Stop Hiring SDRs and Start Building Real Partner Ecosystems Instead with Keith Bossier | Ep. #314

Speaker A: Awkward time to ask this, but. Hey, did you download the trail map?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: No, I don't need to.

Speaker B: I don't understand. You're trusting your signal out here.

Speaker C: I'm trusting T Mobile. They have the best network. And if we end up in bumtots

Speaker A: nowhere, well, we've got T Satellite for backup.

Speaker C: Whoa.

Speaker A: I don't trust my carrier that much. We'll just use your phone as a flashlight.

Speaker B: With America's best network and T Satellite, we're keeping you connected in places you never thought possible. And if you switch today, you get free phones for zero down and only 25 bucks a month per line for four. Find out more@t mobile.com or visit your local store. Best mobile network Based on analysis by Ooklev Speed Test Intelligence data to age 2025 with 24 monthly bill credits and 4 eligible port ins on essentials for well qualified customers with autopay plus taxes, fees and $35 connection charge per line credits and in balance 2, if you pay off earlier, cancel contact US Finance Agreement example $299.99 Moto Edge 5G required T Satellite available with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky included with experience beyond or $10 a month. However, news monthly cancel anytime visit t

Speaker A: mobile.com in the world that we're in, we have a lot of different we call them solutions partners or system integrators, as well as other technologies that we want to be able to partner with. You need to be able to put in plans that are going to amplify and broaden your reach without having to hire a bunch of people in order to make this effective.

Speaker C: And so this concept here on customer success, that is more of an account manager, uh, that has implementation responsibilities is actually not a new concept, but it is a concept that most struggle with because nobody wants to have 30% of their pay based upon, uh, uh, a commissionable variable. The type of profile that we hire for that role is generally someone who's done implementation, not who thinks as a salesperson. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the, um, modern selling podcast, Modern Selling Nation. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Today we're going to be talking about some really amazing things with my friend Mr. Keith Bossier, who is the vice president of sales from S Docs. Yeah, you know, those companies like, I, uh, don't know, docuSign, boo. We're talking about my S Docs, which basically bridges, um, that gap that you've seen before, uh, from other companies and then some. And we're gonna be talking about some really cool stuff. Misalignments between marketing sale, customer success, pricing strategies that lead to business outcomes. Yes, we're gonna be talking about that. Mr. Keith, welcome to the show, my man.

Speaker A: Hey, thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here today.

Speaker C: I'm glad that you're with me, man, and I'm excited to have you with us. Do me a favor, tell the modern selling nation a little bit about your background. Also, I'd love to understand who SDOCS is. I know I kind of tipped it off, but do me a favor. Your background and who SDOCS is.

Speaker A: Sure thing, Mario. Thank you so much again for having me on here. Um, hi, everyone. I'm M. Keith Bossier. I'm a vice president of sales at sdocs. As mentioned before, uh, I've been in the sales and SaaS space for about 20 years with six of those leading sales organizations. My, uh, career has really spanned from everything from legal tech to FinTech, ERP, CRM, and now document automation and E Sigma Signature, uh, companies like Salesforce, Netsuite, Sunguard, Wolters, Kluwer, and now SDOCS that I'm at. So let me tell you a little bit about sdocs. As Mario mentioned, we are a document automation at E Signature organization. So we're allowing companies to take their information from CRM or other sorts of systems to be able to generate, uh, different agreements, contracts, proposals, quotes, service letters, et cetera, in, uh, an automated fashion, making their operations much more efficient, and then going forward with the E Signature to actually execute those agreements and make them legally binding.

Speaker C: Fabulous. So you, um, are the folks that help us get the contract signed so we can get the monies collected, Is that right?

Speaker A: That's right. We accelerate the process of getting the, uh, cash, uh, collected.

Speaker C: Us salespeople love you guys. Yeah, that's what we do. We love that. Because then that's the commissions right there.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker C: Without the E Signature, we got nothing. We got nothing. Uh, do me a favor, Keith. Um, I always ask this question of all my guests. So you're not special in this regard. However, you are special. But tell us something nobody knows about you, even if they're looking at any or all of your social profiles.

Speaker A: So something people wouldn't be able to get from any of my social profiles, including, uh, personal ones, might have to do with the fact that I am, uh, the recipient of not only one, but two open hearts, uh, I had to go through in my own personal life and uh, had a, uh, kind of deformity in my heart when I was younger and had to get that fixed and then unfortunately had a follow up experience that required a second operation. But I've been doing good for about the last 15 years, so.

Speaker C: Wow. Okay. Uh, first off, thanks for sharing that. That one threw me for a loop. You're the first ever to talk about that, uh, on the show, so make that a first. That's amazing and I'm so sorry that you went through that.

Speaker A: It's okay.

Speaker C: But I'm curious, how long do normally heart transplants last? Is it forever or do they usually. Are you like constantly having to do more additional surgeries?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, great question. Just to clarify, it wasn't a full transplant. It was just a valve, uh, replacement. Um, so there's no definitive timeline of what it will last. But based on what the doctors tell me, I should be okay, uh, for the rest of my life without any future operations. Uh, to give you some more peace of mind, I compete in triathlons. I'm a very active athletic individual. Uh, in fact, I've won triathlons and half marathons. So, uh, it hasn't slowed me down at all in life. Uh, it just was an unfortunate situation, uh, that was able to get thankfully resolved and thank goodness for the medical world that we live in today.

Speaker C: Well, thanks for sharing that. I super appreciate that and allowing you to kind of open up on a very personal level. Uh, for those of you that are listening in only on audiocast and you're not watching the videocast, if you look at my boy Keith, you'll definitely be able to tell that he's pretty fit. So with that in mind, that's pretty impressive and thanks for sharing that, man. Uh, so let's get into some good content here, right? We wanna talk about, talk to our sales leaders, we wanna talk to our sales reps, uh, business owners as well, and this one's a tough one. Um, you know, we were talking earlier in the show around, um, pricing strategies and uh, some of the challenges that we see in the marketplace in selling. Everybody wants not just because they wanna negotiate a good deal, but we see price constriction happening a lot in today's current marketplace and, um, based how the market is going.

Speaker A: Talk a little bit, Keith, about what

Speaker C: are some of the practical steps leaders can take to align pricing strategies with business outcomes that customers care most about.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think it's really important to first kind of frame up the market conditions and everything associated at a macro level before even Talking about the tactical, what sort of strategies can people implement? Um, so I think one of the big challenges that companies face is being able to offer a connected pricing model that aligns to the value that their customers prioritize. So even after they're able to identify this is what's valuable, figuring out how you then translate into a revenue stream and what sort of model to associate with that. It's a very volatile time that we live in and I think there's something that is happening where companies are having to re examine that a lot. When you think about it, there's really four key things that are serving as a backdrop for 2025 right now. We have the introduction of AI and people having fear around it, not knowing what it can do, what it doesn't do. You have more sophisticated buying committees than ever before. You have leadership volatility, you have a bunch of things going on, uh, at the government level around uh, tariffs, around H AH1B visas, around DOGE. There's a lot of stuff happening in that front and then there's just global uncertainty across the nations in terms of international uh, diplomacy. So one of the things that's really important to kind of like hone in on is how uncertain of times are we in as we think about pricing. And there was a recent report by the US Economic Uncertainty Index and it showed that in March of 2025 we're actually in the second most volatile time of economics in the past 20 years. More than when Lehman Brothers collapsed in uh, 2008, more than when the US's credit rating was downgraded in 2011, only second to the beginning of the pandemic back in 2020. And so with all of that, it's really important that companies are able to uh, evaluate their entire pricing model and adapt to what customers are asking for from an outcome perspective. And that's something I've actually done at two different businesses, most recently here at sdocs. Before I go further though, I just want to just check in with you if all of that other stuff makes sense.

Speaker C: Yeah, totally, absolutely. Keep going.

Speaker A: Cool. So when I came to sdocs, for instance, one of the things that I saw was our entire pricing model was based on users, so seat based pricing and very quickly did an analysis to look at. Does that make sense? And through conversations with customers and prospective customers we uh, were able to really pull out that it's not so much that it was a user based value that was being derived, it was actually the output that they were able to execute which was the Documents being generated, the signatures being completed. And so what I did is I took that information and then built out a consumption based pricing model which when we look at it over the last four years we've actually pivoted and over 25% almost. Now 30% of our business has changed from this user based model to this consumption based pricing because people are actually understanding that and we've actually grown contract values by greater than 200% in some cases over 1000% um, for existing customers. And it makes it very easy to have conversations during sales cycles because people can understand what they're being charged for, which again in this case the outcome being the document itself as well as the signature being executed.

Speaker C: So how would that work then? If we're talking about this for various SaaS companies to. Are you, well let me take a step back. Are you suggesting then that sales leaders should uh, be thinking about pricing strategies that are outcome based, meaning consumption per usage as opposed to per seat?

Speaker A: I think that's one of the ways. There's a few different ways that people can slice and dice and it depends on their business, their product, like what it is that they're bringing to the market. For us, it's a tangible output, right? It is a tangible output of a document, it's a tangible output of ah, an executed E signature, um, other companies that might not make sense, maybe user based pricing does make sense for some of those. The other thing to kind of note about that Mario, is for us we go through a thorough analysis with each of our customers, uh, that we're bringing on board to have a conversation about their demand plan. Right? Like what do they expect first off, what are the use cases and how much volume do they expect to produce in the first year? And then we want to kind of ballpark around that and be able to do that. There's other companies out there who do consumption based pricing where they do it in arrears and they do like a monthly billing in arrears. And that happens more with like data usage and other sorts of systems which wasn't really something that would make sense for our business. So I do want to caveat that the consumption based pricing isn't for every company, but you have to take a look at your own business, your own markets, who you sell to and what it is that you're selling and what it is that people are actually buying at the end of the day.

Speaker C: Understood. So in terms of practical steps that leaders can take to align pricing strategies with business outcomes, uh, or sorry, business outcomes that customers care most about? I think that's, that's the key. What are the, the one or two, three things that we should be looking at?

Speaker A: So I think you're going to be looking at uh, pricing strategy. We're going to kind of go back to kind of the four P's of marketing. Right? You've got pricing strategies. So pricing, packaging, you know, is it something that you want to do where you're a la carting every single element of your products or are you going to kind of package it up as a suite and then uh, pricing, packaging, and I would say placement is the other element of that is what markets are you selling to? ASTOC sells a lot of times to highly regulated industries. We sell to public sector financial services, healthcare and life sciences manufacturers. Uh, but we also have customers across all different verticals. And so we theoretically have different pricing models or different price points for some of those different customers based on the regulation that's required for supporting those businesses as well too.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's fair and that makes sense. Uh, and understandable. Uh, what you just described however, uh, is a, requires a significant amount of alignment between uh, sales, marketing and customer success. Uh, uh, definitely on the marketing side that would, you know, it's hard to be able to market different types of price plans or pricing models. Makes uh, it very difficult and sometimes can really become a convoluted message to the marketplace. So what do you think are some of the most common misalignments you see between maybe marketing sales and customer success? And how can leaders like you and I fix them to drive stronger uh, revenue outcomes?

Speaker A: Absolutely. And the misalignment between marketing sales is a tale as old as time. I think you get in the SaaS space also lump customer success into that. And they often operate in silos. They have different metrics that they're measured on, they have different imperatives that they're tasked with. Marketing generates these leads that are misaligned with sales priorities. Sales closes deals without confirming long term fit. Customer success inherits unrealistic expectations at the end of the day and then it becomes a predictable fallout. Right. There's a lot of wasted efforts, slower growth, weakened customer trust. Um, and leaders can really fix this by aligning their teams around shared revenue goals, creating cross functional accountability and making customers value that North Star for every interaction. So there's really three pieces of advice I would give for this really. The first is align your revenue responsibilities to appropriate stakeholders. Get your sales and CS teams working together on common accounts and then focus your lead process on Quality over quantity. And those are all things that we've done here at sdocs. Happy to share more with you too, if that's.

Speaker C: Yeah, please expand on that one in terms of the shared revenue goals. Ah. And the three elements that you just mentioned.

Speaker A: Yeah. So again, when, when I started SDOCS four years ago, um, we didn't really have a revenue operations framework or program in place. And we decided as a company to undertake that and evaluate what it is that we were measuring. People on Personas of who we're marketing to icp, uh, ultimately, like what trends were we seeing with existing customers that we were under penetrated with, uh, or people that were getting good value. So throughout that process we decided to figure out like, how we can get those teams working together where what marketing does benefits sales, what sales does benefits customer success. And then the whole circle back. Right. So there's a revenue bow tie, if you're familiar with, um, there's a agency called Winning by Design. And uh, they have a whole program around this revenue bow tie versus looking at things as a funnel. Right. And sales kind of sits in the middle of all of that. And so, uh, at the end of the day, what we ended up doing, for instance on the aligning revenue responsibilities to appropriate stakeholders was there were certain parts of the revenue function that we actually took out of the sales team's hands and put in the CS's hands things where CS was more attuned to the customer and was better positioned to be able to capture, uh, that additional value in the form of revenue. There's also things that we took then they might have been, say, we'll call them renewal based, uh, activities. There's other things where we took revenue responsibilities out of CS's hands and put them into sales hands where there was maybe larger expansion opportunities within existing accounts. And then from a marketing side, we actually looked at how do we um, get more quality leads to the sales team. And one of the ways that we did that was we actually removed the SDR and BDR function from our company so that marketing and sales didn't have an intermediary sitting between them. They literally just sat there and said, how do we get marketing to get sales directly? The right leads at the right time with the right people. Uh, and so with that it's actually turned into higher conversion rates because the sales team is able to qualify out things that maybe score high enough from a marketing perspective. But when they get talked to by the sales team, the customer ends up not having a real need or anything at this point in time so they're not converting it over to an opportunity which is thereby then changing the dynamic of what the downstream effect of from a win rate perspective. Um, and we've seen a lot of success between marketing and sales of having a better fit for who it is that we're starting to target, which has allowed us to refine our scoring model. And then, uh, also from a sales perspective, it's gotten them uh, accelerated on their sales cycle because they're not passing along, they're not being passed from marketing to a qualifier, a BDR to sales. That person has a continuous buying experience which is giving them a better, like an overall better buying experience. Awkward time to ask this, but hey, did you download the trail map? Yeah, no, I don't need to.

Speaker B: I don't understand your trail. Trusting your signal out here.

Speaker A: I'm trusting T Mobile.

Speaker C: They have the best network and if we end up in bumtots nowhere, well,

Speaker A: we've got T Satellite for backup.

Speaker C: Whoa.

Speaker A: I don't trust my carrier that much. We'll just use your phone as a flashlight.

Speaker B: With America's best network and T Satellite, we're keeping you connected in places you never thought possible. And if you switch today, you get free phones for zero down and only 25 bucks a month per line for four lines. Find out more@t mobile.com or visit your local store. Best Mobile Network Based on analysis by Ooklev speed test intelligence data 2H 2025 with 24 monthly bill credits and 4 eligible port ins on essentials for well qualified customers with autopay plus taxes, fees and $35 connection charge per line credits and imbalance due if you pay off early OR Cancel Contact Us Finance Agreement example $299.99 Moto Edge 5G M Required T Satellite available with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky included with experience beyond $10 a month. However, news monthly cancel anytime visit t

Speaker C: mobile.com this is not a commercial for the Way I Heard it with Mike Rowe, the award winning podcast now entering its 10th year and available wherever podcasts are listened to. No, this is a commercial for Mike Rose foundation which has just set aside $10 million to help train the next generation of skilled workers. That money is available right now@microworks.org it's waiting for anyone who wants to learn a skill that doesn't require a four year degree. Electricians, plumbers, linemen, welders, shipbuilders, H Vac techs. America is desperate for men and women with skills they don't teach in universities. And the Microworks foundation is committed to helping train America's workforce for hundreds of thousands of AI proof six figure jobs just waiting to be filled. Apply today for a work ethic scholarship@microworks.org or support our efforts with a donation of any size. We're closing America's skills gap one job at a time. And we could use your help@mikeroworks.org, m m I k e r o w eworks.org experience so I want to come back to um, this concept here of the CS team. It almost sounds like the CS team at your organization is more of an account management team with implementation responsibilities. Is that fair to say?

Speaker A: If you boil it down to that, I would absolutely agree with that. Account management is very much um, a function of their role is to make sure they're staying constantly in contact with customers. They're not just a team that's about adoption and making sure that people are getting utilization out of the product. That's a very, very strong point of it. But it's also identifying cross sell opportunities. There's also points where they can actually introduce new revenue opportunities and manage those opportunities in Salesforce as well as.

Speaker C: It's funny that you mentioned that. And uh, there was something here recently. I started getting in on the front lines of wanting to see what customer support tickets were coming into the queue and um, actually responding to customer support tickets under an alias name that we've created so that people don't know it's the CEO of the company, they're responding. And I started going back and I started looking at how were we responding to um, support requests and asks and, and what was the team doing? And it was very interesting because one of the things I found was as people were coming in saying, hey, can you please cancel my plan? As an example, um, most of our team was not asking, uh, why, like what's the problem? Or how can I help? Um, or if they did, they stopped at I'm running into this block, I simply just don't need it anymore, et cetera, et cetera. And, and so I was watching this happen and then I said, well geez, as a logical salesperson who gets paid, obviously I'm the CEO, but if I'm a, as a salesperson at heart, uh, uh, I get paid based upon commissions, right? So why would I not take that response which is I just don't need it anymore, etc. Why would I not take that and say, I tell you what, I've Got this opportunity here that you can meet with our and fill in the blank with a person. Um, because I noticed that you were not utilizing da da da da da da da da da. Were you even aware that you had these capability sets based upon your role? Most people are using this feature set to be able to do da da da da da da. And the outcome would be. And about 50% of the time everybody said, I had no idea that you guys were doing that. I thought it was just this. And so, um, yes, I would like to know more about that. And what turned out to be a cancellation turned into an actual save. And then it struck me that, um, those that are on the doing customer success or customer support, that they don't have that other side of the brain that we think with in sales, which is save the revenue at all cost.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: Save the revenue. And so this concept here on customer success, um, that is more of an account manager, uh, that has implementation responsibilities is actually not a, not a new concept, but it is a concept that most struggle with because nobody wants to have 30% of their pay based upon, uh, um, a commissionable, uh, variable. And the type of profile that we hire for that role is generally someone who's done implementation, not who thinks as a salesperson. So when you're looking for this role as an example in your CS department, are you looking for the former account manager who's just tired of where they're at, they want something new, or are you looking for a customer support rep who wants to, uh, take the step into a success rep and think differently about their business? Or is it both?

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say categorically the former. Right. Someone who has the experience of managing accounts, has revenue responsibilities, and is familiar with how to manage those situations for our organization is very critical. And I would challenge any, um, revenue leader on that. Ah, because at the end of the day, you want to protect this house, right? You want to be able to protect the revenue. Um, but you can't stop there, right? Like in your example you were giving, someone gave a case of, hey, I'm canceling, because, you know, they're not getting value out of it. And then you ask the question of why you need to be able to have those conversations, especially in the world of profitable, efficient growth. Right. The world of, hey, we're going to do more with less. And if I'm, if I'm looking at two candidates and I've only got the choice of one or the other account manager, 10 times out of 10 for that role, customer support not minimizing that role at all. Uh, but they typically don't have the mindset of I'm going to turn this into a revenue opportunity and they're just going to look at how do I save or even potentially just placate a customer and say, okay, right, and just be like, thank you for your business for all the years. And they'll just move on to the next thing because they have a ton of service tickets. You need someone who's going to be able to do that. And to that point, Mario, uh, one of the things that we did during this revenue operations program is we went through the process of actually creating what I called pops. Right. This idea that we were going to align sales and CS directly to each other from an account level and give them common sets of accounts. Prior to that, we were operating under the model of sales was a go to market vertical. So they had a vertical go to market strategy of people handling financial services or healthcare or whatever. Right. Those regulated industry we were talking about, um, CS was more looking at it from, we'll call it a book of business. How much, how much revenue were they managing for accounts? But it could be across an array of different industries and different companies and they might have cross pollination with different, um, account executives and directors. Um, so we fixed that, we aligned them all together. So we dedicated customer success to also inherent, that kind of intrinsic vertical knowledge too. Because then when they're speaking to those customers, it's not only about again protect this revenue. It it's about what are we seeing other companies do that are like your business and having that knowledge is imperative to being successful with not only retaining but expanding those accounts. So like your point, you were saying other companies also we have these other features and people are using that. Did you know you have that? Well, those are things that we try to proactively get in front of so we're not in a red zone where we're trying to like play defense and stop, you know, someone from leaving. We try to get ahead of that, um, and make sure that they understand that. And it's much easier to do when you have alignment from a vertical perspective in our case, but again, at least at an account level so that when those teams meet, they can have strategy conversations at the highest level about what they're going to do on an account by account basis.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think if leaders are listening in right now, one, uh, of the things you said earlier that I wrote down is you actually removed the SDRs out of your business process and went straight to the sales reps. And I think there's a lot of arguments to be made for that particular scenario. However, what if we took our SDRs and retooled them to be customer support agents and gave them a commissionable variable for learning, uh, to upsell. And now your environment, you've got a product led growth play model, uh, and a sales led growth play. Sorry, Sales led growth play. There we go. Sorry. Get the words out. Uh, and it actually reminds me of a very similar circumstance where, uh, we have a PLG play as well within our platform and our program. And somebody came in and said, hey, I'm getting, um, tapped out at this. I really thought this was included inside this plan. And uh, I, uh, looked back at the previous knowledge base answers and it was, no, it's not included, sorry. Um, but you know, here you can upgrade to these other plans and you can get access to that. And I thought, okay, that's the right motion. But then I got in and I said, well, what if we actually said, same answer, but here's the link to go ahead and upgrade. And oh, by the way, if you really want to try this because you want this feature, here's a 50% off discount for the first year.

Speaker A: Sure, sure, why not?

Speaker C: Right? Got nothing to lose. We're trying to get them to upgrade. And guess what?

Speaker A: Ching, ching, ching, ching, right?

Speaker C: We started seeing like purchase, purchase, purchase. And that was the difference between customer support mindset versus how do I sell something. Right. Service and sell at the same time.

Speaker A: Yeah, we actually, so we, um, our freemium model, right? So we have, just like you said, we have a PLG that goes into an SLG motion. Um, so we had some PLG customers or some free customers that were using our product. And um, over time we looked at again these outcome based pricing and some of them were kind of breaking the model of what was originally designed for the free edition that we were providing. And so we went through a process and gave six to nine months worth of notification to those free customers that we were going to be changing the free program with that. Um, very similarly, we saw a lot of cases opened up immediately afterwards of, um, hey, we've now hit our limits. What do we do? We need to upgrade. We did not take the approach you've said, which I'm not being dismissive of at all, it could absolutely work. Um, but in the moment, because we had such a flurry, right, we have thousands of customers, we have thousands of customers globally. We had a lot of these cases coming in. Um, but we Also knew that there was some that would have required some heavy selling. Right. And so we had some customers come in who were spending $0 with us, who then were looking at $40,000, $50,000, $100,000 contracts with us. And so those were things we decided to ultimately put in the hands of sales. But I absolutely agree there is a time, a place, a product and um, an opportunity for that kind of model to work. We have tried to work with our success program to incentivize the right behaviors from a revenue perspective, including starting to benchmark them against net revenue retention better, uh, as well as you know, obvious things like churn as well too fantastic with financial components associated with that Makes sense.

Speaker C: Makes sense. And why not give them the bump, right? Give them a 20 to 30% uplift in uh, in compensation, uh, if you are helping to grow top line revenue and that, that makes sense. So let's, let's we, we touched on this um, a little bit, um, in your previous commentary, um, or at least you mentioned it. But thinking about sales leaders who are listening in right now on building out and managing the right partner ecosystem to expand reach, uh, efficiently and profitably. I know in the product led motion, uh, you're always looking for that flywheel effect, right? How can you get something to go viral? But not everything has that. There's use cases and I can't say SDOCS is a flywheel motion. I know, fly message. Um, it is a per consumption, per use basis. And then someone says, oh, this is so cool, look at this. Right? Whereas like in a calendly model, it was every time you booked a meeting, you were on a splash page that said, you know, sign up for calendly free. So that allowed people to be able to create that flywheel motion. But then there's this whole partner system, partner ecosystem. What advice would you give to sales leaders on building and managing the right partner ecosystem to expand uh, their reach efficiently and profitably?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Partner led growth is what I call that. There's a whole world of that and it's something or ecosystem led growth, um, that we are getting into at sdocs. And I'll tell you a little bit more about it, but I am a firm believer that efficient partner ecosystems require shared accurate data that have consistent processes for them to even be effective. And in the world that we're in, we have a lot of different, we'll call them solutions partners or system integrators as well as other technologies that we want to be able to partner with. Uh, and so you need to be able to um, put in plans that are going to amplify uh, and broaden your reach without having to hire a bunch of people in order to make this effective. Because to your point, sometimes there's not a motion in play, there's not a lot of revenue associated with yet. Uh, we've seen this most recently as we have branched from a single platform strategy to a multi platform strategy. As a business and working with other communities, we have FTEs that we are not going to um, redistribute and reallocate time for pre revenue activities. This is where we're working with marketing a lot and we're working with our partner marketing group to be able to understand the data behind what drives business in that ecosystem and talk to people who are going to be able to help us get that viral effect. And again that's going to be in our world and our model more of the solutions partners, the implementers, the consultants that go in and are talking with clients and we want to make sure that our product is top of mind with them. So we've done a huge evaluation of this and we launched officially a partner program just uh, not even two full years ago. Before that it was very an ad hoc process for our business where we were just looking at it and if something came in and someone had an interest, we kind of distributed it along amongst the team. But it's a completely different motion, it's a much longer process. Um, the time to revenue is usually double if not triple the amount of time it takes for a direct sale. And so what you would get is you'd have teams that weren't really like caring too much about the partner ecosystem. But what we know is that's how you expand your reach. Right? If I can talk to one person who talks to 10 people, who talks to 10 people, it's the old um, I don't remember what, what um telephone company that was, but it was one fellow does one friend who tells another friend, you know, they, they do the whole like expansion of that. So we're trying to, we're trying to emulate that within uh, stocks on a partner led uh, approach. And the days are early. But I can tell you uh, as we've assessed what ecosystems make most sense for us, uh, we have signed up over 50 new partners in the last 12 months who are going through certification processes who are keeping top of mind who, they're keeping us docs top of mind because we're actually putting the product in their hands to make sure that they can understand it, make sure that they're enabled, make sure that when they go into a conversation with a customer, they're thinking about it so that we're not spending all of our calories trying to talk to every individual customer. Uh, for instance, if you think about Salesforce, they tell it they have over 150,000 customers worldwide. HubSpot has over 200,000 customers worldwide. ServiceNow has about 8,500 customers worldwide. There's these massive technology companies that we are trying to partner with, leveraging their ecosystems. But we can't go to every single, you know, door to door, asking every customer to, uh, look at sdocs. What we needed is get the people who are champions within those companies and talk to those businesses to, um, speak on our behalf. And so that's, that's the approach we're taking there. Does that answer your question?

Speaker C: It does. I'm just curious though. Uh, so I'm a sales leader and I want to start thinking about building out the partner ecosystem. How do you find? I think what you're talking about is integrators and individuals that are inside a lot of these organizations that have relationships already. So how did you target who to go after?

Speaker A: Are we talking about ecosystem wise or within the ecosystems? I just want to make sure.

Speaker C: Uh, yeah. Which partners? How do you find the partners that do what it is that you're wanting them to do?

Speaker A: One of the, one of the cool things about a lot of these ecosystems is they, um, they go through their own process of setting up partner partnerships. Right? So for instance, SDOCS is a certified partner with multiple technology companies. You can find us on different marketplace or app exchange listings and see us there. So what we do is we go through, especially on the integrator side, is we go through and we understand who are the movers and the shakers within that industry, within that company, within that ecosystem to say, let's go figure out how we target those people. Now we're also going out, uh, and having conversations with some of the smaller ones. Because if you go to someone that's the mover and the shaker and you don't have any collective experience or a ton of business upfront, like when we first entered into a new ecosystem, they're like, okay, Gary, come back to us when you have 100 customers, right? They want to make sure that the proof is in the pudding, that people have implemented it, someone else has done it beforehand. So we're looking at both sides of the spectrum of the biggest, baddest movers. And shakers. And then who are the people that are going to be willing to take a chance and look at a new product that's maybe going to differentiate themselves from some of those other bigger players when they go in to pitch their own services on the technology side. So this is like our OEM model, right? So we as a document generation, E signature, there's a lot of technologies out there that could benefit from having more document generation better, you know, E signature capabilities. Um, we look at who are the applications in that sense that are going to have the strongest fit. Maybe it's an HR application where they're going to want to be able to generate offer letters or some sort of um, performance improvement plan type information. They want to be able to generate documents from an HR perspective. Maybe it's apps that sales leaders use from a compensation management perspective, um, or pipeline management perspective. Maybe it's um, an application that's helping out with project management and they want to be able to generate beautiful reports and dashboards. So we look at those and we kind of say where do we play best? Where does document generation esignature fit best within that mosaic of what they are bringing to market? And then we talk to those people about embedding our technology into theirs as well too.

Speaker C: That's such a great idea. I did not even think about that, um, in terms of uh, partner integration uh, into your, into the technology and that's a great spot to be at because now you're native into the application. You're getting a, on a per use by pay by the drink or a portion of the licensing fees. That's a great, great idea there. Um, I want to kind of transition to um, something that we talked about in the pregame and you talked about uh, losing a deal early in your sales career. Um, that taught you an important lesson in uh, empathy, uh, with, in the selling process. Uh, how, how did that experience shape the way you coach your teams today? Talk about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, so just to kind of frame it up for all the listeners out there, early in my career, you know I had this, this opportunity that I thought was uh, a sure thing, we'll call it. It was a six figure deal. And this is back in 2010, maybe something around that time, 2011, it was during my fintech days, uh, and it was an energy business, massive energy company. Uh, and I had a lot of conversations where we were just nailing every checkbox right, every product and every feature of the solution was exactly what they were looking for. Um, but what I didn't Take the time. This was, again, younger in my career was to really understand the why or what was the problem, what was the pain that they were experiencing behind the lack of functionality? The functionalities became kind of a, I wouldn't say nice to have, but kind of a nice to have. It was all about the pain that they had experienced with their existing systems. They actually came to us originally saying they were preferring us, right? It was, they had known of us, they had heard of us, they wanted to work with us, uh, but they ended up going with a competitor because the competitor was able to sell a vision, they were able to make a stronger connection, uh, at the personal level, the business level and the financial level for all the different pains they were having that the product was able to solve. And so that broke my heart. Right. It stuck with me. I realized that sales isn't always about persuasion or being able to just glorify everything from a product level. It's really about connection. It's being able to listen to a customer understand what that is and then tangibly bring that back to them and say, here's what I'm hearing, here's what we can do that solves for that problem. You have to get really deep. You have to ask a lot of questions. You have to focus on what matters to them, not what matters to you. Again, products and features are a very, um, internal, outward facing approach. You have to take an outward, internal approach. You have to hear what people are saying and then internalize that versus I'm going to tell them what I want to say about our product. Um, and so for, as a leader, you know, I think that's really shaped how I coach my teams in a lot of ways. Right. I encourage everyone to slow down, seek to understand and tailor their approach to each client. Don't just follow a playbook. Playbook's good. But every deal is different and everyone will say that, every company will say they're unique, everyone's got different problems. And so as much as people want to accelerate deal cycles, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. Right. Um, I think there's things that you can do tactically within that as well that I coach my team through. Like, have we seen a reverse demo? Have they been able to show us what they're doing today? Have we actually had them articulate their pain in real time on camera so we could see it or in person if we're on the field with them, to actually understand and see the pains themselves so that when we tie our story back, we can say we saw this, we felt this, we understand where you're coming from. It's that empathetic approach. It's not just, hey, our product is the brand new shiny object that's going to save everything. Um, and so that's something that I do within each of my team members deals when I'm talking to them and taking that kind of Socratic approach of, you know, let's think about this harder, let's think about why this deal doesn't happen or what we haven't done or what could go wrong with it. Um, and then internally with my own team, right. It's also influenced how I lead them. So I try to lead with transparency and listen with intent. So I'm not saying something or listening to somebody, just thinking of what it is that I'm going to try to say next. I truly try to sit there, understand, process, absorb and make sure that I'm doing that. Because just like our customers out there, who wouldn't want to buy from the company that's just trying to tell them all of their thoughts and all of their ideas. No one wants to get led by someone who's just going to say, here's all my thoughts, here's all my ideas, and neglect to understand who it is that they're actually overseeing, who they're managing, uh, and making sure that they're coaching them to be, to be better at their job.

Speaker C: I love, uh, that you and the story actually that you started with was out of hearing a no. And uh, oftentimes we develop our learning lessons from hearing a note or something negative that happened as a result of that.

Speaker A: And oftentimes we get it out of

Speaker C: the positive as well. Um, but we're running out of time here, but I'd love this for this question here to quickly just maybe rattle off a few things. How do you encourage your team to handle no in a way that builds resilience, which is what we were just talking about, and motivation to keep on going instead of discouragement?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll do a lightning round on this one. But really managing rejection is a critical element of sales. It's absolutely imperative to being successful. And I've really learned that sales isn't about how often you hear yes, but how you respond to the no's. You know, don't take things personally. Rejection isn't a, um, uh, like a downgrade of you as an individual or a character. It's actually an opportunity to learn more. Right. To understand why you're hearing the no, um, and grow from that. So I Think from resilience. It means you have to push forward. And, and this is what I tell my team, right? You have to push forward even when the results don't come right away. People want instant gratification in life. And sales, unfortunately, is not one of those things where you're going to have that. You're going to often have a lot of struggles. You're going to have a lot of times where you're hearing that no. And you have to be able to push through that and know that if you're doing the right things, the outcomes will happen. So you can't be dissuaded or dismayed by a individual event or even multiple individual events. Uh, so I say expect rejection. Don't fear it. Lean into it. We go through this process of debriefing on losses to understand what could we have done better? Was it a product gap fit or was it a sales motion that was amiss? Did we not understand what we were trying to do? But then also celebrate the good things, the progress throughout deals on big deals, getting to an RFP stage, for instance, we're getting down, selected to want to be in the top choices that could be potentially chosen. Those are things we're celebrating. It keeps the team morale up as well. Um, so I think that's. Those are really, really critical things for any, any salesperson. It's always, I remember one of my first sales leaders told me was, you know, sales is, is like a roller coaster, but you have to run through it. Meaning it's a lot of highs and it's a lot of lows, but you can't let the good times get you too high and you can't let the down times get you too low. You have to stay even keeled throughout it all. You have to somehow make that roller coaster a train track for yourself during that process so that you never get too high on yourself and you never get too down on yourself. And I think the down is the ones that people, um, often fear the most because they're worried about the outcomes of not making money, their responsibilities, their role within the company. And I think as long as someone's doing the right behaviors, it becomes more of a coaching thing than it does the individual. Right? What are we not enabling that person with? How are we not getting that person set up for success so that they can go out and hit their number?

Speaker C: I love it. I love it. Keith, uh, we're coming up on time here, but, um, if somebody is interested in connecting with you, getting to know you, what's the best way to be able to do that is that through LinkedIn X. Tell us what it is.

Speaker A: Yeah, LinkedIn is probably my preferred method. Uh, I have an X account. I'll be honest, I'm not on it as much as some people. Um, I do have one, but I would say my, my account, uh, on LinkedIn is the easiest way. You can also just shoot me. I always love a direct email. If anyone wants to. It's kbossier B O S S I E R sdocs dot com. Um, feel free to shoot me a message. Would love to talk to you guys about anything related to sales.

Speaker C: Um, yeah, and if you're looking for Keith Beausier, it's Keith. And the, uh, last name again spelled B O S S S I E R N. Modern Selling Nation. If you're reaching out to Keith on LinkedIn, please, please, dear God, send him a personalized connection request and tell them, hey man, I heard you on the Modern Selling podcast with Mario Martinez and hopefully you're listening into these insights and tell them something personalized about this particular. Excuse me, uh, podcast here. Keith, I got one last question for you and that is your all time favorite, favorite movie. What is it?

Speaker A: Oh, that's a good question. So I'm a big movie guy and I found my favorite directors. Christopher Nolan, I would say he's probably my favorite. Um, and of his movies, he's got a lot of really good ones. I'm uh, going to go with Interstellar. Right? It's a Matthew McConaughey movie, kind of a sci fi movie, but it's also, it's, it's a really like, it expands your mind, kind of thought about time and dimensions. Um, it's a really fantastic and beautifully done movie. I think Hans Zimmer did the music for it. It's a great one.

Speaker C: And there it is. And uh, you said Interstellar.

Speaker A: Interstellar, yeah.

Speaker C: I'm not even sure if I've ever even heard of that movie before.

Speaker A: Oh man, you gotta check it out. So good. It's a long one. Christopher Nolan movies are long, but uh, it's really good.

Speaker C: All right, that's next on my list to check out. Hey, for all of you listening in right now, listen, don't turn that dial quite yet because we've got this very important message for our modern selling nation right now. M thanks for listening to the Modern Selling podcast. Please do me a huge favor and give the Modern Selling podcast a five star rating and review on itunes. Oh, and don't forget, if you'd like to say 20 hours or more in a month and increase your productivity. Go right now and download fly Message. That's flymsg M IO for free. It's your free text expander and personal writing assistant. Hey, thanks for listening in. And until the next episode, good, uh, selling.

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