The Partner Channel Podcast

Sloan McCauley, Director of Channel Sales at Localytics, and Jen Spencer discuss educating clients, establishing trust and how nothing beats face-to-face time with partners on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. What do you do in your role? I came into this role about two years ago. The first year was about figuring out our strategy. From there it has really been a year of what we consider a full partnership production. At this point we are influencing a part of our overall pipeline here at Localytics. Ultimately my goal in running this business would be to have it be a 50 / 50 split between channel and direct sales.  And hopefully it will continue to grow from there. What major initiatives are you implementing to develop those relationships? We’re aiming to provide as much education and support as possible, and that comes in many different forms. With a product like Localytics, because we are focused on the total lifecycle of users as it relates to the mobile application, we present an opportunity to have partners push their customer to think beyond the download, beyond standard media metrics, and have them  think about retention. How do we turn these users into a lifetime customer and ultimately these producers of our brand? Fortunately we have a platform that allows and equips agencies to push customers to think that way.   How do you support knowledge transfer between Localytics and your partners? These are incredibly busy folks, so it’s about delivering consistency –– being in front of your partners and being on call for them when they need information. It can be phone calls or in the form of weekly or biweekly newsletters. But I don't think anything replaces being front and center in person with partners. What is the biggest challenge with actually engaging your partners? Trying to build up our numbers. This was trial and error because Localytics didn’t have a defined partnership strategy yet. We tried to see who we could get in front of and tried to understand a wide array of partners. Quite honestly we onboarded a considerable amount of those folks this way. Definitely, coming out of the gate, start small and make sure that you establish an ongoing communication strategy with those folks. Do you have any tips for establishing trust with partners? You never want to enter into a business relationship with someone when you don’t understand what their endgame is. The same goes for partners. It is really important to understand what the core of their business is so that you can use that information to turn it into a mutually beneficial relationship. It ultimately builds trust that we are taking the time to look at your client's business. Speed Round Questions: Favorite city? San Francisco. Are you an animal lover? Yes, a big time animal lover. Mac or PC? Mac. Uber or Lyft? Uber. Ride or die Uber. All expenses paid trip to? Croatia.

Jack Kosakowski, global head of B2B sales execution at Creation Agency, joins Jen Spencer to discuss social selling, relationship development and the power of content in this episode of The Allbound Podcast.  How do you define social selling? Social selling is leveraging the communication channels where your buyers are living versus just communicating with them via phone and email. You're providing value and communicating on multiple channels to influence the sale along the way from online conversation to offline revenue close. Should social sellers separate business from their personal life? We live in the most digital age ever. If you're scared of someone seeing your lifestyle through your social channels, you should be careful how you share or how you live your life. You should inspire and motivate people on a personal and professional level, because hiding isn't going to get you anywhere in sales. How can today's B2B account exec or business development rep use social networking to strengthen their phone and email strategies? If you really want to get to that next level, you've got to understand who the individuals are in the accounts you want to sell. Everyone thinks it's all about business value, but really you've got to have some personal value, too. Nobody wants to be sold, but everybody wants to have a conversation, especially if they have something to talk about with somebody. But how do you know that if you're not leveraging the information you're given? What challenges have you identified while working on digital strategies? One challenge is that marketing is not tied to the revenue numbers, from a dollar amount. I think that marketers should get a base salary, but they should live and die on what kind of business comes in like salespeople do. Most marketers aren't in the weeds sitting with the customers –– they're sitting back and creating content based off articles the industry says they should be writing about. A lot of their content may be great but isn't going to help move the needle. When you're disconnected from the buyer, you are disconnected from sales. What is an example of a tactic you used on a recent social selling success? I’d been having some very preliminary conversations with a customer that I really, really wanted. I knew through one of our conversations that we could fix a major pain point for him. So I wrote a blog post on LinkedIn on the whole process of how this could be fixed then sent the link to him and said, “Hey, I wrote a blog post and I was thinking about you and our conversation, and how this might help.” He came back and said, “Jack, we need to take this conversation more seriously. That was brilliant. How can you do this for us?” Most sales leaders don't understand the power of content, but here I leveraged my insight, created the content, and I sent it to the customer in a way that made it look like I wasn't selling. I was adding value to my audience, and content was the way that I got into that conversation. It’s called leading with value. Speed Round Questions: Favorite city? London. Animal lover? Yes. Mac or PC? PC all day. Uber or Lyft? Uber. All expenses paid trip to? Thailand.

Jill Fratianne, a partner channel manager at Hubspot, talks with host Jen Spencer about qualities she looks for in a new partner, insights she’s picked up as a business owner and the importance of face time –– all on the the latest episode of The Allbound Podcast. What are some changes you’ve noticed in the industry over the years? People are very educated when they get to the point of meeting a sales rep. They don't want to talk to you unless you have some extra value to add to the conversation. How do you compare against your competitors? What can you tell me about my business and how is a solution going to give me deliverable results? Never assume they don’t know more than you, or haven't done research before they got to you, because they have. What advice or guidance do you give your partners? You're not there to sell for the sake of selling. People despise that. However, people do enjoy a sales process if they think it’s done well, because they wouldn't be talking to you if they weren't interested in your services somehow. I’ve learned both through business ownership and sales that if you're doing the right thing for people, and you really listen to their goals, they actually appreciate a bit of pushing from you because you're trying to do the right thing for them. How do you build relationships with partners? You have to have a personality type that puts them first –– their needs first and their business first, and your needs second. From now until the end of time. It comes down to personal relationships and caring. How do you measure the success of new and existing partners? We look at everything including what types of calls we do with partners, how many calls we’re having with agencies every day and whether they are registering new leads. Then, of the types of leads that we’re getting, how many coaching calls have I had per marketing agency? Are there any agencies that I have in my book that I am forgetting, or ignoring, or just not paying attention to because they're just not speaking up to me? We measure all of the activity, because in sales, that's the only thing you can control. What challenges do you have in engaging your partners in marketing for themselves? Those who are successful market themselves. Meaning, you'll attract more business when people see that you actually drink your own champagne. I have a free Hubspot account, and I have an account that I pay for. My family and I started a very small, but now wildly successful, wedding business using Hubspot and inbound marketing. I don't have time to do it, but I force myself to use the software, understand marketing, publish posts, do all those things. It allows me to have the conviction when talking to marketing agency clients. Speed Round Questions: What’s your favorite city? Portland, Maine. Animal lover? Yes or No? Of course! Mac or PC? Both. Uber or Lyft? Uber All expenses paid trip, where would it be to? I’d not go anywhere. I’d go over to York Hospital where I am delivering this baby girl in a couple weeks and see her healthy and happy in my arms.  

Jill Rowley, social selling evangelist, discusses the evolution of sales and the need for a new mindset and skillset in social selling. She emphasizes the importance of personalized communication, account-based marketing in B2B, leveraging data, and the future of the sales profession.

Learn how to vet, engage, and grow partnerships based on values. Identifying alignment and good indicators are essential. Sometimes it's necessary to turn away partners. Starting a partner program involves managing expectations and avoiding a cookie-cutter approach. The SaaS industry requires adapting sales strategies and leveraging sales acceleration tools. Engage with customers to drive conversions. A speed round covers fun questions, and there's an event promotion.

Jared Fuller, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at PandaDoc, joins Jen Spencer to share how he scaled the channel program at PandaDoc from less than 1% of total revenue to over 13% in his first six months at the company. What are a few key strategies you’ve implemented to make PandaDoc’s channel program such a success? I reached out to channel leaders who have built something from scratch with a similar SaaS portfolio. I berated Pete Caputa, the VP of Sales at Hubspot, and convinced him to join our board of advisors and get on a weekly call with me. I found someone who was much better than me at building a channel program. When it comes to boosting inbound leads, what types of content are you producing to do that, and what has been the biggest driver for PandaDoc? There are two types of partners at PandaDoc that I’m responsible for: our channel program and our strategic alliances. How we drive inbound traffic is by co-hosting events ––thought leadership webinars, where we’ll bring out a topic, for instance, “The Sales Enablement Stack: How to Build a Process from Lead to Close.” We’ll evaluate best practices with a partner like Close.io. They bring the thought leadership on how to make sure deals don’t fall through in the pipeline and we’ll supplement it with how to put together the right content, how to send the right proposal, how to customize the content, etc., and we’ll deliver that to both of our customer bases and generate leads. Co-marketing for us has been key. It makes sense to do those same type of events with our channel partners. How did you get your sales team bought-in to the PandaDoc vision? I screen candidates for vision. I believe if you can’t find alignment in vision the rest of the deal is dead. I typically paint a very clear vision of why I believe in PandaDoc and see if they feel the same. We’re documents, which could be the most boring thing in the world, but if you can get excited about changing something that hasn’t been different since Microsoft Word launched 30 years ago...if you believe in that, the rest is incumbent upon the team and the process to ensure they’re successful. How did you empower them to exceed quota? I’ve come to realize there’s a massive difference between management and leadership. Management does things right. Leadership does the right things. I’m a horrible manager, but what I know I’m great at is trying to imbue a vision and a sense of passion, urgency and desire upon the people I work with. If you don’t have those, let’s part ways. So we’ve been doing a lot of training around that empowerment piece. They understand that the people who are successful at PandaDoc are doers. For sales leaders trying to grow their strategic partnerships, what tips can you share with them? When you’re starting a partner program, you have to understand people’s interests. You have your interests as a company, you have your partner’s interests, and you have your partner’s client’s interests. And of those, you think the best thing you can do is solve for your partner’s client’s interests. That is actually fundamentally flawed. You have to focus on your partner’s interests. How can you help them grow their business? Want to hear more from Jared? Don't miss out — listen to the rest.

Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, joins Jen Spencer to talk about empowering sales teams in the SaaS industry in this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Tell us what you do as a Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist. My number one focus every day is around customer success and evangelizing ways in which companies can leverage technology in new ways and reimagine the organization that is responsible for selling and bringing products to market. And more importantly, the entire experience that’s created by brands. Growth and innovation are the two things that many companies are focused on today, whether it’s a small business, medium or enterprise. So this was a great way for me to align to the broader remit that people were looking to accomplish this year. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in sales over the years? For anyone who knows me, knows I love to call myself a recovering seller. What has really changed for me – and this may be cliche today – is that the customer really is different than they ever were even 10 years ago. When I was selling, people only had a PC on their desk, they didn’t have them at home. Not everyone had a cell phone and they would turn off that connection when they went home. But now there’s more power in the hand of the consumer than there was on their desk 10 years ago. So much is being generated by this connection between social, mobile, cloud and information. And the speed at which that technology is changing has reshaped the way consumers interact with technology and the way in which they conduct commerce between themselves and a brand. And that was the catalyst for people to then change the way they wanted to consume and sell in their business lives. I think the learnings from B2C are what is really accelerating and challenging sales from a process perspective. What do you think will continue to shape the way in which sales organizations function and succeed in this modern environment? We get caught up in ‘technology is going to solve all the problems we’ve been facing.’ Technology to me is the enabling tool to help facilitate changes in people and process. If you just deploy technology, and you don’t rethink the metrics you’re tracking, the information you are able to gather, the kinds of behaviors that change because of the information gathered, how you should be allocating resources, etc. –– all of that has implications. If you just deploy technology to manage the team better and have more metrics, the relationship between the sales rep and that technology is not one of love. It’s more viewed as big brother, and that’s a people/process shift that should happen in tandem with any kind of deployment of technology. We’ve seen how effective a customer-led sales organization can function, are more organizations starting to embrace this? How do you see them implementing it? This is a big challenge. When you make a decision to put the customer at the true north of the decisions you make as an organization, you have to understand the gap between an executive making that decision and a person in the line of fire such as a customer service representative or a sales rep. They need to understand what it means to them. If we’re going to become more customer centric, what does it change in my daily life? Do we do things differently, or are we just saying it and I’m behaving the same way. If you don’t have that connection point between strategically at the executive level and the entire company doesn’t understand what does that mean to their job, then you’ve really set yourself up for disappointment. You’ve got to get everyone rallied behind it. And it has to become a drumbeat of communication and engagement with all employees, because it really is about changing a mindset. And that is far more difficult than deploying new technology. It will take mindset, executive sponsorship, and inspiring the entire organization to understand what it means to be a customer-centric company. A couple of years ago you wrote a piece about how technology sales reps have “lost their mojo.” Since then have you noticed sales leaders getting better about empowering their sellers? Have the tech sales reps gotten their mojo back? A lot of that had to do with finding a new way while still maintaining the things that made them (sales people) successful in the past. You can’t just forget everything, but you have to be willing to unlearn things we’ve done and relearn by using some of the new capabilities. While we’ve spent a lot of time helping the sales rep be a better seller, I think where we’ve got a blind spot is with the sales managers and they’re the ones that are working every day to teach and coach. What’s the one thing an executive can do today to empower their sales managers? Unfortunately, we live and die by metrics, and until leadership starts to say, “Hold on. If we’re really going to become a customer-driven organization, that can’t be the only thing we track.” Sales leaders have to start to think about the long-term game ––instead of going from lead to cash, you have to go from lead to advocacy. If you want a customer to not only buy from you, and also become a raving fan and advocate on your behalf...it’s going to take more time. And if you’re held to the same metrics, it’s going to be really difficult. Sales managers have to work with their managers to advocate for more coaching and mentoring. Mindset is a huge component here and sales managers and leaders have to lead that charge by working with their team downstream different. Have you noticed a shift in tech companies building their own reseller channels as opposed to going through large distributors? You have to be able to solve against, who is the target customer at the end user level, and how does that end user actually like to buy the technology you sell? You can’t solve to everything, especially if you’re a small company, but you have to look for those hot spots. What are those two to three channels that satisfy the highest percentage of demand from your target end user? That’s how you develop your indirect or your go-to market strategy. It’s the “Bermuda Triangle of Segmentation.” Speed round questions: Favorite city? Somewhere in Hawaii Animal lover…yes or no? Yes Mac or PC? Both Uber or Lyft? Uber All expenses paid trip to where? I’d stay home!