Speaking The Language Of Revenue In Partnerships With Michael Shen

Michael Shen (00:00):

When I think about partnerships, even if you think about the word partnerships, which imply something that's very human to human, I think sometimes what gets lost in translation, especially when you're talking to other leaders in the company who are more revenue and metrics driven is a translation exercise of saying, okay, this is fundamentally something about building relationships with people, but how do we turn that and decompose it into atomic units that we can talk about when we're talking to folks who care about dollars and cents?

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Tyler Calder (00:30):

This is Get It, Together, the podcast where partnership and go- to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they built and scaled. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Get It, Together. Today's conversation is one like all of the conversations I am very excited to have. Today I am with Michael Shen, the head of growth at OuterSignal. Now before that, Michael, you spent several years at Zapier. You're the senior director of channel partnerships at the end. You built and led the agency and solution partner program. What I'm really excited about is what got you there. You didn't come up through partnerships, but rather you largely came up through marketing, which I think provides a really unique and interesting perspective into all things partnerships. We'll get into the core theme of today in a second, but Michael, welcome to the show. Anything I missed in that introduction?

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Michael Shen (01:25):

No, I don't think so. I was just going to mention I had a really circuitous throughout because I started out as a nutrition and wellness buyer managing supplements at Amazon. So it's been a fascinating journey. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (01:38):

That is fascinating. We didn't even talk about this. I had a stint in wellness and nutrition as well on the B2C side.

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Michael Shen (01:45):

Just two protein infused bros time. Clearly.

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Tyler Calder (01:49):

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Clearly. Yep. Yeah. If you're watching on YouTube, you get the joke. If you're listening, we are both jacked. That's right. That's what we'll leave the list

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Michael Shen (02:03):

As. The video windows are struggling to hold our bulk.

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Tyler Calder (02:07):

Yep, exactly. I'd love to hear about that journey a little bit. What got you to the point where you were leading partnerships? What did that look like?

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Michael Shen (02:16):

Yeah, I spent full seven years at Zapier. It was a fantastic run. I joined as a director of performance marketing, spinning up what was a very fledgling attempt to get paid advertising as a growth driver for the business after many years of organic word of mouth that really spread Zapier far and wide. And I scaled that scope to encompass most of the budget and the teams involved in performance marketing writ large at Zapier. And what I found as a common thread is if I take my quantitative framework-based thinking into lots of different places, that can actually coalesce and bring focus to a certain area. So after taking that on for about three years, I spent the stint in business operations helping the business run more effectively. And then my last at Zapier was building the channel partnerships program. It's a program that had been around for a really long time, but really needed a senior business operator to come in, introduce focus, introduce metrics, and really plot out the next path for its future.

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(03:24):

So that's how I landed in channel partnerships. It wasn't orchestrated by any means, but it was a really important area for the company to figure out as it thought about growth in the next couple of years.

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Tyler Calder (03:36):

I want to dig into that. You joined to ... Did I hear it right? Was it paid media or paid search?

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Michael Shen (03:42):

Paid media. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (03:43):

Paid media generally. That's interesting to me because we have a couple customers where the partnership leader came up through paid media as well. And I've asked them the question I'm going to ask you, what was it or what is it about paid media that set you up presumably for success in partnerships? What were some of those lessons? What were some of the things that you took away from that? Because it's a small pattern that I'm starting to see emerge, people coming up through paid media ending up doing really well in partnerships. I'd love to explore that. What are those things that you took away from that and brought into partnerships?

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Michael Shen (04:17):

I think paid media in some sense can be a very different world. It's a very oftentimes mathematical, metrics-driven, ROI-driven world that is very, very measurable in the space of marketing. When we think about canonical marketing, it's a lot of Madison Ave, 5th Ave type of advertisements where it's about driving the appeal of the brand. And I think in this new era of paid media, especially online, there's so much more technology fueling your ability as a marketer to understand whether your efforts are actually paying off. And so if you're in the trenches having to use the tools that justify whether your money is being spent in the right way, you develop a lot of logical framework-driven thinking that help you apply that to places that maybe on the surface feel much more relationship oriented, but oftentimes can have a more rigorous approach to figuring out how to vest your time and energy.

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(05:20):

And so when I think about partnerships, even if you think about the word partnerships, which imply something that's very human to human, I think sometimes what gets lost in translation, especially when you're talking to other leaders in the company who are more revenue and metrics driven is a translation exercise of saying, okay, this is fundamentally something about building relationships with people, but how do we turn that and decompose it into atomic units that we can talk about when we're talking to folks who care about dollars and cents?

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Tyler Calder (05:50):

Expand on that atomic units.

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Michael Shen (05:53):

So I think it could be as simple as saying, okay, when I think about partnerships, and then we'll go into it in a little bit, but we're plotting out the vision for this. How do I take it from just painting the picture of a wonderful burgeoning partnerships program that has X, Y, components in it and really talk about how many partners do we see and can we align on what success looks like? What is the composition of large versus small partners? What are our expectations around the goals and metrics that we have for them? Well, ultimately is the productivity and the partnerships, what does that actually drive in terms of revenue for the company? And does that mean something meaningfully to the trajectory of the company? Those are atomic units of measurement and of financial forecasting that I oftentimes had to talk about when talking about paid media when decomposing it into different channels and capturing the flow from somebody visiting the site all the way down to a conversion that when we think about partnerships, I think oftentimes we don't immediately plot the same kind of framework onto partnerships just because it feels much more loose in relationship.

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(07:02):

And so autonomic units is more of, I think, a fancy way of saying, "Hey, how do we really break it down into numbers if we're talking about using partnerships as a lever for growth?"

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Tyler Calder (07:15):

And so making that shift, you mentioned the partner org at the time maybe needed a little bit more stewardship and senior leadership. You just mentioned how you think about those atonic units a little bit. I'm assuming that played a role into how you evolved the function, but let's maybe talk a little bit more about stepping into that role. What were the initial things that you observed that suggested there needed to be an evolution? How did you prioritize where you thought about spending your time? And I asked this question because a lot of folks in partnerships, yes, they grew up in partnerships, but in a lot of cases they grew up in a single partner type and that's sort of all they know. And then they find themselves taking on a larger partner program that maybe has multiple partner types and they're struggling to figure out where to start.

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(08:09):

I get the sense you take a very first principles view on a lot of this. So what did that look like? How did you step into that role and what did the first call it? I'm not a big fan of 30, 60, 90 day plans because I think it's like day one plan, day five plan, day 10 plan if you're moving really fast, but what did that initial couple weeks look like?

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Michael Shen (08:31):

I can maybe talk about the two things that come to mind and go from there. I think the first thing that comes to mind is the Kanawha will read the room. I think a lot of leaders can come in with a lot of different energy, but in my case, I came into a role and a program that had been around for some time. And so the initial diligence is really talking to people not only within the partnerships team, outside the partnerships team to really understand what the perceptions are. How is this effort being perceived at the company being judged at the company positive or negative? Because ultimately when you want to build a successful partnerships function, you'll need the support of folks around you. This has often been talked about something where regardless of where you report, partnerships touches many aspects of the company from product to marketing to senior leadership.

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(09:21):

And so understanding who are your allies and who are your detractors, that's actually a really important collect political aspect, especially at a larger company of understanding where you need to focus your energy as a leader. And then secondarily, I would say part of this exercise is also trying to understand what is actually working. And so talking to the team, talking to the partners and really understanding where you are finding alignment between partner goals and internal goals is important. Now, when I joined the team, I think one of the biggest disconnects that I saw is the partners were being incentivized in a certain way that weren't actually aligned to the goals of the company and that kind of disconnect is really foundational. So it's my job to identify it and then make recommendations as we think about changes to the program to put these more in line.

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(10:12):

Otherwise, you could be spending lots of your time going after specific goals and objectives and motivating your partners in a certain way that actually doesnt affect how they're seen or how their impact is seen within the organization.

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Tyler Calder (10:27):

Are you able to share some examples of what those disconnects were that you saw? And again, the question comes from a place of, I know a lot of the folks that we chat to, candidly, they may not recognize that that's the case. And so I think maybe sharing a couple examples will help them step back and say, oh shoot, I think we're actually doing that at our org as well.

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Michael Shen (10:50):

Yeah. My very simple framing of the situation that I saw going into the channel partner program or the expert program at Zapier is when I joined the team, the main incentive and metric of success for these partners was the amount of call it Zapier contract value that they were managing. And the disconnect that I immediately sussed out was we were in a path where a lot of initiatives were being scrutinized for how much growth and revenue they were bringing to the company. So immediately there, you have a pretty big disconnect between metrics like, hey, how much of existing Zapier usage is being managed as well as other, I think, call it vanity metrics of amount of engagement and community. I'm saying it in air quotes because I do believe they're important, but ultimately you need the foundational element of, okay, if we're trying to drive growth through this program and many of the programs at this company are being scrutinized for their ability to drive growth, well, that is the first component we need to get stable and in line before we can work on some of these other things that are contributing.

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(12:00):

And I think there is a temptation and sometimes a defensiveness in saying, "Hey, look, our partners are doing X, Y, Z. They're contributing in so many different ways." But ultimately, if we don't get to the root cause of, hey, are they contributing in the ways that are being valued by the organization and its goals? And if the answer is no, then a lot of that stuff can be swept under the rug or there can oftentimes be this constant tension where the partnerships team and the partners feel unappreciated for what they do because there's not this open dialogue about, "Hey, we may be optimizing for the wrong things."

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Tyler Calder (12:37):

I love that. When we were chatting a litle bit earlier before we got into recording, you had alluded to, or maybe I put the words in your mouth, sometimes partnership folks can struggle to explain their impact in terms that the rest of the business understands and even to a certain degree respects a lot of what you just talked about, aligning to what's important to the business. Why do you think that is? What have you observed and what is that internal potential resistance to what partner teams are reporting on? What does that end up leading to as my dog enters the room?

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Michael Shen (13:17):

Grand entrance, announcing entrance. Yeah. This maybe is a callback to my experience in paid media. Oftentimes when you're in paid media, you have to understand what are the attribution rules for a company, unless technical parlance, how do we count value? What are the rules associated with that? Who gets value when and how does the company see that? And so I think for me, returning to those roots allowed me to have those conversations earlier on in my tenure as a channel partner leader than maybe I would've otherwise, because I would know to interrogate, okay, if this effort is, for example, if we are being compared to the productivity of, say, the sales organization, if in case a partner and a sales team are both interacting on a deal, how do we actually portion out value accordingly? Or the team had run various one-off studies on accounts where a partner has been attached and those that have not and understanding, okay, what is again, the perception of the methodology behind running that kind of study allowed me to understand, wow, the leadership team believes there's some issues with the way that we measured in the past, whereas the partner team believes, okay, this is the holy grail for establishing that we have impact.

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(14:39):

And so if those things are not brought out into the open, again, there can be this bifurcation of partner team feeling like certain studies, certain metrics that we look at, those are the things that demonstrate our value when in fact perception can be very, very different.

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Tyler Calder (14:54):

How do you get to the root of that disconnect? Is it as simple as asking?

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Michael Shen (14:59):

I think it starts with asking for sure.

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(15:02):

I think the second aspect is asking and not taking fuzzy answers as taking fuzzy answers. And I think it's as simple as asking, but it also needs to follow up with not taking fuzzy answers as, okay, I'm ready to move on. I think you need to really establish with the folks that you're talking to, what are the reasons you have to believe or not believe in this? And making people really clarify what are their assumptions and biases so that you almost know what the rubric is for proving or disproving what they believe in. So that's one aspect of talking to the stakeholders that you have to manage in terms of making sure everyone's on the same page of how we're looking at something. I think secondarily it comes down to, okay, how do we actually very discreetly get to a decision? And in a larger organization, it's pulling everybody together and saying, "Hey, here's a proposal of how we're going to measure it looking forward." Whether it's a fist to five or whatever mechanism you want to get, make people agree or disagree in the room.

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(16:11):

Sometimes in this case, I've found you can have a side conversation where an opinion gets expressed, that person may or may not be the decision maker and then suddenly you have this whole entangled web of beliefs and previous conversations that aren't very aligned. And especially at a company of a couple hundred people, you need to really identify who makes the final call here and also how do we get to an alignment across the most important leaders? And that comes with having the conversation and spelling out the rules very concretely so that people have something to react to. These one-off studies and conversations where people ask, "What do you think? " Especially, I will say even in the case where you have a senior IC talking to a CEO or somebody in the C-suite can produce something that's like a tepid yes or no that's murky and that's actually more dangerous than a firm yes or no.

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(17:06):

You might have somebody saying like, "Oh, that looks pretty interesting. Yeah, maybe you should follow up on that. " And that's actually, I would say navigate away from that and try to manage conversations toward a I agree or I disagree. That's how you actually navigate the conflict, especially when people are more conflict diverse or because of the power dynamics they don't really want to speak their mind.

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Tyler Calder (17:30):

Yeah, that's super interesting. And I know again, when we chatted previously, you described this reframe that you made that you felt made a pretty big difference, which was instead of trying to defend partnerships and everything you were doing within how you were measuring what was important to you within partnerships, rather than trying to defend that, you led with skepticism. What does that mean to lead with skepticism? And does it play into what we're talking about right now with how you're interacting with key stakeholders?

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Michael Shen (17:59):

Yeah, a little bit. I will say maybe I would reframe what ended up being successful. You still have optimism rather than skepticism. Expectation is my strong suit, I will say, and it starts me well and I'll go into it, but I think especially shout out to my manager at the time, you still have to lead with a vision. You still have to help people see what is this at its most successful stage and what is the timeframe needed to achieve that? And so the most important conversation in the early days was actually painting that vision and saying, "Hey, we as an organization want to get to this crazy goal, crazy, ambitious goal as a company, where does this slot in? And do we have a shared ambition about how big this needs to be as part of that shared goal?" So you're caught up in the groundswell of everything that's funneling toward that goal rather than being this small Motley crew that's operating a Skullcoroks project on the side, which I think can be the elephant graveyard of partnership teams.

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(19:05):

So sharing that vision and making sure it's aligned to the company vision, I think it is really important to have. When I talk about skepticism though, I think you are most certainly, especially if you work at a company where there's not an abundance of partnerships experience, going to receive a lot of questions on, well, why do you believe this is the path that we need to carve out? And that's where preemptively having some skepticism about your own plan is a way to test your own biases and assumptions around what needs to be true so that when you're representing this to senior leaders, you're not just coming in with pure optimism and Verve and saying everything will be sunshine and rainpows at the end of this path, but you're anticipating some of the doubts and the probing questions that they have. So you seem better prepared, but you've also thought through what the implications are.

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(19:59):

So when I talk about skepticism, it's also not from a standpoint of purely why shouldn't this work, but what would have to be true for this to work? What are the assumptions going into this? Have you modeled this? And these are things that are part of the toolkit for being able to, again, talk to different people who think about things in different ways. I really think about success as being able to speak the language of the person that you're talking to. And if you're in partnerships and you're surrounded by lots of people who work with partners, there's this addictive energy of making things happen and talking to folks who are in the bubble of partnerships. I think being able to step outside of that and realize, okay, there are some people with no experience in this space who may question the measurability of something like this.

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(20:49):

How do you also talk to those people as well when you're trying to motivate?

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Tyler Calder (20:52):

I think that's a really important call-out, which is I'll use my words candidly, and this is true for a lot of functions, but I definitely see it within partnerships. You're in your own echo chamber a lot of the time. And the way that you think about the world and the universe and the impact that you're trying for the business may be a litle bit different than how other key stakeholders in the org could be thinking about things. Stakeholders like the CFO, CEO, heads of other functions, certainly. And I like what you said about preparing for that skepticism you might face. It's very similar to how I suggest people prepare for board meetings. Really try to sit down and brainstorm where is there going to be skepticism in what you're presenting? Can you get ahead of those objections, those questions? So it sounds similar in that sense.

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Michael Shen (21:51):

I will add one other thing. I think it's about being measured rather than being ... It's not about being negative about your own program, but I think it's about being measured so that even sometimes when people hear data-driven or being able to defend against skepticism, they think about, let me bring the absolute best data points that I have that tip the scales in my favor. And I think this is situation dependent, but I think sometimes when you're ... I think about my vantage point as somebody who approaches a lot of things with skepticism, if I hear somebody giving me overwhelmingly positive data points with no negative data points or issues, I'm immediately on red alert, high alert thinking, wow, this person is hiding something from me. And so it's about making a measured point and talking about places where it's things are working, things are not working.

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(22:47):

What is the data that suggests one way or the other rather than going in with this ingoing assumption of, okay, everything must be working. I have to come up with all the best data points I have to exactly prove my point, especially as you're presenting to some people with a more skeptical view, that's actually going to be the working approach.

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Tyler Calder (23:09):

Actually, maybe before I get into that, where did you find the most skepticism was coming from? Is that when you're trying to have a financial conversation with people in finance? Was it with sales leadership? Was it with the CEO? Where did you find yourself really needed to make sure you were prepared properly for key conversations internally?

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Michael Shen (23:32):

Yeah, I would say without getting into too many specifics, I think what I noticed that a lot of the skepticism can come when there's not a lot of preexisting knowledge about something. So one example I could give is there was an early conversation where we were sitting in an exec meeting and we had just launched an affiliate program and the affiliate program was being compared to the partnerships program and lumped into this more being of like, "Well, why do we have two separate programs to begin with? Isn't this all discount incentives for people to go do stuff for us?" And so now as somebody who has spent some time in partnerships, I can imagine how there's a sense of immediate defensiveness and revulsion of, how could you compare me? These are vastly different things. And so to go back to your point of where you find a lot of the skepticism, I think it comes from a genuine place of call it ignorance about the different places in which different types of partners can be successful and how to best represent that.

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(24:38):

And I think making sure that you can maintain composure in those types of spaces and be able to explain, I think that is oftentimes the first level of, "Hey, can we get to the shared understanding of how the world might work and be successful for us?" And I think one coaching point that's been successful for me is remember that the skepticism isn't generally about you as a person, but really about the business. And so how can you abstract that away and say, okay, how do I help this person, whoever may be skeptical, understand in their own terms how this partnership's effort can be successful in driving the business, then you can work backward into asking more questions to them to understand where is the actual knowledge blockage, where are they failing to understand something, whether it's a spreadsheet or it's a document or it's a conversation, what exactly do they need to be convinced of?

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(25:34):

And coming at it from serving that need rather than, okay, I know I'm going into skeptical conversation to an earlier point, let me just arm myself with a bunch of random facts that I can spit out in order to defend my point. So it comes back in a more pithy way. I think it comes back to understanding your audience when it comes to the skepticism and really get drilling down into what are they getting hung up on and attacking it from that standpoint.

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Tyler Calder (26:03):

When you think about going into one of these meetings, having a conversation with one of these stakeholders, how are you preparing for that? You mentioned going in with a certain level of confidence, not necessarily being shaken in the moment when you're getting maybe challenged. It's not a challenge of you, it's just for the betterment of the business. What are you doing to prepare for that meeting? Everything from mentally preparing to go in and also what metrics, data points are you bringing to the table that you know are generally going to resonate with those folks?

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Michael Shen (26:44):

Yeah, I'm a big fan of, I forget the exact Japanese term for this, but really trying to orchestrate the outcome of a meeting even before I walk into the meeting. What that means is if I have a chance to preview what I'm going to present either to the direct report or the person that I'm talking to, somebody who knows them well or to them directly, I try to find the time to prep for that beforehand so I can anticipate what are the questions that are going to come up and more importantly, it can map who are going to be the people who are going to be supporters versus detractors in that meeting. I think a lot of the anxiety often comes from going into the meeting with a lot of uncertainty. I don't know how this meeting's going to go. I don't know how this person's going to react.

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(27:30):

And as a person who truly hates uncertainty, I try to do everything in my power to reduce that down to as little as possible. So that's number one. That's a lot of prep work that goes into it beforehand. You don't have to take it on yourself. I think you have to know who are the people, if not the direct connection that I have to the person who know those people and can plan with me. So finding your allies before the meeting to do prep work with you, I think is super helpful.

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Tyler Calder (27:57):

Can I pause on that one for a second? Yes, absolutely. I agree completely. And again, I'll draw a parallel to presenting to the board. Same idea if you can get ahead of it, if you can prep even with a board member ahead of time, have a couple one-on-ones with board members and preview what you plan on sharing all of that, I think goes so far in making sure that to your point, you're actually controlling the outcome of the meeting more so than obviously people that don't do that prep. I think a lot of people don't even think about the concept of trying to orchestrate the outcome of a meeting, but I do think it's critical and I think it's a scale worth flexing. One of the things that I've done, I don't know your thoughts on this is probably going to sound goofy as I say it out loud.

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(28:43):

I still do exactly what we're talking about, but the other thing I've done is I've kind of built almost like persona-based prompts for ChatGPT, Gemini clock, whatever your tool of choices and I'll share, here's what I'm planning to present, act as this person, here's the populated prompt, hammer me as hard as you can. And I have actually found that to be very beneficial and a really good predictor of the types of questions that I'm going to get and I can prepare in advance for how I might want to answer something. So I throw that out there too, because sometimes it can be hard to get on people's calendars and make that thing happen. If you can do human to human, do it, but I've also seen some pretty good success leaning on our robot friends.

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Michael Shen (29:26):

Absolutely. I don't think it's goofy at all. I was going to mention that I do something similar. I think the way to think about it too is sometimes there's nervousness about having a bad conversation. I think even if you have a clinical bad conversation, it's all just data. I think what you need at Zapier world is great is we had broad visibility across lots of the big decisions and docs that were being mentioned. So you can actually see the comments from folks from execs or the people that you're talking about across lots of other decisions and use that to feed the model or the chatbot or whatever you have built. A lot of organizations Patients use meeting recordings and transcripts these days, which could also be fed in. And so the more data that you can collect, you can't get down to, "Hey, what does this person get triggered by?

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(30:10):

What do they get excited by?" And really knowing that going into the conversation and having a couple cracks at it, I think it's an absolutely fantastic idea to make sure you're not guessing at the types of conversations you have. I will go back and clarify that. I think orchestrating the outcome of a meeting must have mental and psychological manipulation because I feel like it can be construed that way. In case I'm really good at manipulation. I think it comes down to how do you understand the people? And presumably you don't need to have a meeting. Everybody talks about this meeting could be an email and maybe there's a future where it's like, "Hey, if I understand how this person is going to respond and what they care about deeply," and I can actually do that mental work beforehand. I've had meetings where it's like, "Okay, you address all my concerns.

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(31:01):

I think we're done here after 10 minutes." That is actually the outcome of the meeting that you want where it's like, "Hey, some part of this is a negotiation, some part of it is your strong point of view while letting people know here are the boundaries and here's what we can do to keep moving forward." And ultimately you're trying to drive to a recommendation of what's best for the business. And so clearing those hurdles and making progress, that's ultimately what matters to your partners and your customers. The meeting itself, it's kind of a ritual to get you to that point. But yeah, the more prep work that you can do beforehand, it's all in service of how do we do better for our customers and partners.

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Tyler Calder (31:40):

I completely agree. Much better said than let's try to manipulate our way to success.

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Michael Shen (31:46):

Strings. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (31:47):

Yeah. But no, you're right. I think it's not about trickery and trying to get an undeserved outcome from a meeting. It is in service of the business and making that meeting as efficient as possible by making sure that you're properly prepared. I don't think you're trying to artificially work your way towards an outcome that isn't the ideal outcome for the business. I think it is making sure that you have a good conversation in that meeting. And where I'm going with that is I've been in meetings, board level meetings, executive meetings where that prep doesn't happen and now all of a sudden what should be a 15-minute conversation is a 90-minute conversation that is tension filled. It can get unnecessarily heated. Sometimes- Yeah, meandering. All of these things can be avoided if there's a little bit more prep ahead of time. And I think that is the best outcome for the business if you're trying to operate that way.

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(32:49):

So we were talking about basically what metrics or data points are you bringing to the table when you're having meetings with senior stakeholders? We talked about the importance of maybe previewing some of what you plan to present. Once you've done that, consistently, what are the things that you're sharing that you're bringing to the table that you have found to resonate with that senior leadership?

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Michael Shen (33:11):

Yeah, I think it goes back to what are the metrics that the company cares about. So if the company cares about revenue in a specific segment, what do you better make sure that you are measuring your impact on revenue to that specific segment or geo or part of the market as opposed to something else? In that context, activity on Reddit or in our community is a secondary or tertiary metric and making sure that we highlight what's most important to the company. I think it's the fast and simple rule. In addition to that, it's not only what is the contribution, but how are you changing the inflection of the growth curve? So what are the two or three big things that you are doing specifically to move that metric? I think we can oftentimes, myself included, conflate activity with impact. And so what you want to make sure there's a clear tie to is how are you spending your time as an investment on behalf of the business to drive the metrics that matter?

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(34:16):

That's ultimately all that matters. You want to make sure that that narrative and that effort is super closely tied. Everything else is a nice to have.

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Tyler Calder (34:25):

Completely, completely agreed. Yeah. I've talked to other partner leaders that have been quite successful and they all share the same sentiment, which is what is the language of the business and how do you align to that language?

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Michael Shen (34:37):

Yes.

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Tyler Calder (34:38):

Typically, it's a financial language,

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(34:41):

But the critical part is figure out how the business speaks, what's important to them, align to that. No surprise. The partner leaders that I speak with that haven't necessarily seen the career success of those folks, they tend to do the opposite. They tend to think, well, why should I meet the business where they're at? Why can't the business speak my language? They don't understand partnerships. Why don't they understand how this is so important? It's like, well, let's chill out for a second. I think it's pretty critical that you meet the business where the business is at, not the other way around. So I would certainly see that I see that as a trend across our customer base.

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Michael Shen (35:20):

I would say it's also like it's a function of how large and important partnerships as a part of the business. There's a harsh reality of partnerships is not a huge part of the business that you don't have a lot of leverage to say, "Hey, let me dictate what's the cadence of the business and what the language is in terms of how we operate." And there are orgs in which that may be the case. And so it's about, I think also aligning what your personal interest is. If you're interested in building something from a small component to a large component, part of that process is learning the business and then molding things in that vision. And then once you get to a certain size of operation, then I think things will be a little bit more two-sided, but that initial process may be one-sided. And if that's something you're not interested in doing, I think maybe you might want to join a very established partnership, Steve, then, where actually their org's work partnerships drives 90% of the revenue.

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(36:18):

And I'm pretty sure I haven't been part of one of those teams, but I'm pretty sure they also drive the language of the business and their investments are the company's investments by default. I think sometimes it's in alignment of what you're really looking for when you talk about what types of skills you want to build and what kind of experiences you want.

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Tyler Calder (36:36):

And I think we may have already answered this, but I want to ask it directly. Coming up through a non-traditional path into partnerships, based on everything you've learned but all the things that you've also observed, what would you recommend somebody that has come up through partnerships? What are the things that they need to unlearn to really be successful?

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Michael Shen (36:58):

What are the things that they have to unlearn?

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Tyler Calder (37:00):

Have you ever observed bad habits? I mean, one of the things that we've just talked about as an example would be you're not speaking the language of the business, you're speaking the language of partnerships, there's a disconnect there. You got to meet the business where they're at. Are there any other examples of things like that where you almost need to unlearn what you've been taught in partnerships and rebuild back up?

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Michael Shen (37:22):

I would say maybe one thing that I would recommend is to talk to more skeptics because if you are surrounded by folks who are passionate about partnerships day in and day out, I don't think they will challenge your assumptions as much as people who don't understand as much and maybe have fundamentally different questions about how things operates people like me basically. But I think really understanding the first principles for why things should be allows you to continue to operate in the same way, but have much more of a rigorous way and a way to translate your belief systems to everybody else who isn't in partnerships. What I mean by that is going back to some of my conversations, understanding whether it's building a financial model or attribution or some of these things, they aren't so much as prescriptive things that you must do and they're more so ways for you to understand partnerships even better from a different lens.

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(38:23):

And so this is a recommendation that it extends to partnership managers or leaders. Oftentimes if you go to an industry event, you're talking to people in the same space who understand the same context, maybe looking at things the same way and for you to really develop your own point of view and to be able to be successful, I think you need to talk to people who are outside of partnerships and especially folks who may be skeptical so that you can pardon your own thinking.

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Tyler Calder (38:49):

A bit of an abrupt shift in my questions. The role of experimentation, I want to get into this a litle bit because as somebody myself, I grew up through paid media. I think experimentation is just core to what you do in paid media. I often find times within partnerships there's a lack of experimentation. How did you think about bringing experimentation into the partner or when you started to lead it?

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Michael Shen (39:19):

It's a great question. I think experimentation needs to be an aspect of every function, not just partnerships. So I think it's more about the culture and maybe the process to make it easier for everybody to do things rather than something that's like in some cases, maybe in accounting, you don't want too much experimentation. But in partnership, I'm lucky to have had a team and a culture that was already pretty well-suited for experimentation. I think the main challenge that we needed to figure out is what is a lightweight way to track all this experimentation across teams and identify the key hypotheses we were having. So I actually think the problem that we needed to solve, or maybe the thing that we needed to optimize is, okay, how do we make sure we're experimenting on the right things as opposed to just whipping a bunch of different tests up?

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(40:10):

Because I think that I actually experienced maybe the opposite extreme, which is not a lack of experimentation, but experimentation that wasn't focused. So I do think the thoughts I have here is really aligning on what do we want to learn? What is our learning objective before we start to plot out, I will do this and I will do that. And tying it back again to, we are learning this because we want to drive these aspects of company goals upward, that is very important. For example, we need to drive upmarket revenue. So specifically with upmarket partners, we have three different levers. Do want to test A is a financial incentive, B is more attention for high growth partners, et cetera. There needs to be a through line between your experimentation and the ultimate business metric that you need to drive as opposed to something that lives in isolation because otherwise I could see teams spinning up 10, 15 experiments a month, they all conclude and then we all do retrospective and everything's well documented, but it's unclear, okay, how does this actually map to the business metrics we're trying to drive?

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(41:21):

And I think it's by no fault of anybody in particular. It's just there is a rigor around making sure what you're doing actually affects the business rather than just activity for activity's sake.

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Tyler Calder (41:33):

I love the examples that you shared as well. Those are certainly meaningful potential experiments that a lot of people could think about, so I think that's great. We're going to wrap up here. We can't leave without talking about AI.

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Michael Shen (41:46):

Yes.

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Tyler Calder (41:49):

What is your perspective on the role of AI within partnerships, within growth? There's so much commentary obviously on LinkedIn, some more sound than others. Do you have a perspective on where all things growth is going with the advent of AI?

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Michael Shen (42:08):

I'm very wary of throwing another opinion into the mix, but maybe talk about it from a standpoint of somebody who at one point was consuming a lot of these opinions and finding it quite overwhelming. I think that's an opinion that's resonate with a lot of the silent majority that's out there, the people who aren't hawking their AI good AI solution or introducing some hot take about how some existential crisis is going to take over. Also, I will say about a year and a half ago, maybe I was quite skeptical about the role and I think I've converted, especially over the course of the last six months between my experience at Zapier and also at OuterSignal as well. As both somebody who has managed teams and been an IC, I will say the best way to develop your own point of view is actually to get your hands dirty.

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(42:59):

There have been many times where I've looked at a post with some degree of skepticism and then either my doubts were confirmed or actually rejected by actually testing things in person and especially with how rapidly things are moving. I think finding something to do, something to practice every single day will help refine your skills and help you not only be able to handle the volume of hot takes that are coming, which I don't recommend you read a ton of that, but also develop your own skillset, which is the most important thing to do in this timeframe. Some of the exciting things I've had to do at OuterSignal that have made me more AI pilled, so to speak, is I think there, especially at smaller companies, there's less of a translation exercise between your thought and actually implementing it. And so I've been making changes to the website, to specific programs, to specific site experiences purely through iterating and creating a first draft with AI and then working with one of the engineers on the team to get it live within days.

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(44:09):

And that kind of power has never been at my fingertips as somebody who has not, granted, not done a lot of graphic design or copywriting, et cetera, but being able to be in conversation for most of the day and to be able to ship these things within days has been very empowering as somebody who often thought, "Hey, these are tasks that are delegated to a very specialized team that need to go through a certain level of approvals." And although we are a company that's 15, I do think this is definitely starting to be translated in works that are much larger than ours where there's empowerment of people and adoption of the tools and the space at which things are moving means that you can go build by yourself and get things shipped by yourself. That's my number one recommendation both for ICs and more, especially managers, I think it's very easy for somebody who manages especially large teams to be like, "I read this take, go investigate it.

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(45:05):

" And being on the receiving end of that is terrible. I think in some cases you need to develop your own. You'll be a much more effective leader if you are also able to build by yourself and then be able to sort through and say, okay, which of these technologies are bunk and which of these are going to be empowering for me? So yeah, in short, go forth and build, I think is the number one thing that I've learned and I think it has made it really empowering and easier to take all of this information in and develop my own point of view on what works.

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Tyler Calder (45:38):

I love it. Could not agree more. I think you just got to get your hands on it to your point.

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Michael Shen (45:42):

Yes. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (45:43):

This was awesome. Michael, thank you so much for the time. I think there's a lot of value in here that people are going to take away. If people wanted to get in touch, learn more about OuterSignal, just follow up with questions, how might they do that?

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Michael Shen (45:57):

Yeah, you can feel free to link with me on LinkedIn. I'm Michael-Shen on LinkedIn. If you want to learn more about OuterSignal, we're a customer intelligence platform that helps people really understand who's buying super interesting product, come check us out at outersignal.com.

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Tyler Calder (46:14):

Awesome. I love it. Michael, thank you so much. Appreciate the time.

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Michael Shen (46:17):

Okay. Thank you, Tyler.

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Tyler Calder (46:19):

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.