Partnership ANNOUNCEMENT: Zero-to-Pipeline in 60 Days with Alex Buckles

You need more Pipeline. I need more Pipeline. Everyone needs more Pipeline. But let's be real, cold outbound is just brutal right now. Conversion ratios are getting crushed, budgets are getting slashed, and the numbers just aren't there. That's why I've partnered with Forecastable to run a free zero-to-pipeline-in-60-days cohort. It's a tactical program where they'll show you exactly how to generate warm, qualified leads using the network you already have. Now, we're kicking this off live on February 20th, and you must attend or watch it on demand to be included when the cohort starts on March 4th. Go to forecastable.com to sign up at the top of their homepage. If you're a sales rep, bring your accounts and get Pipeline in 60 days.

That's their promise. If you're a sales leader or in the C-suite, they've got special cohorts just for you, so you can see what's working as your reps do it in real time. Let's make it happen. I'll see you there. Warm relationships are a real thing. If you can get somebody that already knows that target account and already has a trusted relationship to refer you in, you show up with credibility. You show up with a little bit of trust in the door. You know, it takes only a couple of referrals to open up an opportunity. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us.

And today's conversation is with Alex Buckles. Now, if you've been paying attention, Alex was on the podcast probably about, I don't know, five or six episodes ago. And this is the first time I brought somebody back so quick. And the reason is, is because after I saw what Alex does in the ecosystem of partners and how they generate referrals for individual reps and sales teams, I'm looking at investing in this as part of my own strategy for JD Sales. And we're also doing a webinar with this cohort that we're putting together for free to help anybody, individual reps or leadership, enable their partner ecosystem and start getting leads within 60 days. So we're going to kick this off on the 20th of February.

You're going to want to join this live event. All right. The show notes will have all the details as far as where you can sign up, but you're going to want to join this one. And it was an awesome conversation because this, we got super tactical and some things that you can do to set the stage for what that webinar is going to be. So join us. This is a different way of driving revenue and it will differentiate you. I promise. Let's make it happen. Alex Buckles, what's going on, man? Welcome back to the Make It Happen Monday podcast. How are you doing, my friend? Doing excellent. Thanks for having me, John. Yeah, thanks for coming. This is actually, I was thinking about out of, I think I've done upwards around 300 episodes right now.

And I think this is the first one where we've had the, I've had the guests back after such a short period of time, right? Because we did this maybe a couple of months ago, probably about six or seven ago. And I wanted to explain to the audience why. It's because, first of all, I sat through your presentation from a partnership standpoint of what you could do for JD Sales. And I, you know, as you were mapping it out to kind of show, hey, this is what we show clients. I was like, holy shit, okay. So when can we get started on this? Because it was almost, to me, a no-brainer. And I even said that to Megan, my CLO. I was like, hey, Megan, could you put your eyes on this? Because I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything here as far as this partner ecosystem and them managing it for me.

And because of that, you know, we kind of doubled down on partnership between us and really moving towards empowering sales reps on super tactical things that they can do to enact their own partner ecosystem. And we got some cool things coming up here that we're going to work on together in Zero to Pipeline and 60 Days Kickoff that we'll talk about. But the purpose of this episode for the podcast is to get really, really tactical to show both, you know, individual reps, managers, and leadership what they can do today without any, you know, additional spend, without any additional resources, how they can start to look at another channel outside of just pure outbound right now, which is just getting its ass kicked across the board.

So is that a good setup for the conversation today, Alex? Perfect setup. Let's do it. All right. So with this, you know, for everybody listening, we'll give you all the details of the 60 Days to Pipeline or Zero to Pipeline here coming up in the event that we're going to do here. But we talked last time on the podcast about my whole philosophy has always been, you know, looking at lead generation as different types of channels, right? The main thing, and I start all my trainings off with know your sales equation, right? So we understand what are our conversion metrics. And the big key that I always have people focus on is the meeting, like qualified meetings. Like how many qualified meetings do you need to set on a monthly basis to generate the amount of proposals to generate the amount of closed business?

And once you understand that core qualified meeting component, now you can back out and start to say, okay, well, what channels can I leverage to generate those qualified meetings? Obviously, one of them is outbound, cold calls, emails, and everything else. But as we all know, that is just getting absolutely destroyed right now. There's not one company that I work with that is up and to the right when it comes to results related to outbound right now. So the partner channel is one of them, right? There's inbounds, you know, those type of things, SEO and everything. But then there's the partner channel. And I think a lot of people punt that to their partner channel manager or waiting for their company to, you know, implement some type of partner ecosystem that'll drive leads.

But it's me as a rep, I'm kind of like, yeah, okay, wherever the leads come from, I don't care. This is about empowering that rep who wants to, I want to say future-proof their career, but put a stone in that building block of future-proofing their career. How does an individual rep take these steps right now to start to build out their own ecosystem? And by the way, ideally, that's portable with them. So when they go to the next company and the next company, they're not having to reinvent the wheel every single time. So walk us through a little bit of like, where do I start, Alex? And then what are the steps and tactical things that I can do today to start generating pipeline from a non-existent partner channel?

Because I haven't thought about that yet. Sure. Let's go through each of those. So one, I would start out with the first thing you need to do today is just a mindset shift. It's like, you know, the first mindset shift is realizing that, you know, when I'm staring at my target account list or my territory or whatever it is, and I'm about to go and I'm ready to go work my accounts and do some account development work, I have a choice in that moment. I have a choice to go in and go in cold like I'm used to doing, or I can go in warm. And what does going in warm mean? And there's a lot of buzzwords out there, like warm outbound versus not. But at the end of the day, like warm relationships are a real thing.

And at the end of the day, like it's, you know, if you can get somebody that already knows that target account and already has a trusted relationship to refer you in, then you show up with credibility, you show up with a little bit of trust in the door. And, you know, it takes only a couple of referrals to open up an opportunity versus how many cold calls, you know, to open up an opportunity. And so, you know, when I'm looking at a target account list of 100, 100 accounts, the very first thing I should do is think, okay, where can I get warm points of entry first, instead of always just going in the cold? So first step, default, how do you go warm? And so on that point, right, because I think that and what I want to preemptively address here is the lazy ass attempt to going in warm, right?

Because I will tell you right now, nothing pisses me off more than some rep on LinkedIn, who probably connected with me 10 years ago, 15 years ago, saying, hey, John, I, you know, doing a piece of shit, lazy ass email or in mail that says, hey, John, I see you one connected to Alex. Could you make the introduction for me? Nine times out of 10, I'm not even going to respond to that. But if I do, I'll be like, first of all, who are you? I probably don't know who you are. And second of all, I probably don't really know the person well enough. But the more important thing for me is I don't know you well enough to put my name on you. Because when you're asking somebody for a referral, you're basically asking them to put their reputation on the line to say, I vouch for this person.

That's why, by the way, I've gotten out of the recruiting and hiring business because I've been burned so many times of, oh, yeah, you know what, this company, you should go check them out. Or, hey, you know, this guy is looking for a job. Could you talk to him? I don't know these people well enough to really know if it's a good company to work for or really know if it's a good person. It's the same thing on LinkedIn. So how do we avoid the lazy ass approach to warm entries, which are like, you know, writing for your CEO to do some generic thing or you reaching out generic way? How do we address that? So that comes down to quality of outreach. So think about it. I think it's really no different than thinking about quality sequence or, you know, that you're putting together for a cold outbound.

It's like there's personalization and there's relevance, right? In my mind, and I'm not an outbound SCR expert, but I think about personalization and relevance. And at the end of the day, relevance is more important than personalization, in our mind. And so when you're, let's say you find a, let's say you're selling a SaaS product and you're doing an analysis and you see that this target account has a, you see that you're one of your partners is a services company and they already have them as a customer. And so you want to get a warm introduction from that, you know, that, that services company already has like that trusted relationship and they're probably already advising that customer on whatever it is they're doing every day.

They're running a managed service. And so I want to go to that managed service company. I want to ask for two things. It may not just be an intro. Am I asking for, am I, I'm either asking for intelligence or I'm asking for an introduction. And so the first thing I want to go into is go in and don't just come in guns a blazing asking for handouts, like ensure like there's a two way street and sure you're not just going and asking for, for, for just, just you and that you're adding some extra value in return. But in general, they're like, you want to start out by making that relevant ask. Okay, well, so you have as a customer, are they doing any work right now that's related to the work that, that, that my product solves for?

And if that's the case, then you should go in there with a story. Hey, Sally, it looks like you guys are already running the services in the account. And here in my organization, obviously we're partners here. It looks like the marketing manager over at account A is showing some interest and some intent around our product. And I, you know, what do you think? What's going on right now? Is this a good fit for them? Are there other stakeholders that I should be chatting with? What's the lay of the land? Like, and is there anything that I can do for you on my side? Any accounts you'd like some information on anything I can do for you? Like, that's a good way to go in with a very specific ask. While also giving the context behind your ask as to why you're doing it.

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Now let's get back to the conversation. Yeah, I think it's always, you know, that giver's gain mentality has always been driven into the early days of... That's why I think it's important for reps to... Yes, you got your 100 accounts. Yes, you can look at the partner ecosystem. But, you know, also looking at what the client might need. So forget about what you're trying. Like you're trying to get into that 100 accounts. You want that referral in there so you can sell them something. But also like for the personas and the people that you talk to, what do they need? What do they typically need outside of your solution? And what are the services and solutions that augment support or are somehow related to your solution?

So that you can go in and, you know, lead with value from a partner standpoint and say, Hey, you know, I work with clients that fit your profile at the time. You know, a lot of times they're asking me for solutions like what you provide. You know, would you be open to a relationship where when I find that need, I bring you all in and can I have a direct connection there? And then by the way, it just happens, you know, if you ever come across somebody. So do you lead with like, what's your tact or approach on leading with like walking in the door with something, right? To say, Hey, I want to do this for you for my clients versus, Hey, we both fit some similar profiles. And I was looking at if you can make some intros for me.

And by the way, I'll make some intros for you. And I want to get like tactical as it relates to how you even present that. So people aren't tripping over themselves thinking that, you know, a lot of people give with an expectation of getting in return. And, and I think that's the false narrative that I want to avoid here. I want to focus on like my clients needs, what I got. And if I can find somebody that can bring value to that, awesome. And my secondary benefit is I'm actually going to be able to hopefully get some referrals in. Absolutely. So the right mentality is to give first. So what I tend to do is I tend to always give first. So like at the end of the day, like if I'm looking at, let's say we're, we're looking at a single partner.

So I'm, again, I'm a tech company and let's say I'm, I'm doing business with a services company. And I see they, I pull up, you know, some data, say I'm using cross beam to check, to check account data. And I see that this services partner has five of my target accounts listed as customers. It's like, obviously they have a lot that they can give me. And so I know that if I build a really warm relationship with that account and they trust me, like my potential there is like pretty, it's pretty steep. But five accounts is like no joke, especially if they've got good relationships. So the next thing that I'll do is I'll look and say, okay, well, who else within my organization has accounts or where do we have customers right now that would be on their target account list?

And when I show up to the door, knowing that there's five target accounts I want to get to, I want to show up the door and say, Hey, you know what? Here's three accounts where we can intro you, or how about you give me your target account list? Let me go find you a customer intro first, and then let's have a conversation about what I need. But how I like to start out my relationship is always by giving first. And even if you don't give back, they typically feel obligated and reciprocate. Totally. What are your thoughts on like, you know, and I know this is a little bit more involved and it's tough because, and if you could maybe throw out some other resources to help me understand. And maybe it's just their website, right?

Of like, who are they working with and that type of stuff. But, you know, going into, and actually, you know, so say you find out that five of your existing accounts are using said vendor X, right? What are your thoughts, even as an AE or even as an SDR, quite frankly, not a CS or an AM, and going and actually talking to those accounts and being like, Hey, can I just ask you like, how are you using X and what do you think? And almost doing some kind of secret buyer stuff, right? So you can bring that data back to that company and be like, look, I've actually interviewed five clients. And either it's awesome because you're crushing it across the board, everybody loves you, or just want to give you a heads up.

There's a couple of like red flags here that you might want to address. And I just wanted to bring you that insights because these might be churned. You know what I mean? Is that too much of asking or is that something that you would recommend doing? No, there's the one with partner data. There's all kinds of plays you can run that may not like be all attractive to the sales audience here, but there's a couple of different things you can run. So one, what she's brought up is like churn reduction and expansion too. Like all the time, it's like if especially larger SaaS companies, they know that the more integrations they have into partners, the less likely they are to churn because it's harder to rip and replace, right?

Because I've got 10 integrations in here. So like I'm less likely to rip out my CRM system. And so going in and identifying like, hey, we've got all these integrations with one partner and things aren't going so well. Like being proactive with their team and saying that and giving them the feedback of what's happening in the field goes a really long way in the relationship. And so I'd highly encourage that for sure. Cool. And I correlate that to, you know, SDRs out there listening and they ease. Like one of the things as a leader, you know, is, you know, I'm usually so far removed from the front line, you know, in these bigger organizations that, you know, maybe we do a survey to our customer and that type of stuff.

But man, when I'm hearing from the front line reps of what the, you know, what data they're collecting and what the sentiment is out there, that to me is worth its weight in gold. So it's almost like if I'm an SDR or an AD, I'm also going into data collection mode about my own company. And just like, like, okay, I'm doing a little mini survey here. I'm not going to send it to people, but in the back of my head, I'm going to be asking these questions. And eventually at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, I'm going to bring that up to leadership and be like, Hey, I've been talking to our clients. I've been talking to this. This is the data set I've noticed here. And if you do that from an, I mean, shit, you want an executive to start paying attention to you, go ahead and do that and bring me some insights into my client base that I don't know.

Same thing with partners, right? If you're bringing a partner, some insights into stuff that they're not paying attention to, and it's red flags or whatever, or even green flags, right? Like he doing this stuff and here's your profile based on this. Here's like the profile that I saw of your client base, which is an interesting one, right? Because it might be different than what they see. Yes. And another thing there on that front is like, if you're a services company or if you're a SaaS company who has, you're selling SaaS and you've got installed base and you probably have a bunch of customers that are being managed by services partners. And I always liked having partners in my deals as a seller, even before I got into this business, because I felt like, like, yeah, I can go bring in our own professional services.

But at the end of the day, like they're in, they're going to come in, they're going to do what they need to do. They're going to walk away and move on to the next client. Whereas a services partner, like they feel like they have to keep, that keeps their lights on. Like if they don't serve your customer well, they go out of business, right? And like they pay their bills with that revenue. And so when I was running the revenue function at my last services company, the way that I did it with, you know, we were partnering with Adobe at the time. And so, and so the way that I did it was I went to the, all the customer success managers at Adobe and to the AEs, I'm talking to like the specialist AEs, the named account managers, you know, that owned entire large accounts.

I said, Hey guys, like we're in this law, these five large enterprise accounts right now. We're going to be your eyes and ears. And on a regular basis, I'm going to tell you when there's new stakeholders. I'm going to tell you when they're buying new technology. I'm going to tell you when they're showing interest in other products that you guys have. And by us kind of being their eyes and ears and being a great partner in the field, all the deal flow that we got back from them saying, Hey, by the way, we've got these other three customers over here and we would love to, for you to be the eyes and ears for them too. Like that's, that's a way to give and it's a lot got a longer tail, but the get is really, really big.

And I, so I think, so let's back up, right? So walking through this process, understanding your ideal customer profile, right? And getting as detailed as you can on that. And one of the things that you look for is integrations, right? With other tech. So here's an easy way for any rep. And by the way, people who have listened to my training will know this is, is fits right in because you get super nuanced on your ICP. And then you look at the integrations, right? Not competitors, competitors, a different story. I still think you should have partnerships with your competitors, especially when there's gaps in your offering and it's better to refer one of them, but that's a different story. But with partners, right?

So you look at your tech staff and you say, okay, for me, if you're using Gong, Apollo, Vineyard, you know, you name it, like any of the sales engagement tools, that's great for me, right? Well, now I look and hunt for that stuff. And when I start to see commonalities where a group of my clients are using Apollo or a group of my clients are using Outreach or whatever it is, that's kind of a trigger for me to say, maybe just maybe I should reach out to the Apollo team. Maybe just maybe I should reach out to these teams and see if I can set up this conversation where we can talk about, hey, I got a couple of clients that we can work on together. Would you help anybody else? So now that I've identified that, right?

So I've identified the tech stack where I can probably have some partners that I could go after. I then potentially reach out to them to say, hey, I got some intel for you. Would you mind setting up a relationship? What's the relationship look like? Like, what is the structure of our, like, so say, Alex, I reach out to you and be like, Alex, a lot of clients overlap here, man. I got some things, I've done some due diligence. These clients are a little bit iffy. These are great. You know, that type of thing. Moving forward, I'd love to refer you. Would you happen to know anybody, right? So that conversation happens. It's cordial. We have a good agreement. Where does it go from there? That's a really interesting topic.

So they can go one of two ways. Well, it's usually not a fun situation. Usually everybody kind of gets in and let's say you follow all the things I teach you here and you have the right conversation. You pair the questions. You promise this ongoing thing. You're like, hey, we got a bunch of customers too that you could use. But like, you know, I just need help in this one thing right now. And you go get that help. And then you never talk to that person again. That is like 95% of partnerships, by the way. Exactly. That's exactly how it happens, right? And so like, you know, the original question is how do you manage this on an ongoing basis? And so in general, like if you're a small company, if you work for a small company and you're a rep that kind of owns, you know, global territory and you can kind of sell anything everywhere and you're strapped for resources, like staying in touch with that rep and making sure you actually deliver on those things and stay in touch on a regular basis and, you know, set a communication plan to stay in touch with them quarterly or monthly and make sure it's not always just asking for handouts.

You're like, hey, can I help you with anything? Can I provide you with this? Oh, by the way, we released this new thing lately that you can probably use in these other accounts, you know, or like give them assets, like find ways to add value. But in general, like what we do in our practice every day is that like most reps aren't the ones that are staying in touch with individual reps. Like what we're encouraging is that actually most companies do this for their reps. Why? Because if I go, let's say, you know, uh, John, you and I are both reps in the field and I go to you, John, I'm like, Hey, you know, I got this thing. I can help you out with, I got it. We have a bunch of customers you need.

I need this one thing. Can you help me out right now? And you help me out. But at the end of the day, you have maybe another 50 accounts in your list that met to probably 10 of my colleagues. So the addressable market for my relationship and your relationship is actually really small because it's only the five named accounts we have in common. All the other accounts you have will go untouched because I only care about the five accounts that we have in overlap. So I tell you that because like, if you're a one-off rep, yes, stay in touch with the rep, make sure you deliver and like try to add value as much as you can. But at the end of the day, your company should be doing a lot of this work for you and saying, Hey, here's the accounts where we got to overlap.

What is my company doing for me to make sure that we're staying in touch with these teams and exchanging value? And that's why our service even got created to begin with, because I knew that nobody was doing the in-between work. And so we said, Hey, let's go build a business around doing the in-between work. And I think that's the challenge that I see, right? Is that you either have most organizations either have an extremely robust partner channel with layers of management and leadership and a process associated with it, that that is their job. So they're basically doing you what you're doing for the large organization themselves. And they got, you know, they got experience doing it or it's, it's nothing.

And, and it's, and it relies on the rep, right? And I just remember, you know, I don't know, maybe, maybe I was a little bit ahead of my time, but it just made sense to me to say like this cold call and stuff is, is not delivering what I needed to deliver, right? As far as the, the volume that I need, um, and that partner ecosystem to bring value to my audience. But what was crazy about that was that those relationships that I developed early, and I want to make sure that refs are listening to this all the way in the back, those relationships that I developed early in my career, like would be in business networking international and givers gain mentality and that type of stuff. I would go to those groups, I was at least involved in like three or four of them every single week, right?

Where I'd get up at six o'clock in the morning, go downtown Boston at seven o'clock in the morning and stand up and, you know, have these partner relationships where there were structured meetings. When the shit hit the fan, there's been three times in my career where the shit has hit the fan, okay? Like zero going from 6 million to zero, the economy's gone, all this other stuff. And my ability to go lean on that partner network, first of all, those are still, a lot of them are still friends to this day, like friends. And second of all, they'll do almost anything I need whenever I need it because they know that I focus so much early in my career on giving value to them that, yeah, it's one question away.

Yeah, John, what do you need? So can you talk a little bit about the long-term play here? Look, we're all looking for short-term leads. We're all looking for short-term stuff and we can map that out for you. And I think that's what we'll get into the zero to pipeline in 60 days thing is really all about. But there's the long-term play here of your career, of your friendships, of your partnerships, of your colleagues. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of that to have that bifocal view? Yes. So on that front, there's a couple of benefits. One, once you figure out how to do this stuff, it's not that hard. It's just a mindset shift and a couple of tactics. But at the end of the day, it's relationship building and just not being selfish, right?

Let me just go make sure I'm also adding value and that's how you get it going. But once you kind of figure that out and you start getting into a rhythm doing this stuff, one, it'll change what jobs you take in the future. So when you get on that next interview and you're chatting with a VP of sales, you're going through it, and hopefully you're not just taking a bunch of questions and answering them. You're asking some questions back. And one of the questions you ask back is like, hey, are you guys relying solely on cold outbound? What are you guys doing in terms of partner source revenue? Which partners are actually driving deal flow for you and why? Is it services partners? Is it tech partners?

Help me understand what those cycles look like. Are you guys co-selling? Are we co-selling together on working deals and kind of closing them all like with the same close date? Or are partners referring business in and we're working it? Are they reselling it? Like I would get into all those weeds to find out like, is the organization you're going to actually have something for you to latch onto in terms of partnerships? Because if it does, even if they don't have their stuff together and they have no idea how to leverage that, you do, right? And so because you learned this today and the tactics that we're going to talk about here in a little bit, like because you learned this stuff today and you figured out how to do it, no matter how hard it is right now to get through over that initial hump and that mindset shift, every job from this point forward will leverage that skill and you'll be able to do things your colleagues and your peers won't be able to do and you'll be able to better vet job opportunities on top of it.

Yeah. And you'll never have to ask, I think, the kiss of death question in any interview these days, which is where do my leads come from? Like if I'm a, if I'm a hiring manager and I'm like, okay, Alex, great interview. You know, you answered some great, what questions do you have for me? And one of the first questions out of your mouth is where do my leads come from? I'm not going to say the interview's over, but you better have something to back that up. You better have a reason why you're asking that question because, well, I, because I already know my channels and I can always get that. I'm just curious how many I might get from you. Like if that's your answer to it, okay. But if your answer is blank, like, okay, so where do I get my leads?

Is it inbound? Is it marketing? And that type of stuff. I'm going to sit there and go, all right. I don't know. Yes. We'll be in touch. Yeah. A hundred percent. And to your point too, about like the long-term relationships, I have co-selling relationships that have stood the test of time as well. Like even my, even when I first started co-selling in the SAP ecosystem, once you start co-selling with other reps and like, and they see that, you know, how to sell in this fashion, like they all go to different jobs too. So not only do you land new job opportunities when you need them, but like you go land your next new job opportunity. And all of a sudden you've got this big network of sellers that already know that you know how to sell.

And like you have that reputation and I've tapped into that so many times just in my own, my own career. Yeah. Love it. All right. So what else? What are some other tactics that we can get into to help people drive their own ecosystem before we give them the, uh, the 30, the 60 days, uh, program here that they can join? Yeah. Let's chat about, so like, uh, let's chat about, um, maybe we can get into team managers. Like how does a frontline manager help in this situation? Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, like we're, we're talking about tactics and reps. I've got my account lists and I should never really, uh, like my first thought should never be cold. My first thought should be warm and add value warm, not just go in and like some BS, like warm thing.

Like you said, Hey, I know John, we're both connected on LinkedIn. Would you like, you know, can you, can you go help me out? Like, it's gotta be a real relationship. And, but then again, you know, when you're mapping rep to rep like that, you don't cover all the accounts that rep covers at that other company. And so the organization needs to go help there too. So how can a manager help with that? You know, so one, a manager can help unblock things and get you intros and help you unstick things in deals to a manager can like the real key. And like what we do is like in terms of our, our service offering and like the big North star that we focus most customers on, not the individual reps and talking to like the sales leaders, the CRO, the CEO.

And we always tell them the key to winning here is getting to team meetings. And so as an example, if I am a software vendor or a services company, and I'm in the Salesforce ecosystem, and let's say I'm a service company and I want you, and I want the enterprise financial services team at Salesforce covering North America, referring me business left and right. It's like a sales rep by themselves doesn't typically go and earn that. Yes, they can network their way into somebody that has some common accounts and run some of the tactics that we just talked about. But at the end of the day, we've got to get to the frontline manager of that team. So if I'm the, if I'm a leader at this organization, I want to get to the frontline manager of that team.

And the first thing I want to do is get on a discovery call and what I want to learn in that discovery. And we help our customers like architect these discovery calls. What do you want to learn? What actions do you want them taking? What, what do you want them walking away feeling? And when I get in front of the frontline manager, I want to learn what's your team working on this year? What are, what is FY25 look like? What are you being spiffed on? Where are the accelerators? Where are you losing deals right now? Are you, do you have anybody on ramp? Is there anybody that's super seasoned? Who's the pro? Who does everybody look up to on your team? You know, things like that. And when you learn those pain points, like in that meeting, I then also go back to him and I say, or her, and I say, I'm like, Hey, you know, Bob, Sally.

So I learned all, I'm like, we can actually impact all these different things. Like as, as an ISV or services partner, can I hop on one of your team calls coming up and kind of walk through how we can kind of solve some of these things for your reps in the field as they're running into them? They always say yes. So, okay. So yes. And that, so we get that meeting, right? So I want to share with some insights on how I can help you sell better. What I see most partners fail horribly is when they get in front of the client, the partner, the reps, they do a straight up feature function pitch about look at all, look at our services, look at what they, you know, yes, here's our ideal customer profile.

Here's who fits. And we're going to spoof you on this. We're going to spiff you on that, blah. But you know, it's, it's a boring ass product pitch. And I don't, as a rep, you take me out of the field for an hour or two to give me some type of pitch that I, you know, that may or may not help me, my desire to work with that partner is actually negative because that meeting was so off putting and such a waste of my time that I'm now going to ignore it. So how do you make that, that meeting with, if you get, if you land as a leader, as a rep or whatever, if you land that meeting with a group of sales reps that could potentially benefit from reselling your stuff, how do you run that conversation?

So you're not another vendor pitching shit and having people just have their eyes roll because it happens all the time. It does. And if we let our customers go in front of, in front of their partners with their own decks without any coaching from us, that's exactly what would happen. And so, and so like when we land that team meeting with a customer, like we all, we have, we have a couple of meetings between now, let's say we had a customer today that lands a team meeting two weeks from now, we're going to say, okay, what is it that we're trying to present and we work on that deck between now and then? And that deck, you can't have fluff in there. Nobody on the team cares about how many offices you have.

Nobody on the team cares about feature function, AI, this or that. The only things those people care, like the reps on that team care about, or the customer success managers, or the pre-sales engineers that you're presenting to, all of which can get you deal flow. The only thing they care about is what they're like, is their own job. Like they need to care about their customers hitting their OKPIs and their own career growth. And so you need to come in there and make sure you're speaking to that. And so like when we get into that meeting, what we coach through is one, it's got to be no fault. The what's in it for them has to be really, really strong. It's got to be really well articulated. And when we get in there, we're also looking for hand raisers.

So one of the, those team meetings are pipeline drivers in the meeting themselves. So going back to that discovery call, if we got in front of the frontline manager of that team first and asked about their year and their pains, you should have learned everything that that team's going through, period. Now, when I get in that room and I'm presenting now on the team with a shiny new deck that's nice and buttoned up, I say, hey, who in the room right now has a situation where A, B, and C are true? Who's got an open op right now? Who's run into this before? And even if nobody raises their hand, you just embrace the silence and the manager will speak up because they know it exists in their team. They'll be like, Sally, come on.

I know you had that situation last week. Why don't you go talk about it? So when somebody raises their hand in that meeting and says, I have this, guess what? That's pipeline because now they just identified a problem that you can solve for because you knew it existed in their team beforehand. The next piece, so that's in the meeting. So in the meeting, make sure you're not BSing them. There's no fluff. You're not wasting their time. You're showing them how they can win their year impact. Win rate, deal size, churn, expansion, all that stuff. Get hand raisers in the meeting for, you know, so you get pipeline right out of the door. But the most important piece is setting the expectation for follow-up.

And this can't be like, well, if you've got a team of eight sellers and a frontline manager that you're presenting in front of, it's like we come up with every single team we basically put under management. We start saying, hey, who, like, how are we going to engage this team on a regular basis, each individual member, without pissing them off, without annoying them, without always asking for handouts. And so that communication plan is something that we craft very custom for every single team, for every single customer. Because it's almost like it'd be better, you know, a lot of clients will use me to train their channel team, right? And what I've realized over the years is there's really three levers you can pull to get channel partners, i.e., you know, just partners to give you referrals.

One is, it's, you know, you get a high commission, right? So the margin that they get from reselling your stuff is higher than everybody else's. So, okay. But even still with that, unless it's like in their comp, as far as what they're being measured towards, where their manager's asking, like, where are you on this quota? I mean, we talked about this last time, the Staples channel, like when my little company got bought by Staples, I would literally pay the rep. All the rep had to do was give me the name of the contact person at the company, how many computers they had, and what their current computer support scenario was, whether it was internal or external, whatever it is, and ask the client, would you be open to a phone call from our newest acquisition?

That's all they had to do. And then I would take it and I would sell it. I would close it. I would go through the whole sales process. And if I closed it, I would actually pay them more than what they would get paid for closing the account for a Staples account, right? So if they did their job to close that account, I would pay them more than me doing the entire, and I still wouldn't get them to do it. Because their boss wasn't sitting there talking to them every single week. Hey, where are you on the Thrive Networks call? You know what I mean? And if you haven't hit this quarter, you're going to get fired or whatever. You're on pit, that type of thing. So there's the commission. Then there's the wedge service in the sense that if I can use your stuff to get in, right?

So I can, or get stickier with my accounts, right? To your point of the partner. So, okay, that's probably going to leave me. But what I found is the education is actually one of the bigger drivers. And when I say education, I don't mean how to sell our products. I get a lot of clients investing in my training to train their partners on sales training, period. Not sales training on how to sell their stuff, but literally tactical what I do. And then what the client looks at, or the partner says is, wow, this vendor is investing in us as an organization. Or you can also throw a party or just grab lunch, buy lunch for everybody. So those type of things go a long way at ingratiating yourself into a group of people that you want to sell their stuff.

So is there a balance there of bringing value and say, hey, how can I help in the short term? But also kind of over-indexing a little bit on just bringing straight value to you that I might not benefit from? Yes. There's a lot there. You touch on a lot. So one, the coin operator reps, like those types of partners. And it's not necessarily just partners in that regard. Because you could have referral partners that are just like affiliates, like one-off people that want to get paid for referring you to business. Those are wonderful. Because it's easy. You understand the relationship. They want money. You want to get a sale. It's like, no, it's like easy, easy. So like that's where, you know, from a tactical perspective, we're going to get into relationship strength and comms or and all the things that we do there.

Like from a tactical perspective, we do like in that situation, we do proactive referral monitoring. So in that situation, you get somebody who's coin operated and they love it and they want to refer your business all the time. The challenge is, is that you're not going to be top of mind for them 24-7. They have their own lives, they have their own whatever, they have to sell their own stuff and they may forget about you. And so we do proactive monitoring, like using CommStore data so we can monitor their LinkedIn network data and say, hey, you know what? Once a month, John, I'm going to reach out to you and let you know when you've got new people in your network or once a quarter that meet our ICP and I'm going to even ghostwrite the copy for you.

And all you have to do is approve and send and you get referral money. Does that sound good? So we're going to probably do it for you. You're like, yeah, that sounds good. So anyway, so like that piece is like a super easy proactive monitoring. You also talked about wedge. So like that wedge play is what we call an account development play. I ran this all the time. So here's an example. Going back to, I've done this so many times. I did it in the Adobe ecosystem and the SAP ecosystem. But essentially, imagine going like you want, let's say you want a bunch of referrals from Salesforce and you've already identified the team you want the referrals from. You know which partner is going to deliver this for you.

And you go to those reps and you say, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Rep, why don't you give me your list of 100 top target accounts or like give them whatever boundaries you want to give them for their accounts. You say, you know what? I'm going to go in and I'm going to go and do some account research for you. I'm going to build an org chart of the buying committee and I'm going to go pull together some data and kind of see what we see and identify potential points of entry using my network and our company's stuff, whatever it is we have. And then I'm going to schedule a one hour meeting with you to show you my findings and kind of what I found in each account. Do you think we can get that done? What rep isn't going to say, is going to say no to you doing a bunch of work for them?

So when you say that wedge, anytime you can go in and lean in and help them break into accounts and there's an easy button to give them, like give them the easy button and lean in. Like, so super tactical. One of the things that I haven't done, but I probably should now that I talk about this is, you know, so I use Owler and, you know, those tools to monitor client, you know, trigger events based on my top 25, right? You know, I could easily say, Hey, Alex, give me your top 25. So-and-so, give me your top 25, whatever. It's set up different tracking tools. So when I get alerted about what's happening in those businesses, Hey, Alex, did you see that your, you know, current one of your tier one accounts just this happened to?

Thought you might get some value out of that. And that's, it's the same thing I do with, um, existing accounts who, who do the inevitable. Hey, John, this sounds great, but, or, you know, leads or whatever that, you know, this sounds great, but I'm too busy right now. Like call me back in six months. Right. And I ask like the question, so no problem. Yeah. You know, how's it going to, what's going to change in six months or I deal with the objection, whatever. But then it's like, Hey, how do I stay top of mind between now and then without being annoying? And, and look, the reason I ask is because I tend to follow a lot of the trends that are happening out there in the industry. Like any new tools or tech or whatever it is, is there something that if I come across that you might get some value out of and they'll tell me, right.

And then I track it using Feedly and a few other tools and that's the stuff that I share them. So instead of touching base and checking in, it's Hey, and I track them on I'll learn and all these other tools. So those are just my, like when you get an, when you get an award, for instance, Alex, right. If you were a target account of mine, I would get an alert that you just got an award and all I'm going to do is send a nice little simple email. Hey Alex, congrats on the award, man. Things are killing it over there. See, you know, hope things are going well. Not let's talk about it. Not let me sell you something, but stay in top of mind. And so there's actually some easy systems you can set up.

If I have four or five partners, I'm going to say, who are your 25, your 25, your 25, your 25. I'm actually going to do the due diligence of tracking them. And every once in a while, hit you up with an email saying, Hey, by the way, did you see that this just happened? You check this out, check this out, check this out. And just that alone of staying top of mind will remind, because you and I had a conversation last week about you presenting to me. Yeah. Literally, as soon as we got off that call, I got on another call with this woman who was, Oh, I haven't talked to you in a while, John. You know, we had done training in her past and da, da, da, da. And she maps out this whole thing. And she's like, well, I'm trying to build my outbound engine as a small team.

It's overwhelming. I'm like, I could teach you how to do that. Have you thought about your partner angle here? And she was like, no. And that's where that referral came from. But to be straightforward with you outside of us having a more direct, you know, consistent relationship. Three weeks later, I have that conversation. I don't know if I'm remembering. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know if I'm Johnny on the spot remembering, oh my God, like this is actually a perfect topic. And it was because you had said recruiter, by the way. Like, if you hadn't told me that you had had some success with recruiters, I still, even in that scenario, don't know if I would have brought it up. But because they were in recruiting industry and they had that exact problem and I had just talked to you, I was like, oh, this is a no-brainer.

Like, go talk to Alex. You're absolutely right. Go ahead. But I was just saying, like, what are some, you know, from, again, staying top of mind without being annoying, right? And without always asking for stuff. Is it sharing insights? Is it sharing leads? Is it sharing, like, where have you found kind of the strongest and most efficient way of adding value on a consistent basis outside of the weekly, you know, weekly meetings or the, you know, structured stuff? A couple of different things. So one, like you, like that active staying top of mind is the name of the game, right? And so as an example, one thing we'll do is, and one thing any company can do, like anybody that's got partners, like your company could centralize this service themselves today without us, like using technology they already have on hand, there's a technology out there they're probably already running called Crossbeam and there's a free version of it.

And what one thing we'll do is there is basically like middleware that monitors you. Imagine if you could peek as a sales player. If you could peek into your partner's CRMs and see where they've got open ops and customers, that's like the intelligence that that data gives us. But one thing we can do proactively, like for a few of our customers, we'll go and monitor that data. Let's say they've got 25 server. They're a tech company and they've got 25 services partners, right? That regularly include their tech and their deals. So what we do is we monitor the data. So anytime we see that that one of my partners has a new open opportunity where I already have them or our customer already has them as a customer, we proactively reach out and we say, hey, John, I just saw the data you just opened up.

And by the way, we've got them as a customer. Anything I can do to help you in that account, who doesn't love receiving that? You stay top of mind for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I ask that all the time. I'm like, hey, just do me a favor. Just put in a good word for me. You know what I mean? Like do me a favor. Just let them know that, hey, I heard you're talking to John. You know, just want to get vouched for him. Great stuff, whatever. Like you don't have to refer me. You don't have to get me to power. Literally just lay the groundwork here for me that I'm thumbs up, right? Because just that alone, getting that vouch from somebody else and say, no, no, no. Like you can look at their reviews online and all those.

I'm telling you right here, that's the partner to go with. Like that's worth its weight in gold. Correct. Other ways that you can stand on top of it. Like you said, insights, leads. I mean, obviously that's really obvious. What else? You could do like what assets? So if I'm a rep or anybody, or like if I'm trying to think about like what's in it for my partner, what can I deliver on a regular basis that helps them do their jobs? So like in the case of the recruiting firms that we have as customers, like how do you on a regular basis deliver the right salary guides to make sure that everybody's like hiring the right people? Or if let's say, you know, you know, we have somebody that does a lot of work in the HubSpot ecosystem and does a bunch of recruiting there and they're doing strategic work with like the strategic teams at HubSpot are referring them business.

So when they lose a HubSpot admin, if I lose my most important advocate at HubSpot and that admin walks away and they hire somebody that's a Salesforce admin, that puts HubSpot at risk, right? So I better go find a recruiting agency that's going to put somebody that absolutely loves HubSpot and is capable of it, right? So delivering, like monitoring and looking for new job postings for that CSM is a good thing for that recruiting agency to go and do to start staying on top of and being proactive and adding value to that CSM. Yeah, I mean, I think the common theme here is, and I macro this out, I feel like we've turned into a very selfish society in general, like everybody's always looking for theirs and it's amazing that, you know, how, and it's sad, but it's I think a competitive advantage here to realize how refreshing it is to have somebody actually proactively bring you something that you didn't ask for, that there's no hidden agenda for, you know what I mean?

But there's just something that somebody is actually doing something. It's like the, it's like the lost, you know, and I'm sure you're on the board with this too, like the handwritten note, like, you know what I mean? Like you get a handwritten note out of, like, I don't care who it's from, it's like, shit, man, like, I got this from Jamie, she, you know, she wrote a book and I've been working with her and whatever. And she just, you know, just the other day, she says, there's a little package, winning is a choice. Yes, it is. And just this nice handwritten letter and it's sitting right on my desk. You know what I mean? Because I can't remember the last time I actually got one. So it's those types of things that matter.

Yes. It shows effort. It shows that you care. You're not just here to collect your commission check. Yes. Everybody knows you're a sales rep. Yes. Everybody knows you're going to get paid commission. But at the end of the day, if you just selflessly kind of act in my best interest and try to solve problems for me as a customer, you know, I think you just, it just pays, it just pays dividends in so many ways. And it just shifts the, it shifts the whole fear. Like when, that's why I keep telling reps, like become a problem solver. Cause when you become that problem solver and you have assets to bring, to help solve that problem and you're not constantly just trying to figure out where you can sell your shit.

The weird thing about that is it automatically puts the client at ease, right? So they're now more, more open. And I, I guarantee it that, that you will get bigger deals. You will get more deals, even though you might think you're missing out on the short term because you haven't sold your shit. Like this is a long-term play here in a lot of ways, but you can get short-term gains, short-term gains. Well, and that, that's the big mindset shift that I think that's one of the big, that's the biggest mindset shift that leadership has to make. So we've been talking about sales rep mindset shift or mindset shift, but the leadership needs to understand, like right now there's this, this kind of a stigma and this bad taste in their mouths for partnerships.

At least every sales leader I know is like, you mean that long tail thing that I never really get leads from anyway. And that's what every sales leader is thinking. And we need that, that mindset shift to happen now because now partnerships can generate in quarter pipeline. And that's all I've really done, John, if at the end of the day, like I said, the stuff is not rocket science. All I've really done is built a whole lot of process around turning partnerships into a sales motion that delivers pipeline in a super meaningful way. Instead of you just asking for handouts, you're actually adding value, but you know, you're generating this consistent, wonderful pipeline from, from people that trust you.

And it's beautiful thing. Love it, man. So let's talk about that to wrap things up here. We got this, um, this initiative we're doing, we're going to do a webinar, right? Where you're going to show some, and it's going to be the kickoff to the zero to pipeline in 60 days. So let's talk about that because people are, we talked about some tactics here. We gave them some, hopefully some frameworks thing that they can do, but you're going to get super detailed and, and you get a pretty bold offer that you're throwing out there. So everybody listen in, listen up. So walk us through what you, what we're planning on here, Alex. Sure. So, uh, John and I are going to do a webinar, uh, zero to pipeline in 60 days on February 20th.

Um, and that is, that is a promise is that I can take, I know that if you have partners or you have a professional network that we can get new pipeline for you within six to eight weeks, following the processes that we teach every single day for our customers, what we do every single day as a service. Um, and I want to go, you know, it's like I can teach this stuff academically all day long. Nobody wants to go sit through training. Nobody wants to go fund the next training around this stuff. At the end of the day, sales reps want to just go take their target account list. They want to go see if they can get results by doing a couple of very specific things and to see if they get the results.

Right. And, and so my, you know, my mission this year is just to go show the sales world and all the people. I mean, I have a sales background. That's what I've done my whole career. And I need to show all like my peers and people that I know that like, guys, this is all achievable. You can do it in 60 days. And in this webinar, we're going to, one, you can only access the webinar by going, by going through partnersourced.com and it's S-O-U-R-C-E-D. It's past tense, partnersourced.com. Download the app. That's what gets you access to all this education and the webinar content. And when we get into that in the webinar, we're going to bring in real customers, CEOs, CROs, heads of sales, sales reps that are running these plays with us every single day and getting the actual results in the field.

And then when we end that webinar, we're going to open up cohorts at no charge whatsoever for sales reps, sales managers, sales leaders, and the C-suite to come in and actually bring their account lists and us to walk you through live how to get this stuff done over six to eight weeks. No strings attached. We're just going to teach you. Oh, man. Love it. And I think that, you know, that falls right in the real line with adding value, right? So for me, I always look for who can I bring in, say, add value to my ecosystem. And this is going to be one of those, right? Because I can't stand people pitching their shit. Look, if it's good enough, people will buy it. But if you're not leading with value, if you're not showing people how to tactically do some stuff here, I don't want to have a conversation with you because people are too, you know, there's too many other things going on right now for results not to matter up front.

So I love the fact that we're doing this together. I'm super excited to see what we can bring to the audience here. Any last words before we wrap it up? I would say, I don't think so. I don't think I have any last words other than let's get rid of the event. I mean, this is it. It is only happening once. We're not going to open up another cohort until the fall. It'll be September 2025. Like, this is it. The next six to eight weeks, it's going to be very, very hands-on. We're not here to babysit. If you don't show up, you waste our time. You don't do the things you're supposed to do. You'll get, you know, politely moved to the next cohort. Like, we're here to work with people that actually want to work.

And that's what we're going to bring. So show up, bring your account list, and let's go win some business. I love it. Awesome. This is going to be fun because I think if anybody out there is murdering it on outbound right now, then feel free not to show up. But if you're not, and you think there might be a different way of figuring out how to drive short-term revenue with long-term benefits associated with it, you got to show up to this event because don't do too many of these. Obviously, I think this is the first time you're giving this away for free with those cohorts. But I can't wait to see what the results and, quite frankly, I can't wait to see what the results are going to be for us in our ecosystem with what we're doing.

Because I've always said, man, I feel like I'm sitting on a fucking gold mine of contacts and resources. But for me as a one-man show or two-person show these days, I just don't have the bandwidth. That's why all my partnership, not all, most of my partnership relationships have, from a structural standpoint, not succeeded. Personal standpoint, they always do because people think of me, whatever. But really creating a process around it so it can produce consistent results is what I've been dying for. So I can't wait to see what we can do together here on that. Let's go get it. All right. Awesome, Alex. Well, thank you very much for coming on board. And thank you, everybody, for showing up as usual.

And you better show up to that event. It's on the 20th, right? Yep, February 20th, partnersource.com. Love it. So that'll be in the show notes. We're going to put the link to the app in the show notes. Get in there, download it, tell your friends if you want to make some money. I promise you this is an event you're not going to want to miss. So in addition to that, hopefully you all enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, and it's more important than ever right now specifically, is go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, you make somebody smile, maybe try to make two people smile.

Let's double it up this week. Because no matter how bad you think your day is going, if you make somebody smile, you know you had a good day. And good Lord, the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I'll see you on the other side. And I'll see you on the other side. And I'll see you on the other side. I'll see you on the other side. Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough. Now, to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network.

Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day just like you. Go to jbarrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today. Let's all level up and make this happen together.