Speaker 1: 0:23

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast by MarketingOpscom, powered by the Mopros. I'm your host. Michael Hartman Almost wasn't here today, joined by co-host Mike Rizzo. Mike.

Speaker 2: 0:35

I want to say hello to our folks. You're here, hello everybody. I'm appreciative of the fact that you're here, because now I don't have to be the lead.

Speaker 1: 0:45

You're more than capable. So do we have a, do we? Have a countdown for a Mopsa Palooza. We're six months away, right?

Speaker 2: 0:53

I should probably yeah, we're actually five months, like just under, yeah.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Cause it's November 4th through 6th and today is June 7th. Yeah, All right. There, you have it All right. So joining us today is Asher Matthew, co-founder and CEO of Partnership Leaders. Partnership Leaders is a private network built to elevate the role of partner teams in their companies. Prior to Partnership Leaders, Asher held senior leadership roles in partnerships and go-to-market, including roles at Demandbase, Avalara and Lean Data.

Speaker 3: 1:26

So Asher, thanks for joining us today. Hey guys, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:29

All right. Well, this is going to be interesting. I think this is sort of another in a in, a little sort of mini series although not packed together of different go-to-market approaches that are evolving right now. So I'm excited. I feel like I'm learning more from each of each one of these. So so I think is it safe to say that you're a supporter of community-led and partner-led go-to-market approaches? So maybe let's start like when you say that, because I feel like we've had some other uh guests on who've had things that sound similar. What do those mean to you in terms of community-led and partner-led?

Speaker 3: 2:04

yeah, well, for once, thanks for having me. Uh, to make this a little fun, because we're doing this on a Friday afternoon. It took forever to get this thing scheduled, so you know you guys must have a long, long, long waiting list for this stuff.

Speaker 2: 2:15

We do, we do.

Speaker 1: 2:17

I probably have plenty of people who are mad at me for not replying to them Exactly.

Speaker 3: 2:21

Well, this is like a twofold thing, right, because I think Mike and I talked about doing this thing last year. And then after we got introduced, it took another five months, which is great.

Speaker 1: 2:32

But it's good If you want to be on this podcast.

Speaker 3: 2:35

It's an even half wait. So, yeah, so at least we're persistent. So much has happened.

Speaker 2: 2:43

So much has happened, though, in your world that it just left us with even more to talk about.

Speaker 3: 2:51

All right, let's talk about community and community led growth and partner led growth, but two of my favorite topics and for some context, we started partnership leaders as a hobby and and it's become a business and and it is a community, and it's become a business and and it is a community and so so, so we're we're we're taking the lessons of community led growth and partner led growth and and utilizing them both to build a bootstrap company and and build it over a very long period of time and so so that those are those are the way and build it over a very long period of time.

Speaker 3: 3:30

And so those are the way and also the way we're building partnership leaders and the way Mike's building marketingopscom very similar approaches and what's interesting is that there's no playbook for this stuff. I think there are playbooks being built and Mike and I are actually in a WhatsApp group with a couple other community builders as well, and Mike and I are actually in a WhatsApp group with a couple of other community builders as well, and we've been working through. How do you build a community through community-led motions, through partner-led motions? For what is it? Four years now or three years now, mike?

Speaker 2: 4:02

Yeah, something like that, like three years, I think. Yeah, our little community mafia group there's like four of us in there.

Speaker 3: 4:09

Hey, it's the A team now. We rebranded at the beginning of this year. That's because we needed the A, because it could be the A from AI and we needed the A right.

Speaker 1: 4:19

so I kind of like community mafia. I like that. That's not bad.

Speaker 3: 4:25

We do own the domain communitymafiacom as a group, though Someday, when we actually want to write a creative domain squatters. All right, got it domain squatters yeah, actually domain squatterscom. We need to get that too. Oh, there's definitely somebody that's taken you should do that see okay, so let's talk a little bit about the community-led growth.

Speaker 3: 4:50

and so, like, what's interesting is like, fundamentally, like when you, most companies, have two or three different types, or maybe four or five different types of uh uh, marketing or, sorry, go-to-market motions, right, that they're running, and when you say community-led or partner-led, then that effectively means that one of the motions took a backseat and then there was something that was leading. So I don't know if the framing is correct, but utilizing communities to build a company and utilizing partners to build a company is kind of the way I think about it. And my definition for community is where all of your audiences meet to discuss best practices, to learn from each other's success and to learn from each other's failure so that they don't make those mistakes again. And that's my definition of community, right. And then partners for me are people that are not prospects, people that are not customers, people that are not employees.

Speaker 3: 6:07

Any audience that's not that where you have a mutually beneficial relationship with, is a partner. And then we can dive into a little bit deeper into what these things mean. But when I build businesses, I always look at who are my prospects, who are my customers, who are my employees, who are my investors, who are my analysts. There's all these buckets, buckets, and there is a mutually beneficial relationship you can have with all of them. But partners are either building product with you or they're building go-to-markets with you, or they're serving customers with you, and that's how I think about partners.

Speaker 1: 6:45

It's just one clarified question, because I think in my head I'm seeing a Venn diagram though those whatever those categories are, it feels like partners could also be customers, right?

Speaker 3: 6:54

Yes.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Yeah, there's okay, so not necessarily mutually exclusive. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 6:59

It's not mutually, it's just the nature of the relationship.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Yeah. The primary part of the relationship is the partner one.

Speaker 3: 7:08

Even if they might be a customer at the same time Right.

Speaker 2: 7:10

Yeah, that makes sense. And partner and partners like like marketing ops gets super convoluted super fast. Yeah, partners like to your point, hartman like could be your customers, the nature of your relationship is their partner to you in some way, shape or form. You also have like I mean, asher, you're more of an expert on this than me, but I've been in this community, led sort of space for a little while right, or like building communities, building the sort of partner enablement ecosystems, because they all sort of rapidly overlap. In fact, if you went to go build a community sort of environment in the Salesforce cloud ecosystem, they actually lump together sort of the capabilities of the community cloud product.

Speaker 2: 7:53

I don't know what they call it now. It has capabilities of allowing your customers or whomever is utilizing the technology to help you register deals and do deal tracking and all that other stuff. So it actually in their world it overlaps almost directly with this idea of partners and go-to-market. You can also tie that cloud product back to the support side too and try to help reduce your support cases and stuff like that. But interestingly, beyond that, partners could be tech partners which are integration partners totally different category. They're not even referrals right, they're just straight-up. That's what I'm saying. It's the nature totally different category.

Speaker 3: 8:28

They're not even referrals, right, they're just straight up. That's what I'm saying. It's the nature of the relationship versus the naming of the audience. Traditionally, people have said the partners that we work with are partners that bring us deals, which totally is a world. More and more and more the world is hey, we can have a customer relationship with someone and we can have a partner relationship with someone, and both of those someone's could be the same person or the same entity. Right, it's just the nature of it. And with some people we're going to be building product. With some people we're going to be distributing product, and with some people we're going to be building product. With some people we're going to be distributing product and with some people we're going to be serving or supporting that product.

Speaker 2: 9:15

Yeah that makes sense. Yep, that makes sense. Yeah, just to hark back on because I don't know, that I actually kind of want. I'm looking at our show notes, right, and things we want to touch on today, of course, but, um, uh, I also was just like harking back to the commentary of, like there's no playbook for any of this stuff, like we're trying to figure it out, um, as we go. Uh, for those, those that do want insights into an episode like that, or they want to sort of hear on that, I think that's probably a different sort of episode and recording we could certainly do so. So send us a message, use the new text text message feature app that we just added to our podcast. Text us, let us know if you want to hear about that. But I think, like Asher, you know to your point, right, this is none of this stuff is is very clear. Like there isn isn't a silver bullet for any of it, and I think you sort of have to build the plane as it's in the air.

Speaker 3: 10:19

So maybe the better framing for the audience is the one where we all have a business to run and for tech companies, you need to either build a product or buy it, or you can partner with somebody to build it with you. Yeah, right, so there's that right. Then you can either take that product to the market direct or you can take it with other people, because they already have larger audiences than you, they have more credibility than you, they have established ways for that audience to procure your product. There's that go-to-market piece and then there's the serving piece, which is you can support your customers yourself or you can support it with other people who are already deep in those accounts to make sure that your product gets utilized and it's part of a workflow, so that your renewal becomes easier. And that's the way I think, both community led and partner led and sales led and marketing.

Speaker 3: 11:32

All these things need to tie back to the business goals, because if a business has enough cash, sure, then you can buy, you can build products, which is what everybody prefers, and if you have extra cash, you can buy more product so that you can sell more to the same customer that you already have and increase your growth rates. Now, the world that we live in, nobody has extra resources, and they're being told by their investors not to spend more than they need to. They're also being told by the investors to take care of their customers and save their customers with whatever way they need to get to do that, and so, in that world, partnering with other people that have complementary resources and capabilities becomes a very favorable way to do business, and that's where the partner go-to-market comes into play.

Speaker 3: 12:28

So, I totally am on board. Yeah, and that's where the partner go-to-market comes into play.

Speaker 1: 12:30

So I want to, so I totally am on board. I understand the the partner-led go-to-market. You know it's kind of a continuation of what would have been called like channel partners, right, whether it's distributed, if you were selling widgets, right. You have distributors and maybe manufacturers, reps, things like that. So in in the tech world, I think the tech world, I think where I'm still stuck is with community-led go-to-market. I think of communities as sort of after the sale kind of stuff for the most part, right. So especially if it's a company-built community, like you really want to build stickiness, you want customers to be in there helping each other out. How does that apply to more of a go-to-market with? I guess it certainly has a part, I think, in retention. But what about growth beyond that With acquisition, yeah, it's a great call-out.

Speaker 3: 13:27

Maybe another way to think about this is there are communities that companies can build, which are user communities, and then there are professional communities, like the ones that Mike is building and I am building, and both serve a purpose. The user communities, as we all know, are where customers get together and connect with each other on experiences, and the professional communities are where the industry gets together. So if you're building a professional community, that means the people that care about why you are building that community are there Meaning people that are thinking about your mission, people that are building tools to accomplish that mission, people that are building frameworks so that the message of the mission can be shared, and things that everybody can participate in. And the way to think about this is really in marketingoffscom's way is professional communities have a component and they can follow this framework called people, process, technology and data, and so, as a professional community, you have to help people understand how to organize their function and how to organize their team. Then you have to go talk to your customers and understand how they would build scalable processes and programs. They would build scalable processes and programs, and then you need to go talk to all the technology companies building technology to automate those programs and workflows. And then you need to talk to all the data providers to say, hey, how do we handle first, second, third-party data, which will then help elevate the professionals that are part of that community.

Speaker 3: 15:33

And so the user community versus professional community is a very interesting one. And so, to go back to your point, mike, they'll ask you what's the end result and what are the outcomes. Well, if I'm a technology company trying to go appeal to a persona, then I should go to where they all hang out, and increasingly, they all hang out in communities, because people trust word of mouth way more than anything else, and that's been the reason why communities have boomed. And so your customers were asked to talk to other of your customers. So you need to create user communities. And then, as a professional, you want to get to the highest ranks of your profession, so you need to join a professional community, and you can be part of both communities. Sure, I think that's there. So if you're a company that's looking to acquire customers, you should go hang out with the professional community and support the professional community's mission, and by virtue of that, you get to participate in this flywheel that I'm about to share. So professional communities have market insight.

Speaker 3: 16:45

Now, whichever way they gather that through surveys, polls, webinar feedback, whichever way they have that they also have an idea of why customers are stuck with certain workflows and what are their bigger pain points that they're trying to solve. Technology companies that serve that same persona should be working with these professional communities and learning about these problems and then building technology that solves those problems, and then what they should be doing is they should be taking insights out of the product of how the best customers are solving that problem and sharing it back with the professional community. Now there's a flywheel the people in process side folks, which is the professional community, starts to work with the technology and data side folks, who are building technology and data. And so one way you go and get feedback to build better product. The other way, you share best practices with people that are utilizing your product to solve the similar problems.

Speaker 3: 17:50

And right in the middle is acquisition, because if you do that and you add value, you're going to have inbound. Otherwise you're going to have to go outbound, and this approach has worked time and time again. We're doing this, mike's for sure doing this. There's a number of other communities that are doing it really well, and so if all you care about is customer retention, yes, you should just start a user community and then manage them, but if you care about acquisition, you need to go work with professional communities. So that's a long-winded answer, but I kind of wanted to break it all down of how this slide was actually working.

Speaker 2: 18:26

Yeah, I think it's really helpful for people to think about the go-to-market motion of communities in general. I think, for all of our listeners that are part of that ecosystem, we know that we exist to serve the elevating the role and the location right, and so there's many ways to do that. Some of it is the data insights that we collect and share back with them, that they take back to their boss and say, hey, look, I'm not getting paid enough. Or hey, I have the like look at all these people that have these teams that are being built. I need the resources to go build out my team, whatever it is. And then, on the on the opposite side of that, it's like we're to your point right, like we're identifying what are your pain points and then how can those get solved? And sometimes those are solved by service providers, sometimes they're solved by product companies, and it's because of innovation and the feedback loop that's happening, that's allowing for that to happen, between a professional community of practice doing what we're doing right Partnership leaders, marketingopscom no pros versus your other types of communities, customer communities, et cetera. Yep, there's obviously yes, you, you are like like I. I happen to be more of a HubSpot proficient, like professional right. So, yes, I'm in their community. Right, there's Marketo community. Yes, you're going to be naturally in those spaces too, In our space. You're also going to be talking about those products here in our channel, but you're also going to talk about your career development and there's something that's really attractive as sort of this end user right.

Speaker 2: 20:04

So, if you're a MarTech company, even a service provider company, and you're thinking like, well, should I try to build a community of practice of some sort yeah, I'm not telling you not to like, you certainly can give it a go.

Speaker 2: 20:18

Um, however, just the mere fact that it is owned by a single entity changes the draw. It changes the, the like psychological anchor that your end consumer has and and it and it's not better or worse, it's just different, right, like, they may still go into the community and be well aware of the fact that this is directly associated to one brand and they're okay with that. But they also are always sort of prepared for this notion that, like, I'm a part of their ecosystem, now their world and I, at any given point, could potentially be engaged by that particular brand or what have you. I also know that by being in a community that is owned by a very particular brand. It's unlikely that censored, censored information right, like it's unlikely that a competing service provider will also be able to participate in this environment, which, which, like, further anchors the allure of hanging out in a community of practice versus hanging out in a space that's sort of run by one entity.

Speaker 3: 21:29

So let's talk about like why people like you and I start these communities, can I?

Speaker 2: 21:37

answer yeah, yeah, don't get me crazy.

Speaker 1: 21:40

One thing and I will say Asher, I know you felt like that was kind of a long answer to the question I asked, but actually I think it was very helpful to kind of walk through that step by step. So, thank you All right. Now to the why.

Speaker 3: 21:54

I think, because, I mean, we could go multiple different ways from this conversation. One thing for sure to understand is, like people that are building professional communities are treating it like a business, like there are people that are building charitable communities, which is also great, but professional communities also have to be run professionally, and the way you run a professional community professionally is that you build a business out of it, which generates cash, which then allows the professional community to hire resources and create assets that then go back into serving the professionals who are members of that community and then elevates them. There's this other flywheel that also gets created and there's two models. Right, you can either go raise sponsor dollars or you can go raise member dollars. It's somewhere in there, right, and not a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about this, but I think people that are very proud to be in a professional community should be funding it, whether they are funded through themselves or through their companies. Whichever way they do it, because the more that that community gets funded, they get resourced well, they can hire amazing talent, they can create very high quality research. They can actually then start to change the world for the people that are funding them right.

Speaker 3: 23:34

But if you think about it, people buy Zoom info. Why? Because they want amazing contact data. So they'll pay for it and then they'll get contact data, and then that contact data allows them to make better phone calls, get a higher dial-to-connect ratio, which generates better opportunities, which helps people make their quota right. So the same thing is what members of a professional community should think about, especially because most of these are bootstrap companies.

Speaker 3: 24:02

They're doing it for a reason that the founders hold very personally, and in most cases, the founders have felt the same problems and that's why they kind of went into this business. And what happens is, over time, the founders find out that, well, I'm not the only one that's feeling this pain. There are other people feeling this pain, and so I'm actually going to go do something about it versus think about doing something about it, and so I'm actually going to go do something about it versus think about doing something about it. The number of people that have told me that, man, we had this idea of partnership lead, creating something like partnership leaders. We just never did it Yep, it's a lot.

Speaker 2: 24:44

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 24:44

Right.

Speaker 1: 24:45

We just heard that time and time again.

Speaker 3: 24:49

Happened to go do this. So so, so, and I don't know if you guys have covered the business of running a community on the podcast, but I think it's important for people to understand and appreciate all the things that go in and to give you guys an idea. Partnership Leaders has 2,000 paid members in 60 countries and we serve about 1,400 companies from startups all the way to AWS. Right In a way, if we were building a tech product, we would be fundraising Right Totally, and the reason why we don't fundraise is because if we were to fundraise, we would be building the company that investors want.

Speaker 1: 25:33

Right and I'm not going to name the community, but there's a community. I was a part of where I saw that happen and it did not. The direction it took after it got investment was not one that I thought was beneficial to the community members.

Speaker 3: 25:47

Yeah, 100%, because the interests are so off right. So the minute you fundraise, you're supposed to go T2D3. And this may be. I mean, you guys can cut this out if you want to, but when you T2D3 life, you start doing cocaine and then you die.

Speaker 2: 26:07

You're just like on this mission Exactly.

Speaker 3: 26:15

T2D3 life. Life like everybody that started t2d3 life like doesn't work. Like the people compound life. Yes, absolutely like elon. Compounded life, comfort life, you and I compounding life, right like sure. Like I think compounding is fantastic and and and what. What a community does?

Speaker 2: 26:32

it gives you much better at bats at compounding that life because similar interest individuals or professionals come together and they share their experiences in the forms of best practices and lessons learned yeah, yeah, that the the shortened learning curve aspect of being a part of a professional community like this, I think is is a hands down the most valuable aspect of it, and I appreciate that we're talking about the business of community.

Speaker 2: 27:01

Like, um it it transparently for all the listeners on this, like it took a while for me to even think of, like get comfortable with the idea of what does it mean to be a community and how do we keep supporting this thing and, you know, turning on a membership model and all this other stuff, like we're not as um vocal I'm certainly not as vocal about it as as as you are, uh, asher, but like, the articulation, like articulating it the way that you did, I think, is a talk track I should try to pick up, um, but it's, it's absolutely right. There's reasons why we haven't raised money. Like we definitely have been offered Right, and, yeah, I raised like a tiny little bit of money from friends and family to like keep the lights on and get this thing going. Well, friends and family to keep the lights on and get this thing going, that's just called working capital.

Speaker 3: 27:53

For people that understand business, you need working capital to just buy things and pay bills while more cash is coming in. So that's not really fundraising. Fundraising would be like hey, we've figured out our cost of acquisition, we know how renewals work, and now I'm going to raise a million bucks and we're going to generate seven million on top of that. People are going to feel it's not a good feeling.

Speaker 2: 28:16

I'll tell you this it's not a hamster wheel. I wanted to be on.

Speaker 3: 28:22

Also, by the way, sorry, Mike, it's kind of hard when both of you guys' name is Mike on a podcast.

Speaker 1: 28:30

You can always buy our last names, you can call it Mike1,. Mike2, whatever.

Speaker 3: 28:37

The thing that I want to just say is Rizzo and I have actually lived this journey and we catch up with each other. Every six weeks or so we just call each other up, including our other friends. He always says, hey're, you're much better at like, like fundraising or or selling, and I sort of have that reputation in the market too, which is well grounded, I would say. But I also want to say that, like you know, we actually care a lot and I didn't go start partnership leaders to do a mediocre job and run out of money and then be like, oh, you know what I tried. That's not an option. Your family depends on you on this thing being successful. My family depends on it, but also Krista and I, who are co-founders, we are executives. We could basically get paid three times what we're getting paid at other places, but we did it because we said we want to do amazing, high-quality work that actually elevates the profession. And I'll tell you the core problem in the marketplace and this is going to be very interesting for your audience to think about it because the strategy of what you are building actually matters more than what you build, which is a common thing in business anyways. So there's two ways to slice and dissect the partner problem, and this kind of comes back to the go-to-market problem. That's why I'm kind of going down in this direction. Right Is, a number of people in your audience have worked with partners. They have partnership teams and most of them will say we don't know what they do Right, we don't know why they exist, and they always come to us with silly requests and we would rather do the 50 things that are on our list and then do their list right, like that's the problem. So now there's two approaches. You either go and elevate, educate and elevate the partner teams and help them. Help them become experts in speaking about their profession in an eloquent manner with data, or you go to the other professions that surround the partnerships profession and educate them. The answer is probably both, but a professional community cannot do both. Then you become LinkedIn. Then you have like well, I don't know who's here, why they're here. Most people are here for entertainment and whenever I don't like something on X, I'll just go on LinkedIn and see somebody's pictures and then I'll go back on X.

Speaker 3: 31:24

The partnership leaders decided very early on because it's a problem that we faced ourselves, which is similar to probably. What is a story is that we said technology partnership professionals, who arguably have a very important role because without the creation of technologies, there's no selling and there's no consuming. Those people don't have a voice and those people are business-focused individuals entering the partnerships world, versus previously you just had sales folks and marketing folks. So how do those people get elevated? So we said let's elevate it.

Speaker 3: 32:03

Now every startup has a magical moment, or as I like to call it, gets a gift from the startup gods. Ours happened two years ago and we got the SAP and Microsoft introduced this role called the Chief Partner Officer. Before that, you had a channel chief and you're like what is a channel chief? You go talk to marketing and they say, what's a channel chief? And you're like well, what is a channel chief? You go talk to marketing and they say what's a channel chief? And the digital marketing leader would say I am the channel chief for digital marketing and the field marketing leader would say I am the channel chief for marketing, field marketing.

Speaker 3: 32:42

Right, there's this celebratory role called the channel chief. It's completely built for recognition, but the market created a role called the chief part officer. Also, communities don't create movements. We only amplify it Like there's. No, we don't also create categories, but they can amplify it Like communities can like surface the truth about whether the things are working or not working and they can serve as a source of truth, the, the.

Speaker 3: 33:14

So the market basically gave us this like role called the chief partner officer and we said, whoa, this has legs. Why this has legs? Because about a few years ago, the chief revenue officer role was created and the chief revenue officer role was created to unite the go-to-market functions sales, marketing, customer success. The number one reason why CROs get fired is because they mess up customer success. It's not that they mess up marketing, they actually mess up customer success. Then they created this role called RevOps, which I was at Lean Data. When the RevOps role was created Overnight, I was like wow, a whole bunch of people became RevOps leaders. All they did was the sales ops people got Marketo certifications and the Marketo people got Salesforce certifications. And now the battle of who will have admin access to Salesforce went away because it's RevOps, which is kind of like 80% of the battle between the two teams. Right, because SalesOps does not want to give MarketingOps and Admin access to CRM but they'll happily get.

Speaker 3: 34:27

They'll happily take an AdminLiceX account to Marketo or whatever the MarketingOps tool is, because they're SalesOps right. So that CRO role was supposed to unite everybody and that's actually not worked out the way we thought. And the reason why it's not worked out is because there's still, I think, 70,000 CMOs in the market and only 17,000 CROs in the market. There's 4,500 chief customer officers in the market. There's 4,500 chief customer officers in the market. There's now about 900 chief partner officers, but there's 9,700 chief business officers in the market. So if you look at the data, well, the data is saying we need business people to rise up and solve business problems with these go-to-market motions, versus the other way around.

Speaker 3: 35:15

And at some point in time, with the market, there's going to be conversations where people are saying, hey, the insurance market is growing by 30% year over year. How do we create a business that serves that market and what do we do to get to those customers? And should we use communities, partners? Marketing sales Like this will happen right, and this is an encouragement for everybody that's listening to this call, Because at some point in time you're all going to say, well, what's my future and how do I become more strategic? Because everybody's going to ask you to be more strategic. This is kind of just the right of passage stuff, right, and the way you become strategic is you actually start solving the business's problems. The business's problems are grow more, save money, solve compliance needs right. And if you can do that, you're going to be able to be an extremely strategic person because you're going to speak to the company OKRs versus your department OKRs, and that's the big big difference company OKRs versus your department OKRs, and that's the big big difference.

Speaker 3: 36:15

So, anyways, like long story short, we decided to go and elevate people to this role called chief partner officer. It's going to take us maybe like 10 years to really get to the point where we need it to be, but everything that we do whether it's the events, whether it's our conference, which is happening in August this year, whether it is our education, whether it is our market insights and we do market research with HubSpot, with BCG, with EY, like brand names right, Because we want to do everything very high quality. And we also have a very, very, very big burden on our shoulders, which is, if we put out false information or wrong information and we amplify the wrong stuff and people utilize this and get fired. That is horrible.

Speaker 3: 37:02

Yeah, so I'll pause because I know that was a pretty long narrative to understanding how communities are built and how you fund them and all these things, but I think it's important for people to just get an idea of what's behind the curtains. Yeah, I love it. I think it's important for people to just get an idea of what's behind the curtains.

Speaker 2: 37:16

Yep, I love it. I like the gift from the startup gods. That's a thing that happens.

Speaker 3: 37:25

That is the thing that happens. I'll tell you.

Speaker 2: 37:30

I'll tell you one of the gifts from the startup gods that we got at Mavenlink was the Google App Marketplace. When the Google App Marketplace got started just like anything else, that's brand new it got all of the amplification and we had an app listing in there and we had a boatload of growth. That happened, which meant a better ability to go raise money, Because all of a sudden, your funnel was way bigger. The top funnel entrance was great. So yeah, it happens.

Speaker 3: 37:55

But that marketplace now has 3,000 products on it. I was literally just hanging out with the Google Cloud Marketplace folks in Chicago yesterday and I was asking like well, how many products do you have? 3,000. Now build a go-to-market motion around that.

Speaker 1: 38:07

So you were early.

Speaker 3: 38:10

You benefited from listing early. You discovered a new route to market and then you figured out how to utilize that before other people utilized it, which we can probably talk about the ops debt versus the tech debt stuff, which is another big one of my topics. Maybe a good time to transition, but let me see if Hartman has a question or thought.

Speaker 1: 38:34

I think both of you have this passion for the professional ones. So I'm old enough to remember a time when I used to try to keep up with things I would go subscribe to, basically magazines, periodicals, for professional things, and there was no way to do, there was no such thing as an online community way to do like there was no such thing as an online community.

Speaker 1: 38:56

And so for me, when I started seeing things like the tech companies having their own communities and really doing that, I think the first one I remember was exact target, you know yeah like going to their conference and how they celebrated the community, and then seeing that, like so for me, this, like I've seen this, like so for me, I've seen this huge shift and I think, mike you said, it's a real valuable piece for people to learn and grow and I don't know that I could really, without going down another rabbit hole, about what it was like in the days when I didn't have as much gray hair to now. It's unbelievably different.

Speaker 3: 39:35

I think it's a great thing so well so. So also, if we look back at the gift from startup gods for communities, it's actually COVID yeah.

Speaker 3: 39:45

In some ways you can't meet in person, because if you were still meeting in person, you would be meeting in person still like the market would not shift to digital engagement and the communities that was, the professional communities that were born out of covert are doing really well, as long as they figured out a business model that allowed them to generate cash, to invest in resources, to do very high quality things and actually elevate their professionals.

Speaker 2: 40:15

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean what? Like? I agree with you.

Speaker 2: 40:18

Covid was a supporting factor in the overall maybe an accelerator would be the better way yeah or just like I think, just like a staple, at least from my data, like for those listening, we grow members into our Slack channel by 110 a month on average. Like that is just straight up. It's like it's almost like this weird artificial ceiling, like it never really crosses that number and even during COVID it never really crossed that number. So like I can't say that COVID accelerated anything necessarily, but it definitely continued the the like standardized, like trend of well, I got nowhere else to go, so what am I going to do right now?

Speaker 3: 41:00

And then the other thing that accelerated, or maybe is allowing this thing to continue, is layoffs, because in the last 18 months.

Speaker 3: 41:09

Companies have shown how disloyal they can be to all employees. So now employees are saying, well, amazing that this layoff thing happened to me A number of people that have never actually been through layoff, which is also interesting to watch and then they say, well, what's my support system? And so, if you look back at these trends, these things help build those communities, and I'm a firm believer that in every segment of the market, if you want to call it, or every market, there is one, maybe two really good communities that are very close to their members versus close to their sponsors. And the ones that were close to sponsors what they did is effectively did not charge to become a member, so what you became is a marketing list.

Speaker 2: 42:10

Yep, yeah, you became basically a media asset, right, totally. Yeah, well, you became a list right, because, like yeah a list, you became basically a media asset. Totally. You became a list. 4,000 people sign up in a month 2,000 people sign up in a month.

Speaker 3: 42:21

You're like wait. What is the experience here? How am I going to go find somebody that can actually give me the right info?

Speaker 2: 42:28

Right, that was where I was going to go with it too, to the point of existing, to elevate the profession, or, you know, like our research annually is exactly that. It's meant to be a pulse check on the field, right? What's the salary ranges? What are your KPIs? How are you being measured? Are your teams growing? What is your aspiration? Do you want to build a team? Do you want to stay technical? And if I was an early stage marketing operations professional, reading that report for the very first time, I would be able to glean insights on where could I go next. How are my peers thinking about their success? If I'm an executive, I like to say this report is meant to educate the market top and tail People who don't know they're doing marketing ops. You're figuring it out for the first time. This is sort of generally what it's for. Here's what it's all about For executives who don't understand the value of marketing operations and what it can bring to their organization. Here's how they're being measured. Here's what their aspirations are All of these things.

Speaker 1: 43:26

I've used that report to help get raises for people on my team before.

Speaker 2: 43:34

As a community, you come together. You have to create a business model to be able to support the focus, which, for us, is how do we make these or not make, but how do we enable these folks to not feel alone and to have success in their career?

Speaker 3: 43:52

And we don't have a CPO or you know, chief partner officer, or today you don't have right, correct, but there are VPs of marketing technology at companies which, to me, you can't get to VP of marketing technology if you have not been in marketing ops Like I feel, like that is right of passage to that.

Speaker 2: 44:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think we're on a path to seeing. You know there's discussions about like are the future CMOs going to come from marketing ops? I always say maybe, but I don't think that that's necessarily where a lot of us spend our passion, because marketing at the CMO level is just a wildly different set of things.

Speaker 3: 44:34

Let's unpack this a little bit, right, because this is actually a pretty good topic to dive into and we can talk about the operational debt and the tech debt. One question on the other side.

Speaker 1: 44:41

I think we're going to have to table that for another discussion, which is fine. This has been great.

Speaker 2: 44:46

Uh-oh, did we lose Asher. We lost Asher. Asher, we lost your audio.

Speaker 3: 44:55

Sorry, there we go. I'm saying I'll give it to you in two minutes and then, because you guys just launched this SMS feature, if people actually care about this podcast, they're like hey, let's go unpack that. We should totally do it.

Speaker 3: 45:07

Yeah, but in my opinion, everybody wants to go talk to the C today. Right, like, like every company. You're like, hey, I want to go talk to the cro. The cro is probably sitting there thinking, man, what did I do to receive this type of love? It's like a really hard job. I've done it before. Yeah and and and. The cro's job was to actually optimize revenue, prioritize and optimize revenue. This is a very tough job. This has more to do with finance and pricing and packaging and the sales motion and all this stuff, because this is revenue. This is not just sales. The revenue comes from when your customers find value from your product and then your finance. People say we have delivered the product and legally we can recognize the money.

Speaker 3: 45:59

That's when revenue is earned, right. And so then you look at the CMO role, right, and everybody's like well, how do I become a CMO? Well, you become a CMO when you learn how to prioritize and optimize markets. That role is not about branding and demand gen and all this stuff is a prerequisite to that role. But when you're sitting with other executives, you're trying to solve the problem of how do we grow this business.

Speaker 3: 46:25

You're not trying to solve the can I make my brand look sexier or can I generate 4,000 leads tomorrow? They're trying to solve like hey, we have a business, we have five different products and we're playing these markets and those markets are shifting. So I have to now go make sure that I keep this company relevant to the users that are in these markets. And how are we going to fulfill the? What promise are we making? How do we fulfill it? Right, like the prioritizing and optimizer, the chief partner officer role is needed because in the middle there are relationships, relationships with the other partners, with customers, there's a number of things and so that chief partner officer needs to prioritize and optimize relationships or business relationships, if you want to call it and then we'll see how this thing evolves. But the path to a CMO absolutely could be through marketing ops could be through anything, yeah.

Speaker 2: 47:30

I agree.

Speaker 3: 47:31

What it's not, is just through brand, I think.

Speaker 1: 47:34

Definitely not. Or if you say it's not is just through brand, I think Definitely not. Or if you say it's not just through marketing communications either.

Speaker 1: 47:42

Yeah, that's actually a much better way to do it, just through more comms talked about reinforces my belief that marketing ops, folks and marketers in general need to have a better understanding about how businesses make money and how to speak the language of finance and I just think there is a huge gap in that for most marketing teams that I've seen or been around in terms of that knowledge, and it's one of the reasons, like I tell everybody who's worked for me the last 10, 15 years, that go learn the basics of finance Like that by itself would be a huge difference for you.

Speaker 1: 48:19

Then you can have conversations about how does our company make money, right, If we're like? How do we set our pricing? How do we know when we are spending too much on X, Y or Z? And if you don't know how to have that conversation, how?

Speaker 2: 48:32

about just like yeah, how about, just plainly, how do we recognize revenue Like the first time, that that that comes, that that that terminology doesn't mean anything to anybody that's never spent a second in finance. Revenue recognition Like if you've never spent a second in finance, you don't really understand, to encourage your natural accrual Right.

Speaker 1: 48:51

I have a real example of this where a company I work for I won't say they had a way that they closed opportunities when they won a deal and it might be a multi-year deal they essentially have three opportunities and they would close one year, two years, they would not close all at one time. So revenue recognition was not really in Salesforce because of that, because it was also used as a little like for other purposes beyond that. So so I can see why it was like and I had seen other sort of outgrowths of sort of weird stuff that came from that as, as a marketing ops person, when I started noticing we had just launched, you know, demand gen stuff with Marketo under there and started seeing impacts on on deals that had opened up two years ago Right, which didn't make any sense to me because it's so, but like revenue recognition, it all had to do with like they weren't really using it for revenue recognition, they were using it for something else.

Speaker 3: 49:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 49:59

And I think it's important.

Speaker 2: 50:00

Sorry.

Speaker 3: 50:01

Just to encourage your listeners. Right One, this is not rocket science, yeah. Two, you should absolutely go talk to your finance team.

Speaker 2: 50:12

Yes, and probably go talk to your.

Speaker 3: 50:14

I was about to say, too, go talk to your finance team. Yes, and please talk to your. I was about to say to go talk to your fpna uh team members, right, yeah, and nobody goes talks to them. They're just sitting there running models. And if you just go to say, hey, can you just help me understand how this business is run, they'll be more than happy to spend all the time of the world with you, because that's what their job is to help the business understand how the business makes money and plan for how they will make more money in the future. So if you can go sit with them and learn this stuff, you probably don't even need to take a financial course, because they'll literally just give it to you.

Speaker 3: 50:50

Like, that's kind of how I learned it. I would just sit with with ethan bell at avalara and, uh, and just learn this stuff. And then I did go take some like finance and economics courses after that. But my initial learning came through experience, which is always great, because you make bad decisions, then you feel really bad about it. Then you go talk to your cry and talk to your friends and then they'll say, oh, hey, let's help you out. Uh, it is not, and I would absolutely encourage people to go take this step and uh, and, and that's another way to answer the question of how can you be more strategic, which is where do I spend my money as a business? To make more money by serving a higher quality customer who can afford more.

Speaker 1: 51:37

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 51:38

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 51:38

Yeah, I, uh, we will likely have Nick, uh, Nick Arako on the show. He's the founder of the um, uh, CFO Alliance. I sat at a breakfast with them, um, just a handful of weeks ago. Um, I was like this, this total stranger in the room full of CFOs. But I will tell you the conversations that they're having in that room, the problems that they're faced with. They're all identical to what we face within MarTech and marketing ops. All day long we're saying the same things.

Speaker 2: 52:11

They have a deep desire to want to talk to the sort of go-to-market marketing technology and marketing ops teams. There is some sort of shared nomenclature. It just needs to be unpacked and discovered. So, to your point, Asher, sitting with your FP&A team, your CFOs, people in finance in general, as a marketing ops person, they want to be enabled by the tools and technologies and understand the art of the possible all the way through the business, not just for how to enable them and how to be better at what they're doing and go faster, be more efficient and understand APIs and integrations and stuff, but they also want to know what are we doing internally to be able to do that stuff right and how does the business work? You want to know how the business makes money.

Speaker 2: 52:52

They want to know what are we doing internally to be able to do that stuff right? And how does this, how does the? How does the business work? You want to know how the business makes money. They want to know how the business works on the inside. Yeah, yeah, like why do we need these tools and what are they for?

Speaker 3: 53:01

because they're just spreadsheets all day long and they're like to everybody.

Speaker 1: 53:04

To them, everything is a number yeah, yeah, yeah and I've had the luxury of working with several good fpna finance people and you know when you I'm pretty sure that everybody listening to this is gonna if if I asked, did you have you ever pitched an idea and it was turned down? And you thought it was a no-brainer and it was turned down because you didn't have the right financial model or case for it? You know, if you understand, that's the side benefit of understanding this not only that you can understand how the company makes business, but also you're in a better position to pitch ideas that will get approved.

Speaker 3: 53:42

Yeah, totally agree. I'll close with this. In marketing ways or speak, you know you want a career, you want to create career inbound. Go learn the language of business 100%.

Speaker 1: 54:00

That is the. I could not have said it better. I think that's a good way to stop so it's a good place to stop.

Speaker 2: 54:08

We didn't get anywhere near Asher. We're going to have to do it another one. It's not going to be a year and a half, We'll do it again. I really want to unpack what marketing ops people need to be doing to enable partners what partners need to be doing, to talk to marketing.

Speaker 1: 54:23

I think we're more tactical on that.

Speaker 2: 54:25

We got to go a different direction next time, but this has been super fun. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 54:29

Yeah, absolutely Like this. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. I think this has been a great like just doing this deep dive. I think, mike, it was probably something you probably never would have done, knowing you, so I'm glad we did it. I would not have done that though I know that from the conversations we've had. So anyway, Asher, thank you. This has been fantastic. If folks do want to kind of learn more about partner leaders and what you're doing or keeping up with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 3: 54:55

Yeah, you can add me on LinkedIn or just sign up at wwwpartnershipleaderscom.

Speaker 1: 55:00

Oh sorry, partnership leaders, my bad.

Speaker 2: 55:04

All right, you got it.

Speaker 1: 55:05

All right. Thanks, Mike. Thanks to our audience.

Speaker 3: 55:08

Thanks guys, and we will. I'm putting it in my calendar for 2026.

Speaker 1: 55:13

All right, we will talk to you again another time. Thanks for your support everyone. Bye now.