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Partnership Leaders Co-Founder and Chief Partner Officer Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

After years of taking a backseat to direct go-to-market and selling, the ecosystem is finally taking center stage as the next lever to business growth. Our next guest collaborated with two friends founding a movement and community to drive partner-led business growth. His organization is helping alliances and partnership leaders advance this revolution in B2B selling.

Chris Samila is the Chief Partner Officer at Partnership Leaders, an organization and community focused on empowering partnership professionals to advance their careers and build partnership programs. Along with Tai Rattigan and Asher Matthew, Chris started Partnership Leaders as the “catalyst” of change in B2B selling. I am so excited about our shared mission and what we all hope to do to put “partner-led” B2B growth front and center.

In Chris’s Words

“I would consider myself an enthusiastic evangelist for the partnership profession—currently the Co-Founder and Chief Partnership Officer for Partnership Leaders.

Partnership Leaders provides a community and platform to support a vibrant global network of professionals in business development, partnerships, and alliances at modern tech and service companies. Hundreds of the top software companies in the world help drive success for their partner teams through Partnership Leaders.

My career started in the clean-tech industry with GreenSummit, Adura Technologies, SolarCity, and Tesla before transitioning to the SaaS software space, driving partnership success at Optimizely for six years, which included moving to Australia to open the APAC market for them. Joined FullStory in 2018 and moved back to the USA to lead their Partnership and Alliance efforts globally before transitioning to Crossbeam. Proudly built Crossbeam’s partnership program and the team starting in 2020 before having the opportunity to go full-time on Partnership Leaders in late 2022.

What You’ll Learn

• Chris’s Career Journey (2:20)
• How Partnership Leaders Began (4:48)
• Importance of aligning the C-Suite (9:52)
• Gaining internal buy-in from your organization (16:57)
• Best piece of advice (26:58)

Creating Ultimate Partnerships

Let’s face it, we all have seen partnerships that look good on paper but never live up to their expected results. There are many reasons why partnerships fail, and at Ultimate Partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and frameworks. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website.

Partner Ecosystem Leader Episodes

163 – A Partnership Leader Uniquely Growing Hubspot’s Ecosystem Community

162 – How You Can Unleash the Power of Data to 10X Your Partner Growth!

153 – Janet Schijins – Ecosystems & Megacosm

150- Celebrating 150 Amazing Episodes with a Five-Timer Guest, Jay McBain

149 – WTF is an Ecosystem? And How Partner Hacker helps tech companies PartnerUp with Jared Fuller

Links from this Episode

• https://podfollow.com/ultimate-guide-to-partnering
• Partnership Leaders Website
• FREE OFFER from PartnerTap
• athleticgreens.com/vincem

Transcription – by Otter.ai –

Expect Plenty of Typos & Grammatical Errors

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

partnership, partner, organization, leaders, build, people, world, attribution, ceo, folks, chris, company, good, partnering, realize, business, sas, year, support, community

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Chris Samila, Vince Menzione

Vince Menzione  00:00

Our good friend, industry analyst and frequent guests, Jay McBain has coined this the decade of the ecosystem. After years of taking a backseat to direct go to market and selling, the ecosystem is finally taking center stage as the next lever to business growth. Our next guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering is a leader in driving partnership growth. Having collaborated with two friends to start a movement and a community, helping alliances and partnership leaders advance this revolution in b2b selling.

Announcer  00:36

This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione.

Vince Menzione  00:56

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and today I will bris Amelia is the chief partner officer at partnership leaders, an organization and community focused on empowering partnership professionals to advance their careers and build their partnership programs. Along with Ty rhadigan. And Asher Matthew Criss started partnership leaders to be the catalyst of change in b2b selling. As a partnership leaders member, I am so excited for our shared mission, and what we all hope to do to put partner LED front and center. I hope you enjoy this episode. As much as I enjoyed getting to know Chris familia. Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Samila  01:50

Super excited to be here. Vince, thank you so much.

Vince Menzione  01:52

I am so excited to finally welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You have been around this world of partnerships for quite some time as the founder of partnership leaders, and recently became its first full time employee leading the next phase of its growth. So welcome. Thank you so much.

Chris Samila  02:11

Great to be here.

Vince Menzione  02:12

So for our listeners who may not know Chris Emilia, can you tell us a little bit more about you and how you got to this point in your career?

Chris Samila  02:20

Yeah, definitely. So I’ve most of my career has been spent in partnerships. In the early days, I worked in the clean tech industry. And so I was in sort of more of a traditional channel world of distributors and hardware and resellers and all that good stuff worked at Solar City managed Tesla, so had some good exposure there and then realize that living in San Francisco, the can see the growth of SAS or software as a service was really taken off, I took a pretty big demotion and joined as an SDR with a company called Optimizely. And not too long after joining it was part of the founding team of the partner organization at Optimizely, which was a Mar tech company. And so that was my beginning of life in the modern partnerships, World of SAS partnerships. It was a fun journey, and ultimately led me to moving to the Australian region to manage a pack for Optimizely. Before the second half of my career took off. So were there any aha moments at that point? Yeah, and I think the for me personally, I’ve always found that if I focus on, like, the empathy of what the partner needs, it really helps orient around how do you create value for them. But also, of course, your own organization, I really saw myself as almost like a, as much as I could, as a consultant for the agencies, especially once we realize that you really ought to be working with a managing director or someone pretty senior at the service company. And Hawking your own product only gets so far, if you move into the mindspace of being an industry expert, especially if you work in partnerships at a tech company, there’s just this avalanche of content being given to us through ebooks and webinars and podcasts. And if you can take some of that and turn it around and give it to your partners to be seen as sort of this like harvester of interesting knowledge and really trying to help them in their business. That’s when the penny dropped. And I realized, okay, like, you can build really deep relationships. In fact, I actually met my wife at one of my agency partners, weddings, Julia, so all things partnerships all day long for me,

Vince Menzione  04:24

is the genesis of so many things from your partnership experiences. I love that.

Chris Samila  04:29

Yes. Carol Carolyn’s been really good to me. She’s, we actually was kind enough to move back to America. And when I joined a company called full story, I moved from more of a practitioner like partner manager and did manage the whole region. But it was really a move into more of a leadership role as the VP of partnerships at fullstory. And that was honestly that was the beginning of partnership leaders because I realized that there’s a bunch of stuff I didn’t know how to do. There’s a hope that I could also share my knowledge with other folks that were on the journey of building these programs. And so we created an email thread with about 15 peers in the space. And then within a week, we realized emails too slow. And so we jumped on on Slack that really accelerate how much we could collaborate. And that was the beginning, in essence of the community to take us back

Vince Menzione  05:17

there, because I think it was a really interesting story. And you did a post on this, right? So a few of you met each other, either in person or maybe virtually, and then started this up. Tell us a little bit more about how that all happened.

Chris Samila  05:30

Yeah, so some of the folks that I were got on the original email thread I had worked with previously at Optimizely. These are other other technology partner managers, and leaders at companies in the space. And interestingly enough, I purposely added one of our direct competitors, this gentleman and Gilad from content square, and we agreed, like hey, and we compete on the battlefield, we’re trying to win business. But you know, in the craft of partnerships, like we should openly try to support each other, it sort of set the tone for the community early on. And so Gilad and a number of other folks plus I had the good fortune of running into Asher Matthew at Dreamforce, which was one of my co founders for partnership leaders. And I can just see the excitement and passion around just this new world of SAS partnerships. And it was pretty apparent that there was a core group of people, Asher, and then also my former coworker, Ty Ratigan, from Optimizely, he managed the European region for us, as the partner leader, we sort of just double down on okay, how can we help as many people as possible and in the early days, it was really just questions coming in, we were jumping onto him helping connect people. And it was like very much a goal was to just lift up our space, because a lot of us feel like we’re on an island in our own organizations, and you can’t really be as transparent about questions you might have, because everybody looks at you as we hired you to be the expert. And there’s a lot of surface area and partnerships to know everything. And so that was that was the foundation of what we’re trying to build.

Vince Menzione  07:04

I so get this right. So I’ve run partnerships before in other organizations, I’ve also been our chief revenue officer and other organizations. I’ve seen it from both sides. And you’re right when you’re sitting there, and I came in, wants to be the partner leader. And the first that was the first comment I brought it, I brought in somebody else to help us. And that was the first comment was like, well, we hired you to go do this. It’s so complex, and people don’t realize that you need some additional leg, you need more people to help along the journey. I love that.

Chris Samila  07:31

Yeah, I think the the ability for the partner organization to help the rest of the business is thankfully becoming a bit more apparent, I think the notion that we’re some team that sits off in the corner, and just resells some finished product is just just not the reality of things, you know, we have to have partners, co selling with us and CO marketing and CO innovating, you know, through integrations etc. And we can’t do that alone. Like we inherently need the support of the other business functions to do that. Well. And I think we’re starting to see second and third time CEOs that have seen this model actually play out the right way. And so they’re being more thoughtful and creating that space and resources for these teams. But there’s still a ton of partner folks out there that are sitting in organizations that haven’t quite gotten the leadership team on board with like, what does it truly mean to be, you know, building like a partnership organization that’s impacting the whole business

Vince Menzione  08:27

security. Before we started today, we were both sharing our experiences of being in this partnership world. And sometimes it feels like a lonely place. It feels like you’re on an island, we use the term redheaded stepchild sometimes, and I find that the organizations that struggle the most are the ones where the chief revenue officer, maybe the CEO, maybe the Chief Marketing Officer, have only worked indirect only models, right? And ISVs, or independent software vendors for that reason that didn’t grow up inherently to be partner organizations. But as you suggest, like this world of partnering became so important in the time period that you are working in the mahr tech world. But also beyond that, what did they experience feel like from your side?

Chris Samila  09:07

I think the aspirationally I was trying to build programs that we in essence, worked with all the departments. So whether it was the CO innovation piece, collaborating with the product organization to be able to figure out, what’s our roadmap, and what are our tech partners, roadmaps and where do we intersect? Or from the customer success perspective? How can we use agency partners to augment our own customer success motion, give us more scale, or do things we don’t want to do? I was constantly trying to think about like, Where can we overlap some of these business goals and create a lean for partners to operate with her an organization that’s worked well as long as the other other leader in the organization is oriented the right way and is incentivized the right way. And a lot of this does come down from the CEO or even the board for that matter at this point. And we are seeing in the space, more VCs who sit on boards. In many cases, they’re realizing that organizations that have a thriving partner ecosystem are generally a more stable, more efficient company long term. Not every VC is realized this, which is why we see in some cases, pretty dramatic, unfortunate layoffs happening. A lot of sass companies right now, where they’re, in some cases, taking away the entire partner team, which is craziness. This is where you have to be really aligned with the CEO around what are we trying to build? And how do you get that support so that you’re not just trying to do this by yourself? It just won’t work. If you have a CEO that’s of that mindset, reorienting them around, what does a modern partner program look like? How can they support that? Because I think that’s something that a lot of a lot of folks are still struggling with. I’ve talked to numerous CEOs over the last few weeks where they’ve had their head of partnerships, join partnership leaders, and they’re like, they’re wanting to know what other CEOs are thinking and how are they resourcing this, and how long does it take to get return, etc. Because it’s new, many CEOs and executives have built those direct models, as you said, but this world of partnerships is still new to a lot of people.

Vince Menzione  11:07

To your point. This is why the movement right and you and partnership leaders have been at the center of the maelstrom of this movement. So what is your ultimate vision then for partnership leaders? Is it to help to say democratize the partnership experience across all organizations? Is it to be an evangelist? What do you see as the ultimate vision?

Chris Samila  11:28

Yeah, this has been super interesting. On the outside, we look like a community or a professional association. But from our thinking of where we want to take this, we see it as as a platform for success for professionals in the partnerships world. And there are other organizations out there, I think, pavilions probably another good example, where once you have a core community of professionals, what can you build to support those folks, whether it’s education, or networking opportunities, or business development, or resource libraries, whatever, whatever form it may take, there’s various things you can build to support these professionals. The mission of the organization itself is really just to elevate partnerships to really essence get more C suite representation for Chief partnership officers or chief ecosystem officers, is it’s still very much in minority globally. And until that changes, like we’re always going to be playing catch up not getting the resources, we need not getting the funding to buy the tooling we really need. We’ve really tried to embrace how do we help these professionals on their journey? And then what things can we build once you have that core community in place? What can you build to support them, and continue growing, we have 1200 members in the community today, many of them are from the SAS 1000 great representation from a lot of really high growth companies. But there’s 100,000 Plus partner professionals out there. And so there’s still a ton of room to go out and help a lot more people over time.

Vince Menzione  12:55

So Chris, you’ve just announced your next phase. Can you tell us more?

Chris Samila  13:00

Yeah, so really excited, I feel fortunate that I’m able to actually do this, but I’ve moved over full time to partnership leaders. And so for the last four years, Ty Ratigan, Asher and myself have been working late nights and weekends building, the organization that supports partnership leaders, as well as literally dozens and dozens of people around the world that are helping us either as contractors or volunteers. What I’ve moved over as Chief partnership officer for the organization, which I’m just so thrilled about, because actually can spend all day really thinking about what do we need to do to scale the organization, work with media partners work with technology partners work with our version of solutions partners, which is consultancies that can help these partner organizations. So there’s just like, a ton of surface area of interesting partnerships we can build, to help us really scale because we have literally members on every continent except Antarctica, that are trying to build their own partnership organizations, and we ought to figure out ways to support them around the world. And so it’s a global business. And a lot of the networking community building is inherently local. So we have chapters in 30, plus major cities, and we look to partners of all shapes and forms to help us actually support those folks, and to grow awareness of the organization around the world. So there’s no playbook for partnerships, and there’s inherently even less of a playbook for community building. There’s a lot of free communities out there. But there’s a much smaller number of paid sort of member based organizations like what we’re doing, but it’s fun. We relish the challenge of scaling this thing up.

Vince Menzione  14:40

Many organizations are learning to do more with less. And as you think about how you’re going to reach your revenue targets this year. I recommend you check out partner tap, a founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering partner taps pipeline discovery and CO selling platform will help your channel Medellin sales teams to hit their revenue targets faster. Even with fewer resources. Partners app gives your teams the new automation and partner data. You need to source more pipeline and close deals faster with your best partners. You can find out more information at partner tap.com. First of all, I love chief partnership officer, I just love that title and the fact that you’re you’re eating your own dog food, right? Because you’re building more partnerships with partnership leaders. So I love the fact that that’s the main mission of the role. And I’ve got to speak to some of your leads your new Australian lead, Desmond Russell is a good friend. So it’s great to see that you’re going across the world really Israel, I mean, other locations that I’ve spoken to some of your partnership leaders, chapter leaders, a lot of great work going on there.

Chris Samila  15:53

Yeah, we definitely this is the ability for us to grow, the impact of partnership leaders is linked to really passionate people working on it. So we are super, super appreciative of all those folks. And it’s fun, there’s no shortage of things we can build to help support the industry. I think we’re benefiting from a little bit of the fact that Asher and myself and Ty have come out of high growth SaaS companies. And we operate partnership leaders, less like maybe a traditional industry association and more like a very, very efficient SAS company. And we’ve we’ve literally had to build this thing also in an asynchronous manner, because it was we’re inherently all have remote from one another. So we’ve gotten very efficient and actually like figuring out what we should do, how we do it, and then executing on that in a way that’s like over a handful of slack messages kind of thing.

Vince Menzione  16:42

I love it. I love it. Agile, agile development. Yeah, big time. So you’ve been around this world of partnerships, we’ve been talking about this, you know, this is the ultimate guide to partnering. So I love to ask each of my guests like, what have you seen from the best partnerships? Chris?

Chris Samila  16:58

Yeah, I think like the common threads that I’ve noticed is when I’ve been able to most effectively work with my partners, it’s when we’ve gotten that internal buy in on the vision of partnerships, when you have the support of the product organization and the customer success team and the sales team and the marketing team. And you have, you’ve got the attribution stuff somewhat figured out, and you’re not fighting over who source the sales opportunity, because you’ve got alignment with this with a frontline sales organization, that sort of blocking and tackling of like the first year’s growth of the partner organization is just invaluable. Because if you are driven to immediately start turning out churning out revenue on the first quarter, it’s pretty darn likely you’re going to have a misalignment with other parts of the organization that don’t quite understand how they should be operating with you. And so I have over time realized that I should definitely make sure that the CEO understands this, that that first six months has really changed management and alignment internally. And then you’ll you’re going to start experimenting to figure out which of the partner programs make sense for our business. And some of those are going to resonate, and some of them are and you’re going to quickly pivot to the ones that do. But when you do have that internal alignment, you then have the freedom to be able to work with partners of whether they’re tech partners or service partners, to bring them and embrace them in your organization. There is so much surface area for these partners to interact across the entire customer journey. Our friend Jay McBain is talking a lot about this where we’re not just thinking about transactional partners, but folks that can be partners, they can engage from the beginning of the lifecycle all the way to post sale. And so mapping that out and getting alignment of where you’re going to focus your energy based on what your business needs. That sort of due diligence upfront really pays dividends and makes your life a lot easier to go deeper with the partners you want to engage with.

Vince Menzione  18:51

So you mentioned internal buying, and you mentioned the CEO, right that buy in. And then you also mentioned some of the other organizations getting on board is there anything specific any best practices you can share here,

Chris Samila  19:02

spending time with the CEO, especially as a partner leader, a lot of times the partner team gets nestled under maybe the sales organization or under the marketing team. And that’s fine in the in the early stages, were having some organizational structure to help support you growing the team is totally fine. I think at some juncture, and this is just my personal philosophy is that the partnerships organizations should actually report into the CEO. Or if they do report into say the CRO, there needs to be an a recognition of goals and metrics that are not just revenue oriented, but play into Okay, I need to work with the product organization to make sure we get API’s built so that we can actually build the integrations we need. Like these are those foundational investments so that a year or two down the road, you can actually get a bunch more momentum with the partner profiles you want to pursue. And so somebody II on the C suite has to agree with like the direction you want to take the partnership organization, because, you know, going back to your earlier statement about like SAS partnerships. It’s not like the olden days, when you had a finished piece of software and you were shipping it somewhere, inherently, SAS is changing, you know, every few days potentially. And so you have to work with partners to co sell, the clients expect to have a relationship with the ISV. It’s just a different playing field, which is also why we built partnership leaders is the way we go to market as partner organizations is really changing a lot because of the delivery mechanism for modern software. So these things are sort of intimately kind of connected together. It’s like, if we didn’t have SAS, we may not have partnership leaders, because the way that we did partnerships traditionally would still be the dominant form of of doing so.

Vince Menzione  20:55

Yeah, you’re bringing up some really good points here on getting called the C suite optics, right, you may historically, roll up underneath that Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, traditionally alliances will sit under those functions. But then having the optics and having the investment, I think is what you were saying, right, making sure that from the product perspective, the marketing perspective, the customer support perspective, all those perspectives, it’s understood, and it’s incorporated into the go to market motion for the organization.

Chris Samila  21:27

Yeah, 1,000%. And it’s also something where I think partner organizations and we saw this, we did a big research report with Canalis, and HubSpot around partner ops and programs. And many organizations don’t have good attribution to recognize all the hard work that the partners are doing and the partner organization, there were sort of begging and pleading for rev ops resources to build out some of this tracking. And that’s something where I imagine that’s going to change, we see this actually, there’s very vibrant conversations in partnership leaders around this right now is like best practices around the attribution of partnerships and how you set this up in your CRM and all that good stuff. foundationally, you need that in place, because you need to be able to report back the impact you’re starting to make on the company. And so many partner teams are underappreciated, because they don’t, they don’t have a way to actually highlight outside of maybe sourced revenue, which is pretty darn easy, you know, to track once you have a PRM, or some kind of deal registration. But it’s all the other influence moments of revenue that are today very challenging in many cases to actually actually track. And so you, as a partner leader, have to spend a good bit of time, probably more so than marketing and sales to some extent, like defending why you exist in the organization, because we don’t have as strong of tooling in place as some of those other other organizations. And that is changing. That’s like one place. Like we have an angel syndicate in partnership leaders, specifically because we wanted to help connect the upstart seed level partner tech organizations that are building the innovative solutions to help these modern partner teams. We wanted to connect them to people that could help fund them and help guide them to grow these businesses. And we see right now, interesting, not explosion. But I’d say growth of new innovative partner texts are going to come on the market. And that’s exciting, that will make our lives easier as partner professionals as these things mature. And it’s great, we’re finally getting the focus to kind of match what has historically been done for sales, marketing, customer success, etc. On the tooling front.

Vince Menzione  23:43

Yeah, that attribution piece, our good friend, Jay, McBain brought up the fact that you know, the MAR tech stack 1215 years ago, you didn’t know where half of your dollars went, like the attribution back to the marketing spend, wasn’t there before we had the technology to support it. And then with this channel, tech stack, or partnership ecosystem tech stack, because we’re now calling it, there’s a huge opportunity here on the attribution piece. I also want to make sure we put a link in the show notes to that amazing survey, I participated in it. And I’ve consumed it. And I think was it just a terrific piece of work, and love to see more of that come out of our industry?

Chris Samila  24:18

Yeah, we were super proud of that. And that’s the kind of stuff that when we as a community, we can focus everyone’s attention on like, hey, if we all contribute to something like this, we’re gonna get some super valuable Intel back, which will then subsequently be able to be used to help, you know, advocate for more resources for the partner organization. So we definitely intend to do more of those and a huge thanks to Canalis and HubSpot to really bring that thing to life. The that’s I, every few days. I get a ping from somebody has mentioned that they’re using it in their executive meetings to advocate for more resources, which is awesome.

Vince Menzione  24:54

So you hosted your first live event this year in Miami and I regret Billy couldn’t make it. We had this conversation like early in the year I had this family wedding and Telluride, but now you’re having it in Denver. So I’m so excited for this. Tell us more about the catalyst 2023 event, Chris.

Chris Samila  25:11

Yeah, so this is like super fun. Last year, we did an event in August in Miami, it was about 450 ish people attended, which was amazing, was really focused on partnership organizations heavily oriented on tech companies, we did have service companies there as well. And I think like ultimately, like it was Miami was really good to us, it was a little warm is a little toasty in August and Miami. Yeah. As you know, as a fellow Floridian I think this upcoming year, we realize that we wanted to keep it in August because catalyst the goal of the event is to set people up for success in the second half of the year. So there’s a bunch of other awesome events in the first half of the year. There’s fastconnect, and supernode, from crossbeam, etc. And so we can build into the catalyst event. And it will be in August from August 21 to 23rd. In Denver, learning from last year’s event, we realize that folks actually started showing up before the conference officially open, we had some education stuff going on. And like the foyer just started filling with tons of people wanting to hang out and connect with one another. So we’re embracing that concept for this upcoming year’s event, we’re going to have a lot more networking opportunities and special activities to get folks connected. But yeah, education, we’re going to have a bunch of really innovative companies exhibiting Of course, and we’re going to wrap around the events, Denver specific outdoor activities to really get people to spend time with one another and find those new partnerships and to deepen those relationships with their existing partners. So super pumped, we’re shooting for 800 plus people this year, and it’s at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Denver. So, Vince, you’re gonna make it this year, we’re gonna get you out there, buddy,

Vince Menzione  26:50

I am committing right here, Chris, I’m going to be here ultimate partnerships mastermind is going to be there, we’re going to do something special around this event, I can’t wait to join you. So I like to pivot here a little bit. Many of our listeners are earlier in career professionals trying to understand how to get to this spot in their career, Chris, and so I was wondering, was there like a spark or a best piece of advice along the journey to become an incredible entrepreneur? Yeah, I

Chris Samila  27:16

think this one’s it. My perspective on this has been reinforced by watching, I think the last four years of when professionals actually take the time out of their schedule to try to network with their peers in the space. So much of what we’re doing is peer to peer learning like that you can’t go on Amazon and buy a book how to do a lot of the modern partner plays. And so we’re collectively figuring this out. And I’ve seen over and over again, where we’re focused actually doesn’t take that much time, just take 30 minutes, once a week, go meet somebody new, go talk to somebody else in the space, they can be more senior than you, you can learn from them a guarantee, or you can share things that will help them on their journey. Even on the flip side, you might only be a year in partnerships. But there’s somebody who literally started last week and investing in your network is just incredibly important. And we’ve seen this actually play out more recently on the just economic turmoil. There are folks that are getting laid off that haven’t invested in their network as much and are probably out there struggling to some extent. And then there’s other folks, Aaron Howard, Howard, Howard 10, is a great example. He was part of a layoff from a company, he knew a lot about partner ops, and he doubled down and just started contributing on LinkedIn. He’s part of the peel community, he just started doing as much content to talk about the state of partner ops and sort of figure out what’s going on there. And like, that guy is not going to be unemployed for very much longer, like he really invested in in taking some time to make sure that he had a network outside of his own company, because it’s vitally important. We do an amazing job in our day jobs. But in just the reality of the world today, like you’ve got to have a network outside of your own company and learning from peers is going to be super, super important for many, many years to come. So I’d say like my number one piece of advice is get out there, talk to other people in the space, go to networking events, just like carve out a little bit of time each week to do this. It will build a massive dividends long term for you.

Vince Menzione  29:18

I love that advice. I actually spoke to Aaron last week. In fact, he got his new PC start. I think he’s starting this week or next week in a new role. So yes to Him,

Chris Samila  29:27

super proud of him. He he’s there with a really cool company too. And it’s just like, it was so apparent that the world rallied around him. And I’ve seen this also with other folks in the community where they have spent time helping others and then when something unfortunate happened for them, it was like a wave of people came in to endorse them. And it’s like that is way more effective than just a few LinkedIn recommendations like having people actively trying to help you comes from you investing in that network.

Vince Menzione  29:56

Great pieces of advice, Chris, for our listeners, and this is The favorite question of mine, Chris. So you are hosting a dinner party, and you can host this dinner party in any part of the world. We can talk about where that is next. And you can invite any three guests from the present or the past to this amazing dinner party. Whom would you invite? And why?

Chris Samila  30:19

Yeah, so I think definitely one of them will be Carl Sagan. Woohoo. He is a prolific science fiction writer and scientist, I was very much inspired as a child reading a lot of his books and just hearing his voice warms the heart a little bit when you go back and listen to some of the PBS specials and stuff. I vote I’ve always been attracted to the devoted their life to making the world a better place. So I he would definitely be at the table. It’s sad. He’s no longer with us. Yeah, I think having probably Bill Gates, I’ve massively respect how much he donates to the world through all these different causes in the Gates Foundation. But he also seems to have a really good sense of continuing to invest in his own knowledge. I read his book list every year. And thankfully, he’s still with us. So he could actually rock up and hang out with us at dinner. Nice. And the third one, I worked at that Tesla, and Elon was there. And I know Elon is a little controversial these days, I do find him it was a very challenging work environment, probably would have died young if I continued my career there. But there is something to be said about, like the amount of momentum he’s built in the clean tech industry, specifically through Tesla. So we get rid of the things that are on the on the edges of, you know, I don’t know the best way to describe it. But you know, what I’m talking about the bad things is to get out and have the have the really insightful, entrepreneurial aspects of Elon. I think he’d be a fun person to really spend some time with.

Vince Menzione  31:49

He didn’t get here by coincidence, right? Yeah. And what a great group of people I’d love to come and join maybe for a cocktail. Where are you hosting this party? Have you decided yet

Chris Samila  31:59

Elan Elan is with us? We’ll be doing it on Mars.

Vince Menzione  32:05

Carl Sagan though that’s a first I’d love Carl Sagan growing up, he was billions and billions. I love this, like,

Chris Samila  32:12

oh, man, you go back and listen to that stuff. And it’s there’s a point in time that it felt very inspirational to the things we were doing just as a species. And that kind of those folks don’t come around as often as they as they should. So hopefully, there’s, hopefully we see more of that in the future. I have a two year old now. And you just use hope for a better future for them kind of thing.

Vince Menzione  32:36

Congratulations. That’s amazing. So Chris, you’ve been a lot of fun guests. They’ve been an amazing guest and a fun guest as well. For our listeners, any words of wisdom, advice that you would share with them on optimizing for success in this new year?

Chris Samila  32:53

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think the I would I would invest in your own education, I think the pace at which we’re figuring out how to do things in partnerships is just accelerating, because so many of us are getting connected now and able to share our own best practices on things. So take that time to invest in yourself. I think some people are fortunate to stay at companies for a long time, the trend is the opposite of that. A lot of folks end up having to change roles every every two to three years. But you can make that cycle of building a new partner programs so much faster when you take the knowledge you’ve gained from your direct experience. But also, if you sprinkle in a bunch of insights from people that are building aspects of partner programs you’re not familiar with, I think that’s like that peer to peer learning is essential. And there’s just so much good content out there. I mean, Vince, you have your podcast here, which is amazing. There’s increasing number of other podcasts and webinars and things that it’s very easy for us in partnerships to get overwhelmed and just focus on like our core day job. But when you’re on the peloton, you’re out for a walk, go listen to something that’s inspiring, and hearing somebody else share their experiences. It’s like a shortcut in life, you can learn from their pain and their challenges. So you don’t make the same mistakes. And I wish I had done that earlier in my life. But every week I do this I have a little rubber cellphone mount on my peloton, and I listen to podcasts and listen to videos. And that’s where I try to educate myself every single day based on kind of listening to our peers in the space.

Vince Menzione  34:23

I love it. Chris, you have been a lot of fun to get to know today. And I’m looking forward to doing more work with you and partnership leaders has a member and also as an affiliate. So looking forward to a great 2023 together.

Chris Samila  34:36

Appreciate your scholar and gentlemen, thank you so much for having me on Vince. This is a lot of fun.

Vince Menzione  34:40

Same here, Chris. Awesome. Thank you. So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering and I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive and hearing my voice, chances are you too are looking to accelerate your success through pa partnerships. I mean, let’s face it, we all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of reasons why partnerships fail. And at ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft, and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com.

Announcer  35:34

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 partner and we’ll catch you next time on The ultimate guide to partnering