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.