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Rob Moyer (00:00):

I think it gets back to my RevOps statement orchestration. I've tried to pitch this idea of a role a partner go-to-market engineer. I pitched it actually to one of my clients, that right hand person of every VP of partnerships, they should have a partnership, get a market engineer who can orchestrate a system. Partnerships is behind the tech itself.

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Tyler Calder (00:27):

This is Get It, Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. I think we can all agree that partnerships are having their moment, the stage where potential is clear, but the execution still lags behind maybe just a little bit. So in this episode we're going to get into that. I'm joined by Rob Moyer, founder of BlueThread.io and former partner leader at companies like Gong, TD Synnex, and Microsoft. And we are going to talk about what it really takes to co-sell with precision. We dig into how RevOps fits into that equation, why echo chambers can kill innovation, and how a pod strategy can really help orchestrate better results across partner types. Through all of this, we will chat through Rob's six-step framework for co-selling with precision, and I think by the end of it you'll have a new playbook that you can start to execute right away.

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(01:30):

Enjoy. Welcome everybody to another episode of Get It Together. Today I am with Rob Moyer and I am super excited for this conversation. Rob has been deep in partnerships over the past couple of decades coming from folks like Microsoft, TD Synnex, scaled most recently the Gong Program and now has founded his own firm, BlueThread.io, doing some really incredible work leaning into the moment of partnerships and helping brands out there. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. We're going to talk a lot about this idea of co-selling with precision, which I think is a great term from Rob. Rob, welcome, glad to have you.

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Rob Moyer (02:13):

Thank you and I'm glad that you got the black hoodie memo.

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Tyler Calder (02:17):

There we go. Before we dive into this idea of co-selling with precision, I would love to talk a little bit about what you're doing with BlueThread right now. Why was now the moment for you to start this company? What is it that you're trying to do out in the market? What's the gap that you saw? What's going on there?

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Rob Moyer (02:33):

Yeah, so I've had a pretty successful career and honestly I was going to do this three or four years ago and my buddy called me and recruited me over to Gong and I was so fascinated by the tech that I felt like I had to do it, but I did have a plan to come in and kind of have a business and advisory because I've been an advocate to change and progress everything I did at every step in my career. First when I build a strategy, I start with a customer. And so I just saw with all the changing landscape, I got a little lucky with Gong because it just showed me they transformed sales. RevOps wasn't a thing four years ago, three years ago, and I said now it's the partners time. The community took this view of RevOps meets partnerships meets a very precision approach.

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Tyler Calder (03:30):

Yeah, so you mentioned RevOps, which I think is interesting. I didn't plan on going down this road with RevOps, but now that you bring it up, I think it is worth talking about because we've seen in our own partner program, typically we've worked with agencies that manage partner programs, whether it's an affiliate program, whether they're help managing a more traditional co-sell resell type of program. But I would say over the past 18 months we've seen a huge increase in our inbound interest from potential partner agencies that are all RevOps focused and those RevOps teams are being asked to take on partner tech to own it, to integrate it, make the most out of the data that's coming out of the partner ecosystem. Is that what you're seeing as their moment when you bring up RevOps? What are you seeing?

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Rob Moyer (04:19):

RevOps to me is orchestration. When I think about modern go-to-market, before we lived in a world where you had partner portals, you had tiers, you had pricing cascades, and you had just go find the right partners and magic will happen where kind of RevOps has more of an orchestrated view. When I was thinking about this at Gong, the first partners, I actually failed the first six months there I went with a traditional approach and then my eyes woke up when I looked and go, let's go back to the basics. Where's the tech integrations? What is the stack? And so for example, I started looking at companies that had buying signals, data enrichment, all these different add-ons to Gong that made gong great. I said, wow, direct sales gets this. Why can't we do this in partner land, so to speak? So I think of it as the end goal's, the same closed one revenue, it's just we got a different route because partners, you add third party, you have different dynamics. So my view was more route the orchestration that has to happen in partnerships and then obviously in today's world, if you don't have the right tech that will get you to the strategy meets execution, meets partner tech. And that's where I got the notion and that's why I'm so passionate about this topic.

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Tyler Calder (05:43):

There's a couple things in there that I'd love to explore a little bit. So one you mentioned early on Gong, the first batch of partners, maybe not as successful as you would've liked them to be. What happened there? Let's talk about what went wrong, what were those maybe missteps or assumptions that didn't end up necessarily being true? And then let's get into a little bit of what ended up working, which you already kind of alluded to, but I'd love to talk about that initial learning kind of experience was like, oh shoot, this isn't going as well as maybe we thought, how come?

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Rob Moyer (06:13):

Yeah, it's a very simple concept but huge and I talk about it a lot. The first thing people do is they try and just align the ICP. And so I thought we were going after a certain market. All I had to do is get partners that sold that ICP. What I found is they're talking to the wrong person in that ICP. So I really reimagined getting back to that started with a customer first who's actually buying. So in my mind I was going, I need partners that are not only aligned to that ICP, but they're aligned to the personas that actually buy golf. So when we looked at it, we just said, okay, let's just do a do over. We consolidated our partnerships and we really focused on boutiques and partners that were really heavily impacting our buyer personas and then we started building from there and that was my big aha moment and I completely pivoted our strategy to focus on that and we got tremendous results as a result of doing that.

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Tyler Calder (07:18):

Nice. And then the other thing I wanted to tap into was your use of the word orchestration. What does that look like in practice?

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Rob Moyer (07:27):

Yeah, I think that I talked a little bit about a pod strategy. It's the same thing when you're on a team, generally partnership teams have a similar role, different partner types. The problem is you start getting very vanilla on every point of view. So I deconstruct the actual funnel. So I look at it as I have a full funnel approach. Some partners are great at top of funnel, some partners like in co-sell are in the middle of the funnel. Then bottom of funnel is transaction and retention after the sale. So when I think about that, I was looking at the teams and I'm going, look, we've given partner marketing an impossible task. They're saying go drive leads, but you have five different partner types attacking five different parts, three different parts of the funnel and it's not orchestrated well. So what I did is I deconstructed my teams to go, okay, let's do a hyperscaler pie.

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(08:25):

What's that? Well, I'm going to have my hyperscalers and one team, I'll have a meeting with partner ops, enablement, partner marketing, and we'll have a strategy specific to hyperscalers on co-sell marketing top of funnel. And what I found is I started doing this. So I had one for private equity, I had one for agencies. We got so much better at driving outcomes because no longer was the expectation that marketing would just go me ROI go to your event and we'll check in. Marketing now knows specifically what this partner type was doing and how we were attacking the market. It also helps you and perform processes because what happens is every company's broken no matter what they say, they're broken internally. And having a pod that has a specific problem that will help each other, that's part of that pod structure. So I kind of view it as it takes that orchestration and breaks it down into silos and it's almost like you're building a better, more efficient engine. So when you do go-to-market, it's much more seamless.

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Tyler Calder (09:35):

I'd love to get right into the meat of the conversation, which is this idea of co-selling with precision. This is something you talked about at one of our stacked meetups, the partner stack series of events and it landed quite well. Maybe let's just start with when you say co-selling with precision, why is that word precision important to include in there?

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Rob Moyer (09:57):

I always start with the partner attribution model because when you unpack it, and we talk a lot about having the C-suite outing FP&A aligned to the actual value partnerships, you really have to show the value. And so when you talk about partner source, all influence, what does that mean? Diving into, a lot of times I'll talk to people that have hyperscaler businesses, they're saying, oh, it's going great, but our finance team doesn't really think it's adding value. They think we would've got that deal either way. So I kind of unpack where is the value in co-sell? And so it's thinking about going down into the weeds of where did they impact. So let's take an example. In sales Salesforce, you might have seven processes and an opportunity from SQL to close. How many touch points did that partner have that influenced that opportunity?

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(10:58):

And co-sell was really like did they get executive alignment? Did they push you when you weren't there? Did they have a solution that helped close better or it could have been a tech partnership that through this integration it made it easier to get to the outcome for the problem you're solving. So I look at co-sell as you have to break down where the value is and that precision comes from knowing the value. So when you finish a deal, you could definitively, everybody can go, here's how that partner impacted this deal. It wasn't just a co-sell.

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Tyler Calder (11:35):

Yeah, fair. And so you talk about your process of co-selling with precision sort of six levels. I'll mention them and then I'd love to go one by one. So you talk about mapping accounts, then prioritizing opportunities, talk about joint planning, you talk about enabling the field, which I think is a great point of the process that we'll go deep into. You talk about deal collaboration and then you talk about tracking and attribution and driving the right types of outcomes. So if we go back to the top and we talk about we mapping accounts, what does that look like for you in practice? What did that look like at let's say gong where you're thinking about aligning ICP persona, thinking about the tam, identifying the accounts, scoring the accounts, what did that whole process look like?

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Rob Moyer (12:26):

Yeah, so that IC key plus persona is the magic and then what you want to do is go what is the plan there? So for example, I have an exercise I run, always run with my teams, I run with my clients is just because you have good potential in the cross-matching the account mapping that just tells you one thing that's like telling you, hey, it's 70 degrees outside. Is it cloudy or sunny? I don't know. But going in deep, you want to put what does the math say? So if you have 10 accounts and they're different sizes, you want to be able to go, here's the high propensity accounts, it's not IPP, it's here's the high propensity accounts off of that mapping. That's the first place you want to start because ultimately to get a deal, I always say a true partnership is when you have three deals, three deals done in a reasonable amount of time, three or six months depending on your solution. And that comes from doing this TAM work because you can get some false positives because they have a lot of overlap, but it's not like, well that tam, they're selling to SMB and I'm trying to push out market. So I want to look under the covers on what that TAM is so to speak. Does that make sense?

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Tyler Calder (13:42):

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so presumably you're using something like a Crossbeam to help?

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Rob Moyer (13:49):

Yeah, it's a bit of a Crossbeam and spreadsheet. I think promise of AI is that we're going to get there, but I believe I still want the human discernment. You do this TAM analysis. It's like even today I love ChatGPT, I love Gemini, but I like to check the mass. And I think that's what you'll have here is the STA of when you do your TAM analysis, does it have to sniff test and are using some discernment? Are you validating with the customer on call or a partner on call? Is this real? Because sometimes you do those account mapping and you'll get false positive because there are some accounts that can game you by going, oh yeah, those are all our customers. Well maybe they're not. I like to dig in a little bit deeper.

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Tyler Calder (14:40):

Yeah, cool. So you go through that effort in the spreadsheet. So you move from an account mapping tool like a Crossbeam, you're pulling things into a spreadsheet, you're doing a little bit of a sniff test. What are the things that you're looking for to make sure you're making the right decisions? And I suppose where I'm going with this is how do we help people avoid common mistakes by staying maybe too surface level?

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Rob Moyer (15:08):

I said this recently to the surprise of somebody and I said it's math. Math is the greatest skill you can have in partnerships. Yes, you need to be able to talk to people, you just need that to be a salesperson. But math because when I break this down I even take it a little deeper. So that's why partner ops is so important. What's your average deal size? What is your win rate partners versus direct? So what I'll do is I'll take that TAM and then we'll do this in this prioritized opportunities. We'll take this and go, what is our win rate? What is the average deal size in the segment this partner is? And then I try to create this conversion to deal reg to MQL and then you're good because once you get MQL, your direct team can tell you what your MQL to SQL is and SQL to close and that's how you create the total opportunity. It sounds a little wordy, but it is the math and if you can start from there, now you know where you want to spend your time and I'm adamant to every team I've ever worked with, you have to do that exercise on the front end. Otherwise you, you're just a little blind lot. Is it perfect? No, but it definitely gets you in a much tighter spot as you kind of figure out your own 80 20 rule where you're going to spend your time.

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Tyler Calder (16:34):

Cool. So that leads us to that second step, which is prioritizing those opportunities with a lot of our customers and a lot of partner leaders that I chat with. The prioritization exercise is one of the hardest and it seemingly is harder than other types of prioritization exercises because there is a human involved on the other end where part of prioritization is maybe saying no to certain partners, you're not necessarily going to get the attention that you're hoping for from us right now. And I got to imagine especially working in a business like Gong where it's such a big name, you have people desperately trying to partner with you and work with you. How do you make that a good experience, that prioritization experience where you're kind of saying, yes, we're going to double down here. No, not right now to these partners. How do you work through that in an effective way?

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Rob Moyer (17:26):

There's a couple of ways we do it. So for our top partners, I always wanted a collaboration doc and this helps in the prioritization because I have this whole notion of it's almost like agile for partnerships. It's like test, watch, iterate, iterate, retest, and go for, well one of the ways I test partners is we'll out a collaboration doc, be a deal room with the alliance world. By the way, this is the stuff I like to push to companies like you should all have a deal room. We used Google Docs and what it would be is the basic, here's our commit, like they're committing to five intros, we're committing to five intros, we're going to have a joint value prop. But it's like the whole kind of setup of the partnership. My test is one thing. Are they mutually helping this collaboration or IT on us?Because I want partners who are emotionally invested in this.

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(18:26):

A lot of people are good at like, Hey, want to shmooze you, I want to go why we're great. But the best way to test them is create a document that's a joint go-to-market doc and if they're not updating it, you know what? They're not really the right partner. If you're not updating it, you might not be the right partner manager, but it's kind of that disciplined approach to okay, we've done this analysis, we think there's value, let's go run some plays and if nothing's happening, that's a red flag and I never want to set a partner, but I definitely will give them time if they're not in it because I want partners who want to be there. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's kind of how I prioritize not just opportunities but who I want to work with.

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Tyler Calder (19:17):

Getting super tactical, what are you including in that doc that you're collaborating on?

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Rob Moyer (19:22):

It generally has kind of the general goals. I say you had a million dollar partner source target. The first thing I would do was after that Tamina, how many deals do we have to get to that? And then we'll go, okay, so we have to get 10 deals over the next four quarters, boom, I'll have that. And then there's a good get aspect. What am I giving you? They usually want to be introduced to the customers, especially service partners. I'll say, well if you hit your million dollars, you're going to be far line on customers we're introducing you to. So that's kind of the basis. But then everything else is very tactical. What's your joint value prop? What is our marketing plan together? Think of it as a mini business plan. Any QBR, you can take any style, but it's really a framework of success.

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(20:14):

And then at the bottom there's milestones because that's really where the test is. I always force them the first iteration, two or three milestones with dates and outcomes. Almost like the OKRs by the way, because it really just drives this doc because it's easy to just go to that date and go what happened? And if nothing happened, who's that on? Is that on us or on them? And it's okay to fail, it's okay to change, but it's not okay to just let that time come and nobody says, I'm like, oh, guess we can work through this together. So it's like this accountability joint doc bidirectional and generally as a leader I'll go to the leader in the other company because part of the job as a leader in my mind is to be a part of this. It's not just on the partner manager. So I'd go to the leader of that coming on, Hey, we're going to do this joint doc. I kind of expect that we're both going to be in, we got to hold our teams accountable, but it's a way to kind of der action. Everything I think about is have the greatest strategy in the world. You need a bias for action. And so that's why I break down that way. Cool.

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Tyler Calder (21:28):

Which leads to step three in this process, which is joint planning. And so I like so far how linear and everything feeds into each other. You've prioritized which partners and opportunities you're going to work with that's led to creating the shared doc where you're collaborating and planning. When you get into that hardcore joint planning, you've already mentioned some of the things that you'll end up speaking through, but what are the most critical elements of a successful joint plan?

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Rob Moyer (21:57):

It depends on the point in time conversation. I'll stick with the one that's most popular right now and it's partner source. I'm a big believer partner source is the gold co-sell, silver, blah, blah, enjoying planning. I tend to focus that way. So how are we going to get there? What do you need from each other? It gets back to that plan. We kind of wrote on the first step, now this is the execution. How much money will we need to do this? What will be the ROI on that? How are we going to get there? It could be webinar, it could be live, it could be executive dinner, it could be anything, but it's very focused on the outcomes that will drive the results that we built in this plan. And at every level that I talk about, it seems like I'm in the weeds.

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(22:46):

Well, I am in the weeds and I think that's where the magic happens because it's the best way to hold accountability. So that joint plan will really be designed for the outcome we put at the start. Like no, I'll give you a fling example. Say you have a partner manager that has a $2 million partner source and $2 million co-sell quota. I want the math to show how these 10 accounts will get them there with some sort of pipeline that has generally three x their target. And that's with the assumption that in partnerships you generally have a 30% line rate versus direct is in the low teens. I want this plan to show and it's like that gets back to that org. It's almost like the orchestration of a partner manager and I have my client, how are we going to drive three x pipeline with these 10 accounts and those should add up in this joint client.

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(23:48):

And now I went a little off target from requesting, but I truly believe that you have to have this maniacal focus on how am I going to get my number, one of my favorite sayings to my clients and to the leaders out. You should set the example that every partner manager should need to know where they're at on deal reg, partner source and how many deals they have to do this quarter and how they're tracking. That's not even the pipeline call, that's just your walking deck. If you randomly had your CR talk to one of your partner managers as a quarter of, well I need to hit nine deals at this and I'm tracking to this. It's by doing all this work on the front end, you're creating this discipline approach of really having your territory working out and the math.

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Tyler Calder (24:41):

Yeah. So a couple of things you mentioned there. You mentioned your number, you got to hit your number. When you say your number, is that typically a revenue target?

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Rob Moyer (24:50):

Yeah, it depends on, every company's slightly different. If you're a partner source, it depends if you're a transactional business or you're an influence business, but typically it is about your number. All this, I'm not doing this math once it leads to something.

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Tyler Calder (25:08):

My own bias would be I think partner leaders, channel partner managers should have a very clear revenue goal. As simple as that sounds, I still find 50, 60% of my conversations. The partner team has a relatively small revenue goal and they're still being incented on things like new partner acquisition, which cool, but pretty easy to hit a new partner acquisition number and have those partners not deliver anything of real value. So I think anchoring to a target a RR number is definitely the move.

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Rob Moyer (25:46):

Ellen, could you offer for that? You said something super interesting that I a hundred percent agree and have changed my thought process over the last few years because part of everything I'm talking about is deconstructing the direct sales methodologies to a partner sales methodologies. And my view is like on partner crew should have an SDR team or you come up with a new name, but it's okay to have people that have different types of roles. First thing I come in when I talk to teams that are doing it like you said, well they're not salespeople if they're getting too soft of metric and maybe it's a little controversial, but I think it gets back to some of the conversations they always see like, hey, the average role is 18 months. Well if I was doing it I would do it different. You do need new partners, but I don't want my sellers and focusing on that only to focus on getting the deals so we all have a job.

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Tyler Calder (26:48):

I like that. And I definitely think at a certain size of team, a certain level of maturity bringing on folks that are dedicated to partner recruitment like an S-D-R-B-D-R type of function. I mean in our customer base that's where we really start to see things humming along. The next place I wanted to go to, and I think it comes from you mentioning you're trying to deconstruct the direct motion. You mentioned something around pipeline meetings. What does that look like in the partner org? Are you having your own pipeline meetings within partnerships? Are you part of the whole go-to-market pipeline meeting?

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Rob Moyer (27:23):

It's a slippery slope question, which is what one and what I do now, Brent face, I believe first of all, you need to have a pipeline meeting every week. To me it sets the tone of the discipline. The question is it depends on the maturity of the organization on whether you are part of the bigger one. Because what I find in a lot of companies we're very direct focused. So it's like you go to these pipeline meetings and you're talking two different languages when you almost are doing yourself a disservice. A lot of times direct teams do not understand the concept that win rates are higher with partners. So they're just going figure your pipeline's low, your pipeline's low, then the end of the quarter you hit your number, how'd you get your number? Because my win rates are higher. So getting back to your question though is you got to control what you can control.

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(28:19):

You have to have a pipeline meeting every week. Part of my whole methodology here is you're doing all this math, it has to mean something and you have to be able to track to it. So the pipelines that I run tend to be like, let's stop partner source then would flip the way. Let's talk. I even talk influence because sometimes influence can turn into co-sell, never paid on influence because I think it's too soft. I think it's why so many partner leaders get in trouble. They're just trying to find a win, but it's so soft if you lose credibility. So pipeline meetings, absolutely. And I really use it as a way to keep this whole hierarchy of that's why all our other things we're doing leads to this. I want partner marketing on that pipeline called I want enablement on that call because if we work on a deal and this is going wrong or hey, this partner is behind what's going on, I want the team to understand that orchestration. It's not just the partner manager's problem. It could be like, hey, we're not helping this partner enough.

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Tyler Calder (29:30):

Any other rituals like the same as a pipeline meeting that you've built into your orgs or you're recommending that your clients do?

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Rob Moyer (29:38):

Yeah, it's called five 15. This is the biggest eye rolls I got throughout my career, but it is a weekly report on Friday and it is five minutes to read, 15 minutes to write. Very simple, what's working, what's not, what's next. And I think part of building a great team is understanding what's going on and letting people have a voice. And my view is this is self-discipline. The what's working, everybody knows how to do that. That's the easiest report in the world that we talk about what's not. Sometimes that's where all the good stuff is and it does two things. It kind of highlights what's not working as a leader. You can kind of look at it, but it's also a self-reflection for the partner manager self. And then finally, a lot of times you get with a lot of turnover is this feedback from employees that we're not being heard.

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(30:39):

But by putting this kind of system in place, being heard is on you. There's a weekly requirement that you do little debrief and it's these little things that lead to big things if you kind of listen to everything I'm saying that's really about building that very disciplined approach to your business. And it starts with the most simple thing like a five 15 because when I actually go into orders, I look at it this way, five fifteens is the weekly pipeline is a weekly, then you have an MBR, you have a QBR. So if I have a cadence that will kind of help with this orchestrate sheets out a sense.

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Tyler Calder (31:16):

Yeah, I think that's great. Going back to the co-selling with precision process here, step four, enabling the field. Let's chat about that. What does that look like? I think it's probably from what I've seen, one of the more critical steps but also a step that is easily skipped.

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Rob Moyer (31:34):

A hundred percent. The funny thing is this was probably not in my playbook five years ago because I came from partner led orgs like Microsoft where it was in the DNAI kind of got into this, the startups, the mid-market where ISVs that are growing, generally speaking, they come from a direct selling motion to start and then they layer in partnerships. So enabling the field is about raising the channel IQ so to speak. And the thing is they had a short memory because ultimately you're an ae, you just want your deal's done. And some of them get it early and they embrace partners, but a lot of them, they just don't understand the motion. So enabling the feel is super important. And the way it gets back to that pod system, if you go to enable the field on partnerships, they're just going to be like, I didn't understand any of that.

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(32:29):

So that's like another one where you deconstruct, here's how to work with private equity, their top of funnel, here's how to work with hyperscalers, here's why Cosell works, here's how it'll work with agencies. They can help you front end as a trusted advisor and backend to help you prevent churn. So the way I try to do it is like I'd say share the plays collateral and positioning. It's almost like your marketing internally, it's very similar to everybody talks about enabling your partners, but if you don't enable your own company, you still have a mess. So my theory is where I have a system to enable and some companies are lucky, they have enablement teams. Generally what I find in partnerships, you're in self-serve mode.

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Tyler Calder (33:19):

I think that's fair. I think that idea of enablement obviously critical. I think doing that well in a way that you just framed up helps with your next step, which is the actual deal collaboration. Maybe where I'd like to start here is how would you suggest you do get a direct team excited about working with partners? Especially if they've never done it before, right? Because there's an element of fear. Oh cool, I got this third party in, they might screw up my deal. How do you get past that and get them excited?

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Rob Moyer (33:50):

Yeah, I mean it's almost like imagine that you're an enterprise seller, which was early in my career, like closing a deal. So first of all, you go after the influencer AEs to keep it simple, show 'em how value and then kind of create this buzz. So every real world experience on one where I knew an enterprise account that my partner had and I knew it was a target of ours. So I went to the a e and I said, Hey, who are through top counts? And I said, boom. One of 'em is one that I'm very tightly aligned and go, let's run play with this partner. They are in with all your executives, they're going to help you. We're going to co-sell this deal. So a lot of handholding, but it started with having the partner bring the right person to the first call. And then we started running a full cycle.

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(34:47):

This is what 12 month deal? It was enterprise. It was a huge deal. And what happened throughout this process was he gained a little bit more trust, I want to say within three months he was asking me, Hey, do you have any other partners for some of my other accounts? And we started seeing value and I go being a salesperson myself, I said, yeah, I'll get you to this account, but you need to start telling your team, you need to get me into your team call. So it's like you build trust, you build credibility, and you just keep expanding your network internally. It's kind of like the network effect internally to me it's common sense, but I think a lot of people like, oh, it's a checkbox. We enabled the field. We already enabled them. I don't know why they can't do this. AWS cup cell.

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(35:40):

You got to show them, show them that you've actually done it. And then another thing is you have to create your win stories. Now part of my discipline early, I didn't go a little lazy honest topics myself, but in the early days, get those win stories out there and get 'em going. And then the other little tip that I use is whether Slack or teams, I create channels. I always have a channel for each partner and then I'll add the AEs of that channel. So they start seeing the dialogue and you kind of have this real time collaboration going and to me, if every little step is feeding them a little bit and then you'll get this random A, you go, Hey, I heard you have a channel for this partner. I want in. And then boom. So it's, it's a little bit of a marketing CS improvement.

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Tyler Calder (36:34):

I couldn't agree more with your two big points there. I think one working with who are the influential AEs on your side, the folks you can go one-to-one with, have them see some success. Have other people see that success now all of a sudden everybody wants in. I think that is certainly far more impactful than what you also mentioned, which is in all likelihood what most orgs are doing is, Hey, can I grab an hour with the sales team or can I jump into your direct weekly? I'm going to run through a little bit of how we're going to co-sell with this type of partner. Checkbox, we're done, team enabled, and then wonders why it's not necessarily working. I love the idea of work with one or two AEs, grow from there. That's certainly where we've seen success is where we've seen a lot of our customers really succeed.

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(37:24):

And then your other point on get a channel coin, whether it's Slack teams, whatever it is, that's also been hugely impactful. I think those two things, if nothing else people take away for collaborating on deals, enabling the team, I think you'll probably be light years ahead of where you're now if you're not doing those things. The last part of your co-selling with precision framework here is tracking attribution, driving towards clear outcomes. I think we've talked about this a little bit through this conversation, but anything you'd add there in terms of how you're doing it. Is this what you're reviewing partly during your pipeline meetings? Is it part of your monthly reviews, quarterly reviews,

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Rob Moyer (38:06):

Truth you told 'em doing it for the C-suite. If you have a very structure, what is partner source? What is co-sell? And those attributes, when you finish, you feel strong about understanding the level of impact and level of value that partner has. So when you're rolling up your monthly and quarterly reports, you can say that this is what we did, this is how we did it, and your brand gets much stronger and your credibility, that's how you get more resources. In my last role, I just thought it was natural, but broke down and win rates by each co-sell source, co-sell and influence and then buy segments, enterprise midmark and below. I just thought, man, just do it. CRO latched onto that and just said, this is what you should be telling the CFO because this is the math that says why we need to invest in partners. And so kind my whole view on this co-sell with precisionist, the common thread is discipline, very structured approach, but the outcome is we're still in the business of if you want to grow your business, you need more resources, you can be the greatest, most efficient org in the world, but if you're under resources versus your number or expected growth, you'll never get there. The way you get there is now

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Tyler Calder (39:32):

Maybe an odd question, how can someone know? So as a partner leader, how do you know with confidence to the point where you're going to go to the CEO, CFO fighting for more resources? How do you know you're under resourced?

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Rob Moyer (39:46):

Maybe there's a couple different ways of doing it. I look at benchmarking like your revenue per your a RR per employee versus direct. A lot of times that's why you need to be friends with the RevOps teams and FP&A, how are they benchmarking direct sales? And then I want to know what that benchmark is so I can go, here's what the company's objectives, here's what percentage of partners are, here's our productivity, here's their productivity. Overusing the word math, but that's why every partner leader, they need to have a front end FP&A. That's my little secret that I would tell every partner leader that listens to this, go find somebody in finance that can help you understand how they look at your business and measure you.

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Tyler Calder (40:37):

I think that's perfect. I think where my question comes from is I've seen, and it's not just partnerships, every org, every org feels like they're strapped. Every org feels like they are, they want more headcount, but you got to bring something that's a little bit more concrete than I feel underwater. I feel like I'm stretched too thin. It's like, yeah, I mean sucks, but the math isn't mathing. And so I think that is important to recognize and the math is showing it. We are running efficiently, we are hitting numbers or we're on the path to hitting the numbers. We need a couple more headcount. Here's what the math says and getting it to the data versus man, the team is so stretched, can't keep up with emails. We can't keep up with all of these partner meetings, but are we delivering? Are we hitting the numbers? What are the signposts that suggests now is the right time to invest? This is where we should be making those investments. Every headcount is, it's an investment into growth and so why should it go here? You got to make that case. So I agree. If you don't have a friend in finance, you should probably go talk to finance.

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Rob Moyer (41:47):

Yeah. Yeah. The funny thing about this whole thing, I was having a conversation with a friend, how did you figure this out? And it's like scar tissue,

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Tyler Calder (41:56):

Right? Yeah.

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Rob Moyer (41:57):

All this is, yeah, I did it wrong too. Awesome.

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Tyler Calder (42:04):

I love that. I'm going to have a closing question for us here. Looking forward, what does this all look like? This being partner-led growth, ecosystem-led growth, whatever you want to call it, however you want to think about it. What does this look like over the next three to five years?

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Rob Moyer (42:20):

Yeah. I think it gets back to my RevOps statement, orchestration. I've tried to pitch this idea of a role, a partner go-to market engineer. I pitched it actually, it's one of my clients, that right hand person of every VP of partnerships, they have a partnership go-to-market engineer who can orchestrate a system. And I think because how we're doing and how tech is advancing, partner teams have to stay with pace. And I think about even your products and everybody in the partners, there's this feeling I have that partnerships is behind the tech itself. And so we have to become orchestrators. We have to have systems that keep up with the technology we're using, and I think next year will be this kind of year of orchestration as a result of ai because you need to have systems to take advantage of all these productivity gains that we're going to get.

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Tyler Calder (43:23):

Your mention of AI there in your dream state, what is it that AI is supporting? What leverage point is AI providing?

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Rob Moyer (43:33):

I think of it as very simple. We all have data. That's the system. That's the record. Even C-R-M-P-R-M system of record AI is the unstructured data and it's the insights. Well, AI will help us make better decisions and create this system of action that we are able to kind of have some discernment, understand that data, take those recommendations and execute. I still believe you had to check the math. They still thick. You have to check in with your partners, all that. But AI is really going to help you make decisions faster because in the most simple way in either May is consolidating information quicker than it's ever done. But if you don't have discernment on what that information says, if you're going nowhere, so said a lot there, but I think it's going to ultimately be about you use AI to accelerate, not get analysis paralysis because you have too much. I love

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Tyler Calder (44:34):

It. I couldn't agree more. Rob, thank you so much for the conversation. I think it's been great. I think this six-step framework on co-selling with precision is something that is very much a playbook people should be taking and running with. If folks wanted to reach out, ask any questions, see what you're up to at Blue Thread, how can they get ahold of you?

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Rob Moyer (44:54):

It's Rob at Blue Thread io. I'm still a boutique agency adding on doing well, we're LinkedIn. I love an open dialogue comment. I love going to these events that you put on. That's how we grow as a community. It's not about Rob, it's about a lot of us coming together and figuring this out.

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Tyler Calder (45:15):

Awesome. Well, thank you and thank you so much for being such a big part of the community and helping elevate it. Enjoy. Thank you sir. Thanks for listening to Get It Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools@partnerstack.com slash get it together.