Simone Cicero

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m honored today to welcome our guest, a leader and recognized expert in go-to-market strategies, ecosystem development, and business transformation, Asher Matthew.

 

Asher Mathew 

Thanks for having me.

 

Simone Cicero Did I pronounce it well, Asher? So Asher has a long experience in designing and scaling partnership programs and as the co-founder and CEO of Partnership Leaders, fosters a vibrant private community of professionals and executives that have been active in forging partnership alliances, channels, and business development ecosystems.

 

So I think you have a great experience that I really want you to share with our audience as, you know, when it comes to nurturing strategic alliances and growth and innovation. Your background spans quite wide, you know, between sales, marketing, customer success, partnerships, and you have had a direct experience with startups like, you know, demand base or lean data, Avalara and Nodus technologies, and all of them have been either acquired or went through IPO. 

 

So you also have this very relevant experience. So in this episode, I want to dive into the evolving role of partnerships in ecosystem and driving business success. So as a start, I would love to ask you a little bit of framing moment, let’s say. 

 

So if you can share with us your mental model, your key elements of mental framing when you think about partnering for a modern business. So what does it mean?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah. And, thanks. And this is a great start to the convo to me today. Partnerships augment the company’s direct model, right? And in the direct model, you need to create a product. You need to market the product, to sell the product, and then you need to service the product. Right. And in the same way, partnerships can help you build. They can help you market.

 

They can help you sell and they can help you service. And, and that’s how I believe modern partnerships are structured, and we can unpack this in the podcast.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s great. Just as a start, I want to really, I would say, highlight this with our listeners, create the product, market the product, sell it and service it. So it’s really, really good starting point, very clear frame. I would say next step for me would be to ask you, of course, these are common elements of every business, but how does it differ, you know, in your experience?

 

Is it partnership relevant for all types of businesses, starting from, you know, software companies on one side, or maybe pure service companies on the other side?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, so from what I’ve learned in a software company, you have a product and in a services company, you have offerings/solutions, right? Like that you put together, right? And, in either business, there is a core decision that you want to make when you’re designing your business, which is “am I going to build this myself? Am I going to go buy this from the market, this capability from the market, whether it’s a software or service, right? Or am I going to go partner with someone to get with the ultimate goal of how can I get to the market fast, efficiently, collaboratively in our case? And how do I serve the customer to get them to the outcomes they’re looking for and then capture that value?

 

To me, that is a business design question. Some parts of your business, if you can’t afford technology and or talent, you do need to go partner with someone else. Especially in areas where the rate of innovation is fast, like AI would be like the perfect example of modern space, but there’s tons of those spaces like that.

 

And, and so to me, like you really, as a business leader need to answer the question where you’re going to build yourself, where you’re going to buy capability and where you’re going to partner and then use that to intentionally go select the partners in the market that will help you win more customers and service them.

 

Simone Cicero

Mm-hmm. I mean, that’s a very challenging perspective, right? Because a lot of the companies that I’m working with or I talk to don’t even have the capability in the organization, the skills, the frameworks, the mindset, the frames to look at themselves as a portfolio of elements that connect and compose, right? 

 

So I guess that in your experience what you are requiring is essentially to look at an organization in a very boundary-less way. So you may have an organization that runs on something that you built, something that you bought, something that you partner with. So your value streams will come across a lot of organizational boundaries. It can be, in certain organizations, you can be very lucky that you are organizing in a way that you have product units that also collaborate.

 

But at the very least, you will have to serve customers through a set of complex interactions. So I have two questions for you. Maybe we can start for the first of all, what does it take from a perspective of skills, mindset, capabilities. What is your experience in terms of what are the gaps that organizations have to cover to be really able to think this way?

 

Asher Mathew

Yeah. So to me, like if you’re a startup, you really need to figure out what your core value proposition is and your core product or services. And then what’s the ideal customer. Right. And then as you start growing, you start thinking about who else is serving that ideal customer that you can work with to get that customer to the outcome faster. 

 

Then when that happens, companies get to about 10 million in revenue, they figure it out, they’re now looking for scale. And that’s actually a good time to start thinking about, or somewhere along that journey is a good time to think about your partner’s strategy. 

 

Because you have to be intentional. Because just think about this way, you are have a growing business and there’s already a operating system being designed and there’s already a marketing motion running and a sales motion running. And then you add this partner motion on top of it. And by the way, that partner motion has four components called build market, sell, serve. And it’s like, you know, you have a juggler and the juggler juggles like five pins. And then when they add the six pin, the whole thing falls. It can become a pretty disastrous like that. Right. 

 

So, so what do you want to do is you want to very intentionally say. I am at stage X and my customers really need either more product or I need to reach them in a different market, or I need to sell them through a partner who’s already selling to them or to serve them through a partner who’s already serving them, who was already in the account. Right.

 

So you have to be very intentional about which partner you choose to then build new capabilities inside your company. And then as the company grows to, let’s say 25 million or 50 million or even a hundred million, you’ll start to see a natural evolution of your partner strategy because things will stop being an experiment and they have to be a program.

 

Or better said, things can stop being a project and then they have to become a program. And that’s where you start developing the partner program. Cause now you have just like your customer program, right? Like you have the customers you have, sometimes you have SMB customers. Sometimes you have mid-market customers. Sometimes you have enterprise customers. Well, sometimes you’ll have build partners and sometimes you’ll have market partners. And sometimes you’ll have cell partners and sometimes you’ll have service partners. Yeah. Essentially that’s what you can name them or brand them, whatever you want, but that’s the job that they’re doing. And to me, so, so then you can get to like a hundred million plus. And at that point in time, you know, a number of companies have really solid, I want to say developer programs or integrations, as we call them. And because customers have already asked for integrations and integrations have been built. And so that’s part of your build program.

 

Right? And then from there, these things take on a life of their own because you have a much larger partner base and then they are regional partners, there’s global partners, there’s national partners. So again, just like your customer program evolves and becomes mature, your partner program evolves and becomes mature.

 

Simone Cicero

So a couple of bits that I want to highlight for the listeners. First of all, you said you have to recognize your core. You have to understand, essentially, think it’s both. have to understand, first of all, what your business is about. So you have to be able to represent your business in know, in constant, in a coherent way. And then you have to recognize what is your core value. And this helps you to understand where you have to partner, right? Where you can partner.

 

Then another thing you said, you have to really understand your ICP and the outcomes they want to achieve. And this is very important. Another very important point in our experience. You know, I had Scott Brinker on the podcast a few months ago, and he was speaking about this idea of what you call the joint customer value. You know also essentially develop the, know, customers are looking for outcomes that to go across products. 

 

So you have to understand the joint value that they are trying to achieve. So that’s another very important point. Another thing that I think you made it very clear, you have to standardize your product. You have to get your programs to mature over time. So maybe you start with projects, integrations, and then you move into more scalable partnering as you move ahead, as you grow. In everything you do, so I guess in building, marketing, selling and servicing, you should be growing and diversifying your partners. Am I right?

 

Asher Mathew

Yes, totally. But when you’re diversifying your partners, you need to make sure that there is customer demand for them. And then that’s how you diversify.

 

Simone Cicero

Right, because you have to kind of honor certain expectations in the partnership. That would be a business outcome for everybody. Great.

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, but also your customers will keep telling you if you really built the company the right way, your customers will keep on telling you, why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you talk to this partner? Why don’t you talk to that partner? And it’ll become so loud that you’ll just have to go do something about it. And then that’s when you do something about it.

 

Simone Cicero 

That’s where you have to build the capability in the organization to onboard partners, understand customer requests. So in your experience, how does it work? Is it very often that there is a partnership function in the organization or maybe there is a capability that spans across different products in the organic product teams?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, yeah, so this is this is a good one because as a company matures and their partner, let’s call it strategy matures, right, then their partner function matures. And depending on what the need of the customer is, partnerships can start off in product as integrations. They can start off in sales for our marketing for pipeline and deals. They can start off in customer service for implementations. 

 

So they can start off somewhere and then they just mature over time. Just like again, most companies will start off and say, hey, we need to go and outbound for customers or at least the modern thinking was we’ll do SEO and we’ll do some ads and then we’ll get some traffic to our webpage and then we’ll start this inbound motion right, and just see if there’s an actual need.

 

And then after that, they’ll put a outbound motion on place, right? So you could start off in sales, you could start off in marketing, you could start off in customer success, you can start off in product, right? But then over time, as the function matures and becomes bigger, there is the need for someone in the company to be managing, understanding, prioritizing relationships.

 

And then that’s where you have a seasoned senior partnership leader on the team. And then it becomes a function of its own.

 

Simone Cicero

What I perceive is that markets are becoming extremely competitive. So customer acquisition is being a headache for everybody. I guess that it’s also because most of the customers have been acquired by someone already in the market. So there is a lot of competition. 

 

So essentially partnerships are becoming the major channel for bringing your solutions to the market. And the fact that all these people are already, these customers are already served by some kind of solution, it’s really pushing the companies to deliver value. So you could maybe in the past acquire a customer through some kind of clever customer acquisition motion, right? At this point in time, it’s really about the value you deliver. So it’s really about aligning interest, the customer, the partner and so on.

So what are the implications in terms of organizational structure, product, portfolio, and maturity? in your experience, what happens when an organization really understands and embraces this idea of making partnerships centrally in the organizational structure?

 

Asher Mathew

So just to double click on what you just said, the traditional ways of acquiring customers are very expensive because, and you know, there are privacy laws, like today, if you send 150 emails a day in a burst, it’s not that your sales engagement tool will block you from that. Your email tool will just block you. Like Google will just shut you down. Right. And so.

 

So you can’t actually burst emails through salespeople. You have to actually send them through a marketing automation thing. And then on the marketing automation thing, like people have to double opt in and you know, there’s all this like rules now because people want private personalized relevant information coming to them, not spam, right? Essentially. And then on the other side, what you’ve got is this world where we’re moving away from seat-based licensing to consumption licensing.

 

Right. And because of that, the larger platforms today, right? It’s like ServiceNow, Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Oracle, Alibaba, like all these companies, they’ve created this center of gravity and they have, I mean, Salesforce, for example, right? They have lots of customers in their ecosystem. 

 

And then as you are creating a company, you have to prioritize which ecosystem you’re going to play in first. And that to me is another company design question that needs to be answered. It’s not a, sales team, figure out how to go get a bunch of Salesforce customers. That’s not actually right. Cause you have to say, I am now creating a product which will be hosted on X platform, which will be listed on Y marketplace, which will be integrated with ZAB products. And I’m bringing that to market. Right. So.

 

That way now you’ve got a partner strategy that you need to think about.

 

Simone Cicero

So you have to think about where do you plug your product into?

 

Asher Mathew

Because for most of the tools that are in the marketplace or for the most of the software companies that are being created, and for the matter of companies also, services companies have to specialize. They can’t specialize in every single thing, right? And then software has to be connected to something, unless you’re gonna build a platform yourself, which again, takes a very long time and which is not where most companies start off.

 

And so to answer your question then, when this decision becomes important, technically the CEO is the first partnership leader. And over time, they then delegate that responsibility to another partnership leader. 

 

And in most cases, it’s either a product partnership that kicks things off because you have to pick which hyperscaler you’re going to be listed on or built on. And if you, that’s not a major decision for you because you live in a different industry, that’s fine. Then it will start off with where do my customers hang out and they’ll hang out and maybe like Shopify’s ecosystem. And so you have to go to Shopify and start working with them to understand what programs they have to get your company and your brand in front of customers.

 

Simone Cicero

So again, let me kind of highlight a few bits because every time we speak there are some very important points that I want to transfer to the listeners. So first of all, you said it’s a strategic decision. You have to take a very early on. It’s on the table of the CEO to choose what type of scaler or horizontal platform to choose as a main distribution space.

 

So this makes me think that, and I’ve been working with companies that have been investing quite a lot in their distribution strategies. So for example, they have been building their own marketplaces for their own products, hoping to create network effects. As I perceive it from you, this may be a very problematic choice. So you’re telling you should choose an hyperscaler. know, think about the hyperscalers where you distribute your company, your product, rather than thinking you can build network effects around the distribution space for your own.

 

Asher Mathew 

I mean, you could always try. The most efficient path is to go this way, which is where the market’s already at.

 

Simone Cicero 

And with regards to this, even if we stay into the software space, software plus services space, let’s say, and maybe after I will ask you a few bits on manufacturing and other things, but if you look into the software and services space, we have these two polarities here, right? So we have the horizontals, the horizontal hyperscaler marketplaces where you can distribute the stuff.

 

And then there is a vertical aspect of the market. So let’s say that I am entering into the healthcare space and I want to build software for healthcare, right? Should I look into horizontal partnerships like, you know, partnering with hyperscalers, distributing plugins on, you know, the various AWS, whatever, or should I look into opportunities to find vertical partnerships to maybe there is this company that makes that fantastic software for patient portals. 

 

And I have some software that I want to distribute for. So what is in your experience, how do you balance going for the hyperscalers on one side and going into looking for vertical partnerships on the other side?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, it’s a good question. To me, each one of the hyperscalers has a footprint in a number of industries or verticals for that matter. And if the answer is the hyperscalers don’t have enough in a certain vertical, then there must be another application like a CRM or something like that, that does have enough penetration into a vertical. 

 

Or there’s specialty software, like the one that you just talked about, that does have it. So then again, it becomes a go-to-market, decision, if none of the hyperscalers have it, then I don’t really need to partner with them. I just need to build and I’ll figure it out. 

 

If a large enterprise company has a penetration in the healthcare space, then I should go work with them. If a specialty software solution is the dominant player, I should figure out how I’m going to go connect with them and work with this is like a where do I get the most bang for my buck and prioritize the relationship? This is why I keep saying you need somebody who is constantly prioritizing relationships.

 

Simone Cicero 

And from the perspective of the vertical go-to-market, vertical spaces, right? So where maybe, you know, also because major opportunities at the moment exist in these vertical spaces, right? Which are still representing a good opportunity for business. Let’s say that I identify a particular space where I want to bring my solutions. 

 

And I see that there are several players that already exist in that market. Should I think, you know, what should be my posture as an organization? Should I build complements or should I aim at, for example, white labeling agreements or things that are a bit more ambitious in terms of bringing your brand to the market?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So again, this is another one of those things where you have to think about the relationship with the customer and what is the easiest way for them to acquire, adopt and utilize your product? And if it really is that we are in a certain scenario where the customer really does not like to trust easily a new brand in the market, because there are some regular spaces and there’s some just, there’s just places in the market where, companies that are like, hey, it’s risky for me to go adopt this thing because I’m such a big company and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t want to take the liability on. 

 

And so then the best part is thing is to go white label your product with somebody else’s and push that in because that other large other product is already security. There’s already a security clearance. It already is integrated. like, whichever way you can get your product out to the market faster. You need to go do that.

 

Simone Cicero 

So you really have to be pragmatic.

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, I feel like the modern partnerships are more about “Get a business design” than just like sales and marketing. And then when they’re done correctly, sales and marketing is a outcome of the design versus an experiment.

 

Simone Cicero 

Can you double click on this?

 

Asher Mathew 

Modern companies, like previously, like, you know, what would happen is companies would say, look, I’m going to miss my sales goal. So I’m going to go try partnerships.

 

Right. That’s not something you can do today because you first have to say, well, where do I build first? And how does that product get into the hands of my customers? Right. So it’s like, now you’re back to design first and you’re not trying to just execute. And because the problem is not, am I going to miss my sales goal? The product or the problem is how do I get the value that I’m promising my customers to my customers fast?

 

Simone Cicero 

Right.

 

Simone Cicero 

So you advise against, for example, saying we want to target this industry. are the targets for the first year. It’s much more about, you know, let’s design not just a product, but also our partnership strategy. Let’s understand who owns the customer. Let’s be pragmatic and let’s not put targets that we’re going to kill our stakeholder engagement.

 

Asher Mathew 

Because because what you don’t you didn’t do that for your own company, for when you built your own company, you know, when you start a company, you don’t say like, “I have a million dollar target” already. And you’re like, wait, I don’t even know what what is going to work in the market and if there’s demand. And so if you say, “I’m going to focus on really making sure that we take four partners, make them wildly successful, confirm demand, and then go scale”.

 

Because you would do that for your product, right? You do a product-market fit study and then you do a go-to-market fit study. So you should basically do a partner-market fit study and then you go scale your partnership strategy.

 

Simone Cicero 

You said partner fit strategy, right?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, partner fit. Yeah, you can do a partner market fit. It’s the same thing. Like, I mean, I don’t want to create more terminology, but it’s the same concept.

 

Simone Cicero 

No, but I like it very much, because basically what you’re saying is, first of all, understand what you’re great at. Understand how you can deliver value to someone that is already maybe using another piece of software. Understand how they cover the market and then go strategically after all this partnership, because that’s the only channel to market that you have available. You cannot dream about transforming in the market if there are these incumbent players and the customers don’t want to change their solutions. 

 

So you really need to be pragmatic to the point, strategic in when you build a product partner market fit.

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. This is not like a laborious exercise. This is not like a nine month planning cycle, right? This is like, let’s get a room for two hours to just figure this thing out. And let’s just be intentional about it.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, yes, that’s the hard work that sometimes companies do not do, because they prefer to just throw some ambitious objectives on the table and it backfires all the time, because maybe your shareholders are getting nervous because the reality of the market is different of what you had in mind at the start. So that’s great. 

 

Can we look now into a bit more – say picking your experience in industry which has not necessarily only software intensive. Okay, software is everywhere, we know that. But for example, I was talking to, companies doing printers or doing healthcare devices, diagnostics devices. So how do you approach partnering and go to market?

 

When and what is the role of partnering in industries which are a bit more technology intensive. So where maybe companies have a clear understanding of where their core value is.

 

Asher Mathew

Yeah. So, I mean, when you talk about technology companies, you’re talking about software companies and hardware companies, right? And then you’re talking about services. There’s really three types of comp, like in my book, there’s three types of companies, right? Maybe there are more, but like, like let’s say for this conversation, we say software, services, and hardware. 

 

And then, so, so then the, the, the software conversation we just had, right. In the services world, if you’re creating a services company, you have to end. then you are either a consulting company or you’re an outsourcing company. And so in either case, you have to say, well, what am I consulting on? And who provides that? And then when I’m consulting on X, is there something that’s so related to X called Y and Z that I can go consult on that too? 

 

Because I want to have one conversation with the customer. For example, we say, look, today we want to make sure that opportunities get to the right salespeople at the right time.

 

So I’m going to go consult on how do you create a rules of engagement between sales and marketing teams? I’m just giving a very simple example, right? So as I’m going to that process, I’m also looking at the tech stack. And then say I come across this company called Lean Data, right? Which is where I worked at before. And then Lean Data helps you route leads the right people, right? And so then from there you say, well, if I’m already going to talk to them about writing the right leads to right people, why don’t I also talk to them about setting a calendar appointment?

 

Then why don’t I talk to them about, why don’t I talk to the customer about a email solution, right? So now I’m having like three or four different conversations in one conversation. And as a service company, I have to think about consulting for the solution. 

 

And so my partner strategy is what are the four products that I’m going to be able to solve that I need that I’m going to be able to solve a problem for the customer. Again, you have to be intentional because some companies are okay with trying out new products. Some companies only care about best of breed.

 

Right. You then have to manage SLAs. You have to understand how do you sign up for their partner programs? You have to think about how you get. You have to think about how you get recognized. You know, there’s all these again, partner program dimensions, which are different than they were for the software companies. Right. 

 

And so, so, so then you need a intentional partner strategy for your services company. Right. Same thing for hardware. Now, every hardware provider will say – I specialize in, let’s say, silica.

 

Well, then I need to understand the supply chain of silica. I have to have partnerships slash contracts with mining companies or whatever. you know, I have to have to have partnerships and contracts with refining companies. I have to get like fabs and all these things that I need built. 

 

And so then again, I need a intentional partner strategy. So if I’m a chip set maker, then I need a board. If I have a board, I need RAM. If I have RAM, I need compute. So there’s, again, all these relationships that need to be prioritized. And so in some cases, you’ll say, hey, I’m just going to be a customer and I’m going to buy a bunch of boards that I need to put my chips on. In other cases, you’ll say, hey, why don’t we create a specialized board and a specialized chip set that just has a heat sink baked into it, and we should go and sell that. 

 

Now you have a partner strategy.

 

Simone Cicero 

So, you know, the playbook is always the same. So you need to really understand where is your differentiator, how does it fit into the existing market, are the brands that are already there and how your value compounds and connects with those and then be intentional in building those partnerships, whatever business you are. 

 

So the question maybe could switch into in your experience, what is a good framework to describe the scope of type of partnerships that you can build in terms of more than in terms of what phases of the business we’re talking about, building, marketing, or selling and servicing. 

 

I’m talking about more of what type of incentive structures? 

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, so we can talk about it. So yeah, if we’re talking about the business model, which like if we’re talking about the commercial model, right. And so in the commercial model, there’s really a referral structure, there is a re-sell structure, and there is a, I want to call, co-sell structure, and then there’s an OEM structure, right, or white label. 

 

Referral is: You referred me an opportunity, I went and closed it, I’ll pay you a referral fee. Re-sell is: I took your product and sold it while I was selling my product the customer knows it’s your product. They’re just buying it from me, right? Co-sell is: We both targeted an account. You were running your sale and I was running my sale. We exchanged notes and we traded notes and we supported selling each other’s products. In some cases, I’ll pay you or in some cases, you’ll pay me some incentive to help you with your deal. And sometimes there’s revenue sharing agreements as well. And then OEM is really white label. I bought your product, the customer does not know that it’s your product and I’m just selling it as my product. And then there’s another incentive there.

 

Simone Cicero 

Okay. And in your experience, what is the… I I guess that the question, what is the best, it doesn’t fit very well because you said that, You have to be pragmatic, you have to be, you know, you have to understand the value chain and to understand the context. But, you know, what are the pitfalls and benefits? What are some things that you have to keep in mind as you evaluate these? You know, let’s try to help our listeners to build their own mental model around – what model should I seek for in what context?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah. Yeah. See, I always ask people to just go talk to their customers and say, I’m about to go and build a partner strategy. What are the tools you would like me to partner with our services companies? Right. Like what are the software companies? What are the hardware companies? What are the services companies that I partner with so I can get you what you need faster? 

 

And the pain points are always around – I can’t procure your software fast enough. It’s painful. I can’t implement your software or service in the fast enough. It’s painful. Or I really love your company, but it imposes a lot of risk on my company. And I can’t take that risk.

 

And these are very simple conversations to have.

 

Simone Cicero

No, no, but I mean, I didn’t want to interrupt you, but I like this. I wanted to highlight that maybe if you think about, you know, I have to bring my product to the market. Companies often think of, okay, let’s talk to somebody that already owns the customer so I can, you know, use them as a channel. Okay? 

 

Or maybe I can partner with them. But what I perceive from you is something more swift. It’s something that tells – Talk to the customer, not to the partner, because you have to think about value, not just about the opportunity to channel and just another option to the customer.

 

Asher Mathew 

Totally, Because a transaction is a byproduct of delivering value. Right, without the transaction, the value is not being delivered. But if you just focus on a transaction and never deliver the value, then you have a bad experience. Because you don’t do that for your direct customers either.

 

Simone Cicero 

So when you research the customer and the market, you really need to understand what they are using, what are the products they’re using, what are the problems they’re trying to solve, not just, you know, this software has 100,000 customers, so it’s great for me to try to seek a partnership from them. Yeah. I think that’s a great lesson.

 

So what else? We spoke about the stages in the business process. We spoke about the business model, the commercial model. What else is important to understand when you think about developing your partnership strategy?

 

Asher Mathew

Yeah, I would think about risk. And also think about, look, I’m going to go integrate with this other company. What if that company gets acquired by someone else? Then what happens? Right. I am dependent on this supplier and I’ve really built some joint products with them or services with them. What if they go out of business?

 

I’m going to spend a lot of money and time and energy building this partnership and take them to my lighthouse customers. And they have an allergic reaction to this company for whatever reason. Right. These are things to think about. So you can again, go back to being intentional and really build this thing out. Then you have a happy, amazing customers.

 

And when this thing works, this partner strategy thing works, it’s a multiplier effect. Because the whole system is designed to provide leverage. You know, in go-to-market today, everybody’s talking about efficiency. In partnerships, you don’t have to talk about efficiency because it’s already efficient by design. The whole reason you do it is because it’s efficient.

 

In partnerships, you focus on, profitable collaborative growth. That’s what partnership is.

 

Simone Cicero 

It’s part of this intentionality that you’ve been talking about, right? So instead of spread and pray, spray and pray, really try to be focused.

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah.

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, and there is a time to spray and pray, right? Let’s just say you’ve said, hey, I am being intentional because I figured out that I want to go talk to a bunch of rev ops consultants because they are very close to my customer. Amazing. Let’s figure out a list of 5,000 rev ops consultants and start calling them. That would be spray and pray, right?

 

Simone Cicero 

So I was thinking to one little point that I wanted to ask you about. So with this abundance of capital, right, we see that there’s a lot of pent up capital sitting there. we have, you know, I think surprisingly enough, it doesn’t seem very much impacted by the end of the zero interest rate policies. So it seems like capital is still flowing and acquisitions are happening. 

 

So in your experience, when does a company, why should a company really think about M &A’s and growth by acquisitions? Because in the last few months, we have seen a lot of focus on these thesis, right? So for example, I don’t know, there is people like Slow Venture telling, you should really purchase your customers, not even your partners. 

 

You really need to be aggressive in how you deploy capital for growth. Once you have figured out a product that really delivers these automation improvements, these margins, better margins and better productivity, you should really be aggressive with capital. 

 

So what is in your experience? How is this counterbalancing the possibility of partnering versus really purchasing your partners, your customers, competitors?

 

Asher Mathew

Yep. It just goes back to the buy build partner strategy. Because if your partner is struggling and you have more resources and you have line of sight to offering what they’re selling to your customers at a much faster clip than just how it’s running today, you should buy them and then bring all of that forward value into your company, make your company more profitable and theirs too. 

 

So you basically telling purchasing or somebody in the market is a form of partnership to some extent because you still have to operate that node.

 

Asher Mathew

Right in the same way.

 

Asher Mathew

Yeah, most successful M&A have some elemental partnerships in them already.

 

Simone Cicero 

So it’s just a capital element that fits into the picture, you still either create incentives for win-win outcomes through referrals, reselling, co-selling, OEM-like. That’s great.

 

Asher Mathew

And OEM is just an advanced form of reselling, right? Because you’re already reselling them, now you put your brand on it, it’s OEMing.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah. So maybe last bit before we move into the breadcrumbs. What’s new in partnership? What are the new things that you are excited about? Of course, everybody’s talking about AI, but in general, what do you see? What is your attention now, folks?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, so for me, the new things that are happening in partnerships is that partnership leaders have a number of ways to increase their impact inside of a company.

 

Previously, you had channel leaders who were only focused on referring or reselling or OEMing. And as the rise of product partnerships has taken place over time, there is an opportunity for modern partnership leaders, the people who do understand product, to take the responsibility for those product partnerships and create new revenue streams. 

 

The way that they’re doing this, in some cases, they are creating their own application directories where they list all the companies that complement them. In some cases, people are creating application marketplaces. like the Salesforce App Exchange is a great example of that. HubSpot’s marketplace is a great example of that. 

 

And then a number of companies are pushing that business model even further and figuring out how do they make money for their partners and how do they send their partners opportunities to close. So for example, Canva has a program called Premium Apps, where they take their top apps, know, these are integrations basically in a way, right? Or applications right on their platform and then bundle them in their own subscription and then they pay those application developers.

 

So you’ve got an element of marketplaces. You’ve got an element of platforms. You’ve got an element of AI. You’ve got an element of co-selling, which is different than reselling as we discussed. You’ve got an element of taking these tier-based partner programs and converting them to points base where you reward the partner for an activity that resulted in an outcome.

 

And so you’ve got enough now to say, wow, this job that was just about either reselling or referring is actually about a much bigger impactful thing inside of a company. And to me, that is exciting because that allows people to build a properly resourced function and then create an opportunity for growth for their teams and really provide leverage to a business which in the end could actually serve as a moat.

 

Simone Cicero

And in your experience, how widespread and how frequent is this possibility to, I would say, design scalable platform partnership programs in companies? Of course, everybody knows AppSpot and service, know, Apple change and so on. But you know, how viable is for, you know, maybe startups or new companies that are getting into the market, how viable is to really achieve this?

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah. Yeah. So I would say you’re not becoming a big company without a partner program. None of the big companies have been able to become becoming without partner programs. Right. Now, as a startup, you do need to get to 10 million plus to really start investing and seeing some returns. 

 

But like we were talking earlier on, as you’re designing your business, you do have to think about which ecosystem you’re going to play in. that’s just the reality of today. Right. So, so, um, I believe that modern software companies and modern services companies both have the opportunity to create and scale modern partner programs because even the services companies have to build tools to deliver their services and those tools are apps.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right. So maybe at the start you have to look into what’s there and then as you grow your business, can maybe have a chance to try your vertical, in particular vertical. I mean, we have been so efficient in getting to the right points in this conversation. So I love that. There’s a lot of schemas and frameworks, which I think our listeners will be very grateful for.

 

So as a last bit, you like to share breadcrumbs with our audience?

 

Asher Mathew 

Sure. And when you say breadcrumbs, help me elaborate little bit so that I can share the right breadcrumbs.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, as I said, more or less when we share breadcrumbs, it’s either things that inspired you and you believe that our listeners should really look into. It can be books or movies, podcasts, whatever you like, blogs, articles.

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah. Yeah. I would say if you are someone who wants to understand how partnerships help business leaders, there is a podcast called Unlearn that I host. I’d love for folks to have a listen to it. And I, bring on business leaders specifically onto that podcast. If you are someone that is in partnerships or wants to understand the tactical components of partnerships go to this podcast called Groundwork, which my co-founder Tai runs and he brings on some amazing practitioners. 

 

Those are the two things that I would I would recommend and then outside of that you know, we are running a number of summits around the world and there’s a number of meetups and mixers just so that we can bring both business leaders and partnership leaders together to help them understand how to do this well.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, yeah. And I also think that, for example, joining one of your events could be a good way to not to just learn, but to develop these relationships, which are also very important in the business.

 

Asher Mathew 

Totally, totally, totally. There’s three reasons why people come to Partnership Leaders events. One is they want to meet with their current partners, the other is they want to recruit new partners, the third one is they want to learn how to do their job.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right, right. So definitely suggest our listeners to check the events. Basically, you mean the Catalyst Summit.

 

Asher Mathew

Yeah, so Catalyst Summits and we have the Catalyst Conference is going to be in Seattle on May 13 to 15th and it’s going to be in London, October 22nd and 23rd. So we’re going to have both this year.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, yeah, I mean, thank you so much, Asher. It was really great to the point that the type of conversations I like, very actionable, very schematic, is because I’m a bit of a rational person, so.

 

Asher Mathew 

Yeah, no, I don’t know what you’re doing. I mean, as I looked at your website, I’m like, this is gonna be a fun podcast because I’m gonna finally have a chance to go slow and give just to the point answers.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, thank you so much. hope you enjoyed. Thank you. I mean, for our listeners, of course, you will find all the information that Asher has shared, both the links, the links to the resources he mentioned and the transcript of the conversation, which is going to be very important, you know, because you can find all the frameworks that we discussed on our website. 

 

So if you head to www.boundaryless.io/resources/podcast, you will find Asher’s interview and all the transcripts and everything. And until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.