Why the Biggest Partner Is Not Always the Best Partner

Andrew Massad (00:00):

Anytime someone winds up in a sales cycle and someone has to ask for something like, "Hey, do you have this integration? Hey, do you have this capability?" Whatever it might be, if someone's got to ask, it's probably too late because they haven't had to ask somebody else or they know the answer somewhere else is yes. So we knew what we needed to hack in terms of interoperability and that in itself was its own list.

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Tyler Calder  (00:20):

This is Get It, Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. Welcome everybody to another episode of Get It, Together. Today I am chatting with Andrew Massad, who leads strategic partnerships and alliances at Mixpanel. And today I'm really looking forward to this conversation. We had a couple prep calls and we're going to really dive into what it means to be a data-driven partner leader, which I think is a critical conversation to always be having. And I think the interesting spin we're going to take is yes, you want to be data-driven, but you also don't want to be falling into the trap of being overly data obedient. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and what that means. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

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Andrew Massad (01:07):

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. But I think you got me. I though this was another prep call and I just was ready to ping it, but I guess we're doing it. Red lights on and everything. We're doing it.

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Tyler Calder  (01:18):

Happy Friday. The surprise record, that's when you get the real transparent answers, right?

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Andrew Massad (01:24):

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

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Tyler Calder  (01:26):

I always like to start just hearing about people's journeys, especially with partner leaders. I always find there's so many interesting kind of twists and turns that got people to where they're at. What brought you to where you are today, which is leading all the fun stuff at Mixpanel.

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Andrew Massad (01:43):

I have a windy path. I actually wound up in tech by accident. I was in business school doing finance and economics, wanted to go right into banking. I actually had an internship lined up with a small VC fund that one of my professors was running out of Brandeis University. And a career counselor of mine actually kind of ran into me in the hall and she's like, "Hey Andrew, do you have any internships lined up for this summer?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm doing this VC internship with professor such and such." She said, "Okay, great. Well, you've got an interview with IBM lined up next week. Don't mess up."

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Tyler Calder  (02:16):

I was

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Andrew Massad (02:16):

Like, "Okay." I had actually never thought about tech ever. My dad was in tech and did partnerships, and I just happened to fall into something at the product marketing world in IBM. I did a quick five-year tour of duty across areas of product marketing, a little bit of international ecosystem development, and ultimately sales. It was in my time in sales when things were. We were structuring OEM agreements with Serpent customers that the idea of trying to think creatively about the ecosystem and how people could adopt our solutions is what opened me up more to partnerships. And I thought it was a unique opportunity to marry that sales skillset I had nurtured at IBM through some great mentorship and programs there, but also with that highly quantitative background that I had built in business. It's now been about 15 years of it. So I'm loving every minute and I still learn every day.

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Tyler Calder  (03:13):

That's cool. I didn't realize the journey started at IBM and he had some stints in product marketing. That's cool. I like to

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Andrew Massad (03:19):

Consider myself well-rounded. Jack of all trades, master of none. Just enough to be dangerous.

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Tyler Calder  (03:24):

Yeah, I think that's where you want to be. That does lead to one of the things that I noticed, which I'd love to ask you about, which is through our conversations, through watching you operate even as a customer, from what I can see, and I'm going to put an image of yourself forward to you. You tell me if it's accurate. Yes, you're leading partnerships, specifically strategic tech alliances, but you really do seem to bring almost like a general manager operator approach to a lot of what you do. And what I mean by that is, from what I can tell, you're thinking about the entire business, you're thinking about things holistically, you're taking financial literacy to everything that you do. Is that part of your journey? Is that part of being well-rounded? You pick those things up along the way? Is that you went to school for economics?

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(04:22):

Was it just kind of ingrained in you? What does that look like? And is that a conscious thing or am I presenting something to you that feels new?

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Andrew Massad (04:33):

I think the quantitative background has helped, but that was not something I brought in as a part of my toolkit and made it front and center from day one. I think over the past 15 years of doing partnerships, I've recognized the need to be a little bit more, I wouldn't even call it general, I appreciate you calling it the general manager investor, but just understanding a lot more about my stakeholders across the business, understanding what's important for them and how to operate my business in that way. Because before I was used to being a partnerships person, going into my little area of the world, just churning out results or churning out value that may or may not reflect or be recognized by other organizations, but it was my world and I knew it. So I think it was really important for me to step back and understand how the other areas of the business look to partnerships, how they could look at partnerships, how they should look at partnerships.

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(05:25):

And I think that part was intentional. Sometimes my cross-functional stakeholders don't really know me or my business or what we do. And I would always think, well, why don't they care about partnerships? They don't acknowledge us. Well, equally, I need to put myself in their shoes and act like one of them. So I think it's kind of been parting of walking the walk. And as I've gotten more and more fortunate in my career to go to leadership positions, it's very important to have that cross-functional understanding and frankly, way of operating your business. That part was intentional. And then I think the financial skillset really comes from the great leadership that I'm working with here at Mixpanel, which is a proponent of me doing the real strategic work and thinking outside the box and not solely focused on just driving a net new integration or doing account mapping exercise, but how do we think about really using partnerships as a strategic lever for the business?

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(06:20):

And that requires that skillset. So that's a long way of me saying, I think the cross-functional lens and general manager approach has been something that has grown and become intentional. I think then the true quantitative financial background is something that was there, wasn't really utilized all that often unless I needed to make a business case for more headcount because then I can whip out a financial model real quick. But it's really something that my leadership team has enabled me to flex.

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Tyler Calder  (06:50):

I want to stay on this for a second because I find in a lot of conversations that I'm having with partnership leaders, and this isn't just unique to partnership leaders. I have these conversations with marketing leaders, sales leaders, but it definitely does seem to be amplified with partnership leaders. And that conversation is something that you alluded to, which is, oh, this feeling, they just don't get it. They don't get partnerships, they don't get my world. And that to me becomes a blocker to a lot of things, a blocker to career progress, a blocker to building an appropriate case for the resources that you need. The most successful partner leaders that I've spoken to, you being one of them, they have seemingly realized I need to stop expecting other functional leaders to meet me where I'm at, and I got to start meeting them where they're at a little bit more.

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(07:47):

Was there a moment in your career where that realization was sort of crystallized and you said, oh shit, I might be in trouble here if I don't start to think about my internal collaboration a little bit differently? Or did it just kind of organically evolve? I'm always curious about that. Was it a moment or was it just an evolution over time?

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Andrew Massad (08:12):

I think that's a great question. And I really appreciate you bringing these introspective questions. I though this was a prep call. I think again, it's been one of those things where I get my cross-functional experience was something that was helpful because when I was in product marketing, I recognized whether it was I needed something from design or I needed something from the copywriting team or I needed sales feedback. These people don't get me or what I do, or I get requests thrown over the fence at me to hand something. Or when I was in sales, product isn't responsive enough to me. Marketing's not getting me the assets I need. The BDRs aren't getting me leads. So I found myself early on in my partner career where I was saying, if people don't get it, that happens with everybody. Sales is saying the other areas the business might not get me or what I need or aren't delivering on what I might need or hearing what I'm asking for for help.

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(09:02):

So I think I recognized that as a pretty consistent thing. And then I had realized in my career that especially with partnerships, because it can be a very nebulous type of group where traditionally the focuses are things like source revenue is very, very difficult not only to generate, but to cleanly track on a clean source of truth. And they have things like partner influence revenue or partner influence pipeline that depending upon who your cross-functional stakeholders are, their leadership team is, they might view that as that's flux. I think it's really important in partnerships because you don't have the clear black and white success metrics of a marketing generating leads or churning up a product. You really need to make sure that people understand it because if they don't understand it, they're going to assume that there's nothing there because the name partnerships inherently doesn't carry a, for lack of a better term, an inherent goal.

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(10:01):

Sales is supposed to be closing business. Engineering is supposed to be building product. I know why you're here. I know what your role is. Partnerships, I'm not really sure because at three other companies, we did it differently, never really bought into it. So you really got to recognize that. And the last thing I will say about it, because this was something that was ingrained in me. We were making the joke about my mom in the background at the start of the call. She taught me growing up, you're not a victim. No woe is me. Go out and make the difference that's unique. And I think recognizing that you're not in your own little pocket of the world, once you open up your aperture, it enables you to be a lot more successful.

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Tyler Calder  (10:38):

I couldn't agree more. And again, I know we're talking partnerships, but it's so true that you see this in all functions. And I think the folks that end up being most successful in their careers certainly agree with what you just said. There's such a strong sense of agency and ownership that that idea of corporate victimhood never becomes a thing and they're bringing everybody along for the ride. And again, I try to stress that as much as possible when I talk to folks across go-to-market, just how critical that skill is. And to me, it's one of the most important factors in career progression is exactly that. So I love that. Thanks for sharing it. I want to dive right into the core of what we came here to talk about, which was this idea of being data-driven, bringing that into all of your decisions and actions within partnerships.

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(11:35):

And I wanted to start with what we see a lot of people struggle with, which is partner recruitment and how to do that in a data-driven way, in a sophisticated way. And I'll use PartnerStack as an example. When we started our own partner program many years ago, we fell under the trap a lot of our customers do, and we fell into the trap that we advised even then our customers not to do, which is you should be focused on recruiting the right types of partners in your program. It's quality over quantity. We went straight to quantity. As much as we knew it's not what you should do, we did it. And we incentivized channel partner managers to go out and recruit as many partners as possible. It became a volume play. We were at a point where technically we had over 600 partners in our partner program, and we were doing at the time less than five million ARR.

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(12:38):

It didn't make any sense. And then we readjusted and got back on the right track. We talked about the approach that you've taken and what data-driven and recruitment means to you. I'd love to explore that a little bit. How have you approached that in the past? That next panel. Let's go there.

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Andrew Massad (12:55):

Yeah, I do have to say first that I've been there. So it's not like I knew, oh, you're doing it the wrong way. Oh, been there. Because the math works out, right? Five leads a partner, one deal closing. So you got to get 600 partners, this 600 deals. Of course. Simple math. I was fortunate early on in my partnership career to have a great leader of mine. Actually, name is Ed Sullivan. I'll give Ed a real shout here. Who taught us to be really data-driven? And at the time I thought it was overkill. Man, can't we just go sign partners or just build integrations? It doesn't work that way. So we did a lot of really, really deep exercises of understanding, and it was a cross-functional exercise too, by the way, but understand what is our company ICP? And we did a really deep dive with our product marketing folks, with our RevOps folks, and with our product folks, and with sales folks, just to understand all the characteristics of what a good, I'll leave the company name out, but what about a good customer looks like.

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(13:59):

And it was probably 25 different parameters, things from year of incorporation, which was an indicator for how digitally native or digital forward this company would be. What vertical, what did they play in? Or because we were an app-based company, what was their proportion of app MAU to web MAU? A whole bunch of different things. And we started to look across our customer base. And again, not just looking at who our biggest customers were or who our longest tenured customers were, or even highest margin, looking at the combination of the product that we were building, the ICP we wanted to have and say, "What does this profile look like?" And so when we started to look at this very, very detailed profile with the sorts of customers we wanted, then we could dig deep into the partners that were going to help us do that. And this is when I started to get a lot deeper into the technology alliance part, so I'll touch upon that.

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(14:57):

But in terms of even solution partners, we did a lot of web scraping, a lot, a lot of research cataloging, whether it was from competitors of ours or companies that we aspired to be, whatever it was. We started to look at who were the partners that they're working with? Who are the other people in their space? And then start to look at what were the types of capabilities that were provided by those agencies? Were they an app growth shop? Did they also do web optimization? Did they do things like content creation or managed services? So we started to really diagram all the different services that were made available and the customers that they touched. So we should start to look on the solution partner side. I wasn't quite as close to, but one of my colleagues did an incredible database that he built on his own so we could have the partner selection and not be hunting with their eyes closed or just taking what's inbound.

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(15:53):

I always get the best inbound. And on the technology partner side, I had it a little bit easier. So across all those different dimensions of what made a good customer for our company, we then created a scoring mechanism. So then we were able to look at, okay, based on these 25 things, here are top 500 accounts. It could be customers, could be prospects, but here's what great looks like. Here are the top 500 people we want to go sell to. And we had that clear list and we actually had it in Salesforce numbered, numbered. It was our hit list of this is number one, this is number 589, whatever it was. We knew exactly how attractive in theory that customer would be. And then we were able to use third parties to enrich our Salesforce dataset. So think of there's a million data vendors out there, Apptopia built with, you can find them anywhere.

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(16:44):

And what we did was push that technographic data into our Salesforce. So then we were able to look at and say, all right, across these top 500 or 1,000 customers, here's exactly what their tech stack looks like. Obviously there's a lot of noise and stuff that wasn't necessarily relevant to us, but we were able to look at, we have to weed it out and say, okay, well, so for the piece of software we care about, 70% of our top thousand aspiring customers are using, I'll just use Salesforce, HubSpot for, just keep it simple. 75% of them are using HubSpot, 25% of them are using HubSpot. So this is a deeper conversation we had there. We just had Intel as to which of our customers is using which platforms. So it would help us A, identify which of the integrations of the partners we wanted to go after, depending upon what partner or what the goal of that partner motion was.

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(17:34):

So it was a very, very data-driven exercise, which gave us more questions to answer, but essentially gave us a roadmap to go tell.

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Tyler Calder  (17:41):

And I think this is important because when I oftentimes talk about partner recruitment, you are the first person I've heard start with ICP. And again, it sounds obvious, it sounds simple. Where I find most people start is they immediately start talking about their IPP, their ideal partner profile. And candidly, that always confused me a little bit. I'm like, "How do you know that this is your ideal partner profile if your starting point isn't your ideal customer profile? Is there an actual appropriate overlap?" And maybe some of it is I'm naive and obviously it was part of their IPP, but I've never heard somebody dig in the way that you just did. So you started with ICP and ICP was very data-driven. You had 25-ish signals to identify who would be potentially a great fit, who you could provide a ton of value to. That helped you create your target account list, call it, you said 500 of your top accounts.

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(18:47):

Based on that list, that's when you then started to enrich using tools like Builtwith, Apptopia to understand what their tech stack looked like. You then looked at where was their high concentration around tech that those accounts were looking at. How did you then prioritize who you should think about recruiting as a tech partner?

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Andrew Massad (19:13):

Yeah, you can see me smirking a little bit. I remember the smart prep call. No, that's where we really had to, I know we'll talk a little bit more about this, is not be so. This is where we needed to have some tough conversations and look at ourselves like, one, what do we want to be as a platform and what do we want from our partner team? Because there were two lanes that we could take there. And again, I use the HubSpot Salesforce example. This wasn't necessarily our example, but it's an understandable one in Grasper wants for anyone out there. We had two avenues. I think when we were trying to support open ecosystem, we wanted to make sure we had interoperability and integrations with both Salesforce and with a HubSpot, whoever those entities might be, because you want to make sure whether you have existing customers or you're going into net new sales cycles, you reduce the barriers to entry.

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(20:05):

That's almost the cost of admission. And usually because if you wind up in a sales cycle and any seller will tell you this, anytime someone winds up in a sales cycle and someone has to ask for something like, "Hey, do you have this integration? Hey, do you have this capability?" Whatever it might be. If someone's got to ask, it's probably too late because they haven't had to ask somebody else or they know the answer somewhere else is yes.

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(20:27):

So we knew what we needed to have in terms of interoperability, and that in itself was its own list. But then when we started focusing on our go-to-market investment, and this was not even strategic bet, it was an aligned bet that we had to say, okay, do we want to put all of our eggs in, again, the Salesforce type of basket where it's an established entity that's in 80% of our aspiring accounts? So we're going to be knocking on their door, say, "Hey, bring us into your customers." Normally, it's probably already a competitive situation. Some of our competitors might already be in there. So you're banking on someone who's already established, introducing you or helping you get into where they are. When sometimes when you're the smaller player, you don't really have much to offer them in exchange. There's not many deals. And again, I keep using that example.

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(21:16):

You can't really help Salesforce all that much getting net new logos. And we had to acknowledge that and say, because there are plenty of companies out there say, "Oh, we want to invest everything and be a part of Salesforce App Exchange. We want to go all in with them and put all of this product marketing and hire a dedicated partner person. Who doesn't want to do that?" But that can be a very, very hard road to plow because it's competitive the whole way. Versus you can look at the counter argument. Let's put more of the go-to-market motion with the entity that's trying to disrupt or isn't as present there. Again, assuming that they're still targeting that same market. Why? Because there might be a little bit more on aligned incentives. They've got some low-hanging fruit that they could probably introduce you to of that 500 that they're already in and vice versa.

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(22:04):

Maybe there's some accounts that you're already in with say a Salesforce or whoever that bigger entity was where you might be able to help them create a competitive wedge. And most opportunistically, there's a wedge that can be created there. And I think that's something a lot of people overlook is sometimes massive customer overlap isn't necessarily. It can be a good thing for win stories or marketing opportunities, but it doesn't do all that much for net new. You and I were talking about TAM, but call it RAM, realize is restable market. You want to make sure someone has aligned incentives to be hungry and go out there to try to win the market together. And it's not just trading intros here and there from not trying to upset too many accounts. Where is there someone who likes the same things I like and has that same incentive I do?

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(22:50):

And it usually is a little bit of a harder road. You deal with a lot of FUD, both of you from what's going on out in the market. So it was a whole company throw your weight behind it and say, "This is the way."

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Tyler Calder  (23:03):

Can you differentiate a little bit more between TAM and RAM? Because I also think that was a fun conversation we had just around, we all do it. Specific in partnerships as an example, we certainly did it at PartnerStack. There's a ton of great tools out there to help with account mapping. There's a ton of different data tools out there to help build out what a market looks like. And I remember the first time we did some account mapping exercises with our top technology partners and it's like, oh wow, there's $700 million of opportunity between us. Let's just go get that. And it sounds so simple. It's not necessarily real. It's almost like an investor pitch type of TAM. You want to share the highest possible number, show what the upside opportunity looks like. But the reality is today it's not all there. That's what RAM is to you?

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Andrew Massad (24:02):

Yeah. Let's not get distracted by the, forget even the shared customers. Okay, well then let's look at that customer to prospect or mutual prospect overlap. There's 4,000 accounts. Awesome. Almost like the example you gave of going and signing up 600 solution partners. Awesome. We've got it all there. And I wouldn't even use the word, maybe you could call it RAM, but it's having a clear and committed execution plan. And that would be what I would consider the RAM to say, okay, so great, there's 4,000. Pick out that little niche you're going to start with, whether it's a specific segment, region, and a couple sales, whatever it is. Get a small, very precise slice that you're going after and focus on that. Whether it's an industry you guys are both really strong in, or maybe it's a sales leader patch with people who you know how to partner because that can be sometimes friction too where certain organizations aren't as partner-friendly or certain sales folks might not have as much experience partnerships.

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(25:03):

So find out what is really addressable, and I call it ram for realizable. What do we actually want to go do today? And so within this small section of within the US financial accounts based in New York that are in the mid-market segment, maybe from those 2000 accounts, maybe it's only 50. Say, okay, well, what can we do this quarter? Let's try to get 10 this next six months. Maybe not even so much the realizable address of market, but what is our clear and what is a much more digestible path forward that we want to see if this is going to be successful? Because you can't boil the ocean and there's nothing worse than having spreadsheets on spreadsheets on thousands of accounts and next steps and balls being dropped, and that's not going to work. You just got to make sure you got a clear set that you're going after and you go from there.

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Tyler Calder  (25:57):

I think what you just said is critical and is oftentimes, more than often, not how people approach things. What I heard you say was forget the complexity. Show me what the believable plan is. I don't believe that you're going to go knock down 4,000 accounts in the next quarter. That is not a believable plan. If you try to build the plan, there's going to be too many moving parts. It's going to be complex. You're going to drop balls. There's just not a level of believability to it no matter how much rigor you put behind the plan. When somebody comes to you with, here's where I'd like to start. Here are the 50 accounts. And this is leading to a certain degree because I have a very clear answer. I'm curious on your answer. How much do you care about the business plan behind those initial 50 accounts?

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(26:57):

Somebody says, "I want to go after this geo and this segment within the geo. That equals 50 accounts. I'm going to go after them." How much do you care about the data behind that? I'll share my response because I have a board level experience with this.

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Andrew Massad (27:13):

If you want Zoe, so you don't feel you're giving me the answer, I'm happy to take I'll

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Tyler Calder  (27:16):

Tell you. Yeah, I want to hear what you say. Yeah.

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Andrew Massad (27:17):

I think you're leading me to say, "Well, it's important. I'd love to see how I care a lot." The short answer is I really don't. I care a lot about the TAM because that's the product business case of why we invest in the integration. What does this do for our customers or what doors does this open up? TAM, super important. For those you're going to go after, I don't care. I don't care what the business plan is. Go get those couple wins. What I care more about is that you have a, not so much, but you have a rationale. Why are you going after these accounts? Why now? Why these accounts? And then if you win, why'd you win? If you lose, why'd you lose? And you got to move quick. I care much more about the speed and the two-minute conversation we can have as to why you're doing that than a whole presentation behind what you're doing and why.

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(28:09):

Because to me, you're wasting cycles. Let's figure out what works. And if it doesn't, let's pivot from there. So the succinct answer to your question is, I don't care all that much about it as long as you have a why behind it. As long as you're finger to the wind.

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Tyler Calder  (28:21):

No, that's exactly where I'm at 100%. And it does come from two experiences at the board level. I would go back maybe, call it 10 years. And I remember we're going through with the board presenting this market landscape review. Here's what we think our TAM looks like. Here's the plan to go after our top 500 accounts. I spent a month pulling together data that could answer every perceivable question I was expecting to throw my way. And it was a disaster of a meeting because the more that I shared around the plan, the more they poked holes at it, the more I go back to believability, they just didn't believe we could actually execute on it. They're like, "This is just a bunch of nonsense on paper. There's nothing that's actually believable about this." Fast-forward seven years, I'm presenting the exact same thing. The difference this time is here are the 50 accounts we're going after.

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(29:23):

They're in this vertical. We're targeting that vertical within this geo, and here are the couple plays that we're going to try right out of the gate. And their question was, "Well, why are you starting there?" I was like, "Honestly, it's the most interesting to the reps that we have on it, and they're going to be the most dedicated because it's the most interesting to them." That was our logic. We could start anywhere. The reality is all of the opportunity looks good. Making a very simple bet that they're interested in this vertical. Let's unleash them. Let's learn as quickly as possible. Let's get a repeatable motion. Then we'll hit the next one. Zero All slides to back that up, zero data to back it up. And the board was like, "Sounds great. Let's talk next quarter how it went." And that was the end of it.

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(30:08):

And so I think to me, that's again, something that I see with a lot of leaders is yeah, you need to have some data behind it. You need to be data driven. To your point, you need to understand the team, you need to understand the upside opportunity, you need to understand your starting point. You need to have good signals in terms of understanding what a good account looks like. But then you just got to execute. Just pick your spot, build a believable plan, start to get some wins, learn, fail as quickly as possible, keep going. And I think you see so many people just spinning their cycles in the spreadsheet that they're never actually out there executing properly. Or they're executing a plan that's so complex that candidly, they're not going to be in the job to see it through, which is probably the bluntest way to say that.

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Andrew Massad (30:57):

Yeah. And I think we all still fall victim to it. It's that it was the Amazon thing would be comfortable making decisions off 80% of the data that you'd like to ask. I still fall into it myself. You still try to strive for something. You got to remember this is the best guess and it's okay to be wrong. If you have a plan, and I don't mean a big robust built out thing like you said, if you have a reason behind what you're doing, you have conviction about it, you go on market tests and it doesn't work and you pivot correctly, that's okay. That's okay. I never get on people about that. It's more like, can you have the awareness to pull yourself out and go try down another path? And whether that's a different partner or trying a different segment with a different partner, that rationale can apply to pretty much anything and everything you did.

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Tyler Calder  (31:42):

Yeah. I go back to board experience or just reporting up into leadership. The best leaders I've ever worked with, I have never, I was going to say, been yelled at. I've never worked with anybody that's much of a yeller, but I've never gotten in trouble. I've never been yelled at for something not working out as long as we learned from it and kept moving. Where I've been totally reamed out earlier in my career is basically you are moving way too slow. Get some more bets on the table. We're not happy because, oh, cool, you got one thing right in the quarter. I'd much rather see five things right and 15 things wrong. And to me, that's the just speed to execute and learn and build your motion that way. I think that's sort of what we're talking about. It's that balance of yes, you need data, but you're not overly obedient and sometimes even paralyzed by

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Andrew Massad (32:38):

It. And that's exactly where we wound up was not allowing it to be the paralyzer for you. And I think the other thing we talked about too is what is the data not telling you? And this is really important in the partner world, especially in TechAlliance when you're looking to open up net new avenues. And there was a specific capability. It wasn't whatever, it was SMS. The capability was SMS. And our number one competitor was out there doing it, having significant growth, doing well. And we didn't want to roll out SMS. And when we continued to look at it, it wasn't part of the product roadmap for whatever reason, and it really wasn't showing up all that much in customer loss stories. So it couldn't be that important, right? Well, because it was so important to people that they knew not to talk to us if it was that important to them.

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(33:24):

It was one of those basic things. If you're looking for signals in all your data, sometimes you have to look for what the data is not telling you and think outside the box. So if something is really important to somebody, you might not ever hear from your customer base because your customer base inherently wouldn't be your customer base if that thing was important to them. So you can't let too much of that data-driven philosophy by what's in front of you and what we have today monopolize your roadmap and your focus. You still got to make sure you're trust, not gut, but conviction onto your vision and who it is that you want to be. And we do the same thing in the partner world. We might see strategic partnerships that we think will open up entirely new avenues to us today that might not necessarily help us with the existing accounts that we're going after today or have no presence within our ICP today, but it's in an emerging segment that I think we need to be tapping, and it's literally an entire new channel of growth for us.

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(34:18):

Those are things that you can't ignore, and it might create some conflict with your ICP. I think especially in the age of AI, you got to be a little bit fluid. And I know it's a little contradictory, but it's that 80 / 20 rule of leaving that little bit of fudge factor for innovation, for dynamic market shifts, and for disruption. And if you get too, too hard coded into who you are, especially in tech, that can be something that puts you in position to be disrupted yourselves. It happens within partnerships. We miss out on an entirely new growth channel because we're so focused on what we have today or maniacally chasing a competitor who had beat us to a specific area of the market and we're trying to make up that ground. And by the time you've caught up with it, they're onto something else because they're not just thinking about doing more of what we're doing.

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(35:06):

It's trying to anticipate skate to where the puck is going. And that can be really tough to extrapolate from your existing data.

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Tyler Calder  (35:12):

Where do you extrapolate it from? And again, talking about you're going to be wrong every now and then in terms of where the puck is going, but how do you pull yourself out of that almost blindly following the data and giving yourself the room to extrapolate from a bunch of different signals, quantitative, qualitative, to try to predict where the puck is going and build towards that? How do you actually operationalize that? How do you think about that?

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Andrew Massad (35:47):

It's a really good question. And I think the thing you have to go off of is intuition and intellectual curiosity. But the model that did this for, I think for everybody was Google. What 10% of their business was going after moonshots? And obviously we don't have that kind of revenue to do it, but make sure that you're calibrating yourself or giving yourself five, 10% of your bandwidth to go explore something new. Whether it's a trend you see in the market or something you heard from a salesperson come up on a call, go chase something down and put together a quick hypothesis of what you think that might look like, what it might require, and then go try and go fail. Put together a quick and dirty plan of, I'm having a hard time giving a very specific example, but I would say watch some of the stuff we're doing in Mixpanel.

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(36:33):

We're doing some really cool stuff right now because we are thinking outside the box. But it's important to do that. You've got to create space to not be so maniable on just chasing competitors. And honestly, it's enabled by your leadership team who doesn't just say, "Go chase what someone else is doing." They're giving you that trust and that leniency to go take those experiments. Jen, our CEO, says it all the time, "We got to experiment. We got to test." My manager, Damien, is incredible. Same way. Go try something and fail. Go figure it out. Doesn't work. Shift again. Because that's how you win. And that's how you win. And you go from the 1X moves. There's a 1X lever, there's a 1X growth lever. How do you find that three, four, five, 10 X lever? Because by just carving the same path, you're not just going to get there from blood, sweat, equity, and tears.

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(37:23):

You got to be doing some swings for the feds. And it's a luxury we have when you talk about complexion or makeups at different companies. We're not a publicly traded company, so we don't have the same level of investor scrutiny. We're incredibly frugal as a company, but we have that ability to go take those bets. And it's important that we do that. And so it's important for me that my team has an ear to the market, is involved with our sales team, is involved with our SE team, and they just are passionate in exploring the space. Go think creatively.

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Tyler Calder  (37:53):

Yeah, I love that. And I think your point on, it does start with leadership. They need to create a space where there's an element of safety around testing, experimentation, failure. And I think we're at a place now outside of potential token costs going crazy, where we're at a place where people can truly build and ship experimental ideas. And if it works, incredible. Let's figure out how to formalize that. Let's bring that into the product team. If it doesn't, cool, kill it. But to me, what we're seeing a little bit at a partner stack, what we're seeing with some of our customers is historically companies would build out innovation teams or skunkwork teams, and they'd sit outside of your typical process. And I thought that was great. I've done that very successfully in some other orgs. What seems to have shifted is any individual person can be their own Skunkworks team.

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(39:00):

Anybody can try to build something, ship it, see what the response is. And yeah, you need to have some governance in place and some guardrails, but the ability to innovate and test and get market feedback is easier now than it's ever been. And to me, that's the interesting sort of flywheel that I see happening at PartnerStack, at some other orgs, is look at what this person on the CS team just built to solve a problem that they face using our own product. If they're facing that problem, definitely our customers are facing that problem and they just solved it in a couple hours. Let's maybe push that to a couple customers, see how they use it. Feedback's great. Now let's fully productize it. There's some very interesting things happening there that I'm very curious to see how it plays out across the board.

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Andrew Massad (39:57):

Yeah, I think you nailed it. And we see it too. We try leadership across the company, making strategic bets, all areas of the business, go think creatively. And things like AI are helpful because you can stand up MVPs pretty quick.

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Tyler Calder  (40:09):

We're actually over time, and I don't want to keep you. So I'm going to close out with two questions. You can answer them in either order. One of them we already touched on a little bit, which was related to the AI. But the first one is you're putting on the professor hat, you're standing in the lecture hall, you got a thousand partner leaders in front of you. What is the one piece of advice or lesson that you would want to give them as they depart your last lecture? That's question one.

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Andrew Massad (40:40):

And as it pertains to AI?

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Tyler Calder  (40:41):

No. The second question is, hey, any predictions for what's up with AI in partnerships over the next five years?

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Andrew Massad (40:49):

So I'll answer the second one first, and I think we need to go back to the first one. The prediction is sometimes pendulums swing too far and they can swing back the other direction. So I think what's going to be really important, what I predict is everybody's going to make sure they have as much interoperabilities with the big LLM providers as humanly possible as they should, because that just creates optionality. It's a critical thing today. All customers, prospects, everybody, even we as a business, we're all living there. But to the point of not being a slave to the data, excuse me, not being obedient to the data, I think it's going to come back hard the other way and you want to make sure you're placing your bets in other places too, because I do still think that at the end of the day, these LLM providers and the tokens are an accelerant to whatever you are doing as a business.

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(41:32):

They can accentuate what you've got. They can speed up what you've got, but I think it's important that you maintain who you are, what you do well, and that you're positioning yourselves within other players of your ecosystem that frankly creates a level of defensibility. So I think the pendulum will, I think it'll continue to go the direction it is, but it will also swing back. And so that's one of the bets we need to make sure we're doing is we don't entirely bet our entire business on all things every day being AI-focused. And by our business, I mean my team is a partnership team. So we invest heavily with OpenAI, with Anthropic and with Gemini, but we also need to make sure we're putting our eggs in other baskets. And then the first question was what?

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Tyler Calder  (42:12):

Yeah, it's your last lecture. You're in front of a thousand of your partner leader students. What's the one piece of advice you would depart them with?

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Andrew Massad (42:21):

I'd like to say have fun because it is true. You got to have fun, but also get a win. Be focused on finding a win and not be afraid to lose. Wow. So that's three pieces of advice. Yeah, stick with have fun. Have fun with it.

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Tyler Calder  (42:37):

I think have fun is a great one. I like it. That's awesome. Really appreciate the time. I thought we dug into actually a little bit more than I had planned on. And I think there are going to be plenty of notebooks filled, so I appreciate it. If people want to get in touch, follow up with any questions, how might they do that?

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Andrew Massad (42:57):

Best way to find me is on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active.

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Tyler Calder  (43:02):

Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you, sir. I'm sure you'll get a couple people pinging you on LinkedIn. Enjoy the rest of the day, man.

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Andrew Massad (43:08):

You too. I appreciate your time. Have a great weekend.

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Tyler Calder  (43:10):

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.