Episode Summary
A partnership is a relationship between two or more companies who come together to provide even more value to their customers. There are different types of partnerships — strategic, channel, or technical — and they can have a significant impact on the business. Each such relationship plays a specific part in the company’s strategy and must be entered into after giving it a lot of thought.
In this episode of Taking the Lead, our host Christina Brady welcomes Jessie Shipman, the CEO and founder of Fluincy. Jessie and Christina get into the importance of partnerships and how a partnership strategy can improve business. They discuss strategic, channel, and technical partnerships, partnerships as a go-to-market strategy, and how a partnership team can achieve success.
Guest Profile
- Name: Jessie Shipman
- What she does: Jessie is the CEO and founder of Fluincy.
- Company: Fluincy
- Noteworthy: Jessie started her career as a high school history teacher and then moved into systems administration. She was a Mac systems administrator, and after she moved to work in the MDM space, she became a teacher of systems administrators. In the next chapter of her career, Jessie worked at Apple. She spent three years teaching K-12 Systems Administrators how Apple devices can unlock their teachers' creativity and passion and how to accomplish that with the Apple ecosystem. Then, she shifted to Strategic Partner Enablement. Today, Jessie is the CEO and founder of Fluincy, a company that enables partner selling by connecting sellers to relevant learning at the right time.
Key Insights
- In partnerships, the most important thing is to find joint value. During three years at Apple, Jessie's job was to work with K-12 schools and help them adopt Apple, and in 2017, she ended up at the SE organization, where she worked on partnerships. Apple has three types of partnerships: career, channel, and strategic. Although she did not know what partnerships were then, Jessie realized that joint value was necessary. "I had some amazing colleagues who worked on the account management part and never wanted to diminish our work together. We were going in and saying, 'What is the joint value here? What are you supposed to tell people?' We can't just be like, 'You could put a Deloitte logo on a deck now.' That's not a partnership, although there's a lot of strategy out there that says that that is a partnership. I didn't have a background in partnerships, and I was like, 'I guess the best thing to do is be curious. What do they need? What do they expect? Who are these people on the other end of this, working at these companies, who are also charged with making this partnership work? What are the KPIs? What are the goals? What are the expectations?' And so, I got really curious for a year and a half of digging."
- The customer is not a partner. Although many sales organizations have a strategy of calling their customers their partners, these are two completely different terms. One of the main differences is that the partnership is based on the mutual value of two companies coming together to provide joint value to the customer. Jessie notes that if you are selling somebody something, that's not a partnership. "It's two or more companies working together to bring a joint value to a customer or a set of customers that doesn't exist without that partnership or without them together. […] The only time where you can get away with calling a customer a partner is in your early days or if you have a new product. You can onboard a new customer and have them sign what we call, in the very early-stage startup world, a design partner. So this is a customer who loves what you're doing and is willing to go through all the ugly of a new product and provide feedback, and then they get a discount."
- Ecosystem versus partnership. In addition to the partnership, companies also have a channel team. A channel partner is a company — a reseller, service provider, vendor, seller, or agent — partnered with another organization to market or sell its services, products, or technologies. According to Jessie, the channel has been around forever, and when defining it, we can hear more and more about the concept of ecosystem versus partnership. "Channel is, 'I've got something to sell, and I want to have access to a pool of customers, and so, I'm going to partner.' It is a genuine partnership where I want you to sell my thing, and I'll give you a commission or some margin on my product for you to bring it to your customers as a particular solution to whatever problem. And that is a fully legitimate partnership."
Episode Highlights
Technology Partnership
“Tech partnerships have emerged from the explosion of SaaS. Companies like Salesforce have so many products that live under the Salesforce banner and can solve almost every problem. But they also have the App Exchange, where they house thousands of their partners who solve niche or nuance problems in conjunction with their solution. So it’s like the idea of a single pane of glass — or even the Oracles of the world or the SAPs who have all these different products that live under their main umbrella. Obviously, large enterprises still use a lot of those products, but smaller or mid-market companies can’t afford Oracle, they can’t afford SAP, and they can’t afford the system integrator to implement them because they’re so complicated.
So they’re going out, and they’re finding a SaaS product. They find a little SaaS product that either has a freemium model or a very small per-user fee, and they sign up for it, and they start working on it because it solves a particular problem. And then, they decide, ‘Okay, I need to accomplish this other thing, but this product doesn’t do it.’ The first place they go to is the marketplace of that favored product. And you can click through the mark and be like, ‘Okay, this integrates and solves this problem.’ Or actually, the first thing they’re doing is going and talking to their peers.”
Partnership As a Go-to-Market Strategy
“If we think about marketing and sales as traditional go-to-market, partnerships aren’t its own vertical; it’s actually the funnel that surrounds all of it. It’s not partner sales and partner marketing; it’s like partnerships as a strategy from the CEO all the way down. […]
So, the ecosystem idea does have to be all-encompassing. Ecosystem-qualified leads can flow in and around both sales and marketing. It’s not, ‘Let’s stand up partnerships and have it be this whole other GTM.’ That’s not it. This is the thing that’s going to sort of bridge the gap that has been in this whole competition between SQLs and MQLs and has existed since attribution became a thing. That causes all of this internal animosity and competition that is like, ‘Are we even on the same team anymore?’ Partnerships eliminate that.”
The Path to a Successful Partnership
“It starts with the CEO. It has to be one of those things where the CEO is brought in on ecosystems, and everything flows out of that. So, instead of having revenue KPIs, you have KPIs on how many referrals your team is giving. You have KPIs on giving instead of getting, which is a tough one for a lot of sales executives — and also for CEOs — to swallow because it is a long game. But it is the future; so, starting it right now and letting it be a little painful is super important. I’ve seen it work grassroots, but it’s hard, especially if there is a tendency, particularly in SaaS, to only want to invest in places that have an obvious immediate ROI. Like, I put in $1 here, and in a quarter, I’m going to get $2 back, or I’m going to get $5 or $10 or $15 back; I’m going to spend money there. [… ]
If there’s a legitimate partnership that’s been created where you add value to them, they add value to you, and you choose to give first, you are going to have an incredible flywheel effect. You’re going to push on the flywheel, and you’re going to keep pushing on the flywheel. What’s going to happen is all of the people at that other company are going to become your champions with all of their customers because you keep flowing leads to them.”
