Redefining Partnerships to Drive Revenue with Tyler Calder, PartnerStack

Our mentality is anything that we're thinking about doing ourselves. Our first step is, well, who should we be doing it with?

I'm Jonathan Gandalf and welcome to the Content Cocktail Hour. Powered by the Juice. Our mission is to squeeze out the deepest secrets of B2B marketing professionals to help you push your brand to the forefront of the industry. Let's raise the glass. Welcome back to the Content Cocktail Hour. This is Jonathan, founder and CEO of the Juice and the host of today's episode where I am thrilled to be joined by Tyler Calder, CMO at Partner Stack. We're going to hit on all things partnerships, what exactly that means, what that means to different people. We're going to be sure to get the CMO perspective. We're recording this just before kind of the holiday slowdown and Tyler has me in a festive mood. He's already got a unpopular opinion, or maybe it's a popular opinion, I'm not sure. In his background he looks like it's a believer. He's that thinks Die Hard is a Christmas movie. So maybe we can keep the polarizing opinions going throughout the show and have some fun conversation. Tyler, before I ramble too much or present my own Die Hard opinion, why don't you introduce the audience to yourself kind of in your own words, tell us a little bit about your background and your role at Partners Tech.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you. And good point. On the background, right. Isn't very conducive to a recording, is it? So thanks for having me. My name is Tyler. I head up marketing here at PartnerStack. Been here for about coming up on five years, so quite a ride so far beyond that pretty varied background. Spent almost 10 years agency side the next 10 years. So we're coming up almost on 20 of startup world between B2C and B2B. And in between all that, been teaching for about 10 years or so and so just love, love chatting about this stuff. So looking forward to getting into it.

I love it and I wouldn't be doing my job. Who's our co star in the background you have there on the floor?

This is Maddie, she is our 14 year old Ozzy, if anybody has an Aussie. What I've realized is that the energy doesn't start to dissipate until they're about 12 and she's still very food motivated so I'm surprised she hasn't started to bark yet. She knows whenever I'm on a call and she starts barking like that's how you get a treat because I just Got to just got to get her to just slow down there.

We have an Aussie doodle at home that's very vocal. That's always what we've said about the Aussie is they like to bark. So, Maddie, welcome to the show. Welcome to the content cocktail hour. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us today. And it is the content cocktail hour, so we always like to lead these conversations. What are you enjoying drinking nowadays?

I'll give two answers. I try to hide this stash right here. Like, I try to block that on camera every now and then because I don't know how appropriate it is. This makes it seem like I enjoy getting into the bottle. And that's not necessarily true. I just love collecting bottles that. That I think look interesting. But what I will say very, very simply, I do like bourbon. This is baker's very find it anywhere. But I've been enjoying that quite a bit. But really my go to is turtles hot chocolate. Right now, if you haven't had turtles hot chocolate, that's been a daily treat.

Is turtles the brand or is that like a turtle flavor of hot chocolate?

Turtles the chocolate.

Yeah.

Flavored hot chocolate.

Yeah. To mid Turtles in the holiday, you know, the, the pecan, the.

Just.

Just to be clear, I'll have to look that up. I'm intrigued by it. And fellow bourbon aficionado, so no need to hide it from me. I see you have a putter back there as well. We could probably have an entire episode.

Just there's something here for everybody.

Bourbon golf, you got.

You got some Batman and Superman, you got some golf, you got some bourbon, you got some design oriented Herman Miller things. So whatever you want, we can talk about it.

I love it. Well, today's episode, why don't we start the conversation on partnerships? It's a really interesting topic to me because I think it can mean so many different things to so many different people. Even at the Juice, I can tell you, you know, we've explored tech partnerships, integrations, agency reseller relationships. And myself and our sales leader, we always talk about it's really hard to do partnerships when it's not somebody's top priority or main priority or it just. It's always the second or third priority. And it kind of stays there at least until you can grow into it. At least that's been our experience. But it feels like such a powerful motion when it's done well. And you're hearing it a lot right now in the space that partnerships are. Are the way. Kind of the way to go. To go to market is. So much else is changing. And I agree with all that. But why don't we just start by. Can you kind of define what how you and the team at Partner Stack kind of view view what is partnerships?

I might start by commenting on something you just said, which is it's hard to do this when it's not somebody's top priority. If it's second or third thing on the list, it's really hard to do. Well, we hear that. It's a very fair statement. My flip on it is if you're a go to market leader, I mean your number one priority is revenue. In my mind is. Is the business. Build the business and drive the business forward and especially in the market we've been in the past couple years, try to do it as efficiently as possible. And so I think when I hear folks say on the side of someone's desk, it's not a top priority. So. Yeah, but what is your top priority? This might actually make it to the top as a way to get there. Not every time. I'm not suggesting it's the first step to revenue for everybody, but I am certainly suggesting viewing partnerships as this siloed thing that, that needs to be prioritized is, is fair. But when you flip it and think about it and going into how I think about defining partnerships, very pragmatically, it is any source of indirect revenue is a partner. In my mind. You can get into the nuances of partnerships and the role that trust has to play and we can talk philosophically about it.

But at the end of the day.

I view partnerships as truly like all of your indirect revenue sources. And so basically that means anybody that is helping you drive revenue outside of your full time sales marketing team, that's partnerships. And what I find is when people think about I can't, you know, it's not a huge priority. What they're really saying is not a huge priority. To map out the tech landscape and figure out who we should be integrating with and then get product support to integrate with them. And you know, we're 12 months out before we see traction. It's like, that's fair. But that is, that is just one type of partnership that you can develop. Right. Are there more obvious paths to having some quick wins right now right out of the gate to help you with what your number one priority probably is, which is growing the business? Even if growth isn't the number one priority, my bet is it's probably something like nrr, which is also, you know, a place you could start to look at, hey, how might partners actually jump in here and help support some of our customers? Could we be making more deliberate introductions to agency partners, let's say, to help support our customers? Like things like that. When you start to explore and you start to open up what your definition of a partner might be, I like to say open up your aperture. Now all of a sudden you start to see a lot of revenue opportunity that maybe wasn't as obvious. And oftentimes what I suggest to people is start with your marketing team. Your marketing team. In all likelihood, they're already working with partners as I just defined it, right? People outside of the org driving pipeline revenue. Those could be affiliates, those could be influencers, creators, whatever you want to call them. They're probably folks that end up having the attention of the audience you want the attention of. They have the trust of that audience. Your marketing team is probably already thinking about how you tap into that. Like I said, if they aren't already. And is there more that you can do there? Right? Like is, is that an area you can just pour gas on? And again to me, more often than not, doesn't sit in partnerships, those types of partners. But it's a way to start to show the impact of this idea of indirect revenue and then you can keep growing from there.

I love the, just the perspective shift of like the tactic versus the outcome. When you're like partnerships, as you define it might not be your top priority, but revenue is. And that's just what the outcome of partnerships is. And I think that's, that's even just a good reminder for me, like internally, right? It's outcome driven versus like tactic driven. I think sometimes we get, we as marketers, myself included, we get so focused on the tactics that it's like, no, wait a second, all of these, the goal is just revenue and what's the best way to get that? And a lot of times it can and should be partnerships. So I love that just lens shift on it.

I'm glad you said outcome because I, I think you're bang on. That's something that, that we certainly try to talk to our customers about is exactly that. What are the outcomes that you're trying to drive for the business? Right? Just step outside of partnerships for a second. What are the outcomes that you're trying to drive? And then more often than not, you can start to map different partners to those outcomes. And I also think that's important because I just harped on the importance of revenue. But sometimes maybe it's not revenue right now that's too lagging of an indicator. We've worked with customers where of course revenue is important, but we're, we're trying to build a new category. People don't even know that what we're offering exists. Can you help us work with partners that can help us build that mindshare, build that awareness, help us be a partner in building this category? Revenue is the lagging indicator, but that's a totally different type of partner and the type of audience that they have that you might want to work with. But that's a very strategic outcome you're trying to drive. And so if you go to like literally what I just said of like revenue, you actually might end up working with the wrong type of partner in that case because you're just going to get somebody driving you potentially lead volume that isn't ready because they're not, you know, you go into like problem aware solution where like they're, they're not even problem aware yet. And so I like that of strategically, what are those outcomes you're trying to drive? And then you start to think about, okay, tactically, how do we get there? And more often than not there's, there's some kind of partner opportunity across that journey.

It reminds me, and I'm stealing your punchline here, you and I were talking a little bit before we hit record, but of marketing, right? There are so many different functions and tactics within the broader marketing scheme. You know, we need to build a category and that's a brand exercise. And yes, that'll lead to revenue, but we need to focus on the brand tactics, right? Sometimes it is, hey, we've got, you know, product market fit and we've got a scalable channel. We need to focus on the demand gen exercise, right? Or we need to focus on storytelling and that happens in content. Like it sounds like partnerships is the exact same thing, like dependent on what the business goals are. That kind of determines then what the kind of different types of partnerships you should pursue are.

That would be my view of it for sure. I also, you know, would suggest that's true once you get into what I think is oftentimes viewed as a little bit more of the traditional type of partner, which is your tech partners, who you're integrating with, how you're building that sort of tech ecosystem. But even that, right, there's going to be outcomes you have around your product objectives, around extensibility, bringing proprietary data into the platform that's valuable to your customers that maybe you don't have access to. Right. Like those are all outcomes that again, once you map it, you can move away from being what I think I oftentimes see, which is just opportunistic, low hanging fruit around tech partners and who you integrate with. And really starting to be a little bit more strategic about who should I be chatting with based on those outcomes. And then if you really want to go big with it, M and A activity almost always starts with some kind of partnership. Right. And so even as a partner professional, starting to think that way as well. Like that's the stuff that gets you at the table with the CEO, the cfo. But again, it's an outcome. Right. This is a potential desired outcome for the business at some point in the future. Like how do I start thinking about how I can support that?

Yeah, I'm smirking a little bit because in my seat we hear some of that with the VC and other partners. It's always like, this could really be a strategic partnership in the future. You know, like wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Instead of just like saying it out loud. I think that's a, that's. You're. You're exactly right though. That is the path that most often happens.

Cool.

Okay. So we've talked about like what partnerships are. There's a lot of different partnerships. We, we were talking earlier. Everybody, regardless of whether or not they're successfully doing partnerships or not, it feels like everybody is talking about partnerships. There are some companies doing it extremely well and some that are still struggling with kind of stagnating and getting it off the ground. Do you at Partner Stack, do you all see any consistent themes and people who are doing partnerships well versus those that are not?

Simplest answer I can give is a very cliched one which is just an extreme bias towards action. What I see is there's sometimes a story that we tell ourselves in partnerships that it takes time. It takes time. You got to build a ton of trust. It's relationship based. When you start to get into the product side of it, like these things, you know, they can take time. There's a lot of. And work development work takes time. And that's fine. Right? Those things can be true. But what I see the highest performing customers of our do is they're doing two things concurrently. They're doing the long term with the short term. And the short term is like this extreme bias towards action. And so a very specific example of that. I see a lot of people spend months trying to perfect their ideal partner profile, their ipp and then I see people who just like, I'm just going to call 200 people. I'm just going to do my own outbound. I'm going to see what lands, what doesn't land through that I'm going to figure out who my IPP is because it's going to based on like where we're actually seeing traction. And so to me, like that's a perfect example where in one scenario, sure, maybe you're hitting the market with this ideal partner profile, very well thought out how you're going to bring them in and acquire those partners, very strategic, very well orchestrated, but you're four to five months out from starting the other person. It might feel chaotic, but they're a month in and they've got partners driving some activity and there's some traction there. Concurrent to that they're building the program, they're working on the longer term partnerships. Like they're doing both at the same time. I would say that's, that's the biggest thing that I see. And again like you mentioned the parallels with marketing. I view it as the same with marketing marketers that default to well, we're trying to build a brand. It takes a really long time. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. Like realistically, they probably don't stay in their jobs to see it through, right? They're, they're probably getting, they're probably being asked to leave. The folks that are like, hey, here's what I'm going to do. I got to drive some immediate pipeline right now. It might not be perfect, might not be completely well orchestrated, might not even be perfect ICP that we're bringing through the door. But like week two on the job, I'm driving pipeline and we're building for the long term as we go, we're learning as we go. And then when I have some real traction around revenue impact, then I'm going to start to invest into things like brand that potentially might take a little bit longer, but I'm going to build the goodwill in the business, almost self fund my ability to do the long term stuff before I get, get right into it. So I think there's some parallels there that I see with both marketing teams and partnership teams that end up doing quite well versus ones that maybe plateau and stagnate a bit.

And I even see some parallels between like entrepreneurship and partnerships. And I think sometimes partnerships are a business within the business where it's like entrepreneurs talk all the time, like just go start selling even maybe before you're building and that'll inform what you should build versus trying to build something that's perfect. Then take it to market and find out that it doesn't work. It's like just, just go and kind of learn along the way. I love that bias toward action. That's really strong. You mentioned marketing a few times there. I'm curious, how do you, the marketing leader at a partnerships company, how does the partner sac marketing team use. Drink your own champagne, if you will in using partnerships in your go to market efforts?

One, which I think is fair to say is oftentimes like you go on LinkedIn, right? And outbound is dead. This is dead. That's dead. This is the only path to growth. I don't want to suggest that we're, we're trying to say, hey, partnerships is the only way. You don't do any of that other stuff. It's all dead. So for us, like our principles are pretty simple. One is we try to do the unsexy stuff as well as possible. Like we just try to execute excellently every day on the basics. I'll just start there. And so what does that mean? That means things like we're still regularly invested in like conversion rate optimization, testing our site, testing our demo form. It's something that I find most B2B companies like they never do. Like this stuff becomes a set and forget things like SEO. People say it's dead. Who knows what's going to happen with the rise of AI and how things are shifting with like the whole zero click result type of trend. But for us, we saw an opportunity to really own organic around a lot of partnership themes across the whole journey. And so we've been invested in that for a couple years now. And what it's resulted to is candidly we'll drive four to five times the traffic of our next closest competitor. All through. All through Organic. The interesting byproduct of that is ChatGPT has become one of our biggest referral sources because it's picking up all of the same organic. Right. So there's some interesting traction there. In terms of drinking our own champagne though our mentality is anything that we're thinking about doing ourselves, our first step is well, who should we be doing it with? Like what partner of ours should we be doing it with? Typically events, we're almost always going to partner up with somebody. The content that I mentioned, we're typically going to be partnering with somebody on it. When we think about account based marketing, we think about how do we partner with the right types of folks that are in our partner program to help go to market with it. We'll do account mapping, we'll share target account lists back and forth. We'll figure out, okay, partner stack plus this partner, we probably have the best shot together at penetrating these 20 accounts in our target list. Let's go do that together. These other 15 enterprise level accounts, we might be better suited with this partner. So let's go do that together. Even when I say like we try to do the basics really, really well, our default is but who are we partnering with when, when we look to do it? And so all of that really just came from the data. Right. So I would suggest, like I said, I'm five years. In the first two years we did everything solo. Like I didn't do any co marketing. We barely had a partner program. We certainly didn't have anything to do with like affiliates or creators or content type of partners. And then we just started to do our own testing and experimentation. Everything we did with a partner was just stronger. If it was an event, we had higher attendance, higher engagement, stronger pipeline at the other end of it if it was content, stronger distribution, better data points, more credibility, our ABM programs, stronger account penetration. So everything just kept pointing to like we, this needs to be our default operating mode.

I love the mantra of just like we coach our customers all the time on it with content. Just like be better at the basics. I think you're right. So many people are quick to skip over that or do it once and then just go on and focus on what's, what's trending, what's sexy, what's everyone talking about, right. Versus just doing the basics really well. And I love the collaboration. It's, I mean at the Juice, I can tell you that that's what helped us get off the ground is every piece of content we, we created, it was a collaboration and we, we were always partnering with people that had the audience that we wanted to grow our audience. I think marketers sometimes get so focused on growing their own audience that we forget that we can do it with others who already have that audience and build that way. So I love both those pieces of advice there. Kind of your own experience. Last question. Before I get to our typical last question here, I'm curious as we head into 2025 from the CMOC, just what's top of mind for you?

That's such a good question. Obviously something I should probably think about more in the role. I think there's a few things to point to that I doubt are groundbreaking in any way. One is, obviously you got to talk about AI. The simplest thing with AI Is number one. Don't fear it sounds simple, but especially in marketing, especially creative marketers, I think there's a default. It'll never replace me, though. It's like, okay. Not what we're talking about though, right? That's not the conversation, it's how does it unlock? And so for me, I think there's just an. Org element to it around. How do you get folks across the company thinking about how you leverage, I won't even say AI just tech more effectively in your role. How does everybody become a little bit more of a tinkerer and a hacker in their role? A very simple example. We're going to do our all hands later today. I just want a simple slide of every single logo of every customer we've sold and brought onto the platform this year. It's a lot of logos. Somebody says, oh yeah, I can do that. I'll go pull them all. It's like, well, you pulling hundreds of logos manually, probably not the best use of time. 20 minutes with ChatGPT to write a Python script to automatically pull those logos and resize them and dump them into a folder and then automatically throw them in a slide. Like, you literally just saved yourself probably two hours of work. And so for me, I think there's an. Org element of just trying to reinforce that. Hey, pause for a second. Is there an interesting way you might be able to approach this problem with the tech that that's available to us now? AI just being one of those versus the default of like, oh, no, no, no, no. Like, I don't, I don't buy it. It can never replace what I do. It's like, no. But it could definitely unlock your time so you can do more of what you do. The other is there's always just the view of content and how it evolves. Again, so many conversations around content people don't like long content people like short snippets. People don't read. Sure. I think what you need to do is figure out what's right for your audience. But certainly what I think is true is most organizations, ourselves included, need to be thinking about how do you turn yourself almost into a research lab? More than anything, I think 10 years ago it was every B2B company was, how do you turn yourself into a media company? Right? And that was really, to me, just, how do you get into a cadence of publishing like that, to me is what that meant to me now it's like, no, no, no. Like, how are you an analyst firm? How are you a research lab? How are you Bringing to the table data and insight that folks can't get anywhere else. What is the insight and data that is proprietary to you, that only you can bring to the table? And then how do you package it up in a way that is really actionable and turns you into kind of a default source of that type of insight? I think that's one of the ones that I'm really thinking about. We're doing a little bit of it, but it's how do you scale it out and how do you actually build that perception of, okay, I trust this, right? I get your partner stack and you have a certain bias and you're the vendor, how do we do this in a way that's a little bit more credible? And then going back to what I said earlier, you include partners, right? You pair our content with a third party piece of content or data, I should say. And I think that helps you build that credibility. And then I think the other thing is, again, I don't think it's groundbreaking for 2025, but in marketing and the CMO role, I really think everybody should be thinking about how do you become a little bit more of a financial partner to the cfo? Again, not groundbreaking. I think that's been true forever and ever, but I think it's more important now than it's ever been. Just given how much focus there is on efficiency. What's the return on a dollar spent? The average SaaS company will spend a dollar to make about 85 cents, 90 cents. Not a great look, but that was fine when it was just growth at all costs. Now it's how do you spend a dollar to make two dollars and how do you do that? Pretty predictably. So I think those are the basic things I would point to. But again, to me it comes back to you got to pay attention to the shiny stuff that's happening out there, but you can't get overly distracted by it because it ends up, I think, in more instances than not, taking you down a path that doesn't actually drive the outcome you're looking for for your business. So to me, it's just constantly, how are you building your own unique playbook for your business and your audience?

I love all of that. Oh, that's so good. Such good advice. Specifically the research lab, marketing being a research lab, I, I love that shift. We talk to customers again all the time, like what kind of content should we be creating? Your proprietary data is something that AI can't replicate, at least not yet. You can use AI to build around that, right? But that is your unique value prop to, to your audience. I love applying that research lab language. I think that's really powerful. That might be something I share with our team. That's, that's really good. Well, Tyler, the last question we do always ask all of our guests. I don't typically have an unpopular opinion sitting behind the guest, but beyond Die Hard being a Christmas movie, what's an unpopular opinion you have as it pertains to B2B marketing?

I think it's going to relate to what the monologue I just gave, which is anytime you see on LinkedIn that something is dead, run directly into it and see like, hey, is this actually a thing that we should be trying? Because what I find is more often than not, when people start saying things are dead, there's an opportunity there to squeeze, squeeze some traction out of it. And so I'd probably point to that is most of the clickbaity, echo chambery type of commentary that you see isn't necessarily a playbook that you should adopt and it isn't necessarily coming from somebody who's been in the seat that you're in. And so I tend to look at it as like, hey, I'm actually going to go look at the opposite and, and see if the opposite might be true. And more often than not, I uncover it's like, oh, there's, there's some interesting opportunity here. So maybe a little bit of a cop out answer. But to me that's what I would suggest people do is be more critical in how they react to what they're reading online.

Zig when they zag. I like that. The one that I've seen a lot is like, outbound is dead. And I've got a soft spot. I used to lead a marketing team where sales dev reported into marketing and I've got a soft spot for the sales dev function. And I always say outbound isn't dead. Your outbound is just lazy and uninspired. Yeah, I think there's the we like. We say these tactics are dead. And it's like, well, how are you actually executing the tactic? I could rant all day on this.

Outbound is a perfect example the way you're doing it. Yeah, probably not working. So maybe let's try something else. Maybe the days of having a hundred outbound BDRs. Yeah, I don't know about that. But having a handful of exceptionally strong folks in a very deliberate motion, great. Even something as simple as MQLs are dead. It's a vanity metric. It's like, yeah, but it's a pretty good leading indicator, right? They're dead if they're not real. Like if you're using an MQL to artificially inflate how you look to your boss, that's an issue. If you're using it as a leading indicator to manage the day to day, that's not a bad thing. Nobody's suggesting you only report on MQLs to your board. But that's where I find marketers. Like I stop reporting on MQLs and I don't know what's working and what's not working and I don't know what's happening do next it's like, well should probably have some leading liking indicators that you're, you're looking at.

That's going to be a follow up episode we're going to have to hit on because I, I'm fighting the urge to go down a rabbit hole here so badly. But I, I love that unpopular opinion. Tyler, if people want to learn more from you or learn more about Partner Stack, what's the best way to do that?

LinkedIn is always easiest. You can just connect with me there. Tyler Calder, you'll find me. Or you can just shoot me an email. Tyler partnerstack.com all fair game.

Well, Tyler, thank you so much for joining us today in the midst of the holiday season on the same day. As in all hands, we really appreciate the time. To all of our watchers, all of our listeners, thanks for joining another episode of the Content Cocktail Hour. Until next time, cheers. Thank you for joining the Content Cocktail Hour powered by the Juice. If you want to see more episodes or more resources curated for your role, join us on app. The jump juicehq.com See you next time. Same time, same place.

Cheers.