Navigating Partnerships in the Age of AI

Katie Landaal (00:00):

Something that I learned early on is that the more I knew what was going on all over the place, it was a lot easier for me to then come to them later saying, Hey, so-and-so came to us about this. It seems like it fits in really well with the roadmap that you've already come up with for the next six months. What do you think about adding it in? And majority of the time they're like, yeah, this fits right in.

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Tyler Calder (00:21):

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. You are listening to Get It, Together and today we are diving into how partnerships aren't just a growth weaver, they can actually shape the future of a company. My guest was Katie Landaal, SVP of Strategic Alliances at ZoomInfo and we had a great conversation on keeping programs simple, why starting her career agency side has helped her in her partnership's journey. We talk about getting alignment across your internal teams and we dive into how partnerships can be such a critical precursor to potential M&A activity. I love this conversation. I took a ton of notes myself and I'm sure you will too. Enjoy. Alright. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Get It, Together, the PartnerStack podcast. Today I am with the amazing Katie Landaal, SVP of Strategic Alliances at ZoomInfo. Katie, I know you've been on a few podcasts. I've listened to a number of them. You're certainly recognized as an incredible leader across all things go-to-market and I'm really excited for the conversation today. We're going to dive into a whole bunch and we'll get right into it. Thank you for joining us.

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Katie Landaal (01:49):

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.

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Tyler Calder (01:51):

Awesome. First place I'd love to start. Let's say we both started our careers agency side.

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Katie Landaal (01:56):

Yes.

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Tyler Calder (01:57):

I would just love to hear about that experience. What got you into the agency world to start and what did that journey look like?

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Katie Landaal (02:04):

So it's just kind of a funny story. My last year of college, so I double majored in business and marketing and communications and at the time I was like, well, I'm ready to work now, but what am I going to do? And so I had stumbled across a job at a marketing agency that was basically homegrown out of a garage type thing when he originally was looking for somebody. He really wanted just kind of an office manager, somebody to just help with filing and all this kind of stuff. And so I really didn't think anything out of it. I was like, okay, this is something, and it works with my college schedule at this point. Well, fast forward, I was doing bookkeeping, I was doing the hiring and firing, I was doing managing the office itself when it came to even just restocking the fridge and the snacks and then it started falling into, Hey, I need you to come to this client meeting with me.

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(02:55):

I need you to run this project for me. I need you to do this and this and that. And it just kind of kept growing. And so what happened was I ended up naturally being kind of the right hand and running of this kind of business and I mean it was literally zero to 15 million in about five years. He is still running that agency. We stay very close in touch and all of these things, has acquired other organizations, all of the fun stuff. So it was really cool to kind of be there from the very beginning and just wearing every hat, not only from in the office, but actually going out and packing boxes on behalf of clients and things like that to now where it's at where, like I said, he's got over a hundred employees, he's acquired two other agencies. They're doing well into the hundreds of millions. It was really cool to be a part of that because it kind of teaches you everything you would need to know, not only for running a business, but just how to have relationships with all these different types of areas of the business too.

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Tyler Calder (03:51):

Yeah, I love that. Before we jumped on to record, you mentioned that you do seem to see a pattern in partnership pros where a lot of folks do seem to come from agency side.

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Katie Landaal (04:02):

I've actually noticed that I think in the last, I don't know, couple years, I'd say, especially with the communities like Partnership Leaders and all of the great ones that are out there today, Pavilion Two. It's so nice to see some of these agency folks mature and grow into these roles. There's just such an interesting overlap because you are not only representing the partner within the organization that you work with, same as an agency like representing the client within the agency, but it also goes in the reverse. You're also representing your company to that partner or your company to that customer, that client that you've now have been hired on for your agency. And it's really hard to have that type of perspective as well to be able to see both sides of the house and be able to play in that middle ground where everyone's happy. I've just noticed that there's been a handful of these where I come across and I'm like, oh, you're from an agency. I can tell it's that kind of thing. So it's been fun to see that. Like I said, I think those are the overlaps that I see the most.

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Tyler Calder (05:09):

That's cool. That's great. I love that I oftentimes reflect on the agency days and I agree. I see a lot of similarities between that and partnerships.

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Katie Landaal (05:18):

I think a lot of when we were an agency, it is very similar to the way partnerships are ran today, whereas now agency looks very different. So it's really funny the evolution and I think that's probably why we see so many people from the agency world and partnerships because it truly is, it's like we're not an agency anymore, now we're a partner team.

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Tyler Calder (05:39):

No, I agree. And I think even if I go back and I look agency side and I look at my customers, back then it was the rise of marketing, getting a seat at the table. Very candidly, you saw some of our customers make that transition, some not. I remember out of school and this was my first job and the market is not a good market and all of my clients that are VPs of marketing are either being let go or they're being promoted. A little bit of a parallel to partnerships now there's so much emphasis on the impact that partnerships can have, but you got to make that leap. You got to actually drive that impact and I think companies are giving partnerships a real seat at the table and an opportunity, but we got to grab it. Maybe let's talk about grabbing it because you made that shift from agency. You now leading alliances at ZoomInfo really successful or what does grabbing it look like? What does it mean to look at partnerships and say, you know what, here are the things that we need to do to really catapult ourselves and put ourselves at that revenue table?

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Katie Landaal (06:46):

It looks a couple different ways depending on the organization that I'm with. I've been with the likes of the big guys out there, the Allstate, Ingram, Micros, things like that. And I was running partnerships and ecosystem there or running the programs, building them, whatever the case may be, and then all the way down to small agency, like I said, where I started. And so what gave me that kind of insight is I am flexible and scrappy enough where I can get stuff done while at the same time I have that very much high level corporate business view to know is this the right way to go about it and is it scalable for the longterm and is this actually going to render us the results that we want at the end of the day? Is this really driving where we should be going? And so when I went into partnerships and when I started kind of really being more honed in on this and focused on it, I noticed that again, it was this kind of unique perspective where I could see both sides very similar to agency, making everyone happy, bringing it all together today with ZI, which is really fun and exciting for me is just kind of this entire evolution transformation of AI like data and AI.

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(08:00):

And how does that fall into the entire tech stack, not only from a sales and customer lens, but also what does that look like for the evolution of product themselves? What does that look like for partnerships? What does that look like for consulting agencies? From all the way across the board, you're kind of having to tweak the way that you're doing things because just not doing the same thing anymore. So for us, the biggest places that I've been most focused on is really truly our partnerships that are driving evolution and driving results from a product perspective more specifically. And that's just because that's the age that we're in right now. Yes, you could refer, you could do all of those things all day long, but at the end of the day, unless you're bringing something very innovative, something new to the market, something that somebody else doesn't have or isn't doing as well at, you're just not going to get ahead in the market.

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(08:59):

And I think people, especially even the big houses, Salesforce knows this. They have been the CRM giant forever, we all know this, but I think that they're starting to kind of lose a lot of that because now we're starting to see the way that it's evolving where it's not just based on a CRM platform anymore. You're now seeing example, the merger between CLA and SalesLoft and how that's all fitting in together now and how they're utilizing other areas like a ServiceNow coming up with their own CRM that then is actionable. There's an evolution happening. Needless to say, it just means that partnerships are so much more important now more than ever, especially from a product lens. Going back to your original question of what have I been really grasping at? What have I been really pulling into our organization is those relationships. It's the ones that I'm like, you've got exactly what it is that we need. We have what you need. How do we bring our product teams together to build something phenomenal for the market, and then how do we then build the go-to-market after that? Right? That's kind of the shift that I've seen in a lot of the focus of the way that partnerships work today.

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Tyler Calder (10:12):

Awesome. I love that answer. I think I'm going to say back part of what think I heard you tell me if this feels accurate. So I think part of what I heard was there's a lot that we can do within partnerships. Candidly, some of it is going to lead to fairly incremental lift and then there's sort of larger exponential type of things we can focus on. It sounds like that's what you're talking about is I got to go focus on those big meaty partnerships that will drive innovation, that will drive outsized value for our customer base. Is that a fair articulation fair? Yeah.

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Katie Landaal (10:49):

Yes, and I don't want to devalue the incremental stuff either because that obviously, as long as you can run that as efficiently as possible, and as long as you can run that as a machine, it's a lot easier to not have as much focus on that part because you know that it's running the way that it should be and doing what it's supposed to be doing. That's how we've set it up here. So a lot of the, for example, using PartnerStack for our referral and affiliate programs and some of the deeper integrations that we've had with you guys, I know that I can trust what's going on over there because it's just running as a machine and I have less to worry about, which is why a partnership with PartnerStack is so critical for us. The stuff, yes, the more meaty stuff that I'm focused on now, yes, it takes longer to get to that revenue and the return on investment obviously, but at the end of the day you kind of have these kind of bigger whale situations that come in and you're like, all that hard work for the last 18 months, this is what it came to. So those are the ones that would say are taking up the most amount of my time right now, but all things are incredibly exciting and I can't wait to be able to share them and all that. Cool.

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Tyler Calder (12:03):

Was that when you're part a very conscious decision to say, okay, I need to be able to do two things. I need to be able to have my foundation in place that is predictable driving that incremental growth week over week?

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Katie Landaal (12:18):

Yeah, something I learned early on, especially with ZI, so there was no real strong foundation. There was no machine, so the first few years really truly was building a machine and that is the area that I needed and wanted to focus on. Knowing that in the three to five year plan, I wanted to put myself in a position now where like I said, I can kind of say, yep, it's good. We want to expand and do those things, but I don't have to spend 90% of my time trying to build something that doesn't exist today. Now that foundation is there, now the baseline is there, exactly what you had said. I can now move into these bigger, larger, more strategic thinking, forward thinking areas of the business. And I think, again, a lot of that is dictated by what our priorities are as an organization.

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(13:09):

It just happens to be right now we're very product focused. I mean, which is natural to the market. The rest of the market's also doing that. Everyone is extremely product focused right now who's coming out with the new stuff, especially when it comes to AI. And so for me, that kind of forced me into this place of, okay, now I can actually go chase all of these things that were pie in the sky scenarios that are now real tangible things sitting in my lap that we got to execute and get done. It's not the kind of machine that you're usually doing for an entire partner ecosystem that's running and doing the things that it needs to be doing. Now I'm kind of getting into the rebuild. What can we come up with? How does this look together?

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Tyler Calder (13:52):

That's awesome. I want to dive into the two things you mentioned there. I want to dive into AI a little bit. I want to dive into the big meaty product-based partnerships, but the machine, the foundation, going through that over the course of a couple of years, any insights or anything that you would share with folks that are maybe struggling with getting out from under that?

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Katie Landaal (14:11):

Yes. What I always share, typically when folks ask me how did I do it and how did we do it here at ZI and really in any of my previous roles, by the way, it's all the same and kind of similar scenarios that were just being built from scratch, start simple and start small, try to create this multi-tier partner system with all these intricacies and MDF funding and all this kind of fun stuff. That's all great, and you should absolutely aspire to be there, but I think if you're in a spot that you're not in a well-oiled machine, focus on making your programs very simple, straightforward, make them run, make them work, then start adding on those other things to then scale it, make it bigger and go right. That's how we kind of have done it here and now it's nice because it's running as a machine and now the conversations that we have are how do we make this even bigger for next year? I always tell people, start small, start simple. I've noticed that works much better.

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Tyler Calder (15:16):

That seems to be a recurring piece of advice that I'm hearing from folks that are really, I think leading at the forefront of partnerships and all things ecosystems, and there's a lot of folks that aren't heating that advice and they're creating these incredibly complex programs right out of the gate, and if you can't get it to work with a couple, why are you even incentivizing the team to just go bring on as many partners as possible? Even starting with incentives aren't in the right place. So I love that. That's great. Getting to the big meaty stuff, the stuff that it seems to have you really energized right now, how are you identifying potential product partnerships when there's so much out there, right? Everybody's talking a big game. How are you mapping the market and how are you sifting through all that?

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Katie Landaal (16:07):

Being at ZoomInfo, it's a really interesting place right now because we still are kind of that 700 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to go to market and intelligence and things like that, and so it's bowed a lot easier and getting prioritization with anybody bigger than us. So for example, working with somebody like a Salesforce, it's made it easier to get into the room rather than just starting small, like, oh, you've never heard of us. This is what we do, this is how we do it. So I will say that kind of drives a lot of the prioritization on Another way that we look at it too is truly we say, okay, if this is our messaging, our product, this is what we're driving towards for the next year, three, five years, who are the partners that are currently in the market today that will help drive that at the same time?

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(17:00):

Who's out in the market today that maybe could fill some of those gaps or speed bumps that we have to get to where we want to go to make us go faster? So there's two sides to it there. So we do a lot of this. We want to partner and then we figure out maybe it is something where it is an acquisition, an M&A or a merger or something along those lines that we see value in both sides. We always start with partnership first. It's a little bit of a way of testing the grounds. Are they really fitting into the culture that you've built? Are they really fitting into the systems that you've built? So that's kind of a little bit of just the way that my mind works when we look at partnerships and things like that. When we're talking about the big whales, obviously it's not like, Hey, Salesforce, I think we should buy you.

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(17:48):

No, that's not the conversation at all. It's more of a, Hey, there's a clear need in the market. We both cover pretty much majority of upmarket and all enterprise and things like that. There's a natural merriment there. How can we create something that really does bring something different to those enterprise customers that they could not just go and grab from someone else or try to build themselves unless they were willing to spend millions of dollars on doing it themselves? Again, ZI is in a very unique position because we are a data house. You need data to run any of your AI. As much as people like to think that, oh, I could just run it on my own stuff. It's still the tried and true. If you've got garbage in, you've got garbage coming out. So it's super, super important to have the right type of data fabric from the foundation, which again, has just made it easier with some of these product decisions and partnerships that we've been going into as of late. So yeah,.

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Tyler Calder (18:48):

So you're taking a strategic multi-year view that ZoomInfo has. It sounds like that is largely in heavily influenced by your customer base and the value that you want to provide to them.

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Katie Landaal (19:01):

Yep.

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Tyler Calder (19:01):

That's your starting point, and then you're going out and seeing, okay, who's out there that could potentially help us get to that future state that we're looking for.

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Katie Landaal (19:10):

Right. Or even just what makes the story stronger. That's the other thing that I think is really interesting about partnerships right now is we all now see that not one product or brand is going out there completely on their own anymore because they know that that's just not sustainable, and it's not something that's really going to get you past that glass ceiling. When you start getting into this kind of stage of your business, you realize, I'm not going to hire more salespeople, so how else can I drive more and more sales and more and more consumption? Well, you do that with partners and through those partnerships and so forth, whether it's product based or if it's from the go-to-market perspective or even just from a consulting and solutions perspective. Either way, you've got to have partners within your ecosystem to help push past that, like I said, glass ceiling that your sales organization is able to do on their own.

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Tyler Calder (20:02):

And so given how product-oriented some of these conversations are, how tightly integrated or aligned with the product team are you on the partnership side?

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Katie Landaal (20:12):

I would say almost a hundred percent in a sense that I have really pushed to bridge that gap between product and go-to market. I think we are seen as the bridge that falls in between both organizations. We all know that there's sometimes a disparity between the two. I'm on product calls more than not at this point because a lot of it is that's just where our product's being driven right now. We're just a very open ecosystem. We're very come one come all, and so they need that partnership help to develop the business behind it. I 100%, they take the lead on what they want to do from a product perspective and what's important to them. I'm just there to help facilitate and make sure that it's consumable to our customers, that our go-to market teams and sales teams understand it, that it's really bringing the benefit to the organization the way it should be and not just something, oh, by the way, we can connect to this, I don't know, random tech stack that's way over here somewhere. It should be done with purpose and done for the right reasons. So yeah, I talk to the product constantly, especially right now.

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Tyler Calder (21:20):

Especially right now. Awesome.

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Katie Landaal (21:22):

Yes.

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Tyler Calder (21:22):

Any lessons that you'd share with folks that maybe aren't getting the time that they'd love from their product team? They can't necessarily get their attention, they can't get them excited about a potential product based partnership.

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Katie Landaal (21:37):

I think it goes back to really any partner team themselves, rather it's product driven or if it's sales driven or if it's marketing driven, whatever the case may be. I'm really lucky I have a very close relationship with majority of our product team, but I did that on purpose because then it would give me insight as to where to drive our partnerships as well.

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(21:59):

And then now that we've gotten to this point, now it's just easy. It's like, yep, we've been talking about this already. We know what's going on. I see what's on their roadmaps. I know what their priorities are. I know kind of where they're driving to. And so I think with anybody in partnerships, it's just as important to develop your relationships externally with partners as it is internally with all of the folks that you work with, whether you're going to work with them regularly or not. At some point you're probably going to need them. You're going to have to ask questions, you're going to need to do something, and so it's so vital for you to have those internal relationships too. And so yeah, I would always just emphasize that's something that I learned early on is that the more I knew what was going on all over the place, not that I needed to be an expert, but I had the at least right level an idea of what they were doing, it was a lot easier for me to then come to them later saying, Hey, so-and-so came to us about this.

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(22:57):

It seems like it fits in really well with the roadmap that you've already come up with for the next six months. What do you think about adding it in? And majority of the time they're like, yeah, this fits right in, this is perfect. Or no, we just don't want to take away from what we're focused on right now, but that's fine. I can still develop the go-to-market side of the partnership, co-sell, referral, co-marketing, all of those things. It just doesn't mean that we're ready for the product yet, but that doesn't mean we won't be in the next quarter or two quarters, three quarters, whatever that looks like. It just happens to be that, I dunno what it is this year, it's like they all were ready to go. So I've got a lot of stuff going on with product right now, which I'm really excited. So many things I wish I could share, but I cannot, obviously not yet, but everybody will start to see a lot of it coming out into the market in the next couple months, and so it's going to be awesome to see how happy customers are and it's a lot of things that they've asked for, so it's nice to be able to deliver on that too.

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Tyler Calder (23:51):

Very cool. So you got a lot of exciting things coming, going to hit the market. If we look internally, how are you helping support your sales team, your CS team, the marketing team, getting them enabled, excited about what's coming up, what does that look like?

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Katie Landaal (24:07):

So it's very much a team effort. I definitely cannot take credit whatsoever. I have an incredible team and colleagues and peers that I work with. I think the biggest thing is very similar back to kind of what I was alluding to before is it's so important to have open line of communication to as many people as possible outside of your own organization and kind of wherever the partner team sits because it makes it just that much easier to then go train the teams, be able to line them up and just open transparency of what's going on in the partnership world. I know for me, I regularly set up meetings with our various points of leadership, not only in the sales organization but also our finance, also in product, also in marketing, because then they go, oh, this is coming up. I need to make sure I include this in our already roadmap and plans, for example. That open line of communication is so critical, it's so crucial for any partner team success. That's what I would at least suggest and that's what I do today to make sure that's still rolling out. And then when it just training and enabling everybody, it's again, talking to the enablement team, talking to the sales teams, talking to the sales leaders, the CSM leaders, everybody, just making sure that we're all in alignment and knowing what's going on. So you're developing value for them too, is the really important part.

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Tyler Calder (25:30):

Perfect. You ready to talk about AI?

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Katie Landaal (25:33):

Sure. Everybody wants to talk about AI.

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Tyler Calder (25:35):

Everybody wants to talk about, maybe let's start with your team in partnerships. How are you folks leveraging AI?

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Katie Landaal (25:44):

Well, we actually on our team, we have an internal for ZI ourselves, what we call ZI Chat, and it's essentially our own homegrown kind of AI platform, and it's by far, it's the most amazing thing I've ever used in my life, and I've been such the tech nerd, so everything that comes out with AI, I'm always like, oh, let's try it ChatGPT, oh, Claude, oh, let's see what it does with this, right? With just simple things. What's really interesting about ours is we've been able to actually bring all of the different GPTs basically in and together, and then the user themselves can kind of select which one they want to use depending on what the prompt is, what they're asking, because we all know ChatGPT is more for creative. If you're looking for something that's more specific to really deep research based and really looking at context and pulling the right data points that you need, Claude usually is kind of the one that at least most have been using.

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(26:45):

So for ours, it's kind of cool that going into it, you can just already automatically ask it. Then on top of that, it's connected to all of our internal systems, everything. So if I ask it, help me find some of these calls that I've had with Deloitte, for example, one of our main GSI partners, help me find some of the gaps that are going on there and why it's not moving as quickly in the partnership. It'll literally go through all emails, Slack messages or recorded calls, transcripts, decks. I mean, literally it'll go everywhere. It will go through everything and come back to me with this huge report of saying, well, this is what's happening here. There's been a change with this partner and now we haven't been able to line up with your rep and that new partner and so forth, and here's some of the things that they've been talking about in the market, and this is probably where we need to shift our focus from a partnership perspective and all that kind of stuff.

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(27:41):

So that's how we use it internally. So I've got my cloud team for example. They use it constantly. They're always asking it like, Hey, do you see any overlap or value if our rep brings up this specific cloud for this marketplace transaction, for this either renewal or upsell or whatever the case may be? So instead of them having to spend hours trying to find this stuff either within our CRM or going around and asking every rep individually, now they're able to just go somewhere and say, Hey, help me find the reps I need to talk to this week about these deals specific to let's say Google or specific to AWS, and it'll just pop everything up for them, everything they need to know, and then they just go to the rep already prepped and prepared, and then most of the time it's more of a five minute conversation versus a 45 minute conversation of, wait, I'm sorry.

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(28:29):

What do you do for us here at ZI as a partner team? Or what am I supposed to tell the customer about this cloud marketplace? It just takes all of that away, which is really nice. We use it a lot. I think that if you don't, you're really missing out number one and number two, I think you'll easily get kind of pushed out because you have to have the acumen to be able to actually not only build the prompts, but be able to use it on a day-to-day basis to make yourself either more efficient or move faster. That's the way the entire kind of market is going right now, so you just don't want to be left behind.

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Tyler Calder (29:06):

Yeah, I would agree with that sentiment for sure. Who internally manages all of that, who's making sure that everything's connected and the outputs are trustworthy and all that fun stuff.

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Katie Landaal (29:18):

All the fun things. Yeah,

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(29:20):

We have a chief strategy officer actually, and he runs that entire, that's all he's been doing for the last, oh gosh, a while. It's been like two years I think in the making. He has an entire engineering org under that. I think eventually the thought is that we've built this kind of incredible machine internally for ourselves. What really it's going to be is us pushing it out commercially to others to make it easy. Right now, what you're seeing in the market is a lot of these, especially enterprise or even large enough, they just aren't AI savvy enough to know how do I integrate all of these different things together to actually get the outputs that I want it to do, whether it's for my finance team, my HR team, my sales team, my marketing team, whoever it is, that's the way we're using it internally, for example, so everybody uses it in some way, shape or form.

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(30:12):

How do we push this out commercially? Well, the thought was is okay, if we can use it internally first and really nail it down and get it to where we want it to be, that's something that we can then share with our customers to say, Hey, this is a much easier process for you now. Now you're not having to know what code to write or now you don't really have to know how to connect the different systems together. We're trying to provide that for our customers, which is why, again, we're becoming more and more that go-to market intelligence platform because it's true. We're kind of trying to become the brain for you in a way, right? It's really interesting how it's all coming together and how we've evolved through it.

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Tyler Calder (30:53):

Yeah, that's super interesting. What was adoption like internally? Did that come pretty quickly?

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Katie Landaal (30:58):

It was a pretty fast adoption I think, so Henry, our CEO was very much like, guys, we have this. Use it. Look how I used it today, lead by example, and so he really took the bull by the horns and he was leading by example, and I think people just were like, oh, yeah, this is cool. Oh yeah, this is cool. Oh, I can use it for this or I could use it for that. Or they were seeing somebody else doing some incredible report work and they were like, how do I do that? And they're going over to their neighbor and their neighbor's like, oh, it's easy. You just say, and then you get all these things. So I mean, we adopted it fast within our organization, which has been great. The numbers just continue to go up every day. I wouldn't be surprised if we're at a hundred percent easily by the end of the year, if not sooner, quite frankly. Very cool stuff happening though.

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Tyler Calder (31:46):

Yeah, that's great. I'll use the magic wand question. If you could wave a magic wand and have AI accomplish something that it isn't accomplishing today within partnerships ecosystems, is there a dream state for you that you really have your eye on that you'd love to get to?

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Katie Landaal (32:05):

I think that's hard to answer, number one, because I think a lot of the stuff that we have to, it is possible. I just need the engineering team to take the time to build it so that it brings the right modeling together to give the answers that I need it to give me. It's not really truly a magic wand, it's just really just, Hey, can you go build this? Let me know when you can fit it into your sprint. Great, thanks. It's awesome. I mean, we use it even just for VCs and PE firms to analyze should we be working with this one over this one? How much crossover and how much overlap are we seeing within our customer base? Are we hearing our customers talk about certain ease or PCs more than others? I mean, there's a whole kind of swath of use cases that you can use it for that just really brings to light where you should be focused and where you should go.

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(32:57):

It's data driven, which is also why I think it makes it exciting for me, always been kind of that I love data and that drives all of my long-term decisions, and I remember so many times just asking people for a statistic on something like, okay, well, how much conversion do we have here or how much churn did we have here? And are we seeing stronger ACV or ASP with certain partners over others? And that was always forever to get out of the business intelligent teams, that's basically what they were doing. Now I just go right in. I can ask them and tell me, Hey, in comparison to this partner versus this partner, is there one stronger to our customers or analyze all of our ARR and what our costing has been, and then tell me is this partnership been fruitful for us or not? Again, all things that I can do on my own technically, but it's been great. I just ask it and it tells me right away, and I don't have to guess anymore. I don't have to kind of thumb in the air anymore. You actually have a better source to refer to.

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Tyler Calder (34:01):

Yeah, I love that. Again, that seems to be a pretty big unlock with folks I've been chatting to that have done a really good job internally building a culture of leveraging AI and building internal tooling, and a lot of teams moving from, oh, you got to submit a ticket to get a piece of data from your robots team to now you can just go get it yourself and yeah, no, that's great.

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Katie Landaal (34:23):

I think as you start to see the results from it and how it's being used in a multitude of ways, it's less scary, and so people now when they start to adopt it more, not this thing.

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Tyler Calder (34:36):

What's the fear that you see from people? One of the things that I see from folks is they'll admit it feels like it's cheating.

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Katie Landaal (34:44):

Admitted it myself. There was a point where I was like...

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Tyler Calder (34:46):

A little bit, yeah.

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Katie Landaal (34:47):

I feel like this is making me feel like I'm an impostor syndrome, like I should know this. What I try to remind the folks that kind of start to feel that way or feel like it's cheating, you have to remember that it's giving you the results that you are prompting.

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(35:04):

So what it's spitting out to you is only as good as what you're telling it to do or prompting it to do, and so really it is coming from you. It's just now it's coming in a much faster way, so it's not you having to ask yourself, okay, what kind of report do I want to pull together for so-and-so? Now it's okay, I know what I want. I just have something else helping me get there much faster so it shouldn't take away, and I have to remind myself that too all the time. It shouldn't take away from the fact that you are incredibly smart, incredibly great at your job, all of these things, it's more along the lines of it just helps you to get there faster so that you're not spending hours trying to build it all by yourself.

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Tyler Calder (35:51):

Yeah, I think that's great advice for folks. I love that we only have a few minutes left and I'm going to drop a meaty one. When you go into a partnership, we alluded to this a little bit, but are you thinking about M&A at the outset? Does that sometimes come a little bit later? How are you thinking about that?

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Katie Landaal (36:08):

Sometimes that realization doesn't come until later when you're getting into the nitty gritty of their organization, how they've built things, what they're doing, how it works with you, so forth. Other times, yeah, there are times that we've gone into it that might be a good pickup, but let's partner with them first to kind of test the waters. It depends. It really depends on who and what we're doing and all the fun things, but I've been on both sides of it, so I've been on the side of being the acquired one, and I've also been on the side of being acquire. Again. It's given me a little bit of that perspective that's been unique, at least in my career, that I can kind of see that a little bit ahead of time and know how to direct and prioritize the partnership if that's the direction that we're truly going in. It gives you some good insight there and good gut feel too that you start to learn after a while.

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Tyler Calder (36:57):

And so you would suggest or maybe not even suggest, at least in your experience, you've always started with a partnership though, even if the starting pay, you know what, there could be something here, this a good pickup, you're going to start with partnership first.

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Katie Landaal (37:10):

Yes.F If it was not started as a partnership first, usually it just is something that was like an acquihire situation or there was a really small specific piece of the product that was easier to just pick up from somebody else than it was to go through the partnership and all that kind of stuff, and usually you only see that truly, again, for either the acquihire situations which we call 'em, or in the situation there. It's a very specific tiny little cog in the big machine of it. But yeah, nine out of 10 times we do partnerships first to see how that goes.

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Tyler Calder (37:52):

I love that. I think what we've certainly seen on our side is alignment to some of what you said earlier. You get to see behind the curtain a little bit. You get to see what's real, what's not real. You get to test out culture. You get to see do your customer base ity value. There's a lot there that I think partnership leaders can kind of think about because I mean, career-wise, pretty big swing when you're starting to talk about M&A and a lot of partner leaders are ignoring that as an opportunity.

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Katie Landaal (38:19):

They do and they shouldn't. I learned a lot transparently even before ZoomInfo, so when I was back at web.com, actually my entire partner team and strategy team rolled in directly to our chief M&A officer, basically.

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Tyler Calder (38:34):

Oh, interesting.

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Katie Landaal (38:35):

And I learned a ton there because I could see all day long exactly what it was that he was looking for. Exactly the financials context, even down to what does the C-suite look like? How do they handle customer escalations? How do they treat their entire p and l? All the things that taught me a ton just from being in that group at that time, and I think that's what's bo really well to that viewpoint and business acumen when it comes to, Hey, this could be a great pickup for us. We should do a partnership first, so I can kind of start checking all of those boxes before actually starting to go down the true M&A path. I definitely am not an expert in by any means. I think I can just scratch the surface of it. I've got financial partners and the CFO org obviously, that are much more like these guys know exactly what they're doing all day every day. But for me, from a true business perspective and from a strategy perspective, that's what really I've loved about it, and I know that in the future, that's something that I can always just continue to just go after if I really wanted to just since I've kind of seen it enough of it at this point or been a part of it enough at this point. But yeah, I think partnership leaders definitely should always consider it. It's fun, truly. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (40:02):

Oh, no, totally. Yeah, I've been through a few and it's a roller coaster.

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Katie Landaal (40:05):

And honestly, partnership people are the only ones that kind of get it too, right? Because it is, it's such a roller coaster and you have to pivot quickly and you have to change something fast or whatever the case may be, and so that's probably why we love it so much. We're suckers for glutton. It's just I don't want...

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Tyler Calder (40:22):

Partnership people and agency people.

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Katie Landaal (40:24):

True, true. Again, partnership and agency. Yep.

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Tyler Calder (40:28):

Perfect. We're out of time. I'm going to ask you one more closing question here.

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Katie Landaal (40:32):

Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (40:33):

I've heard you say elsewhere that your sort of leadership philosophy style tries to revolve around this idea of courage, clarity, curiosity.

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Katie Landaal (40:44):

There are three Cs.

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Tyler Calder (40:45):

The three Cs. How for you, how has that played out working in partnerships and more specifically than play out because that's pretty broad. How would you suggest partner leaders take that to heart and kind of action it every single day?

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Katie Landaal (41:02):

I mean, you can use it everywhere in a very broad, like you said, very broad way, or even just individually with your own team that's reporting into you. I try to practice those three Cs every single day, not only leading my team, but also talking to my peers and other leadership within the organization. Have the courage to say, Hey, I don't think this is going to work, or I think this is going to work and I'm putting my foot in the ground about this. I'm digging my heels in and we're doing it. So being curious means, at least to me, and the way that I look at it is I always want to look at both sides of the fence at all times. I want to know if I want to move forward with a partnership, for example, I'm looking at it from their lens.

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(41:45):

Does this actually make sense for them to do? Does this actually make sense for me to do? Are there areas that I just are a bit gray for me that I don't know and I need to get some clarity on? I need to go chase those facts, go chase those financials, customer reviews, whatever the case may be. I always just want to make sure that any decision that I make is made with that curiosity first, which then gains the clarity then after, and the clarity again is just having a very, taking the emotion out of it, very factual. What have you gotten out of being so curious? And so that's kind of how I run it. But again, I do it from individuals. Even on my one-on-ones, I ask them a million questions and really push them, and then all the way to when I'm in meetings with some of our C-suite, I'm doing the same thing with them.

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(42:36):

Integrity is the other one. That's a really big one for me. That's kind of my fourth integrity in all of my relationships, partnerships, whether personal or professional is integrity is the number one thing that I'm always here for. I would rather die on a sword for something that I think is the right thing to do versus crappy thing to do to somebody else. And my whole organization, I've been so incredibly blessed and lucky, they are all meet every single one of those, and they have just been incredible and they all practice the same thing. And again, I think that just makes a really strong partner leader. It makes you easy to work with and you're honest, and you are making sure that you're actually understanding the full scenario, not just jumping in and giving an answer about something or anything like that.

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Tyler Calder (43:26):

I love it. The three C's and the one I.

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Katie Landaal (43:29):

It's perfect. Yes, I know, right? Three C's and one I. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (43:32):

That's perfect. Awesome. Well, Katie, thank you so much. I had a ton of fun in the conversation. I think there's a lot to take away here, so really appreciate it.

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Katie Landaal (43:41):

Yeah, no problem. Well, thanks for having me. And yeah, let me know if you ever want to chat on anything again.

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Tyler Calder (43:45):

Yeah. How can folks reach you if they want to get in touch?

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Katie Landaal (43:49):

The usual things, LinkedIn, email. I mean if you have ZoomInfo, all my info is in there too.

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Tyler Calder (43:55):

There you go.

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Katie Landaal (43:57):

You're welcome to reach out to me anytime. I'm always happy to help or answer any questions or even just be a sounding board for anybody. I'm always open to that all the time.

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Tyler Calder (44:05):

Awesome. Perfect. Well, Katie, thank you so much.

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Katie Landaal (44:08):

Awesome. Thanks.

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Tyler Calder (44:10):

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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