184 - If Partnerships Drive Most Revenue, Why Do We Wing It? with Jon Mead

Welcome to Product Led Growth Leaders. We've got a great guest for the show today, John Meade. He has a background in technical sales, and as a sales engineer, he's been a global director for important SaaS products like Full Story, and he's led partnership operations elsewhere. Today, he is founder and CEO of Partner Bridge, which helps companies scale and strengthen their partner ecosystems.

John, welcome to the show. Thomas, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, awesome to have you.

So let's start off by getting the audience to appreciate the problem. Let's dive into what are the pro before the solution, what are the problems that people deal with today? Yeah, yeah, it's a really great question. So if you look at if you look at like 2025, B2B business, SaaS business did about $390 billion worth of revenue.

Of that, 70% was driven by partnerships, according to Forrester. And if you according to Gartner, about 80% of partnerships fail. So if you look at that number, that's an incredible and astounding amount of revenue that's done through partnerships. But most partnerships fail.

The reason that most partnerships fail is a lot, is not for lack of trying. It's mostly a lack of strategy. So most SaaS partners. I'm sorry, let's double-click on just something there.

What do we mean exactly by partnerships? Partnerships, yeah. Great, great question. So when we're looking at partnerships, we're looking at technologies that you have that a SaaS platform has integrations with and go to market together with, or services or solutions firms, right, who add value to that technology platform, whether it's by way of a practice that they may have, whether it's an affiliate or a marketplace.

We've all seen Salesforce has a marketplace, right? The App Store. That is a partner-driven revenue model. Um, but most companies don't have that type of a program in place and don't really know how to get there.

Um so that's where Partner Bridge actually comes in, is we help SaaS companies figure out who they should partner with, why they should partner with them, how to actually go to market. So like a full-on go-to-market plan um with step-by-step instructions, guides, asset recommendations, metrics to measure. And then we build all of the collateral, right? And then we actually go so far.

Yeah, Thomas, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. No, so because my mind is buzzing with questions here. So I'm a SaaS company and there's certain kinds of partnerships, right?

So you've mentioned them. Some of them are surfaces, help make my product better or service better. Um, then there's others like, you know, maybe your launch partner. I don't know if like a launch customer would count sort of, you know, I don't know, channel partnerships, right?

Where you get an influx of new clients through a certain channel. Um, and so I there's so much there. There's so many different types of partnerships, like like completely different types, right? That like are unrelated in nature, um, uh just qualitatively different.

So where where do you even begin with solving a problem like this? So even before the solution, like how are you even supposed to think about that? Yeah. And honestly, Thomas, that's that's one of the crux, uh like one of the biggest problems that that partnerships have is it's it's so complicated, it's so nuanced to each business, each avenue of revenue, each kind of department almost, right?

So the where where we have chosen to tackle the problem is really on who should SaaS platforms integrate with and go to market with for the benefit of their clients. Right. So what and and we are defining that, delineating that based on categories, based on pricing structure, based on ICP, based on geos that they're selling in, based on the same similar or similar uh challenges that that platforms solve together. So if we look at just that, that that technology partner perspective or that technology partner lens, that's how we're framing the way to go to market or the way to identify the right partners from that side of the house.

Services partners or solutions partners, to your point, introduce a huge amount of nuance between them, right? Because you could have an agency that helps with like one or two things. You could have a boutique uh type of firm that helps with a very specific type of client, right? Maybe automotive clients or healthcare clients.

You may have a regional SI or uh systems integrator or a global systems integrator who has huge amounts of practice with different types of offerings that are our digital transformation or customer experience, right? There are so many different ways to look at the solutions side of the house that that's where the complexity comes in. Whether it's adding new clients or expanding into a new territory, that is where PartnerBridge kind of shines because we have a huge database. Number one, huge database of solutions type partners.

And then number two, we have almost 13 different levers that we're pulling to match our clients to the right services partners, solutions partners. Now, you guys, are you guys consulting uh group or USS? We are a SAS. We do have SS.

So you're handling this with SAS. So are are you are you a two-sided marketplace? Uh you know, for the audience like Airbnb, how you have people who want to host who want to host and people who want to uh stay stay someplace those are two different sides of the marketplace. Are you doing that where it's partners come on, or is it your Rolodex of uh that you're starting with of the of the potential partners?

How did how does that come together? Really great question. So the marketplace, we are not a two-sided marketplace. We are not a pay-to-play platform.

We are not taking any kind of money to sponsor certain services firms or things like that. We identify the services firms through a number of different mechanisms, a number of our own partners that we work with, and we pull their data into our database. We're constantly updating that data. And then we're saying, if you are a partner bridge client, great, here are the right, like the this the top fit partners for you.

But you can filter everything, you can toggle those strategic fit items. Like if you care more about marketplace certifications than you do, say, about case studies, then you can toggle that higher. And that will change the entire strategic fit for your company. So you can start to slice and dice this data in a way that's actually meaningful for you.

Now, who is the target role? If you have a SaaS company, who does this? The CEO, the RevOps person, or just a random department that kind of relates to the type of partnership that we're talking about. Who is the person at the company who uses Partner Bridge?

Right. It's it's a really great question. Who's the who's the actual act executor of the task, right? Um, it depends on the company, right?

The my MBA plat professors would be super happy that I said that. Um, but no, it really depends on the company, right? Um, the stage that they're at, what they're offering is. Um, most often we see that it's head of partnerships who engage with us first, and then their team will leverage the platform to either find the right partners to work with or learn how to build partnership relationships in general.

Um, if it's a more of a growth stage or an early stage organization, it might be the head of revenue, the CRO, the head of sales or business development. Um, we also have uh VC and PE firms that we work with who leverage Partner Bridge for their portfolio to help their port companies really accelerate their own business. And then on the flip side of it, we work with those solutions firms to find the right technology partners that they can bring into their practices to deliver better value for their clients.

Man, awesome stuff. And then what does the competitive space look like in this area? It seems like a kind of a niche problem to handle with SaaS. It is very, very niche.

Um, there are, if you squint, there's probably about five competitors, three of whom, and myself included, who have come out within the last year, right? Um, it's a really difficult problem to solve. And to solve it elegantly and like impactfully is really, really tough. Um, we are, admittedly, we are on our second iteration of our strategic fit engine because I wanted to make it better.

We wanted to make sure that it was the best type of fit for our clients, right? So we we released our first version. It was fine, it did the job. Now we're on the second version within a few months, right?

Um, but and going back to the competitor question, there are some large players, right? There's, and I'm happy to name them, like Partner Stack is a great, great company. They've got some discovery, they've got some partner activation parts of their platform. There's other fantastic competitors like Partner Optimizer, um, more of an enterprise play, but same sort of thing, fantastic data sets, right?

Um, we're doing it a little bit differently, and we're trying to target those organizations that may not have a ton of money to spend on a massive platform to help with discovery and activation. Yeah, no, John, since you're doing it differently, you mentioned you're on this your second iteration, uh, you know, trying to make it better, trying to make it elegant. How important, in your view, is uh is it to get the UX to be strong, to have the user experience be good? It is hugely important.

Um, I did work for Full Story, you mentioned them earlier, digital experience platform, right? Their whole mantra is that the customer experience is the biggest driver for client satisfaction, for growth, for all of that. And that is that is core to when we are building our product UI. Like it needs to be usable, it needs to be friendly, and it needs to be simple enough, but powerful enough to bring value.

Yeah. And do you see that as a potential market differentiator? Because I think a lot of folks learn along the way that we have our features and we need to compete there, but we also need to just resonate with people. Yeah, I I really do.

Um, you know, as I'm explaining the platform, there's there's a lot of data under the hood. There's a lot of data that we're we're both gathering and generating. But the way that you display that data to people matters. And you can't show a wall of statistics.

People will shut down to that. I would shut down to that, right? Um, so as soon as you make this approachable, show graphics, right? Make it in intuitive for what they care about in that moment.

That's the best way to create a good customer experience. Also, making sure that there is both room for feedback. So we've got a product enhancement request form built right into the UI, right? If there's something that they want better, cool.

Click the button, tell me what it is, send it to me. Um But yeah, it's it's absolutely a huge game, like a differentiator for us and hugely important for our clients. Can you give us an idea of what it uh what it's like for a new user with you guys? So um I imagine they have to be diagnosed in the beginning or sort of introduce themselves in their company, and there's some intelligence probably that goes on before the matching exercises and some knowledge of goals, I would think.

Yeah. So there's so there's a few different tiers to partner bridge. We do have a free tier um because I want partners, I want partnerships to become normalized, right? I want a marketing team to understand how partnerships work.

Cool. Come in, create a free account, kind of see what it looks like. Um, then there's another tier where where we start to do some of that matching. You don't have to tell me anything.

We have, we likely have your business or somebody who resembles your business already in our database. Um, we have 20,000 SaaS companies in our database. Um, so if you don't exist, that's fine. We run a number of engines that go out and gather all of the data that we need.

There is user input in case anything was incorrect, right? So I'm doing like product scraping. So if you're uh let's say you're Bloom Reach, you log in, you set up a free account, we're scraping your products because when you generate a playbook, your product book matters. Um if I got that wrong, cool.

You can hit add or modify and change that, make it a little bit different. If you haven't released a new product and you want to see how that product could work with a partner, you can you can uh very securely add that into Partner Bridge and see what that would look like. Um but as far as onboarding goes, it's it's uh point and click. Like you just create an account, you log in, we have a little bit of a walkthrough um for the free version.

As soon as you become a partner bridge client, we actually do a full-on hour kickoff. I if I can, I'll go there in person, we'll go there in person and do it with you. Um, but yeah, we try to teach the teams all of the different parts of the platform. There's a there's a lot going on inside of it.

Now, how close do you plan on getting to PLG in in the sense that I think you're maybe largely already there, right? But um, you know, on the continuum of consulting to SaaS fully self-serve, where someone just hops up into the platform and they just get going and they're there. This a lot of human intelligence and human connection for this type of business, I imagine, but I would think that you're trying to wean it off. Or what do you what are you thinking there?

So it's it's actually, I'm trying to do uh PLG and human influence as like a in concert with one another. So with the PLG, I'm trying to have friction points or breakpoints be identifiable, both through, you know, I have full story on my platform. I'm a client of full stories. Um, so I can see all of those good product.

It's fantastic. It's outrageous. Um but so I I can see the friction points, right? I can use full story to build a better experience.

I have the user intercepts, right, where you can just drop me feedback, but I'm also setting up user groups with my clients to help influence that roadmap. They're going to meet without me in the room, um, you know, equal say two representatives from each company who come in and tell me or they discuss amongst themselves what is the best new feature that Partner Bridge can build. And it's going to be on a six-month basis where they can feed that back to me. And that goes right into the roadmap.

So product-led growth with some of that feature uh automated feedback from partner from Full Story, um, partner bridge intercepts to tell me where where people have ideas and then user input, human guided product roadmap. Ladies and gentlemen, we've been speaking with John Mead of partnerbridge.io. Partnerbridge.

io, check that out. What are some of the things that people can look forward to in the near future as you develop this? Who do you want Partner Bridge to become to people? Yeah, I want it to be a very easy and understandable way to approach partner strategy to help marketing teams, product teams, sales teams, entire organizations move from one two, three person led top of the funnel to a huge, huge engine to build top of the funnel and to build marketing presence.

Yeah, this is really resonating with me because even though it's very much of a business conversation, it's about bottom line, there's a little bit of a humanistic element to it, uh, I think, because partnership, I mean, we by nature as human beings, we want to link with each other and work with each other. So there it just kind of feels good to have that kind of direction and approach to business. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more, Thomas.

Couldn't agree more. Um okay. So uh hopefully everyone checks that out. Um, a partnerbridge.

io. John, where can people find you? Uh I'm on LinkedIn, John Mead. Um, my email address, John at partnerbridge.

io. Please drop me a note. Awesome. Sounds good.

All right. Well, John, thanks for being with us today. Thank you, Thomas, for having me. Appreciate it.