Nearbound Podcast #165: From Zero to $400M in Revenue - Finding Success in a Crowded SaaS Market with Jeff Cheal
Jeff Cheal explains how Optimizely generated $400 million in revenue in a competitive and crowded SaaS market.
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For the last like 12 to 18 months, if you went on, and this is so silly, if you
just
Googled Optimizing, our ARR reported numbers were much lower, this is because
Optimizing merged with the company Epic Server back in 2020, and the problem
with brand awareness
is that when you come together to brands, you choose one of the names, people
only know you as one
thing as opposed to, "Yeah, this should be a really diversified business."
[Music]
All right, we're back at last. Welcome to the Nearbound podcast, and it's
always so much fun
to spend some time and market with folks and then get them back into the
conversation.
So today we have in Jeff Chill from Optimizely that just posted about Optimize
ly crossing 400
million in revenue. And Jeff, you and I had the chance to meet in New York at a
sales assembly
dinner and kind of geek out on all things partnerships revealed near bound. And
I was like,
"Oh my gosh, we have to have you on the pod." So it's so great to see you here,
my man.
Yeah, thanks to the invite. I appreciate it. And yeah, it's a big day for Optim
izely. It's great
to get that out there in the world. And it's exciting. Good time to be part of
the ship.
100%.
No, that's insane. When I saw that post, I told Jared, I was like, "I did not
realize
that Optimizely was that big." And in a time where there's a lot of
doom and gloom around SaaS, I think just being reminded, there's a ton of value
being created.
There's a ton of success out there as well. So I was excited to see that. And
especially
because I was like, "Oh, you're coming on the podcast today. I got to learn
what are the secrets
from an organization that's crushing it at that level."
Well, we got to share a big reason for the announcement, right? It's a little
bit of just PR
about Optimizely because for the last 12 to 18 months, if you went on, and this
is so silly,
if you just Google Optimizely, our ARR reported numbers were that slower. This
is because Optimizely
merged with the company Epic Server back in 2020. And the problem with brand
awareness is that
when you come together to brands, you choose one of the names, people only know
you as one thing
as opposed to, "Yeah, we have a really diversified business." And getting away
from,
I think, a history of Optimize, which is A/B testing, started in 2012 by two
Google product
managers. And this really like romantic story and now merging it with this
platform story and
bringing these things to the forefront. That's what helps us get into market.
We were meeting this
week. CEO was meeting with some of our partners. And we got asked, "What are
our biggest problem
is right now?" Even having good AR numbers. It's just being aware for the right
products. It's
being known for something and not everything. And it's really hard to do,
especially in a crowded
SaaS space. Actually, I want to tie what you just said together, Isaac, with
what Jeff just said.
Because this just dropped in the past week was the Scott Brinkers MarTech
landscape.
Did you see that, Isaac? Oh, my gosh. I had to use a magnifying glass. It was
like a
ponter-lessed painting. It was just more absurd than ever.
So I have to comment on this because it's very relevant to this conversation
being that I think
optimizes is one of those pillar companies. How many of these have actually
crossed 100 million,
much less multiple hundreds of million in revenue, optimizes being one of the
paragons of that space,
is that it grew from 11,000 last year to 14,106. Nearly 30% growth in one year
for a mature landscape.
It's like, I actually did not anticipate that. I didn't think that it was going
to grow so much.
Now, obviously, a lot of those are AI-fueled MarTech applications. But given
what we saw last
year in a consolidation and a lot of companies hurting, I was surprised to see
so much growth.
And maybe, Jeff, you're probably closer to that MarTech interesting narrative.
I'd actually love
your opinion on what you've seen in the past couple of years is a lot of
companies rigor around
go to market and partnerships. How have you grown in a time where the number of
competitors is
increasing and the number of net new entrants into the space is increasing?
Yeah, we grew a few different ways. We went through five or six different
acquisitions in three or
four years. We were acquired by Insight Partners who invested in a business in
a tough time to try
to bring together some similar companies. We modeled out our acquisition
strategy around one concept.
And that was growing up into the right on the Gardener Force to report. A DXP
platform that had
a pretty clear definition of how to win. And we moved away from the competitors
to the standalone
solutions and we're aiming at the adoption point. And we want to have a
cohesive suite.
In doing so, you invest. What came out of that, though, was 10,000 customers
with over 70% of
them owning just one of our products. If we just stopped doing new acquisition
and did cross-sell,
we could be growing as well. And that would be a great way to grow at a pretty
reasonable pace.
And so we're finding vendor consolidation not only from the buyer perspective,
because customers do
want to buy from single vendor. We have opinions and options across all these
platforms. We bought
good solutions that are leaders in a bunch of quadrants and that's good. I
think the anti-
composable solution and a suite solution, we have good things in a lot of
places and that solidifies
the customers. I think as customers are getting more practical about their
spend, they do want to
invest in a platform, whether that is Adobe, whether that is Salesforce,
whether that is other
brands that have unified Martec, because it's just frankly too much work to go
to multiple vendors,
even with good point solutions. So you said something very important, unified
Martec. And I
always can call people's bluff just by going to their homepage. And I love that
I go to the
Optimizely homepage and it says we are a team player. And you're featuring
integrations and
the ecosystem story and those nearbound integrated networks that you have right
at your fingertips.
And I actually love the marketplace and everything that you all built there. In
addition, of course,
to the boutique agencies, to the more GSI players that you now have as a part
of your ecosystem,
that is part of the narrative of this maturing market is if you don't interoper
ate, if you're
not a team player, if I can't trust one major vendor to help me make 10
downstream decisions,
then I don't really want it to add in that new vendor.
Right. And I think, you know, on the integration side, like our challenge is
that it's not going
to be like our system robust, right? Like we're not the center of anybody's
Martec slide. Like I
always position like if you vision a Salesforce and their own Martec slide and
where you fit in that
like massive confusion and investment, like it is very rare to be in the middle
of it's not even
really important. Like you have to integrate with the other pieces and places.
So whether that's
our product team asking my partnership team to go out there and find key integ
rations for things
that we just don't do well, right? And acknowledgement that when we hit that RP
, you know, a good
person that our RP is going to be, do you integrate with X? Like do you
integrate with X? And it's
going to be that sales person's like dread and fear to say like, do we
integrate with X? And make
sure I can say yes, right? Whether that's the pieces that we know they're going
to own like a good
CRM or social platforms or whatever it's going to be. And so you can't be a
leader if you don't
play well with others. And I think we've done a great practice job of playing
well with others.
So I would love to ask you a little bit about given the size of your ecosystem
and you have
partners on the tech side as well as the solution side, you as the I think your
title is VP of
partnerships. Is that correct? Yeah. What are you doing? Like how are you
starting with the strategic level before we get down to the tactical level?
What are you thinking
about on kind of like an annual or quarterly cadence in both of those buckets?
What are you
trying to achieve? Is it like net new partners? Or is there a certain number of
activities you're
trying to drive with partners and how does that differ from app to solution?
Yep. On the solution
side, over 50% of our revenue comes from solution partners, right? And we've
been a partner driven
network for our long history on the on the CMSI because that's a very partner
driven approach.
When I started in 2015, we had no outbound SDRs. We were all inbound just
taking and leads because
majority of our leads were coming from our partner network, but then it was
good or bad.
Now we're at this place where we can be proactive. And so the solution side is
working with partners
on referrals and trying to bring in business by creating books of business that
are partners.
When they invest in our tech, we certify them. They want to refer to us. They
want to build
because they get huge service dollars of our platforms. On tech, it's totally
different.
Because what we're trying to do is establish entropy with our technology
partners, right? We're
trying to go to the leaders in certain tech platforms and attach ourselves to
those deals.
And we compensate our team on referred deals by partners and then influenced.
The challenge is
forming a partnership with a tech partner and having them refer business to you
, that's like
earned equity. And that doesn't happen overnight. You need to really nurture
that. That's a lot of
the new down philosophy. It's coming together and being able to align sales
teams to each other
and gain that equity to where you want to refer to each other. The fact that we
chose to then
compensate our team on influenced deals where we're sharing intel, we're
getting into a run
together, we're figuring out how we went together. And so from a team
perspective, my KPIs are
attached to deals. How many deals can we attach a tech partner to? Increase win
rate in order to
establish when a partner was involved, when they worked, right? And then
renewal rate as well.
We definitely look long term at how many customers are renewing. The close book
revenue,
that should be there. It's icing on the cake. And how many deals refer? It's
those incremental
attributes that allow us to amplify the value of tech partners in a way that we
do.
How much are you fighting over the influence component?
It's tough, right? And that's a hard one to attach to think the business is
open to that
attribution knowing that, hey, we're establishing value in intel. I think the
important thing,
Isaac, is that we have representation on our partner team on the C level. We
have a chief
partnership officer and that chief partners, if officer grew her book in her
experience,
in bringing in partners, establishing their place in our business. And so when
you bring an
influenced attribution to our CFO or to our CSO or whatever, that fight has
already been fought,
right? And now it's just numbers and it's attached. And I think what they want
is accountability
for aggressiveness, right? We want to bring our tech partners to deals. We don
't want to make it
the job of sales reps to ask for it. And so by bringing these people along and
adding intel to
our win plan on somebody who's already trying to form a win plan, that's where
they see the best value.
What I love is how you're talking about the improvements to the business model,
right? So like,
attach isn't necessarily a panacea partner attach rate, right? Par, Aaron McG
arry is like
one of my buddies that talks about this. It was formerly Qualtrics and Sales
force. And I love
the talk track around this because what we're trying not to have is that debate
about influence
where like, look, when partner attach rate exists, what happens to the unit
economics of the business?
Look at the win rate of the partner attach cohort. Is it fundamentally better
or is it not?
And what we're not talking about and arguing about is the effectiveness of the
partner program.
What we're talking about is the growth of the business, right? Like, you need
to be able to
demonstrate the impact of partnerships on the overall growth of the business.
And that's how you
do it. You speak in terms of business numbers, not just partner metrics, Qualtr
tr metrics.
So I love the way that you frame that. It's how we should be having these
conversations in order to
have a partner led or ecosystem led business that is running nearbound plays.
You can
say the Intel play, right? Which I love. It's like, hey, AEs know how to
interoperate here. And
that Jeff's tech partners aren't just going to hand me deals that are ready to
sign on the dotted
line for six figures. Like, I need to build a multi-threaded business case. And
not having
partners involved would be really silly. And the good reps are on text
exchanges with their
counterparts at the partners that they know from a tech perspective. That's
exactly what I'm going
to ask you about. How do those reps work? That's really good. They know. And we
tie it up for them.
You know, scale is not need. You know, linking reps with each other. It's
getting the reps in
the same room and letting them establish their business. And they know whether
it's by vertical,
by size, you know, we're mid-market enterprise. It's the same enterprise rep at
the partner that,
you know, like keeps the fountain running. They do that work. And we don't need
to do that work.
So I can go establish the next strategic partner, right? And bring that in.
Here, we went through
an interesting change. So, you know, when I really got involved in partnerships
about over a year ago,
we really did not have this attribution for the tech program team. And even
having somebody in
the sea level, like the philosophy was there, but it took me nine to 12 months
to get over the
economics of it. And whether it was where are the points going to come from?
You know, what's the
attribution of the point? Everything is a point of the deal, right? If it's a
percentage, what's that
going to do? Is that coming out of the marketing budget to acquire the customer
? Is that coming out
of our, you know, retention budget to keep the customer, whatever? Because it
does all point
to money, right? Somebody's not getting margin from that. We're paying out
somebody else to do it.
I think when it changed was the proof point of the increase win rate, right? To
where, you know,
we knew that. And then, you know, our CFO, CSR willing to now add more people
to the attribution
that would get paid on it by, you know, we're creating better behavior by
paying the right
people. And it was not easy. It was really not easy. And it was a lot of
headaches. And it was a lot
of waving the flag to people that otherwise had a lot of other things to care
about. And finally,
giving their attention where they've been like, listen, we'll give you the
tools, we'll let you do
this. We're going to model this out. We're not going to let it go forever
without analyzing it.
But we trust that the model that you're presenting will work.
Right. So you had to have those tactical, you know, wins in those stories and
the reps like,
you have to fight the good fight, right? Like there is no, there is no solution
or magic wand
where all of a sudden your executive team goes, you know what, you're just
right about everything.
Like it's an ongoing battle and you have to be willing to take that flag. And
one of the things
I talked about in the book, the Dearbound Minds have this journey from
curiosity, right, to courage,
to conviction, like, you got to be willing to risk and to fight the fight. And
that's the job to
be done is you got to unite the departments and, you know, get them to be
comfortable with the
risk associated with it and build that trust. I think it's a fantastic call out
. I had one
quick question coming back to because I'm playing in MarTech for the past
couple of, you know,
cycles of my career. And this is getting a little bit more tactical. One of the
partners that I
worked with when I was at Drift was a little company called CRO metrics or
Chrome metrics,
right. And they're a top agency, they were a top agency partner. I think they
might have been
number one when I was doing some stuff with Optimizely at Drift. And then if I
code your
solutions page now, I'm seeing some bigger names like proficient, right, and
proficient has a big
book of Adobe business. And they're like premier platinum, which is CRO metrics
now is like gold.
There's a different tier in place. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about
like,
hey, we had these boutique agencies, but then I see proficient. Okay, there's
some SI growth there
and it's in the Adobe ecosystem. I'm assuming that proficient and that's going
well. Talk to me a
little bit about how you go from like these boutique agencies to start winning
and having
preferred platinum spot, you know, partnerships with, you know, an SI like a
proficient.
This is the crazy part is that you bring together Optimizely has a complete
partner philosophy
that was almost like, you know, in a in a glass bowl compared to the partner
philosophy that was
at every server. And your tiering is all thrown off and your attribution is all
thrown off and
your values all thrown off. Note that, you know, Optimizely learned a lot in
its partner ecosystem
the years before acquisition and had to go through some growth. And so with the
partners that it
was choosing the value that it was gaining, there's a lot of partners out there
in the ecosystem,
making a business off of Google Optimize that just frankly weren't interested
in partnering
to the platform like Optimizely. And so you met two different companies at the
same point.
When you bring them together, now we're able to go to a proficient, for example
. And their
interest in us is that we can talk to multiple teams in that business and bring
those teams
together on a single account. And so the proficiency and the bigger GSIs of the
world,
they're interested in our multi dimensional like Aspen Reap launched a
partnership with WPP. And
it's because of their, you know, different agencies focused on different things
. Now a CMS project
and a developer project can be paired with a crow project to do it that way.
That doesn't
change our interest in chrometrics. We still have that focus with chrometrics
where they are a
platinum player in their space to do incredible work in a specific line. They
've never really
bricked out into CMS development and that approach. And so while Optimizely can
take a sweet approach
and we can focus on certain partners that want to touch like multiple parts of
the ecosystem,
we can still tier our partners. Now I'll say like the tiering of partners is an
incredibly hard
discipline to keep it right. Because you can't take away a tier unless you want
to be yelled at in
private and public forums about it. It is impossible to measure different
partners in different
places in the same way. Our partner team works incredulously to try to get like
everybody on the
same page. But yeah, it's incredibly hard. And so in that note, like our public
tiers might be
mismatched. We look at those partners strategically in a different way on what
we're promoting to
them and how we're valuing them. And so we'll continue to keep those two things
parallel where
there's experimentation only partners that would be valuable and then the
proficiency too.
What's interesting about that to me that just stands out is
the difference in the end customer. So like this is where Isaac, your title is
Chief Market Officer,
not Chief Marketing Officer. And I've always had this strong pull towards
market dynamics
and less so company dynamics. And what you just spoke to was like, hey, the
market that we're
growing into requires a different type of partner, right? The customer outcomes
, etc. And the partner
value proposition is different. And what Jeff just said, I think it was a
really, really good sound
bite on understanding your partner value proposition has to change based on the
market that you're
going after, the customer demands, and specifically what the partner wants. You
have to help that
partner solve a problem, right? So this cross departmental and being able to
multi thread
and have a more strategic engagement is absolutely critical compared to, let's
say the, you know,
conversion rate conversation with Chrome metrics. That doesn't mean that's not
important for a
subset of your market that you need to grow. But then you start to think about,
you know,
divisions or market opportunities and territories, not just based on company
size,
which certainly there is some of that, but based on customer need and demand.
And that you're
going to have some partners that are really great for some customers and
segments. You have some
partners that are very different. And in that maturation, you start to
understand, ah, I understand
the market. I understand what the customer wants and the what the customer
needs. And
that's the reason why partnerships exist. You know, I think, you know,
proficient makes its
book on, you know, Adobe business and that's fair, you know, and I think they
do that because
Adobe provides a suite of tools and good integrations across like multiple
touch points that allow
a proficient project at an enterprise level to grow a huge scope of work
spanning both like
CMS development, working operations, strategy design, like all the pieces that
it comes. If
we can carve out that in any way by bringing in integrated tools that allow us
to tell that
same story for a different price point with a different trajectory and company,
you know,
we're comparing in size all the time. We're really trying to meet those guys at
the front,
not only in the quad room, but also like at the customer. And that's a good
thing. You know,
it's an honor to be able to compete against those guys and have the same story
told and be
interesting at the same time. They will always be, you know, dedicated players
in our space. They
just want to do CMS development in that size. But it really is where we want to
be. So everybody
trigex upwards. It's knowing from a solution partner side that we can meet them
at multiple
points of their story because it's ultimately the partner story. It's the story
that they're
telling. It's the transformation story that we're telling. We're a suite of
tools, you know,
that fits really well into that story. So you have to build a suite that comple
ments them rather
than trying to get them to play your game. Jeff, I want to bounce back for just
a second on
the kind of executive buy in executive alignment topic. Because I want to see
if I can tease
something out here that I think might be really important for our listeners. So
you have what I
think a lot of people in partnerships imagine is the perfect scenario. Oh, you
've got a CPO,
you've got executive buy in. Sure, it's easy for Jeff because everybody there
believes in him and
gives him the resources. I want to ask you a question. Even though you have a C
PO, even though
you have executive buy in, do you still have to frequently and repeatedly go
through the process
of proving to your internal teams, to your executives the value of the
approaches you're trying to take
having and rehabbing those conversations about whether or attach and influence
makes sense.
How should we do compensation? Is that something that's just settled and now
you can do whatever
you want or you're continually having those conversations? No, and we're not
trying to win
directly. I think the way that we win is we get sales to be our champion. We
prove it to sales
people so that they're screaming on it. Because if we're doing it in our own
bubble, they're going
to stop believing us after a while. It has to be that we showed marketing, that
we were a pipeline
generation by doing partner marketing and attribution to partner-in-a-red
events where
power three, power four events drove better pipeline generation than standard
field marketing,
right, where we could grab other people's customers and bring them in. On the
sales side, we have to
have sales reps, not only in our public channels, like saying, "Hey, we won
this deal because of
this partner." That's a big deal too, Isaac, is that we have a few places in
the business that we
scream from the rooftops. We have to fight to constantly be in that wingwire to
say this partner
was involved and this deal was made because of this partner. If you do that,
the CFO conversation
becomes really easy because then they see the amplification. I love and hate it
. Our partner
community and the partner philosophy that's being built, when it echoes in the
boardroom,
when our CEO walks in and has a conversation and is told that we want a deal
because of an
integration, that's going to happen. That wasn't really our work. That's going
to happen naturally
anyway. He doesn't need to stay like, "Oh my gosh, we don't have a--" or "We
lost a deal because of a
certain partnership." That stuff is getting echoed the right places. We win,
but it's
it's diligence. It's staying a first-class citizen. It's making sure that the
business and the sales
philosophy doesn't come first before the partner philosophy and it's proving to
them through
results and picking the right partners and going to market the right way and
helping them win.
I always say it's worse when the business is here and then the partnership is
here. The more that
you overlay those two things, the better you are. My victory is going to be
when partnership revenue
is a top-line plan on our 2025 revenue. Right now, it's add-on. Right now, it's
evergreen.
It's benefited on the top. When we are beholden to a certain part of the
revenue stream and now we
can budget ourselves that way, that's when we really won. That was such an epic
little monologue
there. I response to that question. Jared, I was thinking about your rhythm of
the business
section and nearbound about the business goals and the partnership goals. The
more those are
tightly aligned. I just think it's such a good reminder for listeners, like if
you ever find
yourself and I know many of you do because I talk with you all the time,
feeling a little bit
thick to me like, "Well, my company, I don't have executive buy-in. We don't
have a seat at the
table. It's only whatever you think is going to solve it and finally you'll
just be free to go do
all the things you want to do and no one will bug you about whether they're
working." That's
never the case. It's not the case for marketers. It's not the case for any
department
at let alone partnership. Understanding that there's a lot of tools in your
toolkit. One is getting
those quick, easy wins with the other department so they can start to believe
in you and be willing
to give you more time and chance. Another is having a, I like to call it a
causal chain,
a logical story for the ways in which partners, that's different from
attribution because
attribution is not as easy a lot of times. But at least you can tell a story
that's logical and you
can show here are the steps along the journey and why partners are going to
make that better.
Then have attribution to the extent that you can while recognizing it's
imperfect. But if you
kind of layer those together and then you have stories and anecdotes that you
highlight,
highlight those wins repeatedly and don't just assume that people, okay,
everybody knows now they
get it. I don't need to keep highlighting it. Yes, you do. You need to keep
reminding. We
want this because of partners. We want this because of partners. That validates
our causal theory.
That also is fortified by the attribution to the extent that we have it and you
're kind of like
cycling through those all the time even when you have executive buy-in. That
conversation never
ends. I think that's just a good reminder for everybody. Yeah, we do. I never
just would call
me shy. I try to scream every chance that I get and even we'll announce anytime
we have a new
connected partner on reveal. We'll go and put a value proposition to the team
and say,
this data is now available to sales and we'll get them interested. In doing so
in that quick snippet
of information, the good sales are if I can see the adoption and the login of
the tools, I can
see the interactions on Salesforce, be sure of the data. I can see the number
of interactions I have
with the tech team because they see a new dimension and it invigorates them to
want to win more.
It's not peppering and it's proof too because it gets them thinking, what's the
next partner that
I need? When they're asking for it, when they're initiating it, when they're
part of the conversation,
and it's not just throwing stuff on a wall and seeing what sticks, then we're
all bought it. We have
invited partners to big events throughout the year. Our sales kick off. We
invite partners
to their dedicated partner days like a lot of other stuff. So partners are part
of that ecosystem
connected directly to sales and now it's not just in another room. It's all
aligned and I think that
repetition and forced behavior makes the financial conversation that eventually
come much easier.
You have to have the reps and sets and that's why I love speaking in terms of
cadences of rituals
and the rhythm of the business from annual down to the daily data place. So
picking that apart a
little bit more, I think a lot of folks haven't really seen the promised land
when it comes to
effectively utilizing partner data. I've written a length about this. One of
the first pieces of
content is I wrote with Kevin Linahan on the reveal team, we wrote a 55 page
guide about the ultimate
guide to driving. That was the hardest editing job I've ever had in my life
trying to whittle
that thing down. So it was literally just about how to utilize partner data and
track partner
activities between sellers and reps because that actually actioning the data is
the hardest part.
I'd love for you to unpack a little bit more down that story, Jeff, of like,
hey, so we announce
that we have a new connected partner and this data is available. What else is
happening? Talk
to us a little bit more about how you're actioning this in a way that you feel
like, hey, this is a
big part of versus waiting for partners to come to you. You are activating it.
Yeah, we're lucky enough to have managers who sort that data. And I think like
sales reps
weren't discovered on their own, but man, they will absolutely take it once you
show them and
bring more deals to the table. And so a few dimensions that we do are like many
, when we launch a
partnership, we'll find five or six active deals in the short term. And I tell
my managers like,
you have to not just ask for their leads. You have to give them leads back. If
we're going to be going
in and evaluating their customer base and trying to find our opportunities, we
also need to use the
data, find our customers versus their prospects and give them a few return
needs to be sort of
just and then on those deals, we come to the table when my manager is inviting
rep A versus rep B.
I'm also sorting the partner's data to find out other customers of that rep in
advance. So I'm
trying to bring multiple opportunities to that rep so that they so I brought
something that they
wouldn't have, make their life easy. Don't try to discover it and make them
like social, right?
Then once you're in and you start to establish, then it's my manager's job to
keep the cadence
going to tell the story, to invite the right data so that the right data points
are coming and we're
almost building that playbook of what the conversation is going to look like
because we've all had,
you know, the rep to rep conversation where everybody shows up at a bad mood,
nobody wants to help
each other and then suddenly partnerships are getting the way rather than value
props, right?
But it's, hey, we bring these points home where we implement this deal,
especially since we can
attribute to that and then, you know, that's value to the job and then it's
finding, you know,
the way out. What are we going to do next? How are we going to help each other
win, you know,
finding that extra so it is a lot of work. It's almost three times the amount
of work on the tech
partner manager to make that thing go. Once you get that flywheel moving, like
our strategic
partnerships are really good ones. Like we just don't have to do that anymore.
Like they do it for
themselves because they know the value that they're getting out of the
relationship. Our biggest
problem right now is that we truly believe we have too many valuable
partnerships to action on
an a given point. We just have a huge ecosystem of tech partners that can be
incredibly valuable
to us and, you know, it's very hard to turn, you know, an average partnership
into a good partnership.
You know, we make the joke that like average partnerships are just really good
pen pals, right?
They're just amazing pen pals that we say nice things to every once a month. We
're supposed to have
a one-on-one, but we want to turn those into strategic mutual partnerships
through, you know,
commercials, through relationships, through everything. And the work to take it
is going to be three times
the effort that you think. But once you get it moving, these will be very
valuable for both sides.
So one of the questions I have for you, because I've definitely seen this stall
out in that early
phase before you get that flywheel going, you get a new partner, you start
sharing data with each
other. And it's like, cool, this data means there's opportunity everywhere. For
every department,
this can help our CS reps, you know, retain customers, this can help our sales
reps, our
co-marketing. But when you started with something very concrete, you said we
look for like four
or five active deals that we can, you know, utilize that partner to help us
with. And we try to give
them some open deals that they have who are customers of ours, try to give them
maybe some
Intel intros influence. That step right there, I'm really curious who is taking
that. Because what
I notice happens sometimes is you your sales team wants the leads from them.
But you got to give
some info or some leads to them. And that's probably going to come from your CS
team. But what incentive
do they have? Or is that coming from your sales team as well?
Type partner manager has to do it. Because nobody else is being attributed on
it. And like,
the CS team will do it in certain relationships. But like, the data is so clear
. It's searchable.
It's findable. Like, we don't need these teams to do that. We can put these
carrots out. And
many times I ask my tech team, like, you need to represent yourself as a sales
person. You need
to put yourself out there as we have enough sales force data to know the health
of the account.
You don't need that rep involved because they've got other things to do. And
they're being asked
to join partner calls all the time. Like, you have to be their constituent.
Because when you do,
they will pick up the slack and drive it. But like, if I don't need to ask the
rep, like,
I can look at the cross of the data. I can see the managers. I'm assuming data
quality is good.
But I'm going to throw some things up there and help and drive. And so by the
time, like,
the involvement is there, it's really already set.
You know?
Man, you just cracked that. It's so interesting because I think it's easy to
feel like,
okay, as a partner, as a partner pro, I'm just this orchestrator. I'm
coordinating everything.
I got so many things on my plate. So we'll get a new partner and then I'll say,
hey, sales reps, could you help them out and like give or success reps? Give
them some intel.
And then you're like, hand it off. They're like, well, they didn't do anything.
And they're not
going to do anything. Like, you're just saying, just go do it yourself. The
information is there.
The data is there. If you have a quick question to ask the rep on the account,
they can answer
you directly. But you can go and deliver that information. You can go deliver
the value to the
partner and grease the skids and make it easier than for you to get that value
back for your reps.
I wish this worked. I mean, they sound good on paper, but like, it does the
common CS,
like rep who has the attainment goals and has, you know, 40, 50 customers to
manage,
really care about like $1,000, fifth for the right information, maybe that they
're not going to
see for two or three months. Like, it's what we threw out there. But in reality
, like, if I can
do their work on their behalf, like, what I want is for them to know when they
get the question of
like, which tech partner should I, you know, pursue? Now, doing all that effort
does not mean that I
could have like, you know, 30 good partners that I can like run at that level.
So at some point,
you have to consolidate and pick the right ones. And that's not fun. You know,
I don't like letting
a partner down who has good momentum and like not pick it up the speed. But the
reality is to
give them that executive like presence, you know, you have to deliver at that
kind of level
and not type of data. And so you end up finding the ones. One last thing too,
guys, you guys,
when we pick our partners, like a lot of what we think about is, yes, we have a
lot of partners
that are bought together by our customers, right? The partners that really
succeed in
care of selling with us are the tech that meet us at the compelling event. When
we sell
experimentation, for example, there are tools that you cannot buy without other
things, like a
sixth sense or a demand base or our content square or quantum metric. Those are
bought by the same
buyer. They're in the same budget. They're considered at the same time. Those
partnerships
are great. I take a lot of partnerships that are enacting on active customers
of ours selling down
the road. Those are good. But let's focus on the compelling event partners
first, because that
will get sales out of bed, right? They're going to tax themselves the same RP
and that makes a
difference. So you got to lean in on the ones like that. And say and say no or
not yet to
partners who you like is a very hard thing to do. But yeah, it's necessary.
It's funny from a company in 400 million in revenue to it's just a founder in a
slide deck
and maybe an MVP product in the VC realm. I mean, Isaac, you've certainly seen
this like why now?
Why now? It's not just enough to have a value proposition. The compelling event
for me has
always been my best way that I've closed deals or big partnerships or something
like that is like,
why now? It's like, well, there's an existing initiative. And when I talk about
nearbound sales
or nearbound marketing and aligning on accounts, it's like, what are you trying
to align with with
your partners? Well, there's a business challenge and there's a business
initiative. And guess what
companies don't talk about? Companies don't talk about on LinkedIn, on their
website,
their business challenges and their business initiatives to solve that. No one
talks about
that publicly. The only way that you get that information is by working with
folks that are
going through that process. So you or one of your partners is a part of those
business initiatives.
And you have some insights into those business challenges. And when you come
together for that
compelling event, that's where you are inevitably going to see win rates
increase because you're
selling into an existing business problem with a known solution where you are
an expert. So I
love that compelling event component that makes you operate more like a
business operator by
understanding the customer, not just, hey, here's the partners that work well.
Well, why did they
work well? It's because of what you just said. Yeah, there's a fear. You look
at that RFP sometimes
and you see, you know, optimize Z and it has to integrate with XYZ. There's
certain things on
there that our sales reps know will be a cascading budget decision, right? We
're going to buy the
CMS before we buy this. We're going to do this before we're going to do this.
And nothing scares
off sales more than knowing that that other thing might get in the way of your
like,
availability, right? That there's a line of demarcation and they will go away
from that partner
because they just don't want to get involved. I want to get my money. I don't
want that partner
involved because I know that might actually come first in the process and come
first in the sale.
There's not much I can do about that. I can then instead bring along other
partners at the
compelling event and make tech partnerships a value, even though a particular
partner might be a
contention, right? I need to bring other things to the table and I need to help
show them that it
was a group effort so that even though it'd be a big ticket item that we sell
with because we
have a lot of big ticket items that we sell with won't get in the way, then the
practice itself was
still successful even if that one partner maybe wasn't valuable in that
situation.
I have to make a lighter comment on a phrase that you said earlier. I wrote it
down because I
loved it so much. Average partnerships are just really good pen pals. Your
account
executives don't care about Popo, partners on paper only. They couldn't care
less and I think
what is that compelling event tying those things together? Don't bring your
account executives or
your CSM's pen pals. They don't want more of your work. What they want is they
want your help
and that's not where a pen pal comes into play. That's where an activated
partner in a customer
story with the compelling event comes in and that's the difference between a
partner operator
that's just doing a job and a partner operator that's achieving results. I love
how you
frame that out, Jeff. The biggest fear that a sales rep has is losing a deal
because we don't
integrate with something and we've had that before and that goes straight up to
the executives.
Why don't we have an integration with these guys? It's so silly. What are we
paying you for?
You should be out there learning ahead of time because our competitor had a
better integration
in this case. That's just lost effort. That's not feature. That's a thing we
can fix. They're
constantly paranoid about the thing that we don't have in order to fix it. They
will take a meeting
with a partner to make sure they know about it, to make sure they have their
relationships,
but they're really counting on partnerships as a function to always be able to
say, "Yes, I think
having involved in these pen pal partner and paper relationships and these A's
come together,
they've always got themselves in mind. They're never thinking about the other
partner on the
other side of the phone, the way that a partner manager is." That's why I think
we have to evoke
that into place. Bring along until they have to help them win the deal. Bring
along. The best
partner example is, "I bring along a tech partner. We're talking about a deal.
We realize that the
tech partners in another part of the business that I'm in, I bring them into my
side of the business.
They bring me into their side of the business. Now we're not just helping each
other. We're expanding.
It's giving my sales rep some of the goods inherently. We're all a little
selfish as we should be.
You're trying to model out how to make them get something so that I can get
what I need to."
Quick question on the data side. When you're talking about these compelling
events or these
pieces of information about a sequence, a cascading effect of budget, the order
in which
customers are going to buy or expand something, are you tapping into your
partner data to set up any
kind of automations or alerts that say, "Hey, this customer is probably ripe
because they just
became a customer of this partner of ours," which historically means that they
're going to be in
the market for our offering. Next, do you have those kind of processes set up
where you're
kind of automatically prioritizing or pushing alerts to people or is it more of
a manual digging
into the data account by account as you go? Now we have more amplification when
somebody just
becomes a customer of our partners, that new data set. That's a huge dimension
of the shared
data that we get through a platform like reveal, right to know when it gets got
launched because
we know that investment will typically relate to the other investments that we
're seeing if we
didn't know about it before. We have way more data than we know what to do with
. That's why a full-time
partner manager could look at that dimension. It's very hard to have that
automation. A problem
that we have too is that some of our partners sell multiple products and maybe
we only integrate
with certain parts of their tech stack and certain products that they sell
rather than everything.
It's certain parts of their business is related to ours. I don't know a perfect
way to do it. I
wish I did because then we'd be pushing more information to them rather than
doing it. It's just got to be
diligence to ask the right questions, to find where the decision making was and
be able to look at
that data and see the trends, to be able to get a better out of it. I know that
we are doing our best
when we register new deals as a team. Look at those new deals immediately. Look
at the partner data,
immediately bringing the partners so that we're not coming at the last minute.
Now we're trying to
bring in tech partners at the discovery and accepted stage rather than a
contract stage to just ask
for a reference letter. There's this rev-ops utopia that I can see looming on
the horizon. People are
getting bits and pieces of it. Some things are manual. There's some alerts here
and there, but you
can imagine a world, not like you have all this data. If you have the data from
your partner ecosystem
and you've got it all flowing in your CRM, over time, the sophistication. We're
just learning how
to use this stuff and to use it well. The ability to proactively push that
information wherever it
needs to be, to set up triggers, to reprioritize account lists, to set up
recommendations for
marketing campaigns. There's just so much there. You start to bring AI into the
mix. I start to get
really excited about where this stuff can go. What we're doing better is we're
big proponents
and build with data. We're big proponents in partner data. What we like to do
with RAPs is try to
triangulate all the tech that we see that somebody's invested in and try to
come up with some idea
about their investment level, but what type of tools they bought. That helps
profile out the buyer
and their appetite to buy. You can't always get it right. You can definitely
see combinations of
tech stack that work. Where we meet best is where built with next to partner
data, looking at the
two data sets, trying to then extrapolate their cycle and their investment
curve and say, are they
our ICP? Did we get it right? Did we put them in a right ICP bucket? Then it
allows us to ask the
questions, "Hey, we saw that you invested in this. Was that a part of the
business? Was that something
you brought in? That's an interesting investment." Now we know they have an
enterprise budget because
the tools that they buy, we can go and feel really confident about what we're
trying to sell.
I think this was such a phenomenal conversation on how to get through the messy
middle of the
partner phase. It's a great analogy that messy middle. You're not in perfection
land, Jeff,
but I think you're showing like, "Hey, getting through the other side of this
is actually,
there's rewards here. There's gold at the end of this rainbow." If you stick to
it,
you follow what Jeff said, you can get through the messy middle and you still
have messy stuff
going on. All partner programs do. All businesses do. It doesn't change. It
just, "Okay, the flywheel
starts to operate. You start to see the network effects." I think you've done a
phenomenal job.
Congrats again on hitting 400 million. It optimizes with a program that's
generating over 50% of your
revenue. We appreciate that. Constantly telling the team, you've got to pick
the right bets.
You're building a garden. You've got to be feed all the plants. Some of them
are going to grow
and some of them are not. We have to be ready to try to commit to a partner,
but fail fast to be
able to pivot and do the ones that are more strategic to the business. The more
critical we are and
not thinking that a partnership may be deprioritized, not a partnership put
away. We can re-invigorate
a partnership after six or nine months. We can focus on more on the strategic
to our business now
that helps us succeed. We're constantly balancing the short and the long. You
have to be flexible
to dare. You have to be willing to ebb and flow as other partner teams change
and grow and do.
Try, do it. We have a good framework here. I think to build a strategic partner
, we'll continue to play
that playbook. If the force has changed, we've got to move on and try the next
with the same playbook.
You're right. Muscle memory is going to be what gets us there.
I love it. Thank you so much for guiding us through the messy middle. Jeff,
Isaac, it's good to see
you again. We've been trading back and forth on different shows, etc. I'm
excited for the next
phase. Do we have anything to plug, Isaac? I don't know if we officially can
yet. I will just say
it may or may not be related to our big annual nearbound event. I'll leave it
at that.
We've got a couple big announcements that are coming up. We haven't dropped any
of the
crazy stuff since the book on y'all. Thanks to everyone that listened.
My marketing team was like, Jared, they're like, "Wow, things have been really
nice and calm and
regular and also too calm and regular." I told them we needed to increase our
chaos quotient in
this quarter. Pay attention in the next few episodes. We have some big
announcements. In fact,
we've said they're always going to get bigger and better. The next ones get
bigger and better.
I'm really excited when we can announce those. Thank you, everyone, for
listening. If you haven't
left us a review on the different podcast channels, go do that for us. I was
just on
DG's podcast. I'm like, "Oh, he asked for this every time. I'm going to ask you
. If you've been a
long-time listener, go leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcast or if you
're watching on YouTube,
hit that like and subscribe. I got to throw over one more plug too. Go get the
nearbound book if
you haven't read it yet. If you haven't read it yet, go get it. Go send it to
somebody. If you have
read it, give a review of that thing too. Jared, if you know people that other
podcasts,
Jared is doing the podcast who are talking about the book. More than happy to.
Now that
people are ingesting it, there's a lot of great conversations happening on what
do we do next.
Keep it going. Keep the conversations going so that we can make it easier.
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