In this Revenue Today podcast episode, host Jared Robin interviews Mary Vue, Head of Partnerships at Zenkari, about the strategic value of integrating partner programs early in a company's product‑market‑fit (PMF) motion. Mary explains how the traditional model of adding partners only at scale is shifting; SaaS companies are now embedding partner strategies during the PMF phase to accelerate growth. She outlines three core benefits: partners provide real‑time feedback that shapes product roadmaps, they become part of the sales DNA reducing friction when scaling, and they enhance customer success by bringing deep implementation experience. Mary backs her points with data from the 2022 State of Partner Ecosystem report and multiple case studies, showing partner‑influenced ARR ranging from 5% to 70% across companies from Series A to $5.7 billion valuations. She argues that early partner investment pays off in revenue, market entry, churn reduction, co‑marketing, and valuation uplift. The episode closes with a call to action for listeners to consider or deepen their partner strategies during the PMF stage.
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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
So excited that you're all here today. We have Mary View. She is the head of partnerships at Zenkari. Incredible, incredible woman. So glad to have her here today. She's an executive member of Cloud Software Association and Partnership Leaders, where she mentors leaders on how to scale global partner programs and teams. So everyone, please welcome the lovely Mary. Mary, take it away.
All right, thank you everybody for having me. I'm just gonna see if I could switch some slides here really quickly, and that way I could share with all of you the, the pretty slides I've made. Let's see here, slideshow. All right, so, so thank you for having me here today, everyone. It's It's quite the act to follow, especially considering Jared is a star over there at Rev Genius. And so a little bit about why I'm here today, right? If all of you or some of you are from New York, I'm sure you've seen these blue signs, question mark out of the blue in the middle of nowhere with an arrow, right? And really what these signs are is that it's They're not there at random. It means information is nearby. And and so for me, I'm really not here by random. I'm really here because you know certainly partner strategy is something you should certainly think about if you're not already thinking about it as you're doing product fit motions, right? And so my hope today is certainly to share with you some of the the trends that I'm certainly seeing in my professional networking communities with my. partner peers, as well as to share some of my own experiences, right? And hopefully the takeaway is if you haven't thought about partnership strategy during your PMF motion, you should. And if you're already doing it, then great, right? I would certainly say continue to invest in it because it will pay back in spades. And so I wanted to kick us off with this slide. This is a PMF framework. I'm sure many of you recognize this slide, you know, the drunken walk to the product fit, hypergrowth, and scale. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to overlay partners in this, right, a partner strategy. So to talk a little bit about the partner trends, I'd say like some odd kind of, or even 4+ years ago, right, some folks call this, hey, you know, the old school style of partnering or legacy style of partnering, or even just, you know, a lot of the enterprise companies, right, today that have partner ecosystems, systems, you know, they really didn't introduce partner strategy until they were in scale mode. And that, and typically at scale mode, they're like, hey, I want to make more money. I'm going to go tap some partners to sell my stuff, to build my stuff, et cetera. So, so that was happening kind of, I'd say 4 years ago, right? I mean, pre-pandemic, et cetera. What is happening today is Essentially, partners are actually— the partner strategy is actually appearing in the product fit motion, right? And there's a couple of different reasons why. Partners take a long time to develop, grow, evolve, right? I mean, think about it. If you're trying to establish a micro version of your company in a partner, I mean, Think about how long it took you to build and scale your company. Now, you have to go and repeat everything in a micro version in a company, not just one company, but 20 companies, 30 companies, 100 companies, 50 companies, 300 companies, right? 1,000 companies. And so, to do that, it does take time. And so, with the explosion of SaaS and ecosystems and apps, You know, many of the SaaS cloud app companies are essentially investing in partners much earlier during the product fit motion, right? And you might think, hey, why, how would this impact me? I mean, partners don't show up until I need to make money, right? I'm still trying to figure out how to message this, how to sell this, how to, you know, implement this, you know, and partners are, you know, probably perhaps not ready for that. Well, I challenge you on that, right? So this is actually a slide from State of Partner Ecosystem 2022 by Crossbeam. They do this every year. This just came out in March. This is probably about the 3rd or 4th year that they've done this. And at the top of this chart is that people invest in partnerships and partner strategies Because, you know, the desire for revenue, right? Certainly everything else is gravy, you know, entry into new markets, churn, marketing, right? Being able to co-market and ride the wave with some other established tech or SaaS company or product. Customer satisfaction, right? I mean, sometimes your team can only do so much, you know, being able to add partners to it kind of helps. of accelerate some of that. And lastly, certainly valuation and share price. While this is kind of the typical reasons why people get into partner strategy investment, what it— what this chart doesn't really address is what is the impact if you pull partner strategy into your PMF motion, right? Whether you're a sales leader, a marketing leader, a CEO, a CTO, you know, you're a leader of your org, if you're an AE or an SDR, right, partnerships are going to matter. And so, when it's in the PMF motion, right, what it really does is, it certainly helps inform your product roadmap, right? So, if your product and engineering team, great, they're ingenious, they have this awesome idea, got you to where you are. Now you're trying to, like, get it to fit in the motion, right? In the market. Partners are working on live customers on a daily basis. They see these problems on a daily basis, and they become a great feedback loop to help inform your product roadmap, to help inform your product and engineering team so that they can work on the right things, work on the things that are faster, create a better UI experience, UI design, user experience, right? Item number 2, sales motion. When you bring partners earlier into the PMF motion, partners become part of your sales DNA. You eliminate any of that kind of sales friction that you might have further down the road when you're trying to scale, right? Because if partners are in your PMF motion, I mean, your, your, your AEs, your SDRs will just automatically say, hey, partners helped me get to President's Club. Versus, you know, versus having this friction of like, why is this, why is this odd third party trying to take away my deal? Right. And lastly, item number 3, your customer success. You know, while you have an awesome customer success team that is implementing innovative customer solutions, partner, think about it, partners are doing this every day already. And partners could essentially help educate even your own customer success team to be even much more innovative, right? You might have a sample set of 40, 50, 100, 200 customers. Partners have had a sample set of 20 years, right? And that's where partners can certainly, you know, by starting in the PMF motion, partners can certainly help become a fabric of your customer success. So I shared some cool stats. I mean, some, some cool impact points, right? I mean, not just me, right? I wanted to show you that, hey, there are a bunch of companies already investing in a partner strategy early on, seed, Series A, Series B, et cetera, right? These are just a few of the companies, a few of the peers that I certainly talk to every day that are already doing that. Right. And their leaders, and, you know, certainly see the value of having a partner strategy during the PMF motion, because it certainly informs the organization top-down, executive level, all the way down to even the field SDR level, right, as well as field marketing. So a couple of fast facts. I do want to share that, hey, you know, I'm not just, you know, sharing other people's data. These are some of my data points that I've encountered, right. So to think about it, you know, some companies never ever even hit 30% of partner-influenced ARR in their entire history. And to be able to plant a partner strategy, invest in partner strategy early on in the PMF, you can certainly have a different impact on your business. So I've highlighted 3 impacts today. One, you know, I've seen you know, either been part of it, built it, frontline, uh, owned it. Um, and the very first one is essentially, you know, certainly see and owned kind of partner influence AR from 5% revenue mix to 50%, you know, from a Series A company that grew into a Series E company with a $5.7 billion valuation, you know. Um, secondly, you know, having worked for a company that, you know, was $100 million ARR and then exited to, um, to acquisition, you know, 40— having worked in that company and driving partner influence ARR throughout the entire business from 40% to 70% mix, that meant that of that $100 million ARR, when we met that threshold, $70 million came from partners, right? That is the impact of that business. And it's not just from a lead gen, demand gen perspective, but it's co-marketing, it's customer success, it's expansion, it's those partners really helping us position our market fit to even get to that $100 million plus, right? And then lastly, you know, for SaaS Series A who say, hey, you know, I'm nowhere near like, $5.7 billion valuation. I'm nowhere near $100 million ARR. I might be, you know, $1 million, or I might be $5 million or $10 million ARR. Introducing a partner strategy during Series A can certainly help inform and actually help create and introduce a new ICP, a new product, a new ARR stream, right? And so those are some of the impactful facts, you know, facts that I can certainly share with all of you today.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds. And you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.
