SaaS Connect - SaaS Partnerships & SaaS Leaders

On this episode, Alex Glenn , CEO at Partnerhub , and Sunir Shah , CEO at AppBind , discuss the keys to successful agency partnerships in 2023. Partnerhub is a purpose-built platform for digital agencies and tech solutions to find one another and grow together. AppBind is a subscription manager to set up clients without the hassle or expenses. Marketing dominates the conversation. The top pain poi...

On this episode, Nick Valluri , Head of Partnerships at Coda* — a collaborative all-in-one doc platform — shares how he came to switch his three tech partnership philosophies when working at Coda. His first philosophy brought to trial was that you have to build momentum and a business case and have a ton of developers before you hire a team. The second philosophy was that you need really big-name...

On this episode, Samrah Khan , Global Head of Industry Technology & Data Partners at Google , explains how to win with Google in a partnership scenario. Google partners either co-market, co-innovate or co-sell, and they can also leverage Google’s sister companies. When you would like to partner with Google, it’s important to understand the culture, and Samrah explains their core culture elemen...

On this episode, Neeti Gupta , Head of Hyperscaler Business Development and Alliances (Microsoft) at VMware — a cloud computing and virtualization technology company that runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS — shares partnering secrets about approaching and navigating the 300,000-employee conglomerate that is Microsoft. In summary, she advises that before approaching Microsoft, you must have...

On this episode, Francois Grenier , Head of Platform Partnerships at Laika — an all-in-one compliance solution — speaks about the real value of tech partnerships from the viewpoint of two very different companies he used to work for: Typeform and Sendoso. Typeform is an online form-building and surveys platform while Sendoso is an internet gifting platform. For Typeform, the value of tech partners...

On this episode, Bernhard Friedrichs , Founder of PartnerXperience and Rob Rebholz , Co-Founder and CEO at Superglue , speak about succeeding in the European partner ecosystem. PartnerXperience helps B2B SaaS businesses unlock the power of partnerships. Its founder, Berhard Friedrichs, has spent the last 15 years building partnerships globally. Superglue is a partner engagement platform. The co-fo...

On this episode, James Huang , SVP Alliances at Copado — a low-code platform that helps companies deploy Salesforce faster — explains how the company has effectively strategically partnered with Salesforce. James provides insights about how other companies can do the same. Copado experienced explosive growth by partnering with Salesforce. Three years ago it had 30 employees and this year it ended...

On this episode, Lauren Salanitro , Co-Founder of Women of Customer Success, and Partnerships Lead at Vanta , an organization that helps companies achieve compliance quickly and easily, talks about laying the foundations of a partnership program.  She also expands on identifying strategic partners, the important questions to ask when vetting partners and measuring the effectiveness of strateg...

On this episode, Charles Yang , Senior Director of Product Management at ScreenMeet , and Tehsin Daya , Head Of Partnerships at Groove , share their journeys with Salesforce, the leading CRM platform, and how their partner program AppExchange accelerated their kickstart. AppExchange is an enterprise cloud marketplace with more than 7000 apps and certified consulting organizations that work with Sa...

On this episode, Tarik Dwiek , Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake — a single, global platform that powers the data cloud — speaks about lessons learned building their ecosystem from scratch. The mission was to make partners successful and create mutually beneficial relationships. Tarik says that from an ISV perspective, it all starts with an amazing product innovation, and the first step is...

On this episode, Maria Pergolino , Chief Marketing Officer at ActiveCampaign , speaks about finding differentiation and what ActiveCampaign did to create a difference in the market. ActiveCampaign’s SaaS platform is a CRM and customer experience automation platform. The platform was launched in 2016 and boasts more than 150,000 customers, with an ARR of $200 million. Maria explains what she means...

On this episode, Amy Gorman , Vice President ISV Sales at Salesforce , shares her journey at Salesforce starting in 2004 and the lessons she’s learned. Salesforce provides CRM software and applications with a focus on customer service, marketing automation, analytics and app development. When Amy began at Salesforce, there were 500 employees. She says, “It was a really exciting time to be part of...

On this episode, Amelia Kirby , Global Head of Technology Platform Partnerships, Work Products at Meta, speaks about the three key learnings building Meta’s first Workplace partner program. Workplace is Meta’s SaaS enterprise technology for organizational communication. Amelia describes the challenges of their first partner ecosystem, sharing key lessons to help others build a partner ecosystem fo...

On this episode, Alex Glenn , CEO at Partnerhub , a platform for digital agencies and tech solutions, talks about whether partner commissions attract and retain digital agency partners. Alex provides sources of information to answer the question of whether digital agencies are attracted or retained by commissions. A poll on LinkedIn found that 75% of agencies said they would still refer if the par...

On this episode, Amit Sinha , President at WorkSpan — a platform for automating and scaling co-selling businesses — talks about getting ecosystems to sell together. Amit starts by explaining that organizations that lack internal structures, mechanisms and policies to govern their ecosystem involvement can easily fail. He outlines the challenges surrounding business ecosystems, such as using risky...

On this episode, Sunir Shah , President of Cloud Software Association , speaks about upcoming plans and events by Cloud Software Association, a SaaS partnership network. Sunir is also CEO at AppBind, a platform that solves the tricky problem of how partner resellers can buy SaaS and bill it to their clients. The Association plans to build a single place where people can gain knowledge about tech p...

On this episode, Alexis Petrichos , Director, Technology Ecosystem at Chili Piper , an inbound lead conversion and scheduling app, shares the partnership experience as a showcase of the actual initiatives between Chili Piper and their first partner, Clearbit. The goal was to find and build a relationship with their first successful partner and then replicate the “formula” to build a successful dep...

On this episode, Allan Knabe , CEO and Co-Founder at apiable.io , and Michael Leppitsch , Head of Data Strategies and Alliances at Ascend.io , discuss fueling API ecosystems with data products for monetization. Apiable.io allows the building of an API developer portal in less than an hour and Ascend.io is a data automation cloud that speeds up workloads 10x faster than ever before.​ The conversati...

On this episode, Rachel Collie , Director, Technology Partnerships and App Marketplace at Unanet, speaks about how reporting structures can blur strategy and how changing them up has the potential to benefit the whole ecosystem. Unanet’s ERP and CRM technologies drive bottom-line growth by connecting their client’s projects, people and financials with greater efficiency and improved decision-makin...

On this episode, Swaroop Kolli , Founder & CEO of Pronto, shares lessons learned from a career in Business Development Partnerships and then becoming Founder of Pronto, a platform that was birthed from the pain points of BDP. Swaroop reveals the challenges of working in Business Development Partnerships, such as tracking via spreadsheets, sharing pipeline data without sharing a system of recor...

On this episode, Bob Moore , Co-Founder and CEO at Crossbeam, a partner ecosystem platform that helps companies build more valuable partnerships, talks about what's really happening with the data that's coming out of the emerging class of software products. The presentation centers on the modern SaaS innovation cycle: Step 1: New technology is developed, which leads to Step 2: New data comes out o...

On this episode, Steve Stewart , Head of Global Channels at Smartsheet — a project and work management and collaboration platform — speaks about how Smartsheet went about building their SaaS partner program journey. When they first started fleshing it out, they only had resell partners. Today they invest in high-value-add solution partners. Smartsheet boasts 185 professional services partners with...

On this episode, Eric Chan , Head of Global Partnerships at Chargebee , talks about how the company matured their partner program between 2019 and 2022. Chargebee was launched in 2011 and the partnerships team was created in 2019. However, because most of the partnerships were due to integrations they were passive and not operationalized. The first step to partnership maturity was to understand wh...

On this episode, John McCabe , VP of Worldwide Channel Sales at SafeGuard Cyber , talks about building a 100% channel sales program in SaaS. SafeGuard Cyber is a platform that protects business communications through NLU (Natural Language Understanding) for cross-channel protection. John has scaled four companies, helping them move to become 100% channel sales organizations. He shares how the move...

On this episode, Gloria Castillo , Sr. Manager, Partner Programs at Loopio , discusses how Loopio built their partner program, outlining five key features as well as lessons learned. Loopio is Request For Proposal software that streamlines and automates the RFP process and allows for easy team collaboration. Particularly interesting is that in 2019 when Loopio wanted to get started building their...