Jeremy Balius: Welcome to Go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to-market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode, we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives and industry playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market. Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to-market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is Measuring partner ecosystem value. I’m joined by Chris Messina from Quarq. Chris is the founder and CEO of Quarq, the first AI platform built to measure the true value of partner ecosystems. After a decade watching partner programs fail due to shallow metrics and executive blind spots, Chris had enough and built a platform that exposes the real impact partners have on KPIs like ARR retention and growth.

Think of Quarq as a credit score for every partner and a portfolio index for your entire ecosystem.

So whether you are scaling an ecosystem or just trying to survive one, Chris is here to change the game. It’s a fascinating conversation for me. How do you show the strategic value of a partner ecosystem? I think this is where Chris’s thought process and methodology has really landed on something that’s given me pause for thought.

We are all facing scenarios where the importance of ecosystems are known that they are critical to the future of. Most tech organizations, but understanding the mindset shift of what is holding back ecosystems from advancing how partnership teams should be interacting within an organization, the types of investment that they need in order to advance. The organization through partners is what Chris is unlocking. I’m really excited for you to hear this conversation.

I hope you get as much value from it as I did. Let’s get straight into it.

Hey Chris, it is so awesome to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Chris Messina: Thanks for having me. Appreciate that.

Jeremy Balius: We’re here talking all things partner ecosystems and I’m super excited to really dig into this.

But before we do, I’d really love to start with your origin story. How did you get to where you are in building for partner ecosystems?

Chris Messina: Yeah, it’s a, a little bit of a circuitous journey through, uh, a few ups and downs. Uh, I’ll give you the, the short version, but, you know, I started off with a pretty rough childhood.

Um, and so that sent me into a world where I, I wanted to go, you know, find a family. And so I became a gang banger for a while, which, uh, of course got me kicked out of high school and got sent to a small school. Eventually barely graduated and decided to join the Army. And that’s where I kind of turned my life around a little bit and started focusing on school.

Um, but then I became a cop after that, after, uh, college, I, I went and, uh, became a police officer in Costa Mesa. Got into an accident, uh, that kind of took me out for a while and decided it was time to go. Uh. Pursue my life in business. And so went back and got my MBA, not a degree that I’d recommend for everybody today, um, but went back and got my MBA and kinda stumbled into digital a few years later and.

A few years into my journey, I got a, an opportunity to take over a partner ecosystem for a company called Integrate. And you know, I’d been in sales for a little while and had done really well there, but I kind of hated it. And so I had this opportunity to take over partnerships, which was a lot more relational.

CEO said, Hey, we need you to learn about data and predictive analytics. So I uh, said, sure, I’ll do that. Went back. I Googled what predictive analytics was, uh, trying to figure out exactly what I was talking about ’cause the opportunity sounded great and I fell in love, and so I fell in love with the profession.

I fell in love with what we do and this ability to be very strategic and sit across different parts of the organization and. Then the reality started hitting, the reality is that, uh, partner ecosystems fail 85 to 90% of the time and this, you know, 20 11, 20 12, you know, that was kind of the, the beginning of this ecosystem play.

Where before that anything that was partner was. Was pretty much channel or OEM. And so now we had these, these interconnected data pools that had to move between and amongst systems and internally and externally. And so it created this different dynamic of partnerships. And so I fell in love with the profession and then kept failing, kept getting my ass kicked by it over and over and over again.

Fast forward to uh, my final corporate stop, which was a place called HD Insights. Great company. Um, I walked in and the, the first thing the, uh, the then CEO told me was that she didn’t believe in partnerships. Hmm. And she explained why. Um, I understood. And so I spent most of 2023 trying to prove a negative and the.

By the, by September I had this beautiful strategy built out and it sat on her desk for about five months and I finally just went up to her and said, look, you know, I’m not making you any money right now, so we either need to move forward with this or let me go. Well, they chose option B. Um, that was February 13th, 2024.

Uh, so I. Hiked to a top of the top of, uh, a peak out here in Colorado, middle of February. Froze my *** off, uh, screamed into the wind for a little while, decided to burn the ships and solve the problem.

Jeremy Balius: What a story, man. Um, I tried to tell it as quickly as I could. I love it. I mean, there’s, there, there, there we could spend the whole episode just unpacking your story.

This is awesome stuff and it, but, but I think what what really resonates with me is just the varied experiences that you’ve brought into. Partnerships itself, I think, uh, and the ability to understand people’s motivations, um, mm-hmm in, in, in partnerships, I think has really given you a groundedness and an ability to understand how relationships and motivations, compliment or are at.

Odds with each other and, and how to work forward with that. I wanna, I want to get into that in a moment and, and, and I’m getting ahead of myself. Um, but I think the best place for us to start here, only because words are being used here that I think we’re all thinking about differently. Can we start with what a partner even is in the context of what we’re talking about here?

Chris Messina: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s one that I, I’ve learned is not an easy answer. As I speak to investors and speak to people who aren’t part of this partner ecosystem world, like we love it. We’re all steeped in it, but when we start, and it’s actually one of the biggest problems we have is people translate this differently.

But a partner today. Is pretty much anything, especially if you’re a technology company that is connected to you and is has the potential to, or is already adding value to your company. And so that can be anything from a reseller, which is the traditional channel partnership. It could be an OEM relationship, it could be an integration with a partner where you are sharing data or you’re sharing some sort of functionality that makes each other better.

Um, it can be. Systems integrators, GSI systems integrators. You’ve got management consultants and media companies, and I mean, I could go on with the list for a really long time, but effectively, if it’s a company that’s attached to your customers, your vendors, everything is a potential partner today because they’re all interacting with you.

They’re all adding value, and they’re all potential force multipliers for you if you understand how they can be that.

Jeremy Balius: So, so all of these organizations are in your sphere, right? They’re, they exist and they’re there and they’re interacting. Uh, but what is it, what is it that’s maybe misunderstood?

You were just talking about working for organizations where, mm-hmm. It wasn’t prioritized, uh, partners weren’t prioritized as such, or maybe it wasn’t understood, uh, the, the compelling nature of positivity that they can produce. And more broadly, maybe what do you see in the marketplace? What, what is misunderstood about partnerships that make it fail?

85, 90% of the time that you talked about.

Chris Messina: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a big question and it’s the reason I started Quarq, but the, there’s a, a lot that goes into the failure of it. Mm-hmm. And the bottom line, after effectively doing a doctorate level thesis on this in 2023. The title of a, a piece that I’ve written, but no one effing believes us. And the reason for that is. Because here’s, there’s a few reasons we are invisible. So we, we live in between the margins. So there’s a couple reasons why we fail so dramatically and we fail so often. Um, one is. That we live inside of everybody’s metrics, so we live inside of everybody else’s KPIs and inside of their tools. One of the things you don’t realize until you start to actually take a step back and look at that is those tools that your other go-to-market teams like your, your sales teams, your customer success team, your product team, your marketing team.

Not only do those tools help them, help them understand how to be successful and measure it, but it defines their success. It allows them to understand what they’re shooting for. Well, partnerships have no such North Star. We don’t have systems of record and we don’t have KPIs under ourselves. And so as a result, then, if that weren’t bad enough, we also have a massive Get off my lawn problem.

Because those people who own those systems, you know those go to market leaders who own those systems, who own those tools, they. You know, it’s predominantly a zero sum gaming corporation. So they’re trying to get their credit, they’re trying to get, they’re, they’re not intentionally trying to push you out.

And this is where we need to have some empathy for the exec side. And this is where we tended to have another problem. And this is where we need to own the problem as partner people. And I’ve been labeled the, uh, the tough love guy in partnership. So, uh, I’ll own that moniker. But where we need to own it is we get resentful and we start telling the executive suite what they need to do and what they need to listen to.

I mean, I’m just wondering when that has ever worked for anybody. Like if your kids come up and tell you what you need to listen to are, are you gonna pay attention? And so they want to believe what we’re telling them. They want to believe all of these cool, these amazing things that we’re, we’re telling them the problem is we can’t show them today.

And so they wanna believe it, we want to prove it. But there’s a, there’s a yawning gap in between because we live inside of all those other things. And so we are effectively invisible.

Jeremy Balius: Okay, is the invisibility driven by lack of access to meaningful metrics?

Chris Messina: So yes and no. Okay. So there are metrics out there, uh, and those metrics are real. So they, I had, uh, one of my companies, we built this thriving ecosystem and we had incredible metrics. The issue is those metrics are all after the fact and oftentimes seen as extremely anecdotal.

Hmm. So, yes, we can, those things are there. Uh. And so the metrics do exist. The problem is we don’t have anything to show what we’re doing right now. What are we doing today that’s impacting these different programs, and how are we impacting them? We’re trying, we have to extract our value after the fact.

And then the other reduction is problem is that the front end of that is. And this is where we typically measure partner. Success is based on leads generated, well, leads generated. That’s another output. That’s something that comes after you create that trust. You build those different things, uh, to get there.

But leads are, you know, that’s just one output of, that’s input into your pipeline, but it’s not the thing that is actually, that actually matters. Your KPIs are what matter. And your KPIs will get you to the revenue if you hit those things. And so that’s where we, we had to figure out how do we measure partners based on how they impact specific KPIs and then create a, a metric unto itself that we can pull out of everybody else’s.

And so we have something that we can visualize.

Jeremy Balius: I really like that. I really appreciate how you’re talking about having empathy for leaders, and I wonder if the lack of access to the right metrics is not just preventing visibility on what’s happening now. By the same token, it’s preventing. Leaders to even make decisions to invest altogether.

Right. I’m just thinking about that scenario where you couldn’t convince the CEO to invest prioritization or budget or any allocation. Mm-hmm. I, I, is it because of these metrics that aren’t visible across pipeline revenue and possibility?

Chris Messina: Yeah, I think it is. I mean, that’s the, that’s my foundational hypothesis is that the, the truth is that as human beings.

We have to have a framework for, for everything that we, we believe we have to, you know, language is a framework that we create to be able to structure the world around us. And so ecosystems, partner ecosystems are inherently complex things. They’re, um, any kind of ecosystem is inherently complex. And so what we’ve lacked is the ability to explain that complexity in a way that can be framed for.

In a way that’s frame that, that is able to be framed for just about any type of audience right now. You have to have, you really have to be steeped in the complexity to fully understand it. You have to be able to see these things and have that ability to kind of see the, the ethereal. And we can’t expect most people to see that.

That’s not the, the reality for us. And so, you know, that’s part of the problem is us not, you know, not having the metrics to be able to create that visibility. The other problem is, you know, this is the, again, the little bit of the tough love, but also empathy for ourselves. We tend to be a very neuro divergent bunch as partner leaders.

It’s, it tends to be a very prominent trait for, and I’ve been doing straw polling on this for years now, and for the most part it’s, it’s proven true, but. That has some really critical strengths, like great relationships or great relationally. We are excellent at pattern recognition, especially those of us heavy on the a, d, d spectrum.

Um, but it also has some other overly emotional traits, some traits that allow us, that cause us to go sprinting ahead before we bring others along with us. So I think there’s, there’s a couple of things that, it’s predominantly that lack of belief, but then I also think there’s some places where we can look inward a little bit too, to be able to.

To really allow that empathy to take hold. Because if we’re empathetic from both sides, if we’re looking at it from both sides, why both sides want this proven, then it becomes a lot easier to to, to feel the other’s pain.

Jeremy Balius: I really appreciate the way you’re framing this. This is so interesting. Uh, you, you mentioned earlier that we have access to a lot of metrics already. Tell me about. What is it about the metrics that are already in place that maybe lack the predictive analysis or lack the mm-hmm. Ability to drive decision making?

Um, are, are we talking vanity metrics?

Chris Messina: I say this all the time that revenue is a vanity metric ’cause it’s true. And I’ve, I, for a lot of us work for companies that have. Been successful on revenue, but had no idea how they got there, and mm-hmm then wound up failing later on, or we’ve all been around that or seen it.

Um, so I wouldn’t say the metrics that we’re using today are vanity metrics, but they’re not ours. And we are not a, we are a non-linear function, so ecosystems are inherently non-linear, whereas product is relatively linear. It’s like I have a thing to build, I have to conceive of it, I have to get to from point A to point B, and all the other iterations in between sales.

I have a number that I have to hit, and we can talk about empathy for sales too as a result of that number and that narrowing of the vision, making it harder for them to engage with. With partner teams who are more longitudinally focused. Um, marketing, you know, I have an MQL, I know where I’m going, although that’s being questioned today as well.

But you know, everything else is relatively linear. We sit across all of those things, so not only do we not fit into a single KPI box today, we don’t even fit into a single organizational box, which is another massive problem when you think about it. Because if you’re a partner person, partner leader at company A, I’m a partner person at company B.

I might be rolling to, to revenue. You might be rolling to marketing. We already start out working at cross purposes. You’re working towards pipeline metrics. I’m working on trying to get things in the door today, much more transactionally. And so we have different, different focuses right off the bat. So, you know, the reason things break down are, are, you know, there’s, there’s a whole lot of them, but a lot of it just comes down to taking that complexity and squishing it down into something that everybody can understand to some extent.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. What kind of mind shift needs to take place to think about value in the context of partners? How do I think about partner value across the org?

Chris Messina: Yeah, and I think one of the things that you asked on the last question I didn’t quite get to is one of the, the reasons things fail is.

We’ve in the whole in partner technology, and I said this probably a hundred times when I was at the Catalyst conference for partner leaders a couple of, uh, weeks ago, but we’ve been building faster horses this entire time, and we all know that old Henry Ford quote, if I ask my customers what they want, they’d say faster horses.

Yeah. Well, we’ve been building systems to try and measure leads. And revenue for partners when most of the value sits in between. And so this is where that schema shift comes in. Mm-hmm. We as partner people, as partner leaders know where that value exists. We know the impact that it has on a RR on growth, retention, on NPS, on on your product roadmap, innovation, like the, the list can go on and on and on and on, but we, we know that, but because we can’t show these things, that’s why, where we fall down.

So we default to things that we know. And that’s why we’ve been building faster horses. Our CEOs are executives in asking for leads and revenue, and we keep trying to give them leads and revenue instead of what they really need, which is proof that all of that other stuff that we tell, talk about all the other things that we say are more valuable than just leads and revenue actually are.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, that’s, um, how would one even shift the conversation? The demand is leads, right? Always forever. Mm-hmm. Uh, how, how do you with empathy shift the conversation or shift? The internal thrust of the. Go to market motion, uh, to look at this value proposition that partnerships represents.

Yeah,

Chris Messina: that is, and this is, I don’t want to get too self-promoting here, but this is exactly the reason why we founded Quarq because unfortunately nothing has been able to do that. To date, that 85 to 90, 90% failure rate has been persistent for over two decades now. And so that tells you there’s a foundational issue that’s preventing the.

Preventing us from, from. Succeeding and, and unfortunately I think because of that faster horses problem, we’ve focused so far, uh, in these other directions. And to be totally fair to everybody who’s come before us, until AI reached it where it currently is, uh, we couldn’t have done this because we have to look at a lot of signals.

From a lot of different places and be able to structure that into some sort of meaningful output that, that people can believe. And so the truth is, and that this is actually the genesis of the name Quarq for the company, is like, and the real, when I first started this journey, I came at it from a top down perspective saying.

Certain companies have a higher propensity towards, um, towards ecosystem success than others. And a lot of that’s based on thinking from like Adam Grant in, in his great book, um, you know, givers, some takers. And then, you know, there’s other range and there’s a whole lot of psychology that goes into it.

But there are, truthfully, there are some organizations that are much more giver oriented, which would make them much more ecosystem oriented. The problem is, again, when have we ever changed anything from the top down? And so I, I had the, I had the problem, right? Nobody believes us. We need to prove it. I didn’t have the solution yet.

And so I took it out there and started getting it beat up and letting people tell me my baby’s ugly. And that’s where that genesis of the word. Quarq. Quarq is the smallest due to the atomic structure. The whole thing is like. If I can get you to see it. So if I can, if I can let the executives, and the other question that I’ve gotten 10 million times in my career is, and I’m sure you have, and most, pretty much every partner person I’ve ever spoken to is, what the hell do you actually do all day long?

Right? Like that’s, nobody knows what we do, so. What we are like giving them just something, letting ’em see, here’s a pipeline of our activity. Here are the things that we are working toward. Here’s what we expect to get from where we expect to go with them. That starts to give them, we’re speaking their language now and we’re not speaking their language in somebody else’s tools with somebody else’s metrics.

And we have to do it in a very transparent way so that they believe it. They have to see everything that’s impacting these, these KPIs, but. We have to be able to speak a language unto ourselves, take that complexity, squish it down into something that, that these executives can, and everybody, the board, the executives, our peers, the, the sales team, everybody can understand what we’re working towards and then it makes it a heck of a lot easier.

Jeremy Balius: I love the way that you’re thinking about this, is the, is the genesis of Quarq. In your own thinking and in your own context, the need to prove the value is, is, is that the reason for that is a hundred percent

Chris Messina: the reason for Quarq. Proving that. The other thing is, and this is again, you know largely this is inspired by, by Adam Grant and a lot of other work, but the idea that being a plus one giving organization, an organization that’s giving slightly more than you’re receiving and you’re measuring that reciprocal value as he talks about other rich giving in the book.

If you can do that, you theoretically can never get out. Give, and that’s what we’re trying to prove is that by being an organization that is, that is intent upon adding value to its ecosystem, which includes, you know, customers and vendors and part, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that you are never going to be able to run out of, give.

Because that reciprocal value is just feeding back into you constantly. And so this is the, the schema shift that we’re trying to, we’re trying to create. If we succeed, we break a lot of things and I, I’m really excited about potentially breaking the way that we do business today because frankly, it’s broken.

Like the horizontal sales model is dead. We, we can barely understand the complexity of our own organizations. How the hell are we supposed to understand that in our customer organizations and we’re prospecting the 50, a hundred customers at the same time? Yeah. Right.

[00:25:26] Jeremy Balius: I love that concept. And I, and I, and I. Really appreciate the framing of, the concept of value and the transference of value, um, to give. How, how do you speak to leaders who automatically push back and say, what about the guarantee of return? How do you talk to them about that, uh, um, that resistance?

When you, when you say the

Chris Messina: guarantee of return, could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Jeremy Balius: So in a linear model I give in order to get. Mm-hmm. And you’re it from what it sounds like you’re talking about it more around you are giving, knowing that you will get, but it is not ultimately the immediate, uh, motivation for giving.

Chris Messina: Yeah. And that’s in the way that we, oh, sorry. I think your audio cut out for a second.

Jeremy Balius: I was just, I was just gonna follow up with how do you, how do you talk about that with a leader who is in the linear model and resistant to the idea of, what do you mean give to maybe get back?

Chris Messina: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a tough one there. Uh, to, and so that is again, one of the reasons why we built this to be able to show that.

Mm-hmm. One of the key components of the platform is actually a give, get balance meter. So we look at that on an ecosystem wide basis, and then we look at that on a partner by partner basis. And so what we’re looking at is. You never want to be out of balance one way or the other. You never wanna be getting too much or giving too much because it’s a relationship.

Any relationship where there is, where there isn’t a value exchange and a a in your romantic life, in your, you know, your friends doesn’t matter. Resentment builds and then that relationship breaks down. And so that’s helping them understand that, look, these are the partners that are giving to us. You wanna go and, and pursue Accenture as a smaller organization.

Great. If we have the resources and we’re in the right place to do that, cool, we’ll do that. But guess what? Our give is gonna be way over on, you know, it’s gonna be mostly give, but we need to be able to measure and watch that move. And so again, by, by. One of the ways that we, we combat that skepticism is saying, we’ll show you like we will be, we will show you where these things are surfacing so that you aren’t having to wonder about it, and then you can actually start to see and visualize where impact is happening so that you can feel a little bit better about allowing your, your.

Partner team to, you know, give ’em a little bit more, more leeway to run through the things that they’re doing. Get to the points where that lead generation does become a machine. ’cause that does that, that’s the, that’s what happens down the road when you have that really, really strong reciprocal value engine.

Your leads are, they’re a byproduct, just like revenue. It’s a byproduct of you doing all the other things and, oh, I use an analogy a lot in this and it’s like. You see, your KPIs are the things, those are the only things that matter. And if you hit those, revenue takes care of itself. If you hit the KPIs around lead generation, that’s gonna take care of itself.

The it. It’s like going to the gym, and I wanna look like a Marvel superhero in one of the movies. Well, I know that I can work out every day, eat chicken, broccoli, and rice, and probably take special supplements, and I’ll look like that. I know the path. I know the journey. I know if I hit those KPIs, I’ll get to the result.

Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but by measuring those incremental gains throughout, like, okay, my body fat percentage went from X to Y, I know that I’m making progress. I know I’m not there yet. And so that’s what we need to be able to show is we need to be able to show those incremental steps. That are taking, that we’re taking to get to the result so that we don’t just get so focused on the result that our leaders get terrified when they’re not seeing it right away.

Jeremy Balius: Man, everything you’re saying is so awesome. This is, I’ve, this is, uh, I think you’re, you’re really vocalizing. Pain points that we even face as a business in that way that we’re talking to people. Um, and I, I deeply appreciate the methodology that’s gone into this. Um, one of the things about Quarq that really jumped out at me that I’d love to hear more about is the concept of shared value index.

Can you tell me about mm-hmm. What that is and what that shows?

Chris Messina: I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it because effectively that is our, our attempt to establish a KPI into ourselves. So the shared value index on its own is effectively a credit score per partner and what it does inside the platform.

And we plug in behind a tech stack and we can, anybody who wants to learn more about it, we can talk about it, uh, another time. But, you know, effectively we are looking at resource. Um, resources on the backend, like marketing calendars and your product roadmap, and we’re seeing how each individual partner.

Is di based on different actions impacting specific KPIs over time. So we look at historical data. We have survey data that goes in there in the beginning. We take context data around your, your, um, your OKRs. K uh, K, uh. Sorry, ICP and different marketing materials, sales enablement, et cetera, et anything that’s gonna help the, the AI understand, like, so the, the survey tells us what you think you value effectively that looks at, gives and gets how you, your strengths and weaknesses where we can give our partners where we have strengths to be able to give there.

And there’s another thing on that that I’ll mention really quickly is those gives. Another thing that we miss as partner people is none of us can tell you what the I and ROI is because we extract from so many different parts of the organization. So by looking at the, the how hard a give is, we also get some ideas to what the resource intensivity of it is.

So when we start using that resource, we’ll know that we’re using X percent versus y, you know, um, and we can get into that more later. So then. You’ve got that historical data, you have the, the context data, you have the, that survey data, and then we’re looking at second party data from like Crossbeam. So that’s your account overlaps, uh, with your, with your partners crossbeam, um, uh, you know, partner Cap does that, and then your spreadsheets and there’s some other solutions out there.

And then we take third party data, which is another really important part of this that we miss out on. As partner people, we evaluate our customers. We evaluate a lot of other things in our our ICP based on this data. Well, if you have three partners that look almost identical on paper and we’re gonna go to market with ’em, we were engaged with all three of them.

How do I know who to pick? Well, I need to be able to understand not only how they’ve been impacting us, but what’s happening in the market. Are they getting tanked on G two right now? Are they gonna get a bunch of negative Glassdoor ratings? Uh, did they recently have an SEC violation or the opposite? Are they crushing it?

Are they doing great things? So that tells us, do we have headwinds that we need to be careful of because it’s gonna blow back on us when we go to market? Or are there tailwinds we should take advantage of? Because the reality is the way we pick most of our partners to engage with is like, I really like working with Jeremy and he really likes working with me.

So we’re gonna go to market together. It doesn’t, we don’t have that database approach. And again, that’s not our fault. We don’t have the systems and tools and the buy-in and the budget to be able to. To stitch all this together. And so we have to kind of, there’s a lot of guesswork in what we do, and that’s, we’re trying to, to, we’re not trying to replace anybody.

We’re trying to empower. Partner people, partner leaders, partner teams, channel teams, and the executives and everybody else around them to be able to not only, you know, demonstrate value, but be able to leverage partners in a way that, you know, Bain and BCG and the World Economic Forum, and Accenture and I could go on forever.

All of these giant brains of industry say that ecosystems are critical, and now we just need to prove that they actually work.

Jeremy Balius: The Quarq’s not competing. It’s sounds to me like it’s almost an overlay that you’re ingesting all of these signals and data points across, uh, a wider ecosystem as well as the, the wider net and parsing it to make sense of. Organizations and their value to

Chris Messina: you. Yeah. And so interesting. Yeah. So you’re looking at all these different dimensions and again.

We had, the only way we could do that is because of ai and we’ve spent the last, I mean it, this is a pretty intensive technological process to build this thing. ’cause there’s multiple LLMs that sit in the back end. We use a partner called Ry, um, as S-S-Y-N-C-A-R-I. And the only reason I I put them out there is because A, they’re great partners of ours and we work well together, but.

One of the things people don’t understand that posted on this recently is that LLMs actually suck at structuring data. They’re great at interpreting it, but they suck at structuring it. Mm-hmm. So by using a tool like synchry. We’re able to pull in data from several hundred different systems, you know, without having to build all that API tech debt ourselves.

And we get that layer of data normalization to start, so it starts to structure it before it even hits the brain and before it starts getting in there. So that what the output is is significantly more believable than, than what it would be if you’re just sucking in data and trying to get it to pull out signals.

That’s how you start getting a lot of the, the hallucinations and the other negative things that come with ai.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, I understand that the, as as this is compiled and as the, the shared value is beginning to be measured and then shown, uh, to individuals in the business, what, what are the aha moments? What do you see people realize or. Convert on when they understand this value?

Chris Messina: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s so we’re relatively early in our process and we’re, we’re in beta right now, so this is a, a new thing out there.

But the aha moments that, that we are getting a lot is, you know, just the fact that. This stuff is already there. The reality that these things, these signals, these, these values are already there for most companies, and that’s one of the reasons we go out there and, you know, we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is because it, it’s.

We know those. If you have your systems even moderately structured, which well structured, which most companies do, I mean, everyone’s data sucks and we all know that. But that’s, you know, that’s a persistent problem. But the reality is you kind of know where things are. You kind of know how things are set up, and that’s.

Good enough. Now it, it maybe may not be perfect to start, but the aha is that I can start to take some of my time back because part of what it does too is it’s just, you know, partnerships are still mostly this, you and me getting together, taking a bunch of notes, trying to figure out where we align, and then we both run back and herd cats.

And then I just have a giant notebook full of all these conversations that. I may or may not remember when a resource comes up and it’s time for me to, to be able to engage you on that thing. I may have forgotten the conversation we had, and you might be the ideal partner. So now that just lives in the brain and when that resource matches, it’s then gonna match the partners that make the most sense.

So it’s taking a lot of that, that manual work that we have to do. It’s identifying where we have potential value exchanges and it’s also. It’s alerting everyone in the value chain. So now your seller, your CS person, whoever’s attached to that account, can know this thing exists and we all have a basis to engage off of versus, you know, the, the, what we have to do today is chase everybody.

Like I at that, the, uh, the, the, uh, catalyst conference, there was a great session by a guy named Matthew Kenly, um, talking about getting your, your seat at the, the executive table. Well, he. He was exactly, he went through all these things that he has to do on a weekly, on a monthly basis to align with his G-D-M-G-T-M leaders and how, you know, he doesn’t really need a seat because they’re in there advocating for him.

Well, and he’s absolutely right. All of the things that he’s saying are absolutely right and what we have to do today. My question to him afterwards is, first of all, the upshot is, Hey, he’s still not sitting in the C-suite, and this is a brilliant guy. He should be getting his shot. B, why in the hell should we have to do all of that?

Nobody else does. Nobody in the entire org, no, not your CRO, not your CMO. Nobody has to go in there and justify their existence constantly and hope other people advocate for them. What if the CMO doesn’t like you, like personality conflicts happen, then you have a whole section of your business that is gonna be much harder for you to be able to, to execute with.

So we need to be able to take this. We are a personality driven, uh, function, which is great, a relationship driven function, but we gotta be able to add some empirical evidence to what we’re doing and get it outta that. I really hope they advocate for me thing even, I’m giving you all the ammo, like it’s how much, how much of that advocacy do we get?

Like, how much time do they spend? Do they really, are they able to defend the positions that we need them to defend, you know? We need to have a seat at that table. And if it’s not, if it’s not because we’re sitting there, our data needs to be sitting there to where we can get specific questions back on Why are we doing X, Y, and Z?

And I can go, here’s exactly why I’m doing it. That’s what we need.

Jeremy Balius: I. Really appreciate the way you’re talking about this, particularly because you’re voicing, um, I think an under-discussed topic in partnerships where forever being on the defense and justifying existence and the psychological toll that at plays on, uh, people and their effectiveness. In their business and, and, and their energy and their excitement to commit, I think is, is not well understood or talked about.

Chris Messina: Yeah. And I, I, I do want to hit that too because, um, one of the, this profession broke me. Uh, it, there’s a, I have a picture that I took, uh, that that last week that I was at HG and I was, and I put it up, I, there’s a, an article I wrote a couple months ago about this and the picture’s on there, I was broken.

I was. On the bathroom floor of hd. It’s a private bathroom clean, so not that bad, but, but I wanted to remember that moment that I was just, I, I felt zero value. Nobody listened to me. It was like screaming into a void. I, I knew what we had and I couldn’t get anybody to move off of it could not get anybody to pay attention, and it like people wanted to believe me.

Our CFO, he and I are still friends. He wanted to believe me. He really did. He was, he was an advocate, but he couldn’t do it because I couldn’t speak his language. I just could, I didn’t have the tools to be able to do it. And so that psychological toll that you’re talking about is very real, and especially when you take into that what I said earlier about being very neuro divergent.

We tend to be more impacted by these things than a lot of other people in the organization, or better or for worse, like that’s on us to figure that out or individually and collectively, but. When you are, uh, one of my biggest jokes in, in this and joke, half joke, is that my career has been being professionally gaslit because I’m like, look at all these amazing things I’m doing, and you walk in and they go, yeah, that’s bs.

Where are my leads?

Jeremy Balius: Oh,

Chris Messina: it’s

Jeremy Balius: the worst feeling ever.

Yeah. I’m right there with you, I’ve felt that pain too Hey, with building Quark, um, and with your partners as well, in what ways has you, uh, the ai, the AI capability really enabled partner leaders to understand, give, and get opportunities? How is that? Unearthing opportunities for them.

Chris Messina: Yeah. So the, the ai, the way that that works is it’s, it, again, we sit behind the tech stack and it’s looking at specific values to start. And these are values, these are things like your product roadmap, your customer. Like, here’s an example I I like to use a lot is, you know, you’re plugged into Gainsight.

Uh, one of the places where we should be adding a ton of value is on the customer success side. Of, we can be incredibly impactful there. They’re actually one of, but they’re also one of the hardest groups to engage because they are inherently reactive. They’re not a proactive organization despite the, uh.

A countless number of efforts. I’ve seen people try to make them, try to get them to turn into one. They’re not, that’s not who those people are. They are great at what they do, and so trying to get them to be proactive on partnerships is like pulling teeth. You’re right. It’s not gonna happen. So here we see Gainsight, you drop from green to whatever color it is, and.

What we need to be able to do there is understand exactly which partners we need to attach to, which ones should, who should we triage with? How do we reach out to them? How do we engage them? So what the AI does is, you know, when it first kicks off, it’s, it’s basically just a copilot. It’s there to help you out understand what, what Quarq is and does and that kind of thing.

Ask questions around, and our, our agent is called Agent Q. But then it continues to learn, and what it does is it starts breaking down and running scenario analysis for you and understanding, okay, here are the 10 partners that could potentially match here. Here are the ones that we recommend right now, but what if we try this So you can start to to tweak things and you can really start to break down.

You really start to break down and understand, um, where, what the numbers actually mean. So what is that shared value index? What are the things, just like a credit report, what are the things that are impacting it? So, and then where AI is going, where we. I keep trying to say I, I or I keep telling people that I’m building the most beautiful platform I possibly can that I hope nobody ever logs into.

And this is another thing that Syn re helps us out with is ultimately we wanna be an agent to agent communication tool. We are you, you hit it. Uh, earlier we, we sit behind everything. We’re not there to replace other tools. You know, like, will we make other tools obsolete by our existence? Probably to some extent, but I’m not here to replace anything.

I want your PRM to work better. And that’s why, you know, the guys at Impartner and my Matrix and, you know, exemplify, they’re all leaning in with us because, and Crossbeam and, you know, I, I, I’m le leaving out, um, a couple of ’em, but they are. They’re leaning in because they see how if we solve our problem, crossbeam becomes exponentially more valuable.

Mm-hmm. Crossbeam is phenomenal. It tells us where this overlap is, but it’s a first mile problem. It’s, it’s kind of, it tells us what’s there. It doesn’t tell us what to do with it. We’re here to help you understand what to do with it, not to execute it for you. And that’s what, uh, so the, the, the nomenclature for what we are is actually a system of intelligence.

So we’re not, and so where we eventually go with the AI is that agent to agent communication. This is where I, I see the future. Uh, for Quarq is Agent Q speaks to the agent that’s working with your sellers, who knows your sellers exceptionally well, who knows your CS people really well. And so when that thing drops from green to yellow, it communicates to that CS person exactly how they need to be communicated to, to engage the right partner and triage that account and make sure that they don’t churn and we get them where we need to do.

We get them with the right people at the right place and the right time.

Jeremy Balius: It sounds to me like Quark is the rising tide. And all the other boats are lifting as a result of the intelligence that you’re bringing in?

Chris Messina: I, I really hope so, because I, and you can probably tell a little bit by the, the passion I speak about this, which I speak about this is I, I truly am passionate about this profession.

It’s not just because I think it can make a bunch of money. It’s because like the people in this profession, some of my best friends. The entire world are people. I’ve from other companies who I’ve never actually worked in the same place with. They’re phenomenal, brilliant people who are getting broken left and right, like I think, I can’t even, I know the average tenure of a seller is 18 months.

I can’t imagine we are anywhere, anywhere. More than that. At best, we’re 18 months like the, you look at the resumes, at the LinkedIn profiles of just about anybody who is a partner executive. It’s just company to company to company to company. And that tells you that there’s something because. If you really think about this role, the way we sit across everything, the way that we have to be strategic, we should at least be getting shots at that CEO suite at some point, and we should be getting our shots at the C-suite.

The reality is none of us are, we’ve got a rubber ceiling, we keep bouncing off ’cause nobody believes what we’re doing. So why would they want to invite us into the, into the exec table? But as CEOs in training. There’s not a whole lot better organization that you can put somebody in internally to get exposure to all these different pieces.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, I agree. Particularly because of their exposure across the organization and the intimate knowledge they gain as a result. The. Partner ecosystems, and or partner managers that lean in on this type of intelligence, how do you see them evolving or accelerating over the next couple of years?

Yeah,

Chris Messina: I, uh, and I’ve actually re. You know, I’m talking to the, the partner leaders guys about this a little bit. I mean, our, our primary KPI at the end of the day, like we have our internal KPIs, we have all that, but the thing that tells us if we are being successful of Quarq is successful. And this is pretty much the same thing.

If you look at at partner leaders, this has gotta be their KPI as well. Are we getting more people into the C-suite? Are we getting more people, their shots are more, are we getting more investment into the ecosystem? Are we seeing less churn and less attrition within the, so it’s, it really comes down to the people.

And if the people are getting, if we are doing what we’re supposed to do, if Quarq is delivering on its promise, then. Partner leaders over the next, you know, couple of years will start to see a, their stars rise within their organizations. They’re gonna start to have the ability to lead the conversation and not be jerked around by it.

’cause right now we don’t even, we rarely get to even help steer the ship. Like now, not only if we, if we can prove this, not only can we be in the conversation, but we might get our shot at grabbing the wheel.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. This is phenomenal and I love the vision. Uh, for those listeners that want to find out more, uh, where can they go, uh, to get more information?

Chris Messina: Yeah. Uh, connect with me on LinkedIn. And then it’s just quirk, QUAR q.ai. And the, the website is good. Now it’s about to be updated into a, into something that kind of goes along.

The trajectory we’re talking about, we’ve talked about here is that empathy for both sides, really letting both sides that, and there’s really, it’s, it’s just two sides of the same coin. We want the exact same things. We want to prove our value, our, our executive teams and our boards, they’re investing in it.

They’re, they’re putting their money into it. They want it to succeed. So if we can just find that communication layer, it’s, I mean, I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Jeremy Balius: Chris, I really appreciate how you are shifting the conversation out of an adversarial us versus them and making it more about a shared mission. I deeply appreciate this. Thank you so much.

Chris Messina: Thank you for having me. This has, uh, been a real, real pleasure