Billy McClennan on Building Partner Programs from $0 to $100M

[Music] All right everyone, what's up? Welcome to the Partnership Mass Mind Podcast. Today's guest is someone who's been a great friend of mine for a long time, but I'm really excited to have him on here because he's one of those rare partnership leaders who's actually done the thing at every stage. Zero to one, one to scale, global execution, revenue accountability, and fantastic people leadership. Bill Limichlennon is the new director of agency partnerships at Attentive, e-commerce giant. Before that, he was one of the earliest, actually the first partnership, high record, just hired by Phil Royu when the company is around a millionaire R and help build what is now arguably known as one of the most successful e-commerce partner ecosystems in all of BdbSAS. He later went on to build and scale the channelationacustomer.io and today he's back in the e-commerce at Attentive leading agency partnerships. Last thing I'll say is this episode is not theory or hot takes for LinkedIn. It's how they work. Actually gets done by someone who's actually done at the highest level. Billy, absolutely pumped to have him here. I appreciate the intro and I'm excited to be here. First time on a pod talking partnerships at least, so yeah, excited to get into it. Well, I mean, that's a huge disservice to the entire partnership ecosystem if no one's had you on, but where we're honored to be the first. One thing I respect about you a ton is that you're just no BS. It's all outcomes are bust. It's all metrics are busts. So I'm going to do my best to unpack the most successful things that you've been a part of. So we can show that with our audience. You're in a rock and roll. Let's do it. Sweet. Well, we always start every episode off with what we call the fast five. So five quick eating questions get you warmed up and give the audience an opportunity to get to know you a bit better. So if this one don't overthink it, just the first thing that comes to your head, mix of lighthearted questions with some tactic ones. All good. Let's do it. I'll try my best. Have a cool first things first. What's one partnership belief you had early on your career that you now think is just dead wrong? Yeah. This is going to sound odd for me because I'm I'd say I'm very sales focused, but I'd say that I used to think partnerships was only about closed one revenue. And I'm still measured on that. I still do believe that, but yeah, partnership says a massive impact across the entire business, right? Like it's not just it's not just source revenue. There's a lot of things that you can't track, right? There's a, you know, we're talking gorgeous. You integrate with Shopify. Huge tam to go after the whole companies focusing on Shopify, right? You know, you get you get featured on a webinar with OpenAI now. Huge audience for your for your company. So there's so many things that partnerships can contribute to the business. I think unfortunately it's just hard to track the upside of those things. So I'm very sales and revenue focused, but yeah, huge impact across the entire business. No, I think that's a great one. I think it's it's it's it's satisfying for other folks to hear. And we'll get into a little bit later when we talk about gorgeous because we both grew up with our first partnership boss was like revenue revenue revenue, which I think has a lot of benefits and we'll talk a lot about that later, but it also can put blinders on you that doesn't allow you to have the holistic understanding of like the true impact that partnerships can bring. But we'll talk about that a little bit later. Speaking of which, second question for you, Billy is what's the most overrated KPI that partnership professionals might use today that you're just gives you the crunch? I don't know if this is a hot take, but for me, it's influenced revenue. I know and not because I don't think it's valuable. I do think the just I was used that partner salon influence. It's just I think the way it's being used now is it's the it's being used to try to justify the success of a partner program most of the time where you can't figure out how to get direct revenue. And and because of that, there's a lot of subjectivity, a lot of fluffiness. And I think it's just used the wrong way. It is valuable. But so I think it's just yeah, it's a hard metric to to double down on. Yeah, no, I think I think that definitely classifies as like spicy take. I think it's such a polarizing topic. I've talked about it at length on our episodes. I think they I agree with you totally. I think in a vacuum when executed correctly and measured correctly and attributed correctly, it's a really successful motion. And in fact, influence was the first partnership motion that predated sourist for those who are like students of the game. But too many people try to use it as this like fluffy way to to measure it and just further impact. And if it's your only quarter element, your job security is toast. And the last thing I'll say, let's see if you agree with this Billy. If your AES aren't the ones going into slacks saying, Oh, thanks so much to the partnership's team shouted to Billy, save my deal. If like that type of chatter isn't happening, you're not really influencing deals because AES will be the first to like, scring it from the mount tops because they know better than anyone else if you really influence the deal. Is that resonate? Yeah, 100% and then just to add on top of that is if a part and I've seen this seen the set companies I've worked for too. Like if the partnership team is saying how amazing they are, they've influenced you know, $20 million and 50 million pipeline generated and all that stuff. And the sales team doesn't see that number. You're going to lose credibility with the sales team and they're not going to respect the partnership that you need to have with sales. And honestly, if you want a good partner program, you need sales dialed in. So yeah, I like influenced revenue, but it's not I think it's it's yeah, it's gone a little too far. Make sure your source source revenue driver is like rock solid and everybody knows it's on the speed and then go figure it out. It's been not the other way around. I totally agree. Cool. All right. The next one for you, a bit of a fun one. You've published papers, scientific papers and the top academic journals, right as a lead author in fact, just give you a little bit about tire pump. And you also generated millions and millions in partner source revenue eight figures in fact, which was more intense and challenging to deal. It's a good question. You know, I haven't thought about research and academia in a long time now, but I yeah, I would say I would say intellectually research was was harder, right? There's a lot of logic, a lot of science, a lot of math. But honestly, like partnerships and sales is a lot more mentally challenging. There's a lot more art to it. We're science people. So I think science is can be easier in some cases, but yeah, there's a lot of art that goes into to GTM and partnership. So mentally, I think you need more exhausting. You need the IQ, but you need the EQ and, and you know, I think that's something I'm trying to work on all the time. That's a great bear. I love that line. And as a four macadamic myself, I would, I would agree totally. I think I like purely intellectually, I think nothing compared to like my time and academia like literally, like you don't get to publish a paper unless you've advanced the entire state of the art, right? Like good was not good enough. You either like discovered something that never existed before or you don't publish a paper. So like the intensity was so high, but I agree. There was more predictability. Like once you figure out conditions and experimental procedures, like you could get the same result over and over again, we're in the business world. Everything is like poorly defined. Like humans are random. There's so much randomness to it. And there's real human emotions involved, which are molecules didn't didn't give us the same type of fits. No, that makes sense. You didn't have to deal with many humans in the lab, maybe two or three on a daily basis. They didn't like to talk to much. Yeah, most of them. Exactly. Cool. All right. Second last one, we'll get into the fun stuff. Well, you just, you know, it's January 2026. You just joined a tentative, which was a huge splash in the ecosystem. You're welcome back to e-com. Question is, you could have chosen basically any company or any ecosystem given your pedigree. So I'm curious why attentive, why now, and why should agencies lean into attentive amongst a credit group this year? Yeah, it's a great question. You get to quiz me on this three weeks into the role. But I think, you know, throughout my conversations, and now it's been validated since I've been here for a few weeks is I would say attentive. The main reason was the level of resources that they provide in the partner programs. So I'll give you examples, right? Like we have partner managers. We have agency success managers that help partners with managed account. We have dedicated partner enablement. We have a partner engineer that joins lunch and learns to demo platforms. Of course, we have partner marketing and events. And to be honest, like 80% of partner programs don't have that level of like full time. It's a lot of borrowed resource. 80% of partner programs don't have full time resources like that. And so I just think, you know, I've been amazed. It's like, there's so much opportunity. So many things we can do better with our partners because we have so much resource. That's, that's definitely a reason to double down. And then I'd say just from an ecosystem perspective, you know, half of attentive's revenue is on Shopify. If you're in retinality, come half is not. So you're not pigeonholed to one ecosystem. And then, you know, attentive is, I would say more mid market and enterprise focus so that there's just a really nice customer base. If you're looking to, yeah, there's a really nice customer base. If you're looking to kind of tap into to some great logos. And they've added a lot of new product functionality. The AI suite's really cool. So I think there's just a lot of services that agency partners can can build off of with partnering with attentive love that well can can grasp again from our huge fans of attentive on a partnership last month. So excited to see what you do in year one. Last question and we'll get into the good stuff is we asked this all the guests. If you weren't in tech or biz dev and money wasn't the concern, right, which I know will be hard for you to detach from. What would Billy McClennan be doing with this time? I already know the answer to this. We talk about this all the time. If I could just do anything right now, I'd probably open up my own coffee shop. I'm pretty big coffee snob self-made barista, let's say and be coffee in the morning and some nice toast homemade bread. And then that same oven would be used for pizza in the evening. So be like a coffee shop in the morning and a pizza shop at night. That's what I'd be doing. I'm glad you're I did. I didn't know if it was still true, but I'm glad to hear it. And as a fun fact, Billy and I are really close friends. So for like the last couple of years, he'll snapchat me a picture of a quartado he's made with a little heart shape and the phone and he asked me to read it. To be honest, I was given a lot of fours and fives for a while, but Billy's now pretty dialed in on his coffee. I think I've got a seven consistently now in the odd time. I'll get up to like an 8.5. Hopefully, 10 soon. Love it. Cool. Well, thanks for that, Billy. I think that gave me the audience a really good glimpse into who you are. Now let's get into the fun stuff. We always start with the origin story. Really just how do you even get into partnerships because we all have very random backgrounds. So for you, you didn't wake up one day and say, "Yep, I want to be in partnerships. You're actually working for an e-commerce merchant, launching a muscle auction center, very non-sass." Then you make the jump to gorgeous when it's under 20 people. Let's just start there. Take us back to that moment. How did you first end up in partnerships and what made you say yes to joining gorgeous when the company was still so early? That was a pretty big bet. Yeah, I mean, similar to you, I didn't go as far as you, but I was in research and then I had a pretty entry-level sales job selling lab equipment to universities and hospitals and pharma. I got introduced and just started up through a mentor or family member at that. They introduced me to these two guys at MIT. They were building a muscle auction sensor and I was like, "Oh, I can use my chemistry experience to help with that." I relocated to the states with them and essentially we launched it. It was there when it was just three of us. We launched it pre-revenue. It was a direct consumer business who owned several consumers. We launched on Shopify and so I did the Shopify motion on the brand side for two years. Honestly, gorgeous came. It was a bit lucky. That company did well for a year. It was hard to raise in the wearable space at the time and so they found an exit and so I was kind of like, "Well, what do I want to do?" I had been connected with the founder of gorgeous. He was trying to sell me on. Gorgeous says I helped desking at the time. He runs Endescan. We were chatting and got connected to Philippe, who obviously is a good friend of ours and we worked for for a long time and they needed a partnership motion. I guess I had the e-commerce experience, not necessarily partnerships, but I knew merchants. They brought me over to do partnerships. Amazing. It's pretty cool. I mean, Loki, currency EO of gorgeous, remain, lapier, hitting you up and you're having these conversations. True scrappy start up. That's great. That's how you got in. Take us back to like, so many people, especially in the accounts space, have like deep respect for gorgeous to this day in the partner program. You were arguably one of the most influential people in getting it to where it is today. So we're big on like giving people a glimpse of what it was actually light at the blood boots on the ground. We had Rich Gardner from Clavio. He took me all the way back six years past when he started what? What did Clavio's partner program really look like? It was shocking. Yeah. How like you'll define it was. Totally speaking, what did gorgeous's partnership program look like if there even was something when you joined Phil? Yeah, it's a good question. And there was something. I mean, Phil, Phil's like probably the best CRO personality you could get. He knows that it's sell anything to anyone, even if it doesn't make sense for them. So I guess when I joined, it's true. I don't know if that's a shout out for Phil or not, but yeah, he's a great salesperson. And it's just a great entrepreneur. But when I joined, it was not really a partnership. It was an emotion. It was an events motion. It was a, yeah, Phil leap was going all over the world to these events, carrying a TV, like a small TV, you know, cheap booth. And he was booking meetings and booking demos and getting revenue. But then that's how the partners were met. So he met all the tech partners, all the agencies. And so there was maybe 10 or 20 of those like original Shopify partners. Phil had some good relationships. I joined. He asked me to do the same thing, go to every single event that you can think of, meet the partners, ask them for referrals and pay them a 20% rev share. That was, that was partnerships. It was get a referral and get, give them a 20% rev share. There was no kind of structured program or what's in it for the partner or anything like that. That's kind of how it started. And I don't know how much detail you want me to give here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's how it started. That's how I got into it. It was a 20% rev share for a referral. I mean, yeah, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty fascinating. Um, you know, for such a successful partner program, like we're just like, it didn't start with like, yeah, like we're very intentional partnerships to speak that we're going to like start to scale this thing. I think it's a good lesson for a lot of like scrappy early stage company seed series A, even series B. If you don't have like this pop in partnership program, like events is like, it's just this panacea. It's like this place where you can meet so many people, see what's going on in industry, get a pulse on the ground. And a lot of partnership motions can kind of get started there. So I think gorgeous is origin stories, a good validation of that. The follow for you then, Billy is, okay, you get the, you're starting to meet these agencies, you're starting to get them all fired up. Let's, let's talk about like really scaling things now, right? Like when you're starting to like really build attraction, you're now in people management, you've got some partner managers coming in. So like, help us understand like what were the first few really successful bets that you made in building out the agency partner program that genuinely changed the trajectory of the gorgeous partner program as a whole, just like you close your eyes, you think of the most successful individual plays or playbooks or motions that really paid off what were those, what are those look like? And I mean, I think just that gorgeous was unique and I want, I don't want to, I want to caveat to here like gorgeous was and still is maybe a bit more up market, but an SMB product. It was a three to $4,000 ACV product. And when you think about the deal size is it's like there's not a lot on surface level. There's not a lot of value that you can give to an agency. The rev shares insignificant, the services aren't going to be there because the customers want to budget, you know, if they're paying $300 a month for a SaaS tool. So I guess take a step back when I was a part, when I started at that motion, you know, I was asking for referrals. I was saying gorgeous was awesome, helped us for Shopify, but I started getting that typical questions around well, what about us? What about us? What about us? How can I get? Things like how can I get leads, but how can I get leads? And, you know, all of those kind of questions are, hey, the rev shares insignificant, I don't care about it. And, you know, we didn't have a partner program. So that was tough for me at first. So I think early on I got, I had that mindset of what can we do for partners? And so to answer your question specifically, what were the few big bets? And we might talk about this later, but you got to be honest with yourself, like, what can you give partners? And like I said, at gorgeous, they weren't going to implement gorgeous. You know, it was a $4,000 deal size. They built Shopify websites. So they weren't going to make money off of that. The rev share was insignificant, but what we did really well was the, I'll say partner marketing, but the events motion. So gorgeous spend a lot of money on events, even when they were a 30 person company. Yeah. And so the first thing I did was say, okay, 100% of events are going to be with partners. And so I thought of partner marketing as a benefit for partners. And I said, Hey, we're not going to charge partners to go to a dinner. But we're going to let you sponsor. We're going to put your logo on it. You're going to promote that's your sponsorship, promote it. We're going to bring you to the event and, you know, we're going to have a dinner with 30 grape brands or we're going to have a happy hour with a couple hundred people. We're going to generate lists for you. And like, these are lead lists for you. And you're going to be a sponsor. And a lot of these agencies didn't have budgets to sponsor anyways, where tech companies do. And so I just doubled down on the agency on the partner marketing motion and said, Hey, you know, like, you're going to get free sponsorships. You're going to get lead lists. We started doing in person our own meetups. And every single speaker was a partner and you're going to be able to speak to these brands. You're going to be able to promote your brand and get lead list virtual as well. Obviously during coven, we do a lot of virtual stuff. And, you know, we were generating that I'll call them not hot leads, but thousands and thousands of leads and, you know, hundreds of thousands of impressions. And so that was really the biggest value that I could give partners early on. The second piece to just add and then, and then I'll kind of transition to you was, you know, gorgeous didn't have a lot of competition as a help desk in Shopify, like Zen desk, gladly, you know, before Rich panel. There was no help desks that were going to try and to partner with these, these, these agencies. And so it was essentially just, you know, we are the help desk for Shopify. It was, and it is a phenomenal product. And you're building a website. If they're on Shopify, they have to use us. So that was the second piece was a lot of enablement, just saying, Hey, we're the best. It's not complicated, but we're a check box in your, in your migration. And so I'll give you two things. The enablement piece, hey, we're a great product for your customer and like we're going to prop you up because we have thousands of customers and big marketing budgets and, and, and we'll invest in you there. And so I'd say those were the two things that we could add early days. And we scaled the team out globally like that. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love that. And I think people might be surprised listening, but they should be taking note of like how much like partner marketing and really events is like steeped and like look, at least see him. I know the first 10 was like built what became like it eight figure sourced revenue channel. Right. Like over years. So like this is the real deal. But I think it might be surprised at how events focused it is. But to Billy's point, sometimes you need to do that. Hey, it's phenomenal for building these relationships up and building these champions. But if you have a lower ACV and therefore revshare is not as enticing and therefore that your customers simply don't have as much to like spin up a services program, we can really like launch that. This is really the only other play that Billy and his team could read. And what I can also say firsthand is it requires a very specific persona from a partner manager perspective that can even pull this off. Right. Like someone who might be like overly strategic and wants to sit at their desk all the time. Like those people don't work out. And these type of people also Billy, but this is a final question. I'll flip gears is like quickly tell us like based on the playbook that you just described that obviously was widely successful. How did that force you to think very carefully about who you could hire? Right? I'm thinking with the best people that you've hired. And obviously, we've both made some whiffs before, where it just wasn't the right strategic fit. So quickly, help us understand the hiring persona, given the playbook that you're running, which was unique versus more strategic at your desk typewriter manager roles. Yeah, exactly. And I just want to caveat here, because it's not like, hey, you can like, events is how you spin up a problem. Of course, of course. But what I want to say here is, this is going to depend on, and we might talk with this on your ICP, your product, like a bunch of different things. Like at Custom Rio, very different. Like we had that motion, but very different, which maybe we'll get into if we have time. And at Attentive, that's a big part of it, but there's a lot more you can do. So it really depends, and we'll talk with this. But you got to be honest with yourself, about what you can add. But get back to hiring personas. Yeah, I mean, first of all, partnerships are very relational anyways. So I learned early on, you need a really ultraverted person. And in the case of Gorgeous, almost ultra, an ultraverted relationship person to better than a really smart product or technical person. And if you look at Gorgeous, they have an amazing partnership team still. But everybody on the team is very, very ultraverted, and some of the best partner managers there that I worked with. And other companies are just very ultraverted. So yeah, I mean, it depends on your motion. But you know, if you think that you can hire a partner manager who has really strong channel sales or reseller experience into, let's call it like a high volume, partnership motion, like, yeah, they're probably not going to enjoy it. And it's probably not going to be a good fit. So yeah, you do got to think about what kind of partner program you're running and how that person fits in. I think that's great. It's a good call for anyone listening who is hiring or will be hiring. Have like, look, you need to avoid the mistake of, okay, you hire people before and a different company, a different context that we're successful. And you just think you're going to apply those same traits as you go look for the next type of people. At your next company, it's like, the program can be totally different in Billy's situation. You need people with stamina. Really people who can manage a crazy book of business where it's like whack a mole, like you're getting not maybe a ton of leads from a few partners, but like just, you know, a lot of leads gross, but from like a lot of different partners, a ton of events, right? So like, you know, you need to work backwards from the program of your building. So I think that's a key takeaway. Now let's flip it, Billy. And just to wrap up your time at Gorgeous. What's one key mistake perhaps that you're willing to share in a moment of vulnerability? Like, you know, obviously didn't break the program or like, wasn't overly critical, but it was like, you know what? Like, if I could go back in time and like, reverse that one, could have saved me a lot of headache and we probably could have put a bit more points on the board. Anything that comes to mind? Um, yeah, I'd say, and I don't even want to call this a mistake. Maybe it was too early in Gorgeous's kind of life cycle and the way the partner, not where the partner program was, where the product was honestly, but we got to a point where, you know, we were trying to continue, you know, we were growing a hundred percent year of a year, the partner revenue, for a while, you were a part of that too. And we got to a point where obviously that was slowing down and everything was like, you know, how can we get incremental gain? Incremental gains can we grow, you know, while we were getting incremental, we were growing, you know, maybe five or 10 percent and it's like, how can we get back to 30, 40 percent? And so we tried to basically say, hey, we're going to build a services motion at Gorgeous. So partners are going to implement Gorgeous and offer services and it wasn't a mistake, but it was a ton of effort. We hired dedicated enamellement resources to build up that practice and the reality was, and this is going back to being honest with what you can offer your partners was, these type of partners didn't want to offer a customer support offering. The Gorgeous product and a lot of Shopify products were plug and play. There wasn't that much services to be had anyways. And so, you know, there was high level interest, but it just was not something that the partners that we worked with were willing to invest in and it ended up just being a lot of time and effort on that. And, you know, Gorgeous just didn't have the right product at the time. I think they're probably in a better place now with their AI agent and, you know, it's a bit more complex these days, but at the time, yeah, it's just, you know, probably wasn't worth the kind of getting into that and going deep there. Yeah, no, I mean, again, thanks for sharing that, that billion. I think it's another key takeaway. Similar to the last one on the hiring side is like, look, like, Billy's been saying, like, you have to be honest with yourself. And like, just because you maybe stood up a successful services program at another company doesn't mean the same thing is going to work. I can't believe like in my first head of partnerships role, I made that same mistake. I made all these crazy assumptions at the same playbooks I had run say, "Gorgeous, we're going to apply the same." And like so many things were different variables wise and I got my butt looked, right? For any leader-level person here responsible for building a program on the early days is like, look, it's good to have playbooks in your back pocket that have worked before, but you need to just assume all the variables will be different, right? Otherwise, you avoid making some really costly assumptions. Okay, cool. Now we're going to transition into the next segment. And this one is one that, and our prep for this call, I took away as being a particularly passionate topic for you. And we're calling this one, "Go deep with few is lazy." And so there's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in partnerships, which is "Go deep with a few." And you've been pretty clear and vocal that most of the time that is lazy. So my question for you, Billy, is, "Why do you think Go Deep with few became the default answer when partner programs under perform?" Yeah, that's a good question. And I'm decently passionate about this too. So a lot of times on social or even out of social, you hear partnership leaders or individuals say, "I need to stop, I have 50 partners, but I just need to go deep with few and focus on my top five partners." And again, depending on your product and your segment and your situation, that's not, I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's usually just a cop out. And I think it's a lazy answer. It's basically what I see is, "Hey, I have all these partners. They're not generating revenue. I'm not getting my quota because they're not yielding." So I'm going to blame them and say, "I'm just going to go with the top five." So that's why that frustrates me, because most of the time it's a lazy answer. And the team, the partner program, the individual whoever it is, is not taking accountability and asking themselves, "Why aren't these partners generating revenue for me?" So yeah, that bothers me most of the time. Yeah, I can say, "I love it. We love the press, I'm just going to follow up." So then tell us, Billy, "How should things like deal size, ICP partner economics actually dictate whether depth or breadth is the right play?" Yeah, yeah. That's the right question that you need to be asking. And I'll just start with this. There's lots of really successful partner programs that have multiple thousands, 5,000, 10,000 partners, HubSpot, thousands of partners, Clavio, 10,000 partners, Salesforce, thousands of partners, Shopify, 10 billion dollar business with 4, 5,000 agency partners. So you can have a ton of partners in your partner program. But to answer your question, I'll go back to Gorgeous, and then I'll kind of contrast with something else. But if you're gorgeous with a $4,000 average deal size and most of your agencies that support your customers work with 5,000,000 to 15 million GMV brands, you don't have the luxury, you don't have the luxury of having 20 partners. You need 100 plus deals a month. And there's just not a single Shopify partner. I'll say that right now that is going to give one tech vendor that level of volume. So you need to play the volume game. If you are truly enterprise and let's say greater than 100,000 deal size, ideally more, and your product is very complex, you don't have a professional services team, there's a lot of implementation lift, and then you can maybe go fewer partners. And again, to do that though, these partners need to be able to generate six, ideally seven, in true enterprise, eight figure service practices to go with few, right? If you want to go with the GSI's or the large size, you want a Merkel or a publicist or a DeLoyd or an essential, you need a product like a GCP or AWS or ServiceNow or Salesforce for. If you think that you're going to get the few partners at the average startup with a 10 or 30 or 40K product, that's just you're going to set yourself up for failure. So answer is, it depends on your situation. Can you go deeper with few or do you need to play the volume game? Yeah, I love that. And it might be intuitive for some, but not enough people actually clearly follow that advice. And I think they do default to go deeper, go deeper, go deeper. I've had bosses, CEOs, pressing me so hard to do the same thing you're describing. It's like, look, I can show you all the math. I can show you how big these clients listen and the average deal size being expected. We need more volume. But the follow-up question I want to ask you here, Billy, is, I think it's more intuitive to think about how to go deep with fewer or larger partners. So let's partner on the side. But let's focus on what you have a specialty with, which is high volume. Let's talk about the operational complexes of that. Let's just say you're a program lead or a team lead or a head of agency partnerships. And you do have hundreds, if not thousands of partners, smaller but highly transactional. Like, you can take this any direction, but like, talk to us about the most important operational components to have right from the early foundational stages. So this thing scales. And again, you can take this any direction you want. From minimizing, live for applying, getting a partner, like, discovery, callbook, getting them in an onboarding. Like, you mastered that, like, having all the right data. But like, if you're going to have a high volume program, OK, but like, tell us, like, what is most important operational components that must be in place? Or you will have an insane Nikki bucket? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a good question. There's two folds. There's like, how do you build a partner program that provides value to a thousand partners? Like, I would ask yourself that. And then, how do you manage it internally? On the first point that I made, you know, if you're one of these people watching, you have a thousand partners in your program. you can say go deep with few in the sense that you're going to have 20 partners that generate a lot of your revenue. And you are going to spend 80% of your dollar and human resource on those partners. That's not wrong. But, you know, if you have a thousand partners, you probably are providing a decent amount of value to the other 900 partners that you can't spend a ton of resource on. So I'll start with the external piece. Like you need to think about what value can I give partners at scale? Again, it's nuance, but hopefully your product, if your product feeds a massive gap in there and what their customers can do, you can educate them on that. They're going to use your product even if you can't give them a lot of resources. You always have that. But that's like one thing right there. If you do have larger deal sizes, maybe RevShare can get interesting or if you have a lower deal size, but you have small partners, you know, maybe a few thousand dollars a year is enticing to those smaller partners and they'll, they'll leverage that. And then, yeah, things like webinars, newsletters, town halls, like just ways to keep them engaged. So like you need a program that can support that volume of partners. Now, operationally, you need a really good CRM slash PRM or ideally, them integrated together, but you need the ability to say to pull or importance. Hey, here's a thousand partners in my program, 30% of them are actively generating business, the other 70% are dormant. This you need to be able to up to your end down to your in real time. So like, hey, it's the start of a new year, these, you know, 50 are going down to your these 20 are going up like an ideal, you can automate a lot of that. So a good operations, like a good partner ops person is good. And then commissions, commissions is a pain for even even low volume partner programs. It's a pain. But if you have a lot of partners need to pay small amounts to to a high volume of partners, you need to have that as automated as possible. So yeah, I mean, those are some of the things that come to mind that you need to operationally be able to look at a thousand partners at scale. Those agree that I love that you took it externally like, hey, like you need like read the wrong like what is what is like the demographic of those eight thousand partners and they how can you have like different value buckets to support them. Each of them. That's that's important. And then on the back and operational side. So we could have a whole other hour long episode on just the operational side because there's so many more things I love to unpack with you like like you built such a strong funnel like partner acquisition, like getting demos booked or discovery calls booked. Okay, then the discovery calls done. You know, they qualify or not if qualified then enroll into partner on boarding like condensed that as fast as possible and you like measure that cycle over cycle. Okay, great. First time, you know, time to first lead time to first close one retention rate. So like again, that's something you specialize in. Hopefully we can find an additional time for that. But we're going to get into the next segment, which is around executive support calling this the silent multiplier killer and you and I have both worked at several different P.A.B.S.S. companies. We've had some great leaders. Candle leave we've been around some leadership that's not as strong. And so what I want to talk about now is, you know, and we're not going to name names, but by any means, but just how important that executive layer is. And having them truly understand partnerships and what are the costs when they don't so the first question for you Billy is again, I think this is such an important conversation started to give you context because I constantly talk to partner leaders like yourself who were just like, I'm like, what's the hardest part of your job? And I'm like, oh, it's easy. Like my company doesn't believe in partnerships. And I'm like, but are you having an impact and you know, as much as I can tell, there's don't like, yeah, like look, the numbers are real like we're really crushing. But they have really bad boss who could be VP partnerships could be a revenue oriented person. So this is a real problem like people just not getting to trust and respect they need. So the first question for you on this one Billy is like, what are the earliest warning signs that maybe a partner leader is being set up to fail even if the strategy itself is sound. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot. That's definitely a loaded a loaded question. Say that again. So I can think of. So basically it's like, hey, look, say, say you say you know someone and they just get this first like had a partnership job or senior director of VP a partnership job. Right. Like what are some early warning signs that they might have that might indicate that they're set up to fail with respect to like they're just the right support, the right belief, the right buying the right resources are perhaps not in place as much as they thought in an interview cycle. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think the easiest one to me and that you'll get you'll get comfortable this when you start interviewing other companies for people that maybe have gotten promoted into the head of the partnership job. But like you should be asking what kind of resources you're going to have allocated to you when you join as a head of partnerships. Like if you're joining as the first head of partnerships role. Or there's like a couple of people and you get there and they're basically like you're not going to have head counter. You don't have partner ops or like we're not willing to invest in certain resources that you need a PRM right like if if they're not giving you any resources. Then that's probably going to be a pretty tall tall task to start. So I would say that would that that yeah, yeah, a couple of things that I've been looking at as resources. That's the number one thing. And I ask that when I'm talking to companies like what resources do you have what resources am I going to get. And that'll give you an idea if they actually believe in partnerships. Yeah, what percentage of the revenue target you're going to hang in my head. Are we going to be able to commit back to budget. Like these are all the tough questions and like, Candidly, we're all humans. It's easy to like not ask some of these tough questions and interviews when you're so excited with the job because you almost like don't want to like hear anything negative. Yeah, I just want to like usually I want this job. But it's like you need to ask the toughest of questions because you don't want to like taking a job as one of the most biggest communities you could ever make. So you don't want to make the wrong mistake. So then the next question for you, Billy is like help us understand just how costly it is. And we both been in situations before. And again, we're not going to name names but like help us understand like how costly can it be when there's like big changes in leadership or you join a company and poor leadership someplace above you, whether it's VP partnerships or you know see sweet like how costly can it be. How disruptive can it be for an otherwise productive partner program when these changes happen. Like what can actually happen as much as you're willing to share. Yeah, it's good. And I've been through this like multiple companies. So it's it's fine to talk about and I've actually gotten more comfortable dealing with these things. But outside of partnerships, every company has phases of change. You get from C to series A or series B different people come in that the early people aren't the right fit. And it's the same with partnerships to an extent like, you know, you might be a part of that. Oh, you were great for this role at this time. But now we think we want to bring in a different person for this role at this stage. And those things can always be disruptive. I'd say how detrimental or how impactful. I think it depends how robust the program you have is if you have a really strong program that you built and they and there's a leadership change at the top like it's probably going to work itself out unless this person is like I have a completely different strategy. And I'm going to go for a 360 which I haven't seen that big of a shift when someone new comes in like, you know, it's hard to rock the boat that much. But it can have an impact and I think it's, you know, it's tough to adapt to that depending on the situation that you're in. But yeah, I mean, we can definitely have a big impact. Yeah, I appreciate you. And the reason I want to ask that is like, look, some people maybe haven't been through that yet. And maybe you're interviewing right now or maybe things are changing your company like, you know, you obviously need to qualify for your job. But your company also needs to qualify for you. And that's why it's like so important to be a high performer and not not to say something obvious. But like more you can like create your own leverage. Be a good human being and be a high performer. Then you do have the luxury of qualifying your company. But like, you know what? This company is great for me for the past couple of years, but things have totally changed. This maybe isn't the right fit for me. So that's why I asked that question for people to start to have the other piece. Yeah, no, no, the other piece for that is just and it's like you got it, you got to work what's in your control and the reality is some of those decisions aren't in your control. And if a change made is made and you're still enjoying things and you're growing and that the programs growing, then then I think you continue with that. But if the change is made and you don't think it's in the right direction, whether whether you're right or wrong, like, what can you control, right? Like you can look elsewhere and look for your next role. So I think you just have to focus on what you can control. Like you can't control everything. But Chris is absolutely right. If you're a high performer and you're valuable to the company, like you probably have a little bit more influence when those changes happen. And you try your best to be a part of those changes so that you can kind of have your impact and feedback on that. Yeah, it's good advice. And I like just focus on where you control. I think the bigger the company you work at, like the more you just have to accept that, like things with like breathtaking decisions will be made that'll knock your socks off that you just can't do anything about. Right. You just have to be able to withstand it or even if things are good, things could be amazing. No, it's not only bad, you know, it's not only these things don't only happen when when things are going bad, they happen when they're going good too. So exactly. Hopefully that was a whole full in case folks haven't gone through that. We're going to go to our last segment, which is on people leadership, which is one of my favorite topics. And both of us have managed plenty of folks and higher plenty of folks. So I definitely want to talk about this. And the first thing I want to say, Billy is, you know, I really struck like when I first got in people management, which you got into well before me. And you're really helpful for me, understanding what good looks like. You know, there's this famous concept by Kim Scott called radical candor and it talks about like great leadership is measured on an X Y curve where on one axis, it's empathy, like really caring where your people, but then on the other axis, the more important one is being like radical candor, like challenging directly, being firm, being direct. Candidally for myself, the empathy was natural, but like I really struggle to develop the radical candor to be able to challenge directly. And as soon as I had to start doing that, my team was like, wait, who's this guy? And then I was like, why is he kind of all this on the news? And I mean, you know, my story, I had some really tough personal decisions, whereas I've always admired you because I feel like not to speak for you, but I always felt like both of those things came relatively natural for you. Like you're obviously a great person empathetic, but you also just seemingly, you know, we're really better at being able to have those. hard conversations. You're seemingly able to balance both. So my first question for you is like, how did you learn to be direct with a losing trust, especially as a young leader? And I appreciate that. And by the way, I've definitely made my fair share mistakes in leadership and I'm still trying to work on certain areas of that. But I'd say for me, and honestly, like Roman, this is like early days gorgeous, like I think he instilled this across his company, but it worked well for me. And you've seen that was the first thing, the first thing for me there is transparency and clarity. Like I don't keep, you know, I'm pretty open with everybody on my team. Like I pretty much tell it exactly like it is. There's not, I try to avoid side conversations even with leadership or other people. And when I say transparency, I mean, goals, people should know exactly what they're, their goal on. They should have the exact playbooks, which you're amazing at, to be able to execute on their job. And at the end of the day, like if you're transparent and goals are very clear, like people know if they're performing or not performing. And that then I go to my analytical side of my brain. And like that's the other piece is like you should be able to track performance. And a lot of companies can't track performance that well. So then when you talk about being direct, you know, there's a lot of subjectivity that that's involved in that conversation. So then it's like, you know, here's what's expected of you, right? Yeah. And you're doing this or you're not doing this. And if they're not doing it, like it's not a, it's not a surprise. So I'd say like that's how I start is, is I'm a very honest person about my, about like what's expected and what the goals are. And then it's just, it makes it easier to have that direct conversation because there's no subjectivity. It's like, look, this is the situation that we're in. And, and then on the empathetic part, like, I don't think anybody wants to not be good at their job or struggle with their job. And so it's like, hey, it's like, I know that's not what you're trying to do. And so we're going to do everything we can do to help you, you know, correct. But if you can't, like, it's also a business. And so like, we're just, we'll have that conversation. So I just try to be honest. But I think it has to start with transparency. And I like that. Yeah. And that's always easy at a lot of companies. But that's the company. That's what you can be. Yeah. You can be a leader like yourself. But if the company doesn't set the tone or culture of being transparent, like it will impact you negatively. So I think that's great. Last question on this one before we get to the wrap up, Billy. And this will really help early managers, early leaders is like, think if you think about some of like the tougher conversations that you might have to have, see with an ICF, I'll give you a couple examples. So like, one of them, like maybe a high performer comes to you and is like hammering you for like promotion or raise, but maybe you don't think they're ready for or there's conflict within the team, right? Like attribution issues or someone's really struggling. Some weird behaviors and you're going to have tough conversation. So my question for you, Billy is like, how do you personally, you don't have to like comment on the specific ones, but like, how do you personally initiate what was, what is a tough conversation for you and the individual where you've got to like book time with them, you got to sit them down and you got to be direct and firm to like address something head on. Right. So like, because I think this is something that like so many people struggle with, Lord knows I struggle with it. So like, the question is, is like, how do you personally initiate an approach otherwise really challenging and uncomfortable conversations of any topic, you know, with those people and handling it as delicate as you can? Yeah. Yeah. They're good questions and I'll go through to because you ask great questions, by the way. And I think there's two scenarios that need to to be addressed here. I think the performance conversations, hey, you're underperforming are for me, even though I'm empathetic, I think those are easier to have because the expectations are set very clear. It's objective. So I think not that they're not difficult, but they're easy to have. And I'm just, I'm just direct and a lot of times I feel like I, I don't know, maybe it's the approach, but it's set up in a situation where by the time that conversation has is happening, that person knows. So it's not, it's difficult for them, but they know. So it's easier to have that conversation directly with them because they're not surprised things aren't unclear. So I'd say just go back to that. Now the tougher conversations for me are top performers looking for promotions. They want to grow. They come at you with a lot of things. Those are tough, those are tough conversations to have. And I want everyone to get promoted and make more money and grow in their career. But I think that the scenario that a lot of us are in is like, maybe the role they're trying to get isn't available. If they're trying to go to manager, there's not a manager role or maybe they're at the top of the kind of senior I see that we have. Those are the tough conversations to have. And again, how do I handle those? I try to be, I try, try to, maybe I'm overly honest, try to say, hey, like, you know, first I'll set growth tracks and competencies around growth tracks. Like do you meet XX and X and I'll really try to push them and get the most out of them and say, hey, like you need to do these things exceptionally to be eligible for promotion. Then the other thing is that I won't over commit. And I'll say, hey, look like you are there, but until the roles open and I'll give you an example at my last company at customer, I had a like this, this guy's an amazing performer and he was definitely ready to lead a team and he was international. And we just didn't have the head count for him to lead a team that we had one other person plus him. And, you know, we just didn't have a manager role. So and he really wanted it. And, you know, I wanted to get it to him. And I was just like, look, when our goals go up and we justify the head count, you can become a manager. And I left recently, but now he's a manager and it took a while. But I'd say the approach there is don't over commit. Like you got to be honest. And if they're frustrated, that's tough. But going back to that, they have to do what they can control. And it's like they keep on doing their best and and grow their region and take accountability and then get into manager or if they're not getting that role, they have to go elsewhere and you never want to see that. But I mean, it's like sports too, right? Like if you're not getting what you need at in one club, like you could make the decision to get promoted elsewhere. If you're if you're thinking about what's best for yourself. So I just leave with honesty and transparency and most conversations and I find that helps make the conversation easier for me. I like don't over commit don't over commit to things. Now I think that's great. I think that this should go down as one of more powerful segments. Just because it's such a personal emotional and that is like honestly like so effing hard to navigate on both sides. I want to go as there for anyone listening is like expectation setting. Like that was a critical mistakes I made where the first time I was like having to be tough on people or like if you're denying promotions that are like, well, why? And it's like, well, crap. I didn't like any set any growth tracks. So like Billy did a really good job making sure that those those expectations are set. And that really protects you as the manager leader because it's like you have something to fall back on to as like a reference point. Yeah. All right, Billy, we're going to get into our final three questions. And this is going to be rapid fires. We'll try to keep these short. And so they'll get it you already here on time. And so this is two of them on just kind of partner manager profiles. And then we'll wrap up with the fun one. So first things first in your view. If you think of like the best partner managers you ever work with superstars. What actually separates a superstar partner manager from just a solid one? Like what are the characteristics rapid fire like the best partner manager traits you can think of? Yeah, all rapid fire. I think for any partnership motion that ultraverted personality and you can't really train that. But like, yep, that's going to go a long way. It's so relational. So like I think ultraverted, ultraverted people make great partner people. And then the other one is I think the what am I doing for my partner question? Like they're always asking their their selves like how can I add value to my partner? I like that. I know everyone says this, but it's it's true. Like, you know, the the worst partner manager, the one that get on this, hey, like let me see your account list. Like what leads can you send me today? And they're not really thinking about, you know, what I deliver to that partner. So ultraverted and just thinking about the partner first is going to be the winning recipe. I love that. Another one I'll add that I'm sure you'll agree with is just like biz dev oriented like pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, like just the bottom line focus. Like doesn't mean you ignore the other stuff. And I like how you focus on like value to partners. But like you've got to be like, you've got to understand what really matters. And you got to think yourself as a PNL of in your own right. And you're crossing the company money. Well, how much you bring in yourself in and the more you can like improve that ratio, the better your job security. To be for any job really. But like it really should be, but like it's people trying to justify with like higher top of funnel quotas and KPI. So 100% we know that doesn't work. Cool. Second last one, Billy is what's the single most important skill partner manager should be investing and learning and developing heavily as we head into 2026 skill. Yeah, that's a tough tough question. I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of cop out on this one myself, but like AI adoption and it's not AI with your partner management. It's just like we talk about having 50 or 100 partners like, you know, sending 20 follow ups after a week is daunting. And so like right now, it's pretty simple, but I use three tools like every day for for partner management. Right. Like I use granola to take notes and then craft action items and copy paste the email. So I can manage, you know, three times as many partner with that one app. I use chat to BT and I've trained my own GPT to be my own like partnership strategist and data analysis person. So like I have a GTP all for sales force only, right? It's like, I don't have to rely on ops person. I say, Hey, like I'm trying to make this report and this custom bucket formula. Like how do I do this? And it spits it out. So I'd say like you should be you should be using both of those. And then I do do some vibe coding on the side. Yeah. Like, yeah, doing some cool. Yeah, proficiency. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a guy. There's productivity. Yeah. Exactly. There's a guy on the team right now who vibe coded this really cool auditing tool for partners that that he's now using. This is that attentive. I'm only the three weeks. I can't take credit for it. But like that's too cool. That's pretty good. Like those things you want to do. So yeah, I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of use cases for like partner, maybe I'm a partner marketing. I've talked to a few other folks like most marketing teams like, yeah, we'll get this done in three months and then we don't even build it in your vision. Not an audit that would they just don't know. So it's like, what are the things that like you can't build a peer, you can't recreate a PRM with like a vibe code. Like that's not the pipe. Like what does it feel like more efficient? What are those light? We don't think they can ship the vibe coding. I'm a huge fan of that. If you don't feel like you're at least 50% more efficient than you were two years ago, then then I would be thinking about how to improve my efficiency at my output 100%. And then last one, Billy, more personal one, look, even a long time supporter of partnership mastermind at the various companies you've been at. consistently putting teammates through our programs. Given how precious budget is, we're really grateful for that. But why is that always kind of felt like a good investment for you if I may ask? Yeah, I mean, I think with your partnership mastermind specifically, I know it's changed a lot over the past 30 days and two weeks with your launch. But I think specifically what that community is, is its hands on. Like I'm not a big fan of like really high level stuff or even communities that you join and there's a hundred channels and there's a lot of mixed quality of people in there. And I won't name any, but like I've been in some of these. And the courses that you've run are like one, you've been very successful in partnerships. But two, they're very workshop style and hands on. And so I think people get a lot out of that. So I think you should invest in L&D. And then yeah, with the mastermind collective, like I've been in the platform. And we talk today, but I need a playbook for the agency's success motion and attentive right now. And I went in there. It's like we can build like 70% of our playbook from that. And instead of making it a core long initiative, it can be like a one week initiative. So there's just a lot of great tools in there to actually help the people on the team be good at their jobs. It's not high level. So yeah, I'm just a fan of what you've been building. I appreciate that big time, Billy. We'll get you around this. We just today, which congratulations, launch your own podcast. Well, I would love to be able to plug that. So quickly tell us about your new podcast. We'll wrap up. Yeah, I appreciate the plug. And it's only one episode. We have four, five recorded. I'm going to try to push one every two weeks. But essentially, it's on that AI proficiency piece. It's not partnerships related at all. Though like partnership, people can definitely take advantage. Go listen to Chris's first episode if you want to see how you can be a partnership leader. It's essentially called your co-pilot. Use AI to either build their businesses or do their jobs in a more efficient way. The one requirement for all of these people is they have to do a screen share. It's not talking about tools that you're using. You have to show people what you're actually doing. The hope is that this helps people who are a bit stressed about feeling like they're behind with AI proficiency, which I've been there. So that's what we're doing. We launched the first one today and we're going to try to launch one every couple of weeks. I love that. I think that's a huge gap in the market. I was obviously thrilled to be on there. I had a ton of fun and definitely encourage people to check it out. Yorko, Y-O-R-C-O, search up Billy McClennan on LinkedIn. But look, Billy, this was honestly fantastic. Long overdue. Thank you so much for all your time. I appreciate you having me. And yeah, we'll talk soon. All right. Until next time, everyone. Thanks so much for joining the partnership. I'm podcast. We like to hear today. Please follow and subscribe. Until next time.