141 – Why Account-Based Networking Matters to Successful Partner Ecosystems.

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An Ecosystem Technology Leader Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

My mission is to help technology organization leaders achieve their greatest results working with technology giants and their ecosystems. We are witnessing a rapid evolution of the channel, partnering, and the importance of Ecosystems. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering is an entrepreneur and podcast host at the center of this discussion. Adam Michalski joins to tell us why account-based networking matters to successful partner ecosystems.

Adam Michalski is the CEO and Co-Founder of Partnered and the host of the Partnered Podcast. I was delighted to welcome this forward-leaning entrepreneur and partner thought leader as we share an immense mutual passion for the role of partnering in driving increased business results.

Our mutual good friend Jay McBain has coined this the “Decade of the Ecosystem”. In this episode, Adam and I discuss Partnered and its unique mission, his amazing podcast, and banter on the topic of Ecosystems and Partnerships shaping this transformational decade.

What You’ll Learn

  • Partner Sourced vs. Partner Influenced Revenue.
  • What is Account-Based Networking (ABN)?
  • How Partnered applies ABN to measure and drive successful partnerships.
  • What he is seeing during this Decade of the Ecosystem.
  • The role of data and attribution in shifting the C-suite mindset toward partnering.
  • What he sees in the best partners.

Why Listen?

We are seeing a rapid and sustained transformation, technology is transforming every company and industry, and we will never go back. Adam Michalski is a rising leader in the “Go to Ecosystems” movement and his perspective and teachings are gaining momentum; we will continue to see significant shifts in how we partner, develop, market, procure and deploy technology today. We are in the early innings of a very exciting and exhilarating game!

WARNING – This episode is exclusively for leaders who care about partner ecosystems, the evolution of selling and the systems driving this next phase of economic growth, and how this “Decade of the Ecosystem” looks to take shape. You will hear Adam’s view on how technology and data are shifting the attribution discussion and how organizations and leaders from the CEO down need to think and move differently during this rapidly changing digital economy. If you are a Channel Leader, make sure your CEO, CFO, CRO, and CMO listen to this episode!

It was great to feature Adam. I hope you learn from this discussion as much as I learned from this rising industry thought leader on Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

Quote From This Episode

What’s interesting is when you start putting real data behind most partner programs, it’s step one as most of these programs just aren’t being tracked properly. We work with some organizations where we see 50, 60, and 70% of their attribution being missed, which means that there’s no chance that you’re able to actually accurately drive. It’s like driving your car with, you know, one wheel and then blaming the car. But it’s actually because you didn’t install three of those wheels. I think (data and attribution) it’s such a crucial part. Frankly, if the CFO or the CRO was looking at that data when you’re only getting very limited inputs, the logical conclusion is always going to be, hey, this isn’t working, let me take the budget and put it towards the areas where I know that if I put $1 in, I get x dollars out of sales, marketing. So the attribution component of this is one that I think is really important. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that most organizations have just right off the bat, just deploying, like some standard processes now of actually being able to just track this, but a lot of the methodologies and the ways of actually really making sure that you’re best in class at tracking this are where we work with a lot of our clients. And I think once again, bringing this full circle is what’s fantastic is once you start to actually accurately track it, then the CFO and the CRO are looking at this from a different lens because it’s a way I actually didn’t know that this was really moving the needle that much or I didn’t know that when you get four partners involved on a deal like it closes 50% faster!



Other episodes focused on the Ecosystem Movement.


139 – How Can Technology Partners Organize for Success around Go to Ecosystems? with Allan Adler.

132 – How to Achieve Your Greatest Results in 2022 – Part Two – Ecosystems with Jay McBain.

136 – How Can Partners Achieve Their Greatest Results Through Marketplaces? With Jake Swenson, VP of Microsoft.

116 – Helping ISVs Accelerate Meaningful Revenue with the Cloud Providers through Marketplaces with Sanjay Mehta of Tackle.io 

Links & Resources

For 2022, I am excited to announce PartnerTap as the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine. I’m so excited to have them on board and for our exciting year ahead!

My organization, Ultimate Partnerships, is also a sponsor of this episode. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

Ultimate Guide to Partnering Transcription, provided by Otter.ai – Please Note – there will be grammatical errors!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partner, organizations, partnership, podcast, influence, adam, sourced, ecosystem, revenue, sales team, folks, companies, channels, cro, track, attribution, marketing, sales, alan, data

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Adam Michalski, Vince Menzione

Announcer  00:00

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione. A proven industry sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  00:23

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering where technology leaders come to optimize results through successful partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right. Optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. Account Based networking. What is it? And how can it help your organization achieve its greatest results. My next guest for the podcast knows more about this topic than anyone Adam mill kowski is the CEO of partner.io and a successful podcast host of the partnered podcast, I was delighted to welcome Adam as a guest because he and I both share an immense passion around partnering. In this episode Adam and I discuss partner.io and its unique mission, we also discuss some of the topics shaping this decade of the ecosystem. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed welcoming Adam mill kowski. Before we dive into the interview, I’m happy to announce that partner tap has become a founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering. I’ve been friends with the founders of partner tap for many years. And partner tap is the only partner ecosystem platform designed for the enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align channel teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine. I’m so excited to have him on board. Adam, welcome to the podcast,

Adam Michalski  02:05

Vince. So great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Vince Menzione  02:07

I am so excited to have you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering you and I have a shared passion around bartering. And you have both a successful business venture now and a podcast that’s been very successful on the same topic. So welcome.

Adam Michalski  02:22

Thanks so much for having me, Vince. Yeah, in a lot of ways, I think you set the stage for what a successful podcast in the space needed to be. So yeah, I’m super pumped to be here super excited to riff on a bunch of different topics podcast included.

Vince Menzione  02:35

So for listeners that don’t know, Adam, tell us a little bit more about you. And your mission.

Adam Michalski  02:42

Yeah, good question. So I’m Adam masky, co founder and CEO of a company called partner. And what we basically do as a company is we work with high growth or enterprise stage companies to help them increase what we call their partner attach rate. So the combination of sourced and influenced revenue. So that’s basically what we do is our mandate. As an organization myself, personally, I’m really passionate about the problem, because I spent my entire career kind of at the intersection of both sales and partnership and see how impactful it could be for organizations, but ultimately realized that there just really wasn’t a lot of infrastructure. So that’s what kind of led me to start the company and focus are dedicate, at this point in the last three years of my life, toward solving this problem. The other area that I focus heavily on is also my podcast, the partner podcast. So we’ve been doing it for about two years now actually started right at the beginning of the pandemic, sponsored by partnership leaders, and it’s awesome, we do them on a weekly basis interview some, like gruesome, great folks, like a lot of which are that you and I both have as mutual friends as well, and have actually learned a great deal just from the ability to kind of like interview and speak with and ask questions of some of the most like thought, most forward thinking folks in the space such as yourself. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me.

Vince Menzione  03:57

I love what you are doing. I really do. And the two years you’ve been going full blast, I think you’re up to almost 100 episodes now.

Adam Michalski  04:03

Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we’ve been doing them every single week. Honestly, it’s one it’s fun giving back, because I think this is a quick changing space, which we’ll probably get into. And so a lot of folks just need best practices on how to ramp up. But it’s also just been educational for myself as well. And just being able to actually I had a very myopic view of the world of just the tech partnership integrations and focusing on that piece of the puzzle. But there’s obviously a lot more to partnering as well. So you

Vince Menzione  04:26

brought up two terms that I want to make sure our listeners understand fully. You talked about source revenue and influence revenue. Can you describe those for our listeners?

Adam Michalski  04:35

Yeah. 100%. So sourced is the most straightforward, you can think about it as like this revenue would not have existed if it wasn’t from a partner. Usually, that’s an introduction, for example. So if you’re working with a partner, and they introduce you to a client that wasn’t sourced by marketing, it wasn’t sourced by your sales team. It was sourced by the partnership team. So this is the most typical way that organizations will judge the revenue coming from The partner program is by source. But I’d say really over the past couple of years, we’re increasingly seeing it now is folks trying to understand and really goal towards the power of the influenced revenue. So it’s really acknowledging the fact that partners aren’t just useful for just your cookie cutter introductions, but they can also provide like information, they can provide recommendations, they can really help you get the deal done faster for more money really using their influence or using their trust or using their their leverage their relationships. So influence is another one. That’s a trickier one to track. And there’s a whole variety of ways that we can discuss that and the problems around that. But that’s really the high level breakdown between sourced and influenced revenue.

Vince Menzione  05:42

Our good friend, our mutual good friend we were talking about earlier, J. McBain has talked about the five seats at the table. Right, the customer is looking to their key influencers in terms of making their decision. And I think that this is a really important topic around influence and influence revenue. And I believe a lot of organizations miss this. So tell us about how you’re solving through for that with partner dyo.

Adam Michalski  06:07

Yeah, it’s so there’s the anecdote that I kind of use here paint the picture is if somebody worked to say, if you were in the market for purchasing a new phone, and one of your friends says buy an iPhone, and then another friend says buy an iPhone, and then your third friend says buy an iPhone, like your propensity to purchase that iPhone is going to increase every single time, because you’re within that they’re within your sphere of influence, you trust them. So therefore, therefore, whenever they say that you should do something, you’re going to take that as like one of the highest forms of reason on why you should act like you trust them. So that’s really like the core thing that we think about in terms of influences. Figuring out who are those folks who are within that sphere of influence, it might be an agency, it might be existing tech vendors in there might be a channel pay could be a whole variety of different folks, that if you’re not really influencing the influencers, who have influence over your customer, then you’re not going to be part of those conversations. And a lot of those, you know, conversations, whether you like it or not, are going to be happening behind like closed doors, and say the CMO of an organization goes to procure new technology, the first place that he or she is going to go, is that that sphere of influence, they’re gonna say, Who do you who should we talk to, for this solution or for this problem that we have. So it’s really important to be investing in that now the way in which our solution works is that we do a number of things. And it really depends on the organization’s like organization’s goals. But one is working with an enterprise organization on figuring out who should they be partnering with from the start working with them to actually get connected and share data across both of their organizations. But then that’s really the bare minimum. From there, we have a system that we call account based networking that we use to basically deployed an organization so that they can systematically go about increasing their partner source and partner influenced revenue. And that’s a combination of workflows, processes, but also the ability to actually like accurately track both source and inference, which is really one of the most critical pieces here because if you can’t track it, then you can’t measure towards it, you can’t go towards it, you actually can’t. Yeah, without the data, it’s really tough to actually tell if any of this stuff works. So that’s really the end to end piece that we call account based networking. And that’s account based networking is the process that we use, but the partner is the tool that we deployed to help you run account based networking effectively at your organization. So for

Vince Menzione  08:19

our listeners, give us an example of how this works. Like I’m thinking, all right, I’m going after a big opportunity. There are several buying influences, and then opportunity. Does the system. Does the application allow us allow me to determine who might be the points of influence and then connect with them? Well, how does that work? Yeah, it starts

Adam Michalski  08:37

with actually integrating all of this information into the sales teams workflows. So step one, just the baseline for the audience over here, whenever you sell with a partner, like at this point, the data is extremely clear, it will lead up to 40%, faster sales cycles, up to 181%, bigger deal sizes, up to 16%, higher close rates. So leveraging partners in your deals, and most organizations understand this already, like they know that’s the case, where a lot of this falls apart is for example, the CRO or the CMO, or even the CEO will set these goals of hey, we want to get to x partner sourced or x partner influence within the next one year, three years, five years, but there’s really no plan in between. So there’s, let’s get to these goals. And maybe we throw partner managers at it, maybe we like we’re just going to try and brute force that number. But without an actual process in which what we call account based networking, it’s really difficult to actually to actually move that in a more regimented or systematic fashion. So what we do is when we work with organizations is we’re basically a will vertically integrate our tools for the salesperson, the sales director as a CRO, the VP of sales, all of which will have different types of needs, but being able to actually push when they should be working with the ecosystem for the salespeople being able to actually tell the sales directors when they should or should not be working with the ecosystem. them and how well their sales team actually is doing that. But then also for the CRO, like boiling these into the actual insights so that they know is this actually working what happens when one of my partners sources or influences a deal does that actually move the needle, a lot of that is where you start to actually get the insight then allow the CRO to justify additional spend in the ecosystem. So that’s a high level, there’s obviously a lot more to it than I’m happy to get into. But it’s really making sure that you vertically integrate all this into the actual existing salesperson workflow. That’s really when you can start to increase this number that what we call the partner attach rate or combination of source and influence revenue, like dramatically. And what’s great. One thing I’ll just add here events is when you do move that needle on that partner attach rate like you’re talking this is not like a small number for most organizations are like millions of dollars of incremental revenue that you can really do. So it’s exciting to be able to partner with organizations to actually deploy these processes that help them really hit their business goals.

Vince Menzione  10:54

And sounds exciting to me. And so I’m assuming you’re integrating across their CRM solutions. And then you’re using something like aI be predictive or predictive analytics in order to tell the sales rep. This is a time to engage your partner.

Adam Michalski  11:07

Yeah, so the what’s really cool here is there’s a couple of datasets that we use. So one is obviously the CRM in most cases, that Salesforce or some cases that’s HubSpot. But whether there’s really been this emergence of new data that’s super exciting, and that really has allowed us to exist is this new account mapping data. So you have companies like crossbeam, or reveal or even organizations who are doing this in like the CSV sharing way of actually sharing account mapping data. So what’s great is like, we aggregate all of that data, basically crunch that and analyze it, and then provide the insights to the sales team on the back end of that will provide like workflows for the partner managers, which they can use to facilitate any back and forth. And all of that gets tracked and fed back into the model so that we understand like, where these teams should be investing their time.

Vince Menzione  11:50

It’s a fascinating topic. It really isn’t. We could spend the whole episode here, but we’re gonna send people the links to learn more from you, Adam, about partner IO and also maybe get a demonstration. So I want to dive in here on this topic too, because we have both in been in and have interviewed friends like Jay McBain and Alan Adler. And this whole topic of ecosystems and partnerships and ties into this conversation about why you need an application like partner.io is because it’s so complex, it’s going to get become even more complex because of ecosystems and constellations and various other ways that organizations work across various ecosystem groups. So I wanted to dive in a little bit here about this topic of ecosystems and partnerships. What are you seeing from your vantage with regards to this acceleration that we’re all been seeing in partnering in ecosystems? Yeah, this

Adam Michalski  12:43

is a great question. Somebody actually asked me this last week and, like, forced me to take a step back and be like, Okay, what, why is all this because like, for us and everyone who’s like boots on the ground, it’s very easy for us to see that a lot of this is changing, you know, and rapidly, there’s more partner managers, who are more job descriptions for partner manager as more organizations are hiring partner poke folks like the investment in the space both from the corporate side, but also even like the private equity side has been increasing. So the question was, like, why, and I actually spent like, some time just over the past weekend thinking through I think it’s a number of factors, it’s tough to point towards any individual factor. But what’s what’s really interesting is like when you think about like your traditional go to market channels, you have sales, you have marketing, a lot of these when you think about it, like over the past couple years, and during the pandemic have become increasingly saturated, like you lost in person events, you lost the ability to like, actually sell to your target persona, via like traditional channels of meeting up with them in person or even having like attending marketing events, marketing has also become increasingly saturated. And then you have things like the death of the cookie that are coming into play here, where companies like Apple and Google are like deprecating some of the primary ways for actually measuring your ad spend and being able to actually target you know, specific personas. So the like, a lot of those channels are already difficult to begin with. For sales teams, cold calling was never easy, and now just became significantly harder, because everybody’s using the exact same channels at the exact same time for marketing now, you know, see, like the cost per acquisition was already decreasing heavily, and now it just became infinitely harder because everybody flooded all those channels. And now it’s, you can’t target as well. So I think that one of the major things was all of these kinds of changes were when bundled together made it very clear that there has to be a better way. And folks we’re basically looking at it’s okay, cool. There’s this really awesome like almost like uncovered gem in the partnership program that never really got the credit that it deserved. And so now it’s like alright, let’s take a serious look at that. And it’s Oh, wow, it actually performs probably the best out of all of our channels. And it benefits not only sales, it benefits product, it benefits customer success, it benefits, marketing, like you can use it in a variety of different ways. So I think a lot of that was like the core changes that were probably already on under way, but just expedited because of the pandemic in the last couple of years. Yeah. And

Vince Menzione  15:04

our good friend Jay has coined this the decade of the ecosystem. And he gave a pretty great talk about this, in fact, and I know you’ve had him and and Alan, come on, in fact, to debate the decade of the ecosystem. You had him on a recent episode, I found the conversation fascinating. What was the most profound thing you’ve learned during that conversation?

Adam Michalski  15:25

Yeah, it was really good. I know, we were joking a little bit about this before, but I think yeah, Alan and Jay, they’re looking at the problem from two sides of the same coin in a lot of different ways. I think that Alan’s super focused the tech side, which is interesting and like modern SAS organizations, but Jay is looking at this more holistically in terms that I kind of liked to think about. It’s like the legacy channel and like, that’s not going anywhere anytime soon. And so in a lot of different ways, they were arguing very similar points. There was obviously some areas where they sparred, which, which was pretty fun. But I think yeah, what I liked the most about that conversation was just where the intersection of both of them it was like the no brainers and one of the big takeaways was the shift that we’re seeing now. Because some of which we were just covering on the question before this of if you a good way that I like to think about it is like sales had its moment where it went from like an art to a science and marketing had its moment where it went from an art to a science and for way too long partnerships or investing in your ecosystem was an art the folks who just like point at the partnership people and be like, Yeah, I don’t really know what they do over there on their island now, because of frankly, forums, like your podcast, and the all the communities that are spot like spawning up. And all of the like increased thought leadership that’s happening in this space, like they’re we’re starting are really still at the first inning. But we’re really starting to actually share more of those best practices, which allows us to create more of that science behind how you actually run these partner programs. I don’t think it’s ever going to be the same as like sales or marketing. Because those are like a lot more, you could have a standard playbook where partnerships really depends on the goals of your organization and the maturity of your organization. There’s a ton of different variables. But what’s exciting is that like both Jay and Alan are on the same page that like we’re there’s this tectonic shift that’s happening and a lot of what’s happening over the next couple of years. It’s really what these entire industry of partnership professionals are going to be able to stand on a much more solid foundation, which is what particularly,

Vince Menzione  17:16

you mentioned something really important here about moving from art to science. And the piece that’s been missing on the partnership side has been attribution, quite frankly, right. It’s been the ability to track or even the vigilance and focus on tracking that information. salespeople have a mindset sometimes of being go it alone, and I want to ring the bell, I want to take the credit for the deal. And oh, yeah, partner might have been involved. But now I really closed everything myself. So I think this a different mindset has to be infused into an organization for this to be successful, don’t you agree? Yes, this

Adam Michalski  17:52

is one that I’m personally extremely passionate about. Because I really do start, what’s interesting is when you start putting real data behind most partner programs, it’s step one is just most of these programs just aren’t being tracked properly, we work with some organizations where we see 5060 70% of their attribution being missed, which means that there’s no chance that you’re able to actually accurately drive it’s like like driving your car with, you know, one wheel and then blaming the car. But it’s actually fact that you didn’t install three of those wheels. So yeah, that’s I think it’s such a crucial part. And then frankly, if the CFO or the CRO was looking at that data, when you’re only getting like very limited inputs, the logical conclusion is always going to be, hey, this isn’t working, let me take budget and put it towards the areas where I know that if I put $1 in, I get x dollars out of sales marketing. So the attribution component of this is one that I think is really important. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that most organizations have just right off the bat, just deploying, like some standard processes now of actually being able to just track this, but a lot of the methodologies and the ways of actually really making sure that you’re best in class at tracking this are where we work with a lot of our clients. And I think once again, bringing this full circle is what’s fantastic is once you start to actually accurately track it, then the CFO and the CRO are looking at this from a different lens, because it’s a way I actually didn’t know that this was really moving the needle that much or I didn’t know that when you get four partners involved on a deal like it closes 50% faster.

Vince Menzione  19:17

How do you instill best practices? Like how do you counsel these organizations to get to best practices?

Adam Michalski  19:23

Yeah, the a lot of it is frankly, just a technology. For the longest time. This has just been a manual initiative for an organization where like most companies will basically have a sourced or influenced object or combination of both on the opportunity in their CRM that gets manually filled out, sometimes by partnership manager or sometimes by the sales team. The problem is the sales team is not compensated on filling that out. And as you mentioned earlier, oftentimes it’s like, Hey, I closed the deal. Why would I give credit to anybody else? So all of those Miss incentives are in place because of the fact that’s a very manual process. So what we basically tried to do is apply like a technology layer. So that allows us to basically capture a lot of that attribution without the need for it to be all incredibly manual. And that’s just a lot of different ways of basically, like our best practices are one, making sure that we’re integrated with all the different communication channels and making sure that we can see all the communication that’s happening with partners, whether that be in email, and on their calendar with with Slack, for example, a lot of folks will use shared Slack channels, but be able to actually track all of that, and then put it back in the hands of the partnership manager who can ultimately make that decision, because they’re often the ones who are gold on, you know, the revenue outcome of these relationships sourced or influenced revenue. So from a technological perspective, that’s how we do it. So

Vince Menzione  20:37

what do you see from the best in the best, like, what are the best partners do differently, or better?

Adam Michalski  20:43

Yeah, starts with like, in terms of numbers here. So like, the way that we like to boil this down is like for simplicity purposes, just putting it all into one number, which is what we call like the partner attach rate. So what that means is like a good example here, so your company has a million pipeline that you’re going after for this quarter, what you want to do is have as close to 100% of that pipeline be partner attached as possible, that means that the partner is involved on all those deals, most companies will be somewhere between 15 to 20%. Today, now some good companies are around like 20 to 30%, great companies, you know, have cracked the code on this. And then they’re they’re up from like 30, to sometimes even as high as 60, to 70%. But when what’s great is you can actually just back in the napkin model, what happens when you increase that like that percent on each percentage, you’re talking like hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of dollars and incremental pipeline that you can get or close faster, because you’re able to actually involve your partners in those sales cycles. That’s like the like a quick, high level breakdown of and what’s cool is a lot of these different organizations already, like they know this, they’ve actually been able to like see, like an or even just quickly model out like the impact. But that’s really the system that they need to make sure that they can increase that. And that’s where we’ve been investing a lot in what we call like our account based networking framework so that companies have an actual system. And it’s not just let’s throw as much against the wall and see what sticks.

Vince Menzione  22:10

I love what you have to say here. Is there a place we can take our listeners to go find out more information about some of these statistics you you quoted today?

Adam Michalski  22:17

Yeah, I think if you just go to Google and Google account based networking, that’s one way to do it. Or if you go to partner.com, we actually have a banner up at the top of our site that says Learn ABN we put a decent amount of resources into what we call like our ABN 101 area of our resources section. So that will teach you a lot about what is it? Why do we think it’s the future of sales, like how to actually do how to run this motion? There’s a couple of different resources that folks can definitely check out.

Vince Menzione  22:43

I love it. And for organizations, we’ll send it will send our listeners there. Absolutely. But if anyone wants to reach out to you, personally, Adam, what’s the best way for them to

Adam Michalski  22:53

do a good question anywhere, so you can check me out on LinkedIn, super responsive on LinkedIn, we post our Friday memes, which is something that’s just a personal hobby of mine that I’ve put together. So you can ping me directly there, you can reach out to me via email at adam@partner.com. Or yeah, or various communities. I’m involved in pretty much all of them at this point, partnership leaders cloud software Association. And so you know, if you see me there, you’re more than welcome to just slack me directly in any of those places.

Vince Menzione  23:20

Great. We’ll send our listeners there. And Adam, you might know, I’m fascinated with the career journey, and helping other early career professionals advance their careers. And it’s so great to have somebody like yourself that has been so passionate here around this area of partnering. But for our listeners, I’d love for them to understand a little bit more about your journey. And your just cause around partnering. Like how did you get here?

Adam Michalski  23:44

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s fun, always looking back on this and thinking through it. I know you and I, we’ve discussed this, but we’re both Jersey Boys. So I grew up in the dirt.

Vince Menzione  23:54

There’s something in the water there I think is

Adam Michalski  23:58

exactly that just makes you want to podcast, but of unknown in all seriousness, Yachty I just wasn’t a role that or something that I saw myself 10 years ago doing was in finance and working in the banking industry. And ultimately, it was just I just wanted to get more into tech and then realize that sales was interesting started to realize that like the effect that partnerships had was very clear to me like the my prior organization and I was working at a company called branch, whenever partners would get involved on the deals, it was just like it was astronomically higher close rates, we would close them for more money, we would close them faster. So I was just like, hey, this is a no brainer. And then it was just like the processes and everything were so manual and it was really hampering itself. Honestly, nights and weekends me and my buddy would just start building technology just because we wanted to help like our day jobs, and then realize there was a more pervasive problem, which is what led me into kind of the more entrepreneurship journey but but yeah, I think honestly, like the one recommendation that I would have would just be follow whatever makes you curious. Like it’s not something that I’ve set out to do from the beginning. I just started to realize that okay, if it’s something that I’m interested in, let me build something in the space. Oh, how other people have very similar problems may come was a natural progression from there.

Vince Menzione  25:09

Was there a best piece of advice on the

Adam Michalski  25:11

journey? Yeah, it was a good question. Because a lot of folks who will come I’m still early in my entrepreneurship journey, but like folks will come to me for advice now in the I was actually just having a conversation with somebody yesterday. And my advice was like, there is no right, right or wrong path. I think that a lot of folks are like, you’ve been taught to think that here’s the playbook on how you become successful. And like, here’s a playbook for each one of your like career journeys. The difference is like an entrepreneurship, there’s no right or wrong. And ultimately, you’re going to be the arbiter of your own success. Like you need to figure out all of the different, like, you need to figure it out for yourself. Nobody’s going to actually tell you, this is how you do X, Y, and Z. There’s some systems and some things that you can piggyback off of. But ultimately, like you need to make the decisions for yourself. And where I see a lot of folks like tripping up is they will look at somebody else’s journey, and then try to like pattern match that against their own not realizing that there is like 1000s of different variables that go into each individual business. That would be

Vince Menzione  26:07

Yeah, they’re trying to hack it, right. Yeah.

Adam Michalski  26:09

Yeah, exactly. It’s because you’ve been taught that your entire life that like, Okay, here’s how you do this, here’s how you do that. Unfortunately, for building a company like there is no right or wrong way. It’s it’s ultimately your journey, and you got to figure it out on the way.

Vince Menzione  26:20

I love what you have to say here. We’re going to have a little bit of fun right now. This is one of my favorite questions. And I’m we are hopefully, we’re talking about being in Florida and New Jersey and the world is opened up and hopefully continue to stay open. By the way, I don’t want to go back and in any form. But you have this opportunity now to host an amazing dinner party. And you can invite any guests, three guests, in fact, from the past, or the present. Who would you invite Adam to this amazing dinner party? And why? Oh, this

Adam Michalski  26:52

is a fun one. I’m struggling between three or four. Can I say for her? Is that cheating?

Vince Menzione  26:57

Well let you have a fourth or put an extra seat at the table.

Adam Michalski  27:01

All right, cool. So the two no brainers for me, just because it’s always an intellectually like fun conversation. And always like pushes my thinking of the space. Whenever I chat with both of these individuals. It’s definitely Jamie McBain, our mutual friend, and also Alan Adler, who I think is like, really, really these guys are two of the most forward thinking in the space. And I always tend to learn a bunch from them. And then I’ll include two fellow podcasters, one of which is Jared Fuller, who I always tend to enjoy that conversation. He runs the partner up podcast. And then I would say the last one and why I wanted to make sure included is events. I think I’ve been a huge fan of your podcast, honestly, since the very early days of us starting up our own podcast. So I think that what’s great is because Jane Ellen are in the league of their own, but with you and Jared, but you’ve heard so many different like opinions and what’s happening in the space and MIT always tends to lead to very good conversation. So I would say that would be that’d be my ideal dinner, like dinner party right

Vince Menzione  28:01

there. All right, we’re gonna have to do this. And we since we’re all in the present, we all can be there. And maybe what we’ll do is we’ll do a follow up podcast and have us all on how’s that?

Adam Michalski  28:10

I like that. Yeah, I was gonna say we can do or have the the Rumble in the Jungle. I know last time it was the big boxing match where we can do a little bit more of a, what was it called a cage match where you get multiple people involved that

Vince Menzione  28:21

unless it’s a dinner party, we’re gonna have some fun. Maybe we’ll have some adult beverages or something. What do you think?

Adam Michalski  28:26

I’m cool with that? Yeah, well shooting on a Friday afternoon.

Vince Menzione  28:30

Adam, I am so excited to welcome you. I hope we continue our friendship and conversation, you said some very nice things. Today, I am equally impressed with what you’ve accomplished in your what I would say shorter span or career. And you’ve been doing some really great work. And I’m just wanting to continue to cheer you on and the work that you’re doing. And hopefully our listeners will get to listen to your podcast, we’re going to provide links in the show notes, we’re going to provide a link to that rumble in the jump jungle that happened with Gemma J and Alan so that other people can learn as much forward from these forward thinking people. So thank you so much for joining today, Adam.

Adam Michalski  29:04

Yeah, thanks, fans. I really appreciate the time and I’m excited to continue to stay in touch as the space continues to evolve. I have no doubt that by being the first of many, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening and will continue to happen over the next couple of years in the space. I’m excited to be on the journey with you.

Vince Menzione  29:18

I’m excited as well. Can’t wait. Thank you. Thank you. As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please subscribe on your favorite platform, like comment, tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to partnering and where they can find us and I’d love your feedback. Please like the podcast and provide comments or reach out to me at Vince Menzione on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also like and follow Ultimate Guide to partnering on our Facebook page, or drop me a line at Vin Sam at ultimate dash partnerships.com This episode of the podcast is sponsored by partner tap the partner ecosystem platform most trusted by enterprises, drive more revenue with your partners and learn more at partner tap.com.

Announcer  30:08

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering

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