Sergio Chavez: The Marketplace-First Approach to SaaS Partnerships

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
All right, we are here in at in Berlin, and we're at ultimate.ai the offices of ultimate.ai we've been spending some time here. It's been a lot of fun, getting to meet so many partner with so great turnout. Tonight, we had maybe 4050, people, something like that. Yeah, so it's been a it's been a great time, and I'm excited to be joined right now by Sergio Chavez. Sergio runs all so marketplace and tech and partnerships for sastrify globally and based here in Berlin, and actually a native of Mexico City, which was interesting. We Sergio took us for to a beer garden last night. We had some bratwurst.

Sergio Chavez  0:48  
Exactly, we had a little bit like a Bavarian experience, but in Berlin. I'm actually based in north, north Bavaria. So we had, we had a good combination here.

Chip Rodgers  0:56  
So that was fun. So Sergio, thank you for joining us, and maybe we'll just love to hear about, you know, what is the partner strategy for sastrify, what? Tell? Tell us a little bit about how you're partnering and how you're What the How does it? How does it part of the business strategy?

Sergio Chavez   1:16  
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And thank you chip for for inviting me. So sastropf is a SaaS procurement company. What that means is we basically help companies to get a good overview about the whole SaaS stack and basically identify ways of reducing risk, saving time, saving money, while managing their whole tech stack on a regular basis, especially as they grow. So we're, we have an old product, so we're a SaaS company ourselves. So therefore we have the traditional type of partners, so in sense of technology partners and channel partners. So basically, technology partners that can help us to enhance our own product or so on SAS solution. But also we have channel partners that are basically open up the doors for us and for our sales team to get into into new logos, when new deals and so forth. But also something that we do is that on top of our own SaaS solution, and we also offer procurement services that help our customers to basically go through the whole SaaS stack and identify optimization opportunities, we also have a marketplace ourselves. So what that means is our customers have the opportunity to buy their SaaS and their software directly from us. So that that makes the whole partnership strategy a little bit more complex than what it typically is for a SaaS company, because we're not only looking into partners for our own SaaS solution, but we're also our sales channel partners for other SaaS companies. So for our marketplace, we basically have partnerships with other SaaS vendors. So we have, for example, Google, Asana, Miro, as some of our top vendors that are available for our marketplace. But we also partner with distributors who give us broader access to other solutions. We're actually partnered with other resellers that actually, in some cases, even compete with ourselves, because they carry some similar products as we do, but also they are specialists in different products that allow us to complement their offer overall. So again, it's a it's a broad partner strategy that we have. And of course, I'm involved in all of these different topics. But also internally, we have sort of, like, certain areas of specialization, like everything that is associated to marketplace. That's what primarily falls under my plate. Technology related primarily falls into our product and engineering team distribution partnerships for our SaaS products, sits primarily with sales, but at the end of the day, we'll try to keep a cohesive collaboration internally.

Chip Rodgers  3:42  
Yeah, that's, that's tremendous. So

Sergio Chavez   3:44  
sorry. Just to add that also, what's, what's interesting with our partners is that actually, we typically have, like, multi faceted relationships, no in the sense of, sometimes they become our channel partners. We become our channel their channel partners. Sometimes we mutually become partners of each other. So there's, there's, whenever we talk about a partner is not just like, okay, looking at it from a one angle, but we look at from three, four different angles at the same

Chip Rodgers  4:09  
time. I love that. Yeah, pretty cool. And customer as well. Right?

Sergio Chavez   4:13  
Correct. Correct indeed. So be that's a great point, because actually some of our customers, so we primarily serve tech startups, tech scale ups. So many of these are actually also potential partners from us. So it's also, again, a very, I would say, very ample spectrum and very fluid spectrum, because we a we started as a customer, then we evolved to as a partner. So there's a lot of good areas of collaboration. That's fantastic.

Chip Rodgers  4:38  
I love that. So, Sergio, what is the value that partnerships brings to both to sastify and to your partners and then ultimately to

Sergio Chavez   4:48  
your customers? Yeah, well, the value that we ultimately see in partnerships is really, how can we add value to the customer? So how can we actually better solve the pain points the reason why they come to us? So that's really the whole focus of of our partnership, and it's actually something that you and the panelists just were just discussing about. So we look at partnerships from from the angle of, how can we add value to the customer? So for example, in my case, primarily focus, okay, from the marketplace perspective, how can we add greater value and bring solutions that basically our customers are using and support them in different in different aspects. So that's, of course, from a customer standpoint, but it also comes with from from a company standpoint, like, how can these partnerships also help us to differentiate in the market? How can they help us to bring to build a more solid value proposition? And this is really the different angles that we see in terms of value. And, of course, ultimately, how can we grow a Partner Network that would allow us to ultimately grow together as we move forward?

Chip Rodgers  5:52  
That's fantastic. I love it. I love the sort of the full circle perspective that you have on on, on the partnerships, and bringing it all to customers. Yeah, indeed. Fantastic. Sergio, thank you so much for taking a few minutes here. And, gosh, it's been a lot of fun and, and thank you for dinner last night, which was a great, a great experience for Berlin and, and I guess we'll just see you. You know, stay connected and and look forward to seeing the great things that you're doing with sastropf, for sure. And

Sergio Chavez   6:26  
thank you very much. Great to have you here in this world.

Chip Rodgers  6:30  
It's been fun. So thank you all again for joining and we'll see you next time you.

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