Strategic partnerships can be the catalyst for business growth and long-term success. In this episode, Emir Elliott-Lindo highlights the significance of cultivating strong relationships with partners and how collaboration can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. 

Emir delves into the essential steps for fostering these relationships, from identifying the right partners to establishing clear communication and shared goals. 

Learn how leveraging partnerships not only creates new business opportunities but also helps brands gain credibility, expand their reach, and innovate together. 

Connect with Emir Elliott-Lindo on LinkedIn

Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn

Listen to the podcast here:

The Power of Strategic Partnerships in Go-To-Market: How to Foster Relationships and Drive Growth With Emir Elliott-Lindo

Signature question:

So yeah, as always, I always start the podcast with the signature question, which is, how do you view and define go to market?

Great question. And it’s possible to say it’s probably specifically pertinent from a partnership standpoint, you know, where, where I live, if you will. So for me to go to market, you know, it’s really kind of the full end in kind of a comprehensive strategy and approach to for an execution plan for a company, you know, it’s kind of how they use it to deliver their products or services to their customers and to drive business growth. It’s not only just about sales and marketing anymore. It’s really kind of cross-functional in approach that lines, product, marketing, sales, customer success. 

And, you know, an area that I’m particularly interested in is partnerships, because partnerships are very cross-functional, yeah, right. And so many organizations have struggled with, you know, with partnerships, a part of go to market or not. It’s actually core and integral to go to market, especially in this space, where, in the day and age, where, you know, B2B, selling is, customers is, you know, they have their stacks. They’ve invested in complex technology and things like that. It’s so important to have the appropriate to ingrain partners into the go-to market, whether that’s, you know, the selling motions, whether that’s working with marketing from a product or content or brand standpoint, finance, all sorts of areas. 

So ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, it’s about, you know, go to market. It’s about your company’s strategy and how you execute it.

Yeah, now I love the fact that you touched upon the important aspect which a lot of folks overlook, which is it’s cross-functional. It’s not just sales and marketing. It includes products. It includes customer support, customer success, and other functions as well. So that’s really, really key. Fantastic. Yeah, so curious. I mean, when is the right time to think about partnerships yeah, especially depending on the product phase and the product maturity. So when is the right time to bring in and look at partnerships?

I mean, I’m a, I’m a big proponent, and, you know, our company, we do this where I’m a big proponent of bringing in thinking about partners, you know, from day one, right? Because there are so many different types of partners, and whether that’s, hey, I’m a chief product officer, and I have to think about, am I building on top of Azure, AWS, Google, etc, right? Type of thing. That’s one aspect of, how am I going to build, and then can I take advantage of the engagement and marketing and alignment opportunities with those companies, right? So that’s one example, right? Another would be, how am I going to deploy, deploy my solution? Or do we build a service organization? Or do we actually work with, you know, some smaller boutique partners, or GSIs or things like that, depending right on the size of the company, et cetera, but to do our deployment, thereby reducing our cost of delivery, right? 

Thereby, you know, allowing us to have a higher valuation. So I think about it day one, whether you execute on it day one. Yeah, sometimes you might, you might say, hey, we know we’re not going to do this, but we’re not. We’ll but once we get to 10 million in ARR, here’s our plan, right? Just be cognizant of the when why and how you’re going to partner at that stage of the growth, of your company. So from day one,

A great point. I mean, I love the fact that, especially if you’re thinking about building it in the cloud, you need to first of all, think about which partner, and which cloud platform you want to go with. And then also, as you said, right, from a technology point of view, yeah. Why this specific cloud platform as an example, right? Google versus Azure versus AWS and so on. And as you’re thinking about that, also the distribution and being on their marketplace? 

Yeah, well, distribution is, you know, first, do I start off with a referral, right? Do I join their marketplace? Many times, companies will say, Hey, I’m going to start and I’m going to put a like, an agency, reseller package together. And you know, one of the things that we say is, that’s fine, that’s that’s fine. But once again, know why you’re doing that. And also it’s not always about you, meaning, you know, companies will say, hey, I want this. Retailers, because I want access to their client base. Yeah, a more, more powerful way, more impactful way would be, hey, how do I help you? Agencies build your business around our platform, thereby helping them drive their service revenue, right? And guess what? You’ll get access to their customers, clients, as they call it. And then the other thing that will end up happening is, as they’re pitching, whether they win or not, they will recommend you, right? Because, so yeah,

I know we got into a lot of details already, so let’s take a big picture. So talk to us. I mean, enlighten the listeners and myself about your career journey, like from day one of your career and what led you to what you’re doing today, around partnerships and doing it on agency.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So it’s funny, I’ve, I’ve got, I’ve been doing partnerships since about 1999 so about 25 years. And, you know, kind of get into that in a little bit. But, you know, my journey started. I’ll go back to when I was, when I was a little kid, right? I was, I grew up in Oakland, and, you know, a single mom for part of my life before she married my stepdad, who’s my dad, in a predominantly black community. However, I went to school in an area called Danville, which, back in those days, was primarily not a black community. I think I was, you know, in my high school, at my high school, probably one of maybe 20 black kids you know, out of out of probably 15 1600 kids. 

I say that because it provided me with an interesting perspective of being able to quickly be able to communicate with different types of people to make sure that you had integrity, empathy, and things like that, and really just becoming a trusted person relatively quickly from there, kind of, you know, obviously, went to college, all that kind of stuff, and I started my official career at Xerox back In those days, back in, you know, the 80s and early 90s, early to mid-90s, some of the top sales programs were Xerox, IBM, and any of I would say that, companies, Lucent, you know, at the time, Pac Bell, things like that.

So why sales? Just curious. Why did you pick sales back then? 

Well, I thought it was back then. I thought it was going to go into, like, advertising or communications or something like that. But back in 94-95, the economy was horrible. And so, you know, not a lot of jobs out there. And so, you know, I stumbled upon this Xerox agency that was like, hey, we need some sales folks. And ended up, you know, taking the job. And what’s interesting there is, once again, it continued to reinforce, I’d say a couple of things. One kind of Hey, you have to have integrity. You have to, you know, treat people well. I can tell you many stories about how, you know, I was walking around, knocking on doors, trying to tell Xerox copiers, and I go to a business, and I’m going into an office, little old ladies kind of walking up to me. 

The elevators are about to close. I stop it. I hold it, yeah. It gets on my competitors in the elevator with me, with this person. We go up. Guess what? She’s the person that was either the office manager who I needed to meet with, yeah, or she was the gatekeeper to the President, to whomever, right? Guess who got the meeting. 

Of course!

I treat people well. I don’t care if you’re a janitor or CEO, you’re still a human being, right? Treat people well. And so I’ve always done that. In fact, with Buddy, my mark, a newcomer, who was at Accenture and WPP and other things, he becomes mayor, making everyone feel like the most important person in the room, even the janitor. And then he executes on our business. Initiative, and that’s one of the critical pieces too, which is when I was at Xerox, and when I was at Alcatel Lucent, things like that were really about also the delivery. Like, right? If you say something and you’re going to do it, do it and show that impact. And so I bring that in moving forward. I ended up, you know, working, working at Siebel, where I manage the Deloitte Alliance globally. Interesting enough. That was a kind of a, I would say, a languishing partnership at Siebel, and quickly, within about a year and a half, two years, with the likes of folks like nada and Paul Clemens and other folks who are Deloitte, we were able to make it the number one selling GSI the last year or two that Siebel was in existence, and that was, you know, yes, Accenture and IBM were doing more revenue, but Deloitte was the one that the sales teams wanted to engage with. 

I’ve been at Jive, where I’ve managed relationships with Accenture, I’ve managed regional relationships, and probably one that’s critical is I ran the alliances team at Marketo for about three and a half years. So that’s our strategy, Facebook, LinkedIn, saps, and the agencies. I personally signed WPP up with Mark Reed and other folks, Accenture, etc. And I guess that would, I would kind of boil it down. I’d say, in this age, where I’d say I came at the tail end of, kind of, I’d say alliances 1.0 which I would categorize as primarily channels, right? A lot of channels, it was just a different distribution model. Usually, it was a salesperson that you just said, Hey, own these five, five folks, you know, I’d say alliances was more of the kind of wine and cheese, that’s what they kind of used to call it, right? And then when I joined the Siebel, you know, and, you know, there was a, what’s it called, a Harvard Business Review written around, I would say that was the first real kind of alliances, 2.0 if you will, around, go to market plans actually being tied directly to revenue, when not and Driving sourced and, co sell revenue and creating solutions offerings. 

I’d say Siebel was probably the, you know, kind of the cutting edge, if you will, of there. Luckily enough, I was actually, I think whether it’s the end or beginning part of, I’d call it partnerships or ecosystem 3.0 which were kind of Marketo when you think about having our launch point ecosystems, having large ecosystems, and you know, early adoption of marketplaces around you, being able to have regional partners, channels and big Strategic Services, partners in big Strategic Tech with, once again, that larger ecosystem around you. 

And so I’d say that that’s kind of 3.0 and we’re entering this age, I would say, of kind of partnerships 4.0 or ecosystem, you know, 4.0 where, you know, lucky enough, we’re starting to, I would say, be invited to the boardroom, I think as part of go to market partnerships, is definitely more ingrained into what companies are doing. We can talk about that a little bit later. And the last piece, I would say is, if you think about HR, when did they get the seat at the table, when they had a system of record right marketing, when did they get a seat at the table? 

You know, back in the 2000s they had systems of record, marketing automation systems, and things like that, partnerships, I would say the time is ours right now. However, the question is, are we going to have our own system of record, or is it more of we have systems, but we need to make sure that our metrics and KPIs are pushed to the right places, whether that’s CRM whether that’s a dose of bow for you know, like a for LMS system, whether that’s pulling and pushing information from a gain site, as an example, like, how are those APIs being used for your technology partners and your ISDS, and where do you want to lean into those? So it’s, it’s an interesting time, and we’re collaborating more now than ever, which, once again, has led me to fractional and strategic partnerships the cool thing about having fractional is at the team, and I can bring all that goodness of you know, maybe my services, expertise, and strategy, or some of my team who has technology or partner program build or partner marketing, and we can bring that all to bear for many of our clients. So we’d love to actually hear your thoughts on fractional at some point in time, kind of the rise of fractional. Know right now in the market?

Yeah, no, definitely, I will definitely share my thoughts and views on that. But just going back to your career story, Emir, it’s very interesting, and I love the fact that you actually called out what sales is truly about. Two things, right? Sales are about making others feel good as a human, that’s super important, but at the same time, the second and more important is delivering on what needs to be delivered, or what you said you’ll deliver for the client. Yes, it’s those two things, 

But in order to do that, you have to use two of these, not one of them. 

Yeah, totally. But that’s the thing. I mean, I’ve seen really top-tier sellers. They excel at both talking, but more so at listening, yeah, for sure, right? And that’s key to really understanding the person, the human, not just a fire at a company, yes, yeah. And then eventually you transition into more alliances and partnerships. That’s a good transition. It’s kind of..

I kind of just fell into it. And all in all reality, I was a direct seller at Lucent, and I was working with the if you remember, the E-business innovators, the science and bias, and all those companies. And once again, like I was, I was selling to them, but I was also working with mentioning his name, again, Paul Clemens and Mark Whalen, who’s CRO box, all that kind of stuff. I was working with them, with Chris, Chris Lockhead, the CMO of science, who’s, you know, one of the, you know, one of the most amazing CMOS out there, and Lucent at the time, was like, Yeah, we need somebody to manage some of these partners, these companies. And they’re like, well, Emir’s been selling to him. Maybe he should be an alliance person. And I was like, What is this alliance stuff? Yeah, you know. And I was interested enough. I was actually told by my manager at the time that I shouldn’t do it and that I would fail. And the VP of the West region, James say, who he’s the one that brought me in was like, I got your back. Go, if that’s what you want to do, go, you’ll be successful. And have been doing it since 1999.

Very cool. It’s all the accidental path or accidental discovery of where you’ll truly shine. And you also called out something else, which is the backing of someone at the leadership level. Yeah, that’s important as well.

Yeah, that’s important, not in your career, but also as part of go to market and partnering and things like that, you know, support and sponsorship and all the rest of that. 

So, yeah, no, very cool. So on a lighter note, like, what is your family? I mean, you’re you even you mentioned you have two daughters, and you’re married, and so what do they think? And how would they describe what AMR does for a living? 

Yeah, thank you for that. Well, it’s funny. I think my wife, she’s a CRO and has worked with her teams implementing SAP and workday, and she’s worked with Deloitte and Accenture and PwCs and things like that of the world. And she gets it funny enough, so she probably gets it better than most people, which is great. My kids, however, it’s pretty funny. I would know they kind of get what I do. But when they were younger, they would say stuff like, you know, dad, dad gets a lot of people, lot of different people from different companies together, usually tied to those marketing companies that this is obviously, when I was at Marketo, those marketing companies that you know when like, you receive a note, or you look at something On the web, and then you go to Facebook, you go somewhere else, and all of a sudden, you know, you see that same ad. They go, he does. He basically works with companies that either built that or the technology for that, but not in a creepy way. So now they get what they are doing, and it kind of makes me laugh, because now, you know, I have both of them in college. One of them had a happy birthday. Chloe, she’s turning 20 today. 

She specifically, right now, is starting to apply for internships and summer internships, and she’s applying to BCG, KPMG, Deloitte, and some different management consulting firms and things like that. And she’s saying, Ah, I’m now getting what you do. So it’s pretty cute. 

So yeah, and looks like your daughter is going. Based sounds like that. I mean, especially, essentially it’s she wants to get into, like the consulting world, at least, to try it out, and coming back to partnerships, working with GSIs, especially these global system integrators like Accenture Deloitte of the world, they’re super critical, yes,

yeah, 

yeah. So, it will be exciting to see kind of where they land, and yeah. And so, you know, as parents, you support them, so

Yeah. So coming back to your question, I didn’t, I was not ignoring your question. So coming back to your question about fractionals, and my thoughts on fractionals, I mean, honestly, my personal take, I’m not a big fan of fractionals for myself. But having said that, I’m working with a good friend of mine who was a CMO at real and scale-up companies, and now he’s exporting the fractional route. So just seeing the value that fractional leaders can bring to especially the early stage companies and startups where they’re at a point where the leadership, or even the board, thinks it’s not the right time to invest fully, for example, into like a marketing leader or a partner leader, but they want to test the waters right? 

Funnily enough, incident, I did have a fractional engagement for myself for a major part of last year, where the Chief Product Officer at a company that’s based in Detroit, and as you can imagine, is based in Detroit, which means they are serving the automotive industry. Wonder, yeah, and she wanted to test the waters with a product marketing leader, I mean, wanted to test the waters whether the organization is ready for a product marketing function. And obviously she’d want to invest in a full-time employee, right? And so, going back to the question, I think there’s definitely value, for fractional uh services and and, but personally, where I am for myself, I want to start building productized services. Oh, I’m making that transition this year in 20.

We’re going to dive into that. We’re going to dive into that. Yeah, but it’s interesting, because with the rise of the rise of fraction. I think that they’re probably one early stage to your point. You know, whether it’s HR, finance, partnerships, staff, product marketing, etc, definitely a value in the earlier seed series, interesting enough, I would say there’s also, having been inside 100, $200 million companies. There are also opportunities because I can tell you, there’ve been times when I’ve said, Hey, here’s what our strategy should be. And then our company brought in an external strategy consultant or consulting firm. And guess what? They gave him the same plan that we did, just probably, you know, some other details, but underneath. But it’s interesting because I think that you know, the Rise of fractions, whether fractional, whether it’s any, any specific area, is critical, because it helps you get up and running. And many of the folks have expertise in this space or can help you, even if you’re a 45-50000  million dollar company, can help you, kind of look at efficiencies, look at other opportunities and things like that. 

So, yeah, totally right. When I was an employee, I used to wonder why the C-level staff, where the executives spend, like, hundreds of 1000s or even millions of dollars on bringing in consulting companies like the Mckinseys, the BCGs, and Bains ,and so on. And then now I’m on the other side, and I see the value, and there’s a reason why, right, yeah. Anyway, that’s a whole different topic 

That is, that is session number two, yes, 

Exactly. All right. So coming back to your company, I’m looking at the name. So it says big friends, company partners, and you specialize in alliances and partnerships. Is that right? Correct?

Correct. Okay, we, yeah, yeah. 

Who do you serve like, and why are ICPs? 

Yeah, yeah. So I would say our ICP would be, it’s probably a couple, a few lenses you can look at first is size and company, right? So typically, we work with those companies that are, you know, doing, you know, two, three to 10 million in revenue, and that’s 10, 15 million, and that’s kind of one stage, right? That’s typically kind of your look, looking to make your first bite at the partnership Apple hires, kind of higher. Moda, your top sales rep, or something like that, to be, your head of alliances or something. And then, you know, they go out and kind of try to learn it, if you will. And so we come in as kind of that first alliance, quote, unquote higher, because we can bring in different, you know, the team. So you’re getting kind of a team. And so we can think about like I might have my point of view, right, my major and minor, Andy might have his. And so we can come up with the right solution for our clients. The other piece, so the next one would be those companies kind of in that 20 to 50 million that are looking they’re starting to scale, if you will. And you know, how do you, how do you engage with a sales force, if you if you’re working within their app exchange, how do you get engaged with AWS?

How have you had a couple of service companies now? How do you start to create proper enablement and and go after larger services companies, or look at global deployments, and then the last would be those companies, probably 100 to 500 million, that are looking at kind of a full refresh of their of their partner ecosystem, kind of strategy and plan and things like that. So that’s the company. Then there’s a lens on the actual roles within who we engage. Typically, we’ll engage with the CEO. Most of the time our sponsor is the CRO once again because they’re looking at, you know, how do you create pipeline generation, acceleration of revenue growth, and things like that. But once again, we always want to have access to the full executive team. 

So CEO, CFO, CMO, Chief Product Officer, and services, we think of ourselves a little bit differently than kind of your traditional consulting firms, because many will kind of say, Hey, here’s our framework, here’s our PowerPoint. Thank you. Right? We think of ourselves more inside out, and so when we work with our clients, we have their email, right? So I would have an email as part of that company or access to Salesforce, so then we can actually be ingrained in that company to help them drive, once again, the outcomes that we all agreed to. So the other piece is, so when you think about, kind of the, I’d say the four stages, we kind of will do we’ll do, like a maturity or growth assessment, we’ll build their strategy. You know, if you’re looking at, like tech partners, what’s your stack, and what are the categories, and who are those companies within the category that you should be leaning into, and then prioritize which ones might be more of the Hey, you’re going to go to market with these, but these other ones, they should build integrations. They should still be part of your ecosystem. And maybe it’s a little bit of one of those kinds of tactical things we will do the execution, the management, and execution. So we’ll build partner programs, things like that. We’ll manage their service partners, and at the end of the day, what we do is we’ll help hire or train our replacement at any of these companies. So, but at the end of the day, it’s about, you know, aligning go-to-market strategy and driving that impact. 

Very cool, yeah, looking back at your extensive career, both running your own company, as well as the different executive leadership roles that you have taken on or took on earlier, and if you go back and look at all those like, clearly, there were going to market success stories and go to market failure stories. So if you can share with our listeners both, like a success story and a failure story, I’ll let you choose which one you want to start with, but yeah, it’ll be good if you can cover both.

I guess I would look at everything as being every, opera, every success, there are things that you could fix. And every failure, you know, there’s things that you can learn from, if you will. So sure, I would say, you know, it’s, you know, from a go-to market success standpoint, one of the ones I’ll talk about is when we were at and actually there was a little bit of a failure in there for us, a tweak, and then we brought it back. But when I was at when I was running partnerships at Marketo, one of the ones that Phil was like, you gotta go. We need a big GSI. I want Accenture Deloitte, and I want a big, big agency or two such as WPP or Publicist, something like that. 

And, you know, had a deep relationship with the sixth century and Deloitte and things like that. Unfortunately, we couldn’t partner with Deloitte due to some audit items, you know, with our VCs, which is standard with some of those companies where they when they audit, you can’t partner with. They officially, but Accenture. We were working up to sign the we were we were developing our partner Alliance agreement. We had enabled resources. We had opportunities and deals in the hopper and it and, you know, we had Rob Davies, Ryan Dubey, Ryan Walzer, a whole bunch of folks with this within Accenture and Accenture Interactive. And the fantastic thing is, mean we were, we were doing, we were building, doing, account mapping, account planning. In our early days, we had built a go-to-market where we were one of the areas that we wanted to lean into from a marketing automation standpoint, that is the alignment between marketing automation and E-commerce. 

So we were looking at Hybris, and we were developing an offering around that. This is where the quote, unquote might be small, a little potential failure that we were able to pull up the game. So we had been selling with Accenture, on a client, on a potential prospect, with our services team, and there was literally we had everything agreed. We were having joint meetings and things like that. It was Friday when we found out that the prospect had decided to go directly to Marketo, PS. PS was high five in like, Hey, we got this. We got this. That following Monday, Accenture was flying out to sign our agreement. They heard about that. I got a call, and they were like, till you guys figure this out, we’re not signing any agreement with you guys. And so I had to get Phil and Jason Holmes and a bunch of other folks together. Interestingly enough, this is where I’d like to think of things as more positive. We were able to kind of come back and say, hey, you know, mea culpa. We put some guardrails and some guide guard rails and guidelines in place, and we were able to sign the agreement. A few months later, they ended up sponsoring the Marketo summit in a pretty big way as a platinum sponsor, yeah. And you know, we went out and you know, we’re closing deals across multiple regions, not only just North America, but we were closing some deals in the UK, Germany, and other places. So great ended up being a great partnership. And still, you know, work and talk to many of those folks to this day, when I think about failures.

I actually had a question on the market and Accenture story that you shared, and great story, by the way, for me, I was aware of those when I said those like, like alliances and partnerships. Especially it takes me back to my days at SugarCRM, where we had our head of partnership our CMO and CRO Clint Oram and Juan, and whenever we were in discussions about launching a new product or planning for our next annual conference, it was all about partnerships, right, and ensuring that the partners get their deal, both in terms of pipeline revenue as well as spotlight. And you mentioned the market and this client trying and having a professional services agreement directly with the market or bypassing the future prospect of GSI so curious like, How can I mean, obviously, you had to play the bring us all in together and mend the relationships, if you will. But, what advice would you give, especially for those who are I mean, it’s obviously because there are people within the company who want to get the deal for themselves right, versus going through a partner because it’s a miss on their side. 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s, that’s as it’s, it’s the constant struggle of awareness and all that kind of stuff. Because, as we know, compensation and metrics drive behavior, right? And so I would say the first piece is you have to make sure that your executive staff, starting with the CEO, is aligned with, here’s how we’re going to engage with our partners, right? Because the reality is, they have a choice, right? Yeah, there were multiple marketing automation systems that they could have used, right, to pick their clients. Um. Um, they picked us because of the not only solution, very robust solution, but also the strong relationships and things that we had with them and we, and we mutually delivered together, which is, you know, which you know, many times the partners, they have a long history with their clients, right? And so I would say it starts at E staff, right? Have to be, make sure that they’re aligned. Have to make sure that, this is why we do a lot of steering committees or governance committees with your executive staff. Whether that’s, you know, monthly, quarterly, it can’t just be, you know, set it and forget it, right? 

You do your readout at the end of the year, or beginning of the year, and then you don’t come back to the east staff until the same time the next year. And so being able to come in and say, Hey, here’s where we’re leaning into here’s our strategy, here’s what we’re going to do from a services standpoint, and the CEO and CRO, head of services, saying, Yep, this is what we’re going to do, and here’s how we potentially will compensate our account managers or AES or our professional services team if they bring in a partner, so it’s not going to impact their compensation. 

That’s always a great thing. But also, there’s a little bit of enablement in education within companies that say you can do this, right? You can go sell and you, if you take it on yourself, guess what? That services partner, typically, as an example, is sitting with the CMO or the CRO or the CEO, building their strategy, and their digital transformation. Yes, you might get your small deal, but that could be taken out in a year or two, and they could replace it with something else. And so that’s why it’s imperative for the awareness internally, for folks to say, hey, here’s why you’re going to partner, and here’s the value to you. It’s going to help you uncover opportunities. It’s going to help cross-sell and upsell. It can help you get into deeper relationships. These partners can be friendly. They’re not here to take deals away from you, 

Right.

In fact, if they are enabled, they’re incentivized, because they want to get their people working on those opportunities, so then they can go find more. 

Yeah, yeah, cool. 

And that’s why they want to create solution offerings and things like that. Because of that, because then they can rinse, repeat, 

Yeah, not totally. And are these typically caught at, like, a deal desk review situation or, like, when are these really flagged directly versus partner?

Yeah, so as early as possible, right? If we work with marketing as an example to start the process of, hey, if we did an event, or whether that’s a webinar, whether that’s sponsoring something, can we capture that as a partner opportunity, not necessarily led yet? Yep, right. So partner opportunities, so then we can keep an eye on it. Then it goes down to once it becomes a lead and we’re working with sales, you know, this is where it comes in. We want sales to reach out to us and say, Hey, we understand that. You know, this services company or this technology company is potentially at this client. Can you get me and get me introduced to them, right? That’s why things like cross beams are great, you know because that helps to start to identify, you know, where other partners are in your accounts, even before you’re even marketing. But you gotta create that awareness. 

You have to teach, talk to, and enable them how to have those conversations with their clients, right, or their prospects. Who are you, who are yours, who are your services companies, who are doing your implementations, who’s building your strategy, and what other technology to use? That’s all information that the salespeople should be putting into their CRM system, Salesforce dynamics, whatever, and that should be that should flow to your partner team. So then we can start to go, Oh, hey, I know that slalom, or whoever is there, let me connect our AE, put together an account plan, execute on that account plan, and the services partner might get the services or the services we get the SaaS revenue, 

Right!

And we’re all happy. And then we go, now, how do we do this again? 

Yeah, yeah, cool. All right, let’s go back to our earlier go-to-market failure story. You are just about getting started on that. 

Yeah, I would say it’s learning right? So we had a client that was built on Salesforce, and interesting enough, and this is where I talk about, you know, challenges. But how do you, how do you, you could turn those into successes too, but, and they were interesting. Enough about that, they were like, Hey, we’re going to lean into Salesforce, but we’re probably going to switch to AWS at some point in time because we think we’ll get more out of it. And they brought, you know, brought big friends in, and we went, Whoa, hold on you. You have a gold mine, not that, you know, get your AWS chief product officer. 

You gotta do what you got to do. But we’re like, you have all these customers that have implemented or engaged with you from a Salesforce perspective, and the previous year, I think they’d had only about maybe 10 conversations with Salesforce. We came in and went, hold on. Let us pull together a plan. Let us engage with our partner, the account manager. We’re able to keep them at the summit level or get them to the summit level. That year, we ended up having over 75 conversations with their field, with our field, to go out and drive the pipeline together. And once again, many times it’s, it’s its pipeline. Sometimes it’s just, it’s the sharing of information, right? 

We had one Salesforce AE who said, Listen, I’ve sold everything I can at my customer, I will get paid because you’re built on Salesforce. I’ll get paid a little bit for what you do, but it’s, it’s not, it’s not, it’s minimal, right? I can, I can go out and buy, you know, some iPods or something like that, but, but what she said is, she goes. Part of the reason I’m doing this is I need to keep service her competitors, service now, Microsoft at the time, right? I need to keep those out of my clients. So she shared a boatload of information on the customer’s strategy, procurement process, how much budget, and things like that. Our AE was over the moon going, yes, they can’t get me in there. They can’t introduce me. But this is all the information that I needed to go sell my deal. And guess what, six months later, sold an enterprise-wide deal to, this client. 

Very cool. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. 

So I know we are, so that’s a failure to success, right?

Good stuff. So I know we are coming to the end of our conversations. So going back again, going back to your career and all the different stages and all that. I mean, what resources or people or mentors really shaped and played a big role in your career transitions? 

That’s a big one. So let’s see people that are shaped. I’ll start that. There are a few there. So you know, starting with my pops, Donald Lindo, you know, the hardest working man in the business. But you know, he taught me from, from, from day one, right? Shoot for the stars. You’ll read, at the minimum, you’ll reach the moon, right? And so, you know, it’s kind of one of those like, push yourself every day. Believe in yourself. And yeah, some days do we have? Do we question? Yeah, but it’s always, he’s like, just keep on pushing. Does not matter. And so I’ve always kept that in my mindset and the funny thing is, at the end of the day, he’d always say, you know, I love what I do. He goes, don’t get me wrong, and he goes, make sure you love what you do. He goes, but I do this. 

And you know, one his one point, he was doing what he did for two he was in the Navy. He was working a weekend job, and he was doing it for his family because I got to do this for my family. And he goes, when we want to do that San Diego trip, because we, I was in the Bay Area, he’s like, this is why I do this, right? So I can enjoy it with you guys, and we can do what we want to do. And so I always take that to heart, just family, work hard and, once again, and he’s a big integrity person as well. Second person, there are actually three. Paul Clemens mentioned him a couple of times. He’s been integral to my career. He was the first person when I was at Lucent, working with him when he was at Scientist kind of almost, you know, whether he knew it or not. Kind of teach me or enable me on how to do this partner job, the right type of thing, pulling together joint proposals, putting together value props of their services with our technology tied to call centers and things like that. 

And you know, he’s been a proponent of mine for years. And back when I was at Siebel, he and a guy named were my two sponsors, and we were able to grow that. And you know, he’s at Deloitte. He’s been there for years, ran the Salesforce practice, ran the line. Is, and I think probably the biggest thing is his belief in me kind of gave me the confidence to go, you know, along with James say, Dad, to go, you know, what? I can do this. 

And that was kind of the foundation of my partnership career, to bookend it on the people. One of the other kind of integral folks is a guy named Tony, namelka. He was SVP of strategy BD at Marketo. He’s been at Adobe PeopleSoft Oracle, running kind of their eight APAC regions in Japan, master strategist. I’d heard about him for years and ended up going to work for him at a company called Badgeville. He pulled me over to Marketo to kind of be a player-coach and build up the alliances team. And so they really emphasized the importance of aligning partner strategies and metrics with the broader that’s what we talked about at the very beginning, broader go-to-market goals, understanding those key metrics and how it relates to CAC, LTV, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, his mentorship really kind of helped me develop. 

And to go, you know what? I can talk to all these other executives. I don’t have to be afraid to go in and talk to our CFO as a partner manager or partner director. And I tell partner leads, to this day I go, they’ll talk to finance, they can be your friend, right? So…

Yeah. 

And in terms of your other question, or the other one is, you know, how do I stay up to date? I will say I need to read more, and that’s something that’s on my New Year’s resolution. For example, the in-revenue capital folks have their cheat code book coming out. Definitely going to be checking that out, reading that when, when I get it from Amazon, when it hits my doorstep, type of thing. But in general, the way I stay on top is one having conversations, whether it’s like this, I had one earlier with guy Lou Taylor. We were talking specifically about partner metrics and how they relate to E staff if you will. And we were talking about our perspectives, and given my point of view, he gave me his point of view, and started to align on things. And so love learning from other people, especially when you can go to things like a pavilion, or you can engage with folks like winning by design or Arcadia leadership experience, partnership leaders, all organizations that have a ton of good information, a lot of great collaboration. People want to talk. They want to learn new things. 

So, you know, those are some of the podcasts I talked about, you know, some of the podcasts I listened to. What is it? Follow your differences with Chris Lockheed, with Jason Yerba and his wife, Sam, friends with benefits and, you know, all sorts of other things. I, as I said, the one place I gotta do is, you know, I gotta, I gotta pick up one of these. And more than I, than I have. There’s a ton of great content out there. 

Yeah, no, I, I mean, you, you emphasize something which I want the listeners to take away from this podcast, which is, there’s never a point in time, or there should never be a point in time where you stop learning. The moment you stop learning, your career stalls or goes down, right, and the ways you can learn is through people like the mentors that you mentioned, Elliot, There are even books that you are looking to pick up and increase throughout this year, and podcasts, right? And podcasts, plus even communities like the pavilion that you mentioned, great community, or go to market, for sure, exactly. And there’s, and there was, I will say, you know, there are some great 

There’s a lot of great LinkedIn on LinkedIn and other places. A lot of great content that I do read, you know, type of things and weather and you know, Forster and Gartner and other places have some good stuff. So just, you know, try to try to be aware and stay ahead of the game so that my gray matter doesn’t, you know, atrophy.

All right, so the final question to you is, if you were to turn back the clock, what advice would you give to your younger self? And I mentioned I’m thinking about and what I want to think about is like day one of your go-to-market journey. What advice would you give to yourself, the younger Emir?

Well, first, and I’m just going to give a shout-out because this was a question, I know we talked about, but you know, I’d say, make sure you’re working with your product marketing team. Shout outside, but I truly do believe that they’re the keepers of the positioning, the messaging to go to market for a company, and that’s integral for partner teams to go. How do I make sure my partner segments are aligned with those and when, when I have a message out to those partners of, why partner with Dot? Dot, dot company? Right? I can say, you know, hey, here’s why, you know, name one ship paradigm, here’s why you should be partnering with us, and here’s the value, and here’s the positioning messaging of our company, and why it relates to you, right, typically. 

So I just know that. But you know what I mean, like, it’s like, PMM is definitely something integral, and I also bring them into my meetings as an example, many times when we’re developing solutions with, you know, in the example, when I was given about Accenture earlier, actually when I was doing some stuff with Deloitte when I was at Siebel always had my PMM there when we were going, Oh, hey, we have Siebel component assembly. We have this new solution. What? What is the solution? We ran a workshop with Deloitte right then built our PMM team, the offering, and we went out to market together, and that was with my product marketer sitting, you know, sitting right by me, co-piloting with me. 

So fantastic. So I appreciate the shout-out.

So but, but, so that’s, that’s number one. But from, from, from day one, I would say there’s, there’s probably a couple of things. One is, especially younger in your career, you try to do too much. And I would just say, focus and do fewer things. Well, instead of trying to do a lot of things, especially when in a place where you’re in an area where I was completely new right to partnerships, and I’m like, Yeah, I can do all this, yeah, really just focus, because then you’re able to drive kind of that measurable impact, and then, and then you move to the next metric, or KPI, and deliver there. 

Second, I would say, is, you know, second confidence, don’t I would say, maybe earlier in my career, I might have been a little bit cocky, is what it is. Sometimes at an early age, age you are confident, not only in the kind of yourself and everything that you do, but also many times when, especially when you’re younger in your career, you have some you have great ideas, especially when I came out, like, we have great ideas, but it was always like, the E staff and leaders that that, you know, kind of, yeah, executed on those or kind of said, Hey, here’s what we should do. And you just kind of went, Okay, the amount of times that I had an idea in my head, and then my VP or somebody above went, Oh, hey, here’s what I think we should do. And I’m like, I’ve been thinking about that for months, right? So, you know, just, you know, don’t be afraid. You know, everybody, we’re all human beings. Open your mouth. Don’t get fed, type of thing. 

So, yeah, yes, able to see now get put your ideas out there and the end with this one, which ties back to fractional, which is in this kind of ties to that, which is the amount of times I kid you not, I remember driving on 280 in the Bay Area having a conversation with Christine Myers and Adam Marlin when I worked with him at Lucent, and literally that we were going, know what? 

Maybe we should jokingly, we’re like, maybe we should form alliances, R Us, right? A fractional life. This is back in Yeah, 2000, 2002 right? Maybe I had another conversation with my buddy, my James. We talked about BD and partnerships and building and, you know what? 20, 2019 when I found big friends, you know, it’s like, Should I’ve done it sooner? Yeah, type of thing. But you live and learn from the experiences that you have out there. But I wouldn’t give up my experiences of that habit, Siebel, Marketo jive, etc, for anything so

sure. 

Great, great piece of advice there.

Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Gururaj Pandurangi shares groundbreaking insights on evolving GTM strategies, focusing on problem-centric selling, scalable outreach, and building trust to drive business growth.

They explore how trust-building conversations and validating problem statements with potential buyers can lead to co-creating impactful solutions.

Listeners will gain practical knowledge on building trust by addressing key problems, validating challenges with ideal customer profiles, leveraging automation to overcome cold outreach limitations, and adapting to modern sales and marketing dynamics.

Listen to the podcast here:

Bootstrapping to Scaling Revenue to Exit:  GTM Conversation with Gururaj Pandurangi, 3x Founder

Signature question: Which do the listeners love, which is how do you view and define go-to-market? 

That’s an interesting question. So typically if you had asked me this question about three, or four years back, I would have had a very different answer. 

And my answer has been evolving pretty much on a year-on-a-year basis. This is my current answer. And maybe we can look at how I thought earlier as well. 

My current answer is that GTM is necessarily a set of practices that brings your product or service to the market, engages with the customers, and when pretty much your customer’s trust. I’m not talking about practices like, hey, this needs to be done by either the sales or the marketing teams, or it’s done by the product management team, or you need to have a separate org for sales and marketing. 

I’m talking about a set of practices that a company will employ to get its products distributed across the market. 

I love the way you phrased it and how you started, which is evolving.

I think that that’s the key. And I wish a lot more people realize that go-to-market is never ever stationary. It’s always evolving. 

I mean, the first thing is our own understanding as a leader or as a practitioner, the go-to-market thought process will evolve, which you alluded to. And second is go-to-market, the motion itself will evolve for every company, every stage, every year. 

Yeah. 

And I think, you know, maybe to not so much harp on that, a couple of years back, I should think, and I came from an engineering product management kind of a background. And I should think that, hey, we build a product, we hire, you know, some sales guys, some marketing guys, you know, they’ll talk about it, they’ll go to roadshows, and it’s their problem. They’ll do the selling, they’ll do the positioning, they’ll do the marketing. Essentially, there’s a separate team, a separate practice, and a separate set of incentives for them—let them deal with that.

My evolution has been that, hey, that doesn’t work, at least in the last maybe three, four, or five years. The entire company has to figure out how to make this happen with product-led motions coming into play over the last four to five years, which has evolved significantly.

Product has become more and more central, rather than something you build and then throw over the fence to the sales and marketing team to sell. My evolution has been that, hey, this is a company strategy, not necessarily an org within the company. 

Correct. That’s super important, right? It’s not a marketing or sales version of go-to-market; it’s a company product or service go-to-market. It’s about how each of these functions works hand-in-hand across the board—from product conception or product team to marketing, to sales, and if it’s SaaS-oriented or even service-oriented, like post-sales and support, and so on.

Very cool. I’m sure we’ll dive into a lot more detail about all these nuances. So let’s take a step back. Big picture, why don’t you walk us through your career trajectory, history, how you started your professional career, and what led you to what you’re doing today?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

I don’t have a simple answer to this, but let me walk you through my career journey. Half of my professional life after graduating in engineering and completing my master’s, I spent working as an employee, either in engineering or product management roles at larger companies, building large-scale SaaS services—either building version-one products for Microsoft or Oracle or various other version-one products. For the second half of my career, I’ve been building startups.

I’ve founded or co-founded two companies, built and scaled them, they got acquired, and now I’m building a third startup called ThriveStack. That’s why my answer to your previous question has evolved. Having been an employee for half my career and a founder and GTM leader in the second half, I had to relearn many things. At Microsoft, for example, you’re building a product, and when you talk to customers, they already know about some of the things you’re building because of the toolchain and marketing chain that’s been established. It’s very receptive. In contrast, at a startup, you have to build everything from the ground up.

So that’s my career in, you know, less than a minute. 

Yeah, I love the way you split it up—first, you were an employee in different functions, and then you became a founder, starting companies and having successful exits.

Let’s double-click on a few of those. Interesting, you say that, Gururaj Pandurangi. Similar to your experience and thought process, even when I was at Microsoft a decade or so ago, and I was a product marketing lead for one of the products there, I recall a conversation where my manager said to me, “Hey, Vijay, you know what, you should go and launch, and you’re responsible for the go-to-market for this product.”

I was super excited. I mean, back then, 10 to 12 years ago, being responsible for go-to-market was super exciting, and I thought, okay, this is great.

But lo and behold, during the process and project initiative, I realized that it was more about ensuring the checklist was maintained. It’s a bill of materials with all these terms, right? 

That’s true. 

I think you probably realized this as well.

You know, now when you look back at it, the word “launch” itself is a very loaded term. If you’re in the product marketing world, it might be a checklist of marketing things that you have to do. If you’re in engineering, launch essentially means a set of release activities you do.

If you’re in sales, you have a set of automations or bring in your Rolodex of customers and talk to them. The word “launch” has bearings in different ways; it means different things to different people.

Yeah. And which is why I think, you know, product marketing manager (PMM) roles have become kind of a glue across these organizations.

Yeah, so rightly put.

Yeah, yeah. So I’d like to double-click on your transition.

You were at Microsoft and large companies, and then you grew up the ladder in engineering and product management roles. At what point in time, or what was the inflection or motivation for you to go down the whole founder and startup world? What led you down that path?

There were many different reasons. First of all, I’ll give you maybe a snippet of time.

I was working on Bing, and Bing had just launched, and we were integrating an ads platform. I was growing the API and the index layer underneath. So I was building essentially the platform strategy towards it.

Yeah. We were getting attacked by various bots. We also took over Yahoo search and Facebook search.

Right.

So we were essentially becoming a syndication partner to all of these search engines that were out there. I was spending about 70–75 hours a week on it. My wife and I had just had a baby.

I talked to my managers and my wife, and I decided, hey, you know what, instead of me spending about 70–75 hours a week working for somebody else, why don’t I try my hand at building something of my own? I had no clue how to build my own thing. So a buddy of mine at AWS and another at Hortonworks sat down, and we started brainstorming.

He said, you know what, all of us have a cloud background—why don’t we build something in the cloud? We spent about a month and a half looking into it.

As we talked to more people, we realized they wanted backup solutions. They had some things in the data center and wanted to use the cloud as a backup. We pretty much bootstrapped a backup and recovery product.

If you had a data center, you’d back it up into AWS or Azure and take it from there. Three or four months later, we started doing meetups here in Seattle. The cloud was being built here in Seattle.

So many people from around the world came to Seattle to meet and have conversations. At one of these large meetups, we presented the idea of a backup—we didn’t even have a product. We said, hey, wouldn’t it be nice if we could click a button, get the backup here, and route the traffic over to the cloud at the fastest pace?

We showed them some mocks at our meetup, where about 150 folks were there. After the 45-minute conversation, we were stormed with questions.

We had so many conversations that same day, we decided to build a company around it. We didn’t have a product—we had mocks. We weren’t even thinking of building that mock; it was just more of a “what if this was there?”

Yeah, that’s an amazing story.

The reason is that a lot of founders have passion and go down the path of starting a company, but more often than not, they end up building a product and then figuring out ways to sell it.

Yeah. 

Since you flipped it and started with, hey, this is the concept—what if you were to build a product? Is there a demand for this?

Right. So what led your team of three co-founders to go down that path? It’s not natural.

To go build a product?

No, to go down the path of finding and validating the demand for an idea.

Well, it was incidental. Two of us were engineers, and one of us was a product manager.

We were just thinking out loud. We wrote some things on a whiteboard, called up a few other folks in our co-working space, and asked, “Hey, what do you think of something like this?”

Every single time we had a conversation like this, a bunch of folks would gather around and ask, “Can you do this? Can you do that?” If we had done this in isolation—sitting in an office and racking our heads—we would have gone nowhere.

The impetus was being in a crowd of people who wanted something like this, and we were there incidentally. I would have done it completely differently if I had money.

I would have actually rented an office and then brainstormed there. But I think it was actually a good practice to be in a group of people, potential prospects, and potential customers and brainstorm with them. 

Yeah, yeah.

And it sounds like you did the initial fundraising after I mean, you guys were bootstrapping until then. For the first startup, we did not raise funds. Actually, we had no idea how to raise capital.

We had no idea how to sell. So all of us were engineers or product managers, we essentially were builders. 

Avian Corporation.

No, it was called Avid. And a bunch of MSPs, including Accenture, Avanade, and all of those guys were also participating with us. And they essentially said that, hey, we have a customer who has a massive data center, could we use your product, you know, and, you know, paint it up with our service.

So Accenture actually made a proposal, they actually sent us a written proposal on that. And they said, if we can do that, you know, we can try about 600-700 virtual machines that exist in our data center. Push up, you know, right now, we’re doing this manually.

And if we can use your product to do this in like two days’ time, that will be a significant savings for us. And we could use that savings to fund some of your products. So that was their proposal coming in from their side.

We actually did not prospect it from them. And we found it very interesting. You know, it’s like, hey, I had never worked with partners.

You know, I was thinking that if, you know, is partner-led strategy, even, you know, even existing, I had no idea. 

Yeah. 

But then I realized that this is possible.

So and we said, yes, we negotiated on, you know, who’s going to own it, who’s going to take the money, you know, essentially, all the people who are associated with that. We won that. And we got Infosys, you know, coming and knocking on our door.

We had Avanade coming and knocking on our door. And we didn’t have a product. We had, you know, we had bits and pieces of it.

And we started getting all these requests. So what we did at that time is, you know, taking a bunch of interns from, from UW, from Berkeley, from Stanford, we’re all here in Seattle. We just grabbed them and said, hey, you know what, let’s put a seven to eight-member team of interns who were very hungry, very, you know, raring to go.

We put them into a room, we start calling the shots. And I was still employed. And I decided that, hey, now’s the time for me to quit.

Nice. Yeah. 

Yeah.

So of the three people, who are founders, two of us quit, and one did not. And one was, you know, moon, you know, doing moonshots with us with, you know, doing this moonlighting actually helped us quite a bit, you know, Amazon or AWS became one of our partners as well. He was working at AWS, and he got connections into AWS S3 and the virtual machine team.

So, you know, nothing wrong in, you know, having moonlighting and people, people say, I think all the Y Combinator folks and accelerators folks and say, hey, go 100% full time is not necessarily needed. If you can leverage the position that people are in, you know, there’s nothing like it. 

Yeah, there are always two lines of thought, right? Maybe even more, but definitely do one thing.

And then you’ll figure out a way it’s almost a parallel or a story where I believe the captain burns down the ship and puts all the sailors on the boat or something, and they need to figure out a way to just figure it out, I mean, go out and explore. There’s no turning back. The other is you’re still in your full-time role, but then you’re vetting out the demand, validating the idea, and then seeing that there are people willing to buy.

And once you see solid traction, then you move. Yeah, yeah. I would rather put this into a slightly principled framework.

I would say that if you’re going to say, I want to build a company, you have no idea, no demand, and saying, hey, I have a bunch of money, I can raise capital, you know, let me go ahead and start building a company. And then I’ll figure out what the problem is. Then I’ll figure out what the solution is.

You know, that’s not the right motivation to start a company. You know, your motivation should be that there is a need in the market. Nobody else is building it.

Why don’t I go build a company? I’ve seen more and more companies who have been successful with the thought that nobody else is doing it, right? Or somebody else is doing it, but not doing it the right way. Let me actually set the right path. I think that’s probably the founder-led mode, you know, mostly that I’ll see.

But if the motivations are, I want to go on a lot of money, I can go build a startup, sell it, you know, not the right way to go at it. For sure. And you did mention about Accenture helping you guys bootstrap.

So did Accenture and other partners come out of the meetup that you mentioned? Or how did they find you guys? Yeah. So we had one of the Accenture solution architects in the meetup. These were some nerdy guys, you know, saying, hey, I’m doing this.

I’m running some commands like this and taking this, you know, and we went on a discovery mode with them, you know, even at that time, like, could you tell us how do you currently do it? Right. What is it that you can improve from your side? We just had a thought that, hey, it should be like a click of a button and you should, you know, that’s like a high-level vision, but we had no idea on how people were actually doing it. There were quite a few folks in the industry who were doing it.

And once we put it out there, you know, we got lots and lots of requests from Europe, from Australia, from places where, you know, we had not even thought about. And we wrote the GitHub blog, you know, GitHub wasn’t existing as such at that time, but we started putting it out there on Reddit on, you know, on various places. And then we started receiving, you know, that, hey, this is how we do it.

Can you show us how you do it? So it was not necessarily a sale. It was more of, I wanted to learn. Can you help me learn? 

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Love that mindset. And then what is the transition like to Avian? 

Like, oh, yeah. So we built this, we built this and it got acquired by a group of investors, mostly because we were earning a lot of money. And, you know, every single deal that we used to get was a one-off deal, right? Accenture would say, hey, there are 700 things that we want to run, you know, in two days’ time, if your product can do this, we’ll pay you so much.

And we would happily take it. But the next month, you know, it would not be a recurring revenue. So we’re building the product and we’re burning, you know, quite a bit of our own internal cash.

When I say cash, we were paying the interns a little bit, and the founders were not getting paid as much. So we wanted to have a livelihood. And out of the blue, someone came in and said, hey, we are actually building a product company, which we’re backup and recovery is just one of the elements to it.

Would you be willing to either partner or co-sell or get acquired, right? And we started, you know, opening our thoughts to it. And they essentially, you know, even before they talked, they actually sent us a letter of intent to go acquire. After that, it was acquired, and we started to get a little bit of revenue on a recurring basis.

The three of us would sit down alongside the interns. They actually did not take the team. They took our product and they built a team around it.

Got it. 

So we started with the IP around it. They acquired the IP, the product, all the code, you know, all of that.

So we were sitting around twiddling, hey, we are getting some money now. What do we do? And then, and we were working on small projects, you know, Accenture was there, Avanade was there, Microsoft was starting to get involved, AWS was starting to get involved. And then the AWS team actually proposed to us that, hey, you’re local here in Seattle.

We have about seven different large clients who are migrating there, you know, all their workloads in the data center to the cloud. We don’t promise you much, but could you become our solution architects? Be the front-facing, because you guys know much better than some of our solution architects. Could you actually go help with that? So they paid us handsomely.

And we went to T-Mobile. T-Mobile, you know, had about seven data centers at that time. And they asked us, how we migrate or rebuild into AWS. And AWS paid us, you know, for that work.

And then, then later T-Mobile said, hey, you know what? No, we will pay you. We want to accelerate. This is going too slowly.

So they started paying us. 

Okay. 

When I say paying us, we were on a 1099 contract.

We had no company. And then we decided, hey, you know what, let’s start a company.

So we registered for Avian at that time. And our first contact came in from AWS. It took us almost two and a half months to get registered as a partner of AWS.

And then T-Mobile, Safeway, Nordstrom, and a whole bunch of other things started happening. 

And did Avian focus mostly on solution services? 

On services. 

We were at that moment, we knew that cloud is the, you know, the next big thing.

Right. 

But we had no idea how a smallish company or a set of small folks could build a solution that can be relevant. So we started getting our hands and noses dirty, you know, by working, doing hands-on exercises, migrating it, running DevOps scripts, and all of that.

And almost a year and a half later, T-Mobile asked us that, hey, now you’ve built about seven applications in the cloud, we want to go production. And for that, we are inviting PwC and KPMG, two different products. We would want them to go to the security and compliance.

And we want to make sure that we will go live with these products being compliant. And they asked us, can you automate security? On a daily basis, run these scripts. And this is what the CIO told me.

Can you on a daily basis, run a script, which looks at all the issues, you know, on a security basis, work with these teams, I will give you some teams, you know, and you can hire your own team as well. Go fix it. And on an everyday basis, you report back to me that all of these are getting ready to be productionalized.

And they offered us $3 million. And I said, well, we actually went in and looked at if $3 million was too little or too much because there’s almost half a data center’s worth of applications were moved over to AWS. And we realized that there was not much margin in that it looked like large money, but we had to go build a team towards it.

We actually went back to T-Mobile at that time with a proposal: what if we build a SaaS product that you license, and we’ll take your $3 million now? But half of that will go to building the SaaS product. And we will give you the licensing fee for the next two years for that.

We need it in the next four months. If you build a SaaS product, it’s going to take more than nine to 12 months. And we’re not ready for it. 

So we went on Nordstrom came along, we had another contact with Nordstrom, they had a very similar request on Azure. Nordstrom was an Azure partner. And then we started seeing this over and over again. 

So we, you know, I decided that I’ll take a small, small team to actually productionalize, build a product, a SaaS product, and use it internally, right to do all of these things so that we can reduce the repeated pains that we would have. Yep. So we built it, we deployed it, we actually in T-Mobile actually gave us the consent to use it internally. 

And we actually use it internally. And then we trained a bunch of teams, you know, without actually selling anything, we had a services contract. And then we said that, hey, this portion of that is the IP of T-Mobile will not use it. 

But this portion of that is our IP. Yeah. And we will, we’ll take it out. 

We went to Microsoft, and Microsoft liked it. And they said, can you do this within Azure, Azure, Azure Security Center? 

Yeah. 

So they paid us, you know, about a million and a half to go build, you know, security policies and things like that within Azure. 

And they said, for that, you can build your product on top of the Policy Center, and we will go market it. 

Oh, wow. 

Right. 

And boom, we said, yep. Well, let’s go build, and register a company. So very cool. 

A lot of these things, I mean, one pattern I’m seeing is a lot of these like your startups, the exits are very natural. It’s not like you’re forcing, hey, I need to make a transition or the team needs to make a transition onto something else. It’s a natural evolution, all driven by customer demand. 

I mean, customers are asking for it or partners. 

I think that is my core belief as well, you know, which is why I think I mentioned to you early on if we were to go this in isolation, we’ll actually never build anything of this sort. We will have to sit down with people who are actually using or having pain, right, day in and day out.

Right. 

That has been my path, you know, until now. So I went ahead and built the company, and Microsoft invested in us. 

Deloitte risk advisory teams invested in us. And Microsoft actually got us the first 50 customers through their marketplace. So we were starting to get deployed at Walmart and various other large things. 

And our team was really under the pressure at that time, you know, or go to market was, was easier with partner-led.

Right!

But our product was not ready to scale for such large things. So Gartner told us, either go, you know, raise a lot of capital or get acquired. 

And we said, No, we can’t raise so much capital because or, you know, or what we are doing is about a million, million and a half. And if we were to do something of that sort, we would only raise about four to 5 million, right? That’s not sufficient, you know. So the term she thought that we got was about four to $6 million, you know, raise. 

And then suddenly, you know, we had seven different offers in 2019 from large network companies to acquire us. We said no to all of them. And we kept saying no to it about like five or six times, Zscaler came along and they told us to run it as a subsidiary. 

Think of it as a separate company. 

Yeah. 

Having these milestones, we will invest and we will own all of your IP in two years’ time and will transition after this particular milestone. 

And we said yes, that that made more sense. Other than just acquiring at an early stage that way. 

Very cool. 

And all that exists also happened naturally. I mean, just as you articulated, right, the buildup of the company, the startup services and products, as well as the exit, all of them happened naturally. It was a pull. 

It was a pull. Yeah, there was no, we never went out to raise capital, you know, outside of the fact that we need money. And Microsoft took us to M12, their own internal teams. 

And they say, based on what you currently have, we can actually you know, so even that was more of a pull.

Right! 

Because we essentially told no, we can’t scale to Walmart, you know, Walmart, the actual cost of running Walmart was about one and a half million dollars for us, just the product, hosting costs, to solve Walmart. And Microsoft said, hey, you can charge about four to $5 million to Walmart. And we can fund half of it. 

And, and, you know, and we said, yeah, we can do that. But we had to go build and accelerate the product towards that, right? So we had this push and pull and push and pull. And, you know, tear your hair apart at that time. 

But, you know, that was the case. 

And throughout this process, I mean, partner-led growth, as you articulated before, it’s always been a partner pull-like, you never sound like you never really have to build out a formal sales team, because your partners are doing all the selling on your behalf and co-marketing as well. 

Yeah, as a startup, yes. 

After we got acquired, you know, Zscaler was a 100% sales-led company. 

Sure. Yeah. 

And, and, you know, we got the, you know, we had to finetune ourselves to this kind of emotion, I was not really acquainted to, you know, hey, you know what, we’ll not talk to customers who would not pay us, you know, at least about $30,000. Correct. You know, I was always hungry, hey, even if you’re ready to pay 5k, you know, 3k, 4k, 5k, we will take you in, because I need the money. 

Yep. 

With Zscaler, it was like, well, our sales and marketing costs are so damn high, that there’s an opportunity cost of working with small customers.

Right?!

Or even if they’re large customers, if they’re ready to pay only like three to 5k, we won’t even take it, we will say no to them. 

Right. 

And that’s where I saw that sales-led motion was very expensive, expensive to build. It was also very linear, the more people that you would get, or you will add two quarters or three quarters later when you will see the return of investment, you will not see the return of investment within a quarter. So it has a lag time, right, you know, of getting the investments, you know, and even those would be half or one-third of the spend. 

Right. 

So the cost of acquisition was, you know, was a massive, you know, deal, which is why I got acquainted with this concept of, as Gary Olson from, from Harvard Business School, he keeps talking about growth at all costs. And I had a conversation with them. 

And then he ingrained in me that this is not going to work over a period of time, you know, profitability and growth need to all come together. Yeah. I started seeing, and I’ll probably even ask this to you, and you talked to a lot of GTM leaders out there as well. 

I see there’s a mix, you know, you can’t just do partner-led growth, you can’t just do sales-led growth. 

Right. 

You know, and definitely you can’t do, you know, product-led growth, you know, as its own single silo, or you will have to combine them together.

Have you seen that happen? You talked to a lot of GTM leaders out there as well. Do they mix them up? Y

eah. So from my own experience, as well as having spoken with leaders from big companies like Clary, Asana, and the likes, and even started like Y Combinator founders, it’s always been a combination, right? No one go-to-market motion really works by itself. 

It’s almost like you need to figure out your channel, make it work, and then layer on and add the next channel. And that’s what I’ve seen work well. Even though that is the intent, a lot of go-to-market leaders, again, it’s not in their hands completely. 

They need to spread and make sure that they’re laying the ground for the next, but at the same time, not lose focus on the sales-led. 

That’s what happened to me. I think I have an interesting story for your audience as well.

At Gscaler, we were a hundred percent sales-led. We would leave money on the table. If it is, you know, anything less than 30K ARR, the SEV deals we would, or the sales team would, you know, would say no to them and walk away. 

We started seeing smaller upstarts, started to build more like product-led motions, self-serve motions, and they were ready to take in a hundred dollars a month, $500 a month, you know, to begin. And then six months later, they will go three times the size or five times the size. And we got hit in, you know, in a quarter, pretty much in four months time, we lost about 17, 18 different prospects that we thought we could actually close. 

And they actually went to the smaller upstarts than us. That’s when, you know, leadership at Gscaler asked me, hey, could we actually layer a product-led growth motion on top of sales-led motion? I spent about like four months making that happen. And I failed at it.

I failed miserably at it. I spent, I’m guilty of, you know, of spending so much money without actually understanding how this motion actually works. I spent about a million, $1.2 million in building or rebuilding, refactoring the product for self-serve, helping coach or GTM teams, and, hey, you know, users will come. 

You had to go and talk to the companies, you know, and upsell them. Conceptually, it made more sense, but we had such a horrible pushback from the sales team. Our product was not ready to do something about that. 

So refactoring cost itself was about 750K, you know, for us to begin with. And then our sales team was like, hey, if this is self-serve revenue coming in, and it is like $1,000 or $2,000, why do you want me to be part of it? To build your own team towards the self-serve motions. So it was like getting squished between a rock and a hard place. 

I have actually not seen a successful product-led growth motion layered on top of a successful sales-led growth motion. That has been my, you know, my bigger appeal, which is why I’m building, you know, ThriveStack, you know, to essentially enable and straddle between those two, PLG and SLG, start with really PLG, and then being able to go and expand it with human-led expansion. 

Absolutely. 

I mean, in fact, the story that you shared, thank you for sharing that story. That’s really critical. The reason why I say that is, that it actually reminded me of my own experience when I was hired at a CSP startup to lead product-led growth. 

And the CPO and the CEO at that time, they were like, they were selling with inside sales, selling to small businesses at about $1,000 ACD or so. And then they did a little experiment, and then they were able to channel and drive individual users to product-led growth. And that’s when they’re quote-unquote convinced that we can start adding product-led growth. 

But when I got in there and started looking under the hood and looking into all the details, that’s when I started realizing product-led growth is a good, attractive magnet. I mean, it’s almost like a trend or it’s like the thing that people want to latch on to the next big wave, if you will. But it’s an entirely different mindset and a different mindset that has to be adopted across the leadership team first will also mean making sacrifices on who you’re going to serve and on the sales team.

And I mean, you have to go, you are absolutely right. You have to get away from the mindset that you’re only selling to the buyers. It really starts from there, you know, that your users, you’re serving to the users. 

You are building the product in such a way that the users are benefiting, you know, from the very get-go, rather than selling it, you know, top-down, this becomes a bottom-up motion. It’s a very different mindset. You’re absolutely right.

Yeah. Some of the really successful companies that have done superbly well are Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, and Dropbox, they’re still more individual. But the key thing is, that they go all in and start, they have the DNA of a PLG first. 

And then once they start seeing within an account, there are like 10-15 users, then they layer on the sales-led on top, talking to the top layer saying, Hey, by the way, did you know that like 5-10 of your team members are doing it? Let’s now talk at the account level versus the user level. 

Yeah. I think, let me make a prediction, you know, based on what you just said.

In 5-10 years time, all the large sales-led companies, you know, they’re anyways getting stagnant at this moment, the growth, you know, growth is tapering down, you know, they are growing, you know, high, you know, high single digit, you know, too low, you know, double-digit growth for most of them. I would imagine that if you take a very similar set of products, a very similar set of things, make a copy of that, from a concept standpoint, but build it like a self-serve motion, and compete with them, you’ll actually win. Yeah. 

And I’m seeing that happen in the cloud security space. Right. You know, they’re getting outcompeted, you know, with smaller upstarts. 

I’ve seen that happen in the financial or fintech space. I’m seeing that happen in healthcare tech, in edu tech, across the board, you take the bigger piece, and you compete with them with a product-led growth motion. Because the bigger company will not be able to change their DNA, the smaller company can actually accelerate with product-led and then add sales, you know, to grow much faster. 

So it’s very likely that over a period of time, we will have a world where end users become the king rather than selling a top-down, end users will now have a choice to go pick the problem that they have, pick the solution out there, get started, and then over a period of time, latch on to do more things. 

Yeah. 

And I see that that future is coming much faster than what we could imagine. 

Yeah, sure. And product-led growth, for all its promises, as well as the pitfalls that it has, definitely is still a very attractive go-to-market motion. And I was in talks with this company. 

I don’t know. Yeah, they were primarily product-led growth. And we use them. 

Oh, there you go. So. So when I was talking to a couple of the go-to-market leadership folks over there, they were explaining their primarily product-led growth. 

The majority of them are small to medium businesses across different functions. And they’re figuring they’re still figuring out the right ways to layer on the same. Yeah, yeah. 

I think that’s the market. Layering on sales-led motions or human-led expansion, I generally start to call it that way. You already have a pipeline, you have a pipeline of customers who are using your product, and they’re already paying you. 

Yeah. 

This is no different than the sales team going and saying, hey, you know what, this is a land deal for 30k, 40k. Next year, we’ll talk to you for 100k. 

Right. And you can expand towards that. 

Yeah. 

It’s just that in this case, in the case of product-led, the deal size might be a lot smaller. So you’ll have to fine-tune your upsell strategy. So hey, these are the things that you’re using. 

These are the things that you’re not using. You know, and this is an enterprise deal, an organization-wide deal. And we’ll give this to you. 

So the upsell motion becomes a lot easier with product-led than with sales-led, which is why I see a path, you know, in the future. Why is ClickUp being successful? Why is Canva being successful? Why is Figma being successful? Not just in entering the user market, and the users are essentially the prosumer buyers, but they’re also able to go and attract larger enterprises and do larger deals. 

Right. 

So Calendly is doing larger deals with large sales organizations. Figma is doing large deals with larger companies. It’s not just one license, two licenses. 

They’re selling, you know, 150, 300 licenses at once, add AI on top of it, and they’re able to upmarket it. So I think that’s a natural way to do it. The converse, on the other hand, is actually very difficult. 

If you’re a sales-led motion, it’s extremely difficult. In fact, it’s almost impossible to layer on PLG. I don’t see companies being able to do that.

And here is why. I mean, I’m talking about it from a firsthand experience that I shared earlier with the Series B startup. And here is why, right? I mean, first of all, if you are inside sales or sales led overall, the way the product is designed, the way the buyers are, quote, unquote, educated to use your product, or even be aware of your product is one way. 

It’s a path A, let’s say A, versus if you were to design a product-led growth from the ground up, the way you’re going to think about how the user will be, first of all, aware of your product, how will they convert from a free trial signup to activation to purchase? It has to be all self-serve, and self-driven for the most part. So you’ll be designing your content, you’ll be designing your features, you’ll be designing your dashboard. So UI and UX will be completely different. 

And there’ll also be a viral effect, a network effect that has been built in ideally. That’s an entirely different thought process in the DNA compared to a sales-led. one 

And not just that, I’ve experienced this firsthand, which is why I’m building the infrastructure for ThriveStack around enabling product-led motion from the very start. 

So tenant creation, in the sales-led world, tenants are being created by the sales guys sending a note to the operations team, hey, go ahead and create this tenant. For a B2B SaaS company, you’d have to automate the tenant creation. I’ve seen, and I’ve talked to many of the companies, the number of signups, fairly outshines the number of conversions, almost to 9x. 

90% of the signups do not convert. Forget to convert, 90% of the signups do not even activate.

Yeah, exactly.

So you’ll have to go build a cleanup process that, hey, you know what, there are so many signups that are coming in and the signups will happen. Most of them will be abandoned. They will go start something if they don’t find any value. 

Nobody will go ahead and say, hey, please cancel my account. They just abandon and then go away. So cleanup on a B2B SaaS is major. 

Abuse is predominant. And I’ve seen, and I talked to one of the prosumer companies, one of the B2B SaaS companies who went product-led, they had 60% or 57% of the signups that were happening were all malicious. Either coming in from fake domains, you know, people are just, you know, they could be competitors. 

They could be somebody else. They could be bots. They want to go look at what you have built, you know, so these signups are coming in. 

These domains are from inboxes, which are temporary.

Right.

They are also duplicates. For example, vj at abc.com is the same as vj plus one at abc.com. So all of these things, I would factor them as the baseline self-serve infrastructure. Also add the product analytics to it. 

Also, add along the signals associated with who’s using the enrichment. So I see that if product-led growth has to become a mainstay, all the growth tools are there in the market, which are just on the GTM side, like even enrichment, lead management, all of that, they all need to shift left. They all need to be inside the product now. 

They should enable the product in order to become a lot more self-servable. So I see, you know if we combine the baseline infrastructure and what you mentioned as the UX associated, the dashboards are different. Onboarding is different. 

There’s a UX part of it, and there’s an infrastructure part of it. I think both of them should go hand in hand, which is why I think it’s extremely difficult to do both of them together, like sales-led motion and product-led motion together. Yeah, absolutely. 

I know we can go on and on on several of these topics, right? But just doing a quick time check, I think we covered a lot of ground here. Just moving on to the closing section of the podcast, like, I think you did answer this in many ways, like what resources or communities or people have shaped and helped in your overall growth? I think meeting and talking to prospects is one of the biggest learnings for me. 

Yeah, I listen to a lot of podcasts. You know, on weekends, I’m a very early riser. So, you know, from 5, 5.30 in the morning, you know, get some of the chores done, and I’m listening, especially on the weekends, I’ll be listening to one and a half to two hours of podcast, and I whiteboard. I’ll just scribble off things and then take off my mind. 

I do attend, you know, and sometimes I speak at various industry events and throw out an idea that, hey, this is possible. And then look at the reaction. I’m looking at, you know, whether people are agreeing to it, disagreeing to it. 

And I do the same and somebody speaking, I actually go and talk to them, say, hey, you’re right or wrong, you know, and express my opinion, regardless of whether that opinion is good or bad. 

Yeah, 

I’ll get something out of it. So I’ve been an active learner for quite some time on that particular front. 

I’ll probably leave it at that. Very cool. And then the final question to you is if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your go-to-market journeys, what advice would you give to your younger self? That’s a very interesting question. 

So don’t build a product. If you don’t understand the problems, it’s a lot better. In my younger days, I would think about a solution.

And I would try to retrofit what the problem is. But I think that’s wrong. I would go tell my younger self, if you have 10 hours of time, spend about eight to nine hours of time just understanding the problem, not the solution, the solution will come out of the problem very soon. 

I think the second thing I’ll probably tell, you know, myself is to understand the problem, talk to at least 30 4050 odd folks who are actually experiencing that problem. They may not necessarily pay you, right? And don’t go behind them to say that, I have a solution to sell, you know, I think you have a problem, you know, go ahead and buy my solution. It’s probably a bad, a bad approach, you know, get in bed with them, if you can, on the problem space, right? 

And I’ve seen that a lot more successful. And every single time I’ve put my seller mode, or have my team go sell, sell, sell, I’ve seen that the market pushes back. But when I talk about, hey, this is the problem.

And these are the potential solutions. How are you doing it today? What pains do you currently have and that just opens the door. We had a conversation yesterday. 

And then I essentially, asked one of the founders who’s in Germany, how do you currently do it today? And like, hey, I take this, I take this, I do this and this. What if, you know, instead of me presenting a solution, this was readily available? Let’s say, these six things that you mentioned, there is a solution, right? How will your life be? And then suddenly, like, do you think that’s available? I said, Well, let’s assume that it’s available, right? And it opens up doors, it opens up conversations, it opens up a lot of trust. So I would, I would teach myself over and over again, harp on the problem, not on the solution. 

And then focus on building trust in the problem, not the solution. 

Absolutely. I mean, that actually reminds me and brings to my mind, something that I want to share with the listeners as well as I put together a thesis around a new offer. 

And then I approached it with Hey, is this even valid with my buyer ICPs? And lo and behold, I took a similar approach, which is here are the different problem statements. Do any of these resonate with you? They said yes, and then added more to it. And in the next, I said, Okay, imagine this solution exists.

Would it resonate or will it work in your environment? Yeah, they said yes. And if you were to build a business case, how would you build a business case? 

Yeah, 

That naturally leads them to a Hey, by the way, you know what, I’m in need of this right now. Can we talk? 

Yeah, yeah. 

I think, you know, you know, one-on-one conversation is actually very difficult. In a one to many conversations actually a lot easier, which is why industry conferences, events, you know, are, are actually the better way to sell, you know, than essentially sit down in a one-on-one conversation talking about, you know, like a cold call, I get a lot of cold calls, you know, my inbox gets filled, my email, my LinkedIn, you know, gets filled with almost 150 plus cold emails every single day. Yeah, right. 

And when I look into that, all of them are selling the solution, nobody’s really talking about the problem. But I think that that thing is going to become more problematic. Today, I see 150. 

And maybe a year later, also, I’ll probably see about 3000 4000 cold emails or cold calls like that. I don’t know the answer to that. That doesn’t work for me. 

I get spammed a lot. When I think about if I have to go build an AiSDR team to be able to do exactly the same things. You know, I’m very hesitant about that part of it. 

So you’re absolutely right. But it is not scalable. Exactly. 

That, you know, on a, on a one on one basis, my evolution to the next step of GTM is how can I do what you just said? Yeah. But, you know, 1000 a day, right? 10,000 a day? 

Yeah. Yeah. 

And, you know, and if there’s any solution there out there to all the listeners as well, reach out to me, I’ll leave my email ID, you know, down there. 

Yeah, that’s a solid note, in terms of how we wrap up this podcast, which is how we started. Again, going back to the key notion, GTM is constantly evolving. 

Right? 

In our case, it’s the last example, which is how do I evolve this GTM motion to now automate and scale! So I’ll stop on that.