Session 5 - Report Up! Create A Quarterly State of Partnerships Report With Claude
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Pallavi Singh: [00:00:00] Hello. 

Justin Zimmerman: Hello again. Hello. 

Pallavi Singh: So seamless. One of 

Justin Zimmerman: the greatest... I know, right? So smooth. And so, uh, yeah, one of the, one of the perks of this job is, uh, I get to talk to, hang out, and create real meaningful long relationships that turn into opportunities for others to learn as well. And so, uh, I think you and I, whoa, we've known each other for, like, four or five years.

Justin Zimmerman: I think it's been a while, actually, when you were, uh, head of partnerships at Help Scout. And so, um, I think this is the, this is the first time you're on the episode of the show. We ran into each other at HubSpot, uh, Inbound, and now it's called Unbound. And- Mm-hmm ... um, uh, I was telling the audience who was part of the last session, I wish I was s- as smart as it seems and as strategic as your session's going to be in relation to the last one.

Justin Zimmerman: But, uh, Alan Adler just talked about the whole concept of creating arc- creating [00:01:00] AI architecture that creates artifacts- Yeah. Nice ... and recording and, uh, document creation. He basically set you up for success in this session right now, which basically he said, uh, if you're creating documentation, you're living in the past, and you- Yeah

Justin Zimmerman: need architecture to help create things at speed and making your value visible. And so, um, I'd love to hand this over to you right now. Do yourself a little bit more justice by introducing yourself, the company, some of the things you're responsible for, any cool success stories or highlights around what you've done, and of course, what we're gonna learn here today.

Pallavi Singh: Cool. Thank you, Justin, and thank you, Alan. Sounds like you set me up perfectly. Yeah, definitely. Um, well, hi, everybody. Uh, my name is Pallavi Singh. I am the head of partnerships at Quo, and today I'm gonna show you how to create a quarterly state of partnerships report. I use Claude. You can use whatever you'd like, but I'm gonna demo it live, so pray for me.

Pallavi Singh: But, um, yeah, we can get into it. [00:02:00] If you haven't heard about Quo, Quo, uh, is a business phone system. It's for SMBs. We have around 90,000 customers today that use us to manage their calls, texts, voicemails. And our team, we are a lovely lean team of three right now, and we run four partner channels. So across agency, ecosystem, technology or integration, and soon to be franchise.

Pallavi Singh: We have around 900 partners across all of the channels. Um, you'll see the X's in here are on purpose. I'm trying to, uh, protect the company, but tell you where we're at. So I, I think it's helpful to give a snapshot of where we're at today. Partnerships is, is around two years old at Quo, and so today we account for around 10% of net new revenue, uh, across the whole company.

Pallavi Singh: We went from zero partners to 900 in just 12-ish months. [00:03:00] We've launched 12 new integrations in the last year, and about half of our partners actively refer monthly, and so I know the, the golden rule is usually 80/20, and so we are blessed to, to have that 50% activation rate. Um, and for the sake of confidentiality, we've, we've crossed into the low to mid-millions in all-time partner source revenue.

Pallavi Singh: So the reason I share that is, is context for the reporting problem because there, there's definitely a building stage that goes on in your first year or so. You don't necessarily need to report quite as deeply. You need to prove out the partnerships program and the why you're doing it and, and how it's indirect sales, um, and how the extended reach will really support the company's revenue.

Pallavi Singh: But then you cross into this next phase of, I guess, like in the classic zero to one or one to two terms, we're, we're firmly in that one to two, and there's, there becomes [00:04:00] reporting that becomes so crucial to your role and to the success that you have. These are programs that are driving really real revenue, and because of that, we all, we all have experienced the want to have leadership understand the, the ship we're flying and, and continue investing in it.

Pallavi Singh: So with that, it sort of leads into, I'm sure many of us are very familiar with, with what we're accountable for, but I wanted to share because it, it's helpful when you're building out this kind of report. So we're gold on partner sourced ARR, uh, how the part-- how the program grows quarter over quarter, what share of partners are actually converting customers, so that's activation rate to us, the integration piece, so the launches and the retention that comes with that.

Pallavi Singh: And then on top of, on top of those goals, there's, there's partner marketing and enablement across all of the channels. So it's a lot of moving pieces. It's a lot of data living in [00:05:00] many different places. Um, and so I think this is a problem that many of us have experienced of how do you solve it? For me, I was spending hours pulling data manually, and I, I feel lucky to have experienced this, so I can really appreciate the blessing that AI can be.

Pallavi Singh: Um, but yeah, spending hours manually pulling data. For us, it's granola weekly updates in Notion, uh, partner stack activity, scattered notes across Slack. Um, and after all of that work, you're, you're analyzing the data, you're parsing it into really clear buckets. Shaping it into a clean go-to-market report was tough, especially to do frequently.

Pallavi Singh: Uh, a lot of it is also written in partnership language. I think that's something I really learned the last few years, um, in these types of roles. But activation rates and referral volume and integration counts, [00:06:00] none of that really connects into how leadership thinks. They are going to be thinking in revenue and decisions and risk.

Pallavi Singh: So, the problem I'm trying to solve, and that I think I have, is that, uh, you wanna produce something accurate and readable. Show the people that need to read it. I needed a report that really led with revenue and that surfaced the right decisions clearly, and that didn't take hours and hours and hours. Um, so this is how I'm working towards that fix.

Pallavi Singh: So, I'm gonna stop talking soon and show you the actual demo, but we're gonna cover how to create a nice quarterly report. You can make this as frequent as you'd like, but the, the goal is that you can bubble this up confidently to your leadership, um, be able to ask for the things that you need. I'm gonna walk through the setup and creation fully live.

Pallavi Singh: Um, we'll generate the Q2 report in real time, and then while it's generating, I think it'll take a few minutes, we'll just talk more around why this matters and, and go beyond the time [00:07:00] savings, and I'll show you how to build it yourself. So that is that. With that, let me just share my-- share a different screen.

Pallavi Singh: Give me a sec

Pallavi Singh: All right

Pallavi Singh: Okay. Just gonna add this. Thank you. Okay Two seconds while I just rearrange my life here. Okay. So I would have loved to show you the full prompt creation as well. Um, but I'm gonna say for the sake of time, I'm gonna show you the project instead. So give me one second here. Thank you for being patient.[00:08:00] 

Pallavi Singh: Great. Okay. So I've created a pro-- What you're looking at right now is I've created a project inside of Claude. I've named it the quarterly state of partnerships, and first I'm gonna walk you through the instructions. So the idea here is that it all starts with a prompt and some really solid instructions.

Pallavi Singh: I didn't sit down and write a perfect prompt. I didn't sit down and, and write all of this out net new from my brain. What I did was I actually speech-to-texted in another chat, and I said, "Listen, I want to create a quarterly state of partnerships report for our team and for the executive team. This is what the team looks like.

Pallavi Singh: This is what the audience is. This is kind of who, who they are. They're smart, time poor, and can be skeptical. Um, they do not need granularity. Uh, someone, someone will ask me about the numbers almost every time. I do not want you to, [00:09:00] to, um, make anything up in here. These are the sources I want you to pull from.

Pallavi Singh: I want you to, to deliver a report with this type of structure." And I kind of just went through what our quarterly meetings look like and just walked through, and I said, "Can you deliver a report that, that, uh, complements that, that structure?" And went through the rest of the tone. I wanted to make sure that this was not me just relaying every single number that we've, we've seen.

Pallavi Singh: So hence why I put in this, "No, we're excited," or, "It was a great month," or, "Continuing to." Um, I would really like it to be clear. I would love for a position to be taken. Um, say what matters and why. It's, it's really the so what piece of, of these meetings that's important. Find the single story connecting the quarter together.

Pallavi Singh: Um, cut anything that's activity without implication. So I kind of just-- I thought about the things that were really [00:10:00] important to our leaders, thought about what would land with them, and I'm, I'm voice to texting this to Claude. Um, this is the output that it's come up with. I've also shared what good looks like to me, and what good looked like was that the room actually understood what's happening, they're aligned, and they focus on a decision or an ask that I'm bringing up.

Pallavi Singh: Then after I, I shared that-- So step one is creating the, the state of partnerships report Step two is creating a talk track for me because we, we speak about this in meetings, and it's just helpful to have a really nice story that I can talk through. So I've asked it the same-- I'm s- uh, I'm still in the same voice note here, um, if you're still following.

Pallavi Singh: But, uh, I asked it, you know, write it modularly so that every section can be standalone because we often have Q&As, and make sure there's a really clear quarter through line short enough [00:11:00] to repeat after any tangents that we come back to a, a unified place, and then weave in something that's risk related.

Pallavi Singh: So do we have anything underperforming? Do we have a dependency or, or, or an assumption that I need some support on? I wanted it to state the cause and then also what it's not to make sure it's not too, um, alarming, um, or catastrophizing. Uh, nothing-- Yeah, nothing important lives only at the end. So none of this should be a surprise.

Pallavi Singh: None of this should be, um, new to the leaders. I want it to come off very controlled. And then guardrails. So you'll see a few guardrails in here for, for this particular demo. Um, nothing sensitive, no competitor information. I asked it to zhuzh all the numbers. Um, but in a real meeting, I would probably put the guardrails of flag if something is really important that perhaps the team might not know, um, or if I should flag this ahead of the [00:12:00] quarterly meeting if I should not wait for that.

Pallavi Singh: Um, so anyways, that is the instructions, and I asked Claude to turn all of that into project instructions that I could reuse every quarter. So this is the output for that. I'm happy to share this piece, and you all can adjust. Um, I think the instructions are kind of the heart of this report, and I've also gone ahead and scheduled it so that it's quarterly, um, and I can just run it whenever I need to.

Pallavi Singh: So now that that is sort of the instruction piece is out of the way, what I want to show you live is really, let's run it. So I also asked it to develop a prompt for me to put in every time I need to develop this report. So demo mode, live audience present, run the state of partnerships report. This is the quarter date.

Pallavi Singh: We know that the quarter is not over, um, but for-- this is for us, our quarter is, or our fiscal year is a bit adjusted, ends at [00:13:00] Jan- in January. Pull the granola notes. I've attached manual partner stack data here because the MCP, um... I just wanted to use our, our hard data, and I think the MCP is still getting there.

Pallavi Singh: And yeah, let's hit it I think it should... In my test, this took a few minutes, okay? So we'll chat now. 

Justin Zimmerman: Yeah, 

Pallavi Singh: well- But what- While it's running. Yeah, sorry, Justin. What's up? 

Justin Zimmerman: No, we can, we can chat. We can, uh, take a bite of a power bar to make sure that we had some lunch. 

Pallavi Singh: That's right. We 

Justin Zimmerman: can, 

Pallavi Singh: uh- 

Justin Zimmerman: I 

Pallavi Singh: was thinking kind of to walk you through...

Pallavi Singh: I know I talked a little bit about like why this is important. Uh, um, but I also just want to call out partnerships I find is one of the hardest functions to be defensible in an executive leadership meeting. It's not, it's not because the results aren't there, it's because there's a different language that's spoken than everyone else in the room.

Pallavi Singh: [00:14:00] Sales is talking in ARR and pipeline almost exclusively. Marketing is talking in MQLs and CAC. Finance is going to be talking in like a payback period type of perspective. But partnerships talks about referral rates and partner counts and co-marketing motions and activations and things that are very real and very meaningful, but they don't necessarily map cleanly to how leadership measures the business.

Pallavi Singh: So what happens is usually, at least for us, we hit around five, 10 minutes in a QBR, someone asks, uh, "What's partner source revenue?" You pull up a number, and the meeting moves on. But you walk out without really sharing the, the true core of partnerships. And I don't really think it's partnerships problem.

Pallavi Singh: It's, it's more around a communication problem. And the leaders that are in the room that are getting budget, that are getting their head count, um, those are the ones that figured [00:15:00] out how to show up in the leadership's language and not just their own. So this report was really the solve for me for that.

Pallavi Singh: And, and over time, as you keep doing them, you'll also be able to adapt this language and bring it to your meetings. So it's not just this AI report that's the only place where it lives. Um, but it's very helpful, I find. Every section leads with revenue. Every win has a business outcome. Every ask is framed more as a decision rather than a request that you need buy-in to.

Pallavi Singh: And more than anything, like also it creates a paper trail for you. So when you're doing these quarter over quarter, the most underrated thing I think you could do as a partnerships leader is, is document. Um, and what you said you'd do, what would, what actually happened, what you're going to do about it.

Pallavi Singh: Most of us find that really tough to do because it takes a really long time, and it's quite tedious on top of the rest of your, your job that's pretty full already. So I [00:16:00] appreciate that when you have this running every quarter, you have a record. Um, most, most VP of partnerships or revenue just really want you to be able to build a strong enough case for them.

Pallavi Singh: I have found that they will rally for you. If there's buy-in, they will, they will go to bat for you. But, um, it's important we make it, we make it easy for them, so. You can do it little Claude, I believe in you. Um, even though this takes a little bit, should take it just a-- hopefully just a minute more. But even though this takes a bit, it still massively impacts the speed at which we can do this today.

Pallavi Singh: Um, I'm still really, I'm still really in it with Miss Claudette here, though. Don't get me wrong. We will do this, and then you'll probably have one or two iterations that you go back and forth on, and that's only natural because you're taking the partner calls. You are, you are in, in the weeds connecting the dots to narrate the story along.

Pallavi Singh: Your, your judgment still very [00:17:00] much matters here, um, because there's only a data-- there's a data portion going on, and let's hope the story it's going to project is the right story. But there's still a very human element in here where... That's why I say it doesn't take zero time, but it-- you can expect forty-five minutes or so, and it collapses the distance between I have all of this information and leadership has what they need.

Pallavi Singh: So instead of hours and hours and hours, maybe just forty-five, thirty minutes or anything. Um, that's really the best part of it. But Okay. 

Justin Zimmerman: Well, well, there is also, like, you know, if you didn't have a live audience waiting for the output with anticipation, and you're f- you, you would go work on another project or task, you know?

Justin Zimmerman: And so I think- Yeah ... that's one of those kind of subtle things that I think, um, you know, could be it a... Could it be a soft KPI? Maybe. But, [00:18:00] like, everyone talks about increased productivity, so, like, that may be the things that you're not spending your time on, like the hours that would go into building this report.

Justin Zimmerman: Uh, you could go have some scheduled partner meetings, some qualification, onboarding, whatever, you know, real next level, next steps in revenue-generating activities. And so, you know, you can kind of see here, at least mentally, this gets done, and now I can go do other things. And so the, the whole concept, and even going back to Alan's, um, more bigger concept around if you really think about what he was saying, if you watched that last session, he was really talking about a multi-agentic environment.

Justin Zimmerman: So you have all these brains that are specifically trained and tasked to do very specific sub-parts of work that he talked about this iterative loop. And I think Alan comes up with his own language to describe things, which is perfectly fine and a great way to brand yourself. But, you know, the common language really out there is just, you know, sub-agents [00:19:00] and, you know, specific skill files that he's now trained his sub-agents to do.

Justin Zimmerman: And so, um- Mm-hmm ... you know, ultimately, um, you know, as we wait for this to finish, you know, you could then go prompt and interact, uh, another agent to go do another thing. And, you know- Mm ... we could kind of see that big picture. And I go back to, um, the prediction I bring up every time I start these s- sessions, is that there are the partner managers, the partner operators who are getting their hands dirty.

Justin Zimmerman: And, uh- Mm-hmm ... they're building one agent, two agent, five agents, 10 agents. And, and they're deploying those to then own and take over a lot of the tasks that either, A, consume a ton of your time, or B, you couldn't get to before because you just either ran out of time or you didn't even have the skill set because you had to go inter-department to then get those fancy graphics done.

Justin Zimmerman: You can now just dedicate, as in Alan's language, the architecture, then create the artifacts. And so, um- Absolutely ... you know, we're, we're hanging out here and you're waiting, and we're watching this character count go up. And we're like- ... when is it [00:20:00] gonna, when is it gonna, you know- Mm ... stop and drop? And so, um-

Pallavi Singh: What do we got here? Yeah. It is also really helpful, uh, it, it is also really helpful because this, this is like traditionally a RevOps supported task, and look, she's done. Um, but this really helps the RevOps team support the partnerships team because they don't have to like be in the weeds here. You can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Pallavi Singh: We didn't have to be here watching the whole thing, but yeah, we could've done something else in that time. Um, but now that she's done, let's see what she's created, and I will re-share my screen so you can see it. 

Justin Zimmerman: I'll bring it up backstage if I see it pop up first. 

Pallavi Singh: Perfect. Great. Um- 

Justin Zimmerman: I got it. 

Pallavi Singh: Can you see?

Pallavi Singh: Great. Great. Perfect. Amazing. So now we can see she's [00:21:00] completed. So there's a nice executive summary here. I mean, this is really what is so key for your leadership team to be able to read upfront. What's going on? Where are you pacing? Uh, week-over-week momentum is what, uh, agen-- Great. Agency is the gap. Um, so you've, you are able to at least have a very full picture of what's going on in your program, um, see how it's performing on, on a more granular basis here.

Pallavi Singh: These numbers are honestly what your, your leadership team needs to be able to rally for you. Um, you can see here a Q2 goal was set forty percent higher than Q1, but still, like, we're pacing well. Um, so you can see the story that it's put together for you. We, we operate based off of Notion, but you can make this a slide deck as well.

Pallavi Singh: You would just go back into Claude and say, "Hey, um, I would like to make this a slide deck. Can you make it a PowerPoint? Export it, add it to Google Slides." Um, [00:22:00] and this is nice because I appreciate when it pulls a verify. So it means, like, this was not sure about the figure, and so you should verify it, which I appreciate.

Pallavi Singh: You don't want anything wrong here. And then a nice what's working, what's not working. So... And it also, excuse me, spans across multiple different programs and the initiatives that you're, you're launching here. What needs attention? Perfect. The what needs attention bucket I find is always the hit and a half in these meetings because half the battle is figuring out what, what actually is the issue.

Pallavi Singh: You might see your numbers down, but, but why? And so this is the piece where if you call it out, you are leading your partnerships team to a place of success because the biggest thing a leadership team would, would love from a leader is to identify what's not working and have a plan for it before they, they have to jump in there.

Pallavi Singh: Um, so I find this is the area where you live a lot. [00:23:00] There's a lot of comments in here usually if it's a pre-read, um, but it's, it's helpful. We all know the, the classic Crossbeam, we wanna fight for that budget. Um, any of the sync issues, and then go-to-market asks. So if you do have an ask, um, what I would do here is actually candidly, I would go back and make sure this is less than, less than six.

Pallavi Singh: Ideally, it's one or two. Um, but I would go back and kind of prioritize this, and that's something I would talk to Claude about and say, "Look, I need this to be shorter." Talk track is built in here, but what you would do, and what I do, I guess now, is I just copy this and put it in another doc. I go through it, make sure the story is Accurate.

Pallavi Singh: That's, that's sort of the narrative I would like to speak about. And then you, you feel set up for the meeting So that's, that's really it. Um, it seems simple, but I, I can't, I can't overestimate or [00:24:00] underestimate how much time this has saved me and how much peace of mind it has saved me to know that this is something that is in my wheelhouse now, that I can launch whenever I need to.

Pallavi Singh: It doesn't have to be quarterly either. Sometimes I just run the state of partnerships on a monthly basis to make sure that we're, we're pacing properly and there's no blind spots that I'm missing. Um, but that's, that's really it. I'm happy to share the instructions or answer any questions. Um, I have...

Pallavi Singh: Justin's gonna share my contact with y'all, but I'm always happy to talk to anyone else in the partnerships realm about this type of stuff. 

Justin Zimmerman: Yeah. I've got so many positive things to say right now, and we've got five whole minutes to just show you so much love and appreciation. And so the first thing I want everyone to do right now, and this is your best interest as well, is if you love what we just saw and you think it was of value and excitement, look inside the chats and then just show a little love on the link.

Justin Zimmerman: Press a love button or a thumbs up button, and then click it if you wanna connect with her, [00:25:00] and she can share some of the links with you so you don't have to wait on me. And so I just dropped your LinkedIn profile in there. We're seeing a lot of hearts and so let's get, let's get, uh, a bunch of hearts on that right now.

Justin Zimmerman: Um, I think everyone's really digging your session right now. Um, and so I... That takes care of, I think, step one for me here, is making sure people, if they wanna connect with you and they wanna get that prompt file, they can click the link in the chats and reach out to you directly. And of course, I'll share that back with everybody as well.

Justin Zimmerman: Um, one of the next things I wanna drop into the chats right now, and for those of you who don't know or watching this as a replay and you kind of want an actual breakdown of everything that, uh, she has mentioned here, um, I've built my own AI to transform these sessions into readable playbooks, and so you'll see a breakdown of all this.

Justin Zimmerman: And so, uh, on partnerplaybooks.com, uh, there's 100 articles, more coming. And so if you didn't know, go click there, save that as a bookmark as well as you're on my list, so I'll, I'll email you that as well. And then, uh, one final fun thing I, I thought of is, uh, you had that talk track. My [00:26:00] question to you is, when are you gonna get like, uh, a Synthesia account or like a clone yourself in video avatar?

Justin Zimmerman: And so then, um, basically when you show up on your Zoom meetings and calls, you just have your AI read off the report and present to everybody. That, that's the next step is, uh, truly- Yeah. So let us know when you do that. So from report to reporting, uh, that would be a, a killer... Hey, it might happen. So if you figure that one out, uh, you- Never say never

Justin Zimmerman: you won AI and partnerships. You are the winner of the entire concept. Uh, so, um- Love it ... uh, 

Pallavi Singh: really appreciate 

Justin Zimmerman: it. Yeah. 

Pallavi Singh: Appreciate all the love and thank you for listening. Um, there was one question I just wanted to answer live from Latif Around, there was a classic issue in getting the data for this type of report, and so how do I address that challenge?

Pallavi Singh: Um, great question. This is sort of the beginning of, [00:27:00] of this whole process. I would say we are very lucky at Quo to have pretty clean data. It... O- or one of our sources of truth is PartnerStack. So if you have the luxury of using your partner portal as a source of truth, then it's a great way to just export that data, and then that's kind of where you start.

Pallavi Singh: That's what I do today. Um, we also have some good data in Mode and, um, Snowflake. There's, there's not currently... We don't connect to the MCP in there cleanly today, so again, it's an export situation. But the nice thing about Claude is that even if you have to export your data from a source, it will parse it for you.

Pallavi Singh: So as long as you have access to that data, then you should be good. And if you don't, um, work with your RevOps team to, to make, make that data accessible to you and clean. But truly, we could, we could talk for a whole other 30 minutes about data hygiene and how tough it is to create really clean partner data.[00:28:00] 

Pallavi Singh: But, um, yeah, that's what I would say. 

Justin Zimmerman: All right. Well, I'm gonna say two more things for us here right now is if you'd love to see us bring her back for another session on her next level, type the word AI in the chats, and then when you're done doing that, I'm gonna drop a link to come join our l- our final session of the day, uh, with Forrest Donovan, who runs partnerships at Storyblok, uh, or it could be sto- there's two stories in my head, so I could be messing up the, the name of his company, which that's not as important as what he's built with Gemini to drive partner pipeline.

Justin Zimmerman: And so if you love this tactical, practical, hands-on version of things that you saw here today, well, of course, uh, we're gonna close out our event today with a, a final session. So thank you so much. Uh, we'll stay in touch, of course. We've been friends for years now, so this is the first of many. It looks like people want you to come back, and we'll make that happen as soon as possible.

Justin Zimmerman: And so here's the link to the next and final session. Come join me there right now. [00:29:00] I'm, I'm wrapping up this one, closing it out, and see you all very, very soon