Avanish and Jim discuss:
- Investing in an ecosystem in a tough market (8:04)
- Committing to working with partners over growing professional services (11:26)
- Finding a way to demonstrate returns and get the C-Suite on board with building an ecosystem (12:40)
- How to avoid having an “identity crisis” by setting an intention for how you will grow your platform (17:15)
- Understanding how a partner delivers services to integrate in a complementary way (19:50)
- The advantages and challenges of a managed service provider motion (21:30)
- Selling a solution rather than an outcome (26:34)
- The importance of authentic communication (29:00)
Guest: Jim Nairn
Since arriving in the Spring of 2021, Jim Nairn has served as WalkMe’s Senior Vice President of Alliances and Channels Ecosystems. Prior to joining WalkMe, from 2015 through 2021, Jim held the role of Vice President of Partner Sales for ServiceNow. Jim’s pedigree comes from a 20+ year career in Direct and Indirect Selling in the Telecommunications, Infrastructure and Software space, before moving into SaaS (with ServiceNow), in 2015. Jim has spent those 2+ decades working with a vast array of partners, traveling the globe and helping grow some of the biggest tech companies in the world. He continues to serve as an advisor for pre-ipo startups, consults a vast network of C-Suite executives and mentors several former colleagues, employees and associates, worldwide. Today, Jim lives just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife Kati… and 2 daughters, Emma and Amelia.
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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