Ecosystem Alpha where Strategy meets GTM Execution

Most software companies enter Asia Pacific and Japan the same way they entered Texas.They hire two reps, translate the deck and wait for pipeline to appear.Carrie Mott has spent twenty years watching that approach burn cash in a region that holds two thirds of the world's population and 33 separate sets of rules.What you will learn- Size Asia Pacific and Japan as 33 markets instead of one theatre, so your entry budget stops funding the wrong motion.- Borrow regional credibility from local partners, media and analyst relationships rather than paying for brand awareness from scratch.- Open a market with one anchor customer voice video instead of an event sponsorship, and carry local proof of return into every deal.- Stop judging ecosystem programmes on lead volume, and hold them to the measures that match how trust is actually built.- Run your riskiest go to market experiments in the region where leaner teams move faster and revenue exposure stays small.About the guestCarrie Mott is Founder and Managing Director of Flywheel Marketing. She has led marketing and sales development across Asia Pacific and Japan for FullStory, Dynatrace and PagerDuty, and she ran marketing for Asia and India at Salesforce. Earlier in her career she ran exhibitions at Gartner and business partner ecosystems at IBM.Mott is credible here because she has sat on both sides of the regional argument. She has carried a regional number inside global vendors, and she now advises the companies trying to enter. She has also filmed more than one hundred customer success stories, so her view on what earns trust comes from the edit suite as well as the forecast call.Chapters00:00 Introduction and guest background06:36 From psychology to partner ecosystems10:15 Why APJ is 33 markets, not one region15:41 Start with the customer's customer27:52 Why trust is now distributed33:20 Running the region as an innovation zone38:34 Customer voice video as the proof engine45:58 Rapid fire and closeVisit ecosystemalpha.com to book a free workshop and pressure test your regional partner model before you spend another quarter on direct hires.

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Most partner strategies do not fail because the partners were wrong. They fail because nobody agreed on the customer first. Kirsten Newbold-Knipp has watched that single mistake drain pipeline, inflate CAC and make perfectly sound ecosystem bets look like bad ones.

What you will learn

• How to spot the moment a vague ICP starts costing you retention, not just win rate
• Why the ideal customer profile and the ideal partner profile belong in the same working session
• How to separate channel, strategic product integrations and ecosystem incentives so handoffs stop breaking
• Why the fight over attribution burns budget, and what to hold teams accountable for instead
• How intent based ICP plays, what Newbold-Knipp calls ABM light, now work on 20K deals rather than only on whales

About the guest

Kirsten Newbold-Knipp is a go to market advisor to B2B software leaders. She has held the Chief Marketing Officer seat at FullStory, the Chief Growth Officer seat at Convey and the Chief Executive Officer seat at AskNicely, and she spent three years as a Research Vice President at Gartner. Earlier she built the first product marketing team at HubSpot.

What makes her view unusual is the sheer number of seats she has held. She has owned marketing, sales, growth and operations inside the same companies, so she has argued both sides of the attribution fight and the ICP fight from the inside. That range is why her advice lands as commercial judgement rather than theory.

Chapters

• Introduction and guest background
• Why a fragmented ICP breaks partner strategy first
• Customer profile and partner profile belong in the same cycle
• Who actually owns the partner portfolio inside a company
• The HubSpot agency channel and the segment call that unlocked it
• Attribution, pipeline ownership and incentive alignment
• The joint selling deal that became the largest in the firm's history
• Rapid fire: overrated metrics, ABM light and who to listen to next

Listen and actHead to ecosystemalpha.com to book a working session on turning your ICP into a partner strategy that holds.

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Most AI projects start with the tool. That is exactly why so many of them return almost nothing. Riaz Kanani flips the question, and the answer changes what your team does on Monday morning.

What you will learn

• Why starting with the growth blocker beats starting with the tool, and what that does to your return
• How to escape the sameness trap so your content stops sounding like everyone else's
• Where corporate IP leaks when teams work through base models, and what MCP servers change
• What it actually took to find a 42 percent saving on one operational process
• Why an IKEA chatbot ended in a new billion dollar revenue line instead of 6,500 job cuts

About the guest

Riaz Kanani is Consultant and Founder at Connected Paths, an AI implementation consultancy based in London. He spent nearly nine years as CEO and Founder of Radiate B2B, the intent data and advertising platform, after building behavioural email and marketing automation at Silverpop and Lyris.

His view carries weight because he ships the thing most people only discuss. He builds MCP servers, runs client transformation work, and reports the numbers on both sides of the ledger. That mix of operator scar tissue and current build experience is rare among people talking about agentic AI.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and guest background

08:16 Building two sided ecosystems from video advertising to ABM

10:05 Escaping the AI sameness trap

19:13 How AI thinks, and why you have to challenge it

23:27 Protecting corporate IP and expert knowledge

29:00 MCP connectors and the move to an AI operating layer

46:10 The revenue receipt, 42 percent saved and the IKEA turnaround

56:34 Rapid fire and pay it forward

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Every enterprise has spent heavily on AI and analytics, yet most executives still pick up the phone to get a straight answer. Rishi Bhatnagar built and sold a sixteen year systems integration business before founding Quaeris to close that gap, and he argues the friction between digital data and human decision makers is costing companies billions every day. This conversation unpacks why adoption stalls long after the technology already works.

What you'll learn:

- How to spot when a partner conflict is actually protecting your customer relationship instead of harming it.

- Why only 5 percent of enterprise AI initiatives reach full adoption despite 85 percent getting started, and what closes that gap.

- How token based agent architectures quietly inflate AI costs, and what a learn once agent design does to your bill instead.

- Why meeting users inside tools they already use, such as Microsoft Teams or WhatsApp, drives higher AI adoption than building a new destination.

- What separates an empathetic partner from a partner who protects only their own margin.

Bhatnagar is the founder of Quaeris, an AI driven data search and BI platform that helps executive teams get direct answers from their business data. He spent sixteen years as CEO of Syntelli Solutions, an analytics systems integrator he grew to seventy five people through early partnerships with Tableau and Spotfire, before founding Quaeris in 2020.

His perspective carries weight because he has sat on both sides of the partnership table. He has sold analytics services as an integrator, built products designed for integrators to resell, and now designs agent architecture around token cost and enterprise governance rather than the growth metrics that benefit the AI labs the most.

Chapters:

• Introduction and guest background
• From Ernst and Young to Tableau: the first partner bet
• Horse and jockey: managing channel conflict without losing the customer
• The last mile problem: why speed of data is not speed of decisions
• Building Quaeris: headless BI and meeting users where they already are
• Why most enterprise AI pilots never reach full adoption
• Token costs and the case for agents that learn once
• Rapid fire and closing thoughts

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Blue Triangle spent three months testing whether automated outbound still works. Thousands of calls produced one answer and zero sales conversations. Lance Buchholz explains what he does instead, and how he funds a long term partner strategy while carrying a quarterly number.

What you will learn

▹ Why thousands of automated calls produced one answered phone and no pipeline

▹ How to run near term, mid term and long term revenue at the same time

▹ Why partner sourced revenue and partner counts mislead a board

▹ The single ecosystem number that predicts churn before the renewal

▹ What to do when a buyer takes your demo and builds the product with AI

Lance Buchholz is Chief Revenue Officer at Blue Triangle, where he owns the full number and answers to the board for it. He has spent roughly 25 years in partnerships, from a billion dollar business with thousands of signed partners to small companies with no partner motion at all, and he has been through a couple of exits on the partner side.

Buchholz moved from partner leadership into the CRO seat, so he now approves the discounts he once had to argue for. That is what makes his view useful. When he defends partner investment, he defends it against his own quota and his own board conversations, not from the sidelines.

Chapters

• Introduction and guest background
• Bear's Paw and the reason it exists
• The automated outbound experiment and what it returned
• Near term, mid term and long term revenue in one plan
• What AI changed about buyer conversations
• The warning signs that a customer is about to leave
• The revenue receipt: an OEM partnership that opened a new market
• Rapid fire: overrated metrics, attach rate and book picks

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Most partnership leaders spend their careers optimising for incremental referral volume. Gautham Pandiyan has spent his building the kind of ecosystem bets that show up in a balance sheet. This conversation is about the ones that transform a business and how to know which partnerships deserve that level of conviction.

What you will learn:

▹ Why partners amplify product-market fit rather than find it, and what that means for how you pick your strategic bets.

▹ How to build a fail-fast framework that lets you evaluate a major partnership in five months rather than eighteen, and pivot without destroying the relationship.

▹ What a clear value exchange looks like in practice, and why expectation misalignment kills more strategic partnerships than bad fit does.

▹ How Gautham's team scaled to $150 million of revenue through AWS Marketplace at Qualtrics, and the cross-functional effort required to get there.

▹ How to build the perception umbrella inside your business so executives and stakeholders see partnership momentum, not just end-of-year results.

Gautham Pandiyan is Global Head of Cloud, SI & Affiliate Partnerships at Pendo, where he leads the company's Hyperscaler, GSI, and consulting partner motions. He previously spent four years at Qualtrics scaling the AWS partnership to nine-figure Marketplace revenue, and has held senior alliance roles across multiple high-growth SaaS businesses.

Chapter overview:

• Introduction and guest background
• How to choose the right strategic partners: product-market fit and natural pull
• The difference between push and pull in channel-first versus overlay models
• Evaluating failures and knowing when to pivot
• Hyperscalers in practice: the Qualtrics and AWS story
• Expectation setting, the perception umbrella, and managing internal stakeholders
• Rapid-fire round and recommended voices

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Growth at all costs is over. Boards no longer ask how many people you hired. They ask how efficiently you can grow, and that question is reshaping how revenue leaders scale across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

What you will learn:

▹ Why treating EMEA as one market inflates customer acquisition cost, and what to do instead

▹ How to trade a share of AE headcount for partner headcount without losing quota on the street

▹ The give to get motion that keeps local partners active long after referral business dries up

▹ How to match global SIs, regional integrators, and boutique consultancies to the right customer segment

▹ A real example where going partner first lifted conversion by up to 50 percent in six months

Guest bio:

David King Harris is VP Sales EMEA at Optro. He has led European, EMEA, and global teams through both the growth at all costs era and the efficiency mandate that followed, with earlier roles across martech leaders and IBM. He speaks in commercial terms because he carries the revenue number himself.

Chapters:

• Introduction and guest background
• Why EMEA is a collection of markets, not one
• Local partners and the last mile of trust
• Matching partner types to your ideal customer
• Where partnerships should sit in the organization
• The efficiency pivot after COVID
• The revenue receipt: partner first results
• Rapid fire and close

Rebuild your EMEA go to market around efficiency.

What you will learn:

▹ Why the partner team's job is not to bring a list of integration requests to product, and what to do instead to validate real end-user value before anyone writes a line of code

▹ How to choose between a large, hard-to-work-with partner and a smaller, easier partner, and why internal relationships and prioritisation willingness often matter more than market reach

▹ What it means in practice when a product manager asks your partner team a hard question, and why the correct answer is sometimes no

▹ How to build the working relationship between engineering, product, and the partner's technical team so integrations move fast without becoming liabilities

▹ The most common mistake product teams make when building toward a partnership, and how to avoid building something customers will never use

About the guest:

Agata Bugaj is Chief Product Officer at ButterflyMX, a property access technology platform serving multifamily, commercial, and student housing. She brings over fifteen years of experience leading product, UX, and engineering teams across B2B SaaS and enterprise eCommerce. Prior to ButterflyMX, she served as SVP of Product at FullStory, where she scaled the product function from Director through to SVP level.

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Most B2B SaaS companies treat integrations as a favour the product team does for the partner team. That framing is killing revenue. When product and partnerships operate in silos, the integrations that get built are the wrong ones. The ones that do get built often go unused. And the network moat that should be compounding never forms.

Agata Bugaj, Chief Product Officer at ButterflyMX and former SVP of Product at FullStory, joins Sebastian Hoelzl and Will Schnabel to break down how product leaders and partner teams can work together in a way that actually moves the commercial needle.

What you will learn:

▹ Why the partner team's job is not to bring a list of integration requests to product, and what to do instead to validate real end-user value before anyone writes a line of code

▹ How to choose between a large, hard-to-work-with partner and a smaller, easier partner, and why internal relationships and prioritisation willingness often matter more than market reach

▹ What it means in practice when a product manager asks your partner team a hard question, and why the correct answer is sometimes no

▹ How to build the working relationship between engineering, product, and the partner's technical team so integrations move fast without becoming liabilities

▹ The most common mistake product teams make when building toward a partnership, and how to avoid building something customers will never use

About the guest:

Agata Bugaj is Chief Product Officer at ButterflyMX, a property access technology platform serving multifamily, commercial, and student housing. She brings over fifteen years of experience leading product, UX, and engineering teams across B2B SaaS and enterprise eCommerce. Prior to ButterflyMX, she served as SVP of Product at FullStory, where she scaled the product function from Director through to SVP level.

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Most e-commerce SaaS companies enter new international markets the same way: hire SDRs, spend on localised ads, and wait. It is an expensive bet that rarely pays. JD Klausner has spent his career proving there is a faster, cheaper, more defensible path — one that runs through the partner ecosystem.

What you'll learn:

• Why the brute-force international expansion playbook is mathematically broken in 2026, and what a partner-first market entry looks like at the execution level — not the strategy deck level.

• How to separate your GTM partners from your product partners before entering a new market, and why confusing the two is the most common reason international launches stall.
• The three-step entry sequence Klausner used at Loop Returns to open the UK market — partner-first to fill product gaps, pipeline validation before hiring local AEs, and localisation only once revenue is real.
• How to kill "commission breath" on your sales floor: the operating model for getting your top AEs to treat local partners as revenue accelerators rather than margin threats.
• What "partner density" actually measures, why it is the single ecosystem metric worth reporting to your board, and how it predicts revenue velocity in a new geography before you have closed a deal.

JD Klausner is VP of Global Partnerships at Commerce (BigCommerce). He previously served as SVP and General Manager, International at Loop Returns, where he led the company's expansion into European markets, and before that as VP of Partnerships at Yotpo. He has spent the better part of a decade building partner ecosystems and channel operating models across e-commerce, martech, and global logistics infrastructure.

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.

Most SaaS vendors assume their software sells itself. Ivan Stegic has spent nearly two decades proving otherwise. As CEO of TEN7, a Drupal agency whose mission is to Make Things That Matter, he has built a business on a different premise: that trust — not technology — is the real currency in any ecosystem. In a world where the % of spend on B2B software and tech services continues to increase, the agency that own the client relationship owns the deal.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why the agency's role in a SaaS partner ecosystem is not to sell software but to act as an unbiased trusted advisor — and why that position is commercially more powerful than any reseller arrangement.
• How open source technology, specifically Drupal, creates a structural cost and flexibility advantage that proprietary all-in-one suites (Adobe, Sitecore) cannot match — and how to make that case to a non-technical CEO.
• The mechanics of a co-sell win: how TEN7 and Pantheon jointly replatformed a health system client, transferring trust from agency to hosting partner and closing a deal neither could have won alone.
• Why Ivan is sceptical of agentic AI at scale, and why he believes open source will dominate the digital experience market by 2030 — including what that means for how agencies and SaaS companies should be hiring right now.
• How a values-driven partner selection process — built on shared mission and ethics, not commercial incentives alone — produces stronger, more resilient client relationships and higher NRR.

Ivan Stegic is the Founder and CEO of TEN7, a Minneapolis-based Drupal agency with a mission to Make Things That Matter. A physicist and psychologist by training, Ivan has led TEN7 since 2007, building a fully distributed team that designs, builds, and cares for Drupal-powered digital experiences for mission-driven organisations across healthcare, education, and nonprofits. He is also a Strategic Board Advisor at Augmentum Global and a longstanding contributor to the Drupal community.

Chapter overview:

00:00 – Introduction & Ivan's background

04:30 – Why SaaS vendors need service partners to unlock enterprise

10:15 – The agency as trusted advisor: unbiased evaluation in a noisy market

17:00 – Open source economics: TCO, flexibility, and owning the code

24:30 – Values-driven partner selection and the ethics of co-selling

31:00 – The TEN7 × Pantheon co-sell: a health system replatform

37:45 – AI scepticism, agentic risk, and what open source dominance looks like by 2030

42:00 – Rapid fire: hiring, predictions, and who to interview next

If the operating model underneath your partner programme was never designed to succeed, start with a conversation. Visit ecosystemalpha.com to book your investment audit.

Legal Disclaimer for Ecosystem Alpha: The Podcast

1. No Professional Advice: The content of this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice (legal, financial, tax, or otherwise).

2. Views Expressed: The opinions expressed by guests on this program are their own. Ecosystem Alpha does not verify the accuracy of the information provided by guests, and their appearance does not constitute an endorsement of the guest or the entity they represent.

3. Professional Titles: Guest titles and business affiliations are provided as of the date of recording. Ecosystem Alpha makes no representation regarding the current status of a guest’s employment or their authority to bind any mentioned third-party entities.

4. Limitation of Liability: By listening to this podcast, you agree that Ecosystem Alpha and its hosts are not responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on the information provided in this program.