Revenue or Ecosystems to Convince the CEO to Invest in Partnerships?

In this episode of SaaS Connect, your host Sunir Shah, President of Cloud Software Association, speaks with Adrienne Coburn, Partner Program Manager at Shopify, and Brian Jambor, who at the time of this show was Head of Partnerships at Sendoso (he is now Head of Partnerships at Nacelle; see his LinkedIn profile for more info.) These two SaaS partnership leaders have built partnership teams from nothing by convincing leadership to invest more and more. What makes the discussion particularly fascinating is that the responses from the two are so varied. Brian Jambor (previously from Sendoso, now at Nacelle) has over ten years of experience building partnership programs. He convinced Sendoso to invest in partnerships by laying out a strong case for additional revenue. Adrienne Coburn of Shopify built the service partner program at Uberflip and recently joined Shopify to scale their strategic partner program. At Uberflip, she found success focusing on what customer problems partners could solve. What worked? What didn't? Why? And what can we learn by comparing the different approaches? Included in the discussion are the following topics: How do you convince the CEO to invest in partnerships? Do you lead with revenue or building ecosystems? What motivates agencies to partner and how the different industries impact motivation Sendoso’s critical shift and its impact How the partner programs got traction. For Shopify, the biggest reason was providing the lowest barrier to entry possible. For Sendoso, it was promoting partners across their customer base. Scaling the visibility of agency partners without spamming customers Using agencies to deliver part of integrations How long it took to start driving real revenue from agencies Why invest in partnerships to build ecosystems, and how to sell the value and ecosystem beyond generating leads and gross revenue Recommended KPIs and tracking metrics How Sendoso got investors The strategy to pull revenue out of an ecosystem of partners Resources Mentioned: Yodel Uberflip Staples Promotional Products Salesforce Keep Web.com Marketo Oracle Crossbeam Thank you to our amazing podcast team at Content Allies. Want to launch your own B2B revenue-generating podcasts? Contact them at https://ContentAllies.com