Busting the Myths of Partner-Led Growth with Bryan Williams

Speaker A: Welcome to Investable Partnerships where we talk to industry leaders about growing revenue generating partnerships. I'm your host Des Russell and co founder of Partner Elevate. And the daily battle for partner success is forcing channel leaders to rethink how to maximize their relevance and value so they can be a driver of partner impact. So let's jump in and find out how. Hi there. Welcome to another episode of the Investable Partnerships podcast. I'm joined today by my guest Mr. Brian Williams, a first time guest but a very good friend of mine, um, that um, we've kind of known each other in the industry for the last three or four years. We've gone in a couple of junkets together and everything like that. Brian, why don't you say hello to the audience.

Speaker B: Thanks and uh, good to be here. I don't know why it's taking so long for us to get together to do this recording. We've been talking about it. So uh, look forward to uh, chewing a fat and having a laugh throughout this session.

Speaker A: Uh, absolutely. I think if there's any, anyone I've got chemistry with on the uh, on the podcast, it's going to be you. It's absolutely going to be you. Okay, so um, uh, you've uh, started Hockey Stick Advisory about three, three years ago. Um, you've come from the uh, from within the industry of partnerships. Tell our audience a little bit about your history. Um, we never land, we, we never learn partnerships. We land in partnerships. So uh, take us, take us on a bit of a history tour.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah you're right. Right. Like everyone ends up in partnerships maybe from sales, marketing, customer support or thrown into it along the way. Um, my story in partnerships actually starts way back. You know, typical Aussie headed to the uk uh, on a backpacker dream after university. And I uh, found myself in the outbound role actually working in Germany, in Luxembourg and also the Middle east for about three years. Yeah and those were days, you know, before you had Firmware Lucia or Sales Loft, any of the sort of tools and have a outbound script and away you go to. And um, throughout role I was working with financial uh, advisors who had set up around the world where there was expats. We ah, would earn more money and let's go find these expats and like let's look after, set up childcare planning, retirement, superannuation funds. And so I had an outbound AE role fresh out of university with a good attitude and um, you know the dreams to earn some high commissions to keep traveling which is what I did but along the way, uh, I developed some referral strategies and I went deep into building some partnerships and I went from success looking like making 100 phone calls a day or booking multiple meetings to running events, working, building relationships with and through partners, building referral strategies with existing customers pipeline and I nearly was able to hang up a phone. So as a result I got that going and I had this light bulb. I was like holy crap, is this better way to be able to go about it? And so that's really where I sort of got the first aha, uh-huh, light bulb moment of partnerships. And you think those who are working in partnerships, it's either they experience that and if they can get exact buy in from the top down to bring partnerships to life as an enabler, there's a real underserved opportunity to um, really harness partnerships as a growth shower.

Speaker A: But I suppose you didn't know you were doing partnerships or that was the motion that you were running. You were just doing what you thought was the A's role.

Speaker B: That's right, yeah. The role was it's like how do you fill diaries, how do you get all these appointments, how do you get it going? And rather than call cold lists and bang for your phones, I found another way to do it which was really efficient, allowing to play more golf, travel more and do lots of things and still be achiever. And I thought this is pretty good. So you know, from those early days throughout my career I've always seen partnerships as a growth driver and uh, I was the first hire a sales hire at vend point of sale been over a decade ago, um, in Melbourne. And you know I grew into a senior account manager role sales and doing all the things. And um, we saw those who, no surprise if they're using partnerships where we're adopting them, they're growing better businesses, they're more efficient, their bigger accounts are stay longer and then further along the journey. When I got to um, work at Xero and grow the ecosystem over about a five year period we saw so many companies wanting uh, to grow and build to the Xero API to add more value to their platform and it was good for Xero because we didn't have to go and build all these features. Um, however I just, I saw too many upcoming companies wanting to partner and just not really know how. And I thought, well, you know, where do companies actually go to learn partnerships in market? It's, you know, you can go to sales training or you can bring that sales enablement in. You can do marketing degrees or Post grad marketing degrees. But where do you learn partnership? So in lots of ways I'm m, you know, harnessing a lot of that loan to ip. I've had uh, through that sort of growth, hyperscale journey of what I went through to help the next generation of upcoming companies come through about, you know, how can they grow with and through partnerships. And that's what we do at hockeytick today.

Speaker A: Lovely man. And so that kind of takes me to this, this point of um, I don't know, I think someone can't remember who it was. On um, on LinkedIn, uh, this week said the, the, the, you know, we talk about the decade of the ecosystem and it's not the decade of the ecosystem. Everyone's trying to put a different phrase and you know, um, uh, it's in Australia we say, you know, it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. It is a duck.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So let's just call it what it is. But um, specifically I wanted to understand this, this term partner led growth because I, I think there is um, a lot of nuance to that. There's a lot of confusion in the market. So you're helping up and coming startups, um, scale ups. Scale ups, startups more the scale ups. You're talking to a CEO and uh, he's heard partner led growth. He's heard partnerships, sure. Explain, like, can you explain what in your view is partner led growth?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So with the lens of talking to the C suite, the founder, the CEO, uh, right. It's partnerships aligns to the company strategy and is an accelerant across, functionally across the board to help you get to where the company wants to go. What it's not, it's not something that's stuck over in a corner and can you fill a fire hose of customers next week, next quarter? Which is, it usually starts that conversation. I've had a conversation with the director of sales who, you know, leadership workshop, who said to me, literally like I want partners to fill our funnel like over next quarter. I don't really have time to talk to them like can we do, can we get that going next week?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's, it's so common. So to, to answer your question, when we're sort of thinking through it is, you know, does, does the CEO, uh, want partnerships to fire and contribute towards lead generation and high qualified leads to come through? Is it a case that they want, they've got a churn problem and they're saying, well if we get some partners involved earlier in the customer cycle they can be onboarded better and look after them. It's not as much support to it. Well, sometimes it's a case of well, we don't want to go build these features. And so it goes back to the basic strategy principles of build by partner. So depending on what the CEOs uh, direction is and what is their North Star over the next year, the role of partnership slots in behind that. Um, and then the North Star from a trends, um, you know, comes downstream from there.

Speaker A: So let's talk through some scenarios um, that our audience could kind of um, uh, uh, assimilate with.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure.

Speaker A: Um, CEO, three years, three years down the line they've maybe got a, maybe a series B B funding and there's like okay, cool, drive down customer acquisition costs scale without adding more uh, people. Um, um, what's the first thing you're going to be doing or talking to that CEO about when it comes to partnerships?

Speaker B: Yeah. So you know, what's the direction of the company over the next three years? Where are you seeing this growth? Um, do you plan to, are you in stage of investing for growth? You want to hiring big sales team? Are you getting expanding the different GEOs? What does that look like? What uh, does the bottom line costs look like? Are you looking to consolidate? Um, what does that look like? So come back to your question before like partnerships has got two growth drivers. The main ones I see it's either can it help top line growth? Can we go faster with three partners or can we grow through partners to protect bottom line costs in specifically capex costs so we don't have to necessarily hire a really big sales team.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: So we often start the conversation there and then from downstream you're able to work out what is the role of partnerships relevant to the company.

Speaker A: So you create an alignment there really at the, at the strategy stage. Right. Um, how many drop faces do you get or drop jaws do you get when you tell them actually how long it's actually going to take to really see that top line growth number?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, it goes in the same conversation around the alignment that you can pull salespeople in and try and fill the funnel next week. But partnerships is built upon growing alignment with your partners externally and getting it going. And so they need to be on the journey with you for that one, two, three years of that. You're actually building the partner capability. The way I often explain it is most companies will have a very defined sales process. You may have your BDRs, your SDRs, your account execs your account managers, your partnerships, for some reason has not been ever treated the same. It's always been treated with like, oh, could we just get a partner manager in? Um, we might know a bunch of people, the potential people we used to work with. Can we just get them to fill up the funnel? Right. You know, so that's why we sort of, we come in and we build a systematic process to actually go through those motions to make them realize that there's accelerated upside to come if they stay the cause and stay invested with it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because one of the things too common is um, very simply like, oh, we tried partnerships, it didn't work.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And when you go for that alignment session and show them some benchmark in case what great could look like that, uh, you get them back on the bus equally. You have to align and say, right, this is an investment that we're building the capability. Same way you, you don't expect to just put a salesperson on board and then say, go bring in sales next week. You're building this operational rigor.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, uh, you know, partner elevate, we see the same thing. It's this, um, uh, when you, when you doing capability building or you're in the, the world of capability building, the capability building is something that comes at a, um, there's a system behind it. Firstly, you have to have a system and I love the fact that you have built and are building and scaling the system out. So first you need a system. Secondly, what we think you need is actually you need um, both a near term and a long term vision. And I think that the long term vision is really where we even at partner elevate. We see, uh, leaders kind of tune out. They go, you're telling me I need to wait two years to completely uplift the capability in my channel. I don't have the time, the time, the time to do that. Um, so I'm, um, a massive, massive, uh, sort of fan around people having a process and then following that process. But it's so hard to follow the process because when revenue's chasing you, you kind of just go, uh, and do anything you can to get that revenue in. And you probably destroy a lot of relationships along the way because we all talk about partnering, trust and relationships. It's really, really key. What's the good part of partnering where trust can't be broken or shouldn't be broken? And what's that part of partnering where you should not break trust, but you should just break the relationship block? What are those signals Yeah, I think

Speaker B: the first one is to stay away from a uh, transactional. That mindset of like, what can you give to me immediately? And the gap which comes up usually that 2 to 4 month mark after everyone's really excited about partnerships is really validating. What is your partner value proposition? And the way we think about it is you just turn it upside down from the partner's perspective. Like right now, what is partnerships contributing towards your business then? What are you actually contributing to someone else's business ongoing. And so how could you be next quarter next okr. Uh, for your key partners, contributing to them ongoing in a meaningful way? Because a lot of what you're saying is you're effectively validating a pilot or some green shoots and building momentum. And as you get that in, when everyone gets excited then they're like, what else can you do to be able to do it? To get to that sort of two year horizon where it becomes integral part of how you do go to market we through others. So it's interesting, you know, you made that really key point before. It's quite common about six months of engagement, we're sitting down with the same execs and they're like, oh right. Well, um, partnerships, we want them m to deliver next week on this one because they, from the top down they've probably got that pressure from the board or from investors around what partnerships can deliver. And we often have to do like a reset session. It's like, hey look, we've met, we've built this momentum, this around it where we're growing into it, we're going to keep watering it around it because um, it's important to stay the course because it can deliver and we say you can, but you have to, you can't give up on it and you have to make sure that you are building sustainable, predictable growth for others as well as yourself.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Now there's this adage of, well it plagues our uh, industry, which is quality versus quantity.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, do I have too many partners? Do I have too few partners?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What's, what's happening? Um, why they're not working? I suppose the first thing is if you say do, if you ask the question, do I have enough partners? Something's not working.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: And then the other thing is, well, actually what's the, what's the mindset that you should actually be going into building your partner strategy? Yeah. When it comes to this view of equality over quantity, um, and the 4800 opinions that are all on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot out there, isn't there? Um, you know, like, I think like getting started going, they're all strategic partners because you've gone through emotions where you've prioritized and you're choosing deliberately to work with a select few. It's not always, um, you know, thought that way. Um, yeah, I would definitely have the mindset of quality and going deep. And you picture if you had two to five partners and just getting going, like, how can you, and why don't you actually like just try and 10x those partnerships and get in built into each other's organizations rather than try and set up partner managers to just try and recruit everyone? Because you can go neat, you know, you can go deep and narrow or you can go broad and weak. And uh, you know, very commonly companies will go like, oh yeah, we've got all these partners. And you're like, well, what do they all contribute? And they're like, oh, occasionally here and now. And then I, uh, just. Unless you set up a scale and you actually got a big enough team to actually service all those and nurture them and grow with you with you know, an advanced partner program. And I always say partner program is always building, never built. You don't just sit and forget them.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Um, you know, you're just not going to bear the fruits of what the partnership could be. I really like that point you made where um, you know, just around the fact that you don't actually um, go and just get a fire hose of partners and then suddenly think like, why aren't they delivering? It just doesn't work that way.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The other thing is that I find um, funny in this conversation of too many partners, too little partners, is the fact that um, uh, the way I look at it is that there's actually a finite number of partners in the industry, um, depending on which industry you're in.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So for partner elevator as an example, you know, we, we, we work with technology vendors and distributors in building their downstream partner capability. Um, and the, the, the funny thing is that um, there isn't a infinite number of partners. So, um, uh, but the mindset is that there is this recruitment mindset of just go find another, just go find another partner. And with leaders all the time, um, not to say stop recruiting, but actually start to use more data in your recruitment process, um, to uh, look at the blind spots, those blind spots that you don't see or you don't get to understand through a, uh, one on one Conversation or a partner pitch meeting or running through your partner value prop and uh, presentation. What are some of the characteristics that you see um, people get, have blind spots about in partnerships that they don't actually see through the typical recruitment sort of process that everyone would go uh, um, go with today I reckon it's

Speaker B: just broken by design. Like the like getting go recruit more partners is either like an account executive go sign up more logos or deals like success is not having ghost agreements with you know a mountain of partners to start off with. Right. I was chatting to HubSpot here locally last week and therefore what they're looking across their solution partner network is can the solution partners continue to deliver the amount of uh, referrals and leads that they can to do it or should they go and recruit more partners to fill the pipe? And it comes back to your point before if you can build the capabilities with those who are already onboarded, they're familiar with your software, product, service, application and go deep with them, why don't you turn them good to great rather than actually try and become this um, one to everything which is really wide uh barrel. So I haven't seen it work too often on that aspect.

Speaker A: Yeah and usually when it does work it works for a while and then maybe 12 months later you just see a whole bunch of partner roles rifted because um, it's not working.

Speaker B: Yeah And I think the other point is um, which we see pretty common is you know you make dimension. There's not infinite amount of partners it's worth doing the time. A lot of companies don't do this around actually going assess who is your partner's partners and what I mean by that you want to go recruit these partners. Well right now they've got existing capacity, capability, commitments to working on whatever draws the revenue for them. So if you think you're going to come in, recruit from day one they're going to stop what they're doing, clear their diary next week, invest time, energy and resources that you've got some promised land offering to them. Um, you might, you really need to come in pretty aggressive and pretty attractive otherwise you're just wasting your time. Once again.

Speaker A: Yeah. Recently um, you've been attended your webinar where you guys um, uh, yourself and who the other two.

Speaker B: Yeah. So did Channel Boost which is part of Code Spar and also with Microsoft. Uh yeah, we launched our own that's the first sort of state of partnerships uh report across APAC where we interviewed a bunch of leaders because uh, we wanted to see like what's the pulse check and where a company's sort of sitting at down here.

Speaker A: What does that look like and what's some of the data points that uh, you could share around sort of where people at particularly um, in the APAC space.

Speaker B: Yeah. Some of the findings were firstly, uh, two thirds of them are all actually investing more in partnerships. So that's good signs that they want to do more. And as a company they're recognizing that they can't keep doing it alone. So that's a positive indicator. Um, you know, looking across the board in terms of where they're spending time, energy, effort, a lot of referral, um, partnerships activated. Um, co sell motions I think are a bit of underutilized. I think companies can do a lot more with and through each other as a uh, white labeling and still not really taking off to the. Across the broad spectrum, uh, for what it can be. But it was actually the findings were the same for what you mentioned before. We struggle to find and recruit enough partners and the partner enablement pieces that they're sort of working on to try and get right.

Speaker A: It's, it's such a look at apac and you look like um, apac. Apj. Um. And you look at the space.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I think you and I have had this conversation before. It's like the last frontier, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It's like North America.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, Emir.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then you go what, where can we expand to? And you go oh, let's go all the way to um, uh, Australia or let's go to apac. And then you go English speaking and you kind of start to use that playbook. And one of the things you and I actually gave a great presentation. It was a fantastic presentation. You should go and watch that one, um, in um, Denver.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Can you remember some of the points that we uh, that. That we're talking about around the typical motions we. We tend to see in APJ or APAC for partnerships and why you should never do uh, your partnership strategy like that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Was that. How was it? Yeah, I can't. Right. I think there's two views like are you expanding into APAC or expanding anime apac. Right. And I think for how things differ down here, you know, I do see the partnership maturity level in general, um, behind or following or what North America is because of just a bigger market and bigger concentration around how do they show up and how do they partner. So I think there's an opportunity for companies down here to, to rise the tide per se. I think when I'm seeing um, North American companies come down in APAC or companies from Europe. They're typically looking for land and expand. Who can help them gain market traction. Is there a few um, loss leader, you know, customers that they can acquire. What's always the case however is um, regional product market fit. It's, it happens both ways. Companies come in and think oh yeah this is amazing. It worked in North America, it didn't work here. I don't know, maybe doesn't handle GST here or companies going to North America which had a dependent channel here and then when they go to North America it doesn't fire because the mechanics are different. So I think regional nuances, it has to be carefully considered. And then the other one for APAC is you know Japan and Singapore. Hong Kong is very different based to how Australia and New Zealand operate as well. So you know it's nice to cut up if someone's in North America and they cut up the geography and say oh yeah it's, it's apac. Well you've actually got markets within there.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. We, we did a bunch of capability assessments across apj um in the distribution channel um where we looked, we looked at 13 global distributors go to markets and one of the interesting points that we found there is that the strategies that were being deployed were completely different in terms of uh, magnitude. So um, places like um, uh which I didn't realize this but ASEAN is a massive hardware based um partnership channel in the tech space. They lead with hardware and services is a, um is something that you, they add on afterwards and most of the time they give the services away for free.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So when you're trying to go and build, go to market motions in those particular um, uh regions and you are positioning your partner strategy or the value prop around more, more revenue for the partner because you've got this product that unlocks X. You go to uh, one of these ASEAN countries and you will just get blank stares from partners because it's like we give, we give our services away but then you go to more mature uh, countries like if you go to India um, or even you come uh down to Singapore, um, their services absolutely controls the way partners are making money and revenue as well. So you really need to like either get someone locally who um, there's a couple of research companies but you really got to spend some time understanding that market before you go and invest you know, um, solidly.

Speaker B: Yeah, well it comes back to that statement for who's your partner's partners. Like you want to if you're launching the Sydney or Singapore, like, what are they spending their time, energy and effort today? Where are they driving their revenue, their own leads and where they do it? And if you come in with a completely different playbook, you won't even, it's not even worth the meeting because you're not relevant to them.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so, um, when you think about what you're doing at like, I love what you're doing at Hockey Stick right now. And kind of we've been on it, we've been on different journeys, um, since uh, that first meeting in uh, Miami. We spoke. Beer on me.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: You know, crazy. Um, uh, what's going on, uh, what are you seeing in the market right now at Hockey Stick that you are um, thinking about? Uh, you spoke about system, spoke about systematic. So what are you, what are you doing, what are you doing for your customers right now that's going to bring the systemization or systematic approach to partnerships?

Speaker B: Yeah. So we've been working hard behind the scenes, listening to customers, you know, talking to previous customers and pipeline and those and to sort of make sure we're continually validating the value that we bring to it. And we're sort of mid flight and rolling out our new operating system where we're staying on a journey with um, our clients longer to make sure we bring those partnerships to life. Like we're effectively a partner led organization through the way that we go to market ourselves. But we also want to do it a flywheel. So the more successful our customers are, the more no surprise it's going to um, drive our growth. So in terms of what we've been working on is um, a program and a productized service which um, stays working with our customers for longer to make sure that the plan that we sort of set to start off with and which we got sign off and approval of, we're actually on the journey and making sure we're bringing that to life and supporting it going forwards. Because what we found is, you know that when you look back to those um, customers you sort of work with in the first year or you chat to them a year later and like, oh, did you do? And how's it all rolling out? It's like, oh, some might have stayed the course and they've got good results and others might get sidetracked or come back to have a leadership change. So we want to be on the journey for longer. And so we're making that investment in building out um, solutions and services which are able to do that the other thing is you can't ignore AI. Right. And um, it's everywhere in every aspect and you know, the angles of it is AI native or it's AI embedded for it. Right. So when we look at the partnership lens and how we're thinking about it today is um, what AI enabled tools, um, across the board that we can provide for them to be able to reach to the objectives of what we set out to do. So what does that look like for joint value proposition? What does that look like, you know, for tooling for market research? So we want them to spend more time nurturing and growing relationships and bringing it to life, which is back against the company strategy. And if we can use AI as a power and a tool to support them do that, we can all go faster.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a lot happening, particularly in the tech space. Um, you look at all the PRMs, you look at all the tools that sit in that tech space, um, around partnerships. And for me what I find quite interesting is um, it's the feature, it's very much a feature thing right now, which is find the time that uh, people spend. Don't have time. Find the part of partnership management where people don't have time to make it happen. Yeah, I. E. Deal registration referrals and everything like that. What I think people are missing, yes, there's a productivity, uh, gain, then there's a productivity hit. And it's one thing you don't have to ask your partner to do at the end of quarter. Hey, um, can you please log those um, those deal ridges? Because, you know, it's part of my KPI. I kind of feel like we're fundamentally, we're still not changing the foundations of what is actually needed in partnerships. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker B: Yeah, it was so much fear mongering and hype around. Oh, we've got to be doing AI stuff and make sure we're on our homepage to do it. But it comes back to the foundations of what you said. Why do we want partnerships to deliver for us? Uh, where are we going to spend our time, energy and effort to deliver those results faster? And then what can AI dissolve rather than the other way around? I know during my Zero era, uh, I go around the country presenting a lot and people always ask like, oh, what's the shiniest, uh, newest tool I want to know? And I'd be like, I would actually stay on stage and say, I'm not telling you. And they'd all laugh and have a joke around and then I'D say well have you implemented the foundations? Have you got like data automation apps? So you've got a rich robust accounting file, have you got reporting app to be able to do on it? Well if you haven't got those like foundational pillars done in that aspect, I don't think anything's changed. So is partnerships working? Uh, we still are uh, the partnerships that we prioritize are they delivering? If not, why not? How do we go deep with the current partners? So the motion still carries on. AI can help productivity maybe go a bit faster, a few bells and whistles but it's not jumping to that to get to the outcome of where we want to go.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And I also have this view that if you don't you know any, any change that you're going to try drive through technology is going to be very short lived. Where you don't have that um, that focus on uh, the fund, the fundamental side. There's a couple of guys in the industry, companies in the industry like I love the uh, like Greg Partney um, from uh EULA and what they're doing around this balance of getting the foundational, you know, making sure you've got the foundations right but then you use tooling and use technology to really just cut all the pain that we currently see uh, in the uh, with PRM tools uh, that are they uh there today. I've had in the last, I would say maybe four months I've had three conversations with founders who are building the next PRM bot. Um purely looking for feedback on um, uh their value prop, feedback on the challenge that they're actually uh trying to solve and before AI people have spent millions and hundreds of millions trying to solve these particular tools um and the challenges that we currently see with it also it's an interesting space. I mean I, I, I love, I love tech and I love the way um, I, I love the way it's used but I'm always going to go get the foundations right and make sure that the fund, whatever you build in on top of is there because most of the time there's behaviors that sit around why these tools are uh, are rubbish.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Why the tools aren't being used.

Speaker B: Yeah. And going back to like principles, led thinking like why do we set out to go in this direction? What are we doing and staying the cause for what we're actually trying to achieve um and stay focused there. Yeah we see the same and I get equally get hit up all the time from various vendors of if we can push or drive their motive or narrative forward. I think it's, it's probably just a space that we play in the market to sort of attract that. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, um, what do you see, what do you see is going to happen in the next, uh, sort of, um, we've only got four more years of the decade.

Speaker B: Oh, that's right.

Speaker A: Well, what's happening? Any, any, any future thoughts that you've got on where things are heading?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think like obviously the role of the hyperscalers, um, is definitely driving forwards and you can read the reports and the analysts on that that um, you know, sort of say Marketplace sales are going to continue to ramp up. Um, obviously a lot of them are underpinned by AI enablement in various aspects. So there's a growth opportunity for everyone to get in and lean in, to close around that. You know, in an AI enabled world, you know, knowledge is free. You can just go Google anything, um, or find out anything or get it to do it for you. It's people sort of forget. You can go look up Wikipedia stuff now, right now for what it is, or you can Google the information. Wherever it does the work for you, it still needs to be interpreted. And the information on top of that of how you interpret and how do you move forward? I think, um, that's going to be the difference going, uh, forwards. But the foundations are still going to be the same. What is working as a growth lever? Yeah. What do we want to achieve? What have we told our board, our investors, um, our company plans, how does that roll down to the executional plan of our team? How are we progressing? And, and then you make changes if you need to, to progress forward. So maybe in, in the way that the, the how we've gone to market is changing with, you know, SEO sort of dropping off across the board. There's so much information out there, so many AI bots just running it for everyone. Um, I think as a business, um, business is just going to keep getting sharp around how they operate, which fundamentally is a good thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, I like it. Uh, um, I'm definitely, uh, um, there's a lot that I agree with you. Uh, uh, over there. I mean, I'm quite interested to understand from a hyperscalers point of view, what does Marketplace actually do, um, in terms of net new, because they're net new for them. So all the vendors we work with on Marketplace, um, their biggest challenge is not necessarily, you know, yes, you've got the Octas, this, you've got the crowdstrikes Hitting their billion dollars through marketplace. But where does, you know, it's interesting. Where does that revenue, where would that revenue have actually gone? M. Um, was it just accelerated? It was there already. So what of that revenue is actually net new and then where's the net new customers? Like where's that net new customer? So I still think that um, while partnerships is going to continue to grow, I still think on the supply side from the vendors and that they're still challenged to find those net new customers, find those net new route to markets and nothing will do that better, uh, than building a scalable, um, value driven, uh, partner channel or partnerships that uh, they can actually work with.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. But I think uh, everyone always defaults to what's the biggest company we can work with and they're going to give it to firehose customers like the hyperscalers. If only got an AWS marketplace in a way, we go to the moon. Right. Or the Atlassians, the Salesforce Zeros HubSpot. I think there's an equally undertapped opportunity to work with what we sort of call as like the next best choice. Like what are the companies who are just a little bit bigger than us, who have got similar appetite or similar growth stage. They, they're nimble, they can make decisions fast and they can move momentum. Like picture if you only had a thousand customers, but you swim upstream with someone with two or five thousand or even a thousand, and you're going to go do a bunch of things together to be able to grow rather than go join the marketplace and be amongst thousands around it. I'm not saying you shouldn't, but it's a, uh, consideration about where you're going to spend your resources. Because how are you going to get buying on a marketplace to try and drive that traction?

Speaker A: Right, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it wouldn't be the Investable Partnerships podcast. Without asking my guest, how would you define an investable partnership?

Speaker B: Yeah, investable partnership. Uh, I'll give you one liner of that. It's you've got a line of sight to the roi. There you go.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Okay, um, so we'll go to our. Yeah, no building on it. You can't just give me a one word, one word partnership.

Speaker B: Right. You've got a sales team around or this is my sales team. This is the inputs and outputs that delivered around it. So if you're looking at your partnerships as a function.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: If you had a bottoms up approach and you had to report back to the CEO board which partners collectively are actually going to provide and produce the number to build sustainable growth. Yeah, so that could be two partners, it could be five. It could be a whole category of it. To be able to demonstrate that back to the business is the key to obviously surviving in your role, thriving, getting more, buying.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Uh, and we use the term because, uh, we coined it, so everyone has to use it. Um, but the thing around investable partnerships for me is that there actually is a science to investing in businesses that you want to grow with. There is a system of investing in businesses that you want to grow with, where the challenge is time that it takes to understand those signals and then go and, uh, work on building the capability, uh, around those signals. So I would, you know, I would much rather if I was thinking about partnerships, which I do all the time, obviously, um, if I was building a partner program, I would be definitely thinking about how do I define what an investable partnership is. For me, what are the traits, what are the characteristics? What are the actual, um, uh, either numbers that I need to see or capability that I need to see and have that as a bit of a DNA that runs through the way we think about partnerships in whatever program, because it takes out the relationship side of things and brings it back down to data. It's not been done enough. And I suppose that's why organizations like us exist, because we can bring the data, uh, to that piece as well.

Speaker B: But that's also the opportunity for us to go out and educate the market around how to build that capability and to, you know, partner with the right organizations to grow with around it. Right. I think about it as, um, you know, partnership should be building on top of your existing sales motions and complement and help accelerate it as per the broader company strategy. Like I said before, not just thinking that there's this, you know, firehose customers coming next quarter, flowing through. Right.

Speaker A: They always come in, Rand. The customers are coming. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yep. I know someone over that works over there. I just. Let's go chat to them. Like, I'm sure, you know, can I help?

Speaker A: I love it. Okay, Brian, so now we, uh, we come to the end of the show, and this is where I say, I say goodbye.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And you, you exit. Yeah, but before we do that, um, uh, I like to play a little, A, uh, little game. It's called the Partnerships Fast five.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah.

Speaker A: Okay, cool. Yeah. So it's very simple. And you should pass it. Everyone passes it. I will say, um, okay, um, uh, simply, I'M going to give you a couple of, um, uh, sort of statements, and I just want you to think about and say out loud, like you. Like you did at school.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: When teachers told you not to. Yeah. Is. What's the first word that comes to your. Your head when I say it? Um, no long sentences. So you've got it. One word.

Speaker B: All right. Okay.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Over here.

Speaker A: Okay, cool. So, first one is. Partnerships thrive on collaboration. Next one. Partnerships embody alignment through partnerships, you can win together.

Speaker B: It's two words. Close.

Speaker A: Okay. It's close.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Get a pass. Uh, partnerships spark innovation. And the final one. Partnerships succeed through one word.

Speaker B: Succeed through win. Wins. Is not a. Is not. There's definitely a few words, isn't it?

Speaker A: Well, you could say winning.

Speaker B: Yeah. Winning. There we go.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Winning.

Speaker A: Yeah, man. Excellent. Uh, Brian, um, it's been so good to have you here on the show. Uh, it's taken a long time coming, and there's a couple of more topics that I'd love to start to unpack. I think we've got to. We got to get you back.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And maybe you can bring Scott from your team next time. Love to have him on the show as well. So, hockey Stick advisory. Besides being all over LinkedIn and everywhere, where can anyone who's watching, anyone who's listening get in contact with you?

Speaker B: Yeah, check us out@hockey stickadvisory.com. that's the main place. Or. Yeah, we are active on, uh, LinkedIn. Spreading a good partnership for it. There's just like you, Matt.

Speaker A: Lovely. Ryan, thank you so much for joining, uh, us and really, uh, appreciate your insights and time today.

Speaker B: Good to be here at last.

Speaker A: Cheers, man. See you later. Bye. Thank you for listening to Investable Partnerships. Subscribe wherever you listen and visit investablepartnerships.com for the transcripts of today's show. Show.