87 – Embrace Really Important Change Happening in the World of Partners

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For this episode of the series to help us Optimize for Success in 2021, I was delighted to welcome Bob Moore, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Crossbeam, a partner ecosystem platform that helps companies build more valuable partnerships by discovering which customers and leads they have in common. For 2021, Bob advises us to embrace that really important change is happening in the world of partners.

​​Bob is a serial entrepreneur, co-founder the cloud data pipeline company Stitch (Acquired by Talend in 2018) and business intelligence platform RJMetrics (acquired by Adby way of Magento Commerce in 2016). Bob is on a mission to help organizations solve many of the challenges of sharing data he saw in his last two companies.

Prior to RJMetrics, Moore worked on the Investment Team of Insight Venture Partners, a leading software-focused venture capital and private equity firm based in New York.  He is a graduate of Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Bob is a vocal supporter of the Philadelphia startup scene, where he serves as the Board Chair Emeritus of Philly Startup Leaders and a has served as a Board Member of Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT). 

​As a writer and speaker, Bob has been featured by The New York Times, Forbes, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, TEDxPhilly, EnterConf, Business of Software, and many more.  He guest lectures regularly at Princeton University and The Wharton School.

​ Outside of the tech scene, Bob is a comedy performer, where he has performed over 100 shows as a member of the Philadelphia-based improv team Big Baby.  He has also served as a Trustee of the Awesome Foundation and the Glassboro Education Foundation

In this episode, Bob and I discuss:

  • His organization, mission, focus, the value of Crossbeam and how it differentiated in Channel Software Tech Stack.
  • His perspective and what he has seen in the market and the channel.
  • Advice on optimizing for success in 2021 by embracing the important change happening in the world of partners.

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed spending time with Bob Moore

LINKS & RESOURCES

As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to Partnering™ and where they can find us.

This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Ultimate Partnerships. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

Transcription By Otter.AI – Please Pardon Typos Below

Bob Moore 0:00
embrace the fact that really, really important change is happening under our feet right now in the partnerships world because the change that’s happening is actually sitting outside of the partnerships realm and sitting in the realm of how products get built, and interconnectivity between companies takes form in the very first place.

Unknown Speaker 0:19
Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to partnering. In this podcast Vince Menzione,

Unknown Speaker 0:24
a proven industry sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders in this forum 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 0:49
Welcome, or Welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And as we kick off the four year anniversary of this podcast and leap into 2021, I’m thankful to all of the amazing thought and business leaders who’ve come to this podcast to share principles, success strategies, and best practices that help technology organizations thrive during this age of change and transformation. As we kick off this new year, I’m excited to be joined for this special series by some of those industry thought leaders to help each of us better prepare for what we can do to optimize success in 2021. for this episode of the series, I am joined by Bob Moore, co founder and CEO of cross beam, a partner ecosystem platform that helps companies build more valuable partnerships. I was excited to welcome Bob as a guest as he has a strong perspective, given the work his organization does with vendors to build strong partner co selling. In this episode, Bob and I discuss his organization, mission, focus and value, his perspective on what he has seen in the market and their channel, and advice for our listeners on optimizing for success in this new year. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed spending time with Bob Moore. Bob, welcome to the podcast.

Bob Moore 2:19
Vince, it’s great to be here. long overdue.

Vince Menzione 2:22
Oh way long overdue. We’ve been talking about this since the summer. And I’m excited to finally welcome you as a guest to the podcast. Our paths have been crossing for years now. You have an amazing career. And you’re an entrepreneur doing some really great work in the partner ecosystem. So I’m really looking forward to this discussion today.

Bob Moore 2:42
Amazing. Yeah, it’s great to be here and way to set the bar. You really your listeners are about to be gravely disappointed.

Vince Menzione 2:50
I totally doubt that. But I’m excited. You know, you live in Philadelphia, I spent 25 years in the Philly region, we could talk about sports, we won’t. We won’t agonize over that today. But I do want to focus in first on you and your business. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about you and your organization cross beam?

Bob Moore 3:10
Sure. Cross beam is really a company that I don’t think could have existed if I didn’t live through some real pain points related to partnerships at previous companies I started. So prior to cross beam, I co founded two other businesses, one called RJ metrics, which was in the data analytics space, it’s now part of Adobe, and one called stitch data that was even nerdier than RJ metrics. It was in the data infrastructure space, it’s now part of talent. And in both of those companies, they were really partner heavy businesses, because they had a lot to do with moving data around. And there were a lot of technology integrations involved. And we just kept running into this set of problems that you could almost describe as like a data standoff problem, where you get into a situation with a partner, and it could be a technology partner, it could be a channel partner, it could even be a potential acquirer or like a Corp dev relationship. But we want to answer these really, really simple questions, things like how many customers do we have in common? And who are they? Or are my sales reps currently trying to sell to any of the same companies that your sales reps are trying to sell to? And it turns out, it’s really, really hard to answer those questions. You know, my data is in my Big Data Silo, my systems of record your data is in your Big Data Silo. And if we want to draw a Venn diagram between my data and yours, it’s hard. There’s a lot of technical challenges, you know, we might have I use Salesforce and you use HubSpot, or, you know, the way that we represent leads and opportunities and things might be different. How do you make an apples to apples comparison technically. But then there’s also this whole universe of trust, and in an era of GDPR and ccpa, and carry a lot about compliance and privacy. How do you go about the process of figuring out where your data sets intersect? When it’s impossible to draw a Venn diagram unless somebody has both data sets. So you know, you need to grossly over share what’s in your data in order to get the answer about where it intersects with your partner. So it was just a mess. And what was shocking to me, after those companies got acquired was that you get a, you know, an opportunity to look at how these bigger enterprise companies run. And all the same problems are there. It’s not like this A solved up market, or that the biggest companies in the world had this all figured out. This was a very universal problem that kind of spanned from the earliest startups in the smallest agencies all the way up to, you know, global system integrators and fortune 500, SAS businesses. So the answer, which we kind of pulled together around 2018 was, what if you build something that function more like an escrow service for data as something that was a service that sat in between companies that were trying to partner with each other, and provided this secure third party environment where both people could connect their systems of record like their Salesforce, and, you know, define these matching lists that were relevant to them, like, these are my customers, these are my prospects, and actually be able to draw those Venn diagrams and get the answers at the other end, while having confidence that all the other underlying data is kept private and secure to both sides. And that’s what crossbeam is. So we came to market in January of 2019. So really, we’re coming up on our two year anniversary here. And at this point, we’ve got about 1800 companies that are now using the platform, dozens of large publicly traded businesses, mostly in SAS and technology verticals, and you know, the partner ecosystems that surround them now on boarded, and it’s just really exciting to see that network graph grow. And, you know, we’re kind of becoming like the LinkedIn for data and helping facilitate a lot of collaboration and co selling and account mapping that just wasn’t possible before. So it’s, it’s been a great ride.

Vince Menzione 6:49
It sounds it. And you know, one thing from a clarification perspective, because you know, I’ve had Jay McBain on, in fact, talks about this and credible ecosystem, we’re seeing solutions that are available out there. What is cross beam? And what is it not?

Bob Moore 7:04
That’s a great, great question. Because I think, in general partner technology as a category, with all due respect to the excellent companies that are out there, and it’s kind of paved the way, it has been a little bit of a stale category over the last decade or so where, you know, you’ve got a category of technology out there that could kind of be classified as PRM, or partner relationship management platforms where they do a very particular set of things. And they do it very well. You know, if you’ve got a large channel, partner universe, and you need to manage things like marketing, through those partners, learning management for those partners, streamlining, onboarding, taking care of referrals, and incentives and things like that, doing lead registration through through people filling out forms, you know, these are the things that PRM does, but it’s a very kind of workflow centric and forms based approach to using technology to grow and manage partner ecosystems, it really I mean, the name management is right there in the name, right, the NPRM. And it is really about how to actually orchestrate the existence of these partner ecosystems, what we are doing is in a very different area, and it’s complimentary to those those PRM systems. Because we are kind of the data platform for partnerships, we are actually serving as more of a force multiplier for those partnerships that you already have by providing a way for you to build up and scale and measure the actual cross pollination of your customer sets and your leads in your sales pipelines. And to do that in a responsible and compliant kind of technologically modern, automated way. So while a PRM system can be a really valuable asset for, you know, the the management of that partner universe, and kind of the mechanics of how it works, you can think of crossbeam as being more the discovery and execution engine for actually doing the work of generating partner influence revenue. That’s that’s where we sit. I think another what we’re not distinction that’s really important is that we’re not a marketplace, and we’re not a co op. And what I mean by that is, every relationship that exists on crossbeam is a peer to peer double opt in relationship. These are partners that were already partners before they joined cross beam, they they were connected with one another, they understood that they had overlapping customer profiles. And just like, again, like LinkedIn for data, somebody sent an invite, and they mutually agreed that they want to partner and everything they do on cross beam between them is specific to them, you know that what data gets shared, under what circumstances and what workflows are enabled. Whereas compare that to say, a co op, where you’d have a situation where a whole bunch of people who maybe they know each other, and maybe they don’t all throw their data into one big pool, and it gets anonymized and aggregated, and you get some benchmarking data out or maybe you get your data enriched in some way by the collective knowledge of that group. We’re not that and we’re not in that business. And we’re also not a marketplace. What I mean by that is, we’re not where you go to randomly Horse trade your data, you don’t show up on cross beam and say, can you please connect me with a random company I haven’t met where we’re going to trade leads with each other. Because it seems like that’s a good idea, you know, that starts to get almost a little more into the, it almost feels more like an ad tech business or more like, you know, something where you’re trying to manifest value out of nothing, as opposed to enrich all the really hard work that these partner professionals are doing to build this partner infrastructure to begin with. And we are, at least in this phase of the business extremely focused on really being that network, as opposed to being a marketplace or Co Op.

Vince Menzione 10:37
So I’m a SAS software provider, and I’ve got a sales team. And I also have a technology relationship, a partnership with maybe somebody who has a complimentary solution. How would we organize and meet up together?

Bob Moore 10:50
Yeah, so this is, this is a great age old problem that we now sit very much in the in the middle of, because really, you know, when we talk about data sharing, it can, it can be kind of a scary term to throw around at the end of the day, the information that’s most valuable that people tend to want to know, when they’re collaborating with their partners, is not all the nitty gritty, intimate details of, you know, who do you know, at this company? And what’s their contact info? It’s actually, who at your company owns this relationship? And what’s the what’s the nature of that relationship that you have with them? And how can I actually facilitate getting my account executive connected to your account executive or getting my partner account manager connected to your partner account manager, so that we can facilitate getting a warm intro made or cross selling our products in some way or going to market together to sell our joint solution. And the motion that exists there in the old days was, and frankly, for most companies, it’s still the new days doing this, which is emailing a bunch of spreadsheets around the account mapping process was an exercise in, let me give you a giant list of all the companies we’re targeting and who the reps are on our side that own them. And you can compare that against who you’re targeting and your reps. And we’ll find some intersections using some fancy v lookups. And, you know, our best Excel jujitsu, and we’ll come out the other end with some action items. But the problem is, it’s really hard to do that matching and have it not missed a lot, it’s very hard to do that frequently and have the data not get stale. So people end up doing it once or twice a year, they end up missing a lot, there’s a lot of false positives, a lot of false negatives. In the cross beam world, you are connecting with a partner. And you’ve already set up your account in such a way where cross beam has this very rich data set that is pulled directly from your CRM that’s kind of been filtered down and qualified to, you know, just that list of whether its customers that you’re comfortable collaborating on with partners or its prospects that you’re hoping to get more information on. And that data stays up to date automatically over time as your dataset grows. And your partners have done the same exact thing. So what happens is in cross beam, you set up these reports that actually are literally Venn diagrams, let me draw a Venn diagram between my prospect list and all of the customers of all of my partners, or let me draw a Venn diagram between, you know, my account based marketing, target lists, and the prospects that are active opportunities for my two or three key partners out there. And when a new hit happens in the middle of that list, you can set up alerts, you can set up automations. So that whether you’re logging into the crossbeam interface, or you’re consuming that data back in Salesforce, or some companies even push it to their snowflake, data warehouse and feed it into their business intelligence tools, in any of those circumstances, you’re never missing an opportunity to have your partner ecosystem influence a deal, push a deal forward source, a new opportunity, when that opportunity exists. The mechanism of cross beam automatically detecting these matches and routing, that data to the right places is the key thing that sits in the middle. And it’s so fundamentally different than how people would do it in the past.

Vince Menzione 13:57
I love what you had to say here and this whole Venn diagram, I’m also starting to see kind of a triangulation, if you will, right there multiple partners involved, the customer is making decisions across maybe two or three partners. Or maybe there is a channel strategy that includes maybe a transactional partner, an influence partner, and maybe a delivery partner. Does your solution allow those multiple organizations to collaborate together?

Bob Moore 14:24
Yeah, this is this is where it gets really fun. Because you know, even though every individual relationship is kind of this point to point relationship that you have on crossbeam, at the end of the day, after you’ve made a lot of those relationships real and kind of established those partnerships in our platform, you don’t just have a bunch of singular relationships, you have an ecosystem surrounding you. And you can go in and build out these reports instead of these notifications and automations not just based on singular overlaps, but based on a Venn diagram that has multiple components, and it’s so Relevant increasingly, these days, because what you said is exactly right that the maturity of the API economy has deconstructed the stack in so many industries. I mean, even if you look at the business intelligence industry where RJ metrics, my first company was based, you know, we started that company in oh eight. And we were all bundled up in one product, a data warehouse, a data, pipelining ETL products, we were a dashboarding and visualization product, we were a data transformation product. And we had a bunch of competition like companies like good data and burst and others that were the exact same. And fast forward to today, that whole product category is gone, because it’s been deconstructed into a bunch of different categories. Now, if you want to buy a data warehouse, you just buy a data warehouse that’s its own product, you pick, you know, snowflake, or Amazon redshift, or Google BigQuery, or the Microsoft Azure offering, you know, if you want a data pipelining product, you pick stitch, you pick five trends, your pick metallian, if you want data transformation, you can spin up DBT. You know, if you want a visualization platform, you can go by Looker, or Tableau or any of the offerings in that space. So what was once one category is now four, well, here’s the problem. If I just as a buyer, just want some charts and dashboards, I want business intelligence, now I have to go buy four products, they’re going to be great products, and they’re going to be you know, best in class at what they do. And there’s a reason that stack got deconstructed. But not only do I need to make these for purchases, I probably need some kind of system integrator or other party that’s an expert on how to tie them together to make my experience as seamless as possible. And you see this all over the place. You see it in marketing and marketing automation, you see it in sales enablement and the ecosystem surrounding CRM platform. So buying best in class technology, and building out best in class offerings, has gone from being the realm of a very verticalized buyer to a very horizontal ops persona, that stitching all this stuff together. And what comes with that is a complete revolution in the partnership space, because partnerships with system integrators and third parties become more important than ever, because there’s more attaching of these products that needs to happen. But even more importantly, the density of partnerships between SAS providers becomes higher than ever, because they’re all interdependent on each other. The the partnerships that exist, our data partnerships, their integration partnerships, and, you know, it will be very, very hard for snowflake to sell its data warehouse, if it couldn’t demo the power of the data warehouse by plopping Looker on top of it, and giving that as an example, or I guess Looker is part of GCP. Now, so I should say, you know, BigQuery, with Looker on top of it. But this is a pattern that you see over and over. And it gets back to your question because the this interconnectedness where you have multiple partners involved, it’s not an anomaly or an edge case, at this point, it’s actually the norm, and being able to look at a single prospect that you have through the lens of not just does this one partner of mine have a relationship? But what are all the different partners I have that represent all the different pieces of the stack and the services experience that are going to be required for me to win this deal? What is their? What’s the fabric of their relationships with this company? And who are the ones I should be working with? Based on that? And without crossbeam? it’s virtually impossible? To answer that question accurately, you’re, you’re just sticking your finger into the wind.

Vince Menzione 18:16
I love how you’re solving for this area, because the complexity is enormous. As you as you point out these multiple solutions, multiple influence points, systems integrators that have to stitch together these these solutions for the whole product is as I refer to it for the customer. Now, who are some of the key customers that you have in market? And why did they select you?

Bob Moore 18:37
Yeah, so we’ve got, you know, I would classify our customers into three buckets, you know, one of them would be very large kind of supernode style publicly traded SAS Enterprise companies. And I would love to rattle those names off for you. If

Unknown Speaker 18:55
only it was that simple.

Bob Moore 18:57
I’d say at this point where you know, we’re now past the solid dozen of those. If you keep an eye on CrossFit calm, we’ll have some some really great, great case studies on those, if you check out our reviews on jeetu. You’ll see some some names there as well, if you want to go see some of the individuals that those companies who are excited about the work they’re doing with us. And then you’ve got this other category where it’s kind of the long tail of ISVs, or SaaS providers that exist in the mid market. So, you know, these tend to be your traditional pre IPO SAS companies that might be anywhere from 50 to 1000 employees, you know, five to $500 million in in ARR. And really, they’re they’re part of that fabric I was just talking about, they tend to be very densely interconnected with one another. And we’ve got companies there and that’s where if you go to the case studies on our website, for example, you’ll see a bunch of a bunch of names that are easy to rattle off folks like course and Dialpad and guru and keeping customer ringcentral send Dosso Uber flip and others where they’re part of the Modern, various versions of this modern best in class SAS stack, whether it’s in marketing element sales enablement, business intelligence and data analytics, you know, fulfillment and logistics. We’ve got companies now, in these very verticalized, SAS areas like learning management systems, HR technology, construction technology, we’ve got a big stronghold there, you know, these are all really interesting, exciting areas. And it’s so fun to see them interconnect with each other, like, you get a big horizontal player that serves all those verticals. And they become like a super node in the network graph that’s connected to all these different clusters that exists in these these various vertical areas. So it’s been really fun to watch that all grow out. And then the third bucket, I would say, is partners that are not the ISV or the SAS players, but that are actually in the in the value chain through services. So that would be system integrators. resellers, value added resellers, agency partners, large global system integrators that we’re seeing an increasing amount of penetration into in different verticals where they’re actually in the, they’re on the services side, but they’re in the partner ecosystems of many of these SaaS companies, particularly the larger ones. So those are the three big buckets. And I think they are, the universe needs to stay in balance with all of them using the platform because the super nodes become these big centers of gravity. And the mid market companies are the real kind of workhorses that are driving innovation and kind of the, you know, they’re the the glass chewing side of the Crossing the Chasm curve. And then the system integrators and the services folks are the longtail and there’s just an endless number of those businesses that are kind of the engine, the tip of the spear, when it comes to actually bringing this stuff to market.

Vince Menzione 21:39
I love your visualization. By the way, I’m kind of picturing it in my mind, right now I’ve got the hyper scalars the supernovas, I’ve got the vertical is Bs and horizontal ISVs. I’ve got the systems integrators also have influencers out there too. Right. So they’re all playing a role here. Sure, that’s

Bob Moore 21:56
a big deal. And I think that’s, you know, part of what we’re doing here is running a little bit of that category creation playbook that you’ve seen a lot of a lot of great companies that came before us do a great job of and, you know, it’s it’s a gift and a curse doing that, because the the gift is that you get to have a little more control over your own destiny in terms of how people see what you’re doing, and what the narrative is around that. But the curse is that you actually have to build it, it’s like, you’re you’re not just walking on a trail that exists, you’re also swinging the machete in front of you kind of chopping down the brush. And, you know, being able to work with influencers and thought leaders and hopefully fill some of the gaps. The vacuum that has existed in the partnership space around how modern SAS 2.0 technology can actually change the way that partner professionals do their jobs for the better. It’s been, you know, we’re really privileged to be able to help craft some of that story and hopefully, you know, create content that helps people in those roles be better at those roles.

Vince Menzione 22:52
It’s so great to see that the technology is there. I find that organizations, though still struggle making the transition, if you will, from the Kumbaya meeting, like we all got together the executive team, we did a quarterly review, we said this is the objectives, we’re going to go drive together. And then what I call where the rubber meets the road, the traction, the actual co selling the triangulation to go actually drive revenue and metrics together. Why do you think organizations get stuck during that? That step?

Bob Moore 23:21
Yeah. It’s a great question. We see this all the time. And I think I can give you our answer around how we how we tend to get people unstuck, because you can imagine if that problem you just described exists, cross beam is gone, cross beam is going to fail inside that organization, like it’s not going to take off. And I think one pattern that is very true, if you look at the businesses where crossing usage has just taken off is that if you just have executive leadership buy in and enthusiasm and you don’t capture the hearts and minds of the, you know, the individual contributors, the end users that are actually in the line of work inside of the business, you get a lot of these Kumbaya style meetings where you’ve got a press release and a handshake and a high five, and not a lot of enablement behind it, that is going to then push the actual doers inside of the company to create results in any kind of scalable, measurable way. And sometimes that press release is the goal. And there there can be these strategic styles of partnerships where there’s upside to that being kind of the the primary objective, but in reality, you’d always be better off if you’ve got some wood behind that arrow. And you can go actually translate it into attributable results for your business over the next, you know, multi year period, not just the moment of the press release. There’s this universe of scenarios where, you know, it’s very, very driven by the senior levels, but there’s not connectivity down to folks that are actually going to do the work of executing on that partnership after the fact. You’ve also got the flip side, which is situations where you have partner managers or other individual contributors in the partnership or who’ve been given a huge amount of autonomy, but really, really struggled to To get buy in from executive leadership around what they’re doing, and particularly in an area in an era where technology partnerships and technology enabled partnerships become more and more important, people that are in partner organizations that are put on an island are just destined to fail. Because it’s an inherently collaborative cross functional role, your entire job is to be a force multiplier for the entire rest of the revenue funnel, and often the product organization as well. But if you don’t have the executive buy in, that’s going to get you engineering resources, that’s going to get you staffing resources, that’s going to get you the dollars, you need to do partner marketing work and go to market work, you really are kind of left to scrap on on your own. And you get put in these circumstances where you know, it’s very, very, it’s very, very left on an island. And because of that, it’s much more likely to fail, it’s much harder to scale, it’s harder to create results, which perpetuates the problem because you don’t have reliable data to say, Hey, here’s why you should go invest in this partnership area, this is a really, really common pain point. So in in cross beam, we when when we can go above the line and below the line, when we are going into an organization. And we have a very clear exec sponsor who is really excited about what we’re doing. But frankly, more often than not, they don’t even have a login to the platform. Like they took a demo with a platform and they’ve seen it and they understand how it works. And they’ll talk to talk about it and you know, get on stage at their their partner day virtual events, or whatever, and talk about how you should partner on cross beam. And they’re the evangelizer. And they’re the ones that are able to make waves. And then we also have buy in from those folks that are actually the doers, the partner managers, the partner account managers, the partner marketers, that are using all of this information to go and take the results and turn it into a co selling motion that involves account executives, or turn it into a co marketing motion that pulls in the marketing team. That’s the key. So it’s a long winded answer to your question about solving it. But I think the interconnectivity between executive leadership, whether that’s on the partner team, or the revenue team that it rolls into, or whatever other team it rolls into, and the actual doers that exist there, in our experience has been the key and making these things really, really work well. And it’s shocking how often that’s not there. And we, we kind of become the fabric of how to make that connectivity actually exist and become real.

Vince Menzione 27:14
I was going to use the term connective tissue, but you beat me to it dead on? Yeah, I see it right, because this is a this is a challenge organizations don’t value partnerships, which is why the combined meeting, maybe it was, in fact, just make the announcement to just make a market statement. Yeah. But in many cases, they don’t take it down to the actual and they don’t understand it. But the the field people do they intuitively know that their success is around finding and stitching together a solution sets are having the right models of influence to drive success. And so it’s that connective tissue between the two.

Bob Moore 27:51
It’s really true. Yeah.

Vince Menzione 27:53
So what do you believe your areas for greatest growth are? Yeah, it’s,

Bob Moore 27:58
again, being in this category creation mode gives you some really exciting opportunities to look at growth on multiple dimensions at the same time. So you can think about, there’s probably the most exciting part of this business is the fact that it’s a network effects business, which is really rare in b2b SaaS. And, you know, initially, when we got started, it was like pushing the boulder uphill, because, you know, we should have never had a first customer, right, because it was the first person that signs up has nobody to partner with. So you know, we just our CFO, and I used to talk about it, like, we’re always landing two jumbo jets on the same runway at the same time in order to make a new sale, because we had to always get two companies to come on at once, so they could partner with each other. And we’ve gotten to a point now in the business where, for the most part, if you’re signing up for crossbeam, somebody in your partner ecosystem is already on there. And your ability to go on day one and have a fruitful experience where you’re connecting with someone and getting that data set up and seeing some real value is much, much higher. And it’s kind of changed the way that that, you know, we drive our onboarding, motion and our sales motion and everything else. And so when I think about growth, I think about the really just eliminating friction as much as possible from the natural organic network growth that happens in these businesses where it’s very network effects driven, we’ve done a lot to help facilitate that probably the most meaningful thing is that, you know, if you’re listening to this, and you’ve never used crossbeam, before and you go sign up for coffee today, chances are it’s going to be free for you. And it’s going to be free for you for a while. We have a really aggressive free tier that basically gives away the entire product where as long as you’re just using it to connect with partners and do account mapping and you know, get these reports about where there are intersections. All of that is is completely free for unlimited partners, unlimited data, unlimited users. It’s only when you want to start pushing data back into your systems of record like your Salesforce or your snowflake, or you know any of the companies that are in our technology partner ecosystem. That’s when you buy up or upgrade to an enterprise license. So what that’s done is made it so that companies just don’t need to worry about the commercial aspects of bringing their whole partner ecosystem onboard, you know, they can sign up and decide that they’re going to use cross stream and invite 100 partners on and say to those partners, this is totally free for you, you’re going to sign up, you’re going to connect your data, you’re going to be able to get all these great reports, you can connect with us, you don’t need to worry about paying a dime. And, you know, if those 100 companies later decide, oh, I want to invite my partner ecosystem on and I want to wire all this data back into my Salesforce and get it in the hands of my sales reps, yeah, they’ll become customers of ours, that’s, that’s our business model. But in that intermediate time, you know, we’ve been able to have the entire growth engine of this business be through low friction, network driven growth. And I think that’s going to continue to be our model. And what’s amazing is, when these things work, they grow exponentially. And that’s, that’s really what we’ve seen today. It’s just this compounding exponential effect, where, you know, it’s almost like a consumer business, we measure this thing called k factor, which is like the virality coefficient of for everybody that signs up, how many additional companies will sign up. And as long as you can keep that above one, the business will grow exponentially. And that’s we we watch it closely, we optimize for it, we do a lot of products work to make it hum and that’s that’s a big area. So I could talk all day about growth opportunities. You know, there’s, there’s ways of expanding use cases, expanding verticals, thinking about, you know, where this goes in the long term. But, you know, at this moment in time, I think that network effects are really the thing that we’re laser focused on. And it’s directly related to creating an amazing experience for our users, and not slowing them down.

Vince Menzione 31:35
I love the way you position it, you create this value proposition that allows people to come in and then see the value of the platform versus the other way around. Right? I’ve got to make this huge investment upfront. And then will I get the will I get my partners to sign up? Pull up? Well, this actually worked for me.

Bob Moore 31:50
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And, uh, it’s a it’s a breath of fresh air coming out of a few previous businesses where when you’re in a space that is not necessarily driven by network effects in that way. And it’s competitive with a lot of established other players. It’s, it’s a different playbook. It’s a different motion, like you can, you know, there’s there’s ways to win, but they’re not always correlated to creating an amazing user experience or creating as much value as you can. For the end users. It’s often, you know, relegated to sales tactics, or like being really, really sharp on go to market and marketing strategy. And we do all that stuff. We care a lot about it. But you know, product, lead growth is really the playbook here. And it’s so much fun to run a business that that has that as the primary driver.

Vince Menzione 32:36
And then you’re getting all the feedback from these users, right? Oh, I need it. I need this feature set, or I need this to be changed or tweaked. And yeah. Forming, forming your roadmap, right? I

Bob Moore 32:45
mean, yeah, it really does. I think that’s some, we’re certainly not operating in a vacuum, that’s for sure. With 1800 some odd companies. On now, there’s there’s no shortage of great customer feedback.

Vince Menzione 32:56
So Bob, we’re coming out of a year like no other. What did you see this past year that you didn’t expect to see?

Bob Moore 33:02
Honestly, growth? I think it’s, you know, it speaks to the incredible position of privilege that a lot of us that work in the SAS industry are in, particularly within, you know, sub verticals of SAS, that that haven’t been as directly impacted by by the pandemic. But, you know, it’s really a remarkable story to see, we see this in in the data, not just in the growth of our own business, obviously, but in the questions that we ask, in our annual State of the partner ecosystem report, where we just got these results back, we surveyed almost 200 partner professionals about their experience in the last year. And we can paired it to the same questions that we asked them a year ago. And what’s really remarkable is, you know, twice as many people saw their partnership teams grow in 2020, as opposed to solve their partnership teams shrink in that same amount of time, almost everybody has obviously gone to remote. But generally speaking, you know, people are still getting raises, salaries are still extremely competitive, people view themselves as actually being significantly more efficient and effective in their jobs in this new working mode, where, you know, the, the overhead of a commute has been cut out. And the introduction of flexibility for remote work has been introduced. And you can answer this question through a lot of different lenses. But since we’re here talking about partnerships, I think it’s worthwhile to kind of do the thought experiment of what does it mean, for the partnerships industry, when you can’t go to events anymore, and, you know, high five and backslap and, you know, sit down at a table or at a bar and hash out that next partnership or you know, put together the mechanics of how, you know, your your year of relationships is going to grow. And I think what it does is it really starts to force people into a mode of operation that is a lot more frankly, rational. It’s much more likely to be data driven. It’s much more likely to be process oriented. It’s much more work like that. To be tightly integrated from a workflow standpoint, and to other collaborators in their business, and there’s a certain level of discipline that gets forced on businesses, when they’re pushed out of being in the same physical environment and being able to take advantage of all those efficiencies, whether that’s internal to their company, or through events and whatnot, external to their partner relationships. So, you know, we’ve seen things, for example, like rep to rep co selling, just skyrocket in terms of how common it is, as a tactic being used at these companies, it’s almost 71%, in the report that we just got up from hovering around 60% in the previous year, and things like that are, in our view, only going to continue where the the best practices of how to spend your time doing this job are going to push their way into these more data driven, disciplined workflow oriented technology enabled versions of the work. And it’s going to be for the better, it’s going to lead to more success and growth and outputs measurable outputs from partner organizations, if anything, I think, you know, the, the pandemic has accelerated that by by forcing this framework of working remotely.

Vince Menzione 36:07
So I’d love to learn more about that data. How do I get my hands on it?

Bob Moore 36:11
Yeah, great question. So we, if you head over to our blog, which is just blog crossbeam.com, we will be releasing this state of the partner ecosystem report for 2021 at the tail end of January, January 21. So if you’re listening to this, and it’s after the end of January, you probably go find it, just Google it, frankly, state of the ecosystem report crossing 2021, you can go download it from our site, if you’re waiting for that date to come along, just sign up for our newsletter. It’s an awesome weekly kind of curated links in articles and partnership, insights and thought leadership from our content team, it’s, we’ve got over 10,000 subscribers on it now really high quality stuff, it’s not super sales, pitchy and we’ll be having a dedicated issue about the state of the partner ecosystem report when it comes out. So the blog, the newsletter, that’s, that’s where it’s at.

Vince Menzione 37:01
We’ll provide links for our listeners in our show notes. So this is great, this is great input, I can’t wait to get my hands on it myself. You know, it’s interesting, because I wrote a blog post in April, about, you know, where we were at that point, nobody knew. But I did say early on, there going to be winners and losers. And I still believe this, I fundamentally believe that the winners will be those organizations that learn that partnering is an accelerant to growth and to survival. In fact, so you, you’re hitting the nail on the head, you’ve got the data now to back it up, it’s really great to see the progress that’s happening in our technology industry.

Bob Moore 37:37
Yeah, and it’s, it’s logical, right? Like, if you’re building a structure, you want to have more more nodes and more edges on that graph, they kind of reinforce each other and create this certain durability, where, you know, being part of a fabric is much better than than kind of being your own thread. And even the biggest companies in the world have embraced this and embrace it aggressively. And more and more, we’re seeing that, you know, Marc Andreessen was right, that software was eating the world, but we make the argument that ecosystems are eating software. And really, there comes a point where your place in your partner ecosystem becomes as important or sometimes more important than the quality of your core software product to begin with. It’s about that connectivity, as much as it is about the core offer.

Vince Menzione 38:18
I love what you had to say there. You know, you know, I focus in on partnering as well, and we share this common bond here. What do you believe? What characteristics Do you believe make a great partnership?

Bob Moore 38:29
I think this gets down to like more of a human kind of therapy session kind of answer. But I do think as much as I am a huge data geek and believe in the importance of systems and workflows and processes. There’s a very, very real human factor there. And the the tenants that I think make for great operators and great teammates carry their way over to being great collaborators from a partnering standpoint. And to me, that’s a really high degree of intellectual honesty, you know, a willingness to take and receive feedback to evaluate situations and find the good and the bad to kind of have a certain level of empathy for other parties that you’re working with. And really to be smart about creating great communication and transparency about what’s expected, setting those expectations very early on. And then being diligent about not just executing on what you said you’re going to do, but measuring how it’s going and having when it’s going well asking that important question of like, Alright, great. How do we double down on this? Like, what does it look like to add a zero to the end of these numbers that we’re seeing, and when it’s not going well, really being able to face that head on and rather than kind of, you know, awkwardly doing your best Homer Simpson back into the bushes actually proactively saying is this working or not? If it’s not, maybe it’s better that we both focus our efforts elsewhere with other partnerships, or maybe there’s some very obvious thing that we can correct against and try to make this do better, but start For the somewhat humanistic answer, but I think that’s really true. I think if those pieces are absent, no amount of data and workflows is gonna is going to bridge that gap.

Vince Menzione 40:07
Yeah, it all comes down to that it comes down to the human element trust all of those things. And here’s the here’s the factor you mentioned, a lot of times, we never had that conversation we need to have, like, let’s go fix this or separate. It’s okay.

Bob Moore 40:21
Yeah, I think it’s, I think that’s so true. You know, you can extend that way beyond the world of partnerships. I think that’s true in people’s work in people’s lives. You know, it’s, it’s the great, the great human challenges, having those hard conversations when they need to happen.

Vince Menzione 40:33
That’s for sure. So you’ve had an amazing career, really terrific entrepreneurship. With, was there any really great advice you received Getting Started? Or when you start to cross beam? Yeah, I

Bob Moore 40:45
think the thing that it’s really easy to find good advice when you’re starting out and ignore it, or not really, like be in a position where you’re able to receive it. And when I look back on, look, the RJ metrics journey was was it was like my version of getting an MBA only it took me eight or nine years instead of two. It’s just like, kind of going through the trenches. And yes, we were able to get to an outcome that we were proud of. But, you know, Looker, which was one of our big competitors in the space sold to Google for I think it was $2.4 billion. Yeah, you know, we, our outcome for RJ metrics was a single digit percentage of that, you know, it’s just like, it sounds like a lot of dollars, when you say it alone, until you say, Oh, we really captured, you know, significantly less than 10% of the value created by the companies doing the same thing in our same vintage. So we went for I mean, we missed, we lost at the end of the day there. So when I look back on some of that, like, why what happened, I often think about the advice that we got in the early days and ways that we could have maybe actualized that a little better. And I do think there’s a lot to the idea of having a very well crystallized mission, vision and values at a very early stage inside of the business that you’re building. I always thought of mission vision values work as being kind of like, you know, big corporate speak, where you get these very shallow outputs that either sound like they were written by committee or sound like they were made up on Sesame Street. Like it’s, it’s which end of the terrible spectrum Do you want to be on in terms of, you know, how uninspiring these things are? And it’s true in a lot of cases, that’s what they look like. But I think the thing that’s so fundamentally different about crossbeam, is that when we started this company, we knew what we wanted to build, like we knew who the users were, what their pain points were, we empathize tremendously with them. We had a sense for where this was going, and what we wanted this product to look like, you know, three, four, or five plus years down the road. And what the space was that we need to surround this product and the narrative that we need to surround its emergence in order for it to be successful. Contrast that with RJ metrics were literally our mission statement at RJ metrics was data driven decisions are better decisions. Now, that’s a great mantra. And I still believe that to this day, but what does that tell you about the market? You’re going into? What does it tell you about the product that you need to build? it? Really what it does is it gives you a license to say yes to everything, like every idea that sounds like it could be a good idea. And it’s anywhere adjacent to data, which is basically everything in her modern world, it kind of allows you to say, Oh, yes, this falls under the umbrella of what we’re doing in this business. And I think the great failing of RJ metrics was that we tried to be everything for everybody. I think we ended up being a little bit more of like a services company masquerading as a software company than an actually centrally focused, vision based company that was excellent at a specific thing, as opposed to, you know, being something that served the need for a very, very wide universe of use cases. We were too generic a product. And that’s, I got that advice. And those early days, you know, plenty of people you can listen to, you know, you can listen to podcasts like this one that are probably eight years old, where you got great early innovators talking about the importance of vision and empathy for customers. And we heard those words, but I don’t think it fit into our worldview, frankly, partly because we didn’t know how to do it well. And you know, this is where getting the, you know, getting your reps in and being a repeat entrepreneur, why venture capital firms tend to be very, very aggressive in backing folks that have done it before whether they failed or succeeded. Because you kind of have to see it and experience it to come out the other end and be able to internalize that advice and and actualize it. And I think the people that are amazing entrepreneurs at their core, which I don’t consider myself to be that I think I’m one that’s like, built up a Frankenstein entrepreneur that’s like turned into being decent at it over time. But some people come right out of the gate and start a company at 22 and knock it out of the park. And I think those are the people that kind of have that inherent ability to crystallize that vision greatly empathize with who their end users are, basically end up with a big meaningful company as a result.

Vince Menzione 44:57
Yeah, you brought up a really good point around vision crystallizing the vision. I believe that partnerships start there, too, I have a fundamental belief that when you’re having that Kumbaya meeting in order to make the translation that in fact, you have a big bold vision for where you want to take this thing.

Bob Moore 45:13
Absolutely true, it echoes its way into how anybody might approach any any part of their job, and particularly people that have the responsibility of creating something new, which is very often, it’s something that I think it’s somewhat maybe unique to the partnerships world where if you’re pursuing a career in sales, you know, the average sales team that you join at a emerging high growth company, you know, might have 20 people on it, it might have 100 people on it, if you’re joining a partnerships team, there’s a pretty good chance, you’re going to be the first hire at a company of that similar stage. And if you’re not the first hire, you’re going to be part of, you know, the, the crew of the first five, and you’re going to have a disproportionate amount of ownership and responsibility. And I think that makes you, you know, a proverbial intrapreneur in a way where you have a very important mandate to create something that’s not necessarily just going through the motions that have been established by the people that came before you in that role. We have way more creators and intrapreneurs, you know, per capita in the partnership industry than we have in in other parts of the org chart. And for exactly that reason, it’s what you say is incredibly true, which is the entrepreneurs mindset, the willingness to think from a long term planning perspective, and, you know, curate a mission vision and a set of values around what you’re doing, I think it’d be a really great guiding light to, you know, not losing focus on what you’re doing, and hopefully creating a really valuable long term outcome,

Vince Menzione 46:38
some great advice for anybody in our business, really, really love what you have to say, here, Bob. So Bob, if you had a personal billboard, this is a metaphor, actually, for a message you’d like to send out to the world? What would you share it?

Bob Moore 46:52
Oh, I gotta think of something catchy. I know, a phrase I’ve always loved, it was like, really dates me back to my age, and when I went to high school, is keep it real. People used to say that all the time. Yeah. And there’s, I also used to say that all the time, and still kind of thinking a lot in that, you know, going back to all those human aspects we were talking about before, and, frankly, to all of the ways in which data is available to actually, you know, give some real teeth to the arguments that you make, or the strategies that you pursue. There’s this, this duality that I think exists across all dimensions of, you know, work in our modern industry, where there’s kind of the real stuff. And then there’s the vanity stuff. And you can see it in the, you know, a classic example is is like actionable metrics versus vanity metrics, what are the numbers that you can look at that will actually tell you how to do your job differently, or whether or not things are going well, as opposed to the version of the chart that’s going up and to the right, that the first time founder will ravenously look for in their data and then drop into their VC pitch deck, like, there’s a big difference between what’s real and what’s not real there. But then you look at it through the partnerships lens, and you get the same thing, you were just talking about those PR driven handshake, high five style partnerships that don’t go anywhere, versus the ones where it’s actually a real partnership, where people are creating these workflows and these outputs that are material to the businesses that they support, and that actually scale and that persist over long periods of time. There’s a difference between keeping it real and not keeping it real in that world. And you know, I could give a dozen more examples. But at the end of the day, I think, where you find your most real inner piece, and also where you find your best business outcomes is when you keep it real,

Vince Menzione 48:41
I love that keep it real. And you know, Bob, in this series, we’re focusing in on you know, what we expect to see in 2021. So, any advice for partners as we start 2021, we leap into it? What advice would you give to our listeners to help them optimize for success?

Bob Moore 48:58
Keep it real. I think it really is kind of, you know, tying all back to that, I

would say, embrace the fact that really, really important change is happening under our feet right now in the partnerships world. And that changes not just because products like cross beam exist, and you can start to, you know, take action on these relationships in ways you couldn’t before and scale them in ways you couldn’t before. It’s bigger than that. It’s way bigger than that, because the change that’s happening is actually sitting outside of the partnerships realm and sitting in the realm of how products get built and interconnectivity between companies takes form in the very first place. And what what’s powering that is the maturity of the API economy, intersected with the mass universal adoption of cloud software, even by the biggest slowing moving businesses in the world. This idea of digital transformation. That’s kind of the key, you know, buzzword if you like to read Gartner Forrester reports or look at what’s happening inside of the world’s largest companies. underpinning that is how to We get our data into the cloud, how do we use these modern technology platforms that create a more effective mobile workforce. And that’s happening in basically every single company out there, you know that that’s got any kind of heft to it in the b2b and b2c focused world. So combine these two things, right? Thing number one, every company in the world has their most important data sitting on systems of record that are connected to the cloud in some way. And then part two, the API economy has made it so that all those systems of record that are connected to the cloud, have ways to programmatically get data out and get data in in an easier fashion than ever. That means that data is reaching a point where it is truly at its most portable. And it’s version that best supports API development and integration, technical integration, development between products. And that means that the fabric of partnerships, and the fabric of services that get provided on top of those partnerships has never been denser or richer, and that trend is continuing exponentially. And the relevancy of that to the biggest companies in the world with the biggest balance sheets, and the most dollars is growing exponentially in tandem with it. So what’s happening out there in the partner world is is truly I think, in the early innings still, but it’s going to move really, really rapidly. And we’re going to continue to see an increased focus on the work that gets done in these spaces and the impact and influence that it can have over how businesses grow. I think my advice to partner folks is to just like change the aperture of your lens. If you’re sitting in a world thinking about, you know, just the tactics of how to optimize against that, that existing partnership, that’s great, and you can do more. But I think you can also try to be optimizing for a world where again, you’re adding a zero or two zeros to the end of the things you’re doing, whether it’s how big your team is, how much a percentage of the company’s revenue influence, the dollars of revenue influence, these things all end up being touched in a really important way by these tailwinds that are going on out there in the market. And we’re only at the beginning of it. It’s it’s going to be a rip roaring couple of years here in partnerships.

Vince Menzione 52:03
I think it’s going to be extremely exciting times I talk about this as fact, we’re gonna come out of this time, I believe in it’s a renaissance that we’re going to see we’re seeing it now like the hyper focus we’ve had to have because we’ve all been working remote. I think we’re gonna come out of this time better than before. What do you think?

Bob Moore 52:19
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think every everything I just said layer on the accelerator that is remote work on top of that, and it only gets gets more exciting. Couldn’t agree more. Bob,

Vince Menzione 52:30
I want to thank you so much for making time to join us. It’s been a real pleasure to have you on the Ultimate Guide to partnering. Thank you so much for joining today. Vince, great to be here and hope to do it again sometime.

Unknown Speaker 52:39
Thanks again for having me.

Vince Menzione 52:41
Absolutely. We’re gonna come back with maybe mid year predictions. We’ll talk again,

Bob Moore 52:44
we can see everything I was wrong about six months from now.

Vince Menzione 52:48
I doubt it. 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 Vince m at ultimate dash partnerships.com this episode of the podcast is sponsored by ultimate partnerships. Ultimate partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships, get partnerships right, optimize for success, deliver results. For more information, go to ultimate dash partnerships.com 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 slash Ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering

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