Join Asher & Kelly as they host Avanish Sahai on this episode of The Unearn Podcast. Listen in to Avanish share insights into the partner ecosystem and his thoughts around undertaking change management. The transcript is below the video.
[02:05] Why the Partnership ecosystem is in a state of great innovation.
[05:01] The ecosystem’s topic needs more points of view from practitioners, needs to be more data-centric, and a lot of education. Part of this education is Unlearning.
[06:56] - The LinkedIn survey on “How do you consume content: and the learning from it.”
[08:04] The need for full-stack GTM professionals
[10:23] An insight into the evolution of Partner Ops.
[13:00] Specific steps taken to bring an idea to scale.
[16:12] Advice for professionals & companies planning to undertake Change Management.
[23:05] Why an economic downturn is the best time to invest in the partner ecosystem.
“For change management to work, there has to be alignment, not just in the C-suite, but even the board."
HubSpot/Partnership Leaders/Canalys's State of Partner Ops and Programs Report
Avanish Sahai's podcast The Platform Journey
00:17
To thrive in an era of digital transformation, you have to go to market differently, let's find out how.
Hey everybody this is Asher Matthew and I'm one of the go-to-market executives at demand base and I'm also the co-founder of Partnership Leaders and I'm thrilled that we could do this with some amazing people and by this, I mean the very first episode of the Unlearned podcast but before I go in and tell everybody about what this is, let me first introduce a couple of really amazing people that I have the pleasure of doing this with. So
Kelly is from HubSpot and interestingly also from someone from HubSpot and you know, he's got a bunch of other things going on but let me pause and give them the floor to introduce themselves.
01:01
Happy to be here and co-host this with Asher, I am a platform ecosystem advocate for HubSpot where I help to grow and engage our ecosystem.
01:15
Thank you for having me, great to see you both so much. I am affiliated with HubSpot as a board member but I've been in the tech sector way longer than probably both of you together, and the places like Oracle, McKinsey some startups and the last many years at Salesforce, ServiceNow and most recently Google Cloud.
01:34
Super. All right, let's do some quick context setting of why we're doing this right. So for me, most people don't know this, but I spend the greater part of Covid recording 200 episodes of this amazing podcast called the Sunnyside Up Media podcast and which actually became a demand basic podcast and was just voted the number one podcast in B two B marketing. So I was just missing this the whole like, like how do I get back into this until kelly was like let's start a podcast. So kelly gives us a little bit of intro into why we're doing this.
02:05
I think one of the reasons is partnerships and ecosystems it's in such a great state of innovation. People in the space are excited, they're passionate, and we're coming up with new business models but it's still kind of siloed. So on the one side, you have these older tech companies that are still using a more traditional channel model but they're open to ecosystems. They're looking to learn, they're looking to make changes and then for the more modern SaaS companies and agencies as well, you also find these silos across departments so you'll have marketing and sales departments that are still approaching it in a very traditional fashion.
So I think Asher you and I both thought let's have some more conversations, let's open the conversation, let's get out of the echo chamber, and let's get thought leaders on here. Leaders in the industry who can give their perspective on how we sort of move these conversations forward and also move the business model forward.
03:05
When I went from working for an application company to a data company, actually had to unlearn everything that I knew about application sales and then re-learn everything about sales and data sales specifically.
And so this concept of unlearning stuck with me and then as we were going through the journey with Demandbase, like my number one thing to every single person at Demandbase was like if you say you want to be a data company, you have to appreciate being a data company.
By the way, this podcast is not about Demandbase, I'm just sharing like live examples around it. But that's the reason why we thought okay if we create the unlearned podcast, it will allow us to take specific topics, break them down, give the past, present, and the future of the topic, and then you know, really give our audience and ability to like learn something new and then apply it. This then brought us magically to companies who reached out and said, hey you guys want to do something from this partner ops thing and I'm like absolutely. It would be great to have somebody who spent a lot of time scaling partner programs and learning about the history of partner operations and then the present and then where we can go. So do you want to tell us a little bit about like why you reached out to us,
04:20
I think Kelly you set a great background, right? We are kind of going into a new mode of operation for the software business, right? I think you hear some of the analysts talk about it as a decade of the ecosystem, you know Jay McBain from Canalys and McKinsey. There's a lot of talk out there, but when you kind of go under the covers, you realize some of it has been done has not been done super well, and when I read your phenomenal report.
Which, by the way it's long, so you know, grab a drink and there are relatively few pictures but again the content is amazing. I think the insights both from again practitioner's perspectives and the segmentation by size by you know, kind of stage of the company and so on.
But what that told me was broadly the ecosystems topic needs more, I think more points of view from practitioners need somebody to be more data-centric, there's a lot of education that needs to be done and I think part of education is the unlearning that you just described, you know, you can call it continuous learning, lifelong learning, but part of that is, you know, the ways things have been done that are probably not the right way to do it and especially if you think about it from a scale and a future perspective.
So I like you said things just converged timing was right, you know, I'm doing my podcasting as well and I think it's a great way. There is an appetite for people to hear and discuss and learn more about these kinds of things. And frankly part of the learning is how not to do it. Right? So some of the history kind of helps us frame that.
06:12
Well, it sounds like we need the Partner Ops Report Storybook version, Kelly.
06:18
Lots of pictures, please.
06:22
Yeah, you're so right. I feel like in 2023 and you're part of the creator program from LinkedIn as well - I feel like there's gonna be lots of people that will actually create conversations and then launch them so that other people can learn from them. And actually, I think was it you or somebody who did a survey that asked like, hey, how do you consume content? And like the traditional methods were no longer were like so low rated. Right?
06:56
Yeah, that's exactly. so I did ask that question recently, you know more part of curiosity, partly just to get a bit of a fact-based for what, you know, things we're doing now. And the question was where do people get information or insights about the enterprise software, cloud SaaS etcera, you know pick your words. And the reaction was the number one is LinkedIn, and number two was podcasts and very close actually one and two.
And then a distant number three was what I call the more traditional sources, right? So publications in traditional and of course had to throw in Twitter and I think it got one vote.
07:40
So now it has a negative vote.
07:46
That person is like can I get the vote back?
07:49
So now we're in a place where you know this kind of session, from a practitioner's point of view and not just the talking heads I think is how people are eager to get more insights and information.
08:04
So a year and a half ago I was sitting with a couple of other go-to-market leaders, right? And I was saying look there is the concept of like full stack developers but why isn't there the concept of full stack go-to-market professionals?
Professionals that are good at sales and appreciate marketing or are good at marketing but also appreciate sales and are good at customer success and helping people understand how to get a person from a customer to an advocate, right? It's like the disciplines have to come together to create, you know the full stack go-to-market professional, and then that person can take a conversation too close to the value and these types of things that we're doing? I feel like we are all bringing us to that point.
08:51
Well, I think that's the idea behind a Chief Customer Officer, right? Is that they are supposed to provide that unifying lens and we here in the partnership community, people talking about the Chief Ecosystem Officer or the Chief Partnership Officer, but realistically that doesn't quite exist, right? Even less so than the Chief Customer Officer.
And I think that's a core challenge for the partnerships and ecosystem space, right? How do you get that unification either you embed yourself in all these departments as an appendage or you somehow come in at the top as part of a unifying framework that would be a different framework that we're used to. But we're not there yet. And I think the survey results kind of showed that even large organizations are struggling with tracking the full impact of partner RO I because it's not unified currently right? And it's kind of all over the place.
Even as we're starting to recognize that the entire journey that you just described can be impacted by partners and facilitated by partners which goes back to how people are consuming information, not only about products earnings and frameworks, where are they getting it right? They're not getting it from the vendor usually or only in the sort of last mile are they getting it from the vendor.
10:06
So let's move this to the past - did partner ops exist before? I'm sure it existed in some flavor. Give us some of the histories of the function and if there are some success stories or was it this painful the entire time, like tell us a little bit about this.
10:23
Yeah, I will. Let's go into the rollback time machine. When we started the business part of the AppExchange in Salesforce, it was eons ago in 2009. Kind of in a more formal way and the person or the persons who work in the, you know, what was then the partner operations team there? I mean they had their tools, and I'm not gonna, I can't make this up. There were spreadsheets, right? And order forms that came in handwritten on a document that was a formal request for a deal.
So this was 2009. So this is not the last millennium. This is not the last century. This is in like 13 or 14 years ago. But the function existed. But the way we ended up having to structure that was, we would throw people at it, right? We would add junior people and say, hey create yet another spreadsheet, track this, you know, connect with why update the Salesforce record to show which partners involved and so on completely manual, frankly a back office function if I can call it that.
It was not a strategy or planning or look forward function. It was basically at the end of the cycle deals, you know, get the deals done, gets the relationship in place, gets the agreements in 11 places, you can find them and then continuously really drive these orders and so on.
Is your role taken forward? There are and I think that you guys picked us up in your survey. You know, there are some more technologies now for sure. There are different elements of, you know, some people deploying PRMs, some people are just deploying some of the account mapping technologies like Reveal and Crossbeam and so on. That's good.
I mean again there's innovation happening but it's still not widespread and the partner ops function itself is still somewhat, you know, trying to adapt practices from sales ops or from marketing Ops, which again, by the way, marketing ops also relatively new function. But how can you kind of take insights and data and start looking forward and putting together a more structured approach to helping the business to, you know, two points both you and Kelly were making, which is, hey, this is part, it's not a silo, this has to be part of the whole and it is part of how we go to markets, how we serve, how we drive customer outcomes and customer success. So I think that level of thoughtfulness and sophistication, I've seen it in a very, very small number of places, certainly, there's a long way to go.
13:00
Do you have like, let's say if you were too because I'm sure you've seen this through your career, like when something starts as an idea, then there are specific steps that are taken to bring the idea to scale or is there any guidance or learning that you can share from your, I would say by the way, your awesome track record in sales.
13:24
Thank you, and by the way, I did also work on Demandbase.
13:30
Totally
13:30
And obviously, I can't keep a job.
13:33
I knew there was a reason why all the stars were connected and I mean this podcast or this episode was meant to happen.
13:43
For sure. Look, I think scale, it's easy to say, it's easy to put on a spreadsheet. Look, this is what is my business gonna look like in three years, five years, 10 years. That's the easy stuff, right?
The hard stuff is, I think two-fold one is its change management, right? It's how you get organizations to operate in a different way and Kelly. you alluded to this, right? You'll have to change how sales operate, how customer success operates, and how frankly the product operates because the product needs to make decisions that impact the partners and ultimately the customers.
That's the part I enjoy about this, this kind of partnership ecosystem world is if to do it well and to do it at scale, you have to touch all those functions because if you don't, it's not gonna work. That I can kind of guarantee from first-hand experience.
That's number one. Number two, and again, this, I think ties back to some of the things you guys unearth in the survey. It's so common that one of the blockers, one of the most frequent, one of the top blockers ends up being systems and processes. Why? Because I talked about change management, which is about how you get people to work differently, but then you hit these barriers.
You know, my current implementation of pick your poison CRM doesn't quite do that. So I have to accommodate, you know, how I work with partners to what my system limitations are. That's not how the world should work, right? So it obviously helps, but we're [HubSpot] is doing a lot of things to enhance that and I know Salesforce is as well.
But just as one example of a category, you know, if the CRM process is set up in such a way that it doesn't have the right framework and data model for engaging one or more partners, you gotta fix those things. Right? So those are some of the lessons I've learned, I think one change management to how to identify the systems and processes in such a way that from the get-go you can adjust, adapt, and enhance those so that you know you can get to that scale.
15:47
Would love to hear your advice on the change of management because it was interesting when people were asked on the survey what was blocking them the first answer was the lack of internal expertise in partner ops, which makes sense to me. I think there's a talent shortage of senior leadership because this is so new and the technology that has made it possible and the APIs are so new. But also it's a function that still needs to be invented and matured. So I think that that is part of the problem.
But the second reason was an internal misalignment and the third was executive buy-in which I think both go to the change management. And I thought there was some good advice from the contributors at different ecosystems on how you go about and do the change management. But I was wondering if you have sort of high-level advice on people who need to do that work in their organization and what tactics they could deploy.
16:42
Yeah, when I read those points, I was not surprised either and I do think collectively they do fall under the change management framework or moniker. I advise a bunch of companies and one of the first things I always say is to look to make this work. It has to be, there has to be alignment, and not just a C suite, but even the board, right? Because again, as we were saying earlier, it involves a lot of different functions and if everybody doesn't understand the implication of this to the implication of building partner ecosystems, operating differently to their respective areas of control, then it'll fail. Right?
I think the tactics that I've learned or tried to deploy are there's a lack of education, right? People have had perhaps experiences from the old-school channel world as you were saying earlier, right? As like it's been this linear arm's length, they, you know, they do one thing and one thing only there is some kind of a discount structure in place and some rules of engagement and then it's hands off, that's not the way it works anymore.
So a lot of it is educating broadly the C suite, often who come from a typical direct sales background and either haven't had to or haven't had the chance to, I should say, with the opportunity to work in more of a partner rich or even dare I say partner first model, which is starting to happen as well.
I think first and foremost is education and showing and that's not just saying, hey, do it or, you know, do it this way. I think it's showing examples. I think it's telling stories, right? And that's why I have the reason that in my podcast I've been bringing in practitioners for them to expose again at scale. How did ServiceNow do it? How did Salesforce do it? What are the lessons learned? Where do we hit our heads on the wall? I would not say it was all seem seamless and perfect. So how do we learn from people who've been down that path before? So I think that's number one, Kelly.
Number two, I think there is an element of data that historically was one of the biggest challenges in this category, which was attribution. And you know, trust in whether someone from the partner organization came and told the CRO or CEO, hey, partner X contributed, you know, in this form to this relationship, they helped us win the deal.Well, egos get involved and you get people saying that, wait, wait, no way. Right. So how do you use it, have you heard that before anywhere anytime?
19:27
Mean everybody wants to take credit for the same deal? yes.
19:32
Do you mean the salesperson only gets the commission if the partner wasn't involved?
19:37
We've never heard any of this.
19:39
So I think that's item number two is how do you build confidence in the data and confidence and trust that the actual what's being presented has been aligned has vetted the party on the other side is saying, you know, all parties, the partnership team, the sales team because of the success team, the partner themselves are, they're all saying the same, you know, the same thing, right? So that's number two.
And then number three and again this is where things will continue to evolve. But I think the more we can deploy proper tools, right? Not bastardize other tools, but they can become more systematic, become more real-time. It's not just a reporting function. It's here's how the deal is progressing, here's how the business is growing, here is how the relationship with that partner is influencing key accounts, and so on.
So I think there is, you know, more and more systems and tools like Pronto and others I think will come into that where you can say, hey, we're actually managing this as part of the business and it's not somewhere back in the, you know, in the back office just for reporting purposes.
20:53
I would say the one thing that you just said, which is super interesting for me because I was sitting with, let me say 45 or 47 VPs of value engineering last night right at this event that was first put on and they also said the same thing, they said for our function to succeed, we have now gone all the way to the board.
In any of the conversations that we've had in the last like 6 or 7 months or even a year, right? I have not heard specifically that the partnerships function was elevated to the board level so that there was visibility. And again, that's one of the reasons why like Kelly and I went down this path to create enablement around the partner ops report so people can take this content and then create slides that are executively oriented. And then some slides are going to be more individual contributor oriented. But either way, there's gonna be a bunch of content created from this asset that helps us all win together.
21:52
100%, and by the way, I think the tide is changing. I hear less resistance. I think there's more openness to it. But the show-me factor still is high, right? And the more we can show through examples, through conversations, through exposing people who bend out the journey and again, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's not all ever gonna be all rosy, but hey, here are the issues we faced, and here is how we address them, or there are two or three approaches to tackle those I think will change the game.
22:23
Do you think the current economic climate at a macro level is going to sort of push back the progress that the partnership has made? Because you know, one problem you face when you have executives and board who are not already bought into this model is to look for what's immediately sourcing revenue, right? And things that take longer to ramp up, which are often partnerships but also aren't currently being attributed in as robust as fashion as it could be, seems more vulnerable. But I'd be curious what your thoughts are on how much of a sort of threat that is to the progress that has been made because I agree in the last 2 to 3 years you've seen, it starts to appear, in the dialogue more in other departments.
23:05
I'm smirking because I have the exact opposite view and interest and here's why are we in a recession, who knows, you know, different data point of different answers to that. Are we going to go into one probably without getting into the politics of it? I think this is a smart time for companies to say, hey, if I need to batten down the hatches and maybe not hire as many as I thought, I might plan to have fewer people in sales, sales, engineering, customer success, etcetera.
Guess what? Building your partner ecosystem is a way to grow without incurring those fixed costs of additional people and so on to your partners can give you leverage and the ratios start to work in your favor because now you have people who are helping top-of-funnel middle-of-funnel sales deals, customer success. So I'm actually in the belief that in fact, a downturn is an amazing time to invest in the partner ecosystem.
24:16
I feel like we're gonna have to have part two of this podcast. I think I got a lot of value just from episode one and I feel like all three of us can spend all day talking to each other so maybe we'll have the all-day podcast one day but closing the first episode out right? I mean who is like and this is like very like like at the moment question right? Who would be like three other people that you would recommend that we bring onto the podcast? We're all that like let's say your level right? Because we need more guidance from people that have been there, done that at scale.
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