A NEW BREED OF PARTNER: The Partnership Ecosystem Model Journey of Patrick Biddiscombe, Part 1

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Welcome to the next episode of partnerships in SaaS. As always, I'm your host, Barrett King. And with me today is a super special guest. I think I say that a lot in the show. This is somebody I've actually known for a really long time. So let me introduce him first and I'll tell you how I know him. But this is Patrick. He's a CEO of New Breed and a longtime friend and colleague of mine, a welcome to show man.

Hey, Barrett, thanks for. Thanks for having me. It's been a long time coming. Excited to be on the, on the podcast.

I think it has been a long time coming. So for context for those listening, Patrick and I met. I love this game because we'll say different timelines together, but we met something like seven ish years ago. We'll say ish, right? Is that fair? Seven ish years.

Hanging out in the fishbowl, man. Seven years ago.

That's right. So I, I know I don't talk about obviously HubSpot and where I work right now on the show. You know, too often I try not to, to be quite candid. But Patrick and I met through HubSpot actually, and, uh, I was his channel account manager at one point. And throughout the time we worked together, we became dear friends. So this is a really cool opportunity for me to have a conversation with somebody I admire, I respect and I appreciate. I think he's going to give us a bunch of good insights into how he's thought about partnerships, how he's been able to grow New Breed from, you know, a, we'll say a smaller stage marketing centric agency early on into the kind of juggernaut and really global business that it is today. But before we do that, there's two things I ask everybody, obviously, first and foremost, and I'll ask you in a second here what partnerships means to you. But before that, I gotta ask what's up with the. The audio video, man? Because you're crushing it. And I have a lot of guests in the show. A lot of folks do a really good job. Yours is like extra special. And I think you're in Florida right now. Is that right?

Yeah, I'm in Florida. So I do four months of the year down in Wellington, Florida, which is right outside of West Palm Beach. And I can't tell on my background if you all can see it, but you got some to polemount, some horse saddles, polo player as my, as my additional passion outside of work. And I was getting ready for the coming on the show and I said Ah, crap. I don't have what I need. And actually we have a customer, a company called Remote Control Studios. They shipped me a kit, got me all set up, and that's how we're here today. Looking good.

Yeah. Shout out to Remote Control Studios if you. I don't know them, but if I did know them, I'd say they're crushing it, which is pretty dope. And I think what I would. What I would offer is like, you know, for me, as somebody who does this on a weekly basis, if it makes a difference, right, you have a better conversation because you can capture it better with good audio and certainly good videos. So cheers to you.

Thanks for.

Thanks for doing that. Let me ask the first question with the most important question that I ask everybody, and then we'll get into our story and then I want to ask you more. But let's first talk about what does partnerships mean to you? And obviously, you know, a lot of folks respond with things like, like you did, which is like working together and thinking about a kind of a mutually beneficial relationship. But I want to give you a chance to kind of start fresh on that question and let the audience know, what does partnerships mean to Patrick? To you?

Yeah, you know, it's actually a question I think a lot about and thought a lot about throughout my career. The whole time I've been in charge of New Breed and running the company and owning the business. Partnerships has been a big part of our business model. And interesting enough, I think often it's. I'll give you what I don't think it is. I don't think it's just a distribution channel. And I think that most people really think about it as, what did you do for me today? How to generate more, you know, know referrals. How to generate more MRR, especially in the SaaS partnership space. I think it's much broader than that. And I think if you take a much more broader approach, you're actually going to drive a lot more revenue together. So my definition of partnerships is it's two way street. And I've always taken that approach, whether that's from educational content together to actually understanding each other's businesses, to how Barrett and I's relationship became colleagues and friends. Right. It had to be a two way street. I took a personal focus on his career path and things that he wanted to do, not just, hey, Barrett, did I help you make your number this month? That was important. We need to do that. But that was the outcome of the partnership, not the definition of the partnership.

Such A good call out of. In terms of the definition versus the outcome. There's a lot of folks that I've talked to have said things similarly in the front end of what you described. In terms of thinking about partnership as far as mutually beneficial and whatnot. The two way street I think is important to highlight because it takes it a layer deeper in thinking about what does the counterpart in this dynamic care about business, individual, team or otherwise? And I think what you've done, uniquely, at least in my experience, is really focused on mutual outcomes. So yes, we're trying to solve for the customer. Yes, we're trying to close business and retain customers and all that good stuff that we think about in terms of the KPIs. But at the human part of it. Right. What does it do for Barrett and Patrick as people? That was one of the things that always struck me as a good operating cadence and model and foundational value that you and I early in our relationship established. But we should. Let's go back first. So let's talk about first and foremost quickly. Kind of, you know, opportunity to plug, if you will. But New Breed is a business. So what do you guys do? Just so that the listener can frame out how they think about you as an organization. Then we'll do kind of the journey of how you evolve partnerships as a part of your go to market.

Yeah. So we're a solution partner in the HubSpot ecosystem as well as an app partner in the HubSpot ecosystem. So on the solution partner side, we have a managed service offering. We can help you get stood up on the platform across the. Across all of their five hubs. And then we can actually run campaigns to help you generate demand. And then on the app side, we're building out proprietary apps to help you use the platform better. The most notable one today is an app called Distributely that does advanced lead rotation. So it's extending the platform for our customers and the HubSpot customer base to get more value out of the platform.

Cool. But you weren't always like that. Right? Because I know early on when we started working together, you were more of a marketing agency, more kind of single solution focused. And again, this is not about HubSpot, to be clear with folks listening, but that's up. Obviously one of their kind of more premier, if you will, partnerships. You were a salesforce partner at one point, if I remember correctly, and a few other ecosystems. So when you were early on, you know, buying into and taking over the organization, what were some of the decision processes that you use how did you think about is probably a better way to phrase it. How do you think about partnerships? How do you think about using leverage against other organizations to grow New Breed as a business? Better, faster, stronger.

Yeah. I'll give you a little bit of background to how I stumbled upon partnerships and ecosystem. Having to do it very early in my career. So I don't have the typical career path. I was an intern at New Breed and the job that the internship was, we're currently on ACT CRM, which was an on prem CRM. And we need to move to a more modern CRM. Small business, very small business. Maybe 20 people at the time. And I went out and did some research on CRMs. And this is 2008 for context. You know, the rise of cloud, Google Analytics, Social was all coming out. So it was a kind of a conversion in technology was happening. And I came across Salesforce and selected Salesforce as the CRM for New Breed. But in that process I came across the partner program and I said, well, this is pretty interesting. So I ended up doing the migration for New Breed to Salesforce CRM.

Hold on, hold on. So the intern did the CRM migration. I just want to highlight that really quick, 20 people are aside, but you took a business that was operating on a system and you moved it. So clearly had some brains on you at the time. I mean, obviously that's not an easy task.

You know, I like technology, understood systems and process and I was pretty hungry. Graduated in 08. Wasn't a great time to get a job. So I rolled up my sleeves, figured it out, and again it was like SaaS model was just starting to take off. Salesforce being one of the first to go to the cloud. And so I had the opportunity just with the timing was that there wasn't folks that were better experts on this than. Than me is what I consumed and tested and tried and learned could put me in the room with executives because this was new for everyone. So ended up doing the migration. But I came across the partner ecosystem and it was pretty. It was like late majority. Right. If you kind of think about it, from the. The early adopters to Late Majority scale and crossing the chasm. And so I still got New Breed into the. The partner program. We started helping. I turned that into a job at New Breed, which opportunistically gave me some money. And then I really like this whole ecosystem model. And I was watching all of these great companies kind of scale up inside the Salesforce ecosystem. And I watched Deloitte and Capgemini and Accenture come in, the big players start to do it at a global scale. I go to Dreamforce every year. I'd write a check for my own pocketbook, go to Dreamforce. So I wanted to understand how this ecosystem worked. Right around the same time period, through a mutual contact, I came, came across HubSpot and it was in this very early, there are 100 people in the MIT incubation center. And I don't know, I just had this feeling and I said, I think this is going to be the next salesforce.com and started paying attention to HubSpot. Long story short, serendipity happened, drove down to HubSpot, opened the door, met with Brian Halligan, happened to be coming up to Burlington, Vermont. We had dinner. The rest is. The rest is history. But learned and watched in the Salesforce ecosystem really shaped how I thought about partnerships. And I learned a lot of great things that they did and a lot of things that they didn't do well. And that taught me a lot about how late majority partnerships and getting to watch them go through those transitions. I read a bunch of books, you know, beyond the Cloud by Mark Benioff. I read a lot about a company called Blue Wolf, which was their, one of their top solution partners in the ecosystem. I watched the app exchange evolve. I was close to a company called Insight Squared, which was one of the top apps in the Salesforce ecosystem system. I was watching a company called Steel Brick, which was a CPQ Mulesoft, which eventually got acquired by. And so I was paying attention to all these companies and I'm a little bit of like a, you know, historian on businesses. I like going back and looking at those old business models and understanding what, what are the things that they did. And it really shaped my view on how to scale partnerships. And there's so many core things that as much as the world's changed and technology changes and business models change at the end of the the core tenants of partnership are still the same. So I've been able to take a lot of that early learnings and keep applying it to our partnership with HubSpot. We've got several other partnerships, but that's the most mature one today.

That's interesting to talk about and I appreciate the context to the idea of stages of evolution of the program itself and where as an organization at your size, maturity, scalability, you should or should not decide to tap into it. I'm curious, as you think about kind of reflecting back on that time more than anything, are there certain indicators that you would Call out. So if I'm like, let's picture someone's listening to this, right? And they're sitting there saying, I'm a tech firm, I'm a services platform, I am who I am. And in context I'm listening to this thinking, gosh, I probably should think about partnerships differently and, or jump into it for the first time. And there's some leading indicators that you would want to share with that person. Thinking about most specifically evaluating fit for themselves into an ecosystem that is like again, stage of growth or product market fit in terms of their ability to solve for a customer. Are there some indicators you had there that you could reflect back on and share?

Yeah. So I think a couple things. One, let's start at the business model level. I'll give you the perspective. I've been on the partner side, so on the solution partner side and the app partner side. So I'll go from, from that side of it versus being the hub of the ecosystem. So the first thing I would say is make sure it's, it's core to your business model. Right. We've got lots of other partnerships that I've tested throughout the years. The most successful ones have been, is when we built it right back into our business and that it's a big, big part of our business. The ones that you're like, oh great, we can occasionally resell or we think it could have value, treat them differently. It's, it's, I think that's different than a partnership. I put that more in the resale bucket versus true partnership. So one, make sure it's core to your business model. Two, make sure there's economic alignment. Right. So HubSpot did a really cool thing. They, they did lifetime value on the subscription. So it made the economics alignment really strong. I think a lot of software companies get that wrong in my opinion. They want to do like a referral agreement versus an actual resale agreement. HubSpot nailed that. I know that was early on with Pete Caputa and Brian Halligan. That was really important to them to make sure that there was economic value and reinvesting into the partnership. But since you're going to build your business around the platform, make sure the economics linkage and make sure there's alignment and then you can really start to build it into your business versus if the economics aren't there, I can tell you over time you're not going to stick through that partnership.