E40: Partnership Lessons from COELEVATE with Author Richard Ezekiel

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, and every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes.

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My guest today is Rich Ezekiel, who is the author of the new book Co-Elevate. And Rich has held senior positions in partnerships across a bunch of legendary companies, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, Seagate, Andreessen Horowitz. And at Andreessen, Rich had exposure to a bunch of other great companies in their formative stages around ecosystem and partnerships like Pinterest, Lyft, OfferUp, and a bunch more. So I'm really excited to talk to Rich about how to think about structuring partner programs. Is it right for you? What are the core components in building these ecosystems? And his book launches on July 29th, which will be a few days after this pod drops. So you can mark it in your wishlist on Amazon. Don't go to a bookstore, buy it on Amazon. And I'm excited for this one. So thanks for joining, Rich.

Awesome, Kyle Norton. Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

So the word partnerships, ecosystem, all this stuff gets thrown around in a whole bunch of different contexts from like, you know, very basic referral, referral reseller partnerships all the way through to like complex product integrated technical alliances. And so in your framework, what You talk about deals masquerading as partnerships. So like, how do you define partnerships? And then we'll dig in and like tease out some of the other definitions there.

It's a, it's a really good question. And I would say, you know, Kyle, being in, you know, in the world of business for so many decades and a lot of different cultures, leadership styles, you know, you name the company and you name the location, it's, it's super interesting how the word just partnerships gets thrown around. And it means a lot of different things to a lot of different folks. And it's all about the context of how it's being used. You know, in relation to co-elevate and, you know, when I have the subtitle and I'll point at the book here, right, it's right next to me on display. But this book is about growing companies, about building consumer value with strategic partnerships. And in this context, I lay out probably like 7 to 8 flavors of the types of partnerships to build now. And they could be product, they could be platform, they could be marketing. And there's B2B, B2C, there's B2B2C, there's different motions, there's different flavors of product, there's different types of where you fit in the supply chain. So what I try to do is add some structure to that term. And it's a great way to start this conversation because what is it? And, you know, I wish I could distill it down, the book, into a very crisp answer. But, you know, it's a combination of relationships. It's a combination of go-to-market strategy. It's a combination of the products and services that we can build together between companies to create something that you couldn't do on your own. And so at a super high level, I'm happy to kind of dig in on kind of the elements of what a partnership is. But I've also tried to outline a methodology of how to do one. So that's also an exciting thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's dig into those elements. So, so just on this topic of definitions, how would— what are the core components of a partnership in your mind?

Well, I mean, it really starts with an idea, an idea of a partnership, meaning, you know, I get into, I think, like the second or third chapter of the book, really about understanding what makes your own company tick. So this is not just about what makes the partner company tick. It's first about what makes your company tick, meaning what are the key performance indicators, KPIs, of how you're looking to build your business, how you measure success of your own business. What's the timing trajectory? What's the investment? What's the cost? What's the resources to execute that? What's what I call, and we've all heard this in different, you know, adventures we've had, you know, what's your BHAG or your BHAGs? These are your big North Star goals you're trying to achieve. Now, after understanding those as a, you know, if it's a CRO, a partnership manager, whomever is tasked with going after understanding the partnership strategy and defining what it can be, it starts with really unpacking your own company and understanding what those core metrics are for success, and then understanding which parts of those actually can be accelerated. Where do we need to save cost? Where do we need to build better talent or expertise? To really reduce risk, potentially time, potentially cost, as I mentioned, and create even something new and differentiated that you may not have done on your own because it's not a core competency. So, so few bits and pieces there, Kyle, you know, that, you know, I could dig into a little bit more, but it does start with first really deeply understanding your own, what I call SWOT analysis. We all know what that is. Second stage is what I call a P-SWOT. A P-SWOT is your prospect or your partner SWOT. It's sort of a reflection of your prospect and finding a very strong counterbalance of your strengths, your weaknesses, what it stands for, and finding the counterbalance of really a strong, a strong complementary relationship to kind of meet the KPI. So I know that's conceptual. There's a lot of examples in the book I go through, but that's part of the methodology, you know, kind of blending, not just starting at the point of saying I want to do a partnership. It's actually, hey, what are you trying to do with your company? What value are you trying to create for, for customers?

And when do you advise companies— actually, I'm going to come back to that question. So should everybody be thinking about building partnerships?

I think every, every company should think about it. I think every company should assess if it's the right growth mechanism for them. And the question is, how do you do that in a, in a methodical way so that you're not sucking up resources and time? And maybe it's not the right growth mechanism because you're too early stage. You may be pre-product market fit and, you know, it's not a growth engine for go-to-market. But pre-product market fit, there are opportunities for different types of partnerships that can accelerate the ability to license technology. Like you wouldn't go build a cloud service on your own or like go create a social network or like, you know, build a search engine. Like there's pretty obvious kinds of relationships you want to build from day one that you know what's core versus context to your business.

And is that not just a vendor relationship versus a partnership?

I mean, I mean, it depends, you know, in early stages of relationships, if you do, it's a, this kind of goes into another, like, what's vendor, what's supplier, what's partnership? You know, I would, let me give you an example. Say, you know, we're creating a company and we're day one and we have, we believe is a pretty killer application that can that can add some new capabilities to a social media platform. This is pretty on the spot making this up, Kyle Norton. Now, rather than reaching out to the standard folks that have the majority of social media presence, maybe there's a new set of tools that they've announced at their recent conference, and they're showcasing maybe one of their influencers on using this new capability. So rather than going in and being another developer, being another app provider, is there a way that you could showcase the latest capabilities of, of that social media platform? So rather than just being a customer, you could say, how could you be an advocate for their new technology and basically showcase it in a way that could bring value to more of their developer ecosystem? So it's kind of digging in in different ways. To— now, that may not be the approach you want to take. You may want to do a vendor relationship, right? And just kind of sign a license deal and, you know, and, you know, and, and go from there and focus on your core competency. And but that's the thing to debate. That's what, you know, I do cover, you know, in part of the Co-Elevate method is like the assessment is, you know, you don't want to be a distraction. I've been in, I've been in the seat driving distractions. You know, and this is not all a rosy picture of partnerships. You know, I've been in the seat where it's like I'm using valuable resources in pre-product market fit. That's wasting time, money, and efforts of a company. Now learning— Yeah, go ahead.

So give me the rest of that assessment. So if the listener is a CRO, they're post-product market fit. And, you know, they're scaling their org and they're trying to assess whether or not they should be pursuing a partnership strategy. How would you advise them to assess whether that's viable for them?

Yeah, you know, I kind of lay it out in a three-layer cake, you know, in terms of a visual. And it does start with what I was mentioning, the, you know, building what I call the strategic business plan. The SBP, and that is more of, uh, what is the company, like I was mentioning earlier, what is your company's business plan? Number one, just first go deep and understand that. Number two, um, really understand your partnership strategy to help to accelerate, amplify, um, what that strategic business plan is. So triangulating on those KPIs of what you're looking to achieve and by when. Defining what a partnership strategy can be, and then what is your partnership plan to execute the strategy? And I break down each of these elements, but the core part of it is to understand how partnerships can play a role. Like, for example, I'll just— you said sort of post-product market fit, and now you're looking to expand the business. Say, for example, you know, one vector is, you know, regionally. you know, how are you looking at, you know, reaching a new country, a new culture, um, outside of— we'll just say we're headquartered in the US. Um, so, you know, a company like Evernote, I, you know, I kind of break this, unpack this and break this out in the book is, you know, Evernote, strongest market, of course, the US. Um, and when they were looking at sort of demographic fit and company fit, uh, Japan actually, uh, sort of came to their top 3. Of how they should assess, you know, bringing their product and their experience in. Now, there's cultural challenges in doing that. There's language challenges. There's even how do you go to market differently? And after doing an assessment of even their logo, was it an appropriate logo for the company? Even their name wasn't an appropriate name for the Japanese market. They shifted and worked with actually incumbents inside in Japan to be the resellers of record and to co-brand and partner the service with an established brand with Japanese customers. So, so there could be ways to amplify and bring your brand in where it may not be a competency you want to build out in your company that you— a lot of folks do kind of build a business case and say, we need a local Japan team. Okay, great. Like, We need to build that cultural bridge. We need to understand the language, understand the culture. But are there ways to get faster to market in a shorter period of time, lower cost, with the right structured partnership that creates equal incentive for both parties to grow the business? So region is one. Region, country, kind of break that out, you know, quite a bit because I kind of see that as, you know, a next growth vector of when you, when you find it kind of humming along in your current market or your domestic market, you know, folks are looking to expand to other types of customers. The other types of things, you know, involve like different types of customers. So like if you're currently focused on SMB or mid-market enterprises, whatever the case is, you're now looking to refactor your product in certain ways that you could reach a larger audience within your certain region. So those types of, I would say, assessments are to really understand, you know, your competencies and what you do and the skill set you've hired for, but are there certain companies, are there certain prospects that you could partner with that are already selling into those segments? And so we could keep going on that, but you kind of get the idea. It's a, I think that's why partnerships in general have been quite of a mystic art, as I call it, because there's so many sort of tangential sort of ways to go do this. And so I attempted to put something together that's more of a methodology, that's more of a framework. It's not like it's— you follow this book and you're going to be the most successful partnering company on the planet. It's applying a pathway that I call more of a treasure hunt than a scavenger hunt. It's like you have a treasure map, you know where you need to go, you got some stops along the way. But in a scavenger hunt, it kind of feels like sometimes I've been part of the scavenger hunts. You're sort of just like checking that out there, trying this here. And well, what's the pathway you can take and build? Yeah.

And so when coming back to this question about assessing whether or not I should build this program. So it's about starting with that strategic business plan, then it sounds like mapping your competencies. So we want to achieve these goals and then starting to think about under these strategic imperatives, what competencies do I need? And asking yourself consistently, is partnering a way to acquire these competencies? Would that be a fair way to frame how companies should assess whether or not there are partnership opportunities there?

I mean, I think in terms of— I know you just were using the word acquire, but that was more in terms of partner, but yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, it could be even an acquisition too. But I think I lay out like 8, 8 or 9 things that are potentially the, the self-reflection, you know, where it's talent, skill set, cultural capability, compatibility, you know, capital, product market fit, you know, there's, there's so many, there's so many things to understand about what is not What is sort of like limiting your growth today? And from that view, you can look at is are you going to sort of organically, you know, build these out through your next, you know, I'll just say from more of a pre-IPO company, like you actually want to go build capital and raise capital to actually build more resources. You want to actually get more capital to build new features. And you, you know, whatever the case is. So it is a self-reflection to kind of look at, you know, what's core versus context. And that's, that's not my, that's a Jeffrey Moore concept that I actually refer to and build out further in the book in the context of partnerships. But core versus context for me has been really the overarching piece as you sort of understand what your company is going to actually have as differentiated and really the durable advantage over time versus like these, if you want to call them context of how you want to build out and elevate your core and partner around those. But you really need like a partnership, someone whose day job this is to do it, you know, to do this assessment and own it and develop the plan and to take folks along for the ride. About what they're doing, not just the day they're doing it, but what's the process they're going through. Because otherwise it's like, wait, what's this guy or this gal doing? Like, I'm a sales guy. Like, I got this, you know? So it's really a partnership with folks in your company to align on what you're trying to achieve and are there most more cost-effective, more, you know, time-efficient, you know, ways to do it. I mean, this is again pretty conceptual, Kyle Norton, and, you know, like the examples are always good, you know, to kind of break out. But, you know, partnerships may not be a great fit for some companies. I think it's a matter of kind of where they're at and what stage.

Yeah. And so you mentioned partnerships can be a distraction. You don't, you don't want to be a distraction. And so Yeah. What needs to be true to start pursuing a partner strategy? Is it like the size of your customer book? Is it a revenue range? Like when is it appropriate to start building a program like this?

Well, you know, I would say that if you, well, a program versus a more of a bespoke strategic partnership may be a little different.

When should I go, I'm going to go hire a VP of partnerships and we're going to start to look at opportunities in the market or—

Got it.

Yeah, like how should we think about, is the timing right? Because I think a lot of companies like, we're going to start a partner program, but you've got 70 customers and $4 million in ARR and nobody wants to partner with you. And you're like, well, why doesn't anybody want to partner with my 40 customers?

Yeah, you know, I think on building, you know, partnership programs will definitely come over time if you find a recipe that's working with more bespoke partnerships. You know, concept is, you know, refer to it again, is that, you know, that's more crawl, walk, run is a methodology that I've seen very effective in building any new type of partnership. I mean, it could even be for products, but like, this is a mechanism and a methodology, I would say, that what you want to do first is incubate a strategic one strategic partnership, maybe two, or put a few irons in the fire where you come up with a concept of what a partnership is. Like, for example, are you creating a product partnership where you're creating a bundle approach of adding your toolset to another established toolset to reach that new demographic or that new type of enterprise? Do it with one company or do it with three that meet the ideal partnership or ideal partner profile, and the ideal partner profile has a certain level of attributes, then you can select what companies they are. Like, I think we've all been in companies where you may have a C-level exec or even someone in the organization that says, hey, we should go partner with Starbucks. Okay, why? Like, okay, like, what's the attributes of Starbucks? Let's understand how does Starbucks operate? What's their SWOT? Um, what is the other companies that have similar attributes to Starbucks? Is it because it's in the beverage space, or is it because the audience that they connect with on a daily basis? Is it their brand? What are the attributes of that company? How can we identify other companies and prospects that meet the same attributes and then develop really a partnership idea? That you can then pressure test with those set of companies to start. So the crawl stage really is about— I call it the partnership pitch, but it's really a, it's a combined collaborative proposal that you're building with your counterpart on the prospect side of the table to develop understanding kind of what they're trying to achieve. So it's understanding how they partner, it's understanding, you know, what's their KPIs. And finding a common KPI that you can both drive together. And then at that point, you may have a structure of how you could build your first partnership. So, and then over time, and this goes back to my days either at Yahoo or Netflix, like, you know, we didn't start with a partnership program, you know, where it actually got to the point of, you know, hundreds of thousands of devices with Netflix. I mean, Every device has Netflix now. But in my, in my early days working with the team, you know, we— it was one, it was Xbox, it was a PlayStation, it was a Roku device. I mean, these were one-off singular partnerships that were super high touch and would take like a single person day to day in the relationship role, but then also like a team of product people that are integrating this and making it work. Well, fast forward a few years and now you've got something called a program and this comes in all shapes and sizes, but you have an actually a self-serve model, a self-serve model that you kind of turn the table and you say, well, hey, how do we enable all the, in the ecosystem to integrate this themselves, meeting a certain level of criteria and certification that now you can reach a whole other scale. Yeah. And so it starts with a spark of an idea, being able to incubate that, understanding how you take it from one to many. Even that one, Kyle, is super interesting because it's not just going from one idea and saying, let's build a program. There are opportunities to really then break down and understand the supply chain of how these devices get to market. Maybe you actually want to do something with the companies that build the devices. Meaning not the brands, but the ones that build the device, or actually maybe the ones that build the chipsets. There's only two of them. So like, why do you have to go work with, you know, 30 companies or 7 device manufacturers or, you know, 8 remote control creators, maybe just two, you know, silicon manufacturers. So, you know, there's a Netflix button being on every single remote.

Was something that you worked on at Netflix. Was that, was that right?

Yeah, I worked on the very first one, um, you know, many different meetings in Tokyo and different parts of, uh, of the world with my colleagues there. And, um, you know, it was blazing a new trail of what is fully— what's, what's possible. But at the end of the day, it's about value to the end consumer. How do you provide awesome access to a great service that folks were using? So rather than navigating through a nest of menus, you know, how do you, how do you provide it, you know, name the consumer electronics company and a very easy way to access really what they want to watch. And so, and then creating some brand recognition on a coffee table, you know, and so that developed its own business model, you know, now you look at remotes and there's like, I don't know, 4 buttons. They're all, they're all logos and you know, a lot of these consumer electronics companies and OEMs created their own like pay-for-placement model. And so like it's a very interesting, you know, we use the word ecosystem quite a bit, but, you know, but this particular kind of just example I'm going through as we talk about programs, there's so much to unpack and learn and understand and go deep on, Kyle, that it's— I'm just like, it's so exciting, you know, but you got to really dig into what is the What's the goal? Like, I'll just use Netflix since I was talking about it. Is that how do you get on in every living room in the world on the planet? How do we do that? And I think, I think the team's done that, which is crazy. It's unbelievable. But the way it got there was through partnerships.

Yeah. And so going back to this, this framework around like where do the ideas come from? So, you start with a spark. Is that about waiting for that spark to happen naturally in the market or the right inbound or the right like serendipitous meeting? Or is there a way to, in a more manufactured manner, go and generate the like a corpus of ideas that could— that you could pursue and explore and stack rank? Like, walk me through some of the ideation process.

That's a— that's a great question, Kyle, because this is the core of it. You know, a lot of, you know, I do really dissect the, the failures of partnerships. I've been a part of them. I've caused some of them. And, you know, and these things tend to sputter out after a couple of years. You know, we get pretty excited on the press release and doing the deal. But if you don't have a good idea that's going to actually stand the test of time and be executed correctly, which we can cover in a, in a subsequent question. But the whole point is, if it doesn't start with a solid idea that's going to create some incredible value for customers, then you might as well go back to the drawing board. Because you really need to understand the customer need. Meaning like there's this concept that I lay out, which is a partnership T. A partnership T has been explained in a few different ways and I think misunderstood a little bit, but at least in the book, the way I explain it is about it's a win-win between you and the, and the partner, but it's a win-win-win. It's, it's a win for the end customer who is actually the customer of the product. In our service and our offering that you're both creating together. So you have a— it's all about that at the end of the day. And finding that—

why is it called the Partnership T?

I just draw it. I just draw it in a way of— I talk about a concept of like there's a— it's like a seesaw, right? And what you want to do is have an equal value exchange or equal balance of value between the two companies. Otherwise, you're going to be off, off kilter, right? And then the T is holding it up. The T is actually— this is the axis. Of holding this up is the customer value is the, is the core. If you don't have, if you're not building customer value, what are you doing? Like at the end of the day, you know, so it's really understanding what the customer wants, your joint customer wants. And even like when you bring the idea to the table and I'll get back to the spark question.

Yeah.

But when you bring the idea to the table to your prospect, it's not about what you can do for that company. It's about what you can do with that company for the customer. Mm-hmm. You know, it's, you know, or it's working backwards from the problem of that customer that's your joint customer and saying, how can you both come together to resolve it? And so it's a little bit of a lens shift that, that has taken some time personally to get there. But now it just feels like I'm kind of wired that way. I try to put it into something that's understandable and not too crazy of a concept and folks can try to leverage it. But back to the spark. This is a bit of— the spark concept is a bit challenging to really pinpoint the inception of ideas. The inception of ideas can come from a lot of different inspiration. And experience and know-how, but they come through conversations that come through what I called, you know, just collaboration or creativity between companies. These will be sparked through experiences. Now, you could create something more methodical, which I do lay out, and that's more of what, what I call sort of this your own SWOT, the P-SWOT, and then what you're really doing is understanding the gap analysis between those two things. And then you're really going super deep on the industry that either your prospect is a part of or that you're a part of or you're jointly going towards. And after truly going deep and understanding those, you may develop a, what I call the partnership spark, or there's actually something more of an X factor. Of a partnership. The next factor of a partnership is a concept of when two companies come together. I think I give an example of even as simple as a ballpoint pen in the book, you know, like in a vendor or supplier relationship. You know, I've got a pen, I've got a BIC here, right? And supplier relationship, I come to you and you're an ink supplier and I say, hey, you know, Kyle, I want I need better ink from you. I got to sell more pens, got to lower the cost of these things. So I need you to sell me more blue ink. So I'm doing a procurement deal with you. I'm trying to get ink at a very low cost, but maybe this is actually at a higher volume now and I can get— maybe that's a cost-effective way to do a deal with you. But actually, I could come to you and say, hey, you know, I actually had an idea. I want to create a new pen with you. And I want to create a pen that is the most smooth writing pen on the planet. And I've actually enlisted an ergonomic doctor that has done studies in this area of how to hold a pen in the most ergonomic way for less fatigue when writing. But I think your ink and the ballpoint of that ink is going to roll so easily that I think what we can do is create a new segment in this market as a high-end exclusive pen that is endorsed by this, this influencer, or you name it, this doctor that is accredited in this area. So let's go after this market together and create a partnership around this new product. And so that could be like an X factor. I call that the X factor where you're creating something that you wouldn't do on your own and you're coming together and creating a new potential product offering. And so the devil's in the details, how to, how to structure that though. So you can come up with these awesome— the whole idea, what I see very consistently is that the, the complexity of doing deals can get in the way of the idea of coming up with the ideas. So like you and I come up with this great pen idea. I know, I don't know if it's an awesome idea, but I don't know, maybe we should talk about it after the podcast. I don't know. But anyway, we come up with this idea right now. There's going to be skeptics across the board inside your company, inside my company. That, like, should we do this? Should we do this on our own? Like, you know, so there's, um, but how would we structure this? Is it a, is it a rev share? Is it a license deal? So there's going to be way more skeptic questions than, um, sort of the optimistic realism of doing this deal. So, or doing this partnership and deal. So there's going to be, you know, really a I need to have, you know, a, a leader that needs to take this on that's going to drive this and own it and not let go and be the champion for it. And my counterpart, Kyle Norton, as my counterpart in this example, we have to do it together. And so that's the way real breakthroughs are made. And there is a long list of breakthroughs that have been made this way that have step-changed every era of this technology business. In our lifetime. You know, they could have been through two people, they could have been through two companies, they could have been through university and a corporation. But this is where someone has had so much conviction to drive this forward. So there's, there's a lot of elements there, Kyle, that I walk through. Yeah, but hopefully this is synthesizing a little bit here on how I'm thinking about it, how I'm wired a little bit. And I've tried to kind of distill that down into something that folks can actually follow.

Yeah. You know, um, and so I want to go back to the, the more methodical approach to finding the spark. So you've got your SWOT and your PSWOT. So you're, you're looking at your— when you're talking about the SWOT, you're looking at your entire business strategy, and then your PSWOT is of the entire market, or is of, uh, the prospect? Of prospect. So, but I want to go one level before that. So when I look at my strategic objectives for 2026 and what is the method by which I can look at that strategic plan and say, this is where a partnership could play a role. Now I'm going to go look at potential partners, do the P-SWOTs and all that. Like what the— there's like a level, there's a an action in between those that I'm— that I think we're missing.

You're saying in between sort of the, the part—

like, so there's strategic business plan, and then there's actually evaluating the, the potential of actual partners with that PSWOT. But there's a whole map of potential partnerships I could pursue. I could pursue, you know, a co-created product that we're co-branding, or there could just be a reseller agreement where I'm trying to find a bunch of resellers. And so my question is, especially for the revenue leaders, how should they think about conceptualizing the map of like the types of partnerships and what ones to start actually unpacking and evaluating if that's the right starting point?

I mean, there's a couple of ways to come into it. I think there's, you know, if you have a partnership leader, that's day job is to go evaluate and determine the right types of partnerships. Maybe they've been doing it for some time. They know the different flavors. They know the different types. That would be sort of, I think, a bidirectional assessment of looking at your, the KPIs of your company, and then looking at the sort of what I call the wild, wide world of partnerships of all the different flavors and types that I've outlined. Right? And there's a lot more. And those could be co-branding, they could be white labeling, they can be platform, they could be marketing that can accelerate the speed of your goals. So if this is like you want to go to market, like this could be a product value add. This could be like, it could be for your product team. Like, do you actually want to go build? That widget? Like, is that something that's core to the company? Is that something that is, you know, another company you could license it from or partner with? And could you share some revenue with them on the top level of selling that product? But, you know, ultimately, you know, it's breaking down sort of the KPIs, but also then looking at sort of the list of the different types of partnerships to assess. That can actually affect those KPIs of like, I hope, you know, internally at the company, what you're doing is you're looking at your SVP, you're looking at your KPIs, and you have an assessment of risk. You have an assessment of, you know, what's your strategic plan to actually hit those KPIs? What are the risks involved? What are the costs involved? How are you offsetting those costs? What's your plan of an approach to that? Is someone coming to the table and saying, have we actually looked at working with a set of companies to do that? Is someone bringing that to the table and saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't build that?

Yeah.

You know, maybe we should license that or partner for that. Now, that's the part of someone really having the credibility in the company and having the confidence to come to the table with the ideas. Because if you just bring up a disruptive idea in a strategic business plan, it's not a good thing to do. You need to have a plan behind it. And so I think that's the part of saying, well, hey, here's what we believe a partnership strategy can be to accelerate either go-to-market in certain regions, accelerate audience and reach a new audience of how we can do it. And picking and choosing what those are and saying, hey, what we're going to do is we've outlined the top 2 to 3 companies within this segment that we're going to go pressure test this idea with. So, and then coming back to the, if you want to call it the leadership team, it depends on the culture and the organization and how it's set up, right? That you want to bring them along for the ride, you know, and say like, hey, let's build this concept together. You know, if it's, you know, maybe you want to just do a simple resell and, you know, and enable the same product you do, but work through some ISVs or work through, you know, consulting firms and enable them, you know, for, you know, maybe there was an audience metric that you're trying to get to and you kind of tapped out on your own doing it organically. And now you're looking at ways to amplify that through like a B2B type of partnership for reaching maybe a different, you know, a different segment, you know, so it's, there's no, I would say, set formula on doing that, Kyle, without knowing the KPIs. You know, I'm getting an idea actually, this would be cool for you and I to work on, is like, is doing an actual workshop, you know, because you have to dive into the actual company. Sometime in my past I've done fictitious companies where it was actually super fun, where I picked like Pied Piper and a few other ones that we all know and love from different shows or movies, right? And we sort of broke those out and we said like, how do we build these companies and what are the risks to their companies and how do we use partnerships to grow them? Or maybe we just kind of don't do partnerships and organically build, but it's really up to— yeah, so hopefully that covers a little bit more. But I think there's an element of knowing the menu in front of you of the types of things you can do with partnerships. What's the menu of the things you want to do in your company? And then creating what are the partnership ideas? And then pressure testing those ideas with a group of, I would say, you know, early adopters. I wouldn't even call them adopters. I'd call them incubating that with a set of friendlies.

Yeah.

To pressure test that concept and idea. And then from there, if you get traction and you can build a team around it, you then have a pretty good business case with— you should have a P&L behind that too about how this business can get built out. But then you may want to go from 1 to 3 to 4, you know, etc. So, but yeah, conceptually, hopefully that is put some more framework in it, but That's kind of what I try to do in the book too, is I put some examples of even ones I haven't worked on that we just know of that have been successful in doing certain things or not so successful in doing things.

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I would love to get an example, just before we get into an example, sort of partner journey, what are the most common failure modes? Like when, what are the things that cause partnerships to go off track?

I need to, I need to look at the reference, the book. I haven't remembered this yet. No, but what is funny about it is that when I wrote the book, I wrote it over about 5 years, which is kind of crazy. And, and I got deeper on it in COVID and I started writing, yeah, more and more during COVID And then at that point, you know, I took a little bit of a break, came back to it, and I'm like, oh my God, I wrote this. I'm like, I don't remember writing this. And even today, and I'm not joking with you here, I go back in and I'm like, I was reading it last night actually. And I'm like, I didn't remember that. So there's such a data bank of information that a book— I wasn't planning to be an author, by the way. This wasn't like a life goal of mine. But it is a— it's a great platform to put information in that folks can reference back. It sounds pretty obvious, but for me, it was like I still refer back to it. So I may have to refer back to your question and look at my own book.

But, but you, you had said, you know, what are the biggest common failure modes? Like, what makes partnerships fail? The most, like, the sign of it is big splashy press release, everybody hooting and hollering on LinkedIn, and then like no business value. What tends to cause that?

There are several factors, but the failure rate I mentioned of 70% of partnerships fail after 2 years, that's a That's a PwC, that's a McKinsey stat. That's not my partnerships. You can ChatGPT that one too if you want. But 70% of partnerships fail after 2 years. 85% of C-level executives see partnerships as essential to their business for growth. 85%. What's the math is? Is a bit funny here. You got 85% of CEOs wanting to do them, 70% are failing after 2 years. What's broken? And typically I see a bunch of things, but I'll focus on maybe a couple. Kyle, for you here and for your audience, typically what happens is you've got an owner driving the pre-deal. You've got someone who is, you know, driving the idea. Maybe the idea is not awesome, but let's not go there yet. Let's talk more about really how does this become and grow into something that we all thought it was going to be, right? And that's the point of the press release. And I would say incentives drive action. So the way in which, you know, business development, sales leaders, you know, kind of the go-to-market leaders that are being tasked with what success looks like in their companies today are typically not managing the partnership. They're not partner managers. You know, they're typically— they could be. I've been, I've been in that role in smaller companies. So that, that gave me a little more light into, you know, hey, my success factor is not the press release. My success factor is not doing the deal. It's definitely one of the milestones or the few milestones to get this across the line. But it's actually about executing it and driving the partnership with operational rigor post-deal into what I call a virtual company. Virtual company in my concept is how two companies come together and create an organization, an organization to drive the partnership. Virtual company, a virtual company with a set of their own KPIs, with a set of their own success metrics. With a set of their own incentives. So now you're driving this not as a side job, as a side gig, or someone who's maybe did the deal and now saying, hey, they're finger-pointing. Yeah, this is actually someone who is accountable for the success of this partnership based on the KPIs. And so this operational rigor and a methodology in doing that, I find, is you know, is one of the cornerstones of flipping the metric of success and failure to 70% plus, um, you know, on what I believe we could get to. Or even like, I think that's one piece of it, is the operational rigor. The idea has a lot to do with it, you know. If you, you know, uh, don't have an idea that's going to stand the test of time or really solve a a critical problem for customers, or maybe only for the prospect and not the customer, you know, my partnership tea concept we were talking about, you may be ending up with the same problem. You could have killer operational rigor, you know, incredible program managers that are driving, you know, and are accountable. But if you don't have a great idea, you're like, hmm, maybe we need to think about more ideas.

And I think that's an idea not good. Like what are the most common places where—

Short term, I would say that, you know, short-term ideas that solve an immediate problem without a pathway of, you know, multi-phases with that partner because our companies, like, you know, companies grow and change. So like partnerships are usually thought of as a point in time. They solve a certain problem today. But if you don't look at your own, when I go back to the strategic business plan of how you're trying to grow your company over the next, I don't know, 5 years. I won't say 10. Not many companies think about 10 years anymore. I don't hear that as often. But anyway, you really think in 12 months and like 12 months, right? Yeah. But, but that's even a great, a great point. Like, but if you know where your company's going, where is, where is your prospect going? If you do the one and done, you're, you're one and done. And so, you know, this, this crawl, walk, run of phase 2, phase 3, of what we're doing kind of post-initial release is really the, the rigor, I'll say again, in terms of the partnership plan. Because the partnership plan that comes out of the partnership strategy is not like one idea. The idea is actually kind of like what surrounds it is the, the strategy of you and that company. And then what you're doing is you're layering in different ideas over a time period that could be 2 years, that could be 3, that could be 5, depending how they do their planning cycles. So, you know, post-deal, maybe depending on what you announced, you maybe announced phase 1 or you announced that you're doing this strategic partnership to do X, Y, and Z. You know, that could be— companies do that too. But the team that's on it, the team that's going to now, after the press release goes out, you know, rather than saying, hey, here's the contract, you know, execution team, by the way, you got to go execute this now. Right? Like, we've seen that before.

Yeah.

You know, you got to go execute. What are we doing? Okay. Like, we can't do this. Like, you want this in 12 months? Like, it's not going to— we got an issue. So anyway, the other part of it is that team needs to be responsible for growth of the partnership because the growth of the partnership, it's not about just the, the KPIs and what you set out to do to, do the initial phase, but it's to grow the partnership over time and they should have incentive around doing that. So because your company changes and the prospect company changes and to have a durable, sustainable partnership, like this is really the ability to grow as your company changes and shifts. And that's where you see a lot of the failure rate come from too, is that you're not adapting to the changes in the market. That you're both operating in. You're not adapting to the changes in your own shifting or your own strategy. And so it's like, why do we need these guys anymore? Or these, this company? It's like they don't, we, you know, like, so, so there is the virtual company aspect of this for strategic partnerships. And that's a certain term I use, you know, and define a little further than maybe different types of relationships you can have. That is where you want to have that kind of rigor in almost how you operate your own company.

You know, in terms of the day-to-day relationship and how you share information, or what, what, what else is involved in a strategic relationship then?

Well, involved in a strategic relationship would be coming back to, well, having a strategy for the partnership, you know, like, so if the, if the partnership is is not like a license orientation.

I mean, just define strategic relationship first or strategic partnership. You mentioned you have a definition there.

Yeah, I'm not going to get a word for word that I wrote in the book, but, but, you know, you know, I'll hit a few high points. I mean, the mutual value exchange and complementary capabilities of bringing together with a shared set of KPIs that you're tracking against. And then you have quantitative measurement of that combined value and offering. So like, and there's strategic is a kind of a, I don't want to call it a buzzword. It's a real word. But at the end of the day, it's about doing something that is critical to the success of your company. Like, it's not like if that company goes away, like, is it actually going to have a pretty significant impact on their own trajectory and success of your company? If yes, then it's most likely a strategic partnership, right? Yeah.

Okay.

So there's different kinds of partnerships. I just— that's the one I drill into. I spend a lot of time in. I think that's where the value of partnerships can really shift this entire, you know, different markets and different, you know, different ways we do business. Yeah.

And so I'd love to hear about your assessment framework. So you have an idea that you like, you've done your SWOT and P-SWOT, you have a couple example partners now, and you're assessing the right partner to choose.

Is—

do you have a framework that you like to go back to to try to make that decision?

Yeah, uh, definitely. Um, there's— and it's not one attribute, You know, there are several attributes that to what I call the ideal partner profile. The ideal partner profile is, is several aspects of that company. And it's really related back to the idea that are important to your idea. So it's not just like objectively about the criteria of this company. It's objective. It's subjective about the idea. Like, do you need a company with strong brand? In this space. Okay, what's the stack ranking of all the companies that you've outlined in a forced stack ranking of the brand affinity with the demographic that you want to reach? Okay, intra-brand, other quantitative measurement or companies that actually measure brand value, you know, so cool. Okay. Reach. How many customers are they actually accessing today? If you're looking at a B2B partnership where you want to do a resell or a co-sell, and you want to enable their sales force to, you know, to amplify your product, you probably want to look at like, are they engaged? Are they engaged with the companies? Like how deeply are engaged? What's the size of their workforce doing that? Do they have a strong brand there too? Like, is it interrelated with that? But you want to first, like, do they have the audience? That's pretty, pretty clear, right? Other things would be, you know, the regional aspect. Do they have presence? In the regions that you want to work with and work in. Some of the softer attributes that I outline or call the subjective criteria, there's the objective criteria that you can understand. Subjective criteria would be like, have they partnered before? Have they done it successfully? Who have they done it with? Have they not done it successfully? Where have the people that do partnerships at that company, where have they worked before? What kind of roles are they hiring for right now? Interesting. What are the technologies that the engineers they're hiring for? What skill sets do they need?

And why is that important?

So what you're understanding is where they have gaps. In their organization. You're understanding, like, so I talk about this, like, funny, interesting concept is like, go work for your partner, like, not literally, but go look at their job board.

Yeah.

You know, like, understand who they're hiring for because it tells you a little more about how they're looking to build out their company. So if they're looking to build out a marketing team, maybe they've told you this, but you're doing your initial research. So you haven't yet had maybe a whole lot of like direct conversation with the company yet. So you're kind of doing your own kind of third-party research and understanding that. And you look there, oh, they're hiring a Korea country manager. Oh, interesting, right? Be careful what you put in a job description. And, you know, that is maybe that's just another tip I don't have in my book, but I learned that on one of my gigs actually, because in looking at companies we were going head-to-head with, we really deeply understood their job descriptions because it was a talent war also.

Right.

So in the relationship, though, back to understanding which are the right companies, there are subjective, objective criteria about like, do they have great market presence and they got the talent to do it? And then there's all this, like, the things that crash and burn are like, do they have the DNA to do it? Do they have the partnership muscle to do it? Do they have an organization to do it? Um, now they may have the willingness to do it, but do they have actually the people and the know-how to do it effectively? And so, um, that can be a— that could make or break going after them. You know, there is an element of understanding, you know, how do they build products on their own? Are they typically an in-house building company?

Are they—

how have they done partnerships in the past and have they then brought products internally? Like, there's so much to understand. So subjective, objective criteria, and then you're going to come up with an overall you could say stack ranking or score of ideal partner profile and identifying prospects that fit that ideal partner profile. And then you got to really put together the partnership pitch. You know, you got to reach out to the right contacts. And that tells you also more signals down the line. Like, you're now just like, you're kind of like, you know, in the walls of your own company still. And you're kind of doing all this research and you have a pretty good idea. Hopefully you're now using a lot more AI, GenAI, to help you get this stuff faster, you know, but now you're actually going to reach out to, oh, we think it's the— should I, should I contact the CEO? Should I contact the CRO? Should I contact the chief partnerships guy or gal? So the initial outreach is super key to get right because you've done all your research. You don't want to kind of like, here's my partnership plan. It's there's definitely a relationship-building exercise to ensure that this is a bidirectional process, that you're collaborating on building these awesome ideas. And may— maybe your idea gets tweaked and more adapted to what they want to do. And so the next part of the co-elevate method, I'll call it, that's what I have in the book, um, is to not just align internally but align externally. And and, and then take it to the next step of, you know, uh, of executing beyond alignment. So Kyle, I'll kind of pause there because I can keep going. I'm just kind of going through the process a little bit. No, that makes sense. Tell me what comes to mind. Yeah.

And so, uh, I think that's a good, good way to look at, at viability. Um, brand value, reach, regional access. Their partnership's capability, the people, where do they come from? Those are interesting questions. One of the— So, you've assessed, all right, now I feel like this is a viable partnership. We're going to pursue it. One of the dangers is that you can sink quarters and years into a partnership and it doesn't work. And so, Have you found there's ways to test the viability of especially like larger partnerships before needing to put a bunch of resources and headcount and money behind it? What's the way to get the right user feedback to know if this is going to work?

You know, there's definitely a lot of ways to do it. It depends on culturally, maybe how the prospect has done it too. So you could have your own methodology on, you know, depending on the type of product, if it's a B2C product or a B2B product, maybe you do have a set of joint customers that you may want to reach out to and have in your pilot program. I don't know if it's a product, you know, if it's, you know, are you saying kind of pre-prospect engagement? Are you saying like pre-launch?

Like, so you've got an idea, you feel like it's a good one. You've assessed and picked a partner.

Yeah. And yeah, I would say at that point you want to build, you want to build. If it's a product-oriented partnership, you want to create some sort of pilot or, you know, prototype. And, you know, you could do an internal beta. You could do, depending on if it's a B2C product, you could do an internal beta with a set of cohort of customers or internal friendlies. You could extend that to friends and family. You could extend that to existing customers as like another way to say, hey, we want to take care of you. We're giving you early beta access. You need to have a quantitative way to measure like what success is for that product. That's more for the product management team in that sense, right? To kind of say like, hey, are you getting the uplift on, you know, is it retention, daily engagement, whatever? You're tracking as a product KPI. But, but I, you know, there's so many different ways that maybe that's a little more in the product world, but I kind of tend to think about it more like the viability of a partnership is based on the viability of the, of the output of the partnership, like the product or the marketing reach, or, you know, I think there's a, a general relationship and health score of the partnership, which is more different than kind of the output of the partnership.

Yeah.

Like meaning the product or the marketing program or the, you know, whatever that— there's also like, is this— are we working well together? That's a very like loaded thing. Like, is this partnership going well? Like, you know, get asked in the elevator by your CEO and, hey, how's a partnership going?

Yeah.

How do you answer that? Right. And so, but if you can answer it to say, hey, we had a goal to reach, you know, a million users by the end of 2026. We're actually tracking really well toward that. We've actually hit 60% and we have a way to get to the next 40, but we could use your help to meet with the CEO. Like, so like, what are the core metrics of the partnership, how it's working? And maybe you kind of, you kind of beta test that. Is that, Kyle, where you were going? Or—

Yeah, yeah. Because I think one of the, one of the challenges that I've seen in previous roles is partnerships have a very long payoff timeline much of the time. And so, understanding how to really assess the viability before you either put more resources into something or know when to walk away because there's a bunch of really big partner ideas. I mean, you said it, 70% fail after 2 years and a lot of those you would have liked to have figured that out at month 5 and not month 15.

Yeah.

And, and so are there ways to like— because, you know, our— my experience, you know, building, uh, a big referral program at Owner is it was— it took us multiple quarters to start getting real momentum into the program, and it's, it's going really well now, but, uh, patience was certainly required. We're partnering with a big organization. They don't move that fast.

Exactly.

You need to educate an entire group of like frontline sellers. There's, there's understandably like a long— there's a lot of things that need to happen to get that partnership to the right place. And this is going well, but I've also had partnerships in previous worlds where you're like, okay, well, it's a long payoff. We got a lot of education to do. And then we never, we never caught that. We never caught fire in that way. And then we ended up sunsetting it. And one of my reflections was like, how could I have known this earlier?

Yeah.

But, and so the question to you is like, when do you walk away? How do you know as early as you can with as few resources applied to something if it's working or not? Because of the nature of partnerships, sort of taking a long, a long time.

So I think in even your example, Kyle, of what you learned, yeah, you would do it differently, likely from day one. So we have a very undocumented discipline. There's many other folks on the planet that were, that have built what you've built, you know, and they've done it. They've done it well. They haven't done it well. Everything in between. And there's maybe AI is going to help us here a little bit. You know, like what's the ideal way to build a referral program? But there has been lack of documentation and lack of collaboration among partnership leaders and in this discipline to share best practices. And where failures occur. So I kind of just put that into my— this is my ethos, Richard Ezekiel, to do this book, right? So I saw it happen too many times. Yeah, I saw my colleagues— it happened to my colleagues too many times.

And so what are those triggers then? Like, from your learnings, what are the things that if I'm a CRO or founder or partnerships leader and I've like— I'm launching a I'm launching a partnership called, like, just call it a reseller or some, or yeah, sure, simple, a simple program. What, how can I know as early as possible whether or not this is working or not and whether or not I should pull the plug when, like, a reseller program does take a lot of, it's a lot of enablement and a lot of momentum building. You have to build, yeah, you have to build, you know, your spotlight success stories within that partner that then you can share. Like, they're—

and you've got, and you've got some tricks or tricks of the trade that you've developed over time that you've seen work.

Yeah.

And so like what you said, Spotlight, that's a very cool idea.

Yeah.

Like, not every— someone coming out of school is not going to know about that. They're going to figure— they're going to do the scavenger hunt. And so they get to the scavenger hunt, they pitch this idea, and then we do, you know, do the deal, and then you're further along and you're like, oh shit, they're not— it's not delivering the goods. So it— I would say that the whole kind of— the whole like foundation of day one and doing all this upfront work, um, which we're going to kind of collapse into much shorter periods of time because of our help from AI, that is going to help us pressure test. Not only is the idea good, But how are we going to track and measure the success along the journey of the partnership? So you, we need a way, and that's, it's not just virtual company. You can do that in a lot lighter weight ways to do it, but there needs to be a tracking mechanism to measure the success of that partnership. And someone owns the, when it's going, if that metric is not being met, how do you come together? How are we going to fix that metric so it doesn't— it's not lagging in the next quarter?

So, but there's signs to you whether or not this thing is going to work or not.

Well, I mean, it's going to be slow or it's slow. I mean, the signals, I mean, there's spidey sense and there's quantitative stuff. Okay. You know, I would say the, the, uh, the quantitative stuff is based on the metrics of the partnership.

Yeah.

So like, that is definitely— I see that. I don't see a lot of that rigor in partnerships. Is the— is just what is— how are you measuring success of it?

Yeah.

Like, that's a very basic question that I— there's not a lot of good answers on it. Yeah. How do you measure it? Oh, well, you know, we have to launch on time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, no, no, no. Like the date, the launch date doesn't matter. Yeah. It's like, are you delivering the value you set out to do? Are you generating the revenue between both companies that you said you would? Or does partner B, are they delivering, you know, X number of deals for this quarter? You know, do they have the right incentive mechanism to do that? Oh, maybe we didn't have that. Okay. Maybe we need an incentive mechanism to grow, kind of increase there. So there's not like one answer along this other than you got to scenario play this out like in a significant way. So scenario planning, other than game theory, there's a whole chapter on scenario planning and game theory. That's a little bit later in the book because that's a bit more like, how is this all going to play out? Because you could like, before you go write the check or you hire the team, you definitely need to get a little sci-fi on this. You know, you need to kind of like, how is this all going to play out? Because if you get in the heat of the moment, Hey, CEO wants to sign this deal. Great. Actually, CEO, don't sign it yet. I don't feel good about this. Why don't you feel good about this? Oh, they don't have a team yet on this. Oh, maybe we should make that a condition of signing the deal. I don't know. Like, Kyle, there's a lot of different, like, ways to ensure success. But if the idea is not good, if you don't have a team that's going to go execute it, and you don't have the documented way that you're going to really get ahead of it. And I think that's why a lot of these partnerships are failing today, because we're all doing like exactly what you said, you know, like that's happening everywhere.

Yeah.

You know, and you get to year one and you're like, what the heck? Like, we signed up to do this, but it's not getting managed. It's, you know, there's not really a documented, you know, methodology or process to do it. There's really not even the tools to do it. You know, I think there's a, there's a huge gap in terms of partnership tools. It doesn't even exist. Yeah, it's like so bad on that front. And that's where AI, not just, not just AI, but that's where like, I mean, sales has a very robust set of, of tools to do this. Well, The trick is to do it across 2 companies or maybe 3 companies or for a program that you can manage it. So then you can start to, like, there was a point in one of my past companies that, and no one told me to do this, but I did an assessment of all my partners of how much audience they're driving and then how much effort and resources are we putting on each partner. About 3 of the partners drove 80% of the audience.

Yeah, always, right?

But we didn't know that. We were at this point, we were, we're doing a, you know, uh, treating the same. Yeah, we're doing a land grab. And, you know, and so at that point, if you're proactive about that though, see, this was a reactive, and then we reorganized and we came up with different models to do deals. You know, based on some of the criteria of these, these partners. But this is the whole thing. Everyone doesn't have all the answers from day one. You know, this discipline is in inning 1 or 2. This is not a discipline that is in education. This is not a discipline you can take a class on.

Yeah.

And so my goal is to change that. It's not about a book for me. It's about actually bringing this into academia. And so, and I can riff on and tell you more about my passion of that, of that piece. But I think there's definitely a trial by fire, learn on the job. That's why a lot of us are much older who do this craft. Yeah. But I'm, you know, that's the point. Yeah.

I think partnerships just requires a a level of business acumen that's unique. You need to know enough about enough different things to connect the dots. You know, it is strategic and the risk is very high and there isn't a great framework. That was my interest in having you on is to try to pull out a framework, especially for CROs that are at the like, you know, $20 to $50 million ARR mark. Where partnerships start to make a lot of sense. How do you go decide? Hopefully we've pulled some of that out. I want to ask one more question before we get into quickfire. What's the favorite partnerships deal you've ever done and why did it work?

The favorite one I've done.

Yeah.

The one you're most proud of. Well, I mean, some of it, I can't go too deep in it, I can give you maybe an example of, I mean, I did talk about Netflix a little bit. Yeah. And for me, Netflix was, I'll just kind of give you kind of the why behind that and being a part of that team that accomplished, you know, really making this a new phenomenon in technology. You know, I would say that before I joined Netflix, I was at Yahoo. And we were, we were creating new technology for the first time, putting applications on Blu-ray players. It was the first time it was ever done.

Cool.

And we, we got a television, ripped off the bezel and started, you know, tinkering with the boards. And we put these apps on televisions and it was pretty cool. We didn't know what the app was. We were putting eBay on there and Facebook and other things. And why are people going to watch these things on television? And Netflix was still doing DVD by mail at the time and they were experimenting with downloads and things like that. And so when I got a cold call from Netflix when I was working for Yahoo and it was this amazing lady that I still stay in touch with and she says, Rich, hey, we're spending a lot of time on streaming now. And, you know, I think you know all the same contacts and we have all the same contacts and this is at Vizio and Sony and LG and Samsung. Hey, we'd love to chat with you. So the partnership that I would say that I had that is most significant that I'm proud about is with Netflix as a company and with Rich Ezekiel. So when I joined the company, it's not just about like what I did there and the partnerships I created. It was with, you know, how they reached out to me, how they, you know, brought me into the company, how I worked with Reed Hastings where, you know, on taking walks every quarter with him and really learning from him around what not to do and what to do. And even talking about the future of education in California, you name it. I mean, he was my oracle. He's an amazing guy. And so I think that experience for me was like, how do you go from one partnership to thousands? And so, um, companies at the end of the day, if they can provide partnership leaders and managers and just entrepreneurs with platforms for their careers to, to really build things that seem quite impossible, they're going to be able to hit the mark for defining their companies. So there's a lot there, Kyle Norton, but like for me, it was about building a career, learning a lot, doing some incredible partnerships. And I think Netflix is one of them. There's a lot of other leaders that I absolutely adore to date. I've learned so much from, but I don't know, I, that one stands out for me. It just, and we were talking about it earlier, so I don't have to go into too much more detail.

Yeah.

Cool.

Well, let's move to a quick fire and then we'll wrap. Um, what do you think separates a good partner leader versus a truly great one?

I think thinking long term, uh, thinking long term and acting long term. Um, acting long term means taking action and being a, a true leader in owning, being accountable, having a vision, a strategy, a mission, and set of objectives around their long-term with that partner. Cool. Yeah.

What's the most common advice you give to partner leader mentees? So somebody is becoming a first VP of partnerships at a, at like a mid-stage tech company. Yeah. What's the, what's the most common advice you give to them?

Well, my job's gotten a whole lot easier now. I say, hey, check out CoElevate. I'm serious, though. That's the, you know, it's funny because when I— what inspired me to write CoElevate was an intern. And I— that's what really got me. Super well-educated intern, actually set of interns that were Ivy League educated MBAs. You name the schools, they were thrown into BD and partnership jobs. And I started to triangulate on interesting ideas, pull some threads. That was the beginning of CoElevate. So, so now I think it's the body of work that at least I could use as some sort of with other colleagues, like even what we're talking about here, that this message can get out and then they can do better work. Cool. Yeah.

What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn?

Saying no is very difficult, meaning to partners and staying true to your own vision and your own strategy in your company. And along with that, it's having conviction for what you believe is right to do and what the idea is. You have to really own it. You have to drive it to the ground. Um, and it's not just to be paint the rosy picture, but have the honest truth about, um, you know, what— be your own skeptic, but also be your optimist.

Yeah. Uh, you can't say your own book. What's the best thing you've read in the last 12 months?

Best thing I've read in the last— I can't say my own. That's hard because I've been I've been spending way too much time into this. You know, well, I have, you know, I've been reading a bunch more books, Kyle, you know, just because I never thought I would write this book. So I've been looking at other business books. And, you know, I think there wasn't— there isn't one that stands out for me because I've read, like, I think probably too many. But I would say, yeah, at this point it's— yeah, no, Kyle, that's a hard one for me because it's, you know, there's one on security, there's one on— that's Hackable is a pretty cool book that I've gotten to know the author of. There's also one called Retail Pride, which is very cool, author named Ron Thurston, that is about an accidental career in retail. He's on his second book right now. He's writing. You know, Taming the Culture Tiger. That's one that I think is very cool. It's from an author named Kate Price that has done an amazing job at how to work with corporations. And like, so there's like, there's— I'm trying to read stuff that's not like about partnerships. It's very hard because I'm just, I'm getting too— I geek out way too much and I need to like kind of zoom out and look at these other kind of books. And they're cool to read because I like how they've positioned the problem and kind of really made it in concise and really easy to read ways. Yeah. So, but those are just some of the few, Kyle. Sorry, it wasn't like a short answer, but like, that's good. Yeah.

Well, Rich, I appreciate you coming on. This was great. And I hopefully folks got a good taste of how to conceptualize building partner programs. And we've brought more structure to something that is like very unstructured in my experience. So yeah, appreciate the time and thanks for coming on.

Hey, thanks for having me, Kyle Norton. Looking forward to doing more with you and feedback from your, from your audience. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network. And please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.