A lot of B.D. people are part of deal teams but haven't necessarily led the deal process themselves so trying to get a sense of truly how much experience do they have there and then figuring out how complex those deals were. Then I would ask a little bit more about their career history so for example how did they decide to join this company from this other company what were they optimizing for? And last references are also very critical because these deals take so long in a lot of cases to actually get done that it's really criticalYou look at someone else's past deal work to really understand if they've done strong deals or not.
Today’s episode is with Cristina Cordova, Notion’s Head of Platform & Partnerships. Previously, she was the 28th employee and the first partnerships hire at Stripe, where she cultivated partnerships with companies like Shopify, Squarespace and Apple, built out the BD org, and led their new Corporate Card effort.
After a decade in partnerships, Cristina has bagged big deals, honed her negotiation skills, built out teams — and made plenty of mistakes she hopes others can learn from. In today’s conversation, Cristina pulls from across her career to share the inside scoop on deals that had an unexpected outsized impact — as well as the ones that went sideways.
She also shares her playbook for being a startup’s first partnership hire, including the three critical areas to focus on first, and the common traps to avoid. It’s also full of actionable tactics on everything from dealing with partners trying to push you around, to how to hire for partnerships roles and structure the org chart.
Today’s conversation is a must-listen of course for folks currently in or hoping to break into partnerships, platform or BD roles, but Cristina also shares great tactics for getting better at negotiating, as well as some fascinating stories of how Stripe and Notion scaled — meaning there’s tons to learn here for everyone.
You can follow Cristina on Twitter at @cjc.
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