How to Build Successful Partner Led Growth

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Transcript

Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow, especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.3s Hello, everyone. This is Victor with Varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did You Know? Podcast. Today we're talking about a topic that I'm personally very passionate about. We're excited to have Roman Kirsanov, who's the CEO founder of Partner Insight, with us today. And Partner Insight is a partner relationship management platform powered by AI. And the reason why I mentioned topic that I'm personally passionate about is because I've been in the partnership building business as a distribution for most of my career. So I love this topic and super excited to have you on Roman. 

U1

Thank you so much Victor, for having me and happy to be on. 1.4s

U2

Yeah. So again a lot of amazing questions that we're going to go over but can you give the audience maybe a little bit about your background, your founder story? Yeah, definitely. Hi everyone, I'm Roman, founder of Partner Insights. I started my career as an entrepreneur and then led go to markets and partnerships in string of tech companies and I had a chance to work across the entire range of tech companies minion that's from smallest growth stage. Sort of 30 people startups to $1 billion plus revenue and had a chance to build partnerships at scale and this included relaunching the entire distribution channel launching 1.6s

U1

partnership program with hundred different retailers which is mostly loyalty program to strategic partnerships and started partnering site when I realized that partnerships is changing and there's a lot of partnership managers on the market today who don't have great tools and they don't have great insights in terms of what is the best practice in partnerships. Who is doing what? How to optimize your process and how do you engage your partners? How to scale revenue as partners. 1.2s That's that's my story. 

U2

Yeah, yeah, no, love it, man. And yeah, very similar with you. I've had, you know, throughout my career, Roman, just building partnerships and definitely a lot of it is just spreadsheets and relationships and those are important. But I think just like salesforce, right? Is a CRM and pioneer that space, which is customer relationship management. I think more teams need to treat partners the same way and a lot of times they use those similar CRM tools to manage partners or they use spreadsheets and that is 1s just not efficient. Right. It's not built for partners. But why did you decide to go after this problem to solve specifically? 

U1

Right. 1s I think the different levels of maturity, partnership maturity in companies typically companies start playing with different partnerships in the early stage or growth stage depends on the niche and that typically shows some signs of results. But then you need to scale partnerships. And if you scale in partnerships, you need to introduce different processes, frameworks and tools because without them, you cannot really scale it efficiently. I'll give an example. I had a chance to lead partnerships in one of large tech companies, so I launched them, engage sort of hundreds partners. Everything was going well and then we wanted to scale it. We hired a couple of people and then everything became kind of really unmanageable without good processes and good tools. And that is one of the reason why I started partnering inside because I realized there are hundreds and thousands of teams on the market who have the same problem. And you mentioned CRM. And CRMs are great, obviously, and they're typically single source of truth for everything related to your customers. But what partnerships are doing a little bit different. They also bring you potential customers, 1.3s but you cannot really put them in CRM in a way that would be trackable for both you and your partners. And for you to scale partnership efficiently, you need to have this middle ground where you would. 2.1s You know, work together with your partners, you have shared visibility and you have ability to make changes on both sides and then track them. And that's why via building partnering site, which is a platform which gives you and your partners a way to collaborate in one place while you going to be managing everything in one place as well. 1s

U2

Yeah, first of all, I'm a big I'm big on branding. I feel like the name of the company matters. It's good for branding, right? It only helps. And I think you have a great logo and company name just fits what you're doing so well. So, first of all, I love that. I think you hit something right on the head there, which is CRM. You can track your partners and opportunities, but in order to open that bilateral communication and working with your partner, because a lot of times you're tracking a lot of things communication with your customers on CRM, but your customer may not need access to that bilateral engagement, but partners do, right? And so it's actually really expensive and very difficult for CRMs to then open up that bilateral communication and you got to pay additional modules and actually really expensive. And so I love kind of what you're doing. And there's a popular term in the market today called PLG, which is product let growth. Meaning it's a lot of tech companies that 1.2s say, hey, your product should be leading the growth and that it should be self served. The customer should just be able to come on and use the product and continue to give value. But I personally believe another type of PLG, which is partner led growth, is so critical, especially in this economy and way of go to market because everything is so saturated. 1.6s Partners are such a great distribution. You get one right, partner, you could access hundreds, right, if not thousands of potential customers. And that is to me, I think a lot of people know about it, but a lot of people haven't really take advantage. But why do you think you've been in this space for a while, Roman? Why do you think partner led sales or partner led growth is important? 1.7s

U1

Right. Great question. So, first of all, let's just touch PLG quickly. As a product like Growth, I think product like Growth is great and there's a lot of great conversations and knowledge and frameworks about it. But 1.9s I think this is sort of like a myth that 1.5s product like grows can can scale company and help companies to acquire all revenue that 1.2s they need. So what I've done recently over the last half a year, I deconstructed 2s gross motions of top sauce companies from Atlassian, which is like an icon of PLG. And Atlassian brings, if I remember correctly, something like third of their revenue is coming from partners to companies like Scroud, Strike Box. I think box 40% of them of their revenue is coming from partners. And the list goes on and on. I think in HubSpot, for example, which is like a CRM product, they 2s

U2

close to 45% is partner led revenue. So that's why I think 1.4s it is like essential. And the question is not 1.8s if the question is when, right? And the question is when is much more difficult question because 1.4s companies. 2.7s Tend to struggle with partnerships in the early stages because they need to do everything and partners require a longer engagement cycle. 1.1s They do not necessarily 2.1s bring revenue quickly and so on and so on. But I think despite all of that, the trend is to engage in partner light, motion, sort of area and area. And I think this is driven by multiple things. One of them is 2.9s direct acquisition, sales and marketing becoming more and more expensive, and we can go into why. And then second of all is that companies 1.6s

U1

integrate more and more with other solutions and more of them sort of starting to do platform motions. And that's why I think partnerships are taking off. I think it's a little bit longer answer to a question. 

U2

No. I love these insights. You've been in the space a long time. So have I. Again, me and you can literally talk for hours about partner let growth and partner let sales. We're just passionate about it. I love the numbers you threw out, right? Like 40% and 30% of revenues. I think companies sometimes don't fully understand that. I think partner, whether you're talking about cold calling, you're talking about outbound, you're talking about inbound, you're talking about marketing, there's so many ways to go to market. And a lot of people who haven't done partners or have success with it, I think just don't. It's something new, right? 1.4s That's all it is. But. 1.2s I kind of have a quick thought that kind of leads to our next question because you mentioned that sometimes partnerships can take longer to materialize, right, can take longer to generate results. And that's why maybe a lot of companies are not focused on it. And I totally agree. But I do believe that if partnership done right and that usually is a combination of finding the right partner, but then it's also the right messaging and product. Because if your product says to me it's all about can you put yourself in the shoes of the partner? Right? What does that partner you're trying to recruit wake up every single day wanting to achieve? And if you can position your product and your service and messaging to help them achieve their goals, then partnership, it can quickly generate results very quickly and much faster because the partners already have a group of customers that they can access. So I definitely agree. It's definitely an art. 1.3s But partnerships can definitely, I think, generate results pretty quickly if done right. But the next question, which is kind of feed off of that, what do you think are some of the challenges that companies face when they try to build partner programs based on what you've seen throughout your kind of career? 2.9s

U1

Right. 1.1s There are so many, frankly. And I think 2.3s we need to acknowledge that. First of all, partnerships have huge potential and literally there's no tech company in the world. I mean, there's a very few, but the majority of big names in B, two B, SaaS for example, they all have very sizable part of the revenue coming from partners. They all scale with partnerships, 1.1s but at the same time, if you look at stats, something like especially in the early stages, something like 60% of companies engage in partnerships sort of reasonably early and then 70% of partnership fail. So there's a lot of 2.1s trial and error in this motion. And I think what companies need to do, they need to, first of all think as an MVP of partnerships kind of launch small partnership with maybe like one or two partners and see how it's going. Was it scalable or not? I've done it myself and other great people in our podcast recommended that. So I would definitely recommend that. And also you mentioned about better to guess story, right? Like meaning that. 1.8s When you want to do partnership, right, you want to engage with potential partners. It's a very crisp better together story. You need to say like in few sentences what is a reason why your partnership is going to be great. 1.1s But not only you need to think about your potential partners, you need to think through the lines of their customers. You right. 1.3s This means that if you 1.1s come with them with a very better together stories, that would explain why their customers would benefit from this partnership working together, I think that the probability of 1.4s success of this partnership itself and also engaging this partner would increase much faster. 1.1s

U2

Yeah, I love what you just said there better together story. I think sometimes a lot of partner teams or companies that looking to get into partnership feel like partner management needs to be like a big team 1.3s and sometimes yes and no. Obviously the more people you have, you can better support the partners. But to kick off a successful partner program, I think definitely they should have a tool like yours, like a PRM to manage because you can't manage what you can't see and track right? And so I think definitely technology and tools are important, but that better together story. Sometimes if you have that right, the partners are just going to take it over and move things forward for you. And sometimes that's really the goal. It's not meant for you to have hundreds of partner support managers who are programmed to be successful. 4.1s Again, so many things, we can kind of COVID on that. But obviously PRM or at least partner relationship management or partner management type of tools haven't really taken off. I mean, it's been around. There's definitely some companies and more traditional companies that has been in the space, but no one and also the space hasn't taken off like it has for CRM and Salesforce. Right. You know, they're like the top or the hub spots. It hasn't really taken off. Why do you think that is? 1s Traditionally. 

U1

Yeah, 1.2s another great question. So first of all, let me touch on what you said about size of partnership teams. Typically partnership teams are not large even in large companies, so they're typically like 1.6s special forces rather than army. And typically it starts with one person and it's going to scale still like a few people and they always like a Swiss army knives. And this is one of the reason why I wanted to realize that this is a problem on the market since that's why we wanted to build this product that we are building 2.2s because typically few person partnership team manages dozens and dozens, sometimes hundreds and sometimes thousands of partners. And it's very chaotic. As a partnership manager, you need to work together with your partners and then you also need to work together with your sales team and market team because you want to pass cool communication with your partner to your partners. You need to pass back all the sleeds and stuff like that. I think to your question, why PRM? 2.5s Space hasn't taken off. I think one of the reason, because 1.6s old school PRM products work well for old school software companies like for example, 2.8s sort of Oracles of the World 3.6s which which had a large partner network and they needed like a portal and there was a pool from potential partners to this large vendors, they needed information and so on. So 1.2s these old school products were not scaling into a newer set of software is because they were built for different use cases. They were built for large vendors. And I think there's a new wave of software companies which also started to. 1.4s Engaged partners earlier, meaning that the more customers of the market today and the more software companies who have partnership teams versus it was five years ago, 20 years ago, 1.5s there's a new 1s SMB segment emerges and therefore I think there's an opportunity for a new breed of tools and the tools are actually 1.4s popping up on the market. We are one of them and we like you to 1.7s have some good adoption and some good visibility on the market. So I think 1.1s to summarize, I think partnership space is still 1s information. 1.6s At least the new generation of partnership space and tools are up and coming. 1.7s

U2

So one follow up question to that, Roman, 1.3s is I've seen 1.6s other PRM tools in the past and maybe a little bit similar to salesforce concept in a way, which is salespeople want to go sell, right? They don't want to go enter data. That's not what people like to do and they have to do it, but they maybe don't use it as often as they should. And so I think same thing for PRM. And it's not just how do you get the partner managers to use it more, but also how do you get the partners themselves to use it. Because I think for the platform too, you kind of need both sides to use it for really the best value to come out, right? And so what do you think about that user adoption side? Not just on the partner manager side, but also kind of incentivize or make the partners want to use it? What do you think? Yeah, that's a great question. Huge pain points, especially of all tools. 1.3s You write that for partnership team to adopt any tools, they need to see value and for them to see value, just like I mentioned about Better Together story, you need your customers to see value from these partnerships. Similarly here. 2.2s Partnership team needs to see partners to see value from products. I think 2s traditionally engaging partners through software 1.9s is not an easy task, meaning that 1.6s if you want your partners to benefit from this tool, it's an it be very easy for them to use it. And companies, especially today, when they use multiple different software tools, they hate to use yet another tools. 1s I think the workaround around that 1.1s would be that you need to provide as much value and make it as easy as possible to use this tool. And this is what we've been focusing on. So what we've done 2.7s for 1.3s shortened time to value for partners, we make it extremely easy to use. It's truly bi directional. I think one of the advantages of our product versus other products is that it's not like we are pushing communication to partners or pushing different collaterals to partners or whatever, or pushing different leads to partners. We are making it bi directional so partners can engage with you and you can engage with partners. So it's very easy. So they see value fast and it's very easy for them to use it. But, but other things that. 2.8s Ah worthwhile mentioning is that one way or another you need to introduce some processes 1.8s for you to scale partnership program, right? Even if you don't use any tools, any software, you still need to 1.1s come up with certain frameworks partner boarding guides, step by step processes, different set of materials, ways for partners to send you leads, 2.4s

U1

ways to approve those leads or disapprove them so you don't have any channel conflict between partners. So my point is that whatever you are using, you still need to 1.1s create processes for you to scale your partnership program. And the earlier you do that in the context of your partnership organization given if it's growing the better. 1.7s

U2

Yeah, I think 1s just like any tool, people buy SAP, people buy NetSuite, and I don't think they fully they know what they want to achieve, but they didn't really put it together a strategy. And oftentimes that's why implementations are so challenging and a lot of things become shelfware. 1.4s I think, like you said, even if you have the best tool of, you still need to have a partner strategy. Because once you have a strategy, then you can put together a process. And when you have a process, the tool can execute on those processes. Right, 1.7s but obviously, AI has been a very hot topic around the world in every industry for the last six months or so. You guys also are adding in some AI features. So how what does the AI do and how does it help with kind of the partner side of things? 

U1

Yeah. 1.4s Just following on your previous question in terms of helping partner teams to make this collaboration with partners easier and 1s helping partners to. 2.3s Do as much self serve activities without needing to ping your partnership teams. Sort of spend time on that. 1.3s We edit AI features 1.2s to help sort of both sides and they are available on our tool. One of the features that we've done. So for example, you have different leads from your partner and you want to either approve or 1.6s remind your partner you can do it. 1.5s Typically you would write to an email saying hey, I approve it and it takes you like five minutes or ten minutes. But when you have multiple partners, it all takes time. So now all of this is dropped. It by AI takes like 5 seconds and you press another button and then this message is sent to your partner. Your partner for example, can get automatic FAQ answer. So AI would query all your FAQ base 1s and would answer contextual question to your partner. Other things that we edit is report routine. So previously if you're a partnership manager or if. 1.8s Um, 1.5s like an employee. And you need to write up what is happening with business partner. Obviously you can take a look on the graph, but you can also press a button. And I will create write up listing all achievements that you've done over the over the course of this certain period of time. Like, here's an opportunity pipeline. Here are the tasks that we close. Here are the outstanding items. AI will help you to create partner meters agenda 1.1s in a minute instead of you spending half an hour. So all of the small things will make your life easier. And we add in more pictures to incorporate powerful AI into your sort of day to day partnerships. 4.2s Please continue 

U2

now. Go ahead, Roman. 

U1

I wanted to say that we also created not AI features, but they help you to 1.3s introduce processes into your partnerships. And we call it Flow, which is like step by step workflows. So you can create different templates for partner boarding or for partner marketing or whatever activities that you run with partnerships. So we wanted to make it flexible and you can share with your partners. So instead of them just searching for your marketing materials or sales training, they can go step by step using the products and sort of everything in one place. 1.6s

U2

Yeah, I think, again, going through the platform with you, it was very well thought out and a lot of the typical challenges of administrative work and follow up and all those things. I think you've been in the industry so long, you saw that and you're using AI or other feature to solve it. I think it's really going to help with user adoption. So as we kind of wrap up with maybe a last question to get insights from you is obviously everybody's looking for ROI nowadays 1.2s return on that investment. And we talked a lot today about managing partners, how to manage the partners that you have 2.4s any suggestions on how your platform, your service can help partner teams recruit more partners, or any suggestions on how partner teams in general can 2.2s recruit more partners. Like, what are some good strategies, or is it where they should look? Is it certain industries, a certain area? Where should they look and how can they grow? Maybe the partner program? Yeah, that is a great question. And frankly, we thought about it a lot. And I thought about it a lot. 2s We have an MVP of mapping different partner networks and suggesting and we had this MVP some time ago, before this recent, you know, big AI boom that we are experiencing right now. But what I realized 1.3s by testing this MVP with clients is that it's really difficult to. 2.6s

U1

To come up with very good partner suggestions. And because of the reason I mentioned to you before, which is you need to think through your potential customer lens, right? Every good partner manager thinks through the potential customer lens, like, who is my potential customer? Who are the companies who have access to this potential customer and what are their potential joint benefits or joint solution, which is better together story that would be beneficial for this potential customer. And in different stages of their growth, companies focus on different 1.8s segments, which is potential customers. And therefore 1.9s having like a blanket 1.3s solution which would give you different partner suggestions is a little bit tricky. But like I mentioned, we do have an MVP and we probably going to be developing it later on. 1.3s But for now, I would suggest partnership managers, like CEOs, do the things through the lines of their customers think what are the ways 1.3s to find or to piggyback on someone else sales motion, which is how do you partner with different companies? And if they would come up with a very strong value proposition, both for customer and for partner, the ROI is actually pretty incredible. I think one thing that you can easily start, you can start with very simple steps. You just partner marketing. You start marketing together and you can see very quickly if there's any 1.5s feedback, if there's any growth in this channel, and then you can scale. So ROI on partnership activities could be pretty high. And one thing that people can explore, I've been writing a lot about that in my newsletter, and we're doing a lot of podcasting on YouTube with great people who led partnership in companies like Atlassia and Loom and so on. 

U2

It. Yeah, 1s it's been great having you on the show with all the insights and conversation. The last question we always ask our guests is, you seen a lot, you've done a lot, you're building a company. 1.2s If you have to give the audience one advice, which, whether it's a personal advice or a business advice, something you're passionate about, what do you think that would be? 1.9s

U1

Good question. 6.6s I've been thinking recently about way we approach different goals. And 4.2s if you sort of push and you get to certain results, 1.5s you always feel like and you may feel like you hit a certain threshold or ceiling or something like that. I think there's always an opportunity to push a little bit harder and try to come up with creative ways to expand. And this is related to the personal growth. It's very related to partnerships, it's related to finding new insights. And I've been applying this principle while 1.3s writing my newsletter, applying this principle while building the company, and so on. So push and then push a little bit harder. It's a little bit Tony Robbins, 2.5s but 

U2

there was a lot that's the entrepreneur spirit that we all have, right? So, no, again, great conversation and excited to partner with you guys to bring your solution to partner teams. So, yeah, no, really appreciate your time. Roman, 

U1

thanks so much. Victor, it's been a pleasure. And I really love that you are passionate about partnerships and in the right way because I think there's a lot of conversation about how partnerships are great, but sometimes these conversations don't have substance. And I think that the right way to approach this is to see the both sides of the picture, to see that potential bubbit see also challenges. And really excited to not only have this conversation, but to work together with you. Thanks so much and looking forward to our collaboration. 1.9s

U2

That was an amazing episode of the did you know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.