Category Visionaries Cassandra Gholston, CEO & Founder of PartnerTap: $9 Million Raised to Revolutionize Partner Orchestration
PartnerTap is transforming how enterprise companies collaborate with their partners through account mapping and co-selling technology. With $9 million in funding, PartnerTap helps technology giants like Salesforce and SAP unlock revenue opportunities by enabling secure data sharing between partner ecosystems. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Cassandra Gholston, CEO and Founder of PartnerTap, to explore how her experience in software sales led her to build a solution that's changing how large enterprises drive revenue through partnerships.
Topics Discussed:
- PartnerTap's core technology for account mapping and co-selling between enterprise partners
- The data-sharing challenges that prevent effective partner collaboration in enterprise sales
- How PartnerTap securely connects partner CRM data to identify mutual customer alignment
- The Fempire community that Cassandra built to connect women leaders in tech
- Why customer retention is more crucial than fundraising for startup success
- Pivoting from a bottom-up sales motion to an enterprise-focused approach
- Maintaining founder energy and excitement throughout the startup journey
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
- Focus on the enterprise early if that's your market: Despite conventional wisdom to start with smaller clients, Cassandra recognized her solution needed enterprise adoption first. "When you decide you're going to do top-down selling and sell into the largest organizations in the world as a startup, that's a hard road. Most startups are going to go after smaller companies first," she explained. This decision forced PartnerTap to mature faster in areas like security posture and enterprise readiness.
- Build a network effect into your GTM strategy: Cassandra targeted companies with large partner ecosystems to create natural expansion opportunities. "Going in and selling to ADP was going to bring a huge partner ecosystem. Their biggest partners became customers. This starts the network effect of PartnerTap," she shared. This approach created a built-in pipeline for future enterprise deals.
- Validate your concepts before going all-in: Before leaving her sales career, Cassandra methodically prepared for entrepreneurship: "I banked a lot of commission checks for over a year... We did a lot of nights and weekends where we got a co-working space and built out the wireframes, and we actually had people come in and give us feedback, like people that were our actual eventual users." This preparation reduced risk and validated market need.
- Be willing to pivot your GTM approach: PartnerTap initially pursued a bottom-up strategy focused on sellers, but quickly realized they needed partner teams' buy-in first. "We thought we're just going to connect sellers with partner data without the partner team. We realized pretty soon that we had to build a whole other module and pivot the way we were selling," Cassandra explained. Recognizing when your initial GTM hypothesis is wrong and adjusting quickly is crucial.
- Make core values actionable, not aspirational: Customer love is PartnerTap's core value, but Cassandra ensures it's lived daily through dedicated Slack channels recognizing team members who exemplify it. Their enterprise-focused success team delivers exceptional service, resulting in zero enterprise customer churn since founding—even through difficult market conditions like COVID-19. As Cassandra notes, "The kiss of death in SaaS is churn."
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