Don't Start Channel Partner Sales Without These 5 Things!

Intro

Channel Sales AKA Partnerships aren’t this magical revenue stream that you set and forget.

If you’ve sold through Value Added Resellers and System Integrators before you know that most won’t be interested in dealing with you. Sure, they might sign a contract with you so they have a shiny new thing to show off on their website but never actually make a sale for you. You’re now pissed and go on to build an army of partners and realise that they’re cannibalising your business by competing on price. That’s the kind of frustration you face if you’re trying to wing it in indirect sales.

But luckily there’s a practice that works and it starts by building a Partner Program.

By the way if you’re new to the channel: I’m Viktor, a full-cycle Account Executive turned Sales Manager with 10 years of B2B Sales experience and on this channel I cover topics from prospecting to closing and everything in between. And if you’ve been around for a while, welcome back, Team!

Today I’m joined by Jani Vrancsik who has 6 years of experience under his belt as a Partnership Manager. Experience which he earned from leading Partnership teams at 3 different tech startups. Let’s welcome him and see how to build a Partnership program that actually works!

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What Mistakes To Avoid When Considering Channel Sales and How to Build a Partner Program That Works

Viktor (00:02.227)

Hi Jani, good to have you on board today.

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Jani Vrancsik (00:05.259)

Hey, Victor, thanks for having me.

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Viktor (00:07.879)

So look, there's this thing in the back of my mind, partnership programs. Like, let's say I'm a startup founder and trying to figure out, okay, is partnerships the right thing for me? And I have it in my mind that, ah, amazing. I don't have to now sell my products. I don't have to promote them. I'll just find a reputable partner or two and let them sell for me. What am I not seeing? Why should I even need a partner management program?

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Jani Vrancsik (00:36.898)

Yeah, well, that sounds very good in theory, maybe even a little bit too good to be true. And if you have that kind of feeling, that's usually the case. It's not going to be as simple as that. Well, what I see from a lot of founders is that they usually want to get started with partnerships or channel sales because they've hit a growth ceiling. They...

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Jani Vrancsik (01:08.527)

They need to hit a big lofty goal this quarter or next quarter. Their direct sales results plummet. So they want to jump on the next shiny object, which can be partnerships. But if you go into it with that mindset, it's usually not going to work. Partners take much longer time to nurture and scale.

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But the reward is often worth the investment. You gotta have this long-term view on partnerships and not just like get revenue from it right away.

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Viktor (01:46.163)

But isn't it the case that they already have their own customer base? So it's just like, hey, there's this new, I'm giving you a new product that you can sell to your customer base and just make money off the margins that I'm giving you. Isn't it that simple?

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Jani Vrancsik (01:59.842)

Well, it could be, but they don't know you. They don't know your product. They don't have the expertise to sell your product. They might not have the same ICP that you have. There are a lot of nuances and considerations to take into account before getting started. How they're going to sell it, what's the exact service that's attached or sold around your product.

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So it doesn't come that easy usually.

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Viktor (02:36.801)

Okay, so what else can go wrong if I don't have a partnership program?

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Jani Vrancsik (02:44.862)

Yeah, so again, usually you want to get leads from your partners. That's perfectly fine. But you should expect that they will expect leads from you. Do you have a lead source that's reliable and predictable? Are you going to are you able to help them grow? Because it needs to be mutually beneficial. It shouldn't be just about you.

So they need to be able to grow with you mutually. So yeah, and then the other thing or like common mistake I see happening is they figure it out, or they start to think that they figured it out. They have some referral fees, they hire one or two people for partnerships, and then...

They just try to work with everyone in their space. They try to have 300 partners in one week or one month, which will end up, like the partner managers will have very low engagement with each and every partner. And I think in the early days, it should be the other way around. You need to have a very...

narrow ICA. Well, in direct sales, it's ICP and partnerships. We usually use the term IPP, ideal partner profile. You need to have a very narrow IPP and disqualify everyone else as quickly as you can. Because if you have just one or two people on your partnership team or you're a founder just trying to figure it out, you'll be left very thin on each and every partner. And they won't, there's just not enough time and working hours to build that trust really. So I think it should be the other way around in the early days, you should focus on a very small set of partners and work very closely with them and develop the strategy together.

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Viktor (05:09.483)

So in that sense, it's similar to direct sales in the sense that as you would build trust with your ideal customer profile in direct sales, you'd still need to do the same. But in this case, it's partnership sales. And with the addition on top of that, partners will also expect leads from you. So you are both doing work for the partner as much as the partner is doing work for you.

Because you're just like a solo founder or the first partner manager at a startup, you don't have that capacity to focus on 10, 20, 50 partners but rather a handful which are gonna be strategic in the area that you make that partnership with. Is that what you're saying basically?

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Jani Vrancsik (06:04.118)

Yes, absolutely. One pro tip I would give to founders or even sales leaders is just to take a look at your existing customer base. What we've did in a previous job where I was leading the partnership team is that we took a look at the user base. And with some data enrichment through Clearbit, we identified the agencies already using the product. And Viv ended up with about 700 or so agencies who already knew the product, who were already using it to deliver for their end clients. We already had some sort of trust from them. So it's usually a very good idea to start there. And you may say, we're very small, very early. Just try to take a look at the data. Just try to take a look into it.

I'm sure you'll have a few. You don't need to have 700 like we did. You can just have one or two agencies. And even when, especially when you're early, they may have been in business and selling to your ideal customer for much longer. They might know the space much more. So even if you don't really get a lot out of it, it's just a good idea to talk to them and get to know them.

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Viktor (07:33.499)

And what do you recommend for sales teams or commercial teams just starting off? Do you have to pick either direct sales or partnership management? Are they mutually exclusive or is there a way that these teams can coexist in the same company in the early stages?

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Jani Vrancsik (07:56.526)

It's a very, very good question. And what I usually advise startups on is to let's not dive head in to partnerships because it's a very prolific and scalable channel. But if you don't have a predictable and reliable direct sales pipeline, you don't have a growth lever that you can use. You haven't figured out your direct sales in the beginning or as the first step. Partnerships will almost always fail.

And the other thing, and that's what I would like to get your thoughts on from someone with experience from the direct sales side, one key aspect or one mistake that usually make or break a channel partner program is how you deal with channel conflict. Because if it's not addressed, it can put the sellers in a position where they're incentivized to focus on direct sales leads and direct revenue, and they can neglect channel sales and partner

So I would really want to get your ideas on like, yeah, what's your thought on channel conflict? How do you do you like working with partners as an AE? And let's just start there.

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Viktor (09:38.847)

Yeah, there's no cookie cutter solution to it. So let me dive into examples from the past. So first thing's first is the same person, the same sales rep responsible for both partners and direct sales. I think that's the first distinction.

I've worked at companies where these were one in the same. So we had our own, we were a territory sales team or area sales team basically. So we had our own product group and our own territory. And everything that happened within that domain with regards to our products was our responsibility, whether the system ended up being installed at the end user site directly or through an OEM, an original equipment manufacturer, or in this case, a partner. And I've worked at companies where there was a separate partner manager and a separate direct sales representative and account executive, whether full cycle or not.

Now, what you've got to keep in mind is sales reps will sell what is easiest and partnership sales, as you said, it takes a lot of time, maybe even up to a year or two years, depending on what type of products that you're selling to yield fruit. But if you have the right type of program, then it's it will have ROI in the end.

But sales reps will sell or focus on what is easiest to sell because I just want to make money this quarter and then the next quarter and then the next quarter. If I don't do that, I might not be around in a year. So I have to do what's best for me. And when there's two separate people, one for part because you want to avoid this trap, like neglecting partners, which is a long term, beneficial strategy in the long term, you might say, okay, so let's just split these two roles, right?

I have a partner manager and I have a direct salesperson. And let's say if there is no SOPs, a standard operating procedure or rules of engagement document saying who's responsible for what by when, what happens when there's a deal going through a partner, which a partner manager is working, but the end user is on the client side.

So if you don't have that type of internal processes or an internal agreement on who does what by when, there's going to be shouting at each other because, you know, reps want to make revenue, whether it's partner manager or the sales rep, everyone will want the bigger piece of the pie. And if that happens, like no one's actually selling and it's just killing the deal from within the company. So these are, first of all, the considerations that you have to make. Is it like one person responsible for everything or two separate people?

And I'll give you a good example. Like the very first company I worked at, Fortune 100 company, amazing sales training, and it's a very high technical product. So we were selling complex hardware and software solutions to, to manufacturing companies and we did full cycle. We were called sales engineers, but we actually did full cycle. So we were our own BDR, our account executive, our customer success, our account manager.

Everything was our responsibility within our product and our territory. That meant if our territory had an OEM, a partner, then it was our responsibility to manage expectations with them and nurture that partnership because they keep getting projects, which means if we build the right relationships, they'll bring us projects.

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But they won't just bring us projects if we don't do the same for them. So if we knew of a project at an end user, we would try, in building the relationship, we would bring those leads to the partner and maybe introduce them even. So that's how, if you bring enough business to a partner, they will reciprocate by bringing you on board next time. So it goes back to what you said beautifully. Now the challenge becomes, OK, what happens when, again, it's two separate people?

So let's say I'm in charge of an end user, and the OEM, the partner, is on a completely different territory. How do you manage that? Who gets the prize at the end? Is it just one person, or is there a quota split? Again, it's not as easy, but this worked beautifully. So we had internal rules of engagement

If we knew that a system was going to be bought, purchased in territory A, at the partner side, and, uh, but we knew that the end user was going to be, uh, in, uh, in a different territory, we had what's called an internal lead system. Uh, and both parties were responsible back and forth for communicating if there's lead, because let's say if I sold to an OEM and then the support had the installation and support had to be done on the other side of the other territory, then retrospectively you could have demanded a larger cut of the deal so you actually end up losing what you saw.

So you did the main majority of the work but you end up losing the deal or the commissions at least not the deal.

So what happened is we had this internal lead system and the beauty of it is because both account executives, both sales reps knew about the deal. Now you have sales rep A working the partner side, sales rep B working the end user side. So there's internal collaboration that will increase your win rates, maybe even reduce the sales cycle time because you're sharing information back and forth. So the time it takes to make the final decision on who to go with will be shorter for the end user. And you can maximize the pie because you're bringing more people involved, but then you have a quota split. You decide upfront who's going to be working how much on the deal. So you know fully who's going to earn what commission from that deal. And I think this worked beautifully.

And it went double when, let's say, it was an international sale. So I was selling in, let's say, Hungary, but the installation happened in France, for instance. Or the partner was in France, and then the project got installed in Hungary. How do you go about splitting quota and incentivize both reps to do the work?

It worked beautifully, but it all comes down to having rules of engagement, who does what by when, and having that frictionless communication through the CRM so you are notified when there's a deal that impacts you. So I think channel conflict, super important, relevant. It all comes down to having processes in place where both sales reps are unified in their approach.

So they stop fighting and both get paid for their efforts. Without that, the whole thing is just gonna fall apart, right?

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Jani Vrancsik (17:24.458)

Yeah, yeah. It's very an interesting approach when you mentioned that a single salesperson can end the whole sales process from end to end. The companies and spaces where I've been working so far had specialized roles. So you have an SDR who's responsible for creating opportunities, qualifying those.

You have a closer, you have an AE, you have sales engineers, everyone's like, they're very much focused on their part of the sales cycle and in there, in that environment where you add a partner manager. And usually you are, as a partner manager, you are responsible for the early stages of the opportunity. And if you do your job well, you will end up with hot leads that they should be easy to close. They have higher close trades, shorter sales cycles, but you usually do the handover to the AE. And then, yeah, if you don't manage channel conflict there, the partner manager and the AE have different objectives and they are incentivized to go into different directions. So now we know that it's not as easy as just, you know, fighting partners and then off you go. There's a lot to take into there.

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Viktor (18:58.247)

Yeah, yeah. So tell me in this case, because at this first company where everything worked, we still we didn't really have a partnership manager because we positioned ourselves as a direct sales company and it worked, but it is complex. So it's not that company was 40 years in the making. So they had best practices. Most companies don't even make it till the first two years. So, yes, partnerships isn't that easy, but it's a good long term strategy.

What do you recommend for revenue teams starting off with partnerships? What is the program that they should get started?

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Jani Vrancsik (19:41.554)

Yeah, there are a few points I think I'd like to point out. First and foremost, you should have the C-level alignment, the internal support, whether it's your CRO, sales manager, CEO, whoever it may be. You need to have this mindset of focusing it on the long term. Because what you need to do is you

What I see right now in 2023 is many partner folks are still being laid off. Uh, the pressure on everyone in go-to-market again, whether you're a CEO, CRO, AE, partner manager, the pressure is enormous. It's insane. Um, and because of that, partnership leaders have a very short average tenure right now. It's, it's hard waters to navigate right now.

What usually happens is the startup, CEO, CRO, whoever it may be, they decide, yeah, we need partnerships. They hire one person for partnerships. Yeah, just we don't really know how to do this, but just go and figure it out. Just do your job, get revenue. And then six to nine to 12 months later, it's not really working that well. There may be some early signs and wins, but then they're out of the job.

It just starts again and it's a they're back to square one as a company and there's a go-to-market organization and it's just going to be this vicious cycle so you need to have the alignment with the c-level with the investors that it's not going to magically start to work for next quarter.

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Viktor (21:29.011)

Right, so when you say you need that C-level alignment, it's because we already established that partnership sales should take off, takes at least one, but in more practical sense, maybe even two years to get started, and we know that. So when you say C-level alignment is just managing expectations with the C-level and don't even start a partnership program, if they aren't willing to commit for that time, or is there more to it?

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Jani Vrancsik (21:57.098)

Yeah, it's pretty much managing the expectations because, yeah, we're both primarily working in startup world where the usual playbook is you go out, you build something, and then you raise a ton of money for it. But then with the investor's money, there comes a lot of expectations alongside it to double, triple, triple the revenue every year.

Yeah, that's just a lot of pressure there. And if you don't set the right goals as a whole, go to market organization, but more specifically, as a partnership team or a partnership leader, you will have trouble. You will have a lot of back and forth. You will have a lot of heated discussions. Because yeah, it's about managing the expectations. And again, it's very different, I think, channel sales or agency partnerships or VARs or GSIs or whatever you may call them. It's all going to be part solutions partnerships. It's just like a little bit different flavor or different size of partner. And it's going to be very different for technology partners. And there's a lot more to think about there. So yeah, if the whole leadership team is not on board with partnerships for one to two or even more years to come, you'll have a hard time managing those expectations.

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Viktor (23:36.815)

Yeah, completely got that. And we already established that partnerships, that there's a ton of things that you can do.

I see why you're saying that C-level alignment and commitment is necessary. What would be next in line for you?

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Jani Vrancsik (23:55.766)

Yeah, once you have the support and the resources for one to two years, you need to find the right partners. In that, I mean, who are your partners? And are they selling to the same customers, to the same ICP? Are they in the same target market? So let's say you have an SMB focused product, but the partners you start to engage with, they're selling very much in the enterprise. Is it going to be a problem on the long-term? Are you going to be able to win together? Are you selling to the same buyer persona, the same stakeholders?

Sometimes it can be relatively simple. For example building out partnerships in the Shopify space. So for that company, it was pretty straightforward. You go out, you go on the Shopify agency listing marketplace, you scrape all the partners there, and you start reaching out, and you talk to them. Of course, it's not just straightforward because there's always going to be like, is it going to be a more enterprise again? Is it the same target markets? Can they, can they sell any services around your product? But that sometimes it's going to be very easy. Sometimes it's going to be very complex. So that's what you need.

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Viktor (25:32.639)

Sounds like a lot of research.

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Jani Vrancsik (25:43.946)

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. So you need to find these right partners and make sure that you are aligned on the market. Same ICP, same target market, same buyer persona. And then again, I think it's very important to disqualify your partners as quickly as you can. Because even when...

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Viktor (25:54.931)

because you won't have that capacity to work with everyone, right?

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Jani Vrancsik (25:58.114)

Yeah, absolutely. You won't have the capacity, you won't have the bandwidth and even when you find a good partner that's selling to the same end customer, they might not have the resources on their end. They might not know your product, they don't have the capacity to learn it, they don't know how to sell it, they might not be able to support the end customer post-sale.

So, yeah, it's very easy to fall into a trap where, yeah, I just need a partner right now and just help them sell and you go above and beyond together with the partner to close the deal. But that's just the start, you know, like what's gonna happen post sale? How are they gonna keep retaining that customer for both of you?

I'm pretty sure you're familiar with Winning by Design. And I took one of their courses recently. And there, according to their own research and statistics, the vast majority, like 70% to 90% of the revenue is realized post-sale and renewals, reselling, upselling, cross-selling to two different product. And yeah, if you think about it, that's a pretty big.

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Viktor (26:58.345)

Yeah.

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Jani Vrancsik (27:24.054)

chunk of money you should care about. It shouldn't be about just close the deal right now, which is an A's role is about usually. It takes a little bit like broader mindset. So yeah, even if you find these partners, you need to be very ruthless in disqualifying them and only focus on the ones that are the perfect fit for your product on your market.

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Viktor (27:55.067)

And I guess committing to back and forth open communication. So it's not just they're expecting leads from you, but it's vice versa. Just like you mentioned in the beginning, you can't expect partners to bring you leads if you don't reciprocate. You can disqualify based on that as well. What is the partner's sort of mindset in working with you? Do they just expect you to bring everything or?

Or do they have like say a direct sales team or usually I guess it's more like a project management team who also does sales and then they bring you into the loop whenever there's an opportunity to bring your product abroad.

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Jani Vrancsik (28:39.778)

Yeah, that's a very good question to ask. What's in it for them and what do they expect from you as well? So you have the alignment as the first step. You find the right partner. You think you found the right partners. Then you need to think about what's in it for them. What are going to be the benefits that you provide? What are going to be the requirements that you set? Is it going to be the referral revenue, is it going to be the marketing opportunity that they get through being a partner with you?

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Viktor (29:16.107)

Wait a second, isn't it enough that, you know, like, I have my product, I'll just, you know, calculate, inflate the prices a little bit, let's say 20, 30%, and then give that margin to the partner. Isn't that 30, 20, 30% enough for the partner?

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Jani Vrancsik (29:31.602)

Usually it's not going to be enough. So the thing is with partners, if you find the... There are going to be partners who definitely care about that. Just comes down to their size and maturity. But I found that the best partners that you can work with, they're not going to care about the referral money because where they want to make their buck is their services revenue.

And if they are working with, yeah, if they're a little bit, you know, more established, they have their own go-to-market strategy, they have existing clients, then that services revenue is going to be much higher than what the referral fee could be for closing deal on your products.

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Viktor (30:19.835)

Ah, so it also depends then on what is the price point of your product. Because if you're selling a six figure product, then 20-30% isn't small change. But if you're selling a product that's $5,000 to $8,000 a year, then 20-30% is not that much. Unless you can sell a lot of it, right?

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Jani Vrancsik (30:40.23)

Even in six-figure deals, you say, let's call it a six-figure, it's going to be 100,000 for a year. You give away napkin math, you give away 10%. It's going to be 10K. The amount of money that they're going to be making throughout that year on that client is most probably going to be much, much more than the 10K that they can get from you for that annual contract. It's like...

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Viktor (31:11.463)

Where does that revenue come from then?

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Jani Vrancsik (31:14.354)

It's going to be the services that they sell to their client on your or using your product. It's the referral fees again, it's usually or what I found is smaller agencies, smaller companies, they will care about that and they will request that. But it's much more how I see it or how I usually tell it to companies I consult is: It's good to have, it's nice to have, but it's more of a checkbox to tick. You will need to give away some, but if that's the only benefit that you provide, then it's not a partner program, it's an affiliate marketing program.

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Viktor (31:59.331)

That's a really good distinction to pull out and affiliate programs are more B2C, or not even B2C, but you're having individuals referring your program, because for an individual, like 10% of 1K is already good, based for groceries at least, or whatever. But for a partner, someone who's in business, it's going to be a chunk change compared to what they're making on their services.

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Jani Vrancsik (32:14.638)

Absolutely.

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Viktor (32:28.059)

And then, yeah, I forgot what I was gonna say. Anyway, anything else here? Like what else is in it for them then?

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Jani Vrancsik (32:37.298)

Yeah, so usually you will need to check this box, give away some referral fee, but then it's much more going to be around, is it going to be the marketing support that they want to receive from you? Because usually as a software as a service business, you have a much bigger audience than an agency has. So is it going to be the marketing opportunities? Is it going to be the certifications that you provide to them? So they can show off that certification that in their

They are experts in your technology. Is it going to be priority support? Is it going to be opportunities that you can deliver to them? So it's usually going to be, it depends on the agency or partner persona. Most of them will tend to end up on this end of the spectrum. It's good to have the referral, but usually you

Prior to support, the marketing opportunities, the true partnership, this is not just about the affiliate kind of revenue. Yeah.

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Viktor (33:45.739)

All right, so by working with your product that gets them awareness, which is a foot in the door for that partner in a new type of client where they're not present yet, basically, that as well.

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Jani Vrancsik (34:01.77)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then, yeah, again, if we're going through this as a checklist, you've got the alignment. You identified these partners. You have a program with benefits. Maybe I don't really like to go there in the early days, but you may even figure it out some tiers with different benefits and requirements. Then you actually need to do the actual work. You need to reach out.

You need to engage them, you need to onboard them, you need to provide them with enablement materials, playbooks, teach them how to sell your product. You will need better cards, sales training, technical training, the certification, you need to set up communication channels, there's gonna be Slack, email, quarterly business reviews.

You need to figure out these cadences, the partner and figure out what they want to, what's the way of working for you. And yeah, that's where it actually starts to kick in and you will see conversations happening. You will learn from these partners. You will learn much more about your partner markets that in the previous steps were just like laying the groundwork, laying the foundation. This is where you actually start to work.

One funny example I usually tell is that, you know, like in the GSIs, the global system integrator space, Accenture is one of the most committed partners. Everyone wants to work with Accenture and get the visibility out of it. And then in one of my previous jobs, we noticed that we had a lot of Accenture users on the product.

There were hundreds of people actually using and signing in into the product. So we just set the target, just go and get Accenture as a partner. As lofty as it sounds, it sounds, it's undoable with hundreds of people from Accenture. So then I went in, I tried to identify these people. We've got some email addresses because they have signed up for the product. And I thought it's going to be easy. Just go out, you talk to them. And like you.

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Jani Vrancsik (36:27.842)

they already love and use the product. And then what I've learned one step later was that, and that's usually the case with a lot of global companies is that most of their end user, or like they did the actual developers, because in this case it was a technical product, they outsource the work to their Asian teams, to their Indian teams, or Vietnamese teams because it's cheaper to hire developers there than in the US. So usually business is done in the US, in the UK, and the actual development work is done somewhere completely different. In this case, it was India. So then we noticed that, yeah, these users are coming from India. And then I realized that only in India, only in Accenture, there are 200,000 people working for Accenture.

Viktor (37:29.192)

Sounds like a big opportunity.

Jani Vrancsik (37:49.886)

And then we realized we have like 100 developer using our product out of 200,000 people only in Accenture, only in India. We thought we had... Sounds like a big opportunity, but what we needed to realize is we thought we had good coverage with Accenture. And then we needed to learn that it's nothing. It's not like a 200,000 people organization just from one of their countries. They're not going to bet on something.

that a fraction of their people know or use. So it sounds like a big opportunity, but at that point, it just seemed impossible to get into. So it's like recruiting the partners, it sounds easy. And in the Shopify example I shared before, you just scrape the partner listing page and you reach out. They're usually gonna be smaller agencies from like 10 people to about 100. It's much easier to get into those. Sometimes it's just gonna be much more complex.

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Viktor (38:20.875)

So are you saying that even though getting the prestige of a larger GSI, you should, at least in the beginning, reach out to smaller system integrators, let's say local in the market, who can respond fast to customer requests, give that hands-on support?

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Jani Vrancsik (38:41.746)

They're going to be much more hands-on and eager to work with you. So in this never-ending quest of balancing short-term revenue goals and getting Accenture as the big hairy, lofty end goal, you need to find this balance. And usually, you'll find that smaller agencies, they're going to be much more agile. And if you have a good value proposition, they have the expertise in your space, they're going to be easier to work with. And they will end up, obviously, with smaller opportunities. But it's going to be much quicker to churn out those deals and close them. So yeah, that's how it usually goes.

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Viktor (39:27.007)

You make a good point there. Plus, I love what you called out in the beginning or one point earlier, collaboration, because how can you expect a partner program to work well? Imagine just internally, if you have no communication between let's say product marketing and sales, you're gonna have three siloed, three completely different areas of responsibility going in three different directions. Are you gonna make progress?

Not really. You add up these vectors and then you're realizing, I've stood in one place all this time. Same goes with the partner program then. So reduce the, I love that you call that, reduce the friction by setting up a comms channel, give them enablement material. How could you expect the salesperson to thrive if you aren't training them on product updates?

And ideally your product keeps evolving to strengthen their position in the market and tap into new markets. If a partner doesn't know that, how can they sell your product effectively, right? I love that you called that out.

We've been talking a lot about partnership management and I think we covered like four or five points on five was it that from the program. That's a lot to remember. So for those still watching, what would you say the top takeaways should be the top three takeaways from today's session that everyone should remember about partnerships.

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Jani Vrancsik (40:53.462)

Yeah, so to sum it up, first and foremost, I think key point is figure out your direct sales first. If you can't sell, you may be a founder, you may be a revenue leader. If you can't sell it in the first place, how can you expect others, a partner, to do it well and to be motivated to do it? So figure out direct sales first and then comes partnerships.

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Jani Vrancsik (41:24.01)

Contrary to the popular partnership narrative, partnership leaders will talk about partnerships. That's what they do, that's what they love.

Viktor (41:33.003)

That's why they make money.

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Jani Vrancsik (41:51.522)

But I think regardless of, that's where they make money and that they're incentivized to do that, to sell partnerships to leaders. But figure out, I think it's regardless of what stage you're in, figure out direct sales first. The second is with all the discussion we've had on alignment, you should get it as a partner leader, you should get a seat at the table. And by that, I mean that you can't and shouldn't agree to being a secondary priority. Because you have a direct sales team established already.

Usually when you start as a first partnership hire, there's already maybe a dozen people in direct sales side in different roles. That's an established, existing revenue engine that you have. The point to figure out is how you enter this space and not be a secondary priority because usually you want to keep what's working. If you add channel sales, you add partners into this mix, there are going to be some tough conversations usually. You need to take a stand, you need to get a seat at the table.

And you shouldn't be neglected. And that's something I've been guilty many times before. But you should be able to be heard and be prioritized. And not just some side. You shouldn't consider partnerships as an afterthought after direct sales. And then the third thing would be, the third takeaway is do things that don't scale well.

Especially in the early days. I see a lot of discussions in the partnership space around partner management platforms, PRMs, the tooling, what's the software that you're gonna use. You don't really need a PRM. Even when you're getting started, your partners are not gonna be logging in and sending you leads there and registering deals.

They're not gonna watch the videos, the enablement content that you put out there, you don't need to think about anything like that in the early days. You just need to do things that don't scale, which is talk to your partners, just learn about them, what their priorities are and align with them. So you shouldn't really focus on the under tooling in the beginning.

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Viktor (44:08.255)

Yeah, it goes back to what you said in the first point is, you need to figure out direct sales first.

Second is if you don't have a process that's figured out and repeatable, what do you wanna scale? Like you're gonna scale something that isn't working and you're gonna spend a ton of time on that. So basically you said, figure out direct sales first. Otherwise, like if you don't know how to sell the product, how can you expect a partner to?

Then get C level executive alignment and buy in that in commitment that partnerships is something that we're doing, whether it takes two or even five years, it's a long term project and then do things that don't scale because you're just going to burn your runway, burn resources into something that's not working and then you have to change up everything. That's the three things, right?

Jani Vrancsik (44:56.37)

Yeah, that sounds like a good summary. Yeah, thank you.

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Viktor (45:00.007)

Perfect. Thanks, Jani. Love that we made time for this and thanks for being on board. For those people who want to find out more, get in touch with you. Where should they find you?

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Jani Vrancsik (45:10.978)

Yeah, thanks for having me again. The best way to reach out to me is going to be on LinkedIn. We're going to put it in the notes. Yoni Wronchik on LinkedIn. That's where I can get back to you the quickest as possible.

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Viktor (45:25.383)

Yeah, for those still watching, I'll leave a link to Yanni's LinkedIn profile in the description below. Thanks Yanni again for coming on board and enjoy the rest of your day. Talk soon.

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Jani Vrancsik (45:34.914)

Talk soon, bye bye.

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