Greg Portnoy: Remove Friction, Increase Revenue

Greg Portnoy
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[00:00:00] Greg Portnoy: Partnerships is a complicated relationship.

[00:00:02] Greg Portnoy: There's data and workflows and touch points and activity all over the place. How do you, if you're not measuring all of that, if you're not tracking all of that and being able to bring that information and data together in some sort of a way that's actionable and reliable, you're never gonna get to that point where they're saying, yes, take my investment dollars, because we know that for every dollar I spent on partnerships, I'm gonna get $10 back in revenue.

[00:00:28] Chip Rodgers: Hey, everyone, Chip Rodgers with Inside Partnering and welcome back. We're here at a Partnership Leaders event in San Francisco around Dreamforce. And it's been an incredible event. Just jam packed this morning. A little breakfast kind of thing.

[00:00:44] Greg Portnoy: It's a good event for a breakfast event.

[00:00:45] Greg Portnoy: I've never really done one of these in breakfast at quite the crowd.

[00:00:48] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. And you know what? What's funny? There was no content.

[00:00:51] Greg Portnoy: I love that. I love that. There was no content. I don't think anybody wants to be lectured at 9:00 AM in the morning.

[00:00:58] Chip Rodgers: It was all just [00:01:00] breakfast and networking. A lot of fun. So many familiar faces and just great to be here.

[00:01:04] Greg Portnoy: Yeah, it's nice to have a partnership focused space at a conference as diverse as Dreamforce. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:11] Chip Rodgers: So I'm so excited to be joined by my friend Greg. Greg Portnoy, who's, CEO and Founder of Euler and just you've been on a tremendous growth path. The last I think you started the company like two years ago, two and a half years ago.

[00:01:25] Greg Portnoy: Half years ago. Yeah. Yeah, two and a half years ago. It's been it's been a wild ride to say the least.

[00:01:30] Chip Rodgers: It's fantastic. Your background is, in partnerships and marketing with you started with Deloitte in a consulting role and then you were with Adobe and. A couple of startups and then ran your own partnership consulting, practice, and and now you're running Euler.

[00:01:48] Greg Portnoy: Yeah. From consulting to sales to partnerships for 10 years, and then saw a big gap in the market for the tooling that existed for partnerships teams as opposed to any other go-to-market team. So decided to build a thing that I always wished I [00:02:00] had for 10 years.

[00:02:01] Chip Rodgers: That's terrific.

[00:02:02] Chip Rodgers: That's so it's a big leap and it's it's a leap of faith and, you've been talking about this new, your vision with Euler for how to work, how partners could work better together. Talk a little bit about

[00:02:16] Greg Portnoy: that. Yeah. If you think about it objectively, partnerships is the most efficient go-to-market channel.

[00:02:24] Greg Portnoy: And yet you look at sales, you look at marketing those are simpler workflows and simpler relationships. I'm not saying they're easy, but partnerships is objectively more complicated, and yet those teams have a plethora of tools to support their workflow, to support their growth, to make what they do scalable and partnerships doesn't really have anything like that.

[00:02:42] Greg Portnoy: We have a few point solutions. We have some legacy PRMs that have. A few features like deal registration and content management. But no one has ever actually looked at the entirety of a partnerships team's workflow and the entire partner experience and thought about which parts of this are unnecessarily manual and inefficient.

[00:02:59] Greg Portnoy: Where are people [00:03:00] spending their time on low value activities versus the only things that you hire, partnerships people, for, which is pipeline generation and relationship development. So how do we eliminate all of that? How do we make this job scalable? And then from there, how do we make this channel predictable so that the people that actually sign the checks and approve the budgets, the C-suite, the boards, can actually feel comfortable investing in something that they understand what outcome they're gonna get for their dollar,

[00:03:24] Chip Rodgers: which is always what you want to see, right?

[00:03:27] Chip Rodgers: That's, it's that's, you're not gonna you're not gonna make the investment unless you are comfortable that you're gonna get something more back.

[00:03:34] Greg Portnoy: Exactly. And that's why they historically have not invested enough. I was just talking to someone and you think about it. Yeah, you see someone hire a sales team, you see them hire a marketing team, day one.

[00:03:43] Greg Portnoy: They say, what tools do you need to be successful? Yeah. That almost never happens on the partnership side, they already feel that even though the partnerships team is smaller than any other, especially by like ratio of quota, they already feel like they're overspending on the, small headcount that they have for partnerships.

[00:03:58] Greg Portnoy: And so they really have to earn [00:04:00] their way to resourcing and budget, and we want to make it so that. There's a very clear ROI story to tell, not just on our solution, but on, on partnerships as a channel. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:11] Chip Rodgers: So then it goes back to measurement.

[00:04:14] Greg Portnoy: Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, partnerships is a complicated relationship.

[00:04:18] Greg Portnoy: There's data and workflows and touch points and activity all over the place. How do you, if you're not measuring all of that, if you're not tracking all of that and being able to bring that information and data together in some sort of a way that's actionable and reliable, you're never gonna get to that point where they're saying, yes, take my investment dollars, because we know that for every dollar I spent on partnerships, I'm gonna get $10 back in revenue.

[00:04:42] Chip Rodgers: So what's the magic to that? What's the connection to say, Hey here is an investment and here's how I'm, you've got, current customers and case stories and and customers that are already. Achieving that. So what's the, what is the magic in that formula?

[00:04:59] Greg Portnoy: The funny thing [00:05:00] is it's relatively simple. The first part of it is relatively simple. Because these teams have been operating so inefficiently for so long and they've been so starved for anything that creates any leverage for them. We already saw just even in our first year in the market when we didn't have 50% of what we have in the product now, we already saw an average of three to four x.

[00:05:20] Greg Portnoy: Partner sourced revenue growth, four to nine x partner portfolio growth and an average $40,000 savings per partner manager on time that was previously wasted on manual things. And so I think the really interesting opportunity though is this AI revolution. Because ai,

[00:05:38] Chip Rodgers: we gotta talk about ai.

[00:05:39] Greg Portnoy: Gotta talk about ai.

[00:05:41] Greg Portnoy: I used to really not wanna talk about ai, but now I'm a big believer. 'Cause it honestly really works. No the beautiful thing about AI is that. You put AI into sales or marketing. These are processes and workflows that have already been optimized to the nth degree before AI and AI can create more optimization.

[00:05:58] Greg Portnoy: But you're talking about incremental marginal [00:06:00] gains. Partnerships is such an inefficient workflow. They have been so starved for tooling leverage and data that when you give something as powerful as AI to those teams, assuming they have some sort of foundational process and relatively good data. The leaps and bounds the absolute just magnitude of impact that something like AI can make for these teams is truly amazing.

[00:06:23] Greg Portnoy: While I'm all in on AI for GTM in general, I think the biggest winner from a go-to-market sense for AI is gonna be partnerships bar none.

[00:06:31] Chip Rodgers: So if I think of the different, motions that partners typically go through, there could be, the kind of, think of the co-build, co-market, co-sell, co-service. Where are the biggest levers?

[00:06:44] Greg Portnoy: I think it's a little bit of all of those. It depends on what your goal is with the partnership, right? Partnership can be done for revenue, it can be done for exposure, it can be done for product adoption. So I think it depends on what your goals are, but ultimately anything where you're doing something co with a [00:07:00] partner, co-sell.

[00:07:01] Greg Portnoy: Co-market, even like resell. For example, like we have an AI agent that now lives 24 7 inside of the portal that not only knows everything about a partner's referrals and deals and commissions and agreements and affiliate links and all that, and pipeline, but it actually will read and watch any enablement content or trainings that you have shared with the partner, and it becomes an absolute expert on all of that.

[00:07:24] Greg Portnoy: So sales enablement, marketing enablement, product enablement. So if you have someone coming in. And asking oh, how do I pitch this part of your product? If they're co-selling or how do you differentiate against this product? Or how does this piece of your solution work? If you've uploaded the content, the AI knows it, it can answer the question.

[00:07:42] Greg Portnoy: That's really the opportunity is that the pure magnitude, again, of touch points and things that you have to do to effectively enable a partner to co-sell. Co-market resell is massive and now tooling and AI can just take off the vast majority of that off of someone's plate. So you can really focus on being strategic and [00:08:00] driving towards outcomes.

[00:08:01] Chip Rodgers: So that is that's terrific. 'cause because partner enablement, it's hard enough as a salesperson to learn about your own products, right? There's all always new things coming out, and now you gotta partner and you gotta figure out what their solution is and what's the better together story and all that.

[00:08:17] Chip Rodgers: So that's what you're talking about.

[00:08:19] Greg Portnoy: Yeah. At the end of the day, like again, it's hard enough to enable salespeople. Now you're gonna expect a totally separate business with totally separate incentives and goals to go out and spend their time, like learning your product, learning how to pitch it, learning how to market it, learning how it works.

[00:08:32] Greg Portnoy: Like it's just it's such a tall hill to climb or steep hill to climb, and they don't want better enablement. They want the answer. So now feed that into an ai. It basically becomes your, Chip plus Greg partnership, LLM, and now just ask it the question. It'll give you the answer. You'll get the thing done that you were trying to get done, and you just move on.

[00:08:51] Greg Portnoy: Yeah. And that's the beauty of ai. People don't want ai. To just make it easier for them to do things. They wanted to do the thing for them. They wanted to give them the answer and it [00:09:00] can, yeah.

[00:09:00] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. And it's, it's so tough to get sales, attention, they're just slammed all the time.

[00:09:06] Chip Rodgers: We're gonna put you through an enablement class sorry, get it to me at the point that I really need it.

[00:09:10] Greg Portnoy: Yeah, exactly. And that's why I'm excited with what we're launching this week. We already Yeah, tell us

[00:09:14] Chip Rodgers: about that. That's exciting.

[00:09:15] Greg Portnoy: So we already had something called Deal Flow AI, which was basically the ability where if a partner emails you a referral or deal registration, you can just forward the email or CC it to Euler and our AI will parse the email, there's no structure required, and register it so that nobody has to, and it'll go straight into your CRM, create whatever you want, opportunities, leads.

[00:09:33] Greg Portnoy: Which is great 'cause nobody has to fill out a form via email. Yeah. Now obviously everybody works, or most people work with their partners in Slack. All of the reps are in Slack. All the conversations and co-selling is happening in Slack. Now we've extended Deal Flow AI into Slack. So now if a partner sends you a deal, reg or a referral in Slack says, Hey, I'm gonna, I wanna register this deal.

[00:09:53] Greg Portnoy: You can click those little three dots next to a message, click register with AI and it'll register directly from a Slack [00:10:00] message. You're done.

[00:10:01] Chip Rodgers: Wow.

[00:10:02] Greg Portnoy: That's it. And not only that, but you can also send leads to your partners from Slack. So now your reps on your team can just be in Slack and actually just call up the Euler bot, select the right form, the partner, fill it out, send it out to the partner, directly tracked outbound, lead to the partner.

[00:10:18] Greg Portnoy: All from within Slack. Alright,

[00:10:20] Chip Rodgers: that's. Amazing. That's exciting. I wanna see it.

[00:10:23] Greg Portnoy: Yeah it's very exciting. It's very exciting. We've had a lot of folks clamoring down our door to build something deeper in Slack. And I think this is going to, just be a game changer where it's, we found that most alliances, most like really good co-sell partnerships.

[00:10:37] Greg Portnoy: They're just living in Slack and the reps are just going back and forth. So why not meet them where they work? Yeah.

[00:10:42] Chip Rodgers: That's terrific. That's exciting. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it, seeing more about it, and, and excited about where it's going, good And good luck with it.

[00:10:50] Greg Portnoy: Thank you. Yeah, no, we're excited too. There's just the first of many of these kinds of announcements where we just, we're gonna keep meeting everybody where they work. We're gonna remove friction, every little bit of friction for [00:11:00] you and your reps, or the partner and their reps, that reduces deal velocity.

[00:11:04] Greg Portnoy: That reduces just revenue. So remove friction, increase revenue. It's actually. It's been pretty simple in that way so far

[00:11:14] Chip Rodgers: That's good. Keep it simple and understandable and a real pain point. Yeah. That's terrific. So Greg we're here at a PL event and I think one of the first times that you and I connected was was it two years ago or three years ago on that WhatsApp channel.

[00:11:29] Chip Rodgers: Remember that Catalyst going to Catalyst? We

[00:11:32] Greg Portnoy: did, yeah. In Denver. Yeah.

[00:11:34] Chip Rodgers: And then we ended up, there was a spontaneous Hey, let's talk about Chief Partner Officers. And we I can't remember but t-shirts between, we came up with t-shirts, the CPO Loading sort of thing. That was a lot of fun.

[00:11:46] Greg Portnoy: That was a lot of fun. And

[00:11:47] Chip Rodgers: I think you actually went out and got the T-shirts.

[00:11:50] Greg Portnoy: I didn't, I think we collaborated on the idea and then somebody else got the t-shirts. But it's incredible to see how much this community and ecosystem has grown. And not just grown, but it really feels like it's [00:12:00] matured.

[00:12:01] Greg Portnoy: There was a lot of kind of hype and we called it the eco chamber for a couple of years there and everybody was talking about it, but now it seems like everyone's like really put their heads down and they're focused on what does good look like? How do we build, scalable frameworks around ideal partner profile and partner acquisition and partner enablement and partner engagement and management.

[00:12:20] Greg Portnoy: And people are just doing the work. And so like the conversations have really changed from this sounds like a good idea and we wanna do well to, we're doing well and this is how we're doing it. And we wanna get better. And it's very exciting to just see, just a lot of really good partner leaders now focused on outcomes.

[00:12:36] Greg Portnoy: Yeah.

[00:12:37] Chip Rodgers: And the conversations going on in Slack, first of all, they're just constant, right? It's, there's so much going on. But to your point, it's all very. Nuts and bolts, real challenges that people have, people chiming in and offering to help and all that.

[00:12:54] Greg Portnoy: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's the beauty of being partner people. We're very collaborative and we're always looking to add [00:13:00] value. At least the good ones are always looking to add value to each other. So it's good. It's good. There's a lot of good information out there and I think it's just getting better and I think the Partnership Leaders team themselves has really started to focus on just being more tactical.

[00:13:14] Greg Portnoy: And I know they're putting on a lot of content that's more tactical. So it's exciting to watch. I think we're, I used to think that partnerships was old hat and that, we were late to the game, but I've realized it's actually a very nascent space. It's actually a very nascent function, and the best is still to come.

[00:13:30] Greg Portnoy: Yeah.

[00:13:31] Chip Rodgers: And Asher and Chris and Ty have done a phenomenal job, putting together the community and it all started organically, which is really cool.

[00:13:38] Greg Portnoy: Yeah, I remember, I think I was like in the first 300 members. I remember them reaching out. I think I joined PL and Pavilion around the same time like shortly after my second VP of Partnerships role.

[00:13:49] Greg Portnoy: And to see what it's evolved into and what they're starting to do with like Atlas and the research reports, which was much needed because we have, C-suite and Boards constantly saying what does good look like? [00:14:00] So it's exciting and obviously I love those guys. I think they've done a great job.

[00:14:04] Greg Portnoy: So it's really impressive what this has evolved into from that early day. Like we're just a slack channel for partner people. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah.

[00:14:11] Chip Rodgers: Greg, thank you so much for taking some time today and chatting about about your journey and about Euler and congrats on the launch and really excited to see see it take off.

[00:14:21] Greg Portnoy: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Chip. Always a pleasure to see you, my friend.

[00:14:25] Chip Rodgers: And thank you all for joining another episode of Inside Partnering and we will see you next time. Thanks everybody.

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