Jason Yarborough, Head of Partner Accounts at Reveal, joins Will and Tom to discuss nearbound - what it is and how you can use it to accelerate partnership programs.

Bart van Zantvoort, Business Development Manager at Channext, joins the show today to talk productive partner recruitment. Channext helps you run and track partner enablement, marketing, and sales. 

Bart shares strategies for marketing with your partners on LinkedIn and activating partnerships successfully.

Chris Lavoie, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Arrive, joins the show to discuss his outlook on partnerships strategy. “A lot of partner leaders are lazy in their assessment of who is a priority,” claims Chris. Partner leaders need to be honest about their own team’s capabilities. “They look too much at the total addressable market and not enough at what their own ability to capture that market is.”

Chris gives tactical tips for how to address this alignment between vision and action. He helps listeners understand how to shrink their definition of who a partner is.

Do you already have a favorite partner community that serves as your go-to resource? Do you have a few that you use for different things? Or are you newer to the partnerships field and still looking for your niche, your people that you can learn from and help as you go about your journeys together? 

No matter where you stand as far as your personal partnerships community, this episode will help you get more value out of your current resources and network. Ben and Tom talk all things partner community, from ideas they have about how communities could be more valuable to the mindset with which to approach communities as your joining.

Ola Ogungbemile, Customer Success Manager at PartnerStack, joins us to discuss internal buy-in, customer enablement, and how and why to get involved in the larger partnerships community.

Working with different types of partners, from affiliates to referral partners to resell models, Ola has an eye on a broad range of areas in the current partnership landscape. He’s also an active member of the partnerships community, which was how we connected with him.

He delivers tactics for success planning calls, building a partner process, creating a weekly internal newsletter with metrics and anecdotes, and more. Tune in to tap into the pulse of the partnerships community.

Michael Jed Lantis, Sr. Alliances Manager at Delegate, shares the things tech partners think service partners care about are not always actually that important. Formerly the Channel Partnerships Manager for the Salesforce ecosystem at Chili Piper, Michael knows the ins and outs of the Salesforce app exchange from both the tech and services partners’ perspectives.

Michael unpacks how service partners choose partners and the challenges presented by enablement requirements. He shares that service partners often aren’t incentivized greatly by rev share or commissions and would rather have co-marketing assistance for customer success stories, webinar hosting, and other initiatives. We discuss the importance of having separate ecosystem managers to address the nuances of large ecosystems like Salesforce and Hubspot.

In today’s episode, we discuss how you can use AI tools to improve your efficiency as a partner professional. AI can be used by partner professionals to make content with partners, to create ideal partner profile blueprints, or to analyze data about groups of partners. 

If you’re a small or even one-person partner team handling dozens or hundreds of partners, you’re definitely going to want to tune into this one. We get into the nitty-gritty of what ChatGPT and other tools can and can’t do for partner professionals.

Maurits Pieper joins the show to discuss the partner program he’s built out over the past two years at Dixa. As head of partnerships, Maurits has uncovered successful strategies and tactics to secure internal buy-in from department heads and the C-suite. Maurits covers ‘partner enablement’ as well, reinforcing the idea that it takes time and support for sellers to learn partners’ products. 

Maurits covers challenges he’s faced as the partnerships motion at Dixa has grown, and how those challenges have shifted with the growth of the department. He brings an optimistic perspective as he talks through examples of people in other departments at Dixa who are excited about partnerships. We touch on how to balance different partnerships and provide some frameworks for thinking through how to divide the accompanying workload.

Today we’re joined by Katie Bentz, Channel Partner Manager at Aircall. Katie discusses the importance of working on positioning tactics with your partners. Katie discusses the unique challenges and opportunities presented in working with agencies. 

The group discusses how to find win-win situations between software solutions and service-based partners. Tom and Will ask Katie about what to focus on with agency partners during initial meetings and how to keep engagement high as the relationship continues. They touch base about how to understand the digital landscape and build trust with partners and their customers.

On today’s episode, Will and Tom discuss how to go about working with your marketing team. How should you approach them? What questions should you ask about their upcoming programs? How do you help them do more with less and build a more efficient organization?

Will recently attended the B2B Marketing Exchange in Phoenix, AZ. This gave him insights into what many marketing leaders are currently working on and worried about. Will and Tom unpack these insights and give tactical instructions for how to foster incredibly productive relationships between partnerships and marketing.