About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, head of go-to-market strategy at Union Square Consulting, reveals the three criteria that separate partners who deliver deals from those who deliver empty promises. For a decade, the partner channel has been USC's largest revenue source—outpacing marketing, outbound, and referrals. Yet for most of those ten years, Eddie was targeting the wrong partners entirely. Thousands of conversations with partners who looked good on paper never sent a single qualified deal.
The breakthrough came from defining an Ideal Partner Profile with the same rigor applied to an Ideal Customer Profile. Partners must: (1) talk to your ICP, (2) discuss what you actually do, and (3) benefit directly from your work. This last criterion is the most misunderstood. Revenue share is nice, but only if meaningful. More often, partners benefit through improved company valuations, metrics tied to their KPIs, or better customer outcomes they can claim in their own pitches.
Eddie breaks down why even internal partners at Fortune 500 companies like Wells Fargo and Salesforce compete for mindshare the same way external ones do. A $500 quota relief doesn't move the needle when a rep's job depends on hitting a $1 million annual target. The conversation covers how to operationalize your ideal partner profile into a continuously improving system, the role of AI in keeping partner definitions current, and how to measure whether your partner program is actually worth the effort.
What we cover in this episode
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1:25
Why partner channel gets overlooked Despite generating the majority of USC's revenue for a decade, partner channels receive less institutional focus than marketing and direct sales.
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2:38
Three criteria for ideal partners Partners must talk to your ICP, discuss what you do, and benefit directly from your work—not just from financial incentives.
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6:28
Direct benefit over revenue share Revenue share is optional; what matters is whether partners gain tangible value—better exits, improved KPIs, or stronger customer stories.
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9:24
Mindshare competition at Fortune 500 Internal partners at Wells Fargo and Salesforce must compete for attention despite being in the same company, revealing fundamental human prioritization dynamics.
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14:37
Common partner profile mistakes Targeting VCs who invest in seed-stage companies when your offering requires Series B revenue; confusing industry presence with ICP alignment.
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21:21
Enablement that actually works Training, coaching, and investment in partner education only stick when partners see clear ROI tied to their own job security and compensation.
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31:37
AI for continuously updating IPP AI can enrich programmatic data and analyze best customers to identify true partner predictors, but requires quality foundational data and process definition first.
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37:15
Measuring partner program ROI Track CAC payback (under 12 months is good) and LTV-to-CAC ratio; a profitable partner motion should hit 3:1 or better over customer lifetime.
The lines worth sharing
We need to define the same level of granularity, the partners that we want to work with as we do the customers we want to work with.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:06
This has been by far and away our largest channel. Without a doubt. Our second channel is obviously marketing.
Eddie Reynolds · 4:49
If they're not talking about go to market architecture, you're going to have a really uphill battle to make an introduction for us.
Eddie Reynolds · 6:09
I've got $1 million quota. And a partner can come to me and tell me they have the greatest thing since sliced bread. If that's not going to move the needle for my goals, I'm not going to spend my time thinking about them.
Eddie Reynolds · 11:58
Common questions from this episode
What are the three criteria for an ideal partner profile?
Partners must: (1) talk to your ICP, (2) discuss what you actually do, and (3) benefit directly from your work. Missing any one of these makes the relationship a time-waster for both sides. Direct benefit matters more than financial incentives.
Why does revenue share alone not motivate partners to sell your product?
A quota-carrying rep with a $1 million annual target won't invest time learning a new product for $500-$5,000 in quota relief. The payback is negligible against their job security risk. Meaningful incentives must align with their primary KPIs and compensation.
How do you avoid targeting the wrong partners?
Verify they work with your ICP (not just your industry), that they naturally discuss your solution (not a foreign add-on), and that they gain real value—better exits, improved metrics, or better customer outcomes. Seed-stage VCs targeting your Series B+ companies is a classic mismatch.
Can you coach a partner to organically mention your solution if they don't naturally?
Theoretically yes, but it's a steep lift without proper incentives. Training, lunch and learns, and enablement help, but only if the partner sees clear ROI. A partner must genuinely benefit or it will never become part of their natural pitch.
How should you measure if a partner program is worth the effort?
Track CAC (customer acquisition cost) payback—aim for under 12 months. Also calculate LTV to CAC ratio; a 3:1 ratio or better indicates a healthy, profitable motion over the customer lifetime.
How does AI help keep your ideal partner profile current?
AI can enrich programmatic data (e.g., finding firms with specific departments or revenue levels) and analyze your best customers to identify true partner predictors. However, you must first define quality data, processes, and personas—garbage in, garbage out.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds reveals the three criteria that predict whether a partner will deliver deals. Learn how to define an Ideal Partner Profile and operationalize it for revenue.
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partner channel revenue
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Eddie Reynolds
Union Square Consulting
go-to-market partners
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Read the full transcript · 61 KB
EDDIE0:00We need to define the same level of granularity, the partners that we want to work with as we do the customers we want to work with
EDDIE0:06and by extension, the partners we want to work with, are the people that can bring the customers we want to work with to us.
EDDIE0:12Now there's many different flavors of partner sales and our partner motion. I don't know exactly what you call
EDDIE0:18is where we reach out to folks,
EDDIE0:19where we primarily don't have any kind
EDDIE0:21revenue share or financial incentive for them, and we just try to tell them
EDDIE0:24how great we are and how much the companies they work with can benefit by working with us in hopes that they will make introductions for us, which is difficult.
RACHAEL0:32does AI play a role in keeping this ideal partner profile current?
EDDIE0:37think there are two things that I'm thinking about with AI right
EDDIE0:40Number one is the ability for AI to take the next step forward from what we can get in the programmatic data sources.
EDDIE0:49The second piece is how do we use AI to actually do this analysis?
EDDIE0:53to help identify what are the things that really make the difference between an ideal customer
EDDIE0:58and one that's not
EDDIE0:59as well as, by extension, an ideal partner and one that's not.
EDDIE1:10actionable playbooks from the trenches working as go to market strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square. Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.
RACHAEL1:25It's about time we got into a topic. We don't talk about much here, even though it's a big part of how USC has grown for the last ten years. And that is the partner channel. Today we're breaking down how to figure out your ideal partner profile, what good partners have in common, and why so much effort gets spent on the wrong people.
RACHAEL1:43Thank you so much, Eddie, for doing this with me.
EDDIE1:45Yeah, thanks for putting this together. It's going to be an interesting one because,
EDDIE1:50you know, this is a topic that I haven't.
EDDIE1:53Done as much research on, or how much education or training or institutional knowledge from other organizations. This is purely what I've learned by doing the last ten years. And so in some ways, it's more valuable because this is just direct, hands on first hand experience from generating millions and millions of dollars in closed one recurring revenue through this partner channel.
EDDIE2:16And then on the other hand, it's it's something I haven't spent as much time thinking about as other things that we talk about in our content. And so it'll be interesting to dive into this and just speak solely from firsthand experience.
RACHAEL2:27And we typically talk a lot about ICP and buyer personas. So how does creating an ideal partner profile relate to or differ from those two things?
EDDIE2:38Well, I think like fundamentally it's the same concept, right? We need to define the same level of granularity, the partners that we want to work with as we do the customers we want to work with and by extension, the partners we want to work with, are the people that can bring the customers we want to work with to us.
EDDIE2:53Now there's many different flavors of partner sales and our partner motion. I don't know exactly what you call it, is where we reach out to folks, where we primarily don't have any kind of a revenue share or financial incentive for them, and we just try to tell them how great we are and how much the companies they work with can benefit by working with us in hopes that they will make introductions for us, which is difficult.
EDDIE3:15You know, it's different than channel sales where there might be like commission or revenue share involved or something like that. But at the end of the day, it's also a similar motion in that we're reaching out to a partner in hopes that they that they work with the types of companies we want to work with, and they will in some way, shape or form, facilitate our ability to work with those in customers and generate revenue off of those in customers.
EDDIE3:37And so we can't do that if we are targeting the wrong partner profile, because if we're reaching out to these partners and they don't work with our customers, which I have done thousands of times and learn this the hard way, then you just end up wasting everyone's time.
RACHAEL3:51And I kind of already know the answer to this. But for the sake of our audience, how much of USC's business has come through the partner channel, how valuable has it been for us and how much is it really costing us over the years?
EDDIE4:01This has been the vast majority of our business, and because I never worked in any level of partner sales before I started this company, but it just seemed obvious to me, I should say I never sold through the partner channel. I was the recipient of sales through the partner channel, through many different mediums, and so I had a lot of experience being on the other side of the table and some perspectives.
EDDIE4:22That was really helpful when I started this motion, but we started this from day one here at USC almost ten years ago at the time of this recording. And this has been by far and away our largest channel. Without a doubt. Our second channel is obviously marketing. I shouldn't say obvious, but it is our marketing channel and vis a vis content like this podcast, and that has really been taking off the last few years, but it still really can't compete historically with what we've done with partners.
RACHAEL4:49So explain what our ideal partner profile looks like and how you were able to develop that.
EDDIE4:54for me, specifically through sheer trial and error, I came up with three pieces of criteria that I think are really important for a partner for us. And I think this applies to pretty much every partner motion for any company out there. So number one, the company that we want to partner with has to talk to our ICP.
EDDIE5:13If they don't talk with our ICP, if they don't work with our ICP, then it's a zero value to tell them how great we are because they can't introduce us to people they don't talk to. Number two, they need to talk with our ICP. And specifically, I skipped over buyer personas. Right now, to a lesser extent, maybe you can get an introduction, but it's going to be a lot harder if you are working with partners that only talk to people in organizations that don't make decisions or influence decisions about purchases that relate to your product or service.
EDDIE5:42Secondly, they need to talk to your ICP and the personas in your ICP about the thing that you do. In our case, we do go to market architecture. By the way, that's a recent iteration of our positioning that I'm constantly working on. And if they're not talking about go to market architecture, if we talk to a partner that say, for example, talks to our customers about payroll, it's going to be a really uphill battle to make an introduction for us.
EDDIE6:09And thirdly, they need to benefit directly from the work we do. So let's say, for example, that there's a marketing agency out there and they work with the same kind of companies that we work with, and they work with the same people in those companies that we work with. And they talk to their customers about go to market all the time.
EDDIE6:28All of this makes sense so far. But if we come in and we revolutionize their go to market architecture, they benefit in zero ways. Well, they might pay lip service to us. They might entertain a conversation. They might even make a one off introduction just out of the kindness of their hearts. But they are not going to focus energy on trying to feed us if they're not getting anything out of it.
EDDIE6:52This is where revenue share obviously comes in. But since we don't really do revenue share with most of our partners, there's some exceptions, like there's some marketing agencies and sales consultancies that we're open to, you know, to share the love. But we've worked primarily with private equity firms and venture capital firms and vendors like Salesforce in the past, and it would be unethical for us to send them money.
EDDIE7:11And that's been our primary source of business. And so the only way that we can benefit them is by finding a way in our work to actually provide that benefit. And so the example that I'll use to make this tangible with private equity and venture capital firms is that they want to get an exit from their portfolio company.
EDDIE7:29If we come in and we drastically improve, go to market and not only help them generate more revenue, but also do it at lower cost with increased predictability, then that becomes a more valuable company that they can exit and get a return for themselves and for their investors. And so the individuals that we work with in those organizations benefit in two ways.
EDDIE7:50Number one, sometimes they have a share in the fund, and so they're going to benefit financially by that company being more profitable and more valuable. And secondly, we tend to work with the people that are focused on go to market, and they have specific KPIs for their jobs that they need to improve revenue, production costs, efficiencies, etc. that they're being judged on.
EDDIE8:09And if we do that, then we are benefiting them directly, whereas someone else in that same organization, let's talk about maybe somebody on the investment team, they're going to benefit far less because the impact of our work gets diluted through each company, each fund, etc. and they're not being judged specifically on go to market metrics and the efficiency of the go to market engine.
EDDIE8:32And so it's a lot harder to make a case to them that they should prioritize thinking about us over all the things that they could be working on in a given day.
RACHAEL8:40And it's interesting because whenever I think of partner channels outside of USC, I think of, you know, partners that get a direct monetary commission for selling their partners products and stuff. So I think that's a huge distinction to make when developing your ideal partner profiles, like how are they benefiting from you? Because it's going to be a slightly different profile if they benefit in a different non-monetary type of way.
EDDIE9:05Yeah. And this is where I'm slightly out of my depth. At the same time, I have worked at two fortune 500 companies where I have sold a slew of internal products and worked with internal partners, as well as, to some extent, external products. So two tangible examples. I worked at Wells Fargo, where we had 186 different lines of business.
EDDIE9:24I was a business banker, I worked with small businesses, and I literally had just a slew of business cards on my desk for everything you could possibly imagine for like, you know, equipment financing and factoring, which is where you can basically finance your accounts receivables and SBA loans and like, you just name it, right. And I would have those people reaching out to me and trying to develop a relationship, despite the fact that we're in the same company, they still need to get mindshare for me because those, you know, 35 business cards sitting on the back of my desk, I'm not necessarily going to introduce all 35 of those business cards to every person that
EDDIE9:57I talk to, right? I worked at Salesforce, same thing. We had all these different product lines. We'd have people flying from different parts of the country and try to pitch us on the product and tell us how great the new product that we just acquired was, and how we should sell it to our customers. That was a core for context.
EDDIE10:11So I'm talking to our customers about sales, cloud, service, cloud, and then every other product under the sun. And then to a lesser extent, you had this, like these thousands and thousands of Salesforce ISV partners that were constantly being on my door or calling my cell phone, trying to get my attention so that I could tell them about the integration tool with Gmail and Salesforce or, you know, the outreach tool or the contact tool or what have you.
EDDIE10:36And even today, I mean, I get people reaching out to me here at USC trying to get us to partner with them and send our customers their way for their products. And so for literally 25 plus years, I've been on the receiving end of this, and everything always sounds nice inside of a pitch deck. But at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, I'm going to wake up every day.
EDDIE10:59I'm going to open up my laptop as the person that would be selling, as the person being the recipient of this partner outreach. And I'm going to decide whether or not that partner is a priority for me to even think about. And it's a real challenge that people have to face, even if there's a monetary incentive. And one of the things that I saw at Salesforce that I thought was really interesting is that we would get actual commissions and quota relief for selling these partner products out in the Salesforce ecosystem, but it was such a small amount of money that for me, it didn't matter.
EDDIE11:31It's like I got 500 or even $5,000 of quota relief for selling this product on the Salesforce platform. And I've got $1 million quota. And like many salespeople, I'm worried about my job. I'm worried about hitting my quota, getting my bonus, getting promoted and or getting fired, or putting on a performance or put on a performance plan. And a partner can come to me and tell me that they have the greatest thing since sliced bread.
EDDIE11:58And if that's not going to move the needle for my goals, I'm not going to spend my time thinking about them all day, every day.
RACHAEL12:04So out of the three criteria that you mentioned, then needing to be people who talk to your ICP, eating, people who can bring up what you do organically and something that directly benefits them. What happens if they don't meet one of those criteria? Can they still be a good partner or do they need all three?
EDDIE12:23I think in that order, it's a stretch, right? So if they don't talk to your ICP, I think you're dead in the water. Like, how are you going to get a customer if they don't talk to the people that you want as customers? If they don't talk to the right people in those organizations, then now you're asking them to make an introduction to somebody who will then hopefully make an introduction to someone else.
EDDIE12:43And that can work. But that's a much steeper battle. Right. And so what I would ask is if you have two groups of partners and you could choose between one or the other, which where should you focus your energy. And this is the whole idea of ideal partner profile and ideal customer profile. We could sell to anyone in the world, but who's the easiest to sell to?
EDDIE13:01Now it's going to depend on how big these potential partners are, how big the ocean of partners are out there, and you have to obviously draw the line. It's something that makes sense for your organization. But in my experience, both on the receiving end and the selling end, you're not just reaching out to somebody once or twice and then, hey, like, can you introduce us to your customers?
EDDIE13:23This is an ongoing relationship that you're building and nurturing and investing massive amounts of time and money and thought. And if you're doing that and focusing on the wrong individual or company and they're talking to the wrong people in the organization you want to work with, and you have this uphill battle, I would just ask why. And maybe the answer is because it's profitable and it works and there's not a better option.
EDDIE13:47But if I could choose between the two, I'd rather talk to partners that are talking to the actual people in the organizations I want to work with, than different people that I'm hoping to make that introduction. Okay, now let's go next on the list. Do they talk about what we do again? If they don't talk about what we do, that's going to be a huge stretch.
EDDIE14:03And I don't know why, but I always gravitate to like life insurance as an example, every single person that I talk to a daily basis has or needs life insurance. I think that we can all make the argument that you should probably have life insurance. Yet there are zero times ever that I've ever talked to anybody about life insurance other than right now on this podcast, the cross we work with need life insurance, but that is not a part of my natural conversation.
EDDIE14:30And there is a list of 8 million things that benefit them personally and professionally, even within business, even within B2B, even within go to market that are never, ever going to talk to a crow about because it's just not part of my natural talk track. And I'm not going to introduce something foreign into that talk track and disrupt the relationship that I have for no reason, because there's already so many problems that the people that we all work with are facing every single day, that it's hard enough to find time to talk through those problems.
EDDIE15:06I'm not going to go and like, introduce something else to that conversation. So I think it's just a lot easier. I mean, I'll give you a concrete example here. When I was at Salesforce, we had Heroku, this platform for developers. To this day, I don't really know what Heroku does or how to describe what they do. And Benioff like a year or two after buying or building it, I don't even know how it was.
EDDIE15:31Became a part of Salesforce. Had this session called what the F is Heroku? Because literally none of us knew what Heroku was.
EDDIE15:39And the idea was, is that we're going to go to the people in the organizations that we work with that are developers or running development teams, or we're going to tell them how great Heroku is for doing software development as part of the Salesforce product suite.
EDDIE15:54And our reaction was, we spend all day, every day talking to sales leaders and marketing leaders and customer service leaders or customer success leaders. This is what we spent years learning about. This is what we understand. These are the relationships that we have. And now you want me to pivot to go talk to the technology leader, which sure, I talk to tech leaders.
EDDIE16:13Fine. But I'm talking to them about development. And I don't understand anything about software development. I don't understand the tech stack that you need for software development and how this is better than using AWS, this, that or the other. And it's just this massive uphill battle. And I don't know if Salesforce has figured that out. And now Heroku is massive product.
EDDIE16:29Sorry, I'm not reading the financial statements for Salesforce on a daily basis, but just during my time there, we had zero success selling it. At least the people that I worked with, maybe different teams and different focuses, they did a better job because it's just such a massive stretch. Whereas when we acquired Pardot and Exact Target, it was a lot easier to say.
EDDIE16:49You're talking to sales leaders every day and marketing leaders about Salesforce. Why don't you talk to them about how they could do email marketing and how they could better qualify their inbound leads? It's like, okay, that's a very logical extension.
RACHAEL17:01So what happens? Or what are the ways a partner can look like they pass all these criteria, but they still actually don't and they're not actually a good partner.
EDDIE17:10I think the first is, is that they work with companies in your industry, but not companies in your ICP. So again, I'll share a tangible example. I can't even begin to tell you how many venture capital firms I've talked to that do seed stage investing.
EDDIE17:23We don't work with companies that have 500,000 or 1 million or $2 million in revenue like they don't.
EDDIE17:29They're not yet ready to solve the problems that we solve. In theory, they could like in theory, if you're going to hire two sales reps, you should have all your ducks in a row, all the things that we talk about. But at the end of the day, they're just not going to do that and they're not going to spend.
EDDIE17:44We like we charge as much as like hiring a full time sales rep. So are they going to hire us or higher sales rep number two or number three? It's just such a massive uphill battle, and I can't begin to tell you how much time and energy I have spent having conversations with VCs that primarily do seed stage investing.
EDDIE18:03And why? Because I'm not doing my homework to figure out if that VC actually works with the companies that we want to work with. And there's nobody to blame but myself. But it's just something that's so easy to overlook, especially if that VC has a big, sexy name and you think, wow, this is some big VC that everybody should want to work with.
EDDIE18:23And then I realize, wait, they don't work with the types of companies that we can help the most.
RACHAEL18:28Yeah, that makes sense. What about when it comes to the second criteria? You need them to be able to bring up your company organically. Couldn't you just coach the company or their reps on how to bring you up?
EDDIE18:41You could. And this ties into the incentive, right? So if we're talking about channel sales where we're paying out these massive commissions and massive revenue shares in the company and the rapper both chomping at the bit to sell our product, then. Sure. Of course. Now, as I said, I'm basing all this just on firsthand experience. I have not gone on the rabbit hole and tried to become an expert in channel sales.
EDDIE19:03I can just say that like I spent years at both Wells Fargo and Salesforce selling all these different product lines, and every single new product that's introduced is this massive, like, learning curve. And so the first thing that I have to do is figure out who am I talking to and what's the conversation that I'm having with them, and what's my incentive to do so right.
EDDIE19:26And I'm trying to think of good examples here. I'm going to have seen spiff and other things where it's like I'm getting 1.5 x commission or two x commissioner, this the other. But at the end of the day, like the lift is so heavy, I'm like, fine, two x commission. Great. But it's ten times harder to sell. So I could just go sell Sales Cloud twice.
EDDIE19:44And I know exactly how to do that. There's zero like additional calories. Or I can go try to sell this new product to a new buyer persona V vis a vis a new conversation, all of which I'm extremely uncomfortable with. Where am I going to have the most success? And so I can just tell you tangibly, like when we did this with Pardot, I remember struggling to sell Pardot in my first year at Salesforce, because I just couldn't understand the talk track of how to talk to marketing leaders, how to talk about marketing tools, what problems are solving, what problems they were facing, etc., etc. the following year I finally had some success and because
EDDIE20:18part is a relatively expensive product, it made it very meaningful dent in my quota I think. Like I probably it made up maybe 20 to 30% of my entire sales. So that's a really massive thing that justifies that level of investment. But it was a massive investment for me to learn how to sell part of it. Coming from understanding how to talk to sales leaders about sales tools and sales process and sales metrics and sales reporting.
RACHAEL20:46Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show. Diagnosing go to market ops. Prioritizing projects for revenue. Impact processes. Metrics. Insights. Building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and undated on our website. Union square consulting frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out.
RACHAEL21:09All right. Back to the episode.
RACHAEL21:11What kind of sales enablement or operational help and support did you get in figuring that out? But somebody listening to this could emulate?
EDDIE21:21Great question. I would say in the beginning a lot and still not enough. And in the end a lot more and maybe enough. So when I was at Salesforce for like three years, and I think that they acquired part out, like at the very beginning of my tenure there, and I only say that like I had all this experience selling Sales Cloud, not that I actually had been there very long, but just I'd been using Salesforce and Sales Cloud and talking to sales leaders, and I'd been in sales, and it was just something that like, you know, obviously you would understand a lot easier than if you've never worked a day of your life in
EDDIE21:52marketing. So what we experienced was, you know, you'd have these reps literally, quite literally fly in. All the reps we worked with were based in Atlanta and I was in New York. So they'd fly in, they'd give us all these coaching sessions and lunch and learns, and they would take us out to dinner and schmooze us. And fun fact, to this day, the most expensive dinner I've ever gone to was with my part.
EDDIE22:14Rep.
RACHAEL22:15What'd you get?
EDDIE22:17So I'll just tell you the story behind the scenes really quickly. So she comes into town and she's like, I want to take you guys all dinner. And she was in town for like 3 or 4 days, and she's like, who wants to go to dinner? And the entire team is like, It's Tuesday. Like, I want to go to dinner on a Tuesday.
EDDIE22:32Like I'm tired. Like I want to go home. And I'm like, I'll go to dinner. Like, and and she's like, where should we go? Like, I don't know, New York. Where should we go? And I was like, hold on a second. So you budgeted to take the entire team to dinner? She's like, yeah. And I was like, and your manager has no idea, like the names of the restaurants here.
EDDIE22:48So I like texts and my friends and I'm like, hey, what's the nicest, most expensive? But like best restaurant in New York? She's like, go to La Bernardine. It's like a I don't remember if it's three Michelin stars, but like the guy that runs the place, he's like, was good friends with Anthony Bourdain and he's on the show all the time.
EDDIE23:02I think his name is Eric Robert. And so he went and got like the tasting menu at at La Bernardine. I'm not normally one to drop $1,000 on dinner out of my own pocket, so that would be this day, the most expensive dinner ever been to. And she brought her like SDR with us. So it was just like three people.
EDDIE23:17It was very fun. But the whole idea was like, even though we were in the same company, like she was literally spending corporate money to schmooze us so that we could, you know, go out and sell this product, which is obviously something you do in channel sales when you're not inside the same company. In addition to that, we had all these training sessions, all this learning and education.
EDDIE23:34Ironically, I spent a lot of my time on the HubSpot blog because HubSpot just had better content than Bardot and still does. And then we're really struggling with it as an organization. And I remember at one point in time we had an executive that stepped in to run sales and marketing for part, and he started training us on these whiteboard sessions, which to this day becomes something that, like, I've always really valued in like my toolkit.
EDDIE23:58And he trained us like via video on how to go into a customer and whiteboard out, like the problems that they're facing and marketing how to solve those problems, and then how a tool like Pardot could help solve those problems. And that was really impactful because it really tied in. Here's a problem my customer has, which, by the way, relates to sales and not just marketing, because what we're trying to do is we're trying to fix the.
EDDIE24:25What's the word, the conflict between sales and marketing. Right? We're trying to get agreement on what is a qualified lead. How do we follow up on that lead? How do we convert it to revenue? So it's already a natural overlap of sales. If I'm talking to a sales leader and they're asking me, well, I need to get more leads, I need to get more pipeline, how can I do this?
EDDIE24:42Should we do outbound? Should we do inbound this that? On the other? It's very, very relevant to a sales leader. Whereas if I call that sales leader and I'm like, I want to talk to you about how your dev team stands up their tech stack. We're both just like, I don't know what we're talking about here. Like it's just so far, it's just such a stretch with pardon.
EDDIE25:01It's not much of a stretch, but it was still a steep learning curve. And so they did all of those things. And then I just had to invest a lot of my own time and learning that, as did every other AI at Salesforce. I'm not trying to say I'm special here, but the reason that we all did it was because there was a direct incentive, and it was like a natural extension of the conversations we were having.
EDDIE25:18I'm already talking to sales leaders. They have problems with inbound leads. They're fighting with marketing. This is something I'm running into in my natural order of conversations. I have a solution for this that I can learn about. It's going to have a really serious impact on my job security, my paycheck, and my ability to get promoted. I'm benefiting directly.
EDDIE25:39The company's benefiting directly. Check check check check and check. And I could go through a list of hundreds of other products at both Salesforce and Wells Fargo. And then I get pitched today that don't check those boxes. And as a result, I do not spend a minute of my time thinking about
RACHAEL25:54I think that, like, perfectly explains the next question I had, which was how much does a partner need to benefit for it to matter? I think that's kind of the crux of everything, is the partner needs to benefit enough so that they make sure that they're talking about it organically in front of the right people. Your ICP.
EDDIE26:12Yeah. And I also want to caveat this because like, we do not do rev share with any of our partners that like sell to our customers. I think we have in the past, but it's just never been a meaningful thing. And I also sort of reached the conclusion pretty quickly that we were getting paid to consult our customers and to advise them.
EDDIE26:32We're not Salesforce reps selling a product. We are literally getting paid to give people advice as well as to, like, put hands on keyboards and implement things, and it feels a bit unethical to then like push a product on a customer because we're getting some kind of a kickback somewhere.
RACHAEL26:48Yeah.
EDDIE26:49No judgment against other people that are doing it. But like ultimately, like I just want to help our customers and I want those customers to be successful until great stories and tell their friends and their peers in the market about the great work that we do so that we can get more customers, we can grow our company. And so the way that I benefit through our technology partners is by having a better mousetrap to give our customers to solve their problems.
EDDIE27:11And so half the time, like, I'm actually reaching out to these tech partners and I'm saying, hey, I heard about your product through other people. I hear it's great. I think our clients could benefit. I want to learn about it, but only if we check those three boxes. It's got to be for a product that's specifically for our ICP that helps the buyer personas in our ICP.
EDDIE27:32It's got to be part of what we do. I don't care if you have, like, the world's best payroll software, it's not something that I'm going to spend time thinking about, even if somehow there's some relationship with the Crow there. I don't know how that would work, but it just doesn't matter to me. And then the way that we would benefit is that it has a tangible impact on our customer, specifically, to the extent that we can tell stories that we drove success in the organization.
EDDIE27:56So, for example, if we go in and we implement some like outbound tool and the customer books, like an additional $30 million of pipeline because we implemented outreach or artisan, and also coupled that with all of the processes that we design in the organization. And now we have a story to tell about how we helped a company generate $30 million in pipeline.
EDDIE28:18Then we are benefiting directly even without like getting some kind of a kickback.
RACHAEL28:23Absolutely. But in terms of people listening to this, you have a company where maybe they do have kickbacks that they need to give for their partner companies. How does the commission structure come into this?
EDDIE28:37Yeah. So like I was just about to say that. Right. So again, I'm only speaking from firsthand experience of being a rep in C at Wells Fargo, at Salesforce, and to a lesser extent, like being the recipient of these pitches here at USC. And, you know, like especially like being a quota carrying rep, like you're just worried about saving your job, like, especially when I was at Salesforce.
EDDIE28:57And I know this is true for many reps in B2B tech. It's just so, so incredibly hard just to hit quota and just save your job. That's a that's all you're thinking about. So even with like additional commission, I'm also thinking about quota relief. And I'm also thinking about like is this going to help my customer to the extent that I build a better relationship with that customer, and I can then upsell them later, right?
EDDIE29:19I mean, I think there's a balance of trying to do the right thing for the customer and also just being selfish and looking out for your own best interests. And hopefully you're in an organization where those things overlap. At Salesforce, I was lucky enough to be in a position where if a customer wasn't successful on Salesforce, then it significantly inhibited my ability to upsell them six months later, and so I'd have vested interest in wanting to see them be successful so that I could selfishly sell them more stuff and hit my quota by the end of the year.
EDDIE29:48And I think that if I am going to have somebody come and pitch a product to me, to pitch to my customers, it's got to check all those boxes. And then it's also, if I am worried about the financial incentive, it's got to be really meaningful. And I've been in so many situations where I'm like, hey, I mean, that's cool and all, but it's going to like take so many calories for me to sell this thing.
EDDIE30:12And it doesn't make a difference to me either with my quota relief or like financially. So it doesn't matter. I mean, so tangible example here, Salesforce would do these like not Salesforce, but Salesforce partners would do these lunch and learns all time in our office. It's like, hey, we have like free sushi and you can come into the boardroom and grab the sushi.
EDDIE30:30You just have to listen to this pitch for this product company. And I'm just like, okay, cool. And like then of course they're always like, you get this to Ching, you know, you're going to get X amount of quota relief and X amount of commission this, that and the other. And I would just ignore it. And then sometimes my customers would buy that product anyway without me doing anything.
EDDIE30:45And I just get free money which is always cool. But the problem would be it's like, oh, like you just got like $1000 or $2000 of quota relief. And I'm like, my quota is $1 million. I am not going to go learn some new platform and new product so that I can make a 1% dent in this thing that could literally cost me my job.
EDDIE31:04Like, I need to hit $1 million or I'm out on the street. I don't have time to like, be thinking about how you're going to like, add $1,000 here. And the pitch is always like, well, it's so easy. Like, this is a great product. It fits with your customer, yada yada. I'm like, I have to learn it, I have this isn't something that I can just like take 30s to just throw it.
EDDIE31:22Somebody, at least me personally, I need to understand the product and how it benefits the customer, what the torque track is, and that takes significant amounts of energy. And I'm already struggling to do that with our sales tool and our marketing tool and our customer success tool and the 85 other tools that we have in our suite. And so if your thing doesn't have some like really meaningful difference for me, it's tough.
EDDIE31:44I'll give you another example here. Financial force is a really big thing. When I worked at Salesforce. And for anybody that's not familiar with the financial force, and it's been a while for me, you know, it basically integrates Salesforce with accounting and gives you all these benefits that are going to relate to the relationship between sales and finance.
EDDIE32:04They also had like a pretty meaningful, like impact on our commissions and our quota relief. But I do remember thinking, wow, like, I've only seen maybe 1 or 2 deals across my team and other teams and it's like really cool that like, Bob over here just closed the deal and got like $30,000 of quarter relief and a big fat commission check.
EDDIE32:24But this is going to be a really steep learning curve for me. And if I'm only getting $30,000 out of it against $1 million quota, I don't know that I can justify spending all my time trying to learn that that platform. So now maybe I was thinking about it the wrong way. I wasn't the number 180 at Salesforce, and maybe that's why.
EDDIE32:44But that was a challenge that I was thinking about is if I don't hit quota, I'm going to lose my job. And I don't know that I have all day today to learn financial force.
RACHAEL32:52So what does all of this tell us about how a company or CRO listening to this can develop their partner program or their ideal partner profile. Keeping this in mind that like a a company, a partner could have all three criteria down. But it's still isn't enough for the salespeople in that company to really promote it to the amount that would be beneficial.
EDDIE33:19Well, I think if you have all three criteria, it is enough, right? Because you have a partner who's talking to the right people about the right thing, and they have a significant, tangible benefit from you coming in and offering your product or service. Those are the three boxes for me. So if you check all three of those boxes, if I'm an individual in an organization and I feel that you have a significant ability to impact my KPIs, my job security, my ability to get recognized and promoted and to get more money out of the company that I work for.
EDDIE33:50Then I'm going to put time and energy into helping you achieve that end. Then of course, you have training and all those other things. But I think the point of this podcast and the newsletter that we're going to write on the back of this podcast, which will be linked in the show notes, we'll have it out before this podcast, is that this is a framework to think about your ideal partner profile.
EDDIE34:11Now, by extension, we're also going to do a newsletter and a podcast about how to build an always on living ICP that is AI enabled, and that is going to go much deeper into sort of like the nuts and bolts of how to do this. And all of that will apply to ideal partner profile as well. But I've talked to people before where they have some kind of a channel sales motion and I say like, do you have an ideal partner profile defined?
EDDIE34:36Do you have a partner personas defined? And they say, no, we don't have that. We just have our ICP defined. It's like, okay, well then that means that your, your, your team is probably going to waste a lot of time with the wrong partners.
RACHAEL34:46So apart from these three criteria, then what else should we be keeping in mind in defining this ideal partner profile?
EDDIE34:54think the rest of it is going to overlap pretty significantly with all the concepts that we're going to share in the ICP document as well. Right? So we need to think about, you know, first of all, how do we define the ideal customer profile or ideal partner profile. How do we measure this. You know, we want to look at customers that have high lifetime value and low churn and high customer satisfaction.
EDDIE35:18And by extension, we want to look at the partners that introduce us to those customers. Right. We want to look at the partners that are going to introduce us to a lot of those customers, and we're going to get lots of opportunities and high close rates and all of those things. Right. This is all pretty basic and obvious, but it is important to do the exercise of actually running that analysis.
EDDIE35:35And then we need to think about how do we define those customers and those partners. What are the firm details, the tech graphic details? What kind of intent signals? What kind of engagement with marketing would like an ideal customer have for us? And then does that translate into ideal partner profile? In our case, about 50% of our partners have actually come to us via our marketing channels.
EDDIE36:00So it's been really interesting to see that, you know, we're out there reaching out and trying to get meetings with folks, and just as often they're coming to us because they're engaging with our marketing. That's the same core concept as thinking about inbound or all bound in go to market with direct customers. Right. And then you have to think about how you're keeping this up to date on an ongoing basis.
EDDIE36:23And so if I keep going, I'm just going to regurgitates the other newsletter and the other podcast that we will have out by the time this one is published, but it's important that this doesn't get stale. Your business evolves, the market evolves, your customers evolve. And so by extension, the partners that are going to be a best fit for you are also going to evolve.
RACHAEL36:42How does AI play a role in keeping this ideal partner profile current?
EDDIE36:47So I think AI has again, I don't want to go too deep on the other content that we're going to create, especially because I haven't really thought through it enough yet. We haven't finished the newsletter or the podcast, but I think there are two things that I'm thinking about with AI right now. Number one is the ability for AI to take the next step forward from what we can get in the programmatic data sources.
EDDIE37:10So for example, we go into zoom info, we go into maybe Clay's a bad example because it's so AI driven, but we go into these tools and we grab a list of customers or potential customers or potential partners. Right. Then we ask, you know, a specific question that can't be answered in those programmatic tools, like, does this organization have this particular department or do they have this number of people, or do they have this problem or are they profitable?
EDDIE37:39Like, do they put content? I mean, there's just like a limitless number of examples that might land in your ICP or IP definition that you can't filter for in zoom info. So how can we use AI to go find that information before we have any humans that are manually going and looking at those websites and looking those accounts to further refine the list of folks that we're going after, I think that's one piece.
EDDIE38:06The second piece is how do we use AI to actually do this analysis? So if we get together our ICP and we say, okay, these are our best customers, here's all the data that we know about them. We can feed it into AI and have AI analyze it and say, how do we best define our best customers based on the information that you have?
EDDIE38:27And this is a balancing act because do we have the right data points? That's what we're feeding the AI. But I think it's really interesting, especially in terms of not doing this one time, but on an always on system to continue iterating on that so that we can keep feeding the are our best customers and then continuously update what data points were feeding the AI, including using the air to find those data points, and then use AI to analyze that customer list, as well as maybe like our lost opportunities, our churn customers, things like that, to help identify what are the things that really make the difference between an ideal customer and one that's not
EDDIE39:06as well as, by extension, an ideal partner and one that's not.
RACHAEL39:10I'm not sure if you are able to discuss this yet on this podcast, but if you are, can you tell us a little bit about the stuff that we're starting to work on for helping our clients stand up AI workflows and getting this AI foundation in place?
EDDIE39:25Oh man, like this is so fast evolving. There's so much going on there. It's pretty hard to summarize it here. And I think like everyone is working on this, so I don't know how valuable this is, but I'll just share one point that I think is important. The biggest thing that we're consistently seeing is that we need to have the right foundation in place in order to leverage AI.
EDDIE39:46So let's run with this example that I just gave.
EDDIE39:49If we don't know who our best customers are and we have no data on them, where do we go if we just dump in our entire customer list into Claude and say, tell me who my ICP is, we're going to get really bad results. So we need to have this like foundational layer of quality data in order to feed the AI and expect any reasonable results.
EDDIE40:12Before we can even get this foundational layer in place. We need to define our processes. We need to define our ICP or in this case, our IP, our ideal partner profile, our personas. And we need to define the step by step process to take a customer or a partner from an unknown into a qualified opportunity, into a closed one customer, into a renewal and into an expansion.
EDDIE40:36And the reason that it's so important to define that process is that process defines the data points we collect along the way, and defines how we execute to collect that data. Now, I'm all for automation, data enrichment tools, anything that we can do to limit the human effort involved. But at the end of the day, there's still a lot of really valuable information that will only be collected if we get humans to execute the right process A and B, even if we can automate everything, even if we have all of our call recording, set up or feeding it all into Salesforce, we have to know what questions to ask.
EDDIE41:16We have to like, I'm a really big believer in tools like attention right now, that we'll take the call recordings and transcribe them into Salesforce, but what do they transcribe it into? They just they transcribe it into fields in Salesforce that asks specific questions. What is the customer's decision making criteria? If you don't ask that question, you're not going to get an answer to it.
EDDIE41:39And then if that's the thing that makes the difference, I'm just stealing from Medicare. As to whether or not you might close a deal, then your AI is not going to be feeding you with valuable intelligence on whether or not your pipeline is healthy. So you've got to build that foundational layer before you can layer everything on top.
EDDIE41:58Then once you layer the AI on top, it's really important to constantly iterate. You have to update the context and the instructions and continue to do so on an ongoing basis. Or it will either not really work very well in the first place, or stop working because things have evolved and it hasn't evolved with it. And then beyond that, it's like there's so many use cases that we could go after.
EDDIE42:20And this is something that I've seen with the non AI tech the last 20 years. It's only going to work as well as the organization focuses on it. So if the crow in the organization says you know what. Like we need to tackle our our partner program. And one way we need to do that is we need to leverage AI and be really laser focused on the right partners.
EDDIE42:38And this is how we're going to build a system that does that, and we're going to stay on top of it and monitor it and make sure that we're seeing like a good partner should be introducing us to X number of potential customers that close at a certain rate and become X amount of revenue in order to be a good partner.
EDDIE42:56And if we are not looking at that information and constantly monitoring that and feeding and updating the AI to do a better job of that, well then the AI is not going to work. Magic.
RACHAEL43:05Yep. Garbage in, garbage out.
RACHAEL43:07And then you also need somebody with like a human in the QA seat to make sure that the stuff that your AI workflows are outputting is actually accurate to the inputs that have been given it. Because I still lose needs is not perfect.
EDDIE43:22Yeah. As I think everybody on earth has learned over the past year or two. Yeah, but I think it's really exciting what's possible right now. It's just that it's so funny because I feel like when I'm on LinkedIn, it's just all AI, AI, AI. And when I talk to crows about the actual problems,
EDDIE43:39it's all foundational stuff. It's like our outbound program is completely broken.
EDDIE43:43We are trying to go after anyone and everyone. We're spraying and praying. And the same would be true with partners as well. And I think even to a greater extent, because I think a lot of people aren't even thinking about are we really carefully selecting the right partners that we go after? Obviously, there are mature channel sales organizations that have thought this through, but in B2B tech, there are so many companies that are just now starting to launch a partner program, and they don't have the same rigor that they're putting in inbound and outbound, and it's going to burn up a lot of time and energy as a result.
RACHAEL44:17And I'm also very excited for when we eventually develop our AI foundations framework. I think that will be a very good one and a very one that's very much look forward to.
EDDIE44:29But there are the framework seem to be popular with people, so I'm always excited that dive into there's just so much work. I'm always like, yeah, another framework.
RACHAEL44:37Okay.
EDDIE44:37How much time and effort is this going to take us? But, people seem to like it. So, you know, shameless plug. If anybody is, wanting to see our frameworks there on our, our website, Union Square consulting frameworks. Although as we as we speak, we're trying to redesign that page so that it's even easier to navigate and find all of our written content in one place.
EDDIE44:59Probably be updated by the time this podcast is released.
RACHAEL45:02Oh baby. And the link to that page will also be in the show notes. If you're able to click on that and not just driving in the car. But I just had one last question for you, Eddie. Just to tie everything together and look at where we go from here. How do we take this ideal partner profile and develop it into an actual working model that drives revenue?
EDDIE45:24So the way we take an ideal partner profile and turn it into something that drives revenue is the same way that we take an ideal customer profile and turn it into something that drives revenue. We need to create a continuous system that is constantly monitored and improved over time, right? So if we take our ideal partner profile and we write up a Google doc and we share it with the entire sales team and then check the box and call it a day, then two things are going to happen.
EDDIE45:48Number one, that information is going to get stale eventually. And so we will end up targeting the wrong people as our business and the market evolves. And number two, it's going to get forgotten about an instant going to be executed upon. So we have to think about how to embed this in our entire system. Right. So let's start with outbound.
EDDIE46:06And when I say outbound I'm including our partner channel. So we need to define the territories and target lists of partners that we're going to go after. And that needs to be directly informed by our ideal partner profile and partner personas. Definition. Right. So we need to go and build that out. And then every time that we update that, we need to go back to it in conjunction, as I mentioned earlier, we need to be constantly updating this definition.
EDDIE46:31Right? So as we land, more and more partners, get more opportunities from those partners and close and lose deals from those those opportunities, we need to continue to feed the system, whether it's AI and or human analysis or a combination of both, which is probably recommended would be a combination of both. We need to be looking at this and saying, like, has our ideal partner profile changed?
EDDIE46:53Maybe we thought it was this, but what we're actually seeing is this type of partner is actually sending us more customers in our ICP than we would have expected. So we need to be constantly updating that. And I think the best way to do that is to create a cadence. This is something like the rev ops team could obviously own and create a cadence to say that we're going to update this every so often, maybe every quarter, every six months, every 12 months.
EDDIE47:16Right. And then I think that the more that we can leverage AI and create this, like as an always on system, the more we can take the outputs and feed it back into the system and reanalyzed it to determine what the input should be. And then, of course, we have the process of reaching out and nurturing partners, which is a whole separate topic that we're going to go into in a separate framework and a separate podcast.
EDDIE47:39But I think, like as it pertains to ideal partner profile, what we need to do is we need to make sure that we're constantly looking at what those inputs are, what the ideal partner profile is, what the actual target list is, who we're reaching out to, and then what are the outputs, what are the successes that we're having, who's meeting with us, who's engaging with us, who's sending us referrals?
EDDIE47:59And are those referrals closing? And are they turning into good customers or bad customers? That, I think, is how you turn this into sort of an actionable thing that really drives revenue, as opposed to a document that sits somewhere in your file system that nobody ever looks at.
RACHAEL48:12And I know I said that was the last question, but I just thought of another one. Is there a benchmark metric or a quantitative way to know that
RACHAEL48:23what you're getting out of your partner program is worth the effort that you're putting into it?
EDDIE48:28Yeah. Ultimately it would be kak or kak payback, right? So, you know, rule of thumb is you want a payback of less than 12 months for anybody listening to this. Not familiar with payback. It's just looking at like, what does it cost us to land a customer versus what is the actual gross margin that we earn off of that customer?
EDDIE48:45And for whatever reason, I'm not a huge fan of it. It's measured in months. So like, how many months does it take us to recoup that investment? So if we can break even in 12, 12 months, a lot of people see that as a very positive thing. We can also look at LTV to calculate what's our lifetime value for our customer.
EDDIE49:02And is that more than 3 to 1 versus what it costs us to land a customer. So if it takes us a year to recoup our costs and the customer sticks around for three years or longer, then great, like we we have a pretty profitable go to market motion. And so we could just look at what does it cost us to run a partner program, and how many customers do we get from that partner program.
EDDIE49:24That would be like the ultimate benchmark for me, right? If we're not looking at financials, then we would be looking at, you know, how many people do we have working partners? How many resources are we, you know, investing there and then how many customers and how much revenue are we getting back? And just like any other go to market motion, it's constantly evolving.
EDDIE49:42It could be working one day and not working the next day. And we have to constantly evaluate if we should invest more in it, if we should step in and try to improve the way things work so we can improve outcomes, or if we need to cut bait because it's not working.
RACHAEL49:56Well. I think that is all that we had for today's podcast, but you can find the link to the newsletter that will go out in conjunction with this podcast, in the show notes. And if you want help setting any of this up, or you'd need help with your strategy on how to do it or hands on keyboards doing it, give a shout.
RACHAEL50:13The link to our website is in the show notes. It's you can score consulting.
EDDIE50:18Awesome! We will probably also have a full framework on partner sales by the time this podcast goes out as well.
RACHAEL50:24All right. Thank you so much Eddie.
EDDIE50:26Thank you Rachel.
EDDIE50:27Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE50:42We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
