Stop Chasing Revenue: The Real Architecture of B2B Partnerships with Martin Scholz

[Music] Good morning, good afternoon everybody. This is the next episode of Built in the Maya, where I speak to people who have built something meaningful in the Maya, in the B2B South Space. And today it's my pleasure to have Martin here with me. And I've met Martin three years ago in Berlin and it was clear that he knows his stuff. Some people call him the man for the partnership. We're here to talk about what makes partnership work, especially in the Maya region, because I think that's important to be clear about, talking about regional differences. And also, and that's one thing I've always appreciated about Martin. It's with no rose-colored glasses, and this is exactly what this podcast is all about. So Martin, welcome. Let's kick it off with a warm-up. Question one. The thing that nobody tells you about scaling in Maya is. It's harder than the. Actually, they tell you everybody tells you about that. It's. We need to be more efficient than in other regions. So it's about efficiency. I truly believe that, yes. Next one. Most sales leaders I've met are great at X, but terrible at Y. They are great in selling and terrible in actually leading. Most. It's incredible. Even after 20 years, people still seem to make the same mistake over and over again. They promote the best-selling person into a sales leadership. However, the skills that you need to be an excellent salesperson is very. A very. A very. A very. A very different from being a sales leader. And they keep doing the same thing over and over again. I don't know how many books or studies and research has been written about it, but still it happens every day. If you could delete one sales buzzword forever, which one would it be? Agentic. Right now, agentic. Let me qualify that very briefly. I strongly believe there's a huge opportunity in using AI for improving processes and structures. But there is too much, way too much BS around agentic AI. People who claim they fired all employees and agentic AI will do it. From me, the nicest is that anthropic had several positions open for STRs. Okay. Final question. What is the advice that you keep giving around partnership? And people just don't seem to get? There are a couple of reiterating work-earning themes. Maybe the one which always sticks immediately is if you want to go into partnerships, don't do it because you want to have revenue. Revenue is not a goal. It's a result, which is one of the biggest misconceptions because it very closely connects to the second biggest thing I keep telling them in partnerships. It's not about you. It's all about the partner. And too many, especially BDBSARS companies start up scale-ups, start partnerships with a focus on what they want, which is nice, but totally irrelevant if you don't care what the partner wants. I think this is a brilliant segue into the lessons learned. Let me preface it with this. Me and my wife, we love the show called "Mayday" or the AirCrash investigation as they translate it. And it's always about the plane crash, the investigation, what happened, and ultimately how it changed the air travel for good or for wherever as a result of that. There are some other stories that I think are most valuable because everybody posts with the results, but nobody tells you the truth. What is the one thing that you learn the hard way around partnership? And I know you've been, some people might call you a veteran, but you've been in the business for a while. Maybe take me back in time into the early days, some of the assumptions, and what was the thing that you really need to reconsider? And it's still true today around partnerships. I guess there is indeed, and we're always smart and inside, right? So I stumbled into partnerships about 20 years ago, and the first years I didn't even know that there was some partnerships. The time was slightly different, was business development, when that was really still the job of developing new areas of business, and not the tough job of trying to make book or phone calls for your contacts executives. And if you want to go into business development, partnerships or you want to develop a new area of business whether geographically, regional, whatever, partnering with somebody who knows that, a segment might be a smart way. So I naturally focused or started to have 80% of my time and team later spent on working as partners in the first company such metrics, where we had made a lot of mistakes, but ultimately very successful with a typical reseller referral program. And reseller and referral partner. Are they the same things or are they different? Very, very different. Okay, that's another segway, something I keep telling people is like, you know, a lot of said, these are who are pressured to hit the quarter. And here's something about partnership, say, oh, maybe should do an indirect channel, let somebody else sell our product, right? So somebody else really owns and sells your product, which sounds nice, but a number one, why would they care? But Sean, someone else sell your product if your own team can't sell it fast and scaled enough. So what's in for them? But the other thing is like, especially if you are in SARS and we talk about SARS, you, I'm sorry, I'm going down in the rabbit hole, you don't sell what we do is we sell licenses. We don't have a physical transfer of ownership. It's not like the go-to times when Microsoft Windows 95 was put on CDROMs or floppy disk put in a card box and shipped around the globe. And they had real resellers or distributors who really were like, okay, we are the tech distributor of Microsoft. So they bought thousands of licenses and then distributed to the local stores. That's not going to happen because we log in via SARS. So we don't have a transfer of ownership. So the question is like, who does cost on boarding? Who does customer success? So there are a lot of things which people completely ignore. The reselling is important, but complex referral is the very thing. Somebody says, hey, you told me that you have this challenge. I happen to know this software, which might be interesting for you. Would you like to get an intro so we can have a look at it and then you know, you get a lead as a surrender. I get a lead, qualified, hopefully pre-qualified, highly pre-qualified lead who is more likely to close, sorry to dive into that. And that's what you are doing at the beginning referral partnerships. So typically I would always say you start with referral because why would somebody resell you? They were on it, you know, the invest on their side is quite massive. And nobody just because they're trying to contract are educated in your process and your product are evangelized. So why don't you start the very natural ways to start this referring if they like a product, if they've see it fit into their customer group, that's a good starting point. And if and when there are other components around it, it might develop into reselling, but that's quite a lot of effort on both vendor side as well as partner side. But the sorry I wanted to share was more like when we when we jumped from somebody had in such metrics was somewhat scalable, readable. We know we worked with digital marketing agencies, we knew what we were looking for and everything. When I went to Uber, we actually had a even bigger share of revenue coming directly from partners, but the model was completely different. And we were looking for partners who could put our product to the SMB market specifically the market, which we couldn't reasonably address ourselves. Our product was a great fit for even small businesses, but it was way too expensive for us to acquire retain and service those customers. So we looked for other companies who have access to the customer group and have an intrinsic motivation to, you know, to put our product to their marketer with a like it's a good fit to to so you can offer your customers an additional product. And of course we wanted to to prioritize prioritize right so we looked at what are the criteria we should look at whether or not a potential partner is actually a good partner because the fun thing is from the top five partners we had four complete different businesses. So there wasn't an IPP we could an ID partner profile was very individual. And this one was big each one was strategic and when I mean strategic it meant if we would lose them as a partner we would see the impact in our revenue and we came up with a scoring board with three dimensions. The first one was customer they should very natural they should have access to to to target a customer group in that case small businesses. In a reasonable number the second one was also from conversations we said okay they have access so we talk to somebody and said hey you have this amazing access to all the restaurant owners you have field sales force why don't you you know bring that to the table and then this potential partner on a field has said look you know we ask our field sales. And they talked to the restaurant owner about your solution and they got slept in the face because these were field sales which were literally delivering groceries to them like this where the the whole say dealers and the restaurant owner Luigi said look what do you want to talk to me with digital marketing give me the tentomators and get out of my store right so they like the credibility the target customer didn't didn't expect this person to want to talk with them about something which is completely out of their competence fields. Or perceived potential to fix your plumbing but I also I know a finance advisor and say what are you talking about we both laugh about it but this happens every day I literally every day have an inbox requests from some. The term and it was where used to be a new from offshore development companies who said hey Martin see your workers are companies what are the partner said look I do work as a company but I have no idea about development I don't even speak to the right people. in the company, even I do speak to the right company, I have no judgment whether your services are either reliable, good or even fitting. Because I'm not a developer, I'm not a product person. It's customer base, like the target, the conversations are happening and the third one. So the third one is capability. Can they do what we want them to do? For a fraud, it's super easy, right? Everybody can send an email or fill out a referral form. But if you want to talk about reselling, I mentioned that earlier, we come back to can they actually service them? Can they charge them? Are they ready to take the financial cash flow? Can they build them? Can they invoice them? Can they service them? Do they have a support team? And especially if you think about SMB scaling, that was a problem. We once had a fantastic partner, great prospect, great customer base, absolutely credible in the digital marketing space. They were not capable to charge the clients because their cash from their current business model was had a different cash flow. They collected from users and paid the merchant, but they couldn't charge the merchant a recurring sarsafee. So while they would laugh to team up with us, they said we would need to completely rebuild our financial, um, create a billing system for that. So capability was the third one. It was a capability of the processes, but also I guess of the people inside, right? Yeah, can we be more like do they have the people they they need? Do they have the resources they need? It has like a couple of dimensions. People, team, infrastructure, knowledge, something like that. So we built this and again, even these three were like learning by mistake, right? We had this fantastic looking customer prospect, where it's this massive amount of customers, where you're like, that would be great. And then we learned, oh, they don't have the access because the credibility is not there. Or they do have the customer, they have the credibility, but they are not capable to do what we need them to do being. Yeah. And then we came up in a situation where we had partner prospects, which scored a really, really high on all three dimensions, where we were super excited to sign them up and we got started and didn't produce a lot. And then we had other partner prospects. I remember with the one case where you know, three people from from also came to our office headquarters in Berlin made the made the company to come to us and said, Hey, you want to become your partner? We looked okay, well, how many customers you have is zero? Okay. And then we checked like customer credibility, capability and they were just about to start. And we were like, do we really want to sign up this partner that they don't score very well on our different dimensions. They were the ones in to see you. And I came to us and we were kind of at the verge of disqualifying them as a potential partner because I like, is it worth our time to invest in this partnership? And lucky we did mostly on the personal relation. We felt like we feel like they want to do that. And guess what, within six months, they become type five partner. And we're like, okay, our model, our, our sparring board is broken. We are missing something. If somebody who scores very well on all three dimensions, doesn't perform in someone else where we had at least at one, a big question mark becomes a core partner within six months. And then, you know, I kind of used the word already realized it's all about the commitment. It's the most important question partnerships is how important is a partnership for the other person. And today I always tell the story of the drug about me before I met my wonderful wife, which I'm nearly 25 years now. I before I met my wonderful wife, I wanted to date Angelage Lee. She didn't want to date me because there was nothing in for them or for her. And the same thing is if we talked about some of these partners, which she actually signed, which had all these great scoring on customer credibility capability for them, the partnership with us was not as business critical. So they were not committed to it. It was a nice to have one for the other guys, the Austrian guys, which came to us, even coming to our short already that commitment, then you exactly what we want. And they built their business with us at the core or one of the core pillars. So we were business critical to their success. That's why they committed. And that's why they closed the gaps. And that's why they were able to they had a very clear pass how to gain customers. They knew exactly what they were, wanted to do and how they wanted to do. They knew exactly what they were credible to talk about this. They came from the industry. They were very much aware of what capabilities they had to produce and they had the fun to do that. And so this was then the four season. Today, this is one of the frameworks which came a bit of a established in the in the partnership scene as the four Seas of Partners qualification. So if you have a prospect and fund a few, these are the four criteria you should check. But the main focus is commitment. If commitment is a delivery binary, if it's there, you can close gaps on others. If it's not there, anything else doesn't matter. How do you I was just thinking every now and then I work with the sales teams and they would say we're busy this week because we're attending this global event for this partnership organization or one name and in names. But it was always them coming to the partnership event and some sponsoring, etc. Do you have a have you developed a kind of a litmus test for what does commitment look like? If I'm a business owner and I have a 10 million euro revenue and I know I want to grow with the partners because I've read how how important that is and how it accelerates and shortens the sales cycle and increases the size of the deal, all the things. How would you how would I estimate or litmus test the the the commitment? Is it about them willing to come to us or is it other behaviors that you see and you already know, hey, there is a certain level of consistency? It's it's a fantastic question and that's a bit of this crazy situation. I just said it's the most important thing to to challenge and at the same time it's the hardest to go. So how do you do the go about that? Commitment is not measurable in KPIs. It's not, you know, you can check customer numbers. You can verify if they have particular capabilities. The commitment is something you have to feel and that sounds very strange. But let me make more tangible. So it it starts it all starts with your initial partner value proposition. If you, you know, if you want to partner with someone else, you need to think about what's what are you offering? What makes you an ideal partner for them? That starts with, you know, how does your partnership would help them to expand or protect their business? If you're not helping them. So let me just if you're partner, if you think you're a very proposition for partners, we pay you a commission. Go home. This is never a partner value proposition. So if you have not something compelling to offer to them, which helps their business, you will not get any commitment. So talking about that partner that came to you, it looks to me like they did the thinking themselves because you were not targeting them back then. Did you, did you realize what was it, what was made you the Angelina Jolie for them? Like your company? Yeah, I mean they, they have to say they came from an industry, basically a management buyoff of a potential partner of our competitor. So they knew that this product works in you, they can't go with the other partner. They knew also that this other partner didn't behave very well. A little bit of a sidekick. It was a US competitor and I always had the big US competitors and there's a cultural difference talking about business and in EMEA, preference for doing business with EMEA with EMEA companies because of a cultural impact as well. So that was that was, they came to us and it was on us to verify if it's tangible. If the commitment, because again, the commitment assets very, very generally, if the commitment is there, they can close the other gaps, but of course they need to have also the ways and the funding to do that. But for them, they knew exactly what they wanted. So that was a very strong signal for us. You felt like this is what I said, we felt like there is something happening. This is going to work. If you, if you have other conversations, if you have a good value proposition and you have already established partners and you talk to the next potential partner and how do you measure this? This is like how do they respond to the meeting in Whites? Are they showing up? Are they collaborating with you? Let me give you two tangible examples. When I joined the third company in US Hendrix, I took over a small team for working with again, channel partners for partly even reseller and I had a great team member, but he was shining away from QBR's quarterly business reviews. And I pushed him a bit and I said, I'm sorry, he said like Martin, please micromanage me. It was the first and only time I met Carri as a leader where to micromanage somebody to do something, but it was honest request because he didn't want. Because he was shining away from the from the business question. He was all about relationship building and then we had the QBR and he was leading it and at one point I asked the partner and the call like, Hey, what's your budget for us next year? And Michael in my team, I literally saw like he came blank or a white on the face. He was slacking me, Martin, you can't ask that question. And I was like, why not? In the end of the day, we are in a business tradition. We're not servation army. If they and it was budgeting season, if they don't have a blind item in their budget of partnering with us, how much business they want to make with us, that's okay. But then I shouldn't have a line item in my business plan. What I get from them. So, you know, are we a line item for them? Are we critical for their business? Are they even thinking about us? A lot of this conversation I train, you know, when I do the partner manager's certification, train partner managers on how to do their job. Before you sign a partner, ask them what their expectations, if your partner can't or a potential partner can't explain how success would look like with for them in the partnership. How would you want to meet their expectations if you don't even know what their expectations are? And that's a dangerous thing in partnerships. Too many areas, you can sign a partnership contract like that. There is no commitment in there. It's not like, you know, if you're on sales, it's such an action. At one point, if you want to buy my service or my product, you have to pay me ex and even we had the nicest conversations and wine and dines and everything. At one point I said, "Powel, are you signing and you laugh at me say Martin in which role do you think I will pay you 10k for that. And then we have this hard discolification. And at that point, it's clear you're not going to have a deal. If you talk about a partnership, I say, "I'm probably going to, you know, we do business together." And you feel like, "Yeah, that sounds nice. Why don't we sign this partner agreement?" And then I put it on my shelf behind me on the blue boxes, and it sits there, and maybe someday somebody comes across or not, then I don't have a partner. And that is a big problem to sign too many partner agreements, which are just sitting in the shelf because it didn't hurt, but it doesn't bring any business for anyone. The commitment is in the small things, but you said it still have hard to gauge in a, in a, in a, let me, let me probably focus a bit more. So number one is like, how good are there resonating with your value proposition? So if I talk to you and say, "Paw, if we partner, here's what's in for you," you should get like, "Oh, that's cool." If you say, "Okay, first indicator." Second thing I would ask you before I sign the partner contract, Pablo, imagine it's the 14th of April 2027. So in one year, what happened the last 12 months that you say, "Thank God that I spoke to Martin one year ago. What has changed?" If you can't answer this, I would say, "Okay, look, Pablo, other partners I'm working with have seen this and this results, would this be interesting for you?" And then I would postpone for the next call next week and say, "Okay, have you thought about it, Pablo? Is this something which is compelling to you?" And if it's not, then we shouldn't start even the partnership. Basically saying it's, it's a sales process or a buying process alone, right? Like you're selling to the customers, like getting the partnership to the point where the commitment exists. And it just reminds me of, you know, SaaS is moving towards usage based or usage invoiced. And that's another beast because you can have a wonderful contract sitting on the shelf collecting dust and nobody uses the product. And that's kind of the clearest indicator whether there is an import act for the customer or not. So this kind of resonates with certain subcategories in the B2B SaaS space. But it is around the partner buying into the idea. And it's not only at the top level, like you can have the two CEOs sitting together and watching a really expensive dinner and agreeing and shaking hands and publishing PR article. But then it's about the grassroots level of the sellers and the people who make the business, who run in the real conversations, correct? Yeah, I think you need both. A lot of partnerships are signed on the partnership level because it doesn't hurt without having the management buy-in. So the partner manager, even if he or she wants to do the activate the partnership, she doesn't get the resources internally. That's also a potential trap. I guess there's one big difference. Sales is transactional. And partnership is mutual beneficial. So while I do agree there are some similarities for usage based thing. It's still that one is the vendor and the other is the deliverer. In the partnership, it's about one and one gets equals three. And I know it sounds cheesy. But in the end of the day, typically a partnership is a business relation between two businesses where a mutual customer is involved. It's not always about the sales or sales being involved or something like that. There are partnerships which are working in different ways. Think about two software platforms where an integration is built because if the two systems speak together, the workflow becomes easier for the joint users. And that's not a sales immediately. But both increase the value perception to the mutual customers, especially mutual customers. And maybe there's a second stage then a point where customers of solution A, get recommended to for a solution B because it's a natural fit in their workflow. But that's not a lot of people always think about partnerships on the channel side like refer to reseller. But there's a lot of power on the process process in the product alignment. Technology partnerships in the rightest sense. But also on the positive side like people helping your customers to adopt your software to fill in gaps to create a simple example would be if you are an LMS and learning management software and your customers are probably not capable to create a meaningful online curriculum. And it's not your CS teams job to create for the customer training material. If you then would have a handful of trusted partners who are specialized in creating engaging online content. Online learning content you could say hey dear client I see that you struggle to create good active engaging content. Would you like to chat with our partner who's an expert and could produce custom content for you. There's many many many things a lot of people only look very very narrowly on partners and hope that somebody miraculously brings in customers for them. Fun fact, if you look at the names always are dropped, perhaps what sales was and the likes their partner business has started post sales. So CRM's like Cubsward and Sales was neat in implementation. So if the customer was convinced to buy the product they needed to have a custom implementation to get value out of it. So sales was enough for that two options built in increasingly bigger professional services team trying to do all the implementations on themselves which always creates a bottleneck or find implementation partners who would they could outsource it. And the partner which was very simple hey probably would you like to earn $50,000 on a project and you as a system resource sounds not too bad Martin what do I need to do for that or probably you need to satisfy two people two days in a training two people two days training for training basis opportunity cost of maybe eight thousand if I'm very conservative. So on the very first partnership deal I make 40 grand profit that's an old brainer that's not a pitch this is like do you and then you probably would say hey Martin are there more projects on the pipe and I would say yes and the new kid on the block I'm disrupting the seal and SAP's of the world you know and then you say okay I put one gross pillar for my company of becoming an SAP sorry and I said it's for implementation part anyway so just some extra to get out of this go to market partnerships reseller as referrals etc but then there are technical and there is on the customer and the implementation side of things where the customer has made a decision and then they need help so there is an open natural opening for somebody to help kind of help drive the value Martin I'm sorry but once I to confuse you because I as a system or you as a system realize that you can have fantastic projects with the sales force implementing them if you then you know friend you have a brand you are a business you are you're on the market so companies know that you are great for implementing serams so companies will come to you and say well we need to upgrade our serum which one do you recommend and then you become out of a sudden go to market partner for me as Salesforce because you bring me the lead and say Martin they are need a new serum I recommend you guys make sure that I get the implementation project so it's not never black and white it's it's what drives somebody to come here for our partner reseller so if I am CEO of a 10 million euro company and I'm starting to think about partnerships where should I look first and number one questions like what would you hope to get out partnerships if you think about driving you forget it but be more specific to you want to get leads do you have a retention problem do you have a charm problem do you have a customer cruise on cost problem there is only so many people I can hire in my local geography but of course I want to grow and I don't want to bear the full cost of having a larger and larger and larger team not only it is harder harder and harder to find them but also it's more expensive once they're sitting on the bench right so there are two things the question is like what do you looking for is it somebody who helps you to generate leads or is it somebody actually safe for you and or somebody helps you on the on the post set site I think the post set set is always easier basically why because you're bringing those partners projects so first thing is again it so much depends on what is your go-to market what is your is are you says that grows are you product that grows is your product a plug and play or do you need an implementation project do you need an adoption project so implementation means for me technical stuff which needs to happen adoption means other things need to happen that the customer sees value so like the lms you can have the lms you don't have to build big integrations or configurations but you need to create content so there's an adoption component so people will actually see the value whenever you have a pro-surf team in your company so which goes on customer success but professional services that's an immediate spot for looking for partners because what your internal team could do you could also support partner as a professional services if you want to look for leads it depends a bit I mean is there a natural complimentary services you know companies who use this software also use that software in conjunction that's a natural product partnership where you say hey we you this company and my company are addressing the same ICP the same personas it's a natural workflow why don't we do joint marketing stories and tell like Amazon like people who bought this also bought that because it makes sense and again that this area of partnership that's so fantastic about it's why I love it so much that's that's not a blueprint it's it's the the curse and the beauty of it the curse is you can't just copy a blueprint there's no partnerships for dummy book out on the road and it's a beauty because you know there's a room for for creativity I still have to find a company who doesn't benefit from partnerships but which kind of partnerships help a B2B SaaS company very very much depends on on each company what is the go-to market well strengths what are the product characteristics in very individual one that makes it interesting you know I could have made more money if I just have what I've stayed in sales but that's a repeatable repeatable scalable process ships is always like yes we look for repeatable scalable partnerships But the question is like, what should I do in this company? Where is the partner of a proposition? How can we drive this forward? And it's not too seldom that when I talk to clients or potential clients, they came to me. If you want to reseller, like that was Advocate, say, I don't think that's a good way for you to go. Look at these alternatives. Wouldn't that make more sense to get a good ROI and actually drive a business sustainable and efficient into the future and help you grow? Now, let me pivot a little bit, Martin, because not only on your LinkedIn, but everywhere else, kind of the sexist stories are far and few in between. And I think it says 80% of partnerships don't reach their potentials or don't really work smoothly. There are some other mindset issues or just myths that people believe in that eventually lead to partnership failure or the expectations not being matching the reality at the end of the day. What do you see companies or people in companies actually think that should be disqualified or challenged? Very good question. I think you need one. If you can't fix it, why would a partner fix it for you? The one, the second big problem I see a lot is that who initiates partnerships in a company? Who makes a decision to start it? It's very often somebody in the sales organization or revenue organizations. And I hope I'm being not too blunt, but a lot of people running around with a CRO title. She's rather in the office. I actually had off sales, which are too big title. They know the world between qualified leads, had qualified lead and closed one. But if you want to look at the whole revenue, you should understand where the leads coming from and what happens on the post set side. Why I'm saying that is CROs say, oh, let's do something with partnerships. They are whole universes focused around to transactional sales. They have no idea about how to run partnerships. So what they do naturally is they apply rules from the sales, which are soon as actually on partnerships, which are mutual beneficial. And then I end up with partner managers who said, I'm targeted or I'm measured by the number of partners I signed, because in sales, if you sign a deal, that's the best KPI you can have, right? Close one deal. In partnerships, I said that earlier, there's only the mutual NDA, which I signed faster than a partnership agreement. So the problem is partner managers go around and sign partners like, you know, in the hundreds. And so what I'm trying to say is, it's easy to win partners. It's hard to activate them. So a lot of most companies who run partner programs tell me they have hundreds partners. And they say, no, you don't. You have 100 signed agreements. How many of them are reactive? And then usually this number is lower than 20. It's the quality of the activation. And it's the engagement. It's the wrong thinking of quantity means something while it's only about quality. You know, get three, four, five partners and see that they deliver before you sign the force of this one at all. And the last one on why it's so easy to sign 100 partners because there's no commitment, you sign it and if you don't do anything, nothing happens to you. Nothing bad happens. And the second thing is that the expectations, this is so critical. When I started my career, 20 years ago, first job search matrix, I wanted to go to US. I had a, I was business development. So I talked to a lot of American business development folks. And I had wonderful conversations like, let's do business together. And it all sounded so amazing. And I was so pumped off the call. Yes. And then my boss said, how was it? I said, it's amazing. It's going to be awesome. And nothing happened. And then I realized after a couple of calls, I said, OK, sorry. I'm not a native speaker. Can you please explain me like a three years old who pays whom for what? And then all these castles in the sky, all these dreams were like, well, Martin, I thought you would sell my software. And I said, I thought you would sell my software. And doing business together, sounds so nice. Like, you know, but the expectation, my expectation was they sell me my software. The expectation was we sell their software. But we never addressed it. And it was like, you both can have their slide with partners and those logos and say, oh, we're growing our number. We're partnering. Of course, we're departureships and ecosystem growth. Look at the number of partners. That's a brilliant example. That was crazy. But not not qualified expectations. And you know, when we talked about commitment, I literally asked my potential partner, what is your expectation? What makes this partnership a success for you? I can tell you what makes a success for me. And that's the other thing which, which, I mean, it's all connected, right? The, the zeros come with this OLED supantium because I need to hit my quarter. I hope to get leads from them. They have access to all the customers I want, especially like the big, you know, in every industry segment, they're the big ones. Like if you are in consulting, the Lloyd KPMG, ECG, whatever, I was like, okay, this is again, Martin looking at Angela Julie, right? How big can it be? In other words, it's all sales for AWS, hyper scalers. Yes, you're not relevant for them. You're not bringing anything for them. So they don't care about you, even if you can't sign up for the partner program, if you can run through all the, the, the program they have maybe structured, you can call yourself a partner, but you will have no benefit out of that. At least not the rent. So that's a question like, you know, what's in for them? How do you, how do you make, what is their expectation? And not just looking at, I would love to have you as a partner because you could open all the doors and I say, yes, okay, but why would I? And coming back to, you know, I said, I'm happy. I'm really married to a little wonderful wife. My concern, I know what I have on her. My concern is like, what makes her stick around with that guy who gets older and the hair is getting less and less and more gray than bond anymore. So I need to make sure that she sees the way in our relationship. And this is what this, this change of perspective is not happening. The most heroes say, I would love to partner with them. They have all the access to the clients I want. And that's nice and that's fair and that's understandable. But what do you give to them in exchange because it's a, it's a mutual beneficial. There's no mutual benefit for them if they make you introductions and they don't care for the 10% commission you pay on referrals. That's not a business case form for them. And that's a big mistake. They think, hey, pay them spiffs, spiffs never worked in partnerships. One exception, if you're a very commoditized market and if a partner can choose ABC and it's literally all the same, they may change the recommendation base with this quarter pays the most. Usually that doesn't, that's not even changing them, bringing them more. It's more like the business they have anyway, they may move it to partner A or B or vendor A or B. I think this will make a few people uneasy realizing, realizing some of the assumptions connected with partnerships. And I mean it in a positive way. One last question before we go to the final rapid fire. So how would, what is the one measurement of business partnership being healthy? If there is a one KPI or one thing that tells you it is healthy. I would go back to a mutual action plan being always up to date. So the key tool you have to understand the health of your partnership is having a consistent mutual action plan, which consists on the reasons why to partner, which is more like strategic like why at all they you would like to, what is the initial vision. And then the part where you have the business plan where it's like, okay, what do we plan specifically on the measure of KPI for the next 6, 5, 24 months. And then what are the action items we do to achieve the goal? What are the, the project plan for the next three months until we have the next QBR? If any of that is a blank, it's an indicator that something is not ideal because one of the two people are not contributing in the partnership anymore. And then we come back to the last one. This is running joke about partnerships that you have to give to get, which is one of things you know, you have to give first, which is BS. If both people on the punch, both would like to give first, you know, it's like, oh, let me pay, no, let me pay, let me pay. So it should be somewhere like 51, 49 is okay, but it's not 80 20. If you are on a partnership where you have 80% to give to get 20 back, then you probably would call it a toxic partnership. And if you're on a toxic partnership, what do you do? You walk away. So much for a punchy ending. So a few questions for the rapid fire at the end. So maybe the first one you already answered, but let's see. So what's one decision that looked wrong at the time, but was actually right? I think they're partnering with that, with that Austrian guys. Didn't really look wrong, but it looked like a big risk, but it paid off. What do you know now that you wish someone told you at the start 20 years ago? On this combination of we don't say we don't save lives. And there's hardly any decision we can't correct. So it's not a great surgery and or a hard open heart surgery. Try make a decision if it doesn't work. We can be vote better than don't do anything. What? Try to eliminate our risk very German. I try to eliminate any risk before even starting. What's the one question nobody asks you? What should? Very, very good question. Should I go on a pilgrimage? And that's actually the question I wanted to ask you to go to all about it. What does pilgrimage to being a pilgrim and being a partner expert having common? Literally nothing, I would say. I put this pilgrim on it because it was a very positive experience for myself. I'm totally disconnected from work. And again, I think I love to talk to people. I don't care for your personal brand. I want to understand who's the repubble. I am all into authenticity, authenticity. So I want to understand who's the reperson. So one of the very few positive things of the Corona area was that everybody worked from home. So we got used to what we have now, right? And I see in your background and maybe I recognize a book and I talk to you about the book and if you immediately have a conversation. Well, some people had Lego in the background and I'm a big Lego fan or someone that said a car in the background and I don't I'm German, but I don't care what cars, but of course, I made a drug about that. So immediately I have a connection instead of. having this very artificial high polished image of us. So I want to understand who's the person I'm talking to. That's a wrap on today's episode. I'm Bavanovaak and this was built in Emea. Go to market operator stories. If something landed, share it with one person who's building right now. Well, thank you. See you next time. (upbeat music)