Episode 10: Partnership Strategy With Scott Pollack From Firneo

The theme of our tenth podcast episode is Partnership Strategy.

Joining our host Jeremy Balius to discuss all things partnerships strategy is Scott Pollack from Firneo.

Summary

Scott Pollack, founder and CEO of Firneo, shares his journey into the world of business development and partnerships. He discusses how he fell into partnerships and the challenges he faced as a partnerships professional in a world dominated by sales and marketing. Scott emphasizes the importance of understanding the value alignment framework and aligning partnerships with the goals and needs of internal stakeholders and customers. He also addresses the longer time horizon of partnerships and the need for patience and recognition of the significant impact partnerships can have on revenue and growth.

Key Takeaways

• Partnerships professionals often fall into their roles and face challenges in a world dominated by sales and marketing.
• Understanding the value alignment framework is crucial for successful partnerships, aligning partnerships with the goals and needs of internal stakeholders and customers.
• Partnerships have a longer time horizon for realizing revenue and impact, requiring patience and recognition of their significant potential.
• Building an internal ecosystem and setting expectations around partnerships is essential for success.

About Scott Pollack

Scott Pollack is the co-founder & CEO of Firneo, a learning community for the next generation of Partnerships, Ecosystems, and Business Development leaders.

Scott has spent over 20 years as a partnerships leader at startups and large companies like American Express, Dow Chemical, and WeWork. He has been teaching courses about partnerships since 2011, and is the best-selling author of What, Exactly, Is Business Development? A Primer on Getting Deals Done.

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.

Jeremy Balius: Hey, welcome to this episode of the B2B Tech Marketing Talks podcast. Where we engage with leading marketing and channel leaders to get fresh perspectives and practical advice on the latest trends, effective strategies, and best practices for B2B tech marketing.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is partnership strategy. I’m very excited because I’m joined by Scott Pollack. The co-founder and CEO of Firneo. Firneo is a learning community for the next generation of partnerships, ecosystems, and business development leaders.

Scott has spent over 20 years as a partnerships leader at startups and large companies like American Express, Dow Chemical, and WeWork. He has been teaching courses about partnerships since 2011. And he’s the best selling author of what exactly is business development, a primer on getting deals done.

This was such a good conversation with Scott, the way that he’s articulating partnership strategy, being a partner leader and excelling in partnership ecosystems. Gave me a lot to reflect on really resonated with me personally is the way that Scott talks about falling into partnerships and learning the hard way and teaching himself along the way. I can really relate to that. He’s given me a lot of language in the way that he describes, Aspects of partnership strategy and the ecosystem itself, and the way to go about building strategy that’s given me so much to reflect on

I’m deeply appreciative of the way that Scott is. Talking about partnerships. Clearly he is enabling community for partner leaders at the same time, building and providing resources for them to excel and thrive in the partnership space. There’s so much value that can be taken from what he talks about today.

I really hope that this adds value to you.

And with that, let’s get into the show.

Hey, Scott, thanks for joining me on the show today.

Scott Pollack: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Jeremy Balius: Oh, it’s really great to have you on. Hey you have previously described the fact that you’ve fallen into your business development and partnerships career.

Could you describe for me what that falling into means? And tell me a bit about your origin story and how you got into this.

Scott Pollack: Yeah, I feel like most people in partnerships somehow fell into it, but my story begins at the beginning of my career. I’ve spent the past 20 years in partnerships and business development roles at startups and large companies.

I was at Dow Chemical, American Express for a long time, startups like WeWork and others along the way. And the story that I often tell about falling into partnerships is to describe myself as a professional ugly duckling. In that, for most of my career, I looked around me and I was surrounded by accountants or traditional salespeople and marketers and not that many other people who really looked like me.

And what that meant was that my first job out of college was in sales. And, or so I thought, I was working with the Dow Chemical Company of all places, a Fortune 50 manufacturer, but I and I entered into a program right out of college for recent undergrads to go through a rotational program in their sales department.

There were 10 of us in the program seven of of us were placed into account exec roles. You’re going to go, sell chemicals to Johnson and Johnson or Pfizer or whatever, and so on. You’re going to be the account exec. And three of us, myself included, were placed into another group within the sales department called Distribution.

And I had no idea what the hell that meant. But it turns out that I was working with partners that were intermediaries between the Dow’s gigantic manufacturing organization and the smaller mom ‘n pop companies that might be making some boutique perfume or whatever else. And these Distributors were our partners.

And so I thought I was in sales. Turned out I was actually in partner management. So I was a little bit different than my colleagues. Spent a few years at Dow in that role. Moved on to American Express where I thought I was going to be with marketing. That’s what I had an interest in. So I joined the marketing team.

And but my group, surrounded by people doing direct mail or acquisition over call centers back in the day online and all the different channels online and so forth. But my group that I was a part of was focused on this new fangled way of acquiring partners acquiring customers, rather through partners, working with banks and other companies in the payments industry that were Engaging with our prospective customers.

And so I looked around me and I was surrounded by marketers, but I was a little bit different because I wasn’t doing the same exact types of marketing as other people over the years. It took me a while to finally realize that I looked in retrospect and realize that I wasn’t a marketer or a salesperson.

I was a partnerships person. So I fell into it. In that way and eventually realized like I felt different all along. I was that professional googly duckling because none of my other colleagues were speaking the same language, were working on the same processes. And it took me a while to come to appreciate that I was something different.

And and that was okay.

Jeremy Balius: What were some of those differences in what, before you could articulate the fact that you were different and you mentioned it was in hindsight, along the way in, in what ways were those differences coming to light?

Is it the way that you were talking about the needs of intermediaries as opposed to reaching end users?

What was it?

Scott Pollack: Yeah. So I’d say number one, a major difference was that. I wasn’t called partnerships per se, I was called part of the marketing team or part of the sales function. So I thought that I should be just like everyone around me doing those roles. But the processes and the approaches that we took were different.

So let’s look at American Express for example. I was in a few different teams there over the years. eight or so years that I was there all of which I spent in partnerships roles. But if you look at the way that marketing worked at that organization or probably any others, right?

There’s a lot of forecasting. How are we going to drive more customer acquisition through, let’s go to the old school example of direct mail, which Amex in, 2006 timeframe, it was a pretty big channel for it. You’re forecasting how many Letters to send and how many people they’re expecting to respond and, but get a credit card and so forth.

And so there’s a lot of the process of forecasting and whatnot. That’s repeatable based on history, based on clear forecasts and and channels that are within the control of the company. And the experiments that are run on that regard were, part and parcel to that role.

But in partnerships, there’s a lot of things that were. Different and out of our control. I wasn’t directly engaging with customers in the way that my marketing colleagues were, I was working with partners who were ultimately in charge of reaching out, I was trying to figure out how do we motivate and engage those partners to then engage customers?

How do we incentivize them so that they will take the actions we want them to take, which will then hopefully motivate the end customers that they’re engaged with to take the action they want to take. Ultimate goal was similar. I had a marketing goal just like my colleagues and any other marketing channels did, but by being in partnership marketing or marketing via partnerships, that kind of channel, we had a very different set of processes, a very different set of of techniques that we had to use.

And. It was different, but not obviously different because no one looked at the role that I was in as you’re a partnerships person and looked at as your marketer, just, go about things in a slightly different way. But again, it took a while to come to appreciate that this was in fact a different job altogether.

Jeremy Balius: This is really resonating with me and I’m identifying with it as well as you’re putting language around it and as you’re talking, even reflecting on my own journey and I can see instances of that and in ways that I hadn’t reflected on, it’s really fascinating. At what point did you come to putting language around this or reflecting on?

Yeah, I feel different. And now I’m recognizing what those differences are. Was there an aha moment or was there a gradual shift? What happened?

Scott Pollack: There was an aha moment. So I spent, first of all, 10 plus years of my career between Dow and American Express. I was on a, a track there.

But I thought I was in sales. I thought it was in marketing. And until I was a few years into my career dynamics I was thinking I’m going to go down the path of being a, career person at a giant company. This was a great place to work. And oftentimes in that company, which was had a lot of different, different, Teams and roles and beyond.

You’ve got to migrate throughout the company. Every 18 months to two years, you take on a new role as part of the culture of kind of moving around internally and moving up accordingly. So I was in, a few different marketing groups and then I thought, you know what, what is really interesting was product management in the Amex context was, being responsible for the gold card.

You’re working on the small business platinum card, so forth. And it was a really core, role in the company had a lot of clout, had a lot of importance. It was a really interesting role and you’re still within the kind of context marketing. So I was thinking, oh, that’s what I want to do next. And I had a boss who, part of the culture there was you talk to your boss about your next role will be, it’s planned.

And I had a boss who was like, you know what? I don’t necessarily think that’s going to be the best role for you. I think he got something here in this world. This partnerships thing is fitting for you. And I was like, no. What does that even mean? I, product management, that’s what I want to be doing.

I want to, if I want to move up here, that seems like the path to do and it took me a little while, maybe a little bit of umbrage at first, but then it took me a while to realize she was right. A hundred percent right. That there was something about this element of relationship management and the kind of particular nuances of influence and negotiation and all the elements that I really enjoyed about the experience of partnerships that I didn’t have a name for it until around that moment.

I realized, yeah, I’m not a marketer, I wasn’t a salesperson I’ve adjacent to many of those things. I learned from those roles and I had a lot of those underlying skills, but I was a partnerships person and it was that moment, five, six, seven years of my career that I realized I’m now going to look for those opportunities.

To broaden my partnerships experience, early on, I had done a lot in the way of the partner management side. We had existing partners and now I was going to look for opportunities to work on, signing new partner deals or look at working on different dynamics of partners. I had worked with companies that were smaller than American Express, and then I moved to a role to work with companies that were larger than American Express partners.

So I had this realization at that point, based on that conversation of basically being told, you’re not really going to be as good at that as you are at this. And and it allowed me to realize that, you know what I wasn’t the same as my colleagues, but I could be something different. It was an ill defined path forward that I took upon myself to accept that it was a little bit of an undefined path.

And I had to carve it for myself, but it was a decision that in retrospect has been, made my career, best decision I could have made. So thanks to Sam for steering me on that path, or perhaps more appropriately off that product management path.

Jeremy Balius: That’s really special. And I think that bespeaks a pretty special leadership to recognize that in you and also bespeaks special specialness within you to be able to receive that.

And to head down a path that is so undefined that must’ve been, I don’t know, in those days, it must’ve been almost entrepreneurial to head down that undefined path because the whole concept of partnerships wasn’t, and it’s still now isn’t even, super well-known or defined more broadly, what was it like to head down that we’re going to carve our own path because we’re literally creating this.

As we’re going we’re building the plane as we’re flying, as they say.

Scott Pollack: I had never really thought about it in that way, but I think you’re absolutely right. And as I kind of process that thought of the entrepreneurial nature of carving out your own path I realized it makes perfect sense because I had often saw myself as almost a an entrepreneur in waiting while I was on this corporate career.

And I’ll explain why. So my. I went to college in the height of the dot com boom at NYU. So I was in the midst of Silicon Alley and I worked at a startup While I was in school for almost from the summer after high school throughout most of my college career, I worked at a startup and it planted the entrepreneurial like startup bug in me when I graduated, it was the after the crash, the dot com crash in the early 2000s.

And. The idea of going and working at a startup or starting my own thing was no longer as much on the table because it was very clear that, all right, let me get a few years of big corporate experience on my belt startups and that community that the ecosystem and collapsed. So I went the big corporate track of Dow and Amex and so on to learn for a few years.

And and ultimately thought I’d return to the startup world from whence I came. And I eventually did as a side hustle while I was at Amex. And around the time that I was undergoing this transformation of sorts of thinking about my own corporate career, I was also trying to plan for what is my entrepreneurial career look like?

And I started a completely unrelated side hustle business. I called it hot pot culinary events. It was in the food world. I was teaching cooking classes and having chefs come to your home and teach cooking classes. It was a fun side hustle for a few years, but it really implanted to me this kind of entrepreneurial sense that I think I trying to explore that unknown at the same time as exploring a different unknown and so I was just very comfortable and just figuring stuff out as I went along and living into the void a little bit there

Jeremy Balius: A hot pot what was it?

Scott Pollack: Hot pot culinary events.

We were doing interactive cooking parties and creating like social experiences around food. It was a lot of fun That is amazing. That’s very cool. I must have learned so much from that as well. I, yeah, I’m a, it’s I don’t like to cook. I like to cater. And now I think I’ve learned how to be pretty cool under pressure cooking for, every year we have a a weekly like family reunion type of an event, 35 people.

And yeah, I’m a man in the grill and whatever else there. And, it’s been a good learning experience for those moments, at least.

Jeremy Balius: That’s a, that’s, I think, a really good segue to talking about entrepreneurship and starting organizations. You’re one of the founders and CEO of Firneo.

Tell me about. Fernio, the concept, where did that germinate from? At what point did you decide we’re going to do this? Let’s do this. And and what you did, what did you do initially to build it?

Scott Pollack: Yeah. The story for you is really an extension of everything we’ve talked about so far of that feeling of being lost and alone and forced to figure out a path for myself.

I figured out the job, not just the career path, but the job to be done day to day. I didn’t really always feel like I had a lot of other places to go, people to go to, peer community to connect with, resources to look to, and so forth. And so the story of Fresno begins a little bit earlier in that, as I was on that journey that we were talking about I thought, you know what, number one, I felt that pain point.

Number two, I was looking for my kind of entrepreneurial next step at this point now I’d shut down hot pot culinary events. I was working at Amex and I had this moment of panic. I was like, am I now just a guy who works at American Express? Not to disparage that company. It was an amazing place to work, but I saw myself.

As an entrepreneur, I wanted to go back to the startup world and I, shut down this one path that just wasn’t the right horse to ride. And I was looking for my next step. And I realized, though, this is around 2011 that the New York tech community was starting to come back online a little bit.

And I said, you know what I’ve been teaching? cooking classes for a while effectively. There’s a couple of companies that were starting around that same time that were creating ways to teach within the New York tech community. One was called Skillshare. Another was General Assembly, both now large companies that, have more of a focus online, but at the time they were creating ways to teach whatever you had a skill in especially in the digital kind of tech space.

Skill set, teach classes. And so I said, you know what, as a, I’m going to, if I’m not going to leave this company as a entrepreneur and do my own thing, I’m going to at least try to go back to the startup world from whence I came. And if I can build my personal brand by teaching what I’ve learned in my partnerships and business development career, that might be a way to return to the startup world.

If not as founder, then as. Partnerships guy somewhere. And so I started teaching a class. I created a class at the time business development was somewhat synonymous with the phrase partnerships. And the kind of where my business card often wrote had written on it and I created a classical biz dev one on one that I taught through early versions of scale share.

And it was an early teacher, general assembly teaching this workshop. And I put my knowledge on a page and started teaching the things that I’d learned about partnerships and BD and so forth. And I found in doing so that. A lot of people came to those classes feeling like I had felt feeling like they were looking for places to go to connect to peers and learn from one another.

And so I did these classes and I started writing a blog and then writing for other publications like Forbes and the like, and then wrote a book really just continuing on this journey of nice became my new side. Hustle is essentially creating content and thought leadership and community around the partnerships.

And ultimately it worked to my ultimate, my original goal, just to find myself back in a startup. And I went to a company called some all and we work and, continue doing this stuff on the side until I got. To the point that we work where I knew as now we can look in retrospect, I knew when I was there that was not going to be my forever home of a company.

It was a bit of a wild place to be and an amazing experience, but I knew that this was a a job that I would be happy to last for a couple of years in with the intensity of that organization. And so I was thinking, what’s next? And that point I was in my, my mid thirties and I was a VP and and yet.

I had no idea what was next in my career. I felt like I had peaked peaking in high school, but I was peaking in my mid thirties with 30 years left in my career, and I had no idea what my next step in a partnership’s career could look like, and that was scary. And that’s when I recalled back to all the experience that I’d had over the intervening seven, eight years or so of teaching classes and writing and finding other people who felt the same way that I’d felt, that I wasn’t alone in that sense of not knowing where to go from here.

And there was a desire, a need to formalize a lot of what I had been doing to create that space to go to, to when you’re in an emerging career track, like partnerships to, and that’s what Firneo was born at. It was that desire to create the infrastructure to support professional development, to create that place for community, to create that place for learning and knowledge and structured mentorship and training to when you’re in a field that doesn’t have, A school that you can go to a college degree that you can study peers and mentors that you’re surrounded by.

Like you are, if you’re a marketer or a salesperson or an accountant or a lawyer. So Fernie was born out of that need to create that underlying support for people who are in emerging careers, starting with partnerships. And that was born in 2018. I’d left WeWork to to launch this and it’s the rest of history, I suppose you can say.

Jeremy Balius: Incredible. It feels so organic and evolving or perhaps heading down that undefined path in a committed way is, Pretty amazing.

Scott Pollack: Thank you. Yeah it felt a lot of it like I was flailing around in the dark a little bit and in the past few years, I’m, I feel like the community, the broader kind of community of people who have been raising their hand, sharing their knowledge as part of this partnerships ecosystem the ecosystem, I like to call it, the partnerships people ecosystem has just been, Thrilling to see how many people have been blossoming the space and making it feel every day like you’re a little less alone so that others who are coming up in the same way that I did don’t necessarily feel that way.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, I’ve, I can see the community component being really important from an EQ perspective, from a, an ability to share and and to feel a particular belonging. Could you describe for me a little bit more around how the community members wouldn’t be receiving that within their organizations?

What’s their most common state or day to day in terms of what they’re facing in their business in terms of the support or lack of support they’re receiving what is that and what’s driving them to Firneo?

Scott Pollack: When you think about partnership professionals and especially in earlier stage companies but this is I think universally true.

The teams are usually pretty small and in earlier stage companies, it’s quite common to be the only one of your kind in a company, the only partnerships person. With a tremendous amount of pressure placed on your shoulders are coming in to lead partnerships. You probably fell into the role in ways that are similar to what I described.

Maybe you were in sales or product or customer success before and then you were, looking to make a change and you were attracted to partnerships and you got the job where maybe you’re first. CEO or some other leader in the organization said, Hey, you’re a smart person. You should take on this new initiative that we’re launching.

Let’s think about how partnerships can augment and expand our go to market motion. So you fall into this role and you’re the only one doing it and your company doesn’t quite understand what partnerships really is. It’s up to you to figure it out and you’re not surrounded by The peers that you might’ve been surrounded by in other roles.

If you are in sales, you’re probably surrounded by other salespeople. If you’re in customer success, you’re surrounded by other similar CSMs and you probably had a boss who understood your role, who came up in a similar path and can share their knowledge and mentorship. Or maybe you’d studied some of those roles in school.

That’s not usually the case in partnerships when you’re. Often alone in the company when you don’t have a background in it, when your boss may be a CEO or a head of revenue or a salesperson or someone that doesn’t have the requisite background to be that mentor. And that means that when you’re in that role, you feel alone.

You feel a little bit lost, a little bit unsure, but you’re motivated, you’re ambitious, you’re a smart professional. So you start doing the things that seem right to do. And that is. Logical. But the challenge is, you’re, when you’re lacking that foundation and that support system of others around you to help guide you as you go, you find yourself pursuing the shiny objects or doing things that don’t, Always pan out in the way that you hope they will, but you’re lacking the diagnostic tools to be able to say, why is this not working?

It should work. I should be able to get more, leads from partners. I should be able to get more support from my marketing team internally. I don’t know what’s going wrong and lacking in all that other support. It can be really deflating. It can be really difficult to achieve the goals that you have set out for you.

Oftentimes ambitious goals because partnerships are meant to be a scalable way to drive revenue or build new products or whatever the goals are. But you’re left without that foundation. And and that’s what often drives people to Fernield where we create opportunities to, to learn from those who’ve come before, to have training and community and coaching that allows you to have that foundation provided and to fill it in, to build the confidence.

But it often comes from that place of falling into the role without the same supports that your colleagues have had for most of their career, probably since college.

Jeremy Balius: It’s such a good reminder, particularly for those who are surrounded by people or who are in the LinkedIn echo chamber of partnerships, people that there are so many people out there who aren’t, and it’s just so salient to think about being on their own, I think where I’d like to take this conversation is into our theme is these people either are being.

Appointed or their roles are being evolved or they’re being pushed into this probably as a result of an organization recognizing that there’s revenue potential from partners or there’s, or they’ve heard about it or seen it elsewhere and they want to replicate it. And I would imagine, correct me if I’m wrong, but I would imagine that a lot of those decisions are being made.

Generally, so non-specifically, there’s this opportunity and we’re going to go after it. And hey, you are now the partnerships manager. You are now the partner leader. You need to go build this. Lack of definition is probably what you’re describing as the trying to figure it out, making mistakes along the way.

How do people like this is. Go back and think about partnerships strategically. If they’re on their own in their business, how do we think about partner strategy? How do they develop it? How do they get leadership team buy in? What is this process that you at Fernio helped take them through to, to get them into a more defined motion when it comes to growing their partner and building scalability into their partner base.

Scott Pollack: So there’s a framework that we prescribe, they’re called the value alignment framework. And fundamentally, what that framework suggests is that every step along the way of the partnering process, and I’ll describe that in a second.

It’s critical to have alignment, alignment on the value that you’re looking to create or the partnership can create an alignment with what value your stakeholders, your partners, your leadership, your customers are looking for understanding of, there’s a simple question that we need to understand, understanding why should they care is perhaps the most important, simple, but not obvious question that we need to answer in order to create that alignment.

Understanding first in your own organization, why are we looking at partnerships? What problems are we trying to solve? What are the gaps that exist in our ability to reach new customers, create new products expand our audience, whatever the goals that we have as a company are, what are the problems that exist that we can potentially solve with partnerships.

Understanding those problems is the first answer to saying why should they care?

Because your marketing team, your customer success team, your sales team, they have those challenges. And if you can start to look at partnerships through the Through their lens, through their eyes of the problems that they’re trying to solve and align the work that partnerships ultimately aims to solve with the KPIs that they’re trying to improve, with the goals that they’re trying to hit, with the problems they’re trying to solve, you’re now starting on a path towards creating partnerships that will actually get that alignment because the value that you’re going after is aligned to the value that they’re looking to create.

And it starts with thinking about it through the lenses of your internal colleagues and leadership. And then, as we move into the market, understanding what are the problems that customers have?

What are the gaps that we are currently facing in exchanging our value, the product, the features, and what have you, that we have?

With their cash that they’ll pay us for, right? What’s preventing that exchange of value. And this is, you can understand what’s preventing that exchange. What are those value gaps? You can then understand what are the bridges that can allow us to reach those customers better to more effectively fill in those gaps, whether that gap is caused by, we don’t have a product that suits their needs, or we don’t have access to that market, or they don’t trust us because our brand is not one they’re familiar with.

Partners can provide that value bridge. And once we start with having a clarity on what are the problems to solve for our internal stakeholders and our customers, we can look at partners as a mechanism to start to bridge those gaps and create that firmer value exchange. And that is what it all begins with.

And there’s more to play off of there. But if you start with that sense of why should they care? Why should my stakeholders care? Why should my customers care? Why should my partners care? Because how are we going to be a value bridge to their partners? We can help them solve their problems. You start down this path of having alignment all along the way.

Jeremy Balius: That is so fascinating. I would, the first thing I started thinking about is that process I would imagine would in a way affect the organization’s value proposition as a whole because thinking along those lines isn’t quite critical. As marketers, it is, but as an organization, it just go sell more guys, but the defining value at that level I think would have a broader implication of the organization that, that that obviously would be beneficial.

How does a partner leader start that conversation? How do they take that to the business?

Scott Pollack: Yeah, I think the first set of conversations that any partner leader needs to have when they’re new to the role, taking on a new partnership initiative, taking on an existing partnership initiative.

The first thing that needs to be done is to understand what is it that impacts the points of view of stakeholders. There’s a concept that we teach is called net perceived value. And it basically suggests that any decision that’s going to be made, Especially on behalf of business is a common is going to be based on the perception of the value of how valuable that opportunity can be for any individual.

And that is that value that can be created as a combination of not only the objective value going after this particular partner or using a non partner example, going to build this factory that’s going to cost us 10 million will generate us 20 In additional revenue, right? So you have an objective value that is being created by this, but you also have to look at the subjective point of view, the subjective value that is created.

How does pursuing this impact my goals? How does this pursuing this opportunity play into the biases that I currently have that are impacting my ability to see the objective value is created there? This is going to mean this helps me get promoted. I may look to pursue that opportunity, even if it’s not the best interest of the company, doesn’t have as much objective value as something else might have, if this is something that I see as risky, because it’s going to take away from my team’s ability to execute and hit my goals, or it’s going to make me look bad.

And then I might, push it, push back against it for reasons that are not necessarily conducive to the company. The combination of those two factors, the subjective and objective points of view, are that what collectively become the net perceived value as a calculation that you can look at is something that you have to understand how all of your stakeholders are going to think about any opportunity, including the opportunities for partnerships that you as a partner leader are bringing forward.

So starting with that, with getting into the minds of your stakeholders, trying to understand what are the problems they’re trying to solve, what are the ways they’re going to perceive the value objectively and subjectively, what are the factors, the psychological factors are going to influence their decision making when they, knowingly or unknowingly, are filtering every decision of whether to support you and your partner in motion through the lens of their net perceived value.

It starts there. And that’s the first thing that any partner leader needs to do is to have those conversations internally to map out their internal ecosystem to figure out where they can get that alignment and where they’re going to reach brick walls on the way to pursuing their partnerships and issues.

Jeremy Balius: Internal ecosystem is, I’m going to, I’m going to grab that that, that is so important. Eloquent and elegant to describe this thought process. We spend so much time thinking about the partner ecosystem, but that internal ecosystem, I think that’s some language right there that really paints the picture of you need to be doing what you’re doing.

Externally, internally as well that I’m going to have to, I’m going to reflect on that. That is so valuable. I’ve got one more for you and this is a bit of a pivot, but I’d like to talk more tactically and specifically around those internal conversations around the time to impact notoriously partnerships and partner sales have a longer term realization of.

Revenue or value to the business without a defined ability up front. You there’s no ability. If we do a, we’re going to achieve B, but if we know we do a, we know good things will happen. How do partner leaders have that conversation and not be treated like the dark arts person who’s magically coming up with some concept so that they don’t have a KPI.

Scott Pollack: Yeah. So I think one of the first things that any partner leader needs to do as they align with their internal ecosystem is start to set the expectations of what partnerships Looks like in terms of timeframe as well as impact because the impact of partnerships is significantly greater than almost any other channel, right?

The prospect of generating 30, 40, 50 plus percent of the revenue of the company from a channel that has a lower cost of acquisition than any other channel is significant. It is, there’s many examples of companies that have achieved exactly that low resource intensiveness relative to the value that’s being created.

It comes with a longer time horizon. And so the expectations that often plague partner leaders as they come in to a new role is that my sales team takes, let’s say six months to ramp up a new hire, to start hitting quotas. Maybe we’ll give you a little bit of a buffer there, but I expect that partnerships should be generating results in nine months.

And the goal that you have is 10x part, sales, because you’re going to have so many partners that are activating in that timeframe. So within a year, we should be expecting an absolutely ridiculous amount of revenue or a year might even be a stretch. Oftentimes it’s a significantly shorter timeframe that people in partnerships roles are facing.

But the reality is that partnerships, while the impact can be significant tremendous, even the timeframes that it takes to nurture a partner program, activate partners and start to see an ROI on that is at best 18 months, two years, frankly, to scale to the point when it’s generating. Really significant, meaningful revenue for the company on a repeatable basis, it could take years and partnerships are an incredibly effective tool for companies that have that patience, especially when you look at the fact that a lot of other channels that we have available to us, marketing or sales channels or any other ways that we go to market oftentimes have headwinds that come over time and your marketing costs can often increase over time as the market gets saturated or as you as just the cost of acquisition increases by nature of other factors or your sales team generating new leads and pipeline and being able to activate them.

The difficulty factor of how your internal, your direct teams generate the results they have increases over time. The difficulty factor increases over time and the results can decrease over time. The cost of acquisition can increase over time. Pairing that with the time frame of partnerships can allow there to be an offset that says, you know what, we are looking at how do we create a consistently scalable and reliable partner channel that can open the door to opportunities for a long time horizon.

It’s, we have to do it the right way. And while yes, we can look at opportunities to create some short wins to appease stakeholders and leaders and investors and boards that are looking for a demonstration early on that there is going to be some ROI and partnerships, the most important thing that can be done.

Not only by partner leaders, but the leaders who are overseeing partnerships, be it CEO, or whomever, is to recognize the need for that patience because the results of partnerships are ones that play out over time when the cost of acquisition remains low, because you are leveraging outside resources, you are able to take advantage of.

The reach that they have invested in with their channels, the brands that they have built with their dollars to take advantage of that. That opportunity is so significant that it can generate significant, tremendous result, but it means that it takes time to nurture those relationships that you can achieve that.

And that’s just slower than other channels where you’re paying for the privilege of speed.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, that’s, there’s a lot to digest there. It’s the, I think privilege is a really good term to use there. Scott, this has been so fascinating. I really appreciate the way that you are articulating partnerships and the way that you’re exuding empathy for new partner leaders and partner leaders more broadly as a community, the way that you’ve, Developed Ferneo as a community to bring people in, to give them support frameworks and to give them guidance and just to give them companionship.

That means a lot to me. I really appreciate what you’re doing.

Scott Pollack: I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a. A lifelong, a career long passion that I’m fortunate to be able to have enjoyed for the past 21 years or so. And look forward to continuing on, especially as the opportunity for partnerships just gets not only bigger, but brighter, more recognized by company leaders who see the power of ecosystems and partnerships to drive the next, 10, 20, 50 years of their companies go to market motion.

That excitement. Is paired with the challenges that come from partner leaders who are figuring it out as they go along for as long as I’ve been in this space and others like me who felt that sense of being a professional ugly duckling, there has still not been as much structured opportunities to learn and grow from others.

And so oftentimes people are following the same path that I followed of figuring it out as they go along. So I’m really excited to continue on that, career long journey now of trying to help others to Feel like they have the competence and confidence as they go along and to do this role and deliver that future we all look forward to have.

Jeremy Balius: Scott, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Scott Pollack: Thank you so much.