Maisa Fernandez on Transforming Partner Marketing into a Revenue Engine

Hey, I'm Rick Courier, and this does never go to market alone. More than a show, it's a community where tech, marketing, and the human connection come together. You're not just a listener, you're a GTM friend. And friends don't let friends go to market alone.

Let's go. My guest today is Maista Fernandez, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing at Palo Alto Networks. We're talking about transformation because Maista's been through this before. She spent years at ServiceNow building the lead-to-revenue system from the ground up.

Back when people told her it couldn't be done. Now she's doing it again, but different. Same muscle, completely different ecosystem. In this episode, we get into how she actually thinks about tech stack priorities, why modular architecture beats rip and replaced, and why she's rotating her own team through different partner types on purpose.

We also get into AI, and Maita doesn't hold back. She's watching how her own LinkedIn feed fills up with generated content, and she's not buying the idea that AI replaces the human side of the job. Her answer is bringing back direct mail, bringing back ABM, bringing back the human touch, all on purpose. I'm excited you're here today, and I really hope you enjoy this episode of Never Go to Market Alone.

Cheers. Good to see you. Good to see you too. I so I interviewed you before about 60 episodes ago.

That's right. I think you were number one or number two. I was. I think I was number one.

Yeah, I think you were. Maybe I was number two. Yeah. I can't remember.

And I was just getting back from the hospital. Were you really? Yes. Um, I leveraged it because I uh go to UCSF.

So it was a very different experience. Yes. Doing much better. Yeah.

So you're at Palo Alto now. Yeah. I love it. I'm loving it.

As you can see, it's very vibrant. Um, there's a lot going on. Um, it's very busy and the business is booming. So yeah, but an exciting time.

What what is your actual role? Are you global, like overseeing all global partner marketing? Uh overseeing all of global partner marketing. So it's it's we were in a scenario where partner marketing was split off into the regions um for a little bit of time.

Initially it was a global at a global level. Um, and I think that the teams have decided that it needs to be more globalized. Uh, and so have that strategy built out at a global level with regional execution and support. Um, so you have that nice bi-directional sync with both the regions and global teams.

So that is essentially what I'm building out now. Um, still building out the team. So it's a small process. Yeah.

Um, but it's an exciting list. Yeah, and I thought it'd be fun today to kind of just talk about partner marketing transformation because I know my experience working with you, you did a lot at ServiceNow. Yeah. Um, you know, around people, process, technology, and did a lot of work with Megan Moore to just transform that organization.

And now here you are at Palace Networks, a new global remit. Probably take a lot of those learnings and probably learn a lot of new things in implementing stuff here. So that'd be fun to just kind of dive into that. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I sort of left for this opportunity in the midst of launching some real transformation over at ServiceNow.

So it's been fun to sort of watch on the sidelines and hear um from my old colleagues how everything is going. Um, and and again, learn from what worked and what didn't. Um, it was a massive transformation that we went through over there and one that I'm definitely looking at kind of lifting and shifting, um, but also bringing in all of those tough learnings of when we're trying to build something fresh and new of how do you do that in a much more uh I will say manageable way so that we're not moving so fast and furious, which we did at ServiceNow, to build out the right type of experience for our partners.

And I think, you know, Palo Alto is a partner-first organization. Um, we we take partnerships very seriously, right? And so um from our perspective, we need to up-level the experiences that we're giving and delivering to our partners. So just last year, you know, our programs team rolled out the next wave uh program uh around some of the rebates and incentives that our partners are getting.

And now, you know, I've been brought in to really rethink what it is we're we're going to be delivering at a marketing level for the partnerships. Yeah, it's great. I wanted to ask you in terms of, you know, what's different about partner marketing today than in the past. And I think a nice way to ask that is like you went through this transformation of Service Now, you know, thinking about partner marketing today, like what what did you see work?

What what did you think was would work but didn't work? Like what were some of your learnings that you took out of that that you're kind of applying now? Yeah, you know, I it it's interesting because every company has a different partner ecosystem and they leverage different partner types for different things, right? And this is one thing that in coming here, where I would expect one partner type to be the top type of partner, that wasn't the case.

And so, you know, you really start to learn as you come into these new organizations as to, you know, how an organization takes partnerships and leverages those partnerships to grow their business. Um, and then also have an understanding of where we're sort of leaving money on the table and leaving opportunities for our partners on the table. And I think that's essentially what what I'm trying to do now. At ServiceNow, obviously, you know, I'd I'd been there for about eight years, so I had a long time to understand the partner ecosystem and you know, which which levers within in those partner types would be most lucrative, um, but also most, you know, prone to growth.

And so, you know, I built out, I think you know this, all the resale side of the house for marketing. And so we had no no resale motion. Whereas here, it's all resale, right? But not all, but for the most part, the majority of our business is is bars and disties.

And so, you know, when you're looking at, or when I was looking at coming in here and identifying the learnings of what was working and what wasn't, it was very different, but it's also doesn't necessarily apply. Um, at ServiceNow, when when we created a lot of the transformation within partner marketing, a lot of it was about how to simplify our messages, our programs, and all of the deliverables to our partners. We had no way of doing that before. We were emailing them, we were spamming them, different people.

They, you know, each each stakeholder probably had six to 12 people that they worked with at ServiceNow. And so those communications got a little mixed and jumbled, and people were not having the best time of in in terms of working with us. And so, you know, what I set out to do was really how do we strengthen those relationships and strengthen the delivery method by which we were, we were creating those relationships to just make it really easy for those partners to consume, to find our information, and then to really start to work with us at a marketing level.

It's interesting because you know, I spent a lot of time talking about relationships on the show and and kind of the juxtaposition between AI and technology versus the human relationship on the side. But it sounds like what I'm hearing is there probably was a lot of like tech and operational focus that helped actually free up the relationship side of things. And you know, we we looked at lead flows, we looked at our partner leads, we looked at infrastructure, we looked at our PRM system, we looked at our entire Martech stack, which are we're all not connected.

And when you take a look at that type of infrastructure, and when you're working with partners and you're trying to follow the lead and help our partners follow the lead, um, it made it almost impossible. And so our my goal when when I built out the partner marketing experience was let's let's create a lead to to revenue generator, right? And and let's help our partners source, document all of the work that they're bringing to the table, right? And and making sure that we have the foresight to help our partners show their worth to the company.

Um, and so that's essentially what we did with with a lot of the work that we rolled out there. I want to ask you a little bit on the tech side, because I think you're very tech forward, maybe more so than some of the average partner marketers I talk to. You know, from your perspective, thinking about partner marketing transformation, you know, if you're needing an organization or partner marketer today, like what are the the must-haves from like a tech stack? And I'm sure that changes depending on your size of a company, but just generally, like, what are the must-haves and just overall, you know, what are your thoughts on on analyzing you know what the current tech stack is and where do we need to prioritize investment and changes?

Yeah, and and we're we're going through that assessment right now, as you can imagine. You know, for me, a really strong TCMA is is really critical, right? And TCMA, you gotta help. Sorry, through channel um marketing automation.

I should probably know that at least part of marketing podcasts. Okay, it's okay. Um and so, you know, making sure that we have really easy ways for our partners to uh, you know, access our campaigns, to personalize those campaigns, to get them into market and to activate those. You know, those are things that if we don't make that simple thing something that's super easy for them to grab on to, then we just we we lose because we lose time to market, we're slowing things down, and we can't put heads to that work.

As you can imagine, you know, Apollo has, you know, over 10,000 partners, if not more, I will say. Um, and probably around 2,000 of those are extremely strategic partners for us. And so we simply cannot scale just by putting headcount, right? Even though we want to.

It's just not realistic. And so there are so many different ways that we can deliver really great value to them just by making things a little bit more accessible. So I want to ask you about the tech side of things, because I know you've had a lot of experience on building a tech infrastructure specific to partner marketing. Yeah.

You know, how do you how do you prioritize in a tech stack? What are like the must-haves? What's your overall approach to tech when it comes to partner marketing? Yeah, I mean, I think uh simplification is the best uh modus operandi here, isn't it?

How how do we help our partners get to market as fast as possible with the tools that we're presenting into them? How do we help them find uh those programs and you know be able to access their MDF very quickly, understand what kind of incentives they have, but also, you know, just really understand how to better market with us. Um, those are the types of things that we're always trying to look at in order to help our partners succeed. And so when I take a look at the tech stack, there's a ton of tools out there right now.

Um, and there are some that are more important than others. There are some that are more used than others. And so coming here now, I have the hindsight of having built out a pretty robust tech stack where at ServiceNow we were really building a lead-to-revenue uh system. And and that was a huge undertaking.

Um, and one that we did in a you know, a very short period of time. It was an aggressive timeline that I had put onto the team. Um and it, you know, we had to work cross-functionally, we had to work with our IT team, as you can imagine, and our programs team and our MDF team, uh, and really link everything together. Uh now with AI, you can imagine there's just so much more we can do.

Um, and there's new products that are coming out every three months, right? And so one of the things that I believe we have to think about is how do we build in a modular fashion? Because there's always going to be new tools that are gonna be presented in, some better than others. Um, and when you think about building in an in a modular fashion and create an orchestration model to an ecosystem, it makes it a lot easier for you to kind of rip and replace when a tool isn't working very well, um, but also slowly crawl, walk, run into the robust infrastructure that you want to create in a in a future, right?

And so I think making sure that you have a mapped architecture of what your critical priorities are today, and then where you want to go with those and how do you expand on those, that's essentially how I would approach uh taking tech into a new organization. And that's essentially the way that we're assessing um our current infrastructure. You know, we're also you oftentimes if you're walking into a new organization, there's already tech that exists. Some of it works, some of it doesn't, and you know, really understanding what is working, what isn't, um, and why, right?

Sometimes it's the that tech is just not being leveraged in the right way, right? Yeah. It's it's it's funny. I was i i I came to that question from thinking like, you know, what are the priority technologies that partner marketers should be thinking about?

But after I hear you saying it, it's more like, what are your priorities and how do the tech solutions align to those? 100%. What are your business priorities first? And how can you help your partners build against those first and foremost?

And so it might just be a front door, right? You just might need a communication tool, a two-partner communication tool so that you can properly organize all of the work that you have already set forth for your partners so that you're able to present that in, you're able to email them, and the partners have a really strong experience with you in order to find things. Um, it it becomes very reliable, right? Um, otherwise, there's, you know, if if you're a heavy bar or DIST D organization, you might want to ensure that you have, you know, a really strong TCMA tool, right?

Uh a through partner um channel automation tool, right? And so to me, it's really dependent on who you are, you know, what partners you're working with, and what it is they need most from you, right? We always have to think about the partner first in these types of situations. By the way, I love the name lead to revenue.

Yes, good, right? I coined that one. I know. In my company that um so obviously alignment probably comes a lot into just thinking about that in terms of aligning with the business outcomes, the teams involved.

What does alignment look like today for a successful partner marketing organization? I mean, uh, as you know, partnership is so cross-functional, right? And there's you need alignment uh within the organization, but also outside of the organization. Um, understanding who your stakeholders are and what is going to drive um the business for those stakeholders, both internally and externally at the partnerships is so critical, right?

Um, so I think as you're building out any type of partner marketing organization, you need to start at the top, right? Who are your core stakeholders? And in marketing, oftentimes internally, you have your CPO, you your CMO, um, and then you might have your sales teams, right? Those sales organization leads that uh you know are working with partners to build the business.

Uh, but then at the partnerships, you also have very similar infrastructures where you have the alliance lead, the lines of business, um, you know, all of these different folks that you need to align to to ensure that not only do they know about you, but they're thinking about you first. So, you know, as a partner marketer, it's not just about thinking uh does my alliance lead know that my marketing exists? But we also need to make sure that our sellers, both internal and at the partner, know what we have and what they can leverage um without even needing us, right?

That's how you scale. Yeah. Um, I want to ask in terms of just like I know I asked a little bit about learnings earlier on, but surprises or things that haven't worked. And I know you've tried a lot, so I imagine not everything went perfectly.

Anything really surprised you or maybe things stalled and thought they would go great. I think we're still in a nascent stage with AI. You know, I I think I think a lot of executives think that AI is going to fix and do everything that we do as marketers. And I have seen that at the content level.

Um, I've started to see it at the ops level. Um, but the fact of the matter is, is the more I use it, the less reliable I think it is. Um, I think at a content level it's getting better, but there is something to be said about that human touch. And I'll ask you today, if you go on LinkedIn, how much of your feed is AI generated?

Too much. Too much, right? And it's I'm starting to I'm starting to stop. I I just don't pay attention anymore because I'm not interested because it doesn't sound like somebody's actual voice.

And I'm struggling with that as a user of a platform, but also I'm struggling with it as a marketer uh to ensure that the messages that we're bringing to market resonate with people because they're real. Yeah. Um, and so I I know that from from like my perspective, you know, I have a big ABM background. I'm bringing that back.

I'm bringing direct mail back. I'm bringing back the human touch because I think people are craving that right now. And I think um we have over-indexed way too much on what AI can do. We've created so much noise that it's not resonating with anybody.

And so the learning there is that I think we thought that AI was going to do it all very quickly, and we got scared into thinking that, right? Um, what I have learned is that that is not true, you know, at least not yet. And to be honest, I think humans are going to push back, and we're starting to see that a little bit right now. Well, I mean, that's part of the reason we're having an event tonight.

Yes, you know, in real life, people connecting and talk. That's it. That's it. You know, it's funny, and in in preparing for that event tonight, I was going back through, so you know, we we run the private Slack community.

Yep. And part of the applications we asked partner marketers some of their top priorities or challenges. And I just went through 60 applications and just kind of I took all those top challenges and I and I sorry, but I ran it through AI. Okay, which is okay.

But I wanted to summarize like what's the common theme we're seeing across them all. And the number one was the inability to measure uh partner marketing, specifically around the things that are just hard to measure, so like pipeline influenced or deal influence. And I loved your just overall take as we think about partner marketing transformation. You know, from your perspective, what is the value that partner marketing brings?

And it's okay if we haven't totally figured it out yet, but where we are today, like how do you how do you tell executives the value of the partner marketing organization? I mean, it's the same story we have told for years. It's a force multiplier, right? And and it is.

And you're creating an extension of your sales team and your sales organization with an entire new black book of customers, right? And you know, anyone who doesn't recognize that, shame on them, right? Because the a lot of the partners that we work with have uh a front seat to massive transformations in an enterprise, uh, whereas we don't, right? We're we're a small portion of that.

We're just a security portion. Um, we need to understand that holistic picture of of where an organization is going so that we can actually provide the right solutions across the entire ecosystem that they're going to be challenged with, right? And so, you know, from my perspective, that force multiplier is really how we can share ROI and prove that the investment. In partnerships is worth a 10x return.

The challenge today is that it's hard to track. I think the the industry has gone through a massive shift. I remember when when I started building out a lot of the tech infrastructure at my old job, people thought I was crazy. They literally thought you can't, they told me you can't do that.

And I was like, yeah, yeah, I understand you can't do that. Actually, you can do that. Oh, partners won't do it. Well, I'm hearing the complete opposite because I think partners need it just as much as we need it.

And when you start to build transparency and a holistic picture of not only the work that we're doing together, the investments that we're making together in a one environment, I think that makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, that is the biggest shift that I'm seeing in the market and in this space in particular. So there's a lot more willingness to provide more transparency and be a true partner. Uh because if you're leaning in, we've got to lean in together.

We're building this business together, right? And and that's where you gain the trust. I want to ask, actually end with a question about you personally, just in terms of, you know, look, look at you. I mean, we're at big, big office complex palatinetworks.

You're leading global partnering here. I personally, like, what do you think has been key to your success? What is hope to you get to this point? I mean, I don't think there's anything, you know, maybe it's luck, dumb luck.

I think it's also for me, it's about the willingness to learn and pilot and test and work with people in the industry who know more than I do and learn from them, right? And and the more of that you do, the better off you are. And it's funny, you know, we're going through a massive transformation on my team. And I've been asking my team members to shift their roles to completely different roles to cover a completely different partner type.

Why am I doing that? There's there's a power in learning about different routes to market. And in different partner types, we obviously have different routes to market. And there's another power, which is those triple plays.

How do we bring multiple partners to do an activity? We're we're right now we're rolling out some some really exciting programs with Anthropic and with our top GSIs, for example, with our Frontier AI Alliance. And, you know, we're building out some really incredible webinars that we're the three of us as partnerships are going in together to talk about a really important issue, which is, you know, Frontier AI security. And um it it's helping all of us get in front of the right customer base um and talk about the important issues as as a as a whole, right?

And so, and we all provide a different type of value to that customer, both within expertise, within security, and within the infrastructure uh to be able to ensure that those those customers have the best at play and can learn from us and protect themselves. I love it. I mean, I think growth comes with being uncomfortable, right? 100%.

So it sounds like you constantly put yourself in uncomfortable positions where you don't know where the outcome is. You're gonna pilot, you're gonna learn. You're gonna fail. And it's okay to fail.

And I think, you know, the pilot side is is is critical. People are like, well, we've gotta make sure that every dollar counts and it's gotta, it's gotta work. Well, there's gonna be times where we're, you know, marketing today has changed. Yeah.

You know, it's not about SEO anymore, it's not about ad buying, it's totally different, right? And we have to recognize that everything we do now is nothing like it was even three months ago. Yeah. It is.

Well, listen, thank you so much for for taking the time out of your busy day to tell me. I've I've learned a lot. So thank you. Well, hopefully, I don't know.

Um, it's it's been great, and it's great to be back um after all this time. So thanks for having me. Thanks, Misa. All right.

That's it for this episode of Never Go to Market Alone. If you liked what you heard, subscribe, leave a review, and share with another GTM friend. For new episodes or to see how we're helping partner marketers succeed, visit partnervista.co because friends don't let friends go to market alone.