142 | Partner ops isn't optional anymore

Jon Busby: So welcome to another episode of the Tech Marketing podcast. and part of our channel series actually, we're really excited to be speaking to some real future leaders in the channel and, uh, B2B marketing space. So, I'm joined by Antonio, head of Global Partner Operations at Tricentis. Is that right?

Correct. Tricentis. So, I mean, we spoke, uh, quite a little while while ago now. It's been a busy, busy, uh, space in the, in the channel area really. 'cause we've, we've all been to lots of events. Um, but welcome to the B2B Marketing podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here, Antonia. Thank you for having me, John, and thank you for having me, Seb.

Uh, it's a pleasure to be here. So. And of course, I'm also joined by Seb. Seb, welcome back to the Tech Marketing podcast. Sure. You're joining me for all of these, uh, all of our channel series of where, you know, we, we are speaking to ch channel people both across marketing ops, um, and a variety of different roles.

So this is, I think this is our first one we're kicking off with. Am I right? It is, it is. So you're gonna hear a lot more of, of, of seven me coming, coming through this, but, um, Antonio, coming, going to you for a second. Like, you began your career as a telecoms engineer, is that

Antonio Caridad: right? Correct. I, um, maybe not exactly my career, but I'm a telecom engineer by college if, if need be.

Um, and I worked in telecoms for. Several years before diving into the world of partnerships. So that is correct.

Jon Busby: Like how did it, like we all have our own little story, I think on the channel side. I mean, I'm, I'm gonna, by the way, I'm gonna use channel, partner and ecosystem completely interchangeably today.

'cause we, we just, you know, it, it's evolving so much itself, but we all have our own stories, um, when we talk about channels and partners about how we fell into this space. So how did you end up going from a telecoms engineer to being, you know, partner operations today?

Antonio Caridad: That's a good question. So, um, I worked in telecom for, for a few years back in Mexico.

I'm originally from Mexico. Um, and I decided to come to the United States to get my MBA, uh, got my MBA at Carolina and it was there that I specialized in sales and marketing. Um, I. And I happened to get an internship at IBM back then, and it was an, an internship within the channels of vision of IBM within partner World.

Um, where we did, we, we did a few different things throughout the internship, but uh, after I, I got the offer to become full-time and I, and IBM said, like, and Antonio, you'd be great, you'd be great at this thing we call channel sales. We could channel partnerships. Um, you want to take a dive into it? And I took a dive and I didn't look back and I've been in the industry, well, I've been in this space because it's been different industries.

Um, but I've been in the space doing partnerships in one way or another for almost 15 years. So, yeah. It's,

Jon Busby: it's cra I think it's crazy how many of us potentially started IBM as well. Um, it's such a, a, you know, the, but certainly back in like 2005, I think they're the only company pushing this kind of model at this kind of scale we're talking about.

Um, Sam, I'm actually gonna ask you the same question 'cause we're gonna do in this channel series. Like where, how did you fall into the channel space?

Seb Tyack: So I, I fell in it, it is more like a second career for me in many ways because I, the first half of my career was spent in technology, but much more in TV and advertising production.

Um, around the advent of the internet in the naughties and working in a creative business, but bringing technology to help manage processes that previously were all analog. So in effect, using the cloud. So I kind of feel like my career took off probably with the advent of the cloud as like a, an actual way of working.

And then I moved. We located, um, to live where I do today and joined, uh, a marketing business that had one main client, which was Dell Technologies. And we worked, uh, really around comms and helping manage partner communications, um, in EMEA and then in APAC and in North America. And I saw the same opportunity that I had in my previous world, which was a lot of people with very big objectives and big tasks, but not with always, not with the tools necessarily to fulfill them.

Um, and there was a lot of processes in the channel space, particularly in marketing. We could see where automation would be a big win. Things were very manual. Um, data could help drive that automation. And that's kind of where I started really partner marketing, but it's kind of ex expanded into all elements of, of running partner programs, um, and partnering, whether it's sales, um, enablement, um, compliance, still marketing, kind of like the whole piece, um, in a way.

So yeah, my, my entry point is, is part of my personal journey. I guess.

Jon Busby: We, we all just fall intimate really. I think that's where we end up. We all just fall into to partners. So Antonio, coming back to your role at IBM, so if I'm understood that correctly, you played a role launching partner initiatives, is that right?

Antonio Caridad: Correct. Correct. So I started my career at IBM working with resellers, um, resellers and distributors. Right. Um, and that's where I truly got my feet wet. Uh, and I started learning about diner workings of. Traditional channel per se. Um, but later I started, um, getting the responsibility of other programs around, um, sis around solution providers, around service providers.

And eventually, um, eventually we created this task force that I was leading around, um, the early days of tech partnerships inside of IBM. Right. Uh, integrations. So back then didn't have a name. Um, and what we did was we identified, uh, basically a way to work through up and coming marketplaces. Not only the AWSs, the Azure, Azures and gcps of the world, but you know, the distributors back then were flipping and switching their ways into marketplaces.

And so Aero was creating Aerosphere, um, uh, Ingram was creating, creating Cloud Blue. Um. Tech Data acquire Avnet, and then Tech Data got acquired by Synex, and then they created StreamOne in, in that whole thing. And then, then, then there were also the born on the cloud distributors, right? The app, uh, directs of the world, the epic sites of the world, and telcos, my background were creating marketplaces and creating big things through marketplaces, right?

So I spent six years doing that. Being me and my team were kinda like, let's call it like the middle layer, doing partnerships internally and externally because we were partnerships agnostic and we were working with multiple IBM brands to bring them into our layer of APIs, and then our layer of APIs would connect to partners, right?

And so we were, we were truly doing partnerships both ways, um, and, and being the connector between those things, right? Uh, between the marketplaces and the different products inside of IBM. And I think we got to the point where we were working with, like, I. Something like 11 IBM brands and 170 something products, um, within our portfolio.

And, uh, some of them were very, very, very successful. Right. And so yeah, I did, I did a little bit of everything. Well, a lot of everything inside of IBM, right?

Jon Busby: So I I, I even in our prep call, we didn't cut touch on the detail there, Antonio. There's some, there's some really, like, let's give a bit of context over the dates we're talking about here.

So you joined there, you say 15 years ago. So 20 10, 20 11. 2011 till, based on those years, what? 20 20, 21. Until 20. Okay. So you were there a while. I was in IBM for 10 years. Yeah. Because talking about some of the elements you mentioned, you built, you know, you built a marketplace of APIs. Like we are now living in a world of, uh, cps, if anyone knows what those terms is, like the future of what the, what API's become like that was mm-hmm.

That felt in, you know, incredibly forward thinking. Like, did you, and I guess, I guess there's no really other way of asking this, like, how did you feel like you were on the cutting edge of building an ecosystem at the time? Or did it just feel like the, this was the obvious answer? I think it was

Antonio Caridad: the obvious answer.

And the reason is not only were, were, were we seeing our partners move that way? We were seeing customers looking to buy that way. Customers looking to buy mm-hmm. In a centralized place where they can bundle. Offerings that where they can bundle pro products and where they can get everything in a single one-stop shop, right?

Yeah. Single pane of glass, single one-stop shop one bill for everything. Uh, centralized everything, right? And so and so, while it failed cutting edge within IBM and within the big partners in the industry, um, it was the way to go right now. Still, like, we always found the roadblocks of people saying like, why would I change if something works, don't change it.

You're gonna cannibalize my sales. I'm not gonna change the way I do things. And you'll always find that you're, you're always gonna have, you know, the, the curve of adoption, like the early adopters, the gap and all that. Um. But yeah, back then, back then it felt, I, I think it's a little bit of both. It felt revolutionary, but at the same time, it didn't feel revolutionary.

It felt like obvious and it felt like we need to do this if we, if we wanna stay alive. Um, so I, I guess it's a little bit of both.

Seb Tyack: Yeah, no, it's interesting because, so our time in the channel is almost exactly the same. So thinking about dates I started, end of 2011 is when I began this role that exposed me to channel, and I guess that's the, that adoption curve.

It's the same at that point was businesses that were building themselves around cloud services and consumption models and recurring revenue versus all of the legacy businesses that were transactional. And it, you know, and so it was challenging. So you got some, some businesses that would go build a business around the new model, which is definitely we can see in marketplaces is.

Totally valid, low viable, um, while other businesses are trying to adapt and kind of transition all of their cost base, which is, which is not simple.

Antonio Caridad: Right? Right. I, I mean, I, I can tell you one thing and that is building this, um, we broke a lot of things. Um, we broke a lot of things, which is something that I always joke around that I love breaking things.

Um, but I love rebuilding things as well, right? If I, I don, I'm not doing it today, but if you ever, uh, I, I'm in a call with me or in a call with me, like I, normally, I'm fidgeting with something and it's normally a pen, and I'm like putting it apart and building it again. So I'm, I was a big Lego fan when I was a kid.

I loved destroying things and rebuilding things in different ways and understanding the inner workings. And, um, in part of that. Was this Right? We, for us to become successful with what we did, we had to break a lot of things. One of them was, we were some of the first few people that, that truly managed to unlock, um, cross border selling within IBM.

Right? Because IBM is very, very broken up in different entities around the world. Even within Europe, you have IBM Germany and IBM mm-hmm. Uh, UK and IBM France, and IBM Spain and all that. And, uh, but in the world of the European Union, you need free flow of goods, right? And so one of the things that we couldn't, that a lot of people back then couldn't figure out is how, how can we allow a partner in Germany to sell to a customer in France?

Oh, and by the way, their distributor might happen to be in Sweden. Mm-hmm. Right? Um, and through a lot of. Knocking on doors and a lot of working on things that I never thought in my career would have to learn, especially, uh, a lot of, uh, fine print and contract reading, a lot of accounting rules, a lot of those things.

Mm-hmm. Um, we managed to do it. We managed to do it. And, um, and so it was a lot of iteration, a lot of trial and error and a lot of, a lot of failure in the way, but a lot of failure in the way of like, okay, pick yourself back up and keep going. Keep going, fail fast. Right? Fail fast, but keep going. And so, uh, and we, we became very successful with certain IBM brands, so.

Yeah.

Jon Busby: Hmm. I, I like, I'd love to understand more about the things you broke, but I guess probably another way of putting this is like, what did you find? Like building something that. You know, I I was gonna say is a few years, certainly a few years ahead of its time, how did you find out which bits were missing?

Like Crossroads selling was one that you just mentioned, like how did you find the other bits that were, and what do you think is still missing from a partner ecosystem of that degree?

Antonio Caridad: Uh, I think some of the things that we also identified that were missing, um, came from truly going and talking to our customers and our partners, right?

One of the things that we identified back then was customers telling us, Hey, I love your product. I just don't want to deal with you. Like, Hey, I, I, I love your product, but I don't wanna sign your contract 'cause I feel like I'm signing my. Life away, right? And so because of that, I want to go through a partner.

I want to go through X, Y, Z, right? And, and in the same way, then we would go to the partners like, how can we make this better for you? Right? And what do we need to do? Well, you have to bring down your, your, your agreement is 27 pages long. It should not be that hard. You don't need 27 pages for what we're doing, right?

Um, and so how can we trim down our agreement to five pages? How can we do things, click and accept how, how can we truly get our partner experience better, that then will drive our customer experience better to keep that adoption going up? Right? And so things like that were, were some of the things that we identified.

Um, obviously moving. Moving things into a new world, you tend to find out that things get coded very rigidly. Like we, we found out that some of our quota cash systems, or even some of our SKUs, uh, within the system where we're created a very certain way. And when you start thinking about like, how can a company that's supposed to be forward thinking build something that is set in stone and it's really hard to change, right?

And so like, okay, we need to, we need to click, click, uh, chin at that stone and we need to change this kind of thing, right? And we need to build it in a way that we know it's going to change eventually. Right. It needs to be adaptable. It needs to be flexible. It needs to be, it, it needs to be able to be, to evolve and not we're we are, we're not building for something to be, again, 10 years, five years from now, for it to be stuck again.

Right? And so it's, those aren't a part that some of the things that. We kept uncovering, uncovering as you peel the layers of the onion. Right? So it was not an easy task, but, uh, took some time. But, uh, but I can say we were successful.

Seb Tyack: That's great. I, I, I relate to the, to the story 'cause I feel like at the heart of it is the challenge of driving change from within and not kind of in a top down process, which lots of businesses go through with consultancies and that how do we improve our margin by shortening supply times and so on.

But what, what we do in effect is take specific areas and then go how do we design an improvement that can kind of last on which you can build the next, the next bit and the next bit.

Antonio Caridad: Yeah, you're right. Our, our division within, within partner world was transformation. So, um, we were part of that. Right Now, the funny thing that comes with it, or maybe not that funny is that, that we always joked about like, Hey, we have to generate a billion dollars, but we have $10 of investment, right?

And so it's a lot of glue and duct tape. And, uh, and sticks to put things together. And then once they're working, and it's a lot of pilot programs. Yeah. It's a lot of literal, like really mm-hmm. Tiny experiments mm-hmm. That you keep growing and keep growing. And, uh, and as you keep growing, as you start having those successes, then you can, okay, here's the success.

Can I get a little bit more, can they'll get a little bit more? Right. Yeah. And that's how you get there. So,

Jon Busby: yeah. Yeah. Like I would always say, like, thinking about it. And it's very similar to building a product. Um, and so my, by the way, my first drop into the channel was building a product for the channel, uh, as, as Seb mentioned.

And, you know, the, the phrase we always, we like to throw around, which maybe is just an excuse for us not wanting to do things properly, is like perfection is the enemy of progress, right? So like, trying to build something that is like incredibly flexible that might meet every need of now and in the future is still a quite time consuming thing to do.

Like, but you're right. Like, you know, some of these, we had a similar problem with a client last week where they, they had two quote to cash systems that they couldn't reconcile. Mm-hmm. Uh, that are built very rigid, built very rigidly. Like how do you know which battles to fight, I guess is what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah. Like how do you know when to perfect something and when and when to polish it and when to step back and say, this is good enough, let's get it launched.

Antonio Caridad: Uh, I mean, you bring something up and, and you just quoted, I. Churchill, which is it, it's a quote that I use all the time, uh,

Jon Busby: unintentionally quoted Churchill.

Yeah,

Antonio Caridad: but I'll take that. But it's, it's, it's, it's a quote that I, that I use all the time, which is perfection is the enemy of progress. Right. Um, and, uh, and it's true. It's, I think there's two things to, to know, and that is, and to always remember. Um, one is that it's good, like just keep going and keep iterating and don't get stuck in, uh, analysis paralysis in perfectionism, right?

Because then you're not going to keep moving forward, right. Especially when you are, when you don't control a lot of things. Um, in the world that we live in, which is partnerships, we do depend on a lot of collaboration and a lot of other things. But guess what? All those other p, all those other teams, just like our partners.

Have other things to do, have their own businesses to run. Right? And if you get stuck in perfectionism and not in, uh, and not in, like, you're not progressing, um, guess what? Eventually they're gonna move on. Why? Because they have other things to do, right? Uh, but at the same time, and super important thing that people need to remember is that boring is not bad.

You need to understand that sometimes the best decision and the best outcome might be boring, but guess what? It's the most effective. You don't have to be shiny and flashy and all that boring. I, I've put out things that are very flashy and, uh, and very what I would think, like, oh, this is super cool in front of my partners.

And my partners tell me like, no. And that's one of the really good lessons I learned is like, don't build in a vacuum and then try to come out and then go to them and ask them like, how, what do you think about this? Because you might have spent, yeah, 3, 4, 5, 6 months in something that is useless, right?

Seb Tyack: Yeah.

Antonio Caridad: But at the same time, I put some, some things in front of them that in my opinion is super boring and they're like, this is fantastic. This is just exactly what I needed to keep rolling and, and, and to keep growing. Right? Boring is not bad. Boring sometimes is really good.

Seb Tyack: Yeah, no, I, I I love that. I mean, I think, so it's often when you were talking about how do we make our partner experience a bit better?

How do we help that drive customer experience? So much of it is small moments that are actually not perceptively a, you know, something. It's like, if we're gonna be more useful, we need to be relevant, specific, timely, actionable, you know? And if, if a partner experience is those four things, you've just helped someone.

I just need to do this because that will happen and that's a good fit. Mm-hmm. You know, so it's not spectacular. It's not, it's it's efficient and effective, but it's, it's those simple attributes, you know? Yeah. We can just surface those all the time. Suddenly, gradually, people will start to go, I do enjoy these experiences.

Yep. You know, as well as talking to someone, it's like, I'm actually just getting the right information when I need it.

Antonio Caridad: Yeah. And, and I mean, let's be honest, a lot of times when you are looking to buy a tool, um, bring something into your tech stack, more often than not, the things that end up making, like the decision maker, uh, choosing you or choosing somebody else, or you choosing a a specific thing, it, it boils down to the boring things.

Seb Tyack: Mm-hmm. Like,

Antonio Caridad: yes, the bells and whistles and all of this. Right. But it ultimately boils down to like, these are my needs. Which are normally the boring things. Can you do the boring things and the needs what I need? Right, exactly.

Jon Busby: Well, it's sometimes, like we've both said a couple of different words, there're both boring and simple.

Um, yeah, simple. But I, but I, but I think it's, you know, sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones. Mm-hmm. Um, and they provide the most amount of flexibility in the most, uh, and the most ability for us to grow. Which brings us onto a great kind of a segue into our next topic, which is kind of, I'm, I'm gonna say talking about boring and simple.

Let's talk about partner ops. That sounds like a bad segue, but really very sorry. Uh, the, um, we, but let's, let's, let's jump into it. Like, why, why do we think. Now partner ops, the, the role that you fall into Antonio is why do you think it's having a moment? Um, like what's, what's been the reasons that it's become so important now?

Antonio Caridad: I, I, I think there's multiple, but, um, the simple, boring and potentially, um, uh, interesting answer is if sales has sales ops and the go-to-market engine, if you're mature enough, has rev ops why those partnerships never have partner ops, right? Yep. So let's, let's start with that. So the, the, the most important thing here that happens, uh, and the reason why partner ops is having a moment, is because for I don't know how many years at this point, we see the death cycle in partnerships, right?

Which means a company. Keeps hearing about how Microsoft does 95% of their revenue through partners and all that, and they're like, I wanna do that. Right? Not that anybody can ever replicate the Microsoft model. Um, if somebody, if a small company does, please point me towards them. But, um, but basically everybody keeps hearing about this.

So a founder, CEO says like, I wanna do that. Let's, let's, let's dedicate a little bit of budget to that. And they hire a partner leader via a VP or via a senior director of partnerships. Um, that person gets afforded normally 12 to 18 months if they're lucky. Um, and maybe a couple of headcounts, but guess what?

They need to generate ROI real fast. They're revenue generators, right? And so because of that, that partner leader Hass, a couple of partner managers, and they spend, they want to spend 80, 90% of their time. Building partnerships, proper partnerships, not paper partnerships. Um, creating proper marketing and sales plans, uh, creating proper goals and targets and working towards them, doing QBs, and then being out there with the partners driving deals.

Right? Guess what? Everything else falls down. Everything else. Nobody does it, which is working on proper contracting, working in proper partner experience, all the quota, cash, uh, things. They do not have the time. Most importantly, to create all the foundation behind the scenes to. To properly capture information and then have the metrics to pre to show their ROI and their work.

Um, and so all those things fall, be, fall, fall through the cracks, right? There's nobody doing it. And so teams now after that, that cycle, um, because then that they don't have the results to show for, or they, they do have the resource to show, but guess what? They don't have the data. Um. Then the party leader gets fired, right?

And then two years later, the company goes again, like, I wanna try it again. Right? And so what happens is that now leaders are identifying the fact that they need operational help. They need operational help with, from somebody running all of this behind the scenes from forecasting and metrics to comp plans, to budgets, to um, to operations, to process efficiency, to et cetera, et cetera.

And, uh, and finally, I think leaders are realizing that maybe, maybe if you're too small, maybe you don't need a dedicated partner ops person, but you don't need rev ops, sales ops help, right? So at least, at least SalesOps giving you a half a headcount or something like that, right? But most of the leaders are now identifying, and I have several friends in the industry that say my first two hires are a partner manager and a partner ops person.

Right? Because I, because the problem is that when you bring. A partner ops person too late in the game, you might have, you might find a very hairy animal that is really hard to untangle mm-hmm. Process wise, um, uh, systems wise, your CRMs, MS, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And so, so that's why I, I am of the, I'm a huge proponent of like, yeah, I'm not gonna advocate that you need a partner ops person right off the bat, but you do need a headcount, either in sales ops or in rev ops doing this for you so that you can actually create a proper foundation and then scale from there.

Mm-hmm.

Jon Busby: And I, so I, and I completely agree by the way, you've, but you've mentioned quite a few different things that we could dive into. Like when we talk about partner ops being a foundation, like what are, what would you, how would you break down the different components that go into that foundation?

Great. Like what are the different pieces?

Antonio Caridad: Great question. So I have my own framework, and the way that I define this are four, four pillars that surround one, central one. The four pillars that are around the four fun foundational pillars are your systems, your tech, your metrics, how are you measuring everything?

And how are you capturing data, your programs, which is how are you building, um, how do you, what would you call it? How are you building a world for your partners to come in and work with you and live within that, that world within your ecosystem? And then finally the last one is enablement, right? How are you ensuring that from an enablement standpoint, an enablement, uh, includes alignment, right?

From an enablement standpoint, this is not only external. But also internal, how are you making sure that you are, that your company, that the rest of your functional departments, marketing, sales, customer success, finance, um, if you have a deal desk quota, cash slash order management team, uh, et cetera, et cetera, how.

Do they, do they understand what you're doing? Are you truly interrelated in the in with them? Do you have champions within those organizations that are truly rowing your way? Um, and so it's those four pillars that if one is crooked, if one is corrected, one if not existing, guess what? The house, the house is crooked, right?

And eventually that house will fall down. So those are your four pillars. And on top of those four pillars, it's a fifth pillar, but think about it more like a, a beam that rests on those four pillars, and that is partner experience. If any of those four pillars is suffering, if any of those four pillars is not existent, guess what?

Your partner experience is suffering somewhere. Either your partners are not getting properly enabled, either your partners don't have the right tools, uh, and it's hard to do. You're hard to do business with. Either the incentives are not there and they don't understand what they do with you. Um. Et cetera, et cetera.

Uh, or hey, the partner manager on the other side also has to go to their corner office and talk to our CEO and say like, Hey, this is what I'm doing with Antonio. And if they don't have anything to show for, guess what their CEO is gonna either tell them, Hey, uh, stop doing that and do something else, something that actually helps a company or, you know.

And so, um, it's those five pillars where my framework really bases itself on. And, uh, and the ones that I normally, when I come in, I score things, I do an audit. I look at how we are doing in these four pillars, what is needed, what is missing, what is extra, and we don't need it. Um, and then once you have that, how is partner experience looking and where are we?

Where do we have to solidify?

Jon Busby: So it's, it's four pillars with partner experience over the top. Is that right? So we've got, um, tech me, uh, tech metrics, what was number three? Programs. Programs. And enablement. And enablement. Yeah. Yeah. So like if, let's go through each one of those one by one for a second.

Like tech, you know, 'cause if he, like, as you mentioned, if, if, if it's four corners of a house, if one of 'em is won key, the thing with it's falling down. Correct. Um, so where, what's the common issues you see across tech, uh, in, um, when we talk, looking at the partner ops framework?

Antonio Caridad: So how are you keeping track of everything?

Like you might start with your CRM, right? And so you need a single source, single source of truth please. Single source of truth. And that's gonna be your CRM, right?

Jon Busby: Yep.

Antonio Caridad: Um. Depending on where you are, you might be using a PRM, you might not be using a PM. I know that people have feelings about PRMs, but A PRM, right?

Um, do you have account mapping tools? Do you have, um, what are the tools that your partners are using to interact with you? Like, how are you, how are you doing contracting? How are you doing, um, capture of opportunities, uh, deal registration, and so on and so forth. Uh, in some cases, hey, if they're, if you have affiliates, you have referrals, how are they, uh, bringing those leads into your system?

Right? So I. That's, that's tech. Like, if, if you're doing something around, um, I don't know, your IPP framework or you're doing partner prospecting, what tools are you using for that? How are you incorporating AI into this, into this whole, uh, whole thing? Are, have you thought about using, uh, A GPT for, uh, interacting with partners and interacting with your own internal team around questions?

Right. That's, that's where tug comes in. How, how friction full or frictionless is it to do things with you systematically.

Seb Tyack: So really, yeah. So you are looking at kind of, it's from the edge to the core, isn't it? Like activities are happening in businesses with partners, with customers. It's like, how are those activities coming into the system and, and how quickly, and then how automated is it mm-hmm.

Actually getting in. So whether it's, you know, driving metrics or reporting or metrics. Triggering that internal conversation with someone around a deal or a new opportunity.

Antonio Caridad: Exactly. Exactly. How, like do I have to spend an hour on the phone with you, uh, every other month doing account mapping? Yeah. Or do we have a tool that does it for us and in five minutes I know what I need to know, right.

Or in less or in less than five minutes, do I have to get on the phone every time I have a deal or do I have a way to just jump on Slack or jump on something and or, or to your portal or whatever. Yeah. To, to give you like, Hey Seb, I have a deal with Coca-Cola. These are the details. Let's run with it.

Take a look and let's run with it. Yeah. Uh, get back to me when you can. And things like that. Right. How easy is it to do these kind of things?

Seb Tyack: No, that it, it makes sense there. There's something, 'cause it's really interesting 'cause when we look at kind of the world we are in with our client, definitely Tech, tech stack systems, integration data.

We, we live that world and I think program as well, like designing that framework to manage requirements, benefits, expectations, like how you grow transparent, fair, even handed really important. And then enablement again, we see the need like that. These are all kind of competitive edges. Well, it rolls up to partner experience, right?

Which is one of your competitive advantages if you can get it right. Because like we said before, like the IBM analogy of like, I love your product, but it's just hard to work with you. Like that's a killer. But the bit I'm really interested in that we don't cross into as much, but we live it with our clients definitely is that internal alignment and the challenge that takes because so much time is spent looking inwards trying to, you know, whether it's justifying or trying to work out how is an MDF program actually going to function from like an OPEX perspective, like mm-hmm.

How does finance work in our business and how do I. Enable something with a partner that, that's really challenging. How much of your time do you think is spent mm-hmm. On that internal alignment kind of requirement versus the pillars and the outward looking?

Antonio Caridad: So it varies. Um, at Tricentis, I don't look a lot around the, like MDF and those kind of things because we have a whole very robust partner marketing team.

So they, they, they take care of that. At IBMI did spend a lot of time on that and that megaport a little bit as well. Hmm. Um, but, uh, but it's still like, you know, one of the things that I, my, me and my team do spend a lot of time, um, is how can we identify the proper partner at the right time in an opportunity?

Right? Like, let's say that you have a bunch of deals that are delayed, that are stalled, that are, um, not progressing. How, how does the. Account executive understand which is the right partner to bring at the right time. Right. How, how do they know what partner manager to go and work with? Right? And um, or even one of the things that I've done in my past was, was using, uh, I, I'm not gonna plug who the company is, but I, I use this call recording system that we created a lot.

We created a lot of tagging, um, behind the scenes and, and, and basically this call recording system was scraping, was scraping the calls and saying like, Hey, because your customer said A, B, C, D, E, FG, we believe that your, that this partner would. What, what would seriously help you Yes. Move this opportunity, right?

Because this partner does five of the seven things that the customer said that they need along with your product, right? Or because you're talking to customer, a i, we know that this other partner, uh, are very solid with that customer. Why not bring them into the opportunity to help them close and potentially, hey, make the, the, the, um, the deal larger, right?

Because going a little bit, and I I, I know I'm moving from pillars, but moving a little bit into metrics, that's where things start coming in, right? That's where metrics matter, because that's when you start realizing, because a lot of times you're gonna have an AE or a sales leader that says like, no, no, no, no, no.

Why? Why? Why would I involve a partner when I can close this on my own and not have to give margin up? Right? And guess what? You're ready now there to have the conversation and say like, well, because a. It's, it's well known that with the partners we can close faster. B, it's well known that, hey, our close rates with a partner are at three x, right?

And c guess what? In our region, maybe within, maybe if you, if you have robust metrics enough, maybe within this sub territory of your, of North America, let's say, uh, we know that the average deal size when this partner is involved, guess what? It's 2.5 x. Yeah. So yes, you gave maybe 20% margin, but guess what?

Your deal is no longer $75,000. Your deal is now 250,000 bucks. Yeah.

Seb Tyack: Right. That's a great, that's, that's a great shout. So, yeah, so in a way, like the metrics naturally that data is, is what drives that alignment because it's just that more evidential. Yep. These opportunities. Yeah.

Jon Busby: Uh, what keeps going through my head and, sorry, I'm bringing us back a little bit to the tech pillar, but, and I know we've not, we're not gonna get through all the four pillars now, but I think we've touched on a few things is, um, it, you know, we, we use this term simple before, like one problem I think we have with partner experie, these aren't things that you can, there there a balance.

You can't add more to make it better sometimes. Correct. Uh, and getting that, like, that's one of the biggest mistakes I think I see many vendors making is mm-hmm. Is adding more tech things. You, it's more benefits for the partner. It's more enablement. It's uh, you know, they're gonna be, they're gonna, they're gonna feel they're gonna have a better program and better incentives because of all this extra stuff that we've added.

Um, and back to your point you made about simplicity, I actually think it makes that experience significantly worse. Um, like would you, do you have any guidance on that? 'cause it's something that I think many vendors are, are, are. Battling with,

Antonio Caridad: yes, tech debt is a real thing. Um, and not only for your partners, for your internal team, yes, you are adding a flashy new tool, but guess what?

Your partner team like, or your sales team in general already uses seven other tools, and guess what? They don't talk to each other. So it's piecemeal here and there. Yes, you have a source of truth in your CRM, but they, they still need to use the tool for X, y, Z for forecasting. One thing for account mapping, another thing for your c like your CRM for sales tracking and, and, and lead tracking and everything, right?

Tech debt is a real thing. And so you, there, there is a very fine balance and especially when you start going out to, to partners like you say John and you give them like, Hey, this is my. PM for deal registration, but I use this other tool for learning and enablement, and I use this other tool for X, Y, Z thing, like for file sharing and for collaboration.

Like in my mind, I'm a partner and I say like, okay, John, you're telling me that I need three logins and three passwords to do three different things with you. And by the way, you're not my only partner. I know you think, you think I am, but no, you're not my only partner. Yeah. Uh, I, I, I, me, myself, I only me, partner manager, I work with 25 other partners that also give three passwords and logins.

Guess what? Like, yeah, I'm done. I'm done. Yeah. Right. So tech debt is a real thing. One of the things that is critical, and one of the first things I always ask when bringing tech is like. How can we integrate this to get, to make it federated SSO one login And, and this is, this is me being nerd, but I always call it like one login to rule them all, right?

Yeah. Um, and so, um, if you are going to do that, you have to think of it, of a seamless experience. How can you make sure that yes, a partner is using two or three platforms, but in their head they should not know this. It should feel seamless and it feel, it should feel like you're in the same experience and everything should feel like you're within four to maximum five clicks from finding any assets from doing anything with you four to five clicks.

Right? And you will always, you always have to think about also the fact that maybe the majority of your partners have a few, a few other vendors to work with, right? But if you, or if you're trying to work with the GSIs of the world, with the hyperscale of the world, guess what? An Accenture, Deloitte. Has a thousand other vendors, if not more, guess what?

There's more. But let's pretend a thousand other vendors asking them the exact same thing. So think about how do you make things super simple for them? And Accenture is never going to log on to your portal to do a deal registration. So think about alternatives. How can you add AI to capture, to capture deal registrations through an email or through Slack?

Integrate, like, Hey, they send you Slack and there's the deal registration in your, in your CRM, right? So you have to think about that. But, but to coming back to your point, John, um, tech debt is a real thing. And you always have to think about tech fatigue. Yeah. Not just because you're adding a shiny new tool.

Does it mean that it's additive? It might be hurting more than you think of.

Jon Busby: Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think there's an element of like creating a toxic partner experience through too much tech, actually. And that's, it's a very superfluous thing for me to say, but I think it's, it's a real concern. But you mentioned people like Deloitte, you know, big strategy players in this space.

Let's come onto the strategy side of partner ops, which is, you know, how, you know, you've touched on a few elements of this, like how do you blend some, some of the items you talked about here are quite tactical, like single sign on mm-hmm. Need to deploy that, that, that, that, that single thing. How do you start to evolve partner ops into something that can be more of a strategic advisor role?

Uh, not just a, not just a support function?

Antonio Caridad: That's a great question. So I, I have this chart in, in my framework that goes from tactical to strategic, right? Ultimately, the, the goal of partner ops, the goal of any rev ops team is first and foremost, foremost. You have to think of yourself, and you are always a call center, right?

But your main goal and your North star is productivity. You are the engine of productivity. You are there to increase productivity. You're not there to just take manual work off of people and off of other teams. Why? Because if they're just putting on you a bunch of manual work that they don't want to do, guess what?

You get buried in tactics. You get buried, buried in manual work, and you are not fulfilling the job that you were hired for, which is to make them more productive, right? Um, but the second thing, as you mentioned, John, is to become that strategic advisor, right? And that that is part of creating efficiencies and creating processes to understand at any given point in time.

Why something is working, why something is not, and what are the right buttons to push. So we have a deal that is stalling. Why? Why is that deal stalling? Well, because, um, we've identified that there's no partner or we've identified that partner, A, B, C, D, um, in the last few months they've dropped off because of X, Y, Z, right?

Um, or, uh, we are, we understand that, um, the following deal is not, we, we don't, we cannot move it to commit. We cannot move it too likely within this quarter because the partner is telling us that X, y, Z is missing, which means like, Hey, do I need to bring another partner into the fold? Right? And so that's where, that's where as a strategic.

Um, advisory role, that's where you have to come in and also be part of those conversations where like, Hey, um, what is happening today? Why are we dropping off here and there? What, um, why are, or, or why is this working? Right? What makes this deal or this region more successful than this other one? Um, what is making this partner, manager, or this ae more successful than the other one?

Right? If you are buried in tactical work, if you're buried in just running reports mm-hmm. And just, um, adding part partners, uh, and users to your portal in just, um, uh, doing those kind of things, guess what? You cannot spend your time analyzing, well, not only gathering the data, but truly analyzing the data and running the proper models.

Periodically, daily, weekly, whatever you want, um, to on, to basically be that, that person, that people go for recommendations, right? That's where you want to be, where you're finding all of this. And then you can say like, Hey, I understand that your team, um, we can make them 5% or 10% more successful by bringing a call recording tool that will allow us to do X, Y, ZFG.

Right? That's where you want to be. And not in the, in the other side where you just like buried. Yeah. Yeah.

Seb Tyack: No, I love it. It, it is very much, it's almost a that point where you don't want to just be measuring what success is. You want to be helping to define what does success look like and then be able to, to measure it.

Um, it, it's a fascinating journey that you've had. 'cause I can't help but think your experience at IBM and what you described sounds like the role you have today in the sense of what you were doing. It just wasn't. Within the context of the on ops role, you know, you were driving transformation, you were playing with things, you were failing quickly, you were breaking everything.

And in so many respects, it's like a perfect grounding to then come in and kind of almost formalize that, that role and what the impact of that role is in, in a business.

Antonio Caridad: Oh, absolutely. Uh, for the last 14, 15 years of my career, I've spent a lot of my time doing ops, even though it was not part of, but it happens.

Like, and, and, and, and this is maybe a commonality for a lot of partner people out there, right? That without realizing, or maybe consciously realizing it, they, they, they have to do all these things, right? And eventually I realized like, yeah, this is, this is where I want to move. I wanna move out from maybe the more salesy side of partner leadership, partner management into this and be an accelerator.

Be that catalyst. For teams and be that evangelist for teams because this is the role and this is the kind of team that they need besides them and behind them and around them to be able to be, to be successful.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I know, I know we're coming up, uh, we've been spending a lot of time going through this today, so I'm gonna bring us on to kind of one of our, our last questions here.

But could it be one of our longest questions as well, like, you know, as partner ops has evolved, you know, it's becoming something that I, that is, you know, I'm now seeing people with partner ops, job titles, like yourself popping up all over the place. Like what advice would you, would you give to companies looking to start their first partner ops team?

Like, where should they focus first, um, in, in building out their first, first ops?

Antonio Caridad: That's a great question. Um, selfishly I'm gonna say you need partner ops, right? But the reality is that I. You can start by dedicating someone in your rev ops sales ops organization to help the partner team. And I would start by doing a full audit of the partnership landscape within your organization.

You're gonna find that there's a lot of things missing. Mm-hmm. A lot, a whole lot of things missing from how are we capturing, hey, like the most important thing right now is like, I need my partner team to have the data to be able to go to my C. Right? How are we capturing? Are we even capturing that?

Right? So it might start by looking, you might start by looking at, at your CRM, hey, uh, we don't have the proper fuels, we're not capturing the proper information. We don't have the proper data hygiene. Right? So it starts there. And then b is, uh, okay, what is, who is part of our partner base who are big, most important partners, but are, are our least active partners?

And let's go and have a chat with them and let's understand. What are the deficiencies? If you're a great partner, what is it truly that you truly love? And what and what are we missing to like, keep scaling this and keep growing this? Right? And on the flip side is if you're not a great partner, um, what, what's happening, right?

Is it, is it a matter of partner experience? Is it a matter of misalignment, of incentive? Is just a alignment of incentives. It's just a matter of I just don't have the resources that I, I need your, your partner managers to be more active with me. Uh, you haven't truly enabled me and I just don't know what we do together.

Um, so it's, it's, I think every company's going to be different, but, but I would start internalizing it first, and that is go and talk to your partner team and see how much manual work and how much of their time are they spending in your CRM in your own tools, trying to gather data in Excel spreadsheets.

Not out there with partners driving deals and building partnerships and that's where you start and then you go out.

Jon Busby: Interesting. So, and just to be clear on this one, 'cause I think there's a gather approach, which is, would you ever find it necessary to assess things from a partner lens as well? Like when is it time to look at things from a partner lens and look at the ways that you can improve it?

Antonio Caridad: So obviously from the very beginning, you're gonna be very, very, very, very tactical. Right? So I, I think you have to get your house. In order first before you can actually tell somebody like, Hey, come and walk into my house. Right? I don't want you to walk into a messy house or into a house that looks like a hoarder's house.

Uh, and so I think you first internalize, and once you have things a little bit on their control in-house and you say like, okay, we're in a good spot where I think we have decent processes, we have decent reporting, we have decent, et cetera, et cetera. That's when you can start talking to partners and saying like, okay, yes, from a partner perspective, I want to understand from the outside in, what are you seeing?

You don't have resources. It's really hard to, to contract with you, um, because your contract is a mess. It's too long, it's punishing, it's, it's too one-sided, et cetera. Um, from a portal perspective, your portal looks like it was built like. Like a 5-year-old in their learn to code classes built it. Right?

Um, it's, it takes me 25 clicks and three hours to find an asset. Like I'm looking for a battle card and I just cannot find it. Um, uh, deal registration. Like every time a registered deal, you still have to get on the phone with me or I just cannot find it. Your portal keeps failing, uh, account mapping. Like I, every month we have to spend an hour and a half doing account mapping, right?

Mm-hmm. How can we get out of this? So those are the things that then from a partner perspective, you need to think about, because again, from a partner perspective, you people need to understand that there's an opportunity cost for the partner to work with you. They're, they're not doing something else.

Seb Tyack: Mm-hmm.

Antonio Caridad: Right? That is a risk for them. That is opportunity cost, and so you need to make it worthwhile. It's, they have a business to run. That partner manager has KPIs and targets to hit. Guess what, if you're not, if they're not hitting it with you, they're gonna move on. And so you need to understand that and you need to align to that.

Seb Tyack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I

Antonio Caridad: think

Seb Tyack: I couldn't agree more. It's, it's so nice to get this perspective around the channel and to hear it because it is the competitive advantage that a business can have. It's that there's, your product has to be great, you need to provide good level of support. Price point needs to be competitive in the marketplace.

But beyond that, it's really hard to differentiate yourself as a, as a partnering business just on those things alone. Mm-hmm. So the, the world, like the, the opportunity to win and it's there in front of us in so many respects of all of the change, ai, lots of other opportunities is. Being that business that does drive that pipeline Correct.

For a partner manager. That does actually, and again, it comes back to, it's not the shiny glary things, it's actually just doing business really effectively and well. Correct. And ops, it's gonna be at the heart of it. It's not there now. There's absolutely no way you can build an, like an automated, scalable business in an ecosystem that's more complicated now than it was 10 years ago.

Mm-hmm. Without someone owning the problem. You know? And if, if marketing needed marketing ops and sales needed sales ops ecosystem is more complex than complex than those two areas on their own. So how we could think we could survive without ops being at the heart of it, I dunno. Absolutely.

Jon Busby: Completely agree.

Uh, I mean, last question and, and tell you, so, you know, you began in sales and found your home in partner ops, right? I would definitely say the passion I've seen from you on this. Uh, is it, it's, it's, um, oh, I can't even think of the right word anymore, but it's, it's, it's contagious. Like I'm excited about what the future of partner ops could be.

Um, but what do you think the most important characteristics are are to look for, if you are looking to bring someone in from a, into a partner ops role? Like what are the, what's the right parts of their persona that you should be, uh, interviewing or, or looking to dial up, uh, in a role like that?

Antonio Caridad: Great question.

And I think you, you kinda like a asked it earlier and I didn't answer it. Uh, apologies for that. But I think one of the things that you, that you're looking for is you need a person that understands, um, process, right? That is going, that, that has a knack for getting under the hood and understanding how things work and how can.

Uh, how can you fix things, fix things? And a lot of times is you need to break things to fix things, right? That's one thing. The second thing is you need a super analytical person. Like you, you need that person that is not going to just look at numbers on the, on the very surface. You need, you need to keep diving into things.

Um, and, and that goes above, like if somebody's asking you for win rates, yeah, go, go beyond that. Look at, uh, uh, deal sizes, look at win rates by region, look at, look at different things around it. So, so you need a very analytical person. Um, and then the, the, the last thing is that. For a lot of people, especially if you talk about ops to a salesperson, like their eyes glaze, right?

Like they, they're like, uh, you know, and so you need a person that has a passion for this, right? Like, it, not everybody is, is, is meant for this. It's just like if somebody asked me to, to read a contract, like, Hey, I've done it a lot of times in my career and I did a lot at IBM especially, but I'm not a lawyer like that.

That's just not my world, right? So you need, you need the right personality, the right person that, that understands that like having a background in sales ops, um, is going to help significantly. Having a, a background in project management is going to help significantly. Having a background in somebody that understands how to speak sales, but also speak technical.

Because they're going to spend their time a lot with developers. They're going to spend their time a lot with IT teams, um, building integrations, building different things, but at the same time, they're gonna spend a lot of time with sales and with leadership. So you, you need that, that capability of a person that is able to translate both things.

And a lot of times it's, it's, it's a hard thing. You know, if you try to get a, a, a developer and a salesperson in a room and you close the door, guess what? It's not gonna go well very, like, very fast, right? Because they speak very different languages, right? And so, um, so you need, you need a person that is able to do that.

Then finally, you need somebody that, that is truly a cross collaborator. You're gonna be working through a lot of different places, a lot of different organizations. They need to be able to ask questions. And ask a lot of questions to understand, um, not only how things work, but what's the North star, what are the goals, et cetera.

So you need a person that is able to collaborate, cross-functionally, cross department in, in a lot of times also with different departments inside of different partners, right? So, um, if you, if you have a lone wall of somebody that likes to work alone, et cetera, that's not gonna be the right person for this.

You need, you truly need a person that is a cross collaborator

Seb Tyack: that I, I mean, I agree, I agree with everything you've said, just because it takes that type of person, but also that skillset as well. And that, and that's not a common skillset. There's like amazing communication, charismatic, analytical breaks, things loves Lego clearly.

You know, like there, there's, there's a lot of qualities that we're looking for. And I wonder in the future. You know, when you, when you look at roles that are not easy to fill, they have a high value in a business. You know, and that's one thing that will become evident that within an ecosystem business, that, uh, the ops leadership role probably will be, be elevated beyond where it is today because it's gonna be aligning all of these areas, understanding all of these areas, bringing all of those qualities.

But I wonder as well, whether in, in, you know, as education programs become more vocational, you know, and, and there's the academic work stream still, but you begin to see more vocational areas because they require, you know, the 10,000 hours of practice to become excellent at something. You want to start that reasonably young.

So it'll be interesting as we've kind of see ecosystem roles develop and mature, if they do become, you know, areas where the training in them becomes much more formalized than it is now, where, like you said, your. Looking for a type of person who's got good experience in sales ops or in project management.

Um, because it's a demanding role,

Antonio Caridad: like a really demanding role. It's a very demanding role. And, uh, and also it doesn't come with the bells and whistles of, you know, sales ops, rev ops, partner ops. It's always a fact that, you know, you're in the deals with partners. You're help or, or with the, the sales team helping, uh, in many cases.

And guess what, there's no president's club, right? There's, it's, it's the unsung heroes behind the scenes, right? Sure.

Seb Tyack: Well, maybe we, we should, we should have a little, um, wager whether we think in the next five years we'll see the first chief partner officer that comes from the ops team. Maybe, you know, because it effect, maybe it's, it's a transformational role.

You know, everything. You've described it as understanding like the cruel bit of know what is happening and how we do it. So the, the running of. Okay, now we're advising, you know, we're providing intelligence to our colleagues to eventually the fly a bit where it's like, well now we're gonna transform our business and we are the team that will do it.

Yep. Yep. I love it. I'm coming to work with you, Antonio. I,

Jon Busby: I think, I think I wanna create the President's Club of partners as well. That's what we're gonna do now. That's the, that's the end one. If you wanna join the President's Club for partnerships, uh, just, uh, drop us a, drop us a line. But we'll do that.

Antonio, it's been a pleasure having you on the tech marketing podcast today, and we're definitely gonna have to have you back to finish off, uh, going through the framework, the rest of your framework there. But, um, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks very much. Thank you for

Antonio Caridad: having me, John. Thank you for having us said, um, this was super fun.

Great. Absolute

Seb Tyack: pleasure. Thank you, Antonio.