Nearbound Podcast

What is up PartnerUp!

Conner Jeffers, CEO of Aptitude 8 and hapily, joins the show to share his expertise on the Hubspot ecosystem. He explains why Aptitude 8 is NOT an agency, Hubspot’s evolution into being an increasingly robust solution, and how he manages the challenges of running software-based (hapily) and services-based (Aptitude 8) business at the same time.

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

What is up PartnerUp!

Today’s episode is a crossover episode from the Marketing Together podcast hosted by Logan Lyles. Jen Spencer is the CEO of SmartBug, a full-service revenue-driving digital agency. She shares essential tips for partner marketing. She touches on things like balancing multiple partners and analyzing the reasons for success or failure of a partner marketing campaign.

Hope you enjoy!

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

What is up PartnerUp!

Sometimes our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses. 

To make progress, we must strike the balance between planning ahead and allowing our direction to change as we take in new information. That partner that’s smaller than you, with a smaller marketing team and audience? Your CMO may be onto something when they say a co-marketing event with them might not be useful to your company.

Optimistic, visionary people often make great partner managers. They’ve always got ideas. Always making new friends. These are great strengths that fit well with the responsibilities of partner work. But we must learn to be aware of and compensate for our shortcomings. 

There’s such a thing as too damn many partner ideas!

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

What is up PartnerUp!

Fredrik Mellander, Head of Partnerships at Teamtailor, joins the show to discuss all the ways Teamtailor is leveraging partnerships to get ahead. We discuss multi-way collaboration, internal buy-in, and dividing teams by region. 

We also talk about deal registration, intent level, channel partners, and churn. How can we better understand how nearbound is different than channel? How can we divide teams by region and empower partner managers to work with their regional marketing, sales, customer success, and product managers?

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

What is up PartnerUp!

How do you deploy the battle-worn tactics when they haven’t been developed yet? How do you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to revenue-generating strategies and marketing plays? 

You experiment, measure the results, and try again. And again. And again. But where should you experiment? How much time and resources is it helpful to spend experimenting vs doing what you know?

Blake Williams, CEO and Head of Partnerships at Ampfactor, is ready to help you go from partner-intrigued to partner-actioned. “How can we expect people to do something they’ve never done before, if they’ll get fired if they mess it up?” asks Blake. 

Blake lays out an 80/20 framework: 80% of your budget and resources toward what you know works (established and tested GTM plays) and 20% to experimentation. “What’s my newest, highest, and best use of these funds?” asks Blake. “New data, new decisions, what does that look like today?” We touch on the intersection of partnerships and demand gen, attribution for partner-generated success, how CMOs can use partners to hit their numbers, and how to measure the success of a partnerships strategy. Can you get ahead through experiment?

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

What is up PartnerUp!

The field of partnerships is in a major state of innovation. The “go to” strategies, tactics, and takeaways are still being developed. 

Kelly Sarabyn, platform ecosystem advocate at Hubspot, joins the show today to discuss her podcast, Unlearned. She also dives into how she’s been using surveys around partnerships, and we brainstorm how surveys could be leveraged (after using ChatGPT to come up with powered-up questions) to understand market attitudes toward partnerships from non-partner people.

Can those who use ChatGPT get ahead? Can we use it to better understand negotiation, leveraging data to get an affirmative answer about which relationship management tactics are most useful? 

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

What is up PartnerUp!

We’re joined by Rich Lewis-Jones and Stan Wasowicz from SmartRecruiters. Rich, VP of Sales, and Stan, Global Director Alliances, are the ultimate killer duo. From demo engineering to working with service partners to building processes to keep track of and share information about your partners’ org charts, Rich and Stan are covering so. Many. Partner. Bases. 

They’re seeing results. As they detail in this call, the sales team recently closed a unicorn prospect and Rich (VP of Sales) is the FIRST to say - it was because of partners. 

We thrash into the details of thinking of it as “our” ecosystem vs “the” ecosystem. Rich and Stan discuss what’s worked for them in terms of taking on a trusted “advisor” or “consultant” role with prospects when recommending partner solutions.

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

What is up PartnerUp!

We’ve got Raja Nucho with us this week, and he’s been from sales to partnerships and back again, then back again again. He understands the need for “Nearbound Surround” in every step of the customer journey.

We dive into his perspective from the services side, the sales side, and the partner side across multiple companies. We explore the tension between driving a sale as quickly and simply as possible and bringing in multiple partners.

We even get into some wild ideas about a future in which no one is an employee, but everyone is a partner. Let’s go!

Oh, one more thing. PLXSummit.com is now live. The 80s dystopian future is here. But there’s always a way to overcome. This year, THE ONLY WAY OUT IS TOGETHER. Pre-register today.

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.

You're in the trenches. The good news is, others have been there before you and lived to tell the tale!

Today's podcast was recorded live at our First Friday event War Stories with Legends. 

Jared Fuller interviews legends of B2B SaaS, Peter Caputa and Jill Rowley.

Peter Caputa built HubSpot's agency program before executive alignment was ever established and Jill Rowley won one of the most important deals in Eloqua's history by partnering!

Kick-back and hear how they did it.

Three digit podcast club what’s up?! We’re so honored to enter the 100+ podcast club with this release of episode 101. Thank you to every listener: From the OG’s who were here at the beginning and new alike who are tuning in for the first time, thank you. We truly are here to serve and help you on your journey.

For our first guest joining us in the three digit era of PartnerUp we have Alexander Buckles, CEO of Forecastable. 

Alex’s entrance into partner land came via the sales organization. So we’re talking Nearbound Sales, people! He was a top performer at Marketo Adobe who always was partner friendly, but never fully committed to the motion or his partner team. 

That is, until he switched sides so to speak and led the Perkuto sales org (a top Marketo partner) to doubling their revenue by going all in on co-selling with the very company he left. He gained so much conviction in the power of selling together, he founded Forecastable on his journey. (Oh hey, if you haven’t caught our new show Selling Together with Jessie Shipman and this topic is top of mind for you, go sub, now!)

This episode is packed full of snippets for those hard conversations you’re having in the field right now with sellers and sales leadership alike. 

Never miss an episode of the world’s number 1 podcast on partnerships by subscribing to PartnerUp on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of us learning out loud.

Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn or Twitter and we’ll highlight your commentary. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and always comment back or respond to emails/dms. Hey! We’re real people. 

You can check out all past and future PartnerUp episodes and subscribe to the world’s number 1 partnerships newsletter, PartnerHacker Daily (PhD) at https://partnerhacker.com/.