Tyler Calder on the Art of Partner Leadership and Revenue Growth

I'm testing these swag, Sam, and I'm. I don't know how I feel about the hat.

I mean, I kind of like it.

Can you make out what it says?

Stacked.

Okay.

And pancakes.

You know, I'm. I'm pretty satisfied with that. Maybe it's a go.

I like it.

Yeah, it's not bad.

Okay.

Welcome to the Friends with Benefits podcast. A business podcast about revenue generating partnerships, not a podcast about business Time with friends. We're your co hosting couple. I'm Jason.

And I'm Sam. Welcome to the show, friends.

Welcome back to the show. Our friends, our dear loved ones, our esteemed colleagues. We are back with episode two of season two, and I couldn't think of a better guest to bring in. A dear friend of the Yarby family. Someone I actually got to hang out with this summer here in Bozeman, Montana, at the Arcadia Leadership Experience, and a gentleman I've gotten to know quite well over the last year. Mr. Tyler Calder of PartnerStat. Welcome to the show, my friend.

Hello. Thank you for having me. I. I love being the second guest. It's my favorite, favorite spot to be in.

Yeah, we got all the. All the kinks and quirks worked out of the first episode, so now we know what we're doing, despite how we started off. The. The tech issues galore. But, I mean, hey, who better to figure it out with you?

Perfect. Yeah. I love it. Thank you for having me. It's great to see both of you.

Always a pleasure. Good to see you. This is a. The debut of a. A new stacked hat. Those of you watching by video.

Yeah. Should I lean in? I won't. I'll lean in a little bit. There's a. It's a tester.

Get stat.

It's a tester.

Is that a one of a kind or are there multiples?

No, this is one of a kind. Wow. And for. I didn't. I should have known this. I did not know this. It costs an absurd amount of money to get one hat.

Sure does.

Sure does. No volume discounts. Don't tell a cfo.

This is not being recorded.

No safe space. It's a tester. Yeah. See? See? You know, see if we like it. We call ourselves pancakes at Partner Stack.

Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, so this. There's further. I like it.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not just a pancake.

I did. I did know that, but I don't know, like, how that originated.

Partner Stack.

Stacks. Stacks of pancakes. Like, following.

Yeah, that was $4 bills.

Couldn't see? Yeah.

Double. Double meaning.

Yeah.

Stacks on stacks on stacks. Stacks.

Making stacks while eating stack.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I was telling you earlier, I originally wanted to have this be our logo melting onto the pancakes as the syrup. And I'd had a brand. Charles, he was just like, no, you can't do that to a logo. I was like, I'll just create a new. A new logo then. This is now the new Stack logo.

What a rebel against your.

Happy about that? Yeah. He was more okay with this. Still not thrilled. But here we are.

I mean, I like it. I would wear it for whatever it's worth.

No pancakes.

Hats for everybody.

Let's talk about what the pancakes do in one minute or less. Could you tell us what Partner Stack is and does?

No. Under one minute. Probably not. I should be able to, right? As the. The head of marketing, I should have this really crisply down.

Gotta have that elevator pitch. Tyler, we can work on it while we're here.

We'll give you a little more time.

Let's workshop it. Okay. Can I. Can I ramble for maybe two minutes?

Sure.

Set the timer, though.

Go. Yeah, yeah. And then. And then I want your. I'd love your feedback on it. Okay. Is that a good deal?

All right, here we go.

Got it. So I'm going to tutor on horn for a little bit because I think Partner Stack, you know, I've been here for four and a half years. It'll be five years, I guess, in January, so more than four and a half. And we've been on this pretty wild ride, this really great journey. You know, I think as far as I can tell, we've become the commercially the most successful partner tech startup in the time frame. And that's not just to brag. What I think is interesting is it's.

A hard category to be successful in.

It is a hard space to be successful in. But I say that. And the success we've seen, I don't know that the majority of our market could crisply tell us what Partner Stack does.

I think you're right. And I think that's fascinating.

I think it's fascinating too. And. And I'll be honest, I've. I've noticed it and I've kind of leaned into it because there's almost this. This Canadian mystery of, like, what are those folks doing up there? And. And that drives this, like, inbound demand and interest. And so that. That's why I wanted to mention that I think it is. I think it is interesting. And so, you know, Parker Stack, I think where Some of that comes from that, that mystery of exactly who we are and what we do sort of comes from the breadth of what we've built. And so when I joined, you know, I, I was definitely immediately drawn to the vision, which I'll, I'll come back to the vision, but like, very tactically, you know, in past roles, I've experienced the pain of, of trying to manage a partner program, as I'm sure, obviously both of you have. And you know, in one instance I was. Somebody literally said, hey, I know you joined as marketing, but here's a $200 million reseller program, can you go fix it? And they handed me one Excel document with one tab and that was it. And I was like, I, okay, I don't know how to do this. And then started to look for tech and didn't necessarily find something that fit our needs. And then in another instance, you know, I stood up an affiliate program that ended up doing probably about 70% of our revenue at the end of the day. Same thing, try to find technology to support it. Couldn't really find something that did exactly what we wanted to do, something we couldn't grow into. And so we, you know, we really. Everything was a half measure, you know, hacked together. So I felt the pain, right. And then, you know, I think it's. You always got to talk about the people, right? Just the people. The pancakes here drew me, certainly drew me to Partner Stack. But really the vision, like what we say is our vision is to change the way the world sells software. And that's a big statement. It's a pretty, pretty bold statement. Certainly somewhat ambiguous, but it's interesting. So what does that mean? When I first started to talk to PartnerStack, you know, there is this vision of democratizing distribution and even that kind of big statement, a little bit ambiguous, but I always fall back to this really well known quote, the founder of Twitch. I forget what his, forget what his name is. Probably should know it. But first time, founders obsess over products. Second time founders obsess over distribution. That's the thing that we wanted to bring to everybody and that's what we've been trying to do, making distribution accessible to everybody, not just the big players with the deep pockets. And so today, to net that out, what Partner Stack is trying to do is really enable companies to tap into that power of indirect revenue channels, whether that is affiliate, co, sell, ambassador, resellers, manage it all from one platform. So the biggest challenge that we saw in the market was a tremendous amount of fragmentation, where you had one team managing an affiliate program, another team managing an influencer program, another team managing a reseller program. All separate technology, separate strategies, separate leaders. And so we said, you should be able to manage all of that one platform. And that's where the breadth comes from. And so certainly people come to us, knowing us for a thing. I want to use you as an affiliate network. I want to use you as a co sell tool. I want to use you as an influencer platform. And we can give them that. But the, the overarching objective is really that how do you pull it all together into one platform? And then how do you. How do you tap into our network of partners? Which is. Marketing's not going to like this either because we haven't announced it yet, but we just crossed 100,000 unique partners being paid out through our platform, which. Yeah, which, you know, in marketing you see a hundred thousand and it doesn't sound like that, that much. And then when you really look at the market, you know, most companies that have any semblance of network, it's very concentrated around a dozen partners, 20 partners, 30 partners. And so to have a hundred thousand that our customers can tap into, to continue to scale is something that's pretty cool and we're proud of. So anyways, that's my rambling. We got to net that out, but.

We can edit that down in post production. You got there. It took a little bit to get there, but we got there. You got there.

We went on a journey.

Yeah, he's in marketing. We have to tell his story. Okay, so wait, I have a question on this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Okay, so you guys do like. I talked to Luke a while back. Luke is your founder. Co founder. And in that conversation, I was one of the few, or one of the many maybe that was like, oh, wow, you guys do way more than I thought. Like, you're much more than a prm. So when a customer comes to you, like, how many of your customers do you think are fully using the true capacity of partner stack?

Probably about 15%.

Okay. How much of what you guys do is like get them in for a use case, like you said, like influencer marketing or whatnot. And then you're like educating your customers on like the true opportunity really, of indirect revenue.

That's absolutely. Yeah, that. That has been the strategy of very simple land and expand. So you come in with a very specific need. We are going to help you solve that need. You know, when it comes to the sales side of things, like, I'm a very Big proponent of. I want to let you know of everything that we can do, but I don't want to spend too much time on that. Right. What I want to get to is solving the immediate problem you have in front of you. And maybe we do that through like a very tactical thing like an affiliate program or an influencer program or maybe we're going into something deeper like co seller, resell, like we will solve that thing for you. But then let's start to talk about what the larger opportunity is. So it's very much like we have so many different folks out in the market and we're very, you know, in a very Canadian quiet way, pulling people in through those different channels and then expanding the business from there. And like I said, you know, our customer base, maybe 15 to 20% of them, using all of what partners that can do. We got a lot of opportunity to continue to push that. But that's been our approach.

It's good. I like it. Talk to a lot of users out there. We actually chatting this morning about 1. So there's a lot of people out there using. I could, you know, I kind of agree with that number 15. Seems like very few are using the full capacity of it and you know, the job they're in is get them to you know, solve what you call the fragmentation. I did, yeah, yeah. In your opening monologue you said something that I think is, is interesting that has nothing to relate to the product, but sort of that your founders being second time founders and focused on distribution. That is. I was having this conversation recently somewhere I think maybe in Chicago at one of the events there just around distribution. Having a lot of second time founders get less hung up on like the, the product and more around the distribution to get the, the product out there. Do you find that to be true.

Specifically around first time versus second time founders? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean I've been through the ringer in the startup world, both agency side and leading marketing in house. And absolutely you can see it. Right. If you're working with a first time founder, typically it's all product, product, product and absolutely you need a great product, but you can have a great product. And if you're not figuring out how to get it in front of the right people at the right time with the right message, it's not going to go anywhere. And so you know, by the time somebody's onto that second or third company, they realize product important. But we got to figure out how we get it in the, in front of the right folks.

Yeah, absolutely. I Think there's.

So for a marketer you want to work for that second or third time founder.

I mean, that's an interesting comment. So you will hear a lot of marketers say that. Right? So, and heads of, like heads of every function will say, I'm never working with a first time founder again. I love. Absolutely not my perspective. I love working with a first time founder, a first time founding team, because I think there is a rawness and a drive there that is really hard to replicate on your second and third round.

That's probably true.

And I think you're in a really interesting position to be more integral to the growth of the company than you would be with a second or third time founder. So if you can have the right conversations, if you can drive influence with that founder, like you really, really, really can see the impact that you're having versus you're working with a third time founder, like they have the playbook that they know they want you to execute on and they're going to be on you to execute it. So I, I find that first time founding team is always really interesting. It's a ton of fun. It's usually a great ride. Um, do you think that's always been my perspective on it.

How do you think that plays out in the, in the partner world? Like if you're a partner leader coming in to work with a first time founder versus a second or third time founder?

I think it's the, I think it's the same. I think, I think it's always going to be challenging. Right. So you need to know what you're getting in for. I think you absolutely want to be interviewing that founder just as much as they're interviewing you to understand their thought process, the mental models that they're using, what is their expectation of partnerships like? You definitely need to know what you're getting into, but once you're in there, I think you need to view yourself as a partner to that CEO. Like you're not necessarily, you're joining that early stage company and that partner of that first time founding team. Not just to be the partner leader, you are there to help be a guide in a world that they're new to and they're unfamiliar with. And I think you need to help them bridge that gap. And so if you're going into it thinking, oh, I'm just going to go and build a partner program, I think that sets you up for some struggles. I think if you go in as like I'm coming in with a little bit more experience around not just partnerships, but all go to market. Building a culture, building a team, building high performance performance. I think that's what you need to bring to the table.

Yeah, you're exercising that, that partner muscle with an internal approach to build an internal partnership. So let's, let's, let's talk about some, some partnership stuff. Let's talk about some partner leaders. We've got some Tyler Calder direct quotes here, and I'm going to abbreviate this one a little bit. But let's, let's talk a little bit about why some boards view partner leaders as just a bunch of whiners who can't hit their numbers.

Did I say that?

I said that? I said that?

Yeah. Quote, unquote.

Oh, geez. Yeah, so I did say that. I think, I think it's documented somewhere too. I think I wrote that down somewhere.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we like copy pasted.

Yeah, I think it might be a little thing called LinkedIn or something. It's.

Did I say that on LinkedIn maybe, or who knows? Yeah, so I mean, let's acknowledge. Definitely a, a spicy statement. That is a broad generalization. Yes. But, but so here's, here's where it comes from. So I heard that directly from a vc, not one of our investors, but I, I oftentimes get pulled into chat with different, different VCs and, and support their portfolio companies. And, and they ask me that question when, when we're talking about partners. And then I heard the same thing from two other people. I won't name who they are because I, that's probably not fair. People know, but they're, they're in the partnerships world. They're very tight with the VC community and they suggested like, we're, we're kind of hearing the same thing. And so that sentiment is, is out there. And I don't think we can just brush it off as like, oh, a bunch of dumb VCs, you know, spouting their mouths. There's a sentiment there, right? Perception is reality to a certain degree. And so I do think there is, there's a bit of an uncomfortable truth there to tackle. And really what it comes down to for me is every function in a business needs to get far more comfortable speaking the language of the business than they probably are 100.

Yeah.

And I think for partnerships, that's what this is stemming from. So can I just, can I go on a ramble again? How to do this without a ramble?

Or you can probe, not go for it. This was, I feel like speaking the language of the business was very much a topic, I think, on the first day of Arcadia, that we were there and being able to understand that and speak the language and translate the problem that we're here to solve in the language of the business. And I think too most partner leaders, at least, like there's a lot of the moment, it's a general statement as well. But have our struggle and being able to communicate in that language.

Yeah. Like even on our last episode, Bob Moore was talking about how when he's talked of crossbeam, when he's talking to partner leaders, all they care about is where they get credit, where credit's due in the business, and the business doesn't give a shit about that. So, like, partner leaders need to think to your point higher and what does this mean for the overall value for the business? How are we thinking high level and strategically? So please ramble.

Yeah. Oh, so that. So Bob was the first guest that I, I'm.

I.

That makes sense. That lands.

I'm like second.

Yeah. I like second to Bob. Who wouldn't like second to Bob? How so?

I could probably name a few.

So I would like. Let's say the starting premise in what I'm about to say is as a, we're talking about partner leaders. Right. So I think this is true for almost every function. Agreed. But if we focus on partner leaders, my starting premise is as a partner leader, you should be thinking yourself about yourself as a revenue leader. Like that, like, full stop. If you are not thinking about yourself as a revenue leader, first and foremost, I think that's where your troubles begin. And so if we accept that you're a revenue leader, then that's where you really need to speak the language of the business. Specifically, how are you talking to the cfo? How are you talking to the CEO? How are you talking to the board? If you roll up to a CRO, it's no different. Right. How do you speak the language of the business to that. That CRO? And so very tactically. And you two tell me if this is a fair statement, but I think a lot of partner leaders are struggling to figure out how they articulate their impact on the business. And that comment about whining that I've heard from investors or this perception of, hey, we really believe in partnerships. We're just. We don't know if the person we have in place can actually do it and execute on it. Where it stems from is a lot of conversations that I've heard around. You know, it takes a really long time. These Relationships are hard to build. I need more resources, you know, and we're here to influence revenue. And all of those things might be true, but the CEO doesn't give a shit about any of that. So if you're going to the CEO or the CFO and you're saying, hey, here's my plan, it's going to take 18 months to really see some traction. And when you're saying it's 18 months just to show that you've influenced revenue, not directly impacted or sourced revenue, like that's where it starts. Like right on that conversation, they're kind of like, oh, like you're, you want me to give you 18 months? Is 18 months going to turn into two years? And then the other thing I find is when you're presenting that 18 month plan, you're not talking about the upside, right? So let's assume that top down, the company said you got to invest in a partnership. So it's viewed as this very strategic thing. They're willing to invest, they're willing to take the time you need to show like, what is the universe of opportunity? Like how big could this thing be? Like, why am I waiting 18 months to 2 years for this thing to really take off? So at a minimum, if you're not showing like the universe of opportunity out the other side of that time horizon you're given, that's problematic. But then I'm still very much an advocate for you got to do two things concurrently. You got to have short term impact on the business, you got to show immediate results. That gives you the opportunity and almost the right or the credibility to do the long term thing. And so when I say speak the language of the business, like you should be speaking effectively of financial language, right? We're going to invest here, here and here. This is how I'm going to allocate resources, which is the job of a revenue leader. Here's what I think the impact will be on a short term time horizon, mid term, long term. And I always like to use kind of like red light, green light, short term, if we're hitting these things, green light, I'm telling you right now, we are going to uncap this next level of investment, like I'm telling you that right now, so you can plan for it. You can also have confidence in me to say red light. I'm not going to ask you for more money because we're not seeing the traction that we want to see, right? So you're, you're basically managing your own little business so that, that's kind of what I mean when I say speaking the language of the business is resource allocation. You know, obviously return on investment, you know, all of that fun stuff.

Yeah. We talked about this a lot when we were in person at Arcadia. And I think your perspective on it is really needed and valued in terms of. I've heard that a million times, like it's a long tail, but there's nothing communicated in that 18 month period. So even if it's not revenue in the first month, like there's gotta be some leading indicators to showcase. Like this is what we're working on, which is going to lead to revenue and just being over communicative and having that plan is so needed a hundred.

Percent, like over communicate, bring the company and every function along for the ride. I think that the leading lagging indicator comment is a really important one. What I've seen is a lot of partnership leaders, they're not talking both. Right. And so the CEO, the board, typically, all they're going to care about are the lagging indicators. Like for the most part, that's all they're going to care about. Until you're hitting those lagging indicators. Like you absolutely need to show them. Here are the leading indicators we're using to manage our business and then going back to like red light, green light. Here are the signposts and the signals that tells us this thing is working and we should keep investing. Like you, you need to give them that map. Otherwise they're just going to make their own decision that this thing isn't working. Even if you might be a month away from the thing, the thing actually taking off. Right. So you, you kind of need to be their guide through all of that and leverage both leading, lagging, take them along for the ride.

Okay, can we get tactical? Sorry, Jay, just really quickly, I think that this is a super important conversation and some people might be listening and say like, okay, but what, what are those? Like, give us some examples of what you've seen for leading and lagging indicators.

Yeah, I mean for me the, the lagging indicator is it's revenue, right? It's, it's how much revenue have you sourced. And in your business, like you're going to have to figure out how you want to define source and attribution and all of that. But that's part of your role is to have those conversations. But for me it's the lagging at that level has to be revenue. When it comes to leading indicators, I mean there's a bunch of different ways that you can look at it and it's probably dependent on the type of partner, the type of partners you're working with for me, and the types of partners that we typically work with. So we work with in our own partner program. A lot of agencies that support B2B partner programs, we work with tech partners. And so if we look at something like the tech partner side of it, I'll get very tactical. We just launched our integration with HubSpot. Very, very excited about it. Impact to revenue. It's far out. Like it is absolutely, you know, multiple quarters out. And so if we say success is revenue, we're going to ignore everything that suggests we're on our path to revenue. So for us, we look at a lot of simple leading indicators. App installs is one, right? So how many agencies are actually installing the partner stack app within their HubSpot instance? That's number one. Then it moves into how many of them have actually used it at least once. Like, let's just start there. We don't know what our magic number is. We don't know if an agency has to use it 5 times, 10 times for it to really be meaningful. For now, we're just saying, like, just use it once. After you get that type of, you know, first shot you saw value out of using the thing, then you get into, okay, is there actual sort of referral business happening through the app, like actual money being exchanged. And effectively the tool would allow an agency to refer business to any number of customers that we work with in our network. So really what I just mapped out is kind of the journey to revenue, right? So first step is you got to get the app installed. Second step is you got to get somebody actually using the thing. Once they use the thing, you got to see them use it multiple things. Once they use it, multiple things, you got to see those multiple things lead to actual impact on their business, which is some kind of transaction. And then, you know, we can go a layer deeper. So we look at are the right agencies using it? Are these agencies that fall within our ICP agencies that aren't using it? What has been our ability to get in touch with them? And again, it's simple. Like, have we called them, yes or no? Have we booked a demo with them? Yes or no? Have we multi threaded in that agency? Right. So that's the type of stuff that we end up looking at. That's what we need to manage the business. I'm not talking about a lot of that stuff with our board. Right. We're not going to say like, hey, look at how many app installs we had. Right. Because they're not going to care. What I'll try to do is like, what. What's the closest thing that signals revenue might be coming? And it would be that, like, hey, there's a transaction that occurs. So that's the thing that I'm going to report on and then we'll start reporting onto revenue when it flows. So I think, like, for me, that's the way I would suggest you do it is look at like, what is the journey that you expect to happen. Spend the time to map that out and then figure out how are you going to measure the journey all along the way. Those become your leading indicators. That's great. Love it.

I love the phrasing of that. The journey you expect to happen. Map that out. And then going back to what you were saying, like over communicating that, I think what you're getting at there is probably one of the most overlooked, easiest tactics to start getting buy in immediately. I talked to a lot of younger partner leaders, younger partner managers that just aren't getting the buy in or the resources, and ask them, like, well, how often are you communicating to your leadership team, like your ELT executive leadership team? And most often it's never unless, you know, something comes up or they got something to report on, you know, and I've implemented back in the day, like just, just a quick email to an ELT around, hey, this is, this is what we're doing is what we're working on. This is what we're seeing, this is what's happening. And to, to kind of take your leading lagging indicators thing to, to the real world. In one of my previous roles, I started digging into just like integrations and started to find out, like, what happens when we have customers connected to integrations to potential partners. Like, what does it look like from a churn standpoint, a revenue standpoint? I started working with our strategy team. We uncovered a treasure trove of information that no one knew existed, no one knew was out there. And I took it and communicated to the leadership team and they were like, holy crap, we need to be leaning into this way heavier. And that's one of the ways that we took the marketing team from being partner curious to partner led simply by taking one of those, you know, you would call leading that indicator here, like, this is where we could be seeing more revenue potential from the partner standpoint. But had I not, you know, tried to find some ways to understand, like what we should be focused on down the road and communicated that to the team wouldn't have been uncovered. Wouldn't have been. Would have. Wouldn't have been something that we could have leaned into from a company.

Yeah. And, like, I mean, I hear that. And what I hear is, like, you just did it. Right? Like, it's as simple as that.

Right?

You just went and did the work. And where I'm going with that is, like, I. I see so many people that just don't want to do the work. Okay, Right. Like, you. You took the time to go investigate, to dig, to. Like, I view that as, like, you're kind of, like, unbiasedly investigating, like, what's happening, where might this take me? And that's where you, like, really start to discover opportunity. And when I talk to people about, like, that's what you gotta do, they're like, well, that's. That's not my job. That's someone else. That's like, I don't know, that's like some data person's job or that's an ops person's job, or it's. It's just not my job. I talk to the partner. That's what I do.

I. I think one of the most crucial skill sets of a partner person is. Is curiosity.

Right.

Because we are already tasked with being such a generalist, and most oftentimes, we may not know. We may know maybe one or two things within a team, a company or a department we're working with, we don't know at all. So you've got to become insatiably curious to be able to find these things out and to dig into the data and information and begin to. To learn what that looks like. You. That curiosity, you start to learn and uncover some things. Right. I think too many partner leaders are, you know, the CRO, cfo, whoever it is, like, all right, here's your number. You've got to hit. Here's $2 million. Go. Hit it. And they just all of a sudden go out there and become a BDR instead of. Stop them to think and ask a few questions like, okay, this is my number. How can I work across the board to hit this and help the rest of the team in the process? And what can I uncover to help me in the meanwhile?

You know what, though? I think you bring up a really interesting point too. Well, you both do. First of all, we're going back to the whining comment. But second of all, I think, like, this CS or integrations equals less churn comment is really interesting in that, like, so many partner leaders come into these roles and they're like partnerships is so much bigger than revenue and here's all the ways that it can add value to the company but they stay very high level and anecdotal in those conversations. Until you can go tell a story in the language of the business that's rooted in data, all of that doesn't matter. And your board and your revenue leaders don't care. Go hit your number, get it done. Until you can tell an actual story about like well look, we've done research. The data shows X amount of like it. The churn is X amount higher when there are less integrations then that's something we can start to like point our attention towards. But until you've done the work.

Yeah.

Theory.

Yeah. And I think you know there, there's kind of two paths to that dream state. Right. Like you might be lucky enough where there it's a top down mandate. Right. The, the, the executive team understands how strategic partnerships can be and you're, you're kind of lucky enough to get the resources and the buy in right out of the gate inclusive of like we gotta be attaching partners to our customers because it helps with net revenue retention. Like maybe you're lucky enough for that to be tops down and you don't have to get the buy in more often than not. No, that's not, that's not the case. Right. It is a bottoms up effort. And to your point, you're just given a number that you gotta go hit. And this is what I say to marketing, like this is what happens to marketing. Like you are responsible for x percent of source revenue. Go do it. Marketing people hate when I say like you have to go hit the fucking. Hit the number. That's what earns you the right to do the cool shit that you really want to do that has the long term impact but you're never going to get there if, if you're not just showing that you can be credible. And to me credible means like you got to show you can take a dollar and turn it into $3, $5, $10.

Yeah. Like do that first you gotta. Which is tactical and then do that like there's no problem like being given a number. Like yeah, give me a number. But like also expect me to ask a lot of questions about how I can get to that number because like, you know, it's kind of like playing.

A board game or something.

Like sometimes there's shortcuts like how can I get there to get to that number? I'm going to find them and I'm going To figure out like where the treasure trove is, like in the data around the integration. Yeah.

And I think like the asking questions is such a huge part of bringing people along for the ride and kind of over communicating. I'm a huge fan of trying to integrate as many perspectives across the business as possible. I'm not looking for consensus, but I'm definitely looking for a lot of different perspectives, including the executive team. So they're, you know, they can see their ideas in what we're executing on which you know, gets to the buying even more. But it's the whole org, right. Like to me even just asking those questions, digging, probing, getting them involved in brainstorms. Like that's how you just start to get more and more buy in and not just buy in, just better ideas. And you know, you're not in it alone. And I think again, true for most functions you think you gotta be the expert, you gotta figure it out on your own and you're kind of on an island, but you really don't need to be like that's a quick way to put yourself in the hot seat. So I, I just, I, I love that approach of like, yeah, go ask the questions.

Yeah, no reason to go.

Okay. So I want to, I want to segue because we just talked about, you know, how marketers, how you've talked to marketers about this. Another thing that you said, we're going to quote unquote, you again is partnerships is what marketing was 15 years ago. Expand on this because I think this is a really interesting take.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I've been, I've been drawing this parallel for, for a while now. Some of it is, I'll acknowledge just my own lived experience. Right. I, I started in marketing in 2007 and in 2007 it was a garbage market, kind of like what we've seen in the past couple years. But there was also this turn on what the expectation of marketing was. So when I started marketing, I started agency side and agency side. Most of my clients were VPs of marketing and CMOs. Like they, they were the ones that I spoke to on a very regular basis at that time. I'll use the whining comment again. Even I viewed them as whining. Right. All I heard from them was I can't get more budget for you as my agency, my CEO doesn't get marketing. You know, this whole crazy thing called digital. Like I just don't buy it.

Right.

Like it's all about brand. And so 15 years ago, what I saw was effectively 80% of my points of contact get fired probably in a two year window. And they all got replaced by folks that at the time were referred to as like growth hackers, you know, heads of growth. And some of those weren't necessarily good decisions. Right. Like I think he lost a lot of really, really solid people in that motion. But it was a changing of the guard to a certain degree. And so marketers went from talking about this takes a long time. Building a brand takes a long time. Building a relationship with your audience takes a long time. And then that started to shift into, you know, we'll talk about MQLs and pipeline that we're influencing. We're marketers, we don't source revenue, we're not responsible for revenue. That's sales. We can only influence it again, those group of people. So we went from like brand impressions, eyeballs to MQL's and influence. That crop of people were replaced. Then you started to settle into where we are now, which is marketers not talking about influence, talking about providing air cover for sales, team building brand awareness marketers over the span of a decade, learning how to talk language of the business. How much revenue are we sourcing? What is the lifetime value of customers being driven through certain marketing channels? What is the return on our ad spend? Like I said before, you give me a dollar, I'm going to give you $5 back. Like I'm going to be very, very transparent in what the return on these, what this investment looks like. And so now all of a sudden there was the shifting expectations of what, of what marketers could be and what they could do. Right. They could actually own a number of, was like, you know, 50%, 60% of a company's revenue. You know, the CMO started to be looked at and viewed as a little bit more of a growth leader and responsible for pushing that business forward versus just making people aware of the business. And I think that's the exact same spot that many partnerships folks are in now.

Absolutely.

I also think it's fair to, I think it's very fair to acknowledge though that we ignore the fact that partnerships is what has made every Fortune 100 company possible. Right. And so where I go with that is I also think we ignore the fact that there's a bunch of people with gray hair that had billion dollar targets that they had to drive through the channel. That kind of the new crop of partner leaders, like we're just kind of ignoring them. And I think there's a lot that we can learn there as, as well. So Again, I want to recognize there's, there's a huge chunk of the market that like, it's a hundred percent channel that's driving the business forward. And there's probably, probably quite a bit that we could learn there. But that's, that's kind of the parallel that I see. And again, marketers, it literally took a decade for marketing as a function to be viewed as a certain way and for it to be generally accepted what their responsibilities should be. Now, early innings for partnerships across most organizations and really where it comes from is, I think, hopefully partner stack has played a role in this. Is this idea that like, partnerships is becoming democratized. Like, every company can tap into it, so every company is focused on it. Every company needs a leader around it. So it is, it is new for most orgs.

Well, I think you're so spot on there. And a few things to call out, like, if partners, if partnerships are becoming democratized, it is in the best interest of you as the partner leader to.

Then.

End of day, what profit are you driving? Because if, if all you're doing is owning relationships, then that's.

Well, I mean, you said profit, which I think is even further. Right. I think profit is something that I, I've seen very few partner orgs think about. Like, they're not thinking about margin at all. This is about growth. Like, if they are thinking about revenue, they're thinking about revenue growth. What they're not taking into account is like, is this thing actually profitable?

Yeah.

And that's where like, you really get into it.

Totally. Well, we'll, we'll quote our good friend Corey Schneider here, talking about, what is my, what is my business costing the company and how am I showing? Like, am I breaking even, period? Am I. You know what, it's, it's ultimately understanding every metric that the board cares about and how your business is driving towards that and being able to articulate it.

Yeah. And, you know, it's funny, I usually don't talk a lot at work and then I get on something with you two and I just can't stop rambling.

I only know you to be a talker.

Is that you say, oh, that's not great.

It's me, it's me.

It creates such a safe, open space here. It's probably the fact that we're not recording that makes you feel so open.

That's probably exactly it. What you just mentioned about, you know, what is important to the board, again, very simple. But I think that is such an opportunity to build the case for the long term. And the strategic. So I always think of like tactical versus strategic. If you're viewed as a tactical function or you're solving a tactical need, as an employee, even as a vendor, you're only ever going to get tactical attention, tactical investment. If you're solving for something strategic that is a clear top down business priority, you're going to get strategic investment, strategic attention. And so where I'm going with that is you need to understand exactly what the business's objectives are, what their priorities are across the entire org. And then you need to sit down and map out, okay, how do I help solve net revenue retention? How do I help solve breaking into a new untapped market? How do I help solve for the extensibility of our product? Like, these are all very big strategic needs that businesses will have and partnerships can help with literally every single one of them. And so as long as you're hitting the like, the tactical need is like, I gotta hit this quarter's number. Yeah, right. That's the tactical need. If you can show that you're doing that, but then show like, here's how I can help with all of these other strategic pieces. Like, that's the other way that you start to shift the perspective of like, okay, yeah, they're doing the partnership thing. Or like, oh great, now they're hitting their number. It's still kind of a tactical view. You want to align yourself with what is documented and said out loud as the key priorities for the business. Top down. Yep.

I think this might be the most crucial topic of conversation for the current state of partnerships out there. Like, and I don't think that's a far stretch. And it's very much similar to the conversation we had last week. Similar, the conversations we had at Arcadia. So like if, if partnerships is where marketing was, you know, 15 years ago, and I love that analogy, it, it rings very true. Like, what did you see as kind of the impetus to those changes within marketing over that time? Like, what were the things that began to happen and how can we begin to replicate that in the partner community?

Oh, there's probably a lot of different ways to go with that answer, but I think most practically it was just the rise of digital. Right. And with the rise of digital, things became more measurable, more attributable, which meant marketers started say, like, oh shoot, like I can actually measure the impact to the business. And then the good ones just went and did that. And then that started to catch on. And then what I really think the forcing function was, was around technology and Folks like Eloqua Marketo, like the rise of these marketing automation platforms which really, really, really pushed not just the narrative of what marketing could be, but also enabled folks to do the job. And so to me, like it was the rise of digital. It was the new technology that actually enabled people to do the thing. And the great thing with partnerships is I think there's so, I mean the technology is there obviously, you know, not just partner stack. Like there's, there's so, so much out there, right? You had Bob on like great, great, great platform to, to really align yourself to revenue and, and all go to market. So there's, there's a lot of opportunity there. The tools are there. I like the ability to measure is there. Right? So now it's just learn from the people have been there, right? Like sit down with your marketing team, learn how they are presenting business cases, investment opportunities, learn how they think about the customer journey. Like build the relationship with those internal folks that are already doing the thing. And then again, like this is way easier said than done, but act as a single revenue team trying to lift the whole, go to market, work together on it. Like to me that, that is how you fast track this maturity curve that took marketing a decade to go through.

I love that.

Okay, so I think we should put it on the calendar now for 15 years from now.

Send a calendar invite, two years.

Let's just, let's just, we'll have a.

Leading lagging indicator meeting to see how we're keeping up with this. I think there's some interesting parallels between what you just said of like, okay, there was the rise of Eloqua, you know, all these marketing automation platforms, data platforms, et cetera. It's going to be really interesting I think in the coming years of like partnerships and how AI plays into all of that. Not to put you in the hot seat, but any thoughts?

I mean my, my general thoughts on AI are, are very simple. Like I'm, I'm not going to pretend to, to have any clue of what it's going to do to partnerships. But my, my general thoughts on it are it's going to move way faster than we think. So if you're not just playing around with it to expose yourself to what it's capable of, you absolutely should be. And I'll just say like, I don't know, have you tuned seen like the, the Google Notebook LM and what it's capable of doing of replicating podcasts just off of a piece of text?

No, but I was, Somebody was posting about that on LinkedIn yesterday.

It's bonkers. Right? And so like, to me, we, we've known about generative AI for the past couple years. When I say things are going to move way faster than we think, like seeing that, I'm like, I thought we were a decade away from being able to do that. Like it takes a LinkedIn post and turns it into a 10 minute podcast. That sounds pretty flawless. Like, it's bonkers.

That is wild. We can, so, so we can just make that our podcast now.

Yeah.

We're out of a job.

That's what you're trying to tell us.

Even though this isn't our job.

I mean, a little, you know, just be weary maybe. I think, I think you need to stay in tune with how quickly it's going and moving and be aware of what's out there. I think you need to not be afraid of it. Right? There's, there's kind of two reactions to it that you see people that are immediately accepting of it and excited about the potential and people who say, well, this isn't going to replace my job. This can't do what I do. It's like, well, that's not the reaction though, right? If that's the reaction, it probably will replace you. If the reaction is, wow, how can this make me 10 times more productive?

Yeah.

How can this make my impact 100x? And that's what you explore. Like, to me, that's the thing that becomes very interesting. Yeah. When you think about partnerships.

Right.

Like it, there's the obvious stuff that you can do right now. Right. Like you can automate communications. You can, you know, you can quickly experiment with different offer types and incentives. You know, with, with us, we already have an early version of like a discovery tool with our network. Right. So how do you intelligently match the, the right partner with the right vendor based on different signals and different criteria? So there's to me, like obvious things like that. But the general thought to me is just like, you just, you just got to stay in line with it, stay in tune with it. I mean, you two talk about this, right? Like you're, Wouldn't it be cool if. Yeah, that's my, that's my favorite thing in the world. I've, I, I used to run wouldn't it be cool if sessions back at the agency. And so when you two said that, I was like, I like these people.

That's all.

This is great comments to me around here. Yeah. Like, that's the AI. Like, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this thing like full stop, think as big as you can. Like, we're probably much closer to that than people think.

Totally.

So this, this kind of reminds me of another topic I think we got into at Arcadia. So I guess we should have just recorded our conversations from the ALX and made that the podcast.

If you don't have FOMO yet, people.

Wasting the time that you're, you're a big experimenter, right. To the tune of like 20% of budget goes towards, you know, innovation. Stuff that can't be measured, AKA experiments.

Right.

That's. It's a lot of trust that goes into your team to ensure that you know you're getting something out of it. Right. Talk to us about kind of like that level of experimentation and what that means to you in the business and you know, how, how you instill that trust or empower your team to pursue that.

Yeah, I'm pausing to be conscious of my rambling and trying not to again.

So AI can edit this later.

That's, that's exactly perfect. Yeah. So. So my whole thing is you want to get to a point where 70 to 80% of what you're doing day to day, like, here you are, that is your foundation. It is proven, you know, it works. It's been through the cycle. Of course you're going to optimize and, and you're going to evolve it, but all of that does is lead to incrementality. And so what I find is that's what a lot of people treat a hundred percent of their budget as is. I know it works, I'm comfortable with it. Do what's safe, that it's safe. That's what leads to incrementality, especially if you're in a startup. Thinking incrementally is just that, that's the death of a business. And so at a minimum, you should be thinking about what's the 20% of my time that is truly experimental. I may not even know how to measure the thing. There's no expectation with my CFO or the board that it's going to deliver anything of value. It might completely flop. But what we're trying to find is the thing that is either the next kind of level jump in our performance, or maybe it's just something that simply. It is incremental, but it's a little bit stronger than what we're doing in the 80%. So that gets kicked into the 80%, something gets kicked out and you kind of got this, this revolving door going. Your comment of like, hey, 20%, 30% of your budget is still quite a bit. I mean it is trust, right? So you have to build the trust first. And then what I was saying earlier, then you earn the right to keep pushing and testing. So how do you build trust is oftentimes the obvious question. I think you know, the highest level way I think about this is when, when you prove that you can operate in the known space, then it becomes easier to move into the unknown. Starting with the unknown is scary as hell for a business. So you don't start there. The known is the fundamental foundational stuff that everybody expects you to do. The unknown is obviously the 20 to 30%. So you're not starting there. You're not saying like, hey CFO, FYI, I'm going to stick 30% of my budget and stuff. Can't tell you if it's going to work or not.

It's total fluff.

Who knows? It goes back to everything we've talked about, right? Build the credibility by hitting your numbers. Then you start to push the envelope. You start to push the envelope. You start to push the envelope. Now the only caveat to that again is if you have a top down organization that is already bought into big moonshots, making huge bets, you have the VC backing to do it. The reality is just most of us don't live in those worlds, right? Most of us don't have that luxury. And so you do need to build the trust and then move and you want to try to do it quickly and just to call out our friend who you already called out, Corey Snyder. I think he is one of the best I've seen at this in the partnership space of moving very, very, very quickly right out of the gate in a new role. I see him working with the exact same types of partners that other partner leaders say takes a really long time to cultivate those relationships and see traction. And he's just like, nah, doesn't hold my beer.

Let's just, let's break shit and fix it later.

Yeah, yeah.

How do you, how do you know, like what's the right thing to experiment with and not.

Oh, so. I, so process. You're systematic about it. I'm a big fan of the double diamond like design thinking approach which is effectively like, let's get into a brainstorm here. Here's what we need to do, here's what we're trying to achieve. Let's brainstorm around it. So that's your, your kind of divergent type of thinking on it. All ideas are good ideas. It's a volume Game volume of ideas. Then you get into your convergent space in a separate meeting. So that's where you get really critical on the ideas and you start to zero in. And so I oftentimes just use the very typical. And it's all estimates, it's all your best guess. What do we think the impact is going to be? What's the time horizon? What's the effort? You put values against those in a spreadsheet. I also use a criteria that I don't see a lot of people use, which is just how excited are we about the thing?

Love that.

Because I think no matter how, like you might say, something could be high impact, low risk, low effort, but nobody's excited about it, you're probably not going to get to that high impact. Right, right. And so I, I like to see, like, who's actually excited and wants to work on this thing. So I, I look at that criteria in a spreadsheet and then you're basically saying, okay, here are the three that we're going to test. We're going to run with. Let's do it. Give ourselves however much time we think to report back and make a decision on do we keep going or not. And then you roll with it. And so again, like, it's getting very systematic about it. So, so we do that usually quarterly, that, that type of brainstorm and that type of process. And then the double diamond of it is you then diverge on how do you actually execute on it. Right. So how do you, you know, you pick what you want to do, then you have some divergent thinking on how you want to execute on it. Then you converge on, okay, here's exactly how we're going to execute it. Owners, KPIs, everything. Go do it.

Love it. Yep. And one of my previous roles, I. Anytime the team brought up an idea, I was like, great, that's your experiment for the quarter. We're going to report back on this as part of your KPIs, on how we're making progress. This is how we'll advance the program.

Yeah. And, you know, I think there's, you'll, you'll hear those all the time in your organization. You know, people will say, I think we should do this or we should do this. It's like, well, why don't you just go do it? Why don't you do it?

Go to the work.

Just make plans.

Bring it all back. It's time for you to do some work.

All right.

Yeah, I know you've got to get back to work. So we're going to pull. We're going to bring this home and got a couple final questions here for you. Easy, easy. T Balls here. So, as a proclaimed hoodie collector, Tyler Calder, do you have a favorite hoodie?

It is whatever hoodie I am wearing in that moment.

You love them all equally like your kids, huh?

Yeah.

Do you have a favorite. Do you have a favorite swag hoodie? Is there one. Is there one company that has a great.

If you had have given me a hoodie, it would have been my favorite hoodie.

Come back for year two.

No promises. Is that the promise?

We can't give you everything at once. We're working from the top down. We give you out hats this year, maybe sunglasses next year. You know, okay. Top, top down. We're gonna outfit the whole body. We'll come back in year five. We got pajama pants.

Okay, I'll be there. That's a good deal.

Loves all of his hoodies equal. I love it. What a guy.

Yeah. Okay, let's close this thing up. So, last question. What is the benefit that comes along with being friends with Tyler Calder?

I mean, you'd absolutely need to ask my friends. Let's just obviously start with that very obvious statement. Although all I can tell you. All I can tell you is I guess the, the friend that I aspire to be and, and probably end up achieving a fraction of the time. So all of the cliches, right. All of the cliches are the type of friend I'd want to be. I, I, I, I want to be there anytime somebody needs help or support. I'll always try my best to never ignore the impulse to be generous or helpful, which is something that one of the previous CEOs I reported to like, really, really pushed on me is just never ignore that impulse to do the thing. And so I, I really try to do that. Right. Like I say, if anything, I mean, it doesn't happen often, but when I have that impulse, you know, to be kind or, or generous to me, that, that's my. That's my immediate priority in that moment is to make sure I just go do that thing that I want to do. Follow your gut, you know? Yeah, follow. Follow your gut. Do. Do the thing that, that you think would be the, the thing that's needed for that friend in that moment and then just high, say, do ratio, Right? So if I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to try my best to do it.

I say, do. I love it.

Yeah, I love it. But, yeah, you you'd need to ask them.

All right.

They probably have a different perspective.

We'll put a poll out on LinkedIn following this episode.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for being our friend. And as always, I just adore talking to you. So thank you for the time today, friends.

Thank you. Thank you to you both.

I appreciate the conversation. Love you, man. Thank you.

Thank you, friends. Love you, too.

Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.

Catch you next time, friends.