Session 2 - From 1,000 Overlaps to 100 Deals The Claude Co-Sell Playbook For EMEA Partner Leaders
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Justin Zimmerman: [00:00:00] And while I've just moved everybody from the last session to this session here, and so I'm super excited, Russell, right now for you to share, uh, what has been probably nearly a decade of learning and experiences in, uh, sales, in partnerships, in co-selling at some of the biggest- with some of the biggest, best companies that we all look to- look up to and, uh, admire.

And I think this is what's going to be an opportunity to show other people who are sitting in similar positions that you have, uh, ways to go from all the noise, all the mess, all the distractions that can show up inside of our day-to-day when it comes to opportunities. Yes, we can have too many opportunities, and to really whittle it down into like what is necessary and what is a priority.

And I think you have a fantastic skill set and, and experience to really walk through this, especially through the lens of someone who lives in EMEA. You live in France. You've owned and taken care [00:01:00] of books of business on this side of the world. And so I'd love for you to give a little bit more highlight and context for those people who don't know who you are, what you've done, so that way anything that I've missed that you think is important, the other people can fill in.

And that way, you can then jump into and then take us through today's playbook 

Russell Bradley-Cook: Justin, thank you for the kind intro. I think I'm gonna bring you to all my meetings, please. Can you just come and just, like, warm up everybody ahead of time? Uh, uh, I'm Russell. Um, one of my claims to fame is that I was HubSpot's first tech partner manager to make it to President's Club.

Uh, this is me with my wife in the Bahamas. We spent a week there, and nothing would make me happier if folks listening to this can end up at President's Club. Uh, if I can give you some tips and, uh, ideas on how to, uh, co-sell and drive revenue for your company and for your partner, uh, so that you can enjoy a wife- uh, a week in the Bahamas, but also, more importantly, your partner would be even more [00:02:00] happy and more impressed with that partnership thing that they can never explain to anybody, uh, at Christmas.

Um, this, uh, session is from a thousand overlaps to a hundred deals. The overlaps refers to, uh, Crossbeam, uh, data grid. I was just wondering if folks in the chat can drop in if they actually use Crossbeam. I, I hope so, but if you don't, please let us know. Please let me know. I'm happy to share some, um, uh, context.

This is not gonna be a Crossbeam, uh, data pitch. I personally have been using Crossbeam data for over three years. I think it's a, a central part of the go-to-market motion. I think there's a couple of, um, gaps or, or limitations in it. And so, uh, what I wanna help do is articulate how you can use AI, but also how you can use data to, to cut through the noise, uh, that Justin was referring to.

Justin Zimmerman: And if you could, give us an understanding of what is President's Club. I have not yet really gotten a full good definition, and so just help everyone out here who is not [00:03:00] as, as, uh, versed as you and maybe some other people in sales. What is it and what does it take? 

Russell Bradley-Cook: Think about President's Club as a spiff to the spouse of the person for sacrificing them to the company for the year, and that you have, uh, objectives for, uh, in sales to, to hit, and then if you pass those objectives by a certain percentage, uh, certain companies, it, it tends to be more of a US company, um, can go to President's Club.

Uh, but indeed, I would say it is as much for the spouse as it is for the person because there's nothing more motivating than having your partner being, say, asking you in mid-May, "Honey, do you think we're gonna go to President's Club again next year?" Uh, to keep you very focused on, on hitting your number.

Um- Uh, Thor, I'm glad you like the, the definition. Uh, so, um, we've got most of the folks in here who are using Crossbeam, which is great. Um, I think that there's a huge opportunity to use [00:04:00] AI to distill the signal from the noise, and what I wanna share is my learnings, and I would say that I am maybe I am a decent practitioner in AI.

Uh, but I think where my secret, uh, sauce comes from is understanding data and understanding how data set, sets can overlay. And Crossbeam as a standalone tool is actually quite useless. Uh, it only becomes valuable as a unique data set overlaid on top of CRM data, and then I'll talk about some of the other data that you can overlay to make it more valuable.

Uh, many companies that I see are lost with their Crossbeam data, and AI can help them, but ultimately, I think if you take nothing away from this, it is not that you have an AI problem, it is that you probably have a data problem. And so what I have been focusing on with my partners is not on the overs-- the size of the overlap, uh, but is the deals that will move the needle for my company and for theirs, uh, so that I can get to, to President's [00:05:00] Club.

And, uh, it has been very impactful for me in my career. Uh, in twenty twenty-five, I was, um, selected as the, uh, Ecosystem-Led Growth Award for Crossbeam, and so, um- The first place that you need to start is your CRM, and, uh, whether you use HubSpot or Salesforce, I have never seen a CRM that is squeaky clean.

Uh, the more garbage you get in, the more garbage you get out. And I think one of the missed opportunities that partnership teams, uh, consistently do, in my, uh, perspective, is to not work with rev ops and with sales on data quality. And so, what typically happens is partners will put in their requests, and then they get completely ignored.

Uh, I would take-- recommend taking a different approach. Uh, I would approach the rev ops team and the sales team with a budget that you've secured from the executive to enrich records, um, because inevitably, those teams are going to be looking for budget to, uh, implement go-to-market plays. And if you [00:06:00] show up not only with a problem, "Hey, I need the CRM to get updated," but also with budget to say, "Hey, we can enrich and validate this data.

Uh, we'll be able to run field campaigns. We'll be able to, uh, target ICPs, uh, more successfully and save reps time," it's a much more constructive, uh, discussion. Putting all of that aside, a lot of CRM data is garbage. Two things, two fields that I have found that have been useful in cutting down some of that noise, uh, is deal stage.

Uh, if it is a late-stage deal, more eyeballs have looked at it, almost by definition. Uh, it's had more time there, so it's more likely to be accurate. And then if it has been touched in less than thirty days, uh, I also recommend including that as a, a filter as you're using AI to analyze your deals. Um, it allows you to identify deals that are probably dead, but the sales team doesn't wanna, uh, focus, uh, admit that, maybe 'cause they have a, a pipeline target, uh, as well.

Um, uh, just curious [00:07:00] actually if folks are on HubSpot or Salesforce. Any, any, uh, strong CRM preferences here? 

Justin Zimmerman: HubSpot for me. 

Russell Bradley-Cook: Nice. Nice. Salesforce in the house. Salesforce. All Salesforce. All right. Good thing I didn't make this all about HubSpot. Uh, hopefully, all this is applicable, um, for, uh, both Salesforce and, and for, for HubSpot.

So, um, this is the overlap grid. Uh, I saw folks have been using Crossbeam. Uh, the biggest misconception, in my view, with Crossbeam is that the grid is two distinct populations, and this took me a while to wrap my head around it, but the customers and the open opportunities are actually overlapping. And so if an existing customer has an open opportunity, domain shows up in both lists, and it is extremely difficult to de-duplicate that in Crossbeam.

I would argue impossible to do, to do that in Crossbeam. Um, but the [00:08:00] first step to unlock that is to think of it in terms of a Venn diagram, and to think that you have customers and you have open opportunities, and there is overlap and, uh, where your sales team and your leadership will look for the biggest opportunity, the biggest, um, revenue is on net new opportunities, net new deals in open opportunities.

But you can also look at the overlap between customers and open op-open opportunities. I'm not saying to throw that out, but think about this is the CSM play as opposed to this is the sales team play. And if the CSM team is not paying you, obviously you need to figure out how you're gonna turn that into net new revenue Um, here is ultimately, I think, w-ways that I have used AI in order to analyze these deals, and, uh, I think you can even coach your partners on doing this.

Uh, I was starting to work with some of my partners to, uh, enable them to do this. And so if you're in a Salesforce environment, um, this is not a HubSpot specific, uh, view of the [00:09:00] world. This is, uh, broadly speaking, properties that you should have in your CRM. Uh, so first on customers, I would look at current revenue.

Uh, this is the likelihood to invest in tools in general and current products. Uh, I-actually I'm curious if folks are multi-product. Uh, please drop it in the hub. I got some questions about that later. Uh, we have some challenges around multi-hub, hub, uh, when we're working with HubSpot partners, but I won't go into that too much.

Uh, account fit, the more accurate information that you have on geo, vertical, and segment, the better. Uh, this is where if you come with an enrichment budget to the, um, to your rev ops team, they're more excited to talk to you. They're like: "Wow! Hey, we know our geo data." Like, there's no rev ops team that doesn't know their data is bad.

And so if you can come to them not only with requests, but also ways to fix their problems, uh, they should be more likely to, to engage. And then cross-team filters is an opportunity, is a customer of, and this is how you unpick that Venn diagram [00:10:00] so that you are not looking at open opportunities which are already customers.

Um, deals, deal names, uh, is valuable free text field, and this is one of the things that AI is the best at, in my view, is taking a lot of unstructured data and making sense of it. And so from HubSpot's perspective, I was looking for deals which said SVH for ser- or service for service hub, to understand which of these deals are service hub related so that I can attach to that.

This partner fits on a service hub deal, so I can target that if that's what's being sold. Uh, deal size, and this is, uh, was also a big unlock for me, was that you should obviously aim for larger deals. Your reps will have more time to, to talk to you. Um, but don't exclude the small deals with high customer MRR, going back to the, the first column.

And what I found, um, I was working on a twenty-five dollar deal, two five, no zeros after it, uh, which had... It, it got flagged on my report, um, because it [00:11:00] also had thirty thousand dollars, uh, current MRR. So twenty-five dollar deal, open opportunity, thirty K Current customer revenue, and we were able to fix, uh, a partner problem, uh, allowed-- rolled out a big, uh, product update which turned that thirty K revenue into a hundred percent, um, renewal when it was a hundred percent at risk.

Um, and so AI allows you to, to surface those, um, smaller deals on bigger opportunities, cross-referencing that with, uh, deal names. And so what I would recommend, and I can share links with this afterwards, if you'd like the link, please drop it into the chat now. Um, I use a, a deal validator agent and then a collaboration request agent.

So if, uh, partners are asking me for information about an account, I wanna go look up that account. Fine, great, agent, go do that for me. Uh, and then I also wanna proactively, uh, validate the, the Crossbeam overlap. Um, I mentioned before, uh, [00:12:00] data. Uh, CRM is not the only data that's helpful for, for Crossbeam. I highly recommend, um, using, uh, enrichment tools.

Curious if any folks on here are using any of these tools, Clay, Apollo, Surf?

Um, very nice, Apollo. Yeah. Um, Clay a-and 

Justin Zimmerman: Polo. 

Russell Bradley-Cook: I love it. I love it. It's all right. It's all right. We can call them Polo for today. This is an EMEA thing. We can call them Polo. Um, so, uh, Surf is actually the EMEA partner on here. Um, Clay and Apollo are both, uh, US companies. Um, there are... I have seen, uh, partners and HubSpot is experimenting with this, uh, to use Clay as, uh, orchestration.

Um, and what you can do from a partner play is to feed Crossbeam data into that to analyze as a data point for your lead scoring. And so, [00:13:00] what I was working with my partners with was like, if you see a customer who has HubSpot on here, try to assign it to a rep who knows what they're talking about for HubSpot, uh, and then reach out to us and let us know, "Hey, we're working on this account," and we'll do our best to, to support you.

Um, the other thing which you, I highly recommend doing if you are focusing on cross-sell or opening up, um, new use cases, is to enrich the personas, uh, enrich the job titles, and enrich the contact location. Uh, is anybody here doing field marketing? I know Justin is like the virtual marketing webinar maestro.

Highly recommend working with Justin. If you're here, you probably already know that. Uh, but if anybody is doing field marketing, I would love to know. I have banged my toe against, uh, I've stubbed my toe many, many times trying to run field events for different reasons. Uh, but one of the biggest ones was that we didn't have the right personas in our CRM, so we didn't know the right people at the right companies to [00:14:00] invite.

And then when we did have them in the CRM, we had them down as the company location, and that is extremely painful because you invite somebody from Texas to an event in San Francisco, they are right back to being like, "What the heck are you talking about? Thank you. No, thank you." Uh, which just is like a bad look for the brands.

It's not a great experience for the customer, and you're like, "Why did I just waste my time doing that?" Um, so contact location as well as the company size, um, job title, persona, really, really helpful. And these are not big budget items. I strongly recommend partnership teams to go to their revenue leaders and to go to the CEO to ask for budget around enrichment.

Enrichment is not an expensive thing compared to the larger tools that you're using, and it's very valuable for your sales and sales team and your, uh, rev ops team. Sorry, my ski-- Uh, layering in intent data. Uh, oops, sorry. I'm going back and forth on my slides. Um, so not all [00:15:00] accounts are in market, and this is one of the things where I say Crossbeam data as a standalone is not always...

If people look at it and think, "Great, this is gonna solve all my problems." Based on your overlap, I highly recommend, and this is what I was seeing from my best-in-class partners, was using data, intent data to see which accounts were in market overlapped with the Crossbeam data in their CRM. And so again, use AI to do this.

Um, this should not be a manual effort, but what you should be aiming for is, uh, being able to provide partner-sourced, uh, partner-qualified leads to your sales reps to say, "This account is using this tool stack, and they are interested in us. We should get on it." And if you provide that, you earn the right to be at the table with sales.

You build your credibility, you build trust, because there is nothing worse than giving sales reps a bunch of cold leads and being like, "Here, call them." And they call five, and they walk away, and they're like, "We're never getting that call again. Don't, don't darken our doorstep." [00:16:00] And so I come from an enterprise sales background before I came in partnerships.

I-- For me, the first rule is do not waste the salespeople's time. And so if you can bring in intent data, I would say this is more expensive than the first one, than the enrichment data. Uh, but the intent data overlap, um, allows you to focus on the, um, Crossbeam overlap data and prioritize which of the accounts that you should be focusing on Anybody using any of these?

I'm curious. Uh, we did some cool Gong listening things, and G2 is an interesting one because G2 gets mentioned a lot on calls and is a really good marketing hub use case. Um, but if anybody's using G2 or Demandbase or 6sense, would love to, to, uh, hear. Um, and then GTM via solution partners. Uh, Crossbeam for me works, I would say, slightly better for tech partners to tech partners.

Um, these are the three use cases which I have seen successful. Uh, on the first one, honestly, I don't think you need Crossbeam. [00:17:00] Uh, I would take five to ten accounts from your solution partner's client list, uh, offer them commission to get the data from them. Uh, if you're partnering attaching on existing deals, here's the money.

If it's net new opportunities, here's twenty-five percent. Obviously, do the commissions based on what your, your business provides. Um, but you can even take that in a CSV and, and dump it into your Crossbeam or to, to analyze it separately. Um, where I think Crossbeam is much more essential is on expansion plays.

And so if you're looking at geographic expansion or vertical expansion, targeting and discussing with net new partners who haven't been onboarded yet, th-the Crossbeam data allows you to prioritize that in a way that's very difficult to do, um, or subscale to do if you're ma-- juggling a bunch of CSV, uh, files.

And then the final thing, uh, and this is, I would say, like a Jedi trick or, or a flywheel, uh, technique, is to create a population of solution [00:18:00] partners called active solution partners Create that in your CRM. You obviously have to maintain it so that these are the active solution partners, um, and share that population with other tech partners who are in a similar tech stack with you so that you can go to market together.

And what that allows is solution partners who are focusing on, uh, a particular tech stack can show up with the entire tech stack, and they can show up with additional services based on being experts on those. And so th- we were seeing this very successful, uh, with HubSpot, Snowflake, Segment, Aircall, where you have joint solution partners who understand how the two tools work together, the limitations, where they are strong and can implement them really quickly.

And it means-- this is actually a huge win for the solution partner, and it's really valuable for the customer because they don't have to pay for the solution partner to learn this new tool. And so if you can reach out to tech partners with an existing solution partner list and say, "Hey, we'd love to collaborate with you on building out this [00:19:00] solution partner, um, network, this joint solution partner network," uh, I highly recommend doing that.

So very quick recap. Clean your CRM data. My God, it's awful. It's always been awful, uh, but it is getting better. Uh, it is not a da-- it is a data problem before it is a AI problem. There is no AI magic wand to fix, but think about the different pieces of data that you have to overlay. Think about a Venn diagram, not a grid, as the way to find the best opportunities.

Um, build and test deal validation agents. Uh, I've got one for you. If you're interested, please drop a note in the chat. Um, and I recommend that you secure budget to do enrichment. Uh, you can win friends with your sales and rev ops teams, uh, and then go to market with solution partners. Um, huge use case.

So, uh, we've got just over five minutes for, um, for Q&A. Don't know how folks are feeling about questions. Uh, we use data if [00:20:00] someone had looked at or downloaded our content. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Again, uh, this is, um, product analytics data. Highly recommend product analytics data. Very, very good use case. Uh, for partners that are normally ahead of us in the sales cycle, we use Crossbeam for the timestamp.

Also super smart. Yes. Uh, I, I hadn't-- So HubSpot tended to be before most of our partners, and so I wasn't looking at timestamps of when other, uh, when customers were signing with other partners, but that is definitely Jedi mind, Jedi mind tricks. Uh, Thorin, really love, uh, really love that. Um, Justin was curious...

Uh, oh, here we go. More questions. Um, how did you get your SI agencies to add their customer list to Crossbeam? Uh, to give them money, honestly. Like, make it very easy. Don't block them on deal registration. Like, unless there's another partner on top of the deal, really make it very easy for them. Um- I would say for the GSIs in [00:21:00] particular, Crossbeam is kind of off the table for now.

Um, not only because they don't want to pay for it, but also because they're country-specific. And so yes, spreadsheets is the way to go. Like a country-specific piece team of Deloitte is different, France is different than the UK. Like there's no way they, they're sharing, they ha-have a unified data to share with you.

Um, so yeah, I would recommend starting with, with spreadsheets, and I would recommend starting small. Uh, start with five to 10 accounts. Um, really zoom in on it, make it very easy to schedule time with your, your reps. Um, make sure that you're paying your reps the same, um, on it. And, uh, I would also add partner marketing as part of that.

That's also a nice way, uh, I mentioned field events before, um, but Crossbeam for partner marketing, uh, in my view is very, very valuable because you actually don't need the sales team. I come from sales. I love sales. Sometimes sales is hard to activate. Uh, you can [00:22:00] often do field events and marketing activities, um, in a more touchless, light touch way for, for the, the sales team.

Uh, Kristin, I was curious, what, what things are, are you blocking you besides that the SIs don't have CRMs?

Justin Zimmerman: Yeah. That might take her a second to, to type in and respond to. Oh, okay. Well, they are protected. Classic 

Russell Bradley-Cook: You gotta pay the money. Pay the money is the, the answer to, to that. Um, I- you need to build trust. Like come with case studies that are specific to their specific To their region, uh, that are specific to the product.

Like, the more, like, focalized is like we can solve exactly what your customers need, uh, the easier it is for them to, to let go of their lists. But yes, they do tend to be a little proprietary on their data. 

Justin Zimmerman: Uh, question, 'cause you're in a unique position where you've been able to look [00:23:00] inside the, uh, regional cultural aspects of many of the countries inside of Europe, and, um, have you noticed one incentive for one country working better than another?

Or is money the universal, uh, solvent for all of them? And so is there something that works uniquely better in the UK, something better in France, something in the Netherlands and Germany, kind of the major, uh, regions? Um, is there a, a one size fits all, or is there maybe more of a, uh, country-by-country, uh, specific approach that has, uh, shown to be better as a, as a door opener to getting the things you want?

Russell Bradley-Cook: Uh, I tend to think that it's pretty universal. Uh, and maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but I think the best-- My experience with agencies is they don't wanna be the first one in the door. And so if you can say, "Hey, other people are doing this," um, [00:24:00] that's, I think, the way to do it. Uh, when we've hosted, uh, joint solution partner events, which is something I highly recommend doing as part of the, um, overlapping solution partner network, the photos that were-- When I saw people taking photos was what are the services packages that you can offer on top of it, and what are the pricing for those service packages.

And it's not that they're all looking to do a lift and shift play, but the, like, the-- to be able to share that information that other people are doing this and you should do it too, um, I think is very, very valuable. Uh, and then, uh, talking about money, um, the caveat on the money is that it's not just for the commission, and that even if you're offering them very high commission rate, that's often not the unlock.

It's also the services on top, and that's where the joint proposition. So for example, like if you're specializing in HubSpot and Snowflake, there's a really cool integration to do with DataHub, which is relatively light [00:25:00] lift and allows you to do, uh, very powerful data work and data analysis behind the scenes.

Um, so it unlocks additional services, and so you need to understand both of those, uh, technologies together. Um, and that gives you good differentiation and additional services. And it's the services revenue which is oftentimes more interesting than the, the, um, than the, uh, initial commission revenue. 

Justin Zimmerman: Well, I wanna give a shout-out to, uh, to you for taking the time to sit down and, uh, put this together for us.

I know this might be one of the first times, uh, you've really committed to unpacking the things that you've said and done. Uh, Allison Bowen, you've been a fantastic, uh, guest in chats. I've really appreciated your contributions, as well as, uh, Kristen, and, uh, soon to be, uh, in our next session, uh, Thorun and, uh, Teddy.

And so I just wanted to make sure that we give you some due respects here in making sure that anybody who isn't already following you, which is kinda hard to believe, uh, an opportunity [00:26:00] to reach out and connect. So I've dropped Russell's link in the chats, and that way you can follow, connect with him.

Let him know you s- you've heard him, talk to him, connected with him here, uh, through here. And of course, I'm sure if you have any specific, uh, one-to-one questions, Russell will be more than happy to chat with you on LinkedIn about those things. Um- Yes ... and then I'd like to give you kinda some of the last words before we get to our final session for, uh, today's first inaugural, uh, Mia Specific Partner Playbooks meetup event.

Uh, we've got a fantastic next Q&A session, uh, around the 10 things you should and shouldn't do, uh, with AI, and stop doing, uh, with, um- ... our, our two fantastic guests. And so, uh, I'll leave that to you, and then I'll go grab the link for everyone else, and then I'll, I'll, we'll wrap this up. 

Russell Bradley-Cook: Thank you very much, Justin.

I'm coming back to check out the next session. Um, but yes, if anybody wants to do a more personal look at their own data situation, I have never-- Like, don't be embarrassed, I've never seen anybody with clean data. Uh, it's all various states of mess. [00:27:00] Um, but there are some really interesting plays around product analytics and around conversational intelligence that I didn't really talk about, uh, today.

So if you wanna look at your data, your tech stack, your partner program, uh, feel free to drop me a note on LinkedIn. Happy to chat. 

Justin Zimmerman: Great. Thank you so much, Russell. Yeah. Thank you everyone 

Russell Bradley-Cook: for 

Justin Zimmerman: this- 

Russell Bradley-Cook: Nice chatting with 

Justin Zimmerman: you. Would be happy to chat ... awesome session. And then I'll, I'm gonna drop the link right now.

So come meet us up in the next session. Uh, we're gonna start in a couple of seconds here. Uh, thank you, Russell. We'll be in chat. Uh, we'll be in touch. And so I just wanna say thank you, everyone, and let's go kick off our final session for the day. 

Russell Bradley-Cook: Take care, everybody.