Partner Ops Is the Hidden Revenue Engine with Antonio Caridad

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Partnership Massamond Podcast. I'm your host, Crystal Vaugh. I am absolutely thrilled to be joined today by Antonio Caridad, who's currently Senior Director of Partner Revenue Operations and Strategy at Logic Monitor. And what I love about Antonio is he's really the leading voice on all things, partner ops and revenue strategy as you're going to see in today's conversation. He's anti-fluff. He has real systems thinking. So today we're going to talk about the infrastructure that actually makes revenue possible. He's got some polarizing sharp opinions that we're going to dig into as we always do onto the show. But yeah, ultimately, super excited to have you on the show with us. So welcome, Antonio. Thank you, Chris. Thank you for having me. Thank you for that intro. I don't know that I'm the leading voice. I try my best to be helpful and to provide good advice and not add noise to all the noise that we have around them. But yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Amazing. This is long overdue. So I can't wait to get this live. But to set the stage, we start every interview with what we call the fast five segment. See, there's just like appetizer bite-sized questions. Give you an opportunity to warm up and give the audience a chance to get to know you a bit better. You ready for that? He's first thing that comes to mind. Ready. All right, let's go. First question. What's more dangerous? Bad data or no data? Bad data. I mean, no data. I think no data slows you down. That data makes you take the wrong decisions. Easy. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. We're going to talk a lot about bad data and poor data hygiene a lot today. Okay, cool. Next one's a bit of a spicy one. If you could delete one metric from partnerships forever, which is to say partnership teams, leaders, ICs, they stop tracking and obsessing over this one metric. Which one are you deleting and purging? The biggest vanity metric of them all, partner signed. It's completely useless and gets you in trouble 90% of the time because the next question is, okay, help me. You're producing and then you're like less than 20% of those. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That is a constant team on this show. Just like how big a vanity metric that is. And no one on your leadership team cares about how many partners you have. Right? Nobody will talk a lot about that today as well. Okay, next one for you. What is one warning label so to speak on your personal operating style? So just as you think about it, for me, if I was to focus on my own partner ops, kind of warning label, it would be if it's not in the CRM, it doesn't exist, so to speak, right? For how I manage my teams, which is to say, like, sure, you can have your Google sheets and stuff. But at the end of the day, when it comes to reporting and cross-functional collaboration, it needs to be in the CRM so that we're all staring at the same system of record. So what is your one warning label, which, you know, is something that everyone needs to be mindful of? I think you just said one that is really prevalent and real important. So to not say the same thing, I'm going to go with beware of the loudest and neediest partners in your ecosystem. Because more often than not, those tend to be not great producers. They're not keeping their heads down. And all they do is just burn through resources. And so more than anything, you have to ruthlessly prioritize and so beware of those very loud and needy partners. Got it. Yeah, I love that. I love that big time. All right. Next one for you. Let's just say you get to fix one thing instantly. I wave a magic wand. Voila. It is fixed at your Abusion, partner selection or internal alignment. And you only get to pick one. I know they're all important, but which one are you picking? That's a true, a true use in partner selection on your panel alignment, internal alignment, kind of like the bad data question. If you don't have internal alignment, you're dead into water. You're dead before you start. The other things you can kind of live with some things. And again, like the other things slow you down, but without internal alignment, you have no other period. Yeah, yeah. I like it. I can tell you're a big leading domino kind of guy, which I am as well, which is to say it's like, look, so many things can be important, but what's the one thing at the front of the line that once it's tipped? You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, but you got to get that lead domino right. And if you do, everything falls into line. Same thing with right, you know, good data. Same thing with internal alignment. I would argue those are leading domino type things. Exactly. Okay. Cool. Second last one. What's the most overused phrase in partnerships right now? Obviously, like, you know, how many logos you sign? We've already covered that, but what's what's an overused phrase right now in partnership that just gives you the Ick when you see it on LinkedIn? There's so many, but I think it's like we're building a world, a world class partner program. Everybody says it. 95% of the time you land on L.O. I have bronze silver and gold. And everybody has a world class partner program. Yeah. I hear that. It's totally what does that even mean? Is it really world oriented? Yeah. It's domestically oriented. That's okay. So yeah, there's a lot of a lot of books. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Cool. And then final bonus question, which we always ask all guests, what would Antonio be doing? If partnerships wasn't a thing you were in the business world, money wasn't an object like truly your set for life. You could do whatever the hell you wanted, you're retired from the partnerships game. What are you doing? That's a good question. And I've always said, if I had had the talent to actually play professionally, I would have loved to play soccer in the absence of that talent, I would have loved to be in in sports advertising. I love that. Well, I saw when I was doing my LinkedIn creeping and preparation for this interview, I couldn't help but notice that you were the VP of the soccer, who was at the soccer club at North Carolina. Is that right? You're like a not for the whole university for our for Kenan Flavler Business School for MBA program. I was right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's all that. I was teaming capital of the team. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was really close. Very jealous of that. Go Tar Heels. Go. Go. Go. Heels. All right. Cool. Well, look, we're going to get into the first segment now that we've got the training mills off, which is always origin story. One thing that's cool about partnerships as you know, we all have really wild kind of entry points for the most part into partnerships. So we like to start there. So for you, let's rewind because your path certainly didn't start in partnerships. It started as an engineer, moved through Telcom and then into IBM and ecosystem. So my first question is, what did that early engineering mindset teach you about systems and constraints that has really served you well in your partnerships career? I think really, like even though I'm an engineer, I lived in that world between at the beginning, between corporate finance and project management and engineering that I think allowed me to learn and the lingo and speak of engineering engineering teams, right? And it's something I do very well today, especially I don't handle tech partner programs anymore, but I used to, but I still work with engineers closely and I'm able to translate sales marketing to engineering lingo, right? Whenever, especially in the upside, whenever we have requirements and things like that, I can speak their lingo. I know how iterations work and how spikes work and how how scrum and agile methodology works. And so like, I think that prepared me very well to be able to be able to reach between different functional teams and organizations. So I love that. I think that's I love that kind of the threading of the needle there on those unique skills. So then let's fast forward a bit. You get pulled into partnerships through IBM after a case competition. So I'm curious at what point did you realize, you know, this wasn't just a role that partnerships is something that you could really see building a career in like really being that lane that you want to stay in for a while. What moment did it crystallize for you? Like, wow, like what a cool job type, you know, I can really see myself spending a number of years here. It's a good question. And I think, one of the things I always realized when I was in college studying telecom engineering is that I was not the prototypical engineer head down in the nitty-gritty of it. I always liked the business side of things. I was like, I had interest in both sides. And I think for the very first time when I got that first my business internship with IBM and then and then I started full-time with they realized that this role gave me that gave me a path to own the business side of things and handle kind of like my own little corporation inside of a bigger corporation. And at the same time still be involved in the nitty-gritty of data and the nitty-gritty building systems and the nitty-gritty of working with engineers. And then, you know, doing sales, doing marketing, doing all those things. So I think that like that clicked really fast. Can I say that immediately? It's like, oh, this is this is my thing. This is my jam. No, I grew into it. But I think very fast I did realize like, this is a path that allows me to do a little bit of everything. Every day is not exactly the same. Every day we face different challenges and different levels. And I think that was it. It's the fact that it allowed me to get a very rounded kind of like profile, right? Yeah. No, I thanks for sharing that. I resonate a lot with that. I think for me one thing I loved was A, you know, I don't get to just work within the confunds of my own company, which could be interesting. but eventually might get a little bored. I get to work with a lot of other companies, the Shopify, the HubSpot, so the world. So it's like you're kind of like working for many companies, which gives you that exposure. But then to your point, you know, for me coming from, on an engineering background, from an academic background, I love that I kind of amquenching two parts of my brain, right? Like I'm quenching like the business side of the brain that is interesting, but which is very people-centric, data-centric, high-stakes-centric. But then also the geeky side of my brain, where it's like close to product. You know what I mean? Like integration partnerships, especially, which you and I both cut our teeth and tech partnerships as well. So yeah, I think that resonates with me a ton. - I think you're nailing there in the head, which is like, I'm a nerd. The deep, like the bomb I'm a nerd. I cannot deny the fact that I'm a nerd, but at the same time, I'm a very sociable person. I need the social interaction, and I thrive on that social interaction. And this job gives you both, right? - Totally. - Absolutely. - Now let's talk about the next piece, which is early mistakes. So we ask every guest, it's like, how did you get into partnerships? What were those key early stakes and key learnings? So for you, you said one of the mistakes was trying to please everyone and assuming all partners were equal. So just walk us through that experience and then ultimately, what did you learn through that and that you were able to kind of correct and kind of carry with you? - I mean, it's nice until that warning that we talked about earlier in the fast questions, right? But it's, yeah, it's trying, at the beginning of my career, it's idling into a lot to those partners that are cloud, that are needy, that are, and you try to please everybody. And very fast, you realize, A, you get underwater. Fast, B, you burn through resources. C, you have a very long list of priorities that now it's like, oh, how the hell am I gonna prioritize this? And so you start to, like the later in my career, I learned the philosophy of ruthlessly prioritizing. And so I think that was, God will say it. It's the fact that when you try to please everybody, you lose sight of what the real North star is, what the business outcomes that you're trying to drive it are and what will provide the most impact. And you burn through resources and when you try to claw yourself back into, like, oh, this is what I was trying to accomplish most of all. These are the resources that I need to do this at that point you're under water. And it's really hard to claw yourself back from that. And so that was the lesson I learned fast. And that I'm still, I'm still, I'm gonna have to be honest. I'm still, I still have to remind myself about like, hey, in the grand scheme of things, what are we trying to solve with this? Why does that impact on this? Is this going to help everybody? Or is it just a one off case that, yeah, maybe that partner's gonna be a little bit pissed off at me, but the reality is like, hey, I have a bigger picture, right? So yeah, yeah. I think that last part, they're like the big picture. I think that's having an understanding of the big picture, I think, you know, calms you down and gives you the patience to zoom out and create a directionally productive path. I think, you know, some people are kind of born with those skills naturally, but I think it really comes down to experience. Like you need to get your butt whipped, you need to make mistakes. Early in your career, so zoomed in, I've got a quota monthly or quarterly, I've got to hit it and it prevents you from really like zooming out. So use your example. So I made all the same mistakes that you had mentioned and we know a lot of folks in the community as well. Okay, cool. Now let's get into the next segment, which is all about why most partnership teams don't produce enough revenue or consistent revenue, I should say. And you've been consistent on this and saying that, hey, look, partnerships don't fail because of strategy alone. It's really more about the fact that they're not really running like a proper business unit. So the first question for you is, you know, if partnerships were truly run like a business, you know, what would most partner leaders have to admit that they're doing wrong today? Right? So it's like, hey, look, say you're advising a partner leader and they're just not producing the results. What are they going to have to admit to themselves that they're not doing correctly today? In most cases, I think we still have a lot of partner people out there that don't prioritize. And this is a little bit self-serving. I might be a little bit subjective on this, but they don't prioritize the fundamentals of how everything has to be operated to execute properly. Right? And they're so focused on-- and they shared, I'm not saying it's a wrong thing, but like, they're so focused on pipe gen and driving bookings, or driving, or driving you know that, that they completely forget like, hey, I need somebody running all of this behind the scenes. And if you don't have the proper architecture set up in your CRM, if you don't have the proper architecture set up to capture the right information and things, if you're not reporting, if you're not, you don't have the processes and workflows and the partner experience and customer experience you're suffering from that. You guys, well, you're not going to last too long because you're going to keep finding yourself in that corner office without data. And let's pretend that you do have the data. With broken processes, that yeah, maybe right here and there, you're getting a transaction here and there, but very fast, your partners are going to be fed up with the fact that your processes are broken. It's very hard to do the business with you experience, experience sucks and they're going to go away. And when they go away, a chunk of your time goes away because they have all those customer relationships that don't come back, right? So one of the things that I always say is partner experience drives customer experience, right? 100%. And we're going to dig into that in a bit. And I totally agree to be clear with everything you said there. Just to play devil's advocate, just to give a, just to be fair to some cohorts of people where it's like, let's just say I say to you, Antonio, I hear everything you say. I'm a leader of a partnerships team. Look, man, I'm early on. I get the importance of process, but like, I'm just trying to figure out who the heck we should be working with from a partner perspective. I've got a couple of pams and cams and ICs on my team. We're just trying to like get by, produce results, run as fast as we can. We don't have all of these resources in place, right? Like a little bit of this excuse making a little bit of it's real. Like what would you say to someone, you know, as coherent and rational as you can? Who is like, look, I don't discount how important proper architecture, infrastructure, process is, but it's like, who's going to do that? When am I going to find time to do that, right? Which is, in many cases, an excuse. How would you kind of like talk someone down off that ledge, so to speak? And whenever I talk about this, I have this slide that talks about all the things that must happen for you to have proper fundamental operations and strategy that is solidified. And you have to take a look at all of the things that must happen and all the things that you don't have enough time in the day to do for your pams or your, or your, or your team, right? And so I think the first and most important thing is understand that, yeah, your priorities revenue, your priorities pipeline to cover for that revenue and for that's what's going to keep you in seat. But you from day one, even if you don't have the head count or the budget to have a dedicated ops person, you do need to find yourself in the office or in a meeting with your revops. If you're, if your engine is mature enough, where with your sales of person and at least get dedicated time from somebody in their organization to at least. At some point in the week, I'm not even going to say that they're in the week. They're working on ensuring that everything is worth at least, even if it's with duct tape, it's working so that you're able to actually do your thing. Otherwise, you're going to get tied into a knife job of you doing this yourself. And so, yeah, in the beginning, you don't need a dedicated partner ops person. Sure. You do need ops support. Absolutely. 100% totally agree. I think that's a great response. And then two things I'll add as well and I'll get your reaction to before I move on. A, like when you're like interviewing for a role, like you should be negotiating in good faith. Like, hey, look, it's going to be important for me to be able to showcase and impact and report up to you and across the leadership team. So I'm going to need, you know, you know, I'm going to need a commitment from you that I'm going to have at least bare minimum resources. And whether you can't provide me ops people, I'm technically sufficient, capable of getting into our serum and building a basic level attribution system. So like I need to know that within a month of me joining, I have an ability to literally track, right? So I can report otherwise, you're going to have no idea how the hell I'm doing and you might, you know, you might make a decision prematurely. So that's like, before we even accept a job, you should be making sure of that. Otherwise, you could be setting yourself up for failure. But then if you're already in C to, to Antonio's point, if you, you know, you can't do everything at the early stage, I get that. But the one thing you've got to get in place is tracking really basic level tracking, like setting up some basic custom level properties and sale source or hub spot, you know, like partner specific properties, like was this, you know, of all the deal sources. Is there a partner source deal source, right? Or is it just ads outbound, you know, marketplace, etc? Like you need to be able to track. Otherwise, how the hell will you even measure how you're doing and report across the work? So like that's where I would like drill down like. bare minimum, you have to have that. Absolutely. Like, you need to think about the fact that, yeah, what's going to be, and what's going to keep you in seat is that pipeline generation and up in those, in the bookings on the revenue because you're going to have targets. But if you can't capture it, if you can track that, guess what? You don't have anything to show for even if it's that, if it's coming in, if you're not able to prove it, that like, it's an on starter. Absolutely. Rob Moore in our just published this book last week. And March of 2026, basically, you know, the, the, the, the partner, partnerships operator, I don't know for the AI era. Rob had this great line in there where it was like, you know, you know, you know, this is what happens for a lot of partnership leaders who don't do proper tracking reporting picture like this big leadership revenue update meeting. The marketing leader pulls up their CRM to show their data. The sales leader pulls up the CRM to show their data. The partnership leader pulls up six different tabs, Google sheets, spreadsheets, all these other things to try to piece together what they did. The CRO nods that writes nothing down and then the meeting just continues on, which is to say that like, like, you just lose so much credibility, right? It's like, why are you reporting in disparate systems? Can we even trust your data? We have to spend 20 minutes to fact check your data, right? So it's an Antonio's point. You have to have that in place from day one. There's no excuse because otherwise how the hell you twist report? No, excuse you don't want to get into that situation where the sales leader on the opposite side of the table or the marketing leader saying like, I don't trust your data because you're bringing it from some other system that is not. Tools are exactly our source of truth, which is a CRM. Yeah, 100%. I'm glad we're on the same page. Okay, cool. Now we're getting to one of the juicier segments. The partner op system. This is your, your, your tried and true four plus one. So let's get, let's get into this because this is definitely where you can really flex your stuff. So you've built this, this now famous four plus one pillar framework. We've got systems, programs, metrics, enablement, all leading to partner experience, which I absolutely love. So walk us through this, right? What does this actually look like inside a company stack and weekly cadence? Good question. So in, in the programs killer, that's where I consider that's, that's where I pull in alignment, internal alignment, right? So making sure that there's alignment with your CMO, with your CRO, with your BPS of sales, with customer success and so on so forth, right? And from there, you can build like it's basically your strategy on how you're building an ecosystem. What kind of partners are you trying to attract and work with and why having a proper IPP and then making sure that you build a program's necessary to stand up that ecosystem and for it to become a fly, a fly will ride recurrent. Yep. And how are you going to operationalize that? That's where the systems come in. If your early stage, most like the nod you're going to have only your CRM, maybe another tool or so, then you're going to more mature, more mature stages when where you might be incorporating PRM, you might be incorporating, I can't map in tools like crossbeam, you might be incorporating some of the new AI, IPP tools that are starting to come out and then intelligence around some of those things, right? But also it's your system surround forecasting, it's your systems, it all be AI that you're incorporating in there. Then you have the metrics. How are you reporting? This is where you make reports. Thanks. And it's not just like pipeline and bookings, right? It's getting into stage progression, um, the velocity, funnels stages. You're getting into wind rage, you're getting into cack, you're getting into LTV, you're getting into all those things, right? And then finally, what fully brings in this encircle, all that strategy and all those fundamentals that you built, it's not enablement, ensuring that from an internal and external standpoint, from an internal everybody understands what the very piece of the, what the piece of the puzzle is in the ecosystem, A E's know how they, how they work with partners, CSMs know how they do, um, how they work lifecycle with your partners or, or PSM, um, your solution engineers are in lockstep with you working with partners as well, you have, maybe you have a service delivery program where you are, you're working with, with deliveries through partners for, um, time to value. And then the external side, which are, which is basically enabling your, um, enabling your partners on your partnership. What is what we do best? How do we co sell? How do you resell? How do we do marketplaces together? How do we integrate together? What, how do we work together? And then I want to understand you. You want to understand me to ensure that whenever I'm not in the room, you're able to speak about us on whenever you're not in the room. We're able to speak about us, right? And so all of that makes for breaks the central pillar, which is partner experience, partner experience is not something that you can just wake up one day and say, like, I'm going to build great partner experience. What, what is that? But partner experience is a product of those other things. It's a product of your strategy, it's a product of your system. It's a product of your metrics and it's a product of your enablement. When one of these things is broken, when one of these things is fruited, um, it can potentially bring not only the house down. Partner experience offers. And as I said earlier, when partner experience offers, the total address of market that your partner is bringing you start suffering, right? When a partner leaves all those customers, leave more likely than not. And so, uh, it's a pillar or think about it less than a pillar, more than being, um, that is a lot of that is that is basically lying on top of all those pillars. Whenever a pillar falls or crumbles, that being starts to get shaky, right? And at some point, all of that will come down. And so, um, that's basically my four plus one kind of methodology. Yeah. No, it's brilliant. I think, I mean, first of all, I love it. Like, uh, we, you know, you, there's all this talk about like customer centricity, which I think is important. I like this partner's centric approach where you're really anchoring everything around that. I think a key takeaway for me is like, how much, how much back end stuff that you might necessarily see is so critical for like standing up a successful partnership. Like it's not just, you know, you have a partner manager who's like really strong relationship wise and, and it's even process oriented and can like support the key contacts on the other side. Like that's obviously a part of the puzzle. Like you really need strong infrastructure and foundation. Um, as it, as a real example, tracking and metrics to your point. There are so many otherwise really productive mutual partnerships that get underfunded and under resourced because the partner managers managing it aren't tracking enough and can't tell the story of how successful that partnership is. So like, which is to say that it's like the full value being unlocked from that partnership is like the iceberg, but what's being communicated to the most senior leaders is the tip of the iceberg. And it's because they're not tracking it. I've seen this time and time again. I've personally managed relationships and partnerships. I've had people in my team where it's like my goodness. Like it's clear as day, there's impact at the customer level at each company level. Right. We should be investing more, but because you're not tracking things properly, you're not telling the story correctly, which isn't allowing you to fight for additional resources to accelerate growth. So I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but that to me is a good example of how not having the right metrics and tracking right hurts, you know, the, the ability to, to improve the overall partner experience. Because otherwise, if you were tracking properly, you'd get even more buying and more resources to accelerate growth. You hit the name on the head. And an important thing to note is that I think you alluded to this, but it's like all these things are interrelated. Like I think there are companies that struggle when they separate strategy and ops and enable momentum. They're siloed because then strategy decides, Oh, we're going to do this, this, this and this. And then suddenly like they bake it, they go and talk to ops and ops is like, Ah, yeah, we cannot do that because our systems are not synopsied because we don't have budget for XYZ tool. And that's because you should have been in locks to it. And then, oh, you want to run this play. And we want to make sure that hey, we're bringing up, we're creating this product. We want to make sure that our partners are up to speed and they're saying all of that. And then once again, you go and you don't have a way to track that, right? You enable a partner, but it's not tied up. And it's like, okay, we enabled all of these partners. We got a bunch of engineers in a bunch of different rooms. What do we have to separate? Oh, we're not tracking any of that. And your CRO is going to turn around and say like, so. What about, like, why should I do this again when I cannot see ROI in my head? I just hear you wasted time effort and resources. Yep, 100%. 100%. So, okay, so now let's get real practical for those listening right now who are maybe at a company. Let's just say you're at a company around, you know, 30 to 75 mil air are, you know, 30 to 100 mil give or take. And let's just say you were dropped in there in Tonyo and you need to build, you know, these key pillars from scratch, so to speak, you know, what are the first few things you're putting in place? Like, obviously, I know you need more information to kind of like orient yourself, but like, you know, of the pillars, the systems, the programs, the metrics, enablement, all the new partner experience. If I just dropped you into your average series B, series C, BB sauce, partner program, that's already up and running, but like, largely doesn't have these things figured out. Like what are the first few things that you really want to make sure you put into place? If you could sequence them. A good question. I think I start with who are we, right? What's our product market fit? Because that's going to, that's going to dictate. with your ICP and from your ICP you can understand, okay, where are the partners that are working with this? Right, so where I'm going and I think you know where I'm going is like, okay, I'm identifying my strategy and I'm understanding how I fit in the market, right? And with that then I can start thinking and working with potential partners about like this is how we fit together and this is why it makes sense. From there, once you start baking that at the same time, you're working with yourself, a person with your red ops person to ensure that you have the bare minimum in your CRM. You're able to have an object for partners, you're able to have an object in set of opportunities to track within an opportunity, an opportunity who's the partner, if they're bringing the opportunity or they're just influencing what kind of partner is that and so on and so forth, the minimum that will allow you to then be able to report on it, be able to report pipe generation, be able to report open pipe at any point that you get into a work asked and call with your, with your CRO and then, and then you're able to report bookings. As part of that, you also need to make sure that there's alignment, right? That you're not, internally you're not finding your AES internally, you're not finding your CSMs, that everybody is in lockstep and they understand the value of working with a partner because faster deals, bigger deals, yeah, bigger way, like better win rates. And then finally, once you have all of that and once you have that strategy and story and you've identified the partners, it's making sure that when you go into a partnership, there's maybe you're too small at that point, but you have a regular cadence. You have a regular cadence to check in to not just become a paper partnership where a vanity metric like with the stuff earlier, that you're ensuring that you have a plan. These are the goals that we're trying to accomplish. These are my targets, maybe again, you're too small to get into MOUs, you're too small to get into commitments, but you're tracking and you're regularly having a cadence with that partner, doing multi-threading with your team to get deeper into that partnership and then making sure that they understand what the partnership is about. Why are we working together? Because ultimately, they also have to stand up in front of their CRO and explain why they're wasting a bunch of time, not wasting, but why they're spending a bunch of time with Antonio Cardiade working on this. Why do you have to show work, right? And so that is part of the enablement, that is part of the strategy so that then you can get into account map and sessions and all that. Because at this point, you're too small to have that that kind of tooling. So that makes sense. - Yeah, totally does. I think that's super helpful because this is definitely a question we get asked of time and the community is, hey, I did get just get dropped and I just took this job. Nothing's really built out. If I had a dollar for every time I heard nothing's built out, like literally I wouldn't have to be doing this right now. I'd just be chilling on the beach somewhere 'cause I hear it all the time. I'm glad you answered that question, but as a follow up question, and I know it's impossible to give one universal answer for this, but is there like a signal for when a company, but more importantly, the partner program is at a mature enough point where you can justify a RevOps resource. I have really, basically, which is to say, it's like, let's just say there's like 10 stages of a partner program evolution. 10 out of 10 is like, you know, you're the Microsoft's of the world. One out of 10 is like pure stage startup. Like is there like a point or a signal or a trigger where it's like, oh, things are getting mature enough and complex enough where we should probably have like a dedicated head count specific for partner ops. I have some thoughts, but I wanna hear you go first. Because I also get this question all out of like, hey, I'm a new partnership leader. Okay, I've proved, I've been hustling, I've been scrappy, I've got a couple good wins. I think I'm starting to get a bit more credibility, a bit more budgets opened up for the next cycle, but I have to make a bet. Do I hire another quote-acquiring partner manager I see or partner marketing or partner navel and partner ops? Like, is there a good rule of thumb or signal that perhaps it is the right time to bring in that precious resource? - Yeah, I think there's, I don't know that there's a size, right? I don't know that there's team size or a revenue size. But I think the signal's hard. When you're starting to get truly deep into attribution battles, that is one thing. When you're starting to get into places where like, very basic Salesforce or hotspot reporting is just not cutting it for you because we know that Salesforce reporting is very limited when you start having to, now, okay, I need better and much more robust reporting. And I'm not even getting into predictive things, right? But I need power BI or I need something a little bit deeper, tablo or things like that. That's another signal. When you're starting to get into different types of motions, so you're not only doing resale. You're not only doing multi-motion. Multi-motion. Exactly. You're not only doing delivery. You're not, when you're starting to get into like, now I have bars, now I have MSPs, now I have GSI's. And all of those are different beasts, which will require most likely, maybe you'll start with a single program, but eventually you'll most likely have to adapt to the different routes and the different types. I think that's where, because now your day is starting to get, it's starting to take you away from that, I want 80% of your time focused on being with a partner on driving pipeline and on covering opportunities and covering white space, expansions, cross-else, all of that. Now you're starting to leave that 80% behind and now you're spending maybe 60%. The rest, you're spending it in the operations world. I think that's where you have to start thinking. Okay, I need a fully dedicated account if I want, because that's, in my opinion, when properly implemented and when properly brought in, it can be a lot more powerful than bringing another quote, a curing person. 100% because the gains are exponential and the fact, and it's the fact that you're going to liberate all of this time for your team to focus on what you hired them for. 100% I think that last line was an absolute clincher, which is exactly my thoughts as well. It's like short term pain versus long term gain. Like short term pain is like, okay, maybe you don't have another person in seat who's purely focused on pipeline, but you do have someone in a partner optional focused on creating leverage for exponential gain in the future. I loved everything about what you said there. I think that was a great segment. And one key takeaway there is, okay, maybe there's not a rule of thumb, but it's like, hey, look, if you're like the de facto leader of the department and you basically feel like your job is turning into partner ops, probably a good signal that you need to bring someone in so you don't fully convert. Okay, so one last question on this, 'cause this is the final one that I get asked a ton as well as, yeah, okay, sure. I have conviction now that it's time to bring in a head count for partner ops. And there is some budget, but I'm getting pushback for this particular role because leadership and finance are like, well, how do we quantify the ROI of this type of role, so to speak? So I'd love to hear from you. How do you justify, or I should say showcase the impact, which is to say this, let's just say this, say you're pitching me, I'm the CFO or whoever, and you're pitching me on hiring one partner ops person. And I say to you, hey, Antonio, okay, sure. But how will I know in one year's time that this person did a bang up job? Like what will be true one year from now, right? That wouldn't be true if we didn't hire this person. Like what's the impact on the business? How will it be felt? How can we measure it? 'Cause I hear this a lot, right? With like, quarter carrying partner managers relatively straightforward. Did you generate pipeline? Did you move pipeline? Did you close pipeline? Right, even for partner marketing, you can measure things like MQLs, et cetera, et cetera. Enablements a little bit tricky, but for partner ops, point blank question, how would you know six to 12 months into their tenure, whether or not they're making a true impact? And how can that be measured? - Good question. And it's not a simple question to answer, and I think different people might have different answers. But I think one of the simplest ways to look at this is efficiency gains, right? From a perspective of when this person joined if they make updates to the partner program, how is that impacting us? How we, as our parrots of principle, gone in a little bit better and not only 20% generating 80% of a revenue, it's maybe we're getting into a 3070 or a 4060 split, right? Where more partners become generators, because now, because now they're incentivized and the proper experience, et cetera, is there. Our wind rates are going up. Like are they identifying issues within our pipeline, within funnel that is hurting us from doing this, right? Have they identified, like one of the things that we help is are you able to identify partners that maybe on paper look fantastic, but in reality, they're not partners that, you know, you don't like, they bring you opportunities, but you don't realize that on the back end, these partners are not keeping the customers, are not retained. the customers long enough or are churning or are demanding so much discount that actually it's their bad partners, right? In the front end pipeline looks fantastic but in the back end you realize that it's all it's it's all cost cost cause because they're not retaining the customers they are commanding such a big discount that the product that our alive those customers in the dialog is not there and so on so forth so this is what these are the kind of efficiencies that you should be able to find but also also in the in the sense of ensuring that your cadence with the rest of the go to market engine becomes better that friction is going away those rules of engagement are better you're you're actually working as a team yeah that that's part of it what else I mean there's there's four things that I could add but um no that's great yeah for for the time that we have maybe that's enough no no that's that's that's certainly plenty and I think it's real I think the last piece you said look is the hurt burn now largely gone which is how do I as a revenue leader whether on the CRO the CFO whoever how easy is it for me to on my own go find all of the necessary and requisite data surrounding the partnership work and team I should be able to go get that squeaky clean no problems and I should trust the data like that is real right it's it's hard to quantify that but that's real if the leadership team feels like wow every time I need any amount of data from the partnership team I just know Antonio and his team they've just got that dialed in like that is that is real that's not fluffy but then the other thing I'll say as well it's more practical on the KPI side is like look if I hire a supposed superstar partner ops person and we already have an existing partner program after one year our average lead to deal ratio should improve our average deal to to close one should improve our average time spent in each stage should improve like you know especially if they're focused on those things so like I think there are real KPI's that you should be able to measure and they're not necessarily in client facing roles or even partner facing roles but they're they're to create real leverage they're first help us see the data so like oh look at that for every lead you get only 40 percent of the convert to deals well that's a huge leaky bucket can you help us through system automation and process improve those KPI's so I think like the the hygiene of it all and the improved accessibility and trustworthiness of the data is a real real artifact in benefit but then beyond that those actual KPI's buttrusting at all I think that is something that you can if anyone listening you're trying to justify a head counter partner ops you could say hey look I'm putting I'm putting my credibility on the line these are the KPI's that after six to 12 months should definitively improve if this person pans out is that kind of translate with you Antonio yeah absolutely it's it's I mean you you eloquently said it better than I do but it's efficiency gains right and then if you want to measure it externally if that partner ops person is focused on partner experience that partner experience should should get better which means that not only your good partnerships are going to get bigger bigger and more recurrent it means that you might actually get to expand as we said into more partners producing right so you can measure it both ways again it's very subjective because one leader might have a different opinion than others and a partner operations person depending on who they are and what role and what company they are their preview might be bigger or smaller into different areas but but ultimately it comes down to efficiency gains and it comes down to all those KPI's getting better absolutely 100 percent I love that okay cool now we're going to get into the stretch on our last 10 minutes we're going to go kind of rapid-fired distinct questions that I'm personally really excited to geek out about and I'm really excited to hear your answer these will be some different categories so this first one is up on on attribution right which look we can have a whole hour on attribution it's critical to get right it's difficult to get a universally accepted definition that the rest of your org accepts on finance and the Sierra on the sales team so like attribution is absolutely critical so my first question for you is where does attribution break down in the real world for you know a lot of these partner programs and how do you fix it with a blowing up trust with sales? where does it break down I think it breaks down in in terms of alignment I think if yeah everybody has some board that you're going to be working as one team and you understand that if you work as one team thinks flow better revenue gets like deals get bigger deals go faster that alignment that alignment is critical if other teams like marketing and your BDR team for example or sales don't want fixes they're they're like it's mind mind mind mind mind it's a hard it's a hard battle to fight but attribution is one of those things that I don't know that I've met anybody that has truly solved attribution in like an ideal world everybody has their own flavor stuff like we've solved it this way and this way but as long as you're able to get to a point where you all agree on these are the rules like the rules are like we're going to measure these touch points over time once you have the historicals you're going to be able to weigh those touch points and say like this is more important than this like a customer looking at a website this less important than a partner bringing a customer to a webinar right or putting a booth in a trade show is more important than having a customer call like you know but once you get into those things and then you have your own rules about hey when a customer looks at our website we're only going to count that is valid within 60 days or within six months or a partner talks to a customer three years ago does that does that count no not really that was three years ago right as long as everybody is on board and you have these rules and you're able to measure those things I think you're in a good path to solving attribution and then again once you're going to without linear multi-touch attribution where you're measuring all these points and in at the beginning you say like everybody everything is the same and because everything is the same we're going to give credit to maybe marketing a partner for this and because of that yeah basically our targets are going to be a little bit inflated because you know it's it's like a Venn diagram there's a little bit of overlap and and we and we expect that all these targets pipeline this chunk is attributed to both as long as everybody is okay with that and everybody understands why they're so overlap and all that you should begin a good path and then you can get into like bringing tools that can eventually get you into a U-shade and W-shade and algorithmic but now for that you need to have plain data and you need to have the historicals to be able to actually give proper waiting to the different touch points that lead you to that much more robust and elevated kind of attribution model right so that makes sense yeah totally I think a couple key takeaways there is like look we said this earlier like you got to track everything if your company isn't set up right now to like handle proper attribution of partnerships you can't make excuses you have to track every single thing I don't care if you have an piece of paper physically on your desk you need to make sure that when it comes time to like quarterly commission calculation like you're getting all of your deals factored in but another key theme as well is especially early on is like they need to educate the right people at your company on like literally how does partnerships bring in deals I remember when I last company was when I was I was hired to build a partner program for the first time they had sales ops and marketing ops and they had a really strong like overall attribution model but they had no idea how the heck it worked for partnerships so I actually had to spend a surprising amount of time educating them on like here's how we bring deals in like referrals like sometimes they come from email through email and then we've got to like log them correctly or sometimes it's a UTM link that's on a partners list you know partner page that we get listed for or sometimes they submit a link through a partner portal as an example like and they had you know it's not a fault of theirs they just they weren't familiar with this so we had to like work to I didn't have partners at the time so I had to enable my own sales ops team to refactor how we handle attribution because they're like oh I don't even know what the heck partner referral meant so to speak so don't discount early on like don't assume is the key takeaway that like if you're joining a company they understand how partnership motions work they're familiar with the traditional models adds very easy and very clean you know outbound super easy super clean because it's all trackable through these UTM links so you have to educate before you can actually build the systems together you know absolutely and as part of the process that you're gonna go through it's okay to make assumptions at the beginning like you're going into cases where hey a partner talked to a customer about our product fine and then immediately after that call the customer came and look at your website and so your first touch point of that customer is going to look like oh the customer touch they're like looked at the website but hey maybe a few hours or a couple of days after the partner actually registers deal you need to get to a point of assuming with your team is like hey guys whenever this happens we're gonna make an assumption that this was because of the partner right and so technically the first touch point is the partner telling the customer to look at the website, right? And so it's okay to make assumptions at the beginning, you're gonna get better with time, but you need to start somewhere. 100% 100% cool. Just to wrap up, we have one final two parter. And of course, we couldn't have an interview without talking about AI. And look, everyone's talking about it, you've taken some really grounded, even polarizing stances on this, which I love. So first question for you is, look, everyone is trying to throw AI partnerships, point blank question, Antonio, where is it actually useful today? Good question. I mean, I'm going to start with the fact that you cannot just throw AI out of problem and think it's going to be fixed. Especially if it's a bad data problem. But inputs bad outputs at scale with AI is just going to exacerbate your issues. I think where I think where it's useful is, I mean, there's a couple of instances. There's AI tools out there that are able to capture all of the signals and all of your interactions with partners with customers. And basically populate your CR. You're taking manual efforts away from your AEs from your partner managers, because the AI, whatever tool it is, or combination of tools, is listening to your recordings is looking at your emails, it's it's connected to all of your interactions, and basically it's captured. That takes a lot of the manual things away. And a lot of the potential human error away from the equation, right? So that's that's one example. Another example is if you have a robust engine, and you let let's pretend that you have relatively good data, where you are getting into scoring partners based on revenue based on win rates based on on verticals based on deal size et cetera, AI being able to identify and recommend partners based on a different set of parameters, whenever a deal comes in. So a deal comes in for healthcare. And AI says, Hey, you have a fantastic partner that is an offspring healthcare. Yes, they are top three in win rates. They are, their deal size is 2.5 x larger than our normal average side deal size. This is a prime partner for you to bring into the steel. Yep, right? That is that is a perfect use of AI that is actually useful and it's not noise. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I was just coaching a 200 million error HR tech vendor today was just coaching their team on some cool AI workflows and that like partner prioritization type workflow. I think that's a fantastic use case because if AI is set up to be like pervasively kind of listening through with your listening to sales deals, client calls, et cetera. And then it's also paired by being connected with like your partner data, which could be in your serum could be in tools like crossbeam. It can just proactively say, Hey, look, hey, AI, you might not know what you're in this 50 K deal right now that doesn't have an X activity date. Last activity is created in 30 days. It has these three surrounding partners. This one in particular, just close that deal two months ago probably has relevant insights like just this like intelligence layer. So to speak with the keys, you need the right data, but it needs to be connected to all those different disparate data sources. So I think that's a great way to close out. Final question for Antonio to wrap up. Let's just say someone is not in a partner ops role, but is listening and they're like, you know what, that actually sounds pretty interesting. I want to give you the opportunity to speak to the world, so to speak for all of our millions of listeners, so to speak. Why do you believe partner ops is such a great potential career path, whether you're already in partnerships, and this is like you pivoting or breaking it into it altogether, because I am on record saying, I think in this new AI era of all the partnership type role types, I think partner ops is going to be in one of the highest demands because you can create so much leverage, right, with lesser headcount. That's just my take. So I want to give you the opportunity to speak to the world. Why do you believe this beautiful profession should be something to be considered in the future? The reality is that as we all know, I'm not going to be the guy that says, I've bound this dead and all of that like you see a lot of people saying, but I've bound this struggling in its evolving in bound is struggling and it's evolving, right? Why? Because there's a multitude in the over saturation of signals in the market. And so one of the things that people are realizing is that for you to break through right now, it's all about trust and systems of trust, right? And who and who holds the trust of customers, other companies, not necessarily you. And so you need you need to work with them to be able to tap into that trust. And as partner teams evolve as partner teams grow as companies realize that this is the bed that they want to bet on. This is a whore's that they want to bet on. In order to, as we were talking about earlier, in order to create the efficiencies to build the, let's start from beginning to build the fundamentals and scale this motion and scale the strategy and then build the efficiencies. This is a roll that's critical. Like, I don't know that there's any robust and mature company in the industry that doesn't have a wrap up team now. Just a few years ago, just a few years ago, rabbits look, that was not a thing, right? Wrap up started a few years ago. And they're like, well, what is rabbits? The rabbits is now like, central and critical to the Gordon-Martin engine. I'm part of that, right? And part of the office is becoming a very, very important part of that wrap up sanction. And you earned a driver's seat to what you just said, you're in the driver's seat to create those efficiencies, you earned a driver's seat to build. And then you're in the driver's seat to become this new, maybe it's not new anymore, but this term and industry now, which is a Gordon-Martin engineer, and be at the front center, you're the Formula One driver of that AI Formula One car. Yeah. Right. So it's you get to do that, you get to build that, you get to be that guy. I mean, that, I don't have anything else to add to that. That is a mic drop of all mic drops. But yeah, I think like what like a security team is to an engineering team, where it's like critical, right? Like I see like partner ops and rev ops becoming that critical to the revenue work as a whole, but you did it much better justice. But look, we're at time in Tonyo can't thank you enough. I can't wait to get this episode live. And yeah, thank you so much for dropping your wisdom. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Chris. Thank you for indulging and listening to my incessant granting. And I hope that this is helpful for a few folks out there, certainly for a lot of folks. And you can you can always find me around. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Somehow in Tonyo finds time to share his wisdom despite a very hectic job and family life. But like, thank you, Antonio. And thank you all for listening. If you like what you heard, feel free to subscribe to the partnership mastermind podcast. Until next week. Thanks so much. Thank you Chris.