Today I had one of the most interesting discussions around a topic I don’t believe is discussed enough amongst product and leadership teams early on in SaaS growth - what happens when a PLG focused SaaS org launches into partnerships with service providers to support their extensive customer base or break into new markets?

To answer this, I asked Alec Biedrzycki, Head of Partner Marketing @ Jasper.ai. Al cut his teeth in partnerships at people-driven org HubSpot. Then Al went to product-led SaaS rocket ship Airtable. Now, he’s with one of the most excited products in Ai… 

But, what Al will explain in this episode is - just because the product-led strategy is working so well does not mean a partner program is going to have immediate success. 

PLG products bring inherent challenges to partnering with service providers. 

We’ll explain… 

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

In this episode, we are going to focus on a very specific partner persona - a recently-acquired enterprise-focused digital agency - to learn how an acquisition presents new challenges and opportunities in partnerships, w/ Nick Thomson from The Stable.

Today you will hear: 

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

Welcome back, everyone! I hope you enjoyed the last episode where Will Taylor and I chatted about the viability of a partnerships-led-only growth strategy. 

I’m the luckiest podcast host again this week because I get to speak to an ecommerce thought leader who now runs a niche product and partnership offering supported by someone who cut her teeth in partnerships at Gorgias - an ecomm platform known to have a well-oiled partner program. 

Coming to this episode today is Nik Sharma, CEO of Sharma Brands, HOOX, and 1180 Media. With him is the amazing Dillon Duchesne, who leads partnerships and biz dev for HOOX.

The theme of today’s episode is How CEOs need to be heavily involved and support a 1:1 partnerships strategy to ensure its success - especially early on. 

Today, Nik, Dillon and I chat about:

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

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Will Taylor asked this question on LinkedIn;

Before we go into much detail about that question from my friend Will, we should first ask ourselves the question; "What does partnerships-led mean?"

Is a webinar I do with another company partner-led? Or, is that just solid efficient thought-leadership content marketing?

Is an integration a partnership? At Partnerhub®, we have integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, Sendgrid.... Does that mean they are our partners?

And when I set up an affiliate tracking funnel and payout system for my product... Does that mean those bloggers who signed up and shared my link are my partners?

Now, I brought Will to the show to help me answer: 

Read the full article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/partnerships-led-growth-only-strategy-most-viable-alex-glenn/?trackingId=QD367pFTTP2ngINOu14Q%2FQ%3D%3D

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

This podcast is recorded at a perfect time for us with HubSpot and Salesforce Partner Tracks around the corner, we are working with our friends at Dealhub (represented today by channel leader Omer Fuchs, VP of Strategic Alliances) to prepare their partner track with the intent of finding and aligning with more solutions partners like our guests on this episode.

With him is Diana Gonzalez Sr. Channel Manager at RevPartners and the Robert “RevOps” Jones, the Sales Director at RevPartners.

This type of partnership is one where the agency becomes a power user and product expert using their own process optimization first, then role it out to the clients. This is a very different relationship than say Shopify has with their partners (agencies don’t run their internal sales ops on top of Shopify). Which means, the level of product and partnership synergy can either happen very quickly, or fall flat due to some internal stakeholder on the partners’ team not being fully sold on the product for their use, and therefore the senior person is now in the middle getting requests from the tech partner manager that they have no answer for since that persons’ team is not bought into using it. In short, this type of partnership almost has to be a power user first.

The big question then becomes - does this type of agency-partnership have to start with them using the product internally, and becoming a power user?

Then begs the question - does that mean you have to sell them an account? Or do you gift them one?

In either case, on this episode, we will be reviewing:

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

When your solutions partners ask and need referrals back from you in order to continue sending you referrals, here are some ways to keep that reciprocity engine going, in a manageable and scalable way.

Scenario 1: You are managing hundreds of partners and you cannot possibly feed them all.

Scenario 2: You are new or simply do not have customer access to be able to effectively intro partners to users.

In either scenario, your goal is not to try and wedge your way between AE's and Users with a partner intro... You're a partner manager - you don't have direct comm's or relationships with end users. You cannot and should not be the directly-referring party.

Instead, your goal is to become the valuable consistent "conduit" for traffic and then referrals your partners receive from your brand.

On that note, here are 5 ways to generate referrals back to your partners...

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

Links mentioned:

I cannot say enough about our guest today. Barrett King, Sr. Manager - GTM Strategy, Global Partner Ecosystem at HubSpot, joins me to run through how go-to-market with solutions partners. We’ve spent some time on previous episodes (refer to the episode with Justin Graci if you like this topic) on partner GTM, but I cannot tell you the listeners we have given you enough on the subject until we hear from Barrett.

In this episode, we will highlight 3 key areas of partner GTM:

When you’re ready for partnerships

What partnerships are and will for your org

And how can you further develop that output

Are partners offense or defense

Misconception of “Affiliates” vs “Partners”

Defining personas

Attracting partners

How much of this is on sales vs marketing

What is bare bones enablement

What matters most to early partners

When and where certifications come in

What partners need in year 2

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

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In this episode, I get to interview a newly-acquired agency’s founder Brandon Amoroso from Electriq, a top Shopify marketing agency, and one of his top partners, Noah Rahimzadeh who runs Partnerships at Malomo.

This episode focuses on how to make your way into the preferred tech stack of a top digital agency.

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

Shout outs:

https://www.windsor.io/

https://www.superfiliate.com/

https://www.okendo.io/

In today’s episode, we hear from one of the best partner-marketing leaders on the planet in Mark Kilens, and one of the most experienced partnerships people coming out of sales, Airmeet's new VP of Partnerships & Channel Sales, Rhonda Scher.

Rhonda was deep into sales before working in her first partnerships role at Hopin. Mark cut his teeth building HubSpot’s renowned partner and user training programs before running marketing at companies like Drift and now he’s CMO of Airmeet.

During our talk today, the three of us work to uncover:

This is an excellent episode to share with your marketing team or CEO.

But as usual, before we start, please hear from our amazing sponsors.

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.

‍

Logan Lyles, Head of Partnerships at Teamwork, and former VP of Revenue at a top B2B agency called Sweetfish (important context to know about him going into this), is joining us because he is having to ideat, present, gain buy-in and execute on partner marketing as we speak in his first year at Teamwork.

On this episode, Logan and I will discuss:

Another tactical episode you should listen to and maybe share with your marketing team or CEO.

But as usual, please listen to a word from our fantastic sponsors :)

Co-marketing articles mentioned in the episode:

https://www.particl.com/blog-posts/seoroundup

https://smith.ai/blog/how-to-track-smith-ai-live-chat-in-google-ads-google-analytics

Sponsors:

Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts.

‍Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.