PartnerOps Partner

Send us Fan Mail Partner Recruitment is an often overlooked aspect of program development. It lives with program leads and ends up lost in spreadsheets and email.  Odds are, even a startup has all the tools you need to build a basic partner recruitment model that creates more transparency and improves your partner experience. In this episode, practical guidance on how to achieve that reality as we...

Send us Fan Mail Geez what a title.... but why not be specific?  In this episode, the value of enhancing your Crossbeam (or really any) Salesforce widget with the power of Spekit, a just-in-time learning platform designed to bring enablement and education to where your teams work in real time.  I put this tech together for the first time at 6sense and found it incredibly helpful for improving how...

Send us Fan Mail Building trust with Partners, like with people, takes time. 2023 is going to be a hard year for many and the word of the year is going to be 'Retention.'  Shift the narrative with your Partners and start measuring what you GIVE instead of what you GET. Tune in for ideas on: Leads MDF  SPIFFs Training Account Mapping Renewals and Retention Reporting The main idea? Give mo...

Send us Fan Mail SaaS has a well established book of metrics as an industry that tend to revolve around a few key pillars of Revenue, Customer Behavior, and Marketing Costs. There's a lot to talk about within that space alone. If you've been listening then you know I tend to drill down toward Ecosystem. I'll come back to a primer on SaaS metrics soon, promise, but today is a convers...

Send us Fan Mail Another week, another podcast!  This week we go back to basics and review foundations of Partner Architecture. Yup... I know that's also obvious in the title.  What do we cover?  - Why Architecture Matters - Core Assumptions  - Ideas for a Good Foundation  Also, if you're interested in building your network around Partner Operations use this link to sign up for a monthly...

Send us Fan Mail Closing out 2022 with a podcast is just fun. This is far and away my favorite 'thing' outside of work that's still professionally oriented. My apologies in advance as this one goes a couple minutes past my typical 10 minute goal, but there's just a lot of good things to say.  This week's episode covers the ideas in my weekly newsletter over on LinkedIn (li...

Send us Fan Mail Continue the journey as I shared where I've landed, why I picked it, what I'm excited about, and why I still have some concerns.  As always, I approach this with transparency and honest thoughts. I feel fortunate to have landed quickly at such a strong company with a manager that comes with stellar reviews from my personal network and a chance to start before the end of...

Send us Fan Mail This week I got a challenging response from a new friend - it's more than Partner Operations.  I'll admin, I get sucked into existing frameworks pretty easily. I think it's the nature of my personality, lots of fun personal history we can talk about sometime over a beer, but ultimately it's this desire to figure out what IS and work WITHIN that model to drive c...

Send us Fan Mail Working in SaaS #4: Job Search Update and Offers  Another lightning fast discussion around my job search! Tune in to learn about:  The three different roles I got into process on within a couple of weeks of being laid off The disparity between three roles all tied to 'Partner Operations'  How I got into those processes (hint: people make the difference!) What the process...

Send us Fan Mail The short answer: A jack of all trades supporting a wide set of initiatives to drive Partnership process deeper into the org they serve. The long answer: It's really not well defined and will largely depend on your organizational maturity around Partnerships. This role could be responsible for the following (non-exhaustive) list of "things" within the organization: ...

Send us Fan Mail Working in SaaS is not all roses and sunshine, as we're seeing in the news week over week. One big risk for anyone in and around SaaS - layoffs.  This week, I talk about my first experience with layoffs, how to spot them coming (hint: it's all about growth), and the strange upside around perception that comes from being included in the cut.  Pull up a saddle and let me b...

Send us Fan Mail I stumbled into SaaS almost 15 years ago after working for low pay as a restaurant manager coming out of college. I got a referral in, underbid the salary, and they took a risk. I'm now here to tell you - there are great things about working in SaaS.  A few things I talk about in this episode: Education requirements for SaaS work (hint: there are basically none) Career mobili...

Send us Fan Mail You ever wonder what a job search in SaaS looks like following a layoff?  Yeah.. me either, but here we are and if talking through it offers some encouragement for the people I know recently impacted, why not be open on the journey?  I was going to talk about the pros and cons of working in SaaS but after a few tries realized those were worth their own shorts, so tune in next week...

Send us Fan Mail If you work in Professional Services AT a software company, your job is not about Professional Services. Yes, that's what you do each day, but you do it in service to the Total Lifetime Value of the customer. The TLV impacts retention, which impacts valuation, which impacts shareholder value. Professional Services itself is wrapped up in the Customer Acquisition Cost so there...

Send us Fan Mail Operations is almost an entirely 'behind the scenes' function for your average SaaS company. Projects in this space invariably touch 'live' environments where people are working and downtime is extremely limited or prohibited, depending on the system. The result is that most of the best moves happening in your ops ecosystem are nearly invisible to anyone outsid...

Send us Fan Mail In 2022, I was unexpectedly laid off from what I thought was going to be a much longer and more lucrative journey in a SaaS unicorn. This podcast is born from that time, driven to explore the unknown side of SaaS companies and the constant ebb and flow of new technology. It was originally called 'The Partner Syndicate' but... well... I changed it.  I got to thinking abou...

Send us Fan Mail Day 5️⃣ The future of #PartnerOps (hint: think #ecosystem ) Time for some speculation! Where, exactly is PartnerOps heading in an ecosystem driven world? Getting to the future requires we consider a bit about the current state. #PartnerOps is not like other careers. ❌ There's not a clear entry point - usually pivoting in from program management (where ops begins) or an inter...

Send us Fan Mail Day 4️⃣ New #PartnerOps Hires - Tips for Success If you're new to #PartnerOps or just feeling a bit lost in your current role you might benefit from a few tips on getting started that can also help an established role get re-centered in an off season. ✅ Map the Partnership Processes. Go find every process tied to Partnership, write it all down, get it reviewed, and collect i...

Send us Fan Mail Day 3️⃣ Refining the Scope: #PartnersOps or #BusinessAnalyst ? Partner Operations, more than many other operational roles in my experience, tends to be a catchall title reflecting a deeper need for operational AND programmatic support. Operational work falls to the first few program hires trying to stand things up and by the time an Ops hire shows up on the scene there's a mi...

Send us Fan Mail Todays Post: 2️⃣ Making Your First #PartnerOps Hire Yesterday (see link in comments because LinkedIn posting needs help), I covered a laundry list of things that typically fall into/around Partner Operations. The potential scope of the role combined with the timing of your first hire determines whether you look INTERNALLY or EXTERNALLY for your first partner ops role. Let's t...