Session 4 - The PRM Power Hour — Inside The World's Top Revenue Platforms For Affiliate, Co-Sell, and Tech Partner Programs
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Justin Zimmerman: [00:00:00] And I'll bring us up on here live right now for everybody who's gonna be joining us for our August edition of the Partner Playbooks monthly virtual event And so, uh, we've got some fantastic opportunities right now for everyone who's watching, listening, tuning in live. Uh, we have put a lot of thought into our session for the day, and so if you're joining us on the East Coast of America, welcome, good morning.

West Coast, even more... I'm sorry, afternoon, and then good morning to you guys in, uh, California. Speaking of locations, uh, everybody knows one of the best things about coming to virtual events is the connection, the camaraderie. The content is great, but we're also here to learn and connect with others. And so, uh, if you got any of my messages, as I'm sure you did, uh, make sure you've got your LinkedIn profile in and ready to share in the chats.

Uh, there's gonna be some opportunities to, uh, connect later on [00:01:00] today, and so a great place to start with the connection is obviously sharing that there. Uh, a lot of times I hear people say they got a, a couple of, uh, dozen connections, uh, from these events, and so don't hold back. Share your links in the chat.

Um, we've got an opportunity today to do some new cool things. Uh, we've also got a little bit different of a format. Uh, but listening to the audience and you guys, um, we've cut it down from a four-hour, full-day event down to a nice, tight two-hour session, so that way you don't feel like you're missing anything and that we can put as much energy and effort into, uh...

Same amount of time. Less amount of time, same amount of energy and effort. And so, uh, we've got an opportunity today to really go through, uh, the newest playbooks, the newest power partner people. Um, and obviously my co-host for our first session here, Tyler Calder, from, uh, the esteemed PartnerStack, who's helped make all of these sessions, all of these events possible and free for all of us.

And so we're gonna be sharing a little bit more about what they're doing, what they're working on right now. But as you [00:02:00] guys all pile in and start to, uh, show up here, again, share your link and, uh, we will do some of the morning announcements, afternoon announcements as we, uh, start our session for today.

And so let's get into, uh, the next slide. Um, one of the things that's great about doing these events is, uh, I get to see all my friends, all the people who on a monthly basis, uh, come back and, uh, get to reconnect. And so from a digital perspective, um, if this is your first event, type in a one. If this is a second time you're here, type in a two.

Uh, of course, if you've been here multiple times, type a three plus. And of course, we always wanna honor, uh, the PartnerStack customers who help make what they do possible. So type the word Stack in the chats if you're a customer as well. And, um, we'll be looking at all these great ones. Okay. Welcome, Cindy.

Welcome, Craig. Milind, welcome back. Uh, just seeing some of the names and engagement. Art, thanks for coming all the time. Welcome, Ken. Jay, thank you so much. Uh, Steven, of course, third time's the charm. Uh, we've got [00:03:00] CJ, we got Rick And so I love seeing all these ones, twos, and threes. And so, um, fantastic to see so many great people back here.

Vanessa from Austin, uh, good to see you here. Zach Chambers, I see your name pop up all the time. Sunny, all these familiar names, I love it. Feels good to, uh, have a group of friends that, uh, live across the world. It's really nice when, uh, you can travel across... And that's what's great about partnerships, is we just have people all over the world, no matter where we go, uh, we can connect with.

And so thanks for sharing that in the chats. Uh, good to see everybody back here. Uh, one thing that you guys don't know or may not know is at the end of every one of these events, we take the sessions, we run them through a rigorous process, and, uh, take the best parts and pieces and share them and turn them into articles that we put on partnerplaybooks.com.

And so you're not aware of it, uh, you wanna read what we say, you wanna catch up on things in depth maybe you missed and you didn't get quite the note written down that you wanted to, but we did it for you. Uh, again, also, uh, we'll say thank you to [00:04:00] PartnerStack for helping make a lot of the articles on the site free and possible.

Uh, and so go click on that link I just shared in the chat right now. Uh, you'll be able to go and watch, listen, and learn, and engage with all the content, uh, both past, present, and, uh, future as well. So, uh, click on that link. Make sure you know it exists. Share it with a friend. Uh, you'll get a lot out of it as soon as, uh, well, as soon as you click on that link Uh, one of the next things on our housekeeping is, of course, uh, the Partner Playbooks Slack group.

And so this is a, a special place. It's free. Uh, it shows up, uh, in an easy, convenient spot in your day. You don't have to look and search for another space and be a part of another 20 different groups that you never check on. This one is a Partner, um, Playbooks free channel. And so if you have a paid Slack account, no Gmails or free accounts, uh, this is done through that feature, and so I'm gonna drop that in there if you wanna be a part of the group.

Allows me to share, uh, special things that we just can't share via [00:05:00] email, opportunities to connect in ways that just Sl- uh, LinkedIn and email and text messages don't allow for. And so if you're not a part of that group right now, click on that. If you run into any issues, message me back on all the places that you know where to find me.

And then, uh, let's go into one more fun thing here. Of course, like I mentioned, uh, Part- uh, PartnerStack makes so much of what we do here possible and free, and so we wanna give them a shout-out for making today's session possible. Um, as you guys know, maybe you do know, but Tyler knows 'cause he's wearing the hat, PartnerStack was acquired by AppDirect.

And so previously, they were running a annual event that was pancake themed, the Stack and the Stackie Awards. And so through the acquisition, through the merger, uh, they've all come together now in a much larger 1,200-person partner leader event called Thrive, Thrive 2026. And so if you happen to be or want to be, uh, in the Los Angeles area at the end of September, uh, as a member of the [00:06:00] group, as part of the Partner Playbooks community, you can get a free ticket to come to this.

It is normally $995. In fact, the price is going up. But, uh, you can get a special discount code through me. Uh, reach out to me. I'll share that also as well in, uh, the chats here in a second. Uh, click on that link to get a free ticket. Now, one small caveat is that even though the ticket is free, uh, they do have some very specific cancellation policies, and so you don't wanna sign up and then not show up, and so they really wanna make sure the people who get the free ticket are going to attend.

And so just read through a little bit of the fine print when you sign up because, uh, they're giving away free tickets. They just wanna make sure that you're committed to coming before handing those out. And so I'll share that free code in the chats when I'm done with this section. And of course, uh, shout-out to Brandlive for helping make this platform that we're watching this on available and free to us, and as well as SalesMessage, who helps, uh, subsidize some of the SMS costs that I spend on making sure that if you're on my VIP SMS list, [00:07:00] you get special, uh, invitations to me here.

And so that's the big part here around the, uh, sponsors and thank yous. Uh, and then of course, at the end of today's two-hour session, um, you can jump into the networking lounge where you and some other friends that you make along the way here today, especially if you're dropping your LinkedIn profile in the chat and you really wanna go connect with somebody, uh, you can have one-on-one, uh, up to four people in a digital space.

Those little couches, you can click on them, join a room, and then meet one-on-one with people to talk about the ideas, concepts, uh, processes, any of those things you wanna mention and talk about. Uh, those will be available to you to have more of a peer-to-peer opportunity to connect with others. And so want you to know that that's available to you as well.

And then, of course, every single month we run this poll, and I'm always curious to find out the progression, any sort of changes in the, the behaviors and uses of AI in our space. And so I'm gonna share a poll right now if you can. Uh, click on the one [00:08:00] singular Tool that you use the most. Uh, it should be on stream for you.

And so as it comes on stream, you should be able to see it. And, uh, it's gonna be interesting to see what everybody uses. So take the time right now as we, uh, move through this next step to just click one of the buttons, the one that you use most. I'll leave that up for a little while, and so put your attention on that for a few minutes.

Uh, looks like we've got a good poll response so far. Almost half the people in the room very quickly answering it. I love it. Fantastic. Yeah, so, uh, keep answering those away. I'll keep it up, and at the end of our session here today, I'll share these back with you so you can kinda see where you and some of the other people in the partnership space are putting their attention when it comes to AI.

And then, uh, of course, the thing that you really are here for and the things that you really are gonna get the most from is our schedule of topics, sessions, and speakers today. And so, of course, here we are sitting at the top of our, uh, event right now in the PRM Power Hour, where we're gonna get inside of the top revenue platforms for affiliate co-sell and tech [00:09:00] partner programs with Tyler.

Now, of course, PartnerStack is a little biased as to the tools and systems you ought to use. But I've never met anybody more unbiased about being biased than Partner, PartnerStack and Tyler. So he's gonna do a fun job of, uh, making sure that he shares things with you from a thought leadership perspective.

He does happen to sit on, uh, a very interesting position where he's the CMO of this company, and he sees inside of hundreds if not thousands of different partner programs. And so he does have an educated view into the world of what's being done, how they're being done. Now, of course, they're using PartnerStack, but he'll point out the moments in time where he's being biased.

Um, and, uh, we trust him. He's a trustworthy guy. He's Canadian, right? Where's all my Canadians in the audience today? Let's, let's type the word C-A-N just to see where our Canadian friends are. Um, Canadians, you can really trust them. I don't know. I get that vibe about you guys. And so, uh, we're gonna be covering that for the first hour here.

And then, uh, for the rest of the, uh, hour block following that, we've got two additional sessions, [00:10:00] uh, you're not gonna wanna miss. We've brought back Scott Murtagh, uh, former partner, manager, director at, uh, ReachDesk. He has gone deeper than anybody I know on a tactical, practical way to spin up, uh, AI agents, tools, and actually build real agentic workflows that does the work for you.

Uh, we had a little bit of a change on topic, and so if we are disappointing you by changing it, uh, from recruitment And partner discovery to automated co-marking marketing results. You're not gonna be disappointed when you attend that session. Uh, it's, it's equally and powerfully, uh, and visually beautiful and amazing, so please stick around for that, uh, at, uh, 2:00 PM.

And then following that, we're gonna do a Q&A with a very hot topic that all partner people face at some point in time in their career, uh, which is around events, and most recently, the power of small and executive... small events and executive dinners. And so we've got two fantastic speakers, uh, who have a whole load of experience in them.

One of them you might already know, Rob Moyer, uh, and another one, Nick Sands, who, uh, is maybe not as well-known but is [00:11:00] equally, uh, skilled and versed. Now, also, if you wanna go check out the event bonuses, uh, you can scroll up, uh, in, in the main directory of sessions here. Later on today, you should see two events pre-recorded for replay, uh, that happened a little bit earlier today.

One of them was, was with Russell Bradley-Cook, uh, who is the technology co-sell, uh, partner manager at HubSpot who's been running big co-sell motions with some of the best names in the ecosystem business, and they're gonna run through... He's gonna run through his Crossbeam, uh, view on how to take thousands of overlaps, turn them into hundreds of deals.

Uh, go watch this, that session. And then if you happen to be, uh, interested in some of the tactical, practical ways, uh, small partner teams have been able to leverage Claude to then run simple but, um, I would say busy work-level tasks that you don't need to do anymore, go check out the final bonus session called 10 Things Partner Managers Should Stop Doing.

Uh, that'll [00:12:00] be incredibly helpful for you as well. And so, uh, those are available for a bonus. Check 'em out later. But let me kick things over and off to Tyler right now 'cause, uh, we're about to get started on, uh, at the top of the hour, what it takes to, uh, run things and, um, really take your PRM knowledge and skill to the next level.

Tyler, welcome. Welcome back. 

Tyler Calder: Thank you, sir. I always love your introduction. Such high energy. Um, gets me going, sir. And hello 

Justin Zimmerman: to every- I practice them in the mirror every, uh, every night before an event 

Tyler Calder: You do? 

Justin Zimmerman: Yeah. Uh, just that same thing over and over again. Yeah, just Stuart Smalley. 

Tyler Calder: It shows. Appreciate it.

Um, and certainly appreciate everyone here. Uh, I was checking it out, saw a number of folks here for the first time, a number of folks here for the third plus time. If you're here for the third plus time, I'm sorry that you have to see my face again. Uh, apologies. I'll, I'll try to keep it fresh. [00:13:00] Um, to Justin's point, um, I am obviously an employee of PartnerStack and AppDirect.

What that means is I certainly do have a view, and I'll always try my best to call out, uh, my biases, um, as I'm sharing information and thoughts. Uh, and I'll do that through, through this. Um, what I wanna chat about today is candidly a little bit of a hodgepodge of things. Um, so Justin, if, if you wanna pull it up, we can get rolling.

Um, but I'm gonna talk a little bit about just, I think, what's happening in the market. Um, I'm gonna do that quickly because I don't think there's any surprises there. I think it's all things that we're aware of, but just for context setting, wanted to share some of it. I'm gonna talk a little bit about, um, our view into, you know, what it is, uh, that makes a tech platform a modern partnership platform [00:14:00] That is gonna have a biased spin to it, and I'm again gonna call it out as we get into it.

Um, and I'm gonna ask some questions 'cause I'd love folks' insight on, on some of what I share. Then I'm gonna share a little bit around what we're seeing out of our customer base. So for context, um, at PartnerStack, we've worked with well over 1,000 B2B SaaS companies over the years. Um, about 50% of those folks leverage us as an affiliate creator influencer platform.

The other 50% leverage us as a PRM co-sell ecosystem platform. Uh, and then, you know, there's a cross-section that leverage us for both. Um, I'm gonna talk a little bit about that and, and sort of the vision, but the goal is really to hopefully share some insights that are maybe new, uh, and some recommended actions that don't necessarily require any platform at all, anybody can run with tomorrow morning, next week, whenever you choose to.

So I'm gonna dive in. Um, before I do this, I'm gonna [00:15:00] say something creepy because Ken, who just dropped his LinkedIn profile in the chat, who wears multiple cyber partner hats, I creeped your LinkedIn profile immediately, and I just gotta say, you appear to be a fellow hoodie lover. I think it's one of my favorite profile pictures I've ever seen.

It is a very good-looking hoodie. So Ken, you've already made my day. You've inspired me from a wardrobe perspective. All right. That's it. That's my creepy comment for the day. Let's dive in. Six things that I'm gonna cover. The first one, like I mentioned, some insights into the market, some of what we're seeing.

I don't think any surprises here, so I'm gonna go pretty quickly. Gonna talk a little bit about how that insight translates into why, from what we can see, the way a lot of organizations operate around partnerships hasn't caught up to that data. Then I'm gonna get into the part about PartnerStack, a little bit [00:16:00] about how we've built our platform, how we're trying to address what we see in the market.

Then we're gonna get into the AI conversation because certainly we need to have the AI conversation. I'm gonna share a few, uh, workflows, um, that we've built to help automate some things, and then where do we go from there? Um, I'm not gonna go overly deep into the product. Um, I think if you want a live product demo, we're gonna host a group live demo, low stress, not a sales pitch, just literally a walkthrough next week.

So feel free to sign up for that if you wanna go deeper into the platform and the product. Justin, you good? 

Justin Zimmerman: I am good. Yes. I had a thought. I decided not to say the thought, 'cause I think what you've got to say is gonna be more important 

Tyler Calder: Well, now I'm curious. You can't leave people hanging. Unless it's incredibly inappropriate, I think you should share it.

Justin Zimmerman: No, I was just gonna say, for people who want a demo, they can type the word [00:17:00] demo into the chats, and I'll add them to the group demo if they're not already on that. And so that was really it. 

Tyler Calder: All right. Cool. Appreciate that. All right. So I'm gonna dive into this first little part here. So, um, I think I've, you know, I've been at PartnerStack for coming up on seven years.

Um, and, you know, one of the reasons I was really interested in PartnerStack and joining the company was because prior to, I worked for, uh, a large global publicly traded organization. Um, I, I led global marketing, and then one day, uh, the, the president came to me and said, "Hey, you know, we would love if you took over, um, the reseller program."

And I said, "Sure. Don't really know what that is. Haven't had a lot of exposure to that type of partnership in my, in my, uh, career so far. So it seems like a pretty cool challenge. Let's do it." Uh, turns out it was a $200 million reseller program that was quite literally just stitched together across five or six different spreadsheets, [00:18:00] and again, quite literally about 80 finance people just trying to hold it all together, make sure the flow of funds were actually flowing.

Um, and that opened my eyes to the, the need for technology and a platform that could, that could support. Um, enter PartnerStack and then, you know, things really started to take off, and you heard folks like Jay McBain and others talk about how we're entering the decade of the ecosystem. And so we're, you know, well into that decade.

And I think we're at a point where nobody is debating that partnerships is a revenue driver. I don't think anybody's debating that partnerships should have a seat at the table. Um, I think, you know, when I started at PartnerStack almost seven years ago, that wasn't necessarily true. Those debates were still happening.

I don't think that's a debate anymore. What I think is true, though, is, uh, most organizations have not figured out how to scale [00:19:00] partnerships. And I don't mean partner leaders haven't figured it out. I think partner leaders very much have figured it out. I don't think the broader organization has figured it out.

And so some of the data that, that we're seeing that reinforces why companies are leaning into partnerships, again, I don't think a huge surprise here, um, CAC, cost to acquire customer, has exploded over the past five years. We're, you know, over 250% growth in what it costs to acquire a new customer. Not great, especially when you pair it with the fact that most organizations are seeing their growth rates decline by about 50% over the same time period.

So it's costing more to acquire customers And at the same time, we're acquiring fewer of them, which for most B2B organizations means growth has shrunk. This isn't saying that companies aren't growing, it's just suggesting that the growth rates have been cut by almost in [00:20:00] half. And so companies are starting to realize we need new routes to market, we need to be a little bit more efficient, and that's where partnerships steps in, right?

Again, I think everybody here recognizes that. Everybody has seen if you attach partners to your go-to-market motion, everything improves. Marketing performance improves, sales performance improves, CS performance improves. All of the most important metrics to the business improve. The struggle is how do we operationalize it, right?

And so that's a little bit of what we're gonna talk about today. How do we operationalize it? How do we scale it? Related to that, which makes our jobs even more challenging within go-to-market, but is something that partnerships can really help solve for, is this idea of trust. I don't know about folks here, pro- we probably talk about trust and use the word trust 100 times a day with our customers, our partners internally.

And, you know, the reality is, and the data shows this, that trust is eroding, trust in companies, [00:21:00] and there's a disconnect. 90% of executives believe that their customers trust them. They believe that what they say is true. They say they're gonna ship something, they believe that it's gonna be shipped and it's gonna work.

Only 30% of companies-- uh, customers actually believe what companies and executives are saying out of market, right? So there's a huge disconnect. It makes our jobs in go-to-market much harder. Um, it makes, you know, the role of a salesperson a bit of a slog because it's this uphill battle to gain that trust.

One of the things that I hear a lot of people talk about is trust is gone. I don't think that's the case. I think trust has eroded within the company's go-to-market function, within the executive function. But that doesn't mean trust is gone. It just means that it has moved. And so when you look at the data coming from folks like Gartner and other analyst [00:22:00] firms, and they look at, uh, where trust lives, it lives in third parties.

It lives in peer groups and communities. It lives with influencers. It lives with third parties. These are your partners, right? So again, it just leans in and reinforces why partnerships is so critical. The numbers back up that it's one of, if not the most efficient route to market, and it addresses the trust gap, the trust issue, right?

So there's a massive spotlight on partnerships. And again, I'm gonna keep saying this, the challenge isn't that we need to convince people that partnerships is critical to our go-to-market, critical to growth, critical to profitability. What we need to do is show that we can actually operationalize it, we can scale it, we can be as disciplined as other functions have become because they've been at this for a little bit longer in most organizations.

And then the one thing I'll share is, uh, some of [00:23:00] the data that I will provide, some of the commentary and anecdotes that I share, they're coming from companies like these. Um, so a lot of really, uh, high growth SaaS companies across the world. Um, like I said, we've worked with, uh, a little over 1,000 SaaS companies over the years, uh, and we try to do our best to take the, the shared knowledge and understanding, feed that, not just back into our product roadmap, but feed it back into the community, which, you know, Justin has done such a good job at kind of pulling together.

So I think we should all appreciate Justin on a daily basis. Um, and then lastly, again, I think the stat everybody knows, companies that do prioritize this type of partnership ecosystem focus, they're growing two times faster than those that aren't, right? Pretty, pretty straightforward, pretty simple. So when I say the operating model didn't catch up, what does that mean?

What are we actually looking at? What are we talking about? Um, some of this data comes from a mix of, like I said, our own data, but some of it [00:24:00] also comes from Chris Lavoie, who founded and runs, uh, Partnership Mastermind. Um, I always want to give him a shout-out 'cause he's a, a great collaborator, um, somebody who, who is deep in the community as well.

Uh, and so I, I think it's fair to certainly acknowledge that some of this is from, from him as well. This is where I'd love a little bit of audience participation. Does this land? Are you seeing the same thing? So number one, this one surprised me. 65% of partner organizations are still running either all of or a good chunk of their program on spreadsheets, shared documents, and they don't necessarily have a source of truth, a platform.

I'd be curious just in the chat, is this you? Yes or no? Yes, we're still kind of patching things together, or no, we feel like we're, we're relatively mature and we're, we're tech-enabled, if you're comfortable [00:25:00] sharing. I understand some folks may not wanna share that. Um, and then the other one which, uh, was less surprising was that three in four partner leaders, um, are managing a lot of the work in Slack, in Teams, in Notion, um That's not surprising to me, right?

I think we all want to work in the tools that we already work in. Um, so this one isn't as surprising, but I'd be curious if this lands for people as well. Whether you have a tech platform for partnerships or not, do you find that most of the work is happening in tools like this, Slack, Teams, whatever it might be?

Um, I'd, I'd be curious. So that's one thing that we see, right? There's a revenue motion in place. There is executive alignment that it's important, but there's a little bit of duct taping. There's not, uh, perhaps enough investment into [00:26:00] infrastructure. Um, and then, you know, no surprise here because you hear it all the time.

You hear the 80/20 rule, right? 80% of our revenue is being driven by 20% of our partners. What the data is showing is it's about 75/25 on average. So, um, 75% of partners are sitting idle. They're not overly active. If they are active, they're not really driving significant impact. Um, again, this I'd love to hear people, what percentage are you at?

Are you at 70/30? Are you at 80/20? Are you at 90/10? I've heard some customers suggest they're 95/5, right? There's a high concentration on just two partners driving the bulk of the output. Very curious where people are at. The takeaway when we dig into this that I've come across and that I've seen, and, you know, I, I think Chris would, would back up, Chris Lovelall, where some of this data comes from, is, um, a lot of folks assume that this [00:27:00] is an enablement problem, right?

Let's just enable our partners more. Let's make sure that they're certified. Let's make sure that we're sending them more emails. Let's, you know, let's make sure that they get that fancy PDF that they will probably never read. Um, and that will solve this. And the reality is it doesn't. I think most of us have tried that, and we realize, for the most part, it does not solve that.

Um, it's more of a scale problem, right? How can a small team, which most partner teams are, they're relatively small from a headcount standpoint, you know, it's a challenge to sometimes make an argument that you should get headcount over other functions. Um, and so it's, it's a scale challenge, right? How do we scale, uh, enablement, onboarding, activation when I and my team only have so much time, and we have too many partners to try to activate, right?

We're actually okay with 75% [00:28:00] being idle or dormant or whatever term you wanna use. I'll come back to this because I think this is where AI can support quite a bit, and this is where we have some data to back up that it is supporting quite a bit. And then the other piece, um, that we've seen that comes out of the data is, uh, attribution.

I think attribution is a challenge for everybody. There's a lot of commentary around attribution. It's BS. You shouldn't even try. It's almost impossible. You got a dark funnel. You know, you can never get to an accurate place with attribution. The way I think about attribution is, is sort of twofold. Number one is we all know that you need some semblance of attribution internally to build credibility, to build trust that what you're doing and what you're investing into is driving results.

It's how you continue to build a case for additional budget, continue to build a case to, um, invest into, whether it's tooling or headcount or co-marketing, whatever it might be. [00:29:00] You need to be able to tell that data backstory, and attribution is part of that. The other way that I think about this that I see not a lot of folks thinking about it is attribution is critical context And so when I say context, context for whatever LLM you're using, whatever agents you've built, whatever AI work that you're doing, if you don't have an accurate attribution model that is being fed into that AI model, that LLM, that agent, then it is almost impossible to have a next best action type of recommendation, right?

If your attribution is broken and it's not accurate, then you're gonna get recommendations that are just wrong. They're incorrect. And if they're incorrect, then you can't really build automation around it, right? You're just gonna automate poor judgment coming from an anonymous robot. And so [00:30:00] really understanding that attribution model and understanding the full picture is what becomes really, really critical to unlock the power of AI.

And I'll come that, come back to that in a second, um, what that could actually look like. But what we're seeing again in the data is 65% of partner leaders aren't overly confident in their attribution model. Most have some kind of model that they lean on, but there's a lack of confidence in it. Um, I'm just catching up on a couple of comments from Steve, Rick.

"Our partner channel motion is in its infancy, but we're basically using Slack and HubSpot for everything." Yeah. And I think that's a great place to start, right? Like I, I'm also an advocate for, um, you don't need to invest into a dedicated platform or solution, uh, until you have to, right? You know, I'd love to say, of course you should buy something like a partner stack day one, um, but I, I just don't think that's good judgment.

I think, you know, we've seen a lot of people very [00:31:00] successfully build their initial program and scale to a certain degree doing exactly what you're doing, Steve, and I think that's fine. I think when it gets to a point where people are stretched too thin, you're dropping balls, the partner experience suffers, uh, you're starting to see almost like sh- I call it like shadow work going around, or the like finance is doing more than they need to, sales is picking up more than they need to to support a partner program.

Those are signs that that maybe, you know, a platform is worthwhile. But we see that a lot and, and I think it's cool. Um, and then Rick, "My insight into the tech ecosystem is that 65% is accurate. We are at an inflection point." Yep. I think that's all fair too. Sweet. And then hello Pam from Texas. There we go.

Um, and then very quickly, um, 'cause Justin, you know, you always tell me, "Move faster. Get to the good stuff." So I'm gonna try to, I'm gonna try to be less, "This is a three-hour lecture Tyler," and this is a one-hour, you know, action-packed say it. What do you wanna say, [00:32:00] sir? 

Justin Zimmerman: Oh, I... It was, it was not, it was, uh, it was something like, um- Stop being so Canadian right now.

Tyler Calder: Oh, okay. Sorry. That was a joke. Me saying sorry was a joke. Canadian humor. Canadian humor. Um, again, very curious if this lands for people. On the left is what we typically see today. Um, you have data coming from your ecosystem, your partner program. That is fed into a relatively static dashboard. That dashboard is interpreted by an operator, right, a partner manager, and then that kicks off manual effort.

That kicks off shoot down off Slack messages, emails, booking meetings, refining your QBR approach. It kicks off the action. Um, what we're seeing the highest performing program shift to is what you see on the right side, which is rather than just static data [00:33:00] coming out of your program that is stale as soon as you get it, you're looking for more real-time signals that are automatically, in real time, fed into whatever agent or workflow that you've built.

That is then putting a layer of judgment on what's being seen in those signals. That is then automatically prioritizing what the next best action is, or at least recommended to be, and then you move into human in the loop. Right? So on the left, it's human in the loop the whole way. On the right, the human jumps in once you're fed something relatively real time.

"Hey, we recommend that you should do X, Y, and Z based on these signals that we're seeing. Do you wanna trigger this work?" And then you can decide, trigger it through an automated workflow. I'll take it over. You know, we'll do this manually because we think that's more important for this specific thing. But now all of a sudden, seventy-five percent of the job [00:34:00] is not fully automated, but a little bit more informed with real-time data.

And so that's where we see scale coming from, is moving a little bit more to the right. This is the part where I'm gonna talk a little bit about PartnerStack and what we've been building and what we have built and how we think about the world. I'd be very curious if, if this lands. I mentioned at the top fifty percent of our customers look at us as an affiliate influencer creator platform.

Typically, on that side of the business, uh, we sell into marketing organizations. They use us to very aggressively build pipeline, um, drive attributed revenue. And then on the other side, the other fifty percent people use us as a PRM co-sell ecosystem platform, whatever you might wanna call it. The vision of PartnerStack was always there should be a single platform that helps you manage all of your indirect revenue.

And historically, and I've been in this world where I've led large teams, [00:35:00] I've led large kind of functional, uh, revenue orgs, where I was responsible for running an affiliate program, running a reseller program, running a customer advocacy program, and now all of a sudden I have three, four, maybe five different tools to do all of them.

None of them are speaking together. None of them are helping me, I'll use the word orchestrate, which is probably overused, but orchestrate all of that indirect revenue. And so what we said was... And when I say we, like, let's be honest, I had no part in it. The founders of PartnerStack, right? I think entrepreneurs are amazing people that do really, really hard things.

They said, "This is what we wanna build." And so how do you have a platform that helps you drive demand, helps you close that revenue, and then helps you retain and expand? And so that's what we've been trying to work on. And in our mind, that is the basis and the foundation of a modern platform. Whether you wanna call it a PRM, an [00:36:00] ecosystem platform, a co-sell platform, I don't care.

At the end of the day, it is a platform to help you manage all of your indirect revenue opportunity, which is effectively the ask of your board, of your CEO, of the business. How do you do that as efficiently as possible? When we get super tactical, one of our other beliefs is, of course, AI is important. Of course, companies like PartnerStack and others in the space need to be shipping AI forward functionality But the fundamentals need to be right.

The fundamentals of the platform you use and the fundamentals of your own program. And again, would love to hear from people if this lands or not, but for us, these are the five things that we view as being fundamental. The first is reporting and attribution, like we talked about. And like we talked about, both because you need this internally to prove the value and credibility and trustworthiness of the partner org, and that you're being a [00:37:00] responsible steward of the investment being made.

The second is intelligent partner tiering, right? And so this may not be a huge deal if you hand- have a handful of partners, but if, and I don't know if who said it, you know, if you have 150 partners and you're trying to figure out how do we tier them, you know, what are the gates to move between tiers? Do we do it once a month, once a quarter, once a year?

Like, all of that is very time-consuming, and if not done really, really well, can lead to a very poor partner experience. Um, and so our perspective is there is so much data flowing into whatever platform you're using, that in relatively real time, you can start to be dynamically moving people into tiers, and you can decide, right?

We don't wanna do it dynamically. We wanna do it once a quarter, whatever it might be. But at a minimum, you should know that a partner has hit certain criteria that suggests they should be moving up a tier. They should get benefits of those [00:38:00] tiers. And that is a nice kind of surprise and delight moment for that partner to say, "Hey, guess what?

You know what? You just hit this critical point. We're moving you up. Congratulations. You can celebrate. You can kick off whatever workflow to send gifts," and whatever it might be. Payouts and compliance is a big one. What's always interesting to me about this one is we find a lot of partner leaders don't actually care a ton about this.

It's the finance teams that care a ton about this. This is making sure that you are paying out your partners on time accurately. Uh, you can do it globally across multiple currencies. Uh, it is auditable. Uh, this is something that I think is critical as you scale, especially as you scale globally. And then the last two, you know, we touched on partner LMS and onboarding.

I think it's critical that there are mechanisms and ways to enable your partners almost in real time. I don't necessarily mean what I was alluding to before, you know, [00:39:00] static, go through this course that's gonna take you a couple days. I mean, how do you build this in real time based on the signals that you're getting through your platform?

And then again, the fifth one, if this is important to you, this is very important to you. If it's not important to you, then it's probably not important to you. Um, but it's one of those things where if being able to fluidly list and work within hyperscaler marketplaces, uh, if that's important, then having that ability within your platform, uh, I, I think is, is a critical component to being a modern partner platform.

Um, when we did this, uh, for the EMEA group, Justin, were you on muting to ask the same thing? Drop a number. What's most important? You're 

Justin Zimmerman: so good. Y-y-it's like you can read my mind. Well, you can read my mute button actually is what it is. Okay. Correct. We've, we learned, we learned a, a non-verbal communication.

Yeah, exactly. I was gonna... I, I like jumping in at this part right here and really asking the audience as they look at the screen here. Am I stealing your [00:40:00] thunder? If so, I apologize, but, uh, everyone watching right now, just always curious. This is, I think, a fantastic way to kinda look at, uh, your needs, your, uh, your challenges.

Like, which one of these speaks to you the most? One, two, three, four, or five? I'd love to see just, uh, of all the options and choices, and so the way, uh, ev-everyone else can see, uh, which of these is kind of the most important thing to you and your partner team 

Tyler Calder: Or something that's not here. Right? Again, I'll call out that this is our view, which is, as a vendor, a biased view.

So if there's something here that is critical to you that you don't see, feel free to drop it in. This 

Justin Zimmerman: actually- And, and I'm- Go ahead. Yeah, and, and I'm actually super curious, and so, like, how does this compare to our EMEA partner friends? Like, which is most important to them? 'Cause, uh, I don't wanna s- I don't wanna give away the answer.

I wanna see everyone else's answers in the chats right now. But, like, we saw a lot of w- of... We saw a lot of ones in the previous session, and, uh, [00:41:00] we're seeing a little bit more, I would say, variety of answers here. And so it seems like, uh, number one's- Hmm ... really important. Let's see. We've got, uh, some twos and some fives.

Okay. Yeah, so just curious to see, like, how people are looking at themselves and their partner program, and which part of it is most important. 

Tyler Calder: Ooh, I like Sonny's question. Oh. What about internal alignment, technical validation, being on a partner or customer line card, the strategic readiness? Uh, so you're, you're suggesting having that baked right into the platform?

Like, kind of have that, that insight, that data stored right in the platform? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a cool idea. I like that 

Justin Zimmerman: Maybe some new product ideas for things you guys haven't thought of are gonna come out of this. Yeah, I got a plus one from Sonny for, on Sonny's thing. 

Tyler Calder: That's awesome. Very cool. I like it.

Thank you for that. Um, I'm gonna share a little bit about, about some of how we approach this, uh, a little [00:42:00] bit more tangibly. So, um, when it comes to reporting and attribution, you know, know what's working, act on it automatically. I am of a view that your partner platform, whatever it is, should be your partnership source of truth.

But no matter how sophisticated your partner platform is, it is always gonna be missing insight. You have that insight in other tooling. So for us at PartnerStack, we use Salesforce, PartnerStack, HubSpot, Gong, email, Slack. All of that data is funneled into a single database, which we then connect to with Claude, uh, or, um, now that we're part of AppDirect, another really cool tool called Devs, um, which, uh, allows us to kind of build, um, internally in a very compliant, safe way.

[00:43:00] Um, all of that gets funneled into a single source that we can then query and build automation around. Why is this important to attribution? It's important to attribution... Oh, yeah. Rick, Aaron Bailey, there you go. I'm gonna have to tell him, you know? He's gonna feel like a rock star. Thanks for the shout-out.

Build first. Oh, look at that. I don't know that anybody else knows what we're talking about, but you and I do, so there you go. Um, what I think is really critical here is, uh, like I was saying, attribution using only a single source of data, especially coming from a marketing world, I have never seen provide that accurate of a picture, right?

Um, you have to pick a model where last touch, where first touch, where, uh, time decayed, where weighted. There's challenges with all of them. The really interesting thing to me now with all of the different sources of data [00:44:00] that we have, I can see what PartnerStack is telling me, right? I can see who submitted the deal, what partner it was.

I can see any partner conflict that might be arising through that. But then I can also start to look at HubSpot and see the entire digital journey that somebody took to turning into a lead. I can look at all of the email and Slack communication that has happened between that vendor, the partners, and our internal team.

And I think most impactful is I can look at all of our calls, which to me is the most accurate, right? Because that's where people are really telling you, "Oh, so and so referred me over." Happens to be that's not the partner that actually registered the deal. And now all of a sudden you can build an attribution story that is far more accurate in telling, which helps you provide more informed investment recommendations.

It helps you make better next action judgments. It helps you provide a fairer compensation model [00:45:00] amongst your partners. And so this is where as long as you have the ability to connect all of these data sources, tap into it using something like an MCP and Claude like we do, you can start to build things like this, which is just a snapshot.

But for us, one of the things we look at is, you know, not just a dashboard of how much pipeline we've driven and how much revenue we've sourced. We can start to look at, well, what deals have stalled? What partners have been involved? Which partner is the best one to tap into to reengage it? What are the actions that are recommended?

What email should I draft? Who should I call versus email? All of those things become far more actionable. And then again, I can decide, do I want to automate that and push it towards an agent that I've built? Do I want to have somebody on the team take a human first approach and run with it? This is where we start to close that gap where sixty-five percent of partner leaders can't really tell an attribution story.

Again, I think a lot have some semblance of an attribution model that they try to run with, but actually telling [00:46:00] the story and taking action around it is much harder. And then, yeah, uh, Vanessa, to your point, Granola is ano- another incredible option, a hundred percent. Um, and then when it comes to intelligent tiering, you know, this is where I was alluding to before.

Um, you're getting so many signals coming into your platform that you can start to be a little bit more dynamic. You can start to identify, you know, what partners that have hit a threshold. You don't necessarily have to wait for a QBR. Uh, or you can decide, we know, but we are gonna wait for a QBR, right?

The, the point is you have way more intelligence to make better decision and calls on how you want to operationalize this, that you'll provide a much better partner experience, a much more informed, uh, motion than I think what most people are providing now. Justin, go ahead. 

Justin Zimmerman: Yeah. I was just curious before we move on to just see of everyone listening, watching right now live, what are your favorite tools that you're using in your [00:47:00] tech stack?

And so that way other people might have an opportunity, like Vanessa shared Granola. Which ones are kind of sitting top of mind for you? And let's create a list in the chat right now so other people can pick up and learn some tools that they ought to know about that maybe are not as well known right now.

Tyler Calder: Love it. Um, I'll actually drop one from a recording standpoint. Uh, and I probably shouldn't say this on a recorded call because it is certainly not approved by my employer. Uh, but I use Plaud, uh, most recently, if anybody's familiar with them, P-L-A-U-D. Uh, it's both a piece of hardware that records in person, um, but for me, more importantly, their desktop, uh, recording and transcription service is better than any other tool that I've personally used, and it might just be my style, but that's one that I, I think is worth checking out as well Um, the parts that nobody wants to build themselves.

Um, so again, what I've heard, you know, from a [00:48:00] lot of partner leaders is, you know, payouts is great, it's helpful, it's a little bit more for my finance team. Um, your finance team will love you if you can support them and save them twenty, thirty, forty hours a month in all of the work that they do to make sure that the flow of funds is accurate, um, partners are being paid on time if there is a compensation model in place, you're being compliant globally, all of that.

Um, okay, cool. Nice. Um, I'm gonna keep going. This I mentioned, uh, again, uh, around this idea of enablement. You know, again, you're getting so much data and signals from what partners are engaging with you, what partners were highly active, and now maybe it looks like they're kind of pulling back and slowing down, which one's never activated.

Um, you can get, you know, insight and profile data about what type of business they are. Even if you wanted to, what type of kind of [00:49:00] personality they are, if you believe in some of that. All of that can start to inform how you want to try to enable them in a little bit more of a just-in-time approach, right?

So rather than everybody getting the exact same nurture sequence, it's far more dynamic and just in time based on exactly what you know about that partner, right? And so again, this is how you start to fix that seventy-five percent of partners are sitting idle, not really doing anything. Um, and then the working with hyperscalers, it looked like maybe a couple people were, were interested in, in this.

But again, for us, this is such a massive opportunity for most, uh, B2B organizations that is grossly underexplored, underinvested into. People don't do it at all. It's a really interesting opportunity, and if you can do it within your partner platform in a really frictionless way. Uh, for anybody that's tried to do this without tech support, it's a nightmare.

Like, it takes so [00:50:00] many resources from your product team, your engineering team, from your ops team. If you can have a platform that helps streamline this, even, even better. And so again, going back to, to our point of view on things, you know, we really believe that your partnership platform, PRM, ecosystem platform, again, whatever you want to call it It should be very much focused on being the source of truth for measuring the right things for your business, the right types of outcomes, not simply giving you a static dashboard on how many partners you have, how many leads they've submitted, you know, how much pipeline they've contributed, how much source revenue.

Those are all important things, but you wanna be able to tell a much more accurate story around how is it impacting win rates? How is it impacting ACV? How is it impacting NRR downstream once you start to attach partners to customers? Um, the other thing is you wanna be able to meet sales where they're at, right?

[00:51:00] Sales has had tooling for twenty years to give them all of the data they need to reinforce that they are the revenue engine for the organization. You need to sit right next to them in their pipeline meetings, their revenue meetings, with the equivalent set of data. You should be operating as one team, but to operate as one team, you need the type of insight that I alluded to in number one.

Um, and then I'm gonna go straight to four just for a time standpoint. When you think about the use of AI, AI should not just help you craft emails, help you build a static dashboard. You should be pointing AI at helping you make better decisions. Again, you can only make better decisions if the context is right, the context is relevant.

And so for anybody that was here last month, I talked a lot about building that context layer, so I'm not gonna regurgitate a bunch of it. You can check out that recording, but that's what that entire session was. The key takeaway, [00:52:00] if you want AI to live up to the promise of AI, because quite frankly, it's not living up to the promise for most organizations.

Again, most of what you see on LinkedIn about all the cool shit people are doing, most of it is a half-truth. Um, and if you ask people point blank, they'll admit that. Where this really lives up to the promise is you take the data that you're feeding into the platform, into the model as seriously as possible, right?

You're spending more time doing that than just about anything else, making sure there's appropriate context. And again, the data coming out of your ecosystem is probably more valuable than just about anywhere else. Um, and to help folks take advantage of that very quickly, we launched a skills marketplace a couple months ago.

It's been very active. People are diving into it. It's a very simple idea. You can go in, you can look at all of the different skills that are available. You do not need to be a PartnerStack customer to leverage this. As long as you can access your partnership data, [00:53:00] whether that lives in PartnerStack, another platform, or even in spreadsheets, you can use these skills to do things like, you know, as simple as building your ideal partner profile to as sophisticated as, you know, building out a next best action morning brief, where you can literally automate workflows to take those actions.

Um, so you can go in. There's a lot of people across the community that have submitted really interesting skills. They're not all from us. If you've built cool stuff that you want to share with the community, you can submit it. We'll check it out. If it looks good, we'll approve it. Um, but I think that's certainly worth checking out.

This is some of what we've seen from an impact standpoint. Um, about seventy-five percent increase in speed to output within partner teams, about forty to sixty minutes, uh, a day saved, uh, and revenue per partner manager up. In my mind, these are insane numbers given how simple some of these things are, right?

So I, I think it's worth checking out because the lift [00:54:00] is low relative to the upside. And then, uh, again, if you wanna see this live and go deep into this in a live demo and see how it really truly works, um, you can sign up, uh, for that live group demo, uh, next week. I think it's on September fourth that we're gonna run it.

Um, but these are just some of the things that we've launched that have been helping partner teams. I mentioned earlier, people wanna work where they already work. Um, so we allow you very simply, in this case, um, to submit deals across Slack, Teams, Gmail. Um, what we see from, uh, a data standpoint is about a twelve percent lift in lead submission and accurate partner attribution when people are enabling and turning some of this functionality on.

Um, from a partner recruitment standpoint, you know, what we hear is partner recruitment isn't a challenge Good partner recruitment is the challenge, right? We can [00:55:00] go out and find a high volume of good enough partners, but most of them contribute to being the seventy-five percent that are idle, right? We're, we're never actually activating them.

And so what we've done is built kind of an AI-forward way to identify partners that are not just a really good fit, but have the signals to suggest that they'll activate with you, and they won't be part of the seventy-five percent, will be part of the twenty-five percent. And again, people, I think, know PartnerStack as having a network of partners, and they think of it as an affiliate network.

The reality is only about forty percent of those partners are affiliates. The rest are co-sell partners, agencies, consultancies, tech integrators. Um, and so there's a really good opportunity to identify good fit partners regardless of what type of partner program you might be running, partner types you might be working with.

And so what we've seen is about a sixty percent lift in best fit, um, partners being recruited, um, from folks that are, are leveraging this. [00:56:00] Um, I'm gonna skip this one. Um, I'm gonna go to this. Uh, what we see with folks that are leaning in and leveraging our MCP connector, uh, to really tap into some of this partner data, um, they are able to take really quick, clean action, um, with data that was sometimes really hard to get to.

They had to submit tickets to, you know, a rev ops team or a partner ops person to get this. Now all of it, all of it is, is sort of in their hands and, and ready to go. Um, and then, you know, what do we suggest people focus on? You know, one is, I think we talked a lot about attribution. I don't actually think you need to start with technology here.

I, I think what I would suggest to people is really think about and understand what is your CFO's dream state for how you talk about attribution, how you report on performance, and then start to think about, okay, how do I get better at talking the language of the business? Once you understand that, [00:57:00] then you can start to work backwards and either build it manually, use a platform like ours.

But I would say, like, do you actually have a really good grasp on that? Have you actually sat down with the CFO and asked them what that should look like from their perspective? I would also suggest don't accept the 80/20 rule. You know, I think that's something that we've broadly accepted in partnerships.

Uh, I've seen a lot of people just accept, "Well, it's only ever gonna be 90/10." It's what it's always been, and it's what it, it always will be. I think there's a huge opportunity to unlock the potential of kind of the mid and long tail of your partners. Um, the third, sit down with sales. Like, if you're not part of the sales cadence, I really think you should be.

I think that's one of the things marketing teams did 15 years ago to elevate themselves to be on the same level as sales, is they made sure, marketers made sure they were part of every single pipeline review, sales meeting, and showed the type of impact that they were having on that, uh, that performance.

And then [00:58:00] fourth, I think a lot of us are doing this, but if you're not, play around with AI. Run one skill against the data that you already have. Again, that data does not need to live in PartnerStack. It can live in any platform. It can live in a spreadsheet. You can still leverage these skills. Uh, Steve asked the question, "Does your network have segmentation by industry construction?"

Yes. Yeah, uh, tons of segmentation and, you know, the beauty of AI is it's not just like filters that you toggle. You can actually upload a very defined ideal partner profile with all of the signals that you look at if you're that sophisticated, and use that to help identify partners as well. And then one last thing which I think is really important, um, as much of a conversation around AI that there is right now, and there has been and continue to will be, you know, what we see in the data is there's absolutely a sweet spot between automation and program growth, or a correlation, I should [00:59:00] say.

And so what we see is on one end, and it's a bell curve, basically, on one end, if you're doing everything manually and you're sort of AI automation adverse, you lean in everything's gotta be human and relationship first. You shouldn't let the robots touch anything. You're probably gonna grow, but you're not gonna grow at the same rate as folks that have found a good balance.

They have figured out the things that should be automated and the things that shouldn't be automated. Those are the programs that are succeeding. If you go too far towards automation and try to remove the health, uh, the human element, it's almost like you're not automating anything. Your growth rate stalls, you piss off partners, it's not a good experience.

And so finding that balance I think is critical. And I actually think partner people are best primed to do this because we tend to prioritize relationships and people first versus prioritizing the tech. I think if we lean into that prioritization and then sprinkle on the automation and tech, we're gonna be able to put ourselves in that sweet spot.

And so with that, thank you, [01:00:00] and of course, you know, thank you to our friend Mr. Zimmerman. I always like to create my fun image. I know, you know, we did EMEA this morning. You're hanging out over in Europe, so I thought this was fitting. There 

Justin Zimmerman: you go. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna add it to the collection. At the end of the year, we're gonna have a nice calendar.

And I just wanna give a drop in the chats for everyone remaining here right now. Uh, if you want an individual personal tour of the things that Tyler talked about that we couldn't get into details, I dropped a link to get your own personal demo. Uh, and the fact that you're here right now with me, you'll get an email later next week to come join the, uh, group demo.

Uh, but if you have some really specific questions and you're actually truly interested in getting deeper into the platform one-on-one, use the link in the chats right now. Uh, and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna say goodbye to our Canadian friends, specifically Tyler. Let's say goodbye to Tyler.

Goodbye, Tyler. And I'm gonna drop- Thanks, everyone ... one more final link in the chat so you can come join me and Scott Murtagh [01:01:00] for our next session, where we're gonna do a live build using Claude to generate marketing assets, co-marketing assets. And so if you're a team of one, maybe two, and you're struggling to get things done, we're gonna show you how to do that.

Go hit that link right now, pop on over, and we're gonna show you a real tactical, practical, hands-on, nitty-gritty applications of skills that should be submitted to the PartnerStack library. And so let's end this session here. Head over there, so that way we can then take the next rest of our day, uh, and then put it to even higher, better use.

And so see you, Tyler. See you, everybody. Let's pop over there right now for a hands-on tactical, practical Claude demonstration