

I'm always curious how the internal business conversations were around how it was building. Were there signals that this was going to pay off? Were there tough periods where internally the case really needed to be made over and over again? I'm always curious about that journey getting to a place where, yeah, now it is a solid foundation. How did you get there? What did that look like?

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Jamie Benoit (25:48):

Yeah, I think that you absolutely have to give it more time than you ever think that you should. And something to plan and prepare for as well, that you will see, I think, a bit of a step back before you see those leaps forward. That's something that every business that's looking to transition into the partnerships world should plan for. And I think that we always plan for it. I think like others, it just takes longer than you ever think. I think it probably was over a year before we were really seeing the transition pay off. When you decide to make that push towards partnerships, I think that you have to do it all in. So like a lot of what I talked about when it comes to good partner principles, you have to be willing to live those all the way through. And that means that if your direct sales engine is what's doing really well in that moment needs to be given up, that is what needs to happen.

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(26:58):

And I think particularly in the MSP market or the channel market, if you are not living that, it will be sniffed out pretty quickly. It's one of the first questions that partners ask us. Are you channel only? And being able to say yes will propel your growth and being able to prove that will propel your growth. But I think in terms of overall time, yeah, it just takes time. And we see things like time to grow. So each individual partner taking time to grow. We saw losing some margin I think is inevitable. You're giving up a piece of your margin in order to go through the partnership model. You have to go through that enablement phase. So there's definitely a transition period in getting there. And I think you have to be willing to weather that storm. A couple things that are really important to me being able to do that is leadership alignment.

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(28:03):

Even if I would say our leaders weren't feeling anything different than the rest of the company was feeling. So everyone was excited by it, but everyone was cautious as well. And I think the biggest thing for us was board alignment. Our board was very on board with this and there was never a question of transitioning or abandoning it. And that came from their experience, but also they're witnessing the small things that are working well for us as we grow. Another thing that I don't know if is realistic for everyone, but we made sure that the small partner base that we had was in a really good space before we went and decided to grow more. So we had a handful of really excellent partners that were growing very quickly and doing really well, and that really helped support our growth as well as we went through some of those foundational changes.

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Tyler Calder  (29:06):

Well, you mentioned margin. I'd love to touch on that. Any business that looks at a strategy or motion that is going to give up margin, there's going to be some questions. What's the math there? What are the things that outweigh the loss of margin that suggested, no, of course we're still going to do this. This is still a no-brainer. What does that equation look like? Because I do think a lot of people struggle with that. It's like, wait, hold on, I'm giving up how much to these partners? When you look at it just as a number on a spreadsheet, yeah, it can raise some questions. What is it that outweighs that margin that you're giving up?

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Jamie Benoit (29:47):

What would it take to keep the margin? I think is a really interesting question. We chose to give up the margin and grow in this space because it didn't make sense for us to keep it And try to do it ourselves. It's an uncomfortable transition for a lot of people who don't work directly with partners and see all of the work that goes into what they do. So it's definitely something that I could see people struggling with. And now I'm working in the banking space and it is a little bit different than the MSP world where there is a lot of direct and partner existence with both, and there is a lot of talk around giving up margin and things like that. But there's just so much more benefit to giving it up to scale. And I think that if we take partner lead routing as an example, we route our leads to partners.

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(30:44):

So if we get a lead in through our website, that goes directly to a partner. Yes, we may have given up a little margin on that if we're looking at it from a micro lens. When you look at it at a macro lens, almost every time we give up a lead to a partner or transition a lead to a partner, we get deals tenfold from them because of what we did in that one case. So it does pay off, but you have to be open to looking at it from different angles and really never lose sight of the big picture when you're giving up that little bit of margin on one individual deal.

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Tyler Calder  (31:24):

Yeah, I think that's bang on. Couldn't agree more. If you're only looking at the individual thing, let's say the individual deal, it's really easy to nitpick it and question. You step back and to your point, you realize number one, without these partners, we never would've broken into the US. So there's an element of just scale, it just wouldn't have happened. And then also to your point, we give them a lead, they send 10 back. The math really starts to math when you step back and look at it from that perspective. Couldn't agree more. You mentioned another shift in transition that you've made. So now not just MSPs, but now also looking at, is it fair to say, a whole new vertical within the financial space?

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Jamie Benoit (32:17):

Yeah, it's still cyber. It's still a cyber product, but really it's fraud, fraud prevention, so a completely new vertical for us. We've always worked in the financial services space. One of our first customers was a bank, so it's been a very big focus for us over time, but we've now developed a new product line for that industry in particular. So yeah, big change for us for sure.

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Tyler Calder  (32:48):

What have you learned through that change? You're just tackling the biggest problems in the business and just knocking them down one by one, which is awesome. What's this latest challenge look like?

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Jamie Benoit (32:59):

Yeah, it's fun and super uncomfortable. Never relaxing for sure. Yeah, the new challenge of partnerships in the financial services industry has been really interesting because we're looking at partnerships from a few different ways and partnerships are very different in that space. So we're looking at partners that are MSPs that serve FIs. So that almost all the same principles apply. Very partner first. There is big push for deal routing and deal protection and all of those different pieces that are very foundational to our background. And we've had those partners for a long time as well. So before we ever made the big push, we've had those partners. So I would say that's not a whole lot different. But two other things that we're really diving into are technology partners. So aligning strategically with digital banking providers and core banking providers to build partnerships out. That's a new space for us, and that's one that is very different in principle and learning a lot from other tech companies that are navigating the same space.

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(34:12):

They're not running on the same deal protection principles and things like that that the MSP spaces, so that's very new. And then the third way that we're looking at the partnerships is through the banks themselves. So the new product that we're selling in that space, it's actually a consumer-facing product. So we're looking at the bank as the partner to deliver the solution to the consumer or the end user of the digital banking, which is really interesting. But our background in the MSP market has been so useful to be able to say what makes a good partner? What do partners need? Similarly to a lot of channel partners, what can we do to alleviate the bank or credit union from implementing all of these processes and how can we make this easier for them as a partner? So that's been a really interesting challenge for us, but I think it's allowed us to excel in that space because of the unnatural background that we had or the maybe not so related experience.

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Tyler Calder  (35:23):

When you think about all of the, I'll call them shifts, but really just the evolution of the business and how you've approached partnerships, the shift from having a really strong direct motion with a partner motion, then leaning more heavily into partnerships, becoming more partner first, moving into the US, moving into a little bit more solidly like financial services with this new offering. When you think about all of those transitions, how much of the original playbook was easily translated over versus how much did you need to change?

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Jamie Benoit (36:04):

There's probably a couple of different ways to look at transitioning the playbook. And that could be you have background in partnerships and you come into a company to apply that. I think that's sort of one way that experience transitions and applies. But for me, it was more so I have background with the company and the products and the customers that I can apply through the motions. I do think that a lot changes over time. As you scale, things are just inherently different than they were when you were smaller. But for us, we try to maintain the same principles. We try to be a good partner. We try to have really strong customer service, something that we're always complimented on. We have discussions on a weekly basis on how that can never change. So I think the core values have never wavered for us, but how we accomplish those has.

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(37:08):

And again, being really strong in who you are as a partner is what is going to help shape that next phase really smoothly.

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Tyler Calder  (37:19):

Yeah, I think that's very fair. I got two more questions as we wrap up. The first one is imagine you're playing the role of educator, you're standing in front of 500 partner leaders, you are giving a lecture on everything you've learned through this journey. What is the one tip, lesson, piece of guidance you would give those folks?

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Jamie Benoit (37:46):

I think that it would be maybe two.

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Tyler Calder  (37:50):

We can do two for sure. I

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Jamie Benoit (37:52):

Would say the first one would be stay the course even when it gets tough. It will always just take longer than you think it will, and staying the course is really important. And I think it shows integrity and consistency for the partners that are watching you as well. No one wants to see you saying that you're a really good partner and then abandoning ship on that. So staying the course and being consistent, and then having a really strong set of principles of what it means to be a good partner and sticking to those and sticking to your word as well.

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Tyler Calder  (38:29):

I didn't expect to have follow-up questions, but now I'm very curious. I have a couple. The principles piece that you just mentioned, are those actually documented somewhere internally? Do you actually have a documented list of principles for how you want to work with partners and treat partners? Or is it just kind of organically come to be that's how you work with them?

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Jamie Benoit (38:48):

I think originally it was a lot of being more organic. But yeah, I would say it is documented. We definitely have a list of, I would say we framed them in the way of benefits of working with us, but they are the principles of here's what our partnership program looks like on paper. And it's all those principles. So knowing exactly what we have to offer a partner and how we will do business with them, that is documented. But I think a really good exercise for any company entering the market is consult others on what those principles should be if you don't know or you aren't sure about them, but document them. And I think that's a really great way as a leadership team to go into a new strategy to say, here's exactly what we will be doing and how we will do it together.

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(39:43):

And I think that will make that staying the course with those really, really important. I think the same way that someone has core values as a company, having core values or core principles of your partnership program is important.

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Tyler Calder  (39:59):

What are a couple of the core principles that you're particularly proud of?

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Jamie Benoit (40:04):

We hear and see a lot of people burning each other, I think, in the partner space. So taking renewals from a partner or offering better incentives for purchasing direct, not following deal protections, those are all things that are really important to us. We, if anything, transition renewals to partners. So if we had a direct renewal in the past that is a partner customer, we are very eager to make that transition. We don't go after our partner's customers. We do those lead routings. We are really, really clear and strong on our deal registrations even when it can be tough. That's really, really important for us. And that builds a lot of trust in the space. And we do our best to serve our partners with as much customer service and support as we can. I think not losing the principles of also what it just means to be a good supportive person or treat our partners like a coworker is really important.

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(41:19):

So always picking up the phone, always being timely, things like that are really core to who we are.

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Tyler Calder  (41:25):

I think I'm very genuine when I say this, I think you're probably the most partner-friendly organization I've chatted with.

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Jamie Benoit (41:36):

That's a very nice compliment for sure. It's something that we've worked very, very hard on.

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Tyler Calder  (41:44):

Yeah. Yeah. I think truly you're thinking about things the way a first partner-friendly organization should be. That's awesome. Last one, because we can't get away without talking about AI. What do you think? Are you leveraging it? How's it supporting? What's the future of partnerships and AI?

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Jamie Benoit (42:06):

Feel

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Tyler Calder  (42:06):

Free to be bold and wild.

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Jamie Benoit (42:08):

We are leveraging AI for sure. I think that's been an interesting transition for us. We are a cybersecurity company and our company was founded by a set of security professionals. So the topic around AI has always been hot at the leadership table with both a strong desire to leverage it and a really strong desire to be careful. So there's been probably, I wouldn't say overcautious, but a very cautious approach to how we will use it. We use it strategically. We use it where it makes sense. We use it both in the product and our processes. I would say there's a very big push to use it to support but not replace. So never outsource your critical thinking to AI, but use it to elevate you and your work. It's been very transformational for us on the go-to-market perspective. I think on the development perspective as well.

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(43:13):

I was just looking at a few weeks ago some designs that we used AI to amplify our work, and it's really phenomenal how much it's changed. Similarly with our product, we're using it to do things that we couldn't do before. So like automation and processing, training assignments, things like that. It's been really interesting. But yeah, it's always a hot topic at the security company, how we're leveraging AI and how we'll work with it. It's been helpful on the sales side for sure. I've been really digging into it myself and I know the team and we've been talking a lot. The conversation is never allowed to die on how it can help us in different ways that we can share with each other on how we're using it.

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Tyler Calder  (43:59):

Awesome. I love that. It feels like you're striking the right balance. Which is great. Cool. Well, Jamie, thank you so much. Really appreciate the conversation. If folks wanted to get in touch with you, how could they go about doing so?

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Jamie Benoit (44:15):

Yeah, I'm always chatting on LinkedIn. I do a lot of posting and sharing on LinkedIn, and then I can share out my email as well if there's a way to do that.

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Tyler Calder  (44:25):

Let's save your inbox.

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Jamie Benoit (44:26):

Okay.

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Tyler Calder  (44:28):

I'll suggest people go to LinkedIn.

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Jamie Benoit (44:31):

Okay.

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Tyler Calder  (44:31):

Start there.

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Jamie Benoit (44:32):

Sounds great. Yeah, that's perfect.

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Tyler Calder  (44:33):

Perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

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Jamie Benoit (44:36):

Okay, thanks, Tyler.

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Tyler Calder  (44:38):

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

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