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An Ecosystem Tech Leader Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
I welcome back a woman channel tech stack pioneer trailblazing enterprise co-selling with iconic brands. Cassandra Gholston is the CEO of PartnerTap. Cass and I discussed why she founded PartnerTap and why leading organizations like Concur Genesis, ADP LogMeIn, and LastPass chose their solution. We also discuss the woman entrepreneur movement #fempire and how technology partners can take advantage of a free offer from PartnerTap. In this episode, Cass shares how you can unleash the power of data to 10X your partner growth!
In Cassandra’s words
Cassandra Gholston is the CEO of PartnerTap, a partner ecosystem platform that identifies new logo opportunities with each partner. PartnerTap is the leading solution for enterprises that drive revenue through and with partners. Customers include ADP, SAP Concur, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Genesys.
What You’ll Learn in this Episode
- How PartnerTap pioneered and defined a category. (2:33)
- What PartnerTap is and is not (8:31)
- How do iconic brands unleash their potential with PartnerTap? (10:12)
- How you can take advantage of a free offer (15:25)
- How she thrives as a woman entrepreneur and founder (17:06)
- The new energy around Ecosystems and technology (23:08)
Quote From This Episode
“There’s a case study about to be released from one of our customers, LastPass, who is moving to a partner-led or channel-led strategy. Their question was, “how do we do this?” How do we understand where our top partners have the customer base to our top prospects or two prospects that we don’t even have in our database? And so, using the PartnerTap technology, they literally within minutes generated 15,000 opportunities. They took that data and said, “we’ve got to hire a BDR team to go Cosell!”
Episodes featuring Partner Ecosystem Leaders and Experts.
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
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.
116 – Helping ISVs Accelerate Meaningful Revenue with the Cloud Providers through Marketplaces with Sanjay Mehta of Tackle.io 115 – Creating Value to Innovative Routes-to-Market with Precise Industry and Customer Solutions – with Oguo Atuanya, Microsoft GM for Scale Partners.
114 – Cloud Wars Ranks the Most Influential Cloud Vendors During This Rapid Transformation – with Bob Evans, creator of Cloud Wars
Links from this Episode
Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
partner, partnerships, women, companies, ecosystem, data, selling, cosell, concur, mcbain, channel, tap, technology, leaders, prm, organization, customers, event, building, tech
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Cassandra Gholston, Vince Menzione
Vince Menzione 00:00
How you can unleash the power of data to 10x your partner growth. On this next episode of ultimate guide to partnering, I welcome back a woman channel tech stack pioneer trailblazing enterprise co selling with iconic brands.
Announcer 00:18
Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione. A proven sales and partner executive brings together leaders to discuss transformational trends and deconstruct successful strategies to help technology leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione.
Vince Menzione 00:41
Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to 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. Cassandra or Kaskel Olson is the CEO of partner tap, a founding sponsor of this podcast and a longtime friend, Cass and I discuss why she founded partner tap and why leading organizations like Concur Genesis ADP logged me in and LastPass chose their solution. We also discuss the woman entrepreneur movement fempire And how technology partners can take advantage of a free offer from partner tap. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed welcoming back. CASS gholston. CASS Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much fans. It’s such a pleasure to be here again. You were on episode 90. Wow. And I think we were just celebrating your 100 and 60th episode the other day. Like it’s amazing. And speaking of time, you and I have known each other since you started up the organization. Yes, you are one of the first people I reached out to because I was listening to your podcasts. And I’m like this person gets partner and I need to meet him. I need to know him really well. You’ve been an amazing entrepreneur and doing great work in our partner ecosystem. So I’m really excited to have you back today because there’s been so much renewed excitement about our ecosystem. Yes. So for our listeners, can you tell us more about partner tap and this exciting partner category you pioneer?
Cassandra Gholston 02:33
Absolutely. It’s a really interesting time. Jay McBain is coin, this the decade of the ecosystem. And back five years ago, you were one of very few people that were really talking about partnerships and ecosystems. And this was in a time where we were pioneering this idea of data sharing and automation around data sharing and your ecosystems. We knew that companies were sharing data to understand where they could go to market understand the whitespace understand where they could drive new sales opportunities. And this activity was going on by channel teams by partner teams by sales teams, it was happening all throughout the organization. And it was happening by spreadsheets being emailed around. And that was just not secure. It doesn’t really drive massive results. But everybody was doing it because they were getting some results from it, I saw that there was a big whitespace there was no companies that were building data sharing applications that would connect two companies together and allow them to decide what information they wanted to share with each other. And then quickly tell them, here’s where you should market, here’s where you should connect your sellers. Here’s the teams you should put together. And here’s the best partners you should be working with. And that’s what we built. And for last five years, we’ve really been focused on the enterprise and building a solution that helps enterprises really scale their go to market motion with their partners, and allows them to securely data share and get instantaneous results nightly.
Vince Menzione 04:30
That striking me reminded me of the days when I was leading the organization at Microsoft. And literally we would share spreadsheets back and forth. We never could align the territories because everybody’s territories, what you call the southeast and what I call the southeast are two different things and vertical alignments and so on. And then the data wasn’t secure, right? We didn’t have secure data. It wasn’t dynamic. It was changing all the time. You’re going back and forth with spreadsheets, and I remember those early conversations with you and going wow, I really wish So I had had this while I was at Microsoft. So what gave you the idea to start partnership? I worked for a company called concur. They were one of five other companies, salesforce.com, NetSuite. They took these early bets Concur was on prem, they were migrating all of their customers, their on premise enterprise customers to the cloud. They had an enormous ecosystem of partners, travel management companies, card providers, banks, technology, ISP providers that built hooks into this new cloud based technology concur, was really doing these cosell motions with an ecosystem of partners very, very early on. So this idea of having partners work together compensation structures that comped the direct seller, and the partner seller, it wasn’t a thing. Now fast forward, we’re seeing the hyperscalers co selling in we’re seeing many other companies understand that CO selling and driving revenue with your ecosystem, and your direct field seems, is the way of the future, living the problem of a seller having the ability to go to market with 1000s of partners, but not understanding which partner overlaps my territory, which partner is the best partner to either bring into this deal? Or who is already working this deal? We’re just such difficult questions to answer. There was just no automation to know it was spreadsheets going around the organization that never got down to the field, it was the field team mapping their own account list with their five partners. And those were the only partners they’re bringing in to opportunities co selling has really taken off. And Microsoft led the way but Concur was doing this in the early days in really incentivize their direct team to embrace the partner ecosystem. And we went off to sell the SAP SAP for billion that is a case study for Castellina. In itself, I think, even just as many as seven years ago, Microsoft, even though they worked with partners, it wasn’t true co selling. And it wasn’t until the recognition that okay, we’ve got this cloud, we want these organizations to come to our cloud. And the only way we’re going to effectively do this is if we offer to cosell with them. For a lot of these organizations. It’s an wasn’t a natural act. I’m going to hire 100 salespeople, we’re going to dial for dollars. And we’re going to directly sell to a customer. Why do I need to work with Microsoft, or Amazon or Google? And now this recognition, Hey, we should go do selling we should go do co selling we should go partner together. And I love it. I love it as somebody who’s been around this for a while as you’ve been around. We talked about Jamie McBain, there’s quite a bit of excitement around ecosystems. There’s this channel tech stack that he talks about. And he talks about all this new technology and that we’re in the early days, he uses the analogy of the mark comm tech stack going from a few Eloqua Marketo and others to now like 8600 tech companies in the mark comm stack. And he sees the same evolution in the channel tech stack. So I want to talk about your place there in that stack. What is partner tab and what is it not.
Cassandra Gholston 08:31
So we’re really in that data sharing category that channel enablement where we are enabling sellers, direct and channel or just channel and vendor to really uncover and sell net new accounts. And that data sharing category, we are not a PRM system. So oftentimes, we get lumped in to partner relationship management. And what I always say is the PRM isn’t driving leads to the PRM. Right? Partner tap is that flywheel in front of the PRM that is generating net new leads. And that data then flows through DL reg systems which PRM or home grown systems that some of our customers have, but every one of our customers today has a partner relationship management system that is one piece of technology they all have and we are the flywheel to the PRM.
Vince Menzione 09:42
So we are living through interesting times. We’ve gone through exponential growth in our industry and our tech sector and now this year we’re hitting a few road bumps I hope they’re just road bumps and top companies like an a good year they grow like 9% CAGR, right. What would it take like for them to double, triple or even 10x Their growth year after year? And how does your technology help them unleash that potential with this CO selling or new opportunity sharing?
Cassandra Gholston 10:12
There’s a case study that is about to be released from one of our customers last past who is really moving to partner lead or channel lead strategy. And their question was, how do we do this? How do we understand where our top partners have customer base to our top prospects or two prospects that we don’t even have in our database. And so using the partner tab technology, they literally within minutes generated 15,000 opportunities. And they took that data and then said, We’ve got to hire a BDR team to now go, and cosell with these two top partners. So that’s one piece? Where are all the accounts that I don’t know about? And what are the top target accounts that we know about, we just can’t break into them, another customer of ours Genesis, they have a huge ecosystem of partners. They’re doing tons of business through their ecosystem. But now with partner tap, they can really focus on all of the target accounts in each country and feed data from their partner channel of hey, do you have accounts in these key targets? Do you have relationships, and what they’re doing is they’re allowing their partners to connect in share customers. And then once a deal registration happens, that account now is no longer available to any of the partners that have mapped in. So they’re really using partner tab to avoid channel conflict, and get the right partners into these key accounts. And right now, you need absolute focus on generating net new opportunities. And the only way to focus like that is to either do this on spreadsheets manually, which would be impossible because you do all this data mapping, and then you have to redo it with every single partner again, and again, you’re going to have channel conflict in that type of environment. But with a system like partner tap, you can find the alignment, you have now all of this data to go drive marketing campaigns, to drive cosell sales plays right at your fingertips. That’s a really, really interesting use case. And we’re seeing this type of use case in probably 85% of our client base right now, everybody is thirsting for more revenue, finding the deals. And they know, just like you said, you can’t just have a bunch of people hammering the phones right now you have to leverage all of the partnerships that you have, because they have the relationships. And that’s how companies are really getting in and getting a solid foot when they’re going into a process.
Vince Menzione 13:26
I think about several things here. First of all, I think about some of my clients, in fact, that today, you’re still doing things very manually, they’re working with the hyperscalers, they’re working with downstream channel, they’re then going off and doing events, right? They’re trying to generate new leads, but they’re not doing that mapping that says okay, this is somebody who came to the event. This is somebody that has a propensity to buy a cloud solution and a propensity to buy our solution. How do we map those accounts? How do we get more deliberate about our execution, count based marketing, co selling all those things together? And who are the five seats at the table? Are we making sure we’re influencing each of
Cassandra Gholston 14:02
them? That’s definitely the old way to do things. It’s the way it always has been, there’s been no other alternative. But now, there is a new way where you can have 100% focus on where you’re going to market with each partner on the right accounts with the right contacts, you can put a list into a marketing automation system or you can run an ABM campaign. But if that list is bad, then you’re not going to generate any return. So it’s so important right now, when budgets are tightening to get the right accounts at the right contacts through the right partners. And it’s such a simple thing with solution like partner tap.
Vince Menzione 14:54
So you take all the complexity out and you increase the probability of success.
Cassandra Gholston 14:58
Absolutely. You’re You’re going to have better outcomes, you’re spending a lot of money running ABM campaigns. And now you’re running the right list, the ROI is so high. And that’s why these companies that we have and had for years just continue to expand with us.
Vince Menzione 15:18
I mentioned that example. Can you think of other examples why they don’t use a technology like partner tap? Oh, the
Cassandra Gholston 15:25
number one is they don’t know that we exist. So that is the number one problem, I think once they find out, we have a free solution. So anybody can go on to partner tap.com, they can log into our free solution. And there’s a lot you can do for free, a lot of our companies start out like that, I want to see this actually work. Because I’ve been doing this manually for my entire career, prove it to me, that’s how we generate a lot of our pipeline is through, somebody comes on for free. And then now they’re hooked. And they want all of this data in their CRM, they want to have our support to help them connect in their ecosystems.
Vince Menzione 16:11
Great, and we’re gonna provide links in our show notes, it’s partner tap.com, not hard to find. And then what happens from there. So you
Cassandra Gholston 16:18
can run those partner spreadsheets, you see the mapping work, and then yeah, they move to wanting to add on more people inside their organization, or partners. Or we’ve also seen people go, I want to go run event, I need this amount of MDF. And here I have my prospects and customers from this industry. And they can prove the exact targets. And so we’ve actually seen people get more MDF, because they’re not just saying, Yeah, I’m going to throw this event, I’m going to invite companies from this industry, it’s like very specific. And so then they know, the actual reps on the other side, and the value that could be generated true ROI from the event.
Vince Menzione 17:06
So impactful, we could spend a lot of time your guests because I’m in the weeds with you on CO selling. And let’s talk about women entrepreneurs in business, we have a lot of leaders in tech come to this podcast, I’m very deliberate about this, because I look around the room. And it’s still very much a white male dominated tech sector, like the C suite, the top tech CEO list, all very male dominated, and even within the investment community, right, all of the players seem to be male dominated. And it’s clear that it makes it harder for you. But do you see any advantages here?
Cassandra Gholston 17:44
I think that yes, in the CEO, position, male dominated, for sure. But what I see in large enterprises that we work inside of is a lot of women in tech and diversity is a key value to many organizations. So leaning into the feminine, and what makes you different from all the companies in your space, I think, is a hidden superpower, because a lot of our customers and decision makers are women, and they are leading teams of women, I can’t tell you how many zoom calls I get on. And we notice one on this call is a woman. So I’m seeing that more and more. And when I get on calls, and it’s all men, that’s now becoming more rare. So in the partnerships in the ecosystem in the channel space, I’m seeing something different. And in some of these groups that are in communities that are being startup, we’re also seeing that 40 to 50% of the members in these partnership communities are women. I think it’s a great time to be a woman business owner, I think it’s a great time to be a woman in tech. We’re definitely writing the next chapter. So it’s an exciting time. But definitely there are days when I feel like I’m Annie Oakley on the prairie.
Vince Menzione 19:15
I partner with some amazing women leaders. In fact, I tend to lean more to working with amazing women leaders, as we mentioned, Erin Fagor, and there’s some others that are part of this mastermind community. And you got actually to spend some time with some of those folks. For this. She submits event you just returned from Colorado with some of these amazing women leaders. Can you tell us more about that recent experience?
Cassandra Gholston 19:37
So that was an amazing experience. We submitted a 14,000 foot mountain, my co founder autumn Grimm, who’s my CRO, about six months ago, Aaron Tiger had said, Hey, I lead this group. It’s called Chi summits. We go on a fourteener it’s a weekend experience. You guys should come in autumn said, Sign us up we’re in. And after she said that, I said quietly, do you even know what a fourteener is. And so then I started sending her links to how to train for a 14 or how to get ready. It’s a big climb for sure. But doing that experience with the women in tech that we did it with shout out to women from VMware from Microsoft, from people running their own companies. It was an incredible group, and a very difficult climb and the celebration afterwards, and all of the stories about how this parlayed into just being a woman in tech, running those daily grinds such a great experience. Shout out to Aaron Fagor. If you’re a woman in tech, and you want to join she summits next year, reach out to us, Aaron is all about making more weekend’s next year.
Vince Menzione 21:01
Can I come along? Can the allies come up? Can we have an ally Summit?
Cassandra Gholston 21:06
Absolutely, I think we need to have more ally events, for sure. I coined a term with all these women. And I was saying we talk about behind the scenes at partner tap that we’re building this female empire. We didn’t coined the term, but we said fempire, because I’m sure everybody’s heard that term. And so I was telling all the women there, the fempire is really about female empowerment and changing the flow of capital. women that are in power need to understand their power and use the power to elevate women below them into leadership positions, help support female founded companies, because there are some amazing female founded tech companies. And our company is one where we have focused so much on building our own revenue engine, supporting and building for enterprise customers. We’ve taken on no VC capital. And we’re leading the charge in some of the largest companies in the world.
Vince Menzione 22:13
And you hosted a dinner at the catalyst event, the partnership leaders event in Miami just about a month ago, a fempire. Dinner,
Cassandra Gholston 22:20
yes, the fempire dinner. So that was the first dinner that we hosted. And we reached out to women executives that were going to be at the catalyst event, I figured five or six might show up. And what we found was we had such a response where we ended up buying out this restaurant. And there’s just such a movement right now for women in partnerships, women in the channel, women in tech to really bond together because sometimes it is lonely when the men are on the golf course or get invited into rooms that women just don’t get invited to. And we just want to remind women that powerful and you can use that power to elevate more women on this journey.
Vince Menzione 23:08
I love what you’re doing here. We’re going to provide the link for your LinkedIn page to the show notes. If anybody wants to reach out regarding fempire Awesome, our good friend Jay McBain, and we’ve talked about this decade of the ecosystem, right? We talked about this earlier that we’ve been living in exciting times. But what are you seeing now that you didn’t expect to see,
Cassandra Gholston 23:29
what I didn’t realize is how many companies would start spinning up around the ecosystem space. It’s so exciting. I met a founder that is building technology on ecosystem technology. It just, it’s it’s happening more and more. But five years ago, it felt like it was PRM marketing automation and through channel marketing systems. And now it’s so much more and companies are continuing to spin up. So I would definitely agree with where Jay is that that now is the time for partner technology. And I’m just so excited to see the new innovations and the companies that we’ll be building off of partner tap and the data that we are generating from our solution. It’s just an exciting time you could start a company and you can think that you see a category partner tap literally found a category and is now accelerating. So someone like Jay McBain I love reading everything that Jay puts out and all of his predictions. So he is the data and numbers guy and the other thing that I love about Jay is that he is a big huge proponent for female women and tech women entrepreneurs. His wife Michelle, McBain renews and again she is awesome as well. Also, the two of them are just they’ve just really evangelized this space.
Vince Menzione 25:05
What I love, especially and obviously Jay has been here five times on the podcast. He’s a five timer, but I love is the mindset shift that we’re starting to see. And because it’s a groundswell, right, a lot of these earlier in career leaders that are coming forward with partner hacker and partnership leaders are buzzing out really that this is important to their organizations. And I think the leadership is starting to listen, so excited for what’s ahead in this rest of this next decade.
Cassandra Gholston 25:34
I am to look, I told you the story about concur, who really leaned into an ecosystem approach when it wasn’t called. And, yeah, they sold for over $8 billion. That is the kind of thing that happens when you harness an ecosystem, it’s a hard strategy to get off the ground, but it pays dividends. So it needs to be a discussion in boardrooms and in the C suite. Because if you’re not thinking about the strategy, you will lose to your competition for listeners,
Vince Menzione 26:11
ensure that your CXO listens to this episode, because I think you made some really impactful points here, Cassandra, and I want to thank you, you have been an amazing guest. I love our friendship. I love the work that you’re doing during these exciting times. For our listeners, what advice would you give to them to optimize for success,
Cassandra Gholston 26:33
they should absolutely get their free account with partner tap and figure out that go to market flywheel that can happen. And I think that they all need to be thinking about their ecosystem strategy, and what they are doing to help support the team that is really doing the hard work around partnerships. That is not an easy job.
Vince Menzione 26:59
It’s not an easy job. I want to thank you, you have been an amazing guest. Thanks so much for the time. 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. Chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through 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. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com.
Announcer 27:47
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