AI That Drives Partner Marketing

Transcript:

Hondo Lewis (00:30.956)

All right. Here we go. I to see if people coming in here.

Ryan de la Parra (00:43.822)

It's like people are joining.

People are joining. Good to have you. Very nice, very nice. All right, so hi everyone. Welcome to the Partner Vista webinar, AI that drives partner marketing. I'm your host, Hondo Latif Lewis, co-founder and president at Partner Vista. I'm here in sunny Denver, Colorado, where we get cold and snowy weather, but...

at least 300 plus days of sunshine. And another fun fact is the Denver Omelet was not created here. So I'd love to see where everyone is in this webinar, where it finds you, and maybe a fun fact to go with that. So let's open up the chat and let the comments flow. You can just let me know where you are today, where you're coming in from, and a fun fact to go with that.

Let's see what we got going on in the chats.

Hondo Lewis (01:50.03)

Who's gonna kick us off here?

Ryan de la Parra (01:57.87)

I think they're shy on that.

I think people might be shy. They might be shy.

You know, we're a community first company here at Partner Vista. So we wanna hear from you, you know, we wanna hear from you directly. let's warm up the webinar and let's see where you're coming in from. And maybe a fun fact, you don't have to share a fun fact, but let's just see where everyone's coming in from.

Hondo Lewis (02:28.968)

Austin, Texas, ATX in the house. Boston, lots of Boston people here. Golden, Colorado, we've got some Coors, Coors beer fans over there.

Hondo Lewis (02:42.914)

Boston, Bill and Ryan, you've got a following there. You've got some fellow Bostonians.

Detroit in the house. Let's go.

Love it. Patty, great to see you on here.

post office but some of these fun facts I know that the floating post office one I do not know I guess apparently Detroit I don't know if they can see the chat but Detroit is home to the world's only floating post office interesting

That's a great fun fact.

Hondo Lewis (03:17.25)

Love it.

Frog. Nice. Overseas.

Yeah, gotta love the international effect here. A little global.

Thank you, Marie, for chiming in here, for joining us.

Yeah, looks like they can't see the chat, on this then we see Cali, Los Angeles, Chicago, Colorado, Austin, Texas, Boston, Prague, Detroit, Denver, another Denver. I think we got a free Denver and three Boston. We need one more Boston person.

Hondo Lewis (03:49.038)

another

Hondo Lewis (03:56.27)

I love it. Yeah, sorry. looks like we got this webinar set up where the chat is only visible to the host. So sorry about that. And maybe we can change that for the next time we run through.

Hondo Lewis (04:17.858)

Cool, I'll just give it a couple more minutes here, get everyone settled in and then we'll get this going.

Hondo Lewis (04:32.494)

And just know, as we engage with this webinar, we definitely want you guys to ask questions. We'll be able to see those questions. I'll do my best to respond in real time. And we'll certainly make room at the end of the webinar to answer any questions that you may have. So please keep the chat going, even though you can't see it right now. But we will definitely see it and we will answer in real time or at the end of the webinar. So definitely want to hear from you.

as we start here.

And let's just see before we jump in, just want to do a quick commercial break.

We haven't even started out though, you're already throwing commercials around.

Wait, yeah, you know, I gotta get in. You know, I gotta pay the bills here. Let me just make sure. Let's see.

Hondo Lewis (05:59.32)

Cool, so Partner Vista, we are a partner enablement company providing plug and play co-branded co-branded co-marketing initiatives. And we are a plug and play co-branded engagement journey solutions company. Our solutions are designed to enhance the better together and ecosystem story. The content environments that we create are meant for educational

and entertainment purposes. We are here to bring you along the journey, connecting media, nurture and sales activation into one repeatable journey from partner budget to pipeline. We're here to connect the dots. We're here to make your life easier. We want to focus on nurture and sales activation, bringing deals closer to closed one for improved sales success. Partner Vista.

built with partner marketers for partner marketers. And that is it for the commercial break there. Let me just make sure to stop sharing. I wanna get to the stars of the show here. Just make sure that we've got everything in line. So without further ado, let me start with Bill Crowley, founded AI Advantage Assessment.

and Crowley Consulting after 20 years at TechTarget where you ran the cloud international purchase intent and AI Advantage Assessment is a research entity focused on helping marketers inform decisions about where to focus their AI adoption. And Crowley Consulting provides fractional CMO and CRO services to small mid-sized growth company.

I believe you hold dual citizenship in US and UK. So you're bringing a global go-to-market perspective to us today. Bill, welcome. And where does the webinar find you and a fun fact that goes with it?

Bill Crowley (08:10.1)

You know, the used up my fun fact I almost always get was that after 10 years on one, then I got a dual citizenship and all my kids. And so not too many people have had to raise their hand and solemn allegiance to the Queen at the time. that was my fun factor, right?

Very nice, very nice. Well, we'll take that. Sorry from stealing your thunder there. For sure. And Ryan, Ryan De La Parra, VP, field and partner marketing at Myriad 360, a global solutions integrator. You have over 16 years of experience building go-to-market strategies and partner programs for technology companies.

Ryan, you've driven measurable revenue growth through dynamic partner ecosystems, no matter ISVs, GSIs, MSPs, the full partner acronym, Alphabet, if you like. You've done it all. You currently lead global efforts to align sales, marketing, and business development around a unified strategy grounded in data analytics. So you're bringing real world expertise to us. So we thank you. Welcome.

Where does the webinar find you and a fun fact to go with?

The webinar finds me location wise in New York City currently. I'm here for our annual client appreciation event that we have every year where we bring all of our clients in, our partners in that we appreciate and work well with. think we're around 700 people tomorrow. So excited to be here in New York, even though I'm a Boston guy. Fun fact, I know, I've got too many, but my go-to is a...

Ryan de la Parra (09:53.364)

Apart from the pretty boy look, I'm quite the big avid metalhead. I love heavy metal. I go to a lot of really intense metal shows. something I just love. All genres. All genres. There's not one that I don't like.

Dark metal, are you a dark metal guy?

Hondo Lewis (10:10.494)

Well, I bet we need to see you with your t-shirt and torn jeans on.

Yeah, it's my wife calls me quite the chameleon because I am able to kind of just like change the look up pretty quickly.

I love it. I love it. Well, thank you both. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you for coming onto the webinar. Some quick housekeeping. All attendees will receive a complimentary AI benchmark report showing how you and your team compare to industry standards. I know Bill is going to share some data with us here shortly. So not only will you walk away with an AI assessment, we want you to walk away with specific examples of how AI is being used to improve

Partner marketing workflows and where the biggest opportunities lie for us in 2026. So no pressure gentlemen, but here we go. Bill, let's start with you by setting the table. You've benchmarked hundreds of marketing teams across B2B. Help us understand where AI adoption really stands and where are most partner marketers and really marketing teams in general today in their AI journey?

Yeah, great. Thanks, Hondo and everyone at Partner Vista and Ryan. I'll back up a bit, you know, why we started looking at AI adoption as a lens to help people figure out where to go next is that, you know, AI kind of felt like a set of decisions that were too important to leave to just the typical resources for making a decision. And, you know, I'm not going to try and belabor too much about why I look at it, but

Bill Crowley (11:46.414)

We all know that it's going to play a role and go to market success in your operations and that companies may succeed or fail based on it. And in marketing, it is a bit career existential. mean, it has elements of like, who will survive the development of this? But the decisions are a bit different. It isn't just like, am I going to buy this app?

the amount of personal initiative being applied to AI, the infrastructure behind it, team enablement of AI so that you're lifting all boats. All of those things matter in a different way than typical tech decisions. And AI isn't just one thing. It is many, many, or it isn't just for one thing. It's for many different use cases. But things that don't change are you've only got a little bit of resource to figure out what you're gonna do next. And unfortunately, all of the advice sources, not to guess, but...

from the vendors themselves, it's pretty self-serving. And so if this is the challenge, we have to look carefully about what to do next. And adoption, i.e. what are your peer marketers doing, reflects a kind of collective wisdom that people who voted with their feet already, like I have already committed my time to do something and my treasure and time and treasure. And so that's kind of an impartial and trustworthy thing to follow.

I try to gather some data that helps you guide yourself on that. I'll tell you a little bit about that, and we'll get to the data, which is AI Advantage assessment starts with a marketer AI adoption survey. And as Hondo said, everyone that's here in the webinar has the ability to take the survey and we'll give you a personalized assessment of where you're at. And it's totally free. And there's sections for each marketing discipline.

for demand gen, for content marketing, for things around partner. And everyone gets a free response there. This is an example what we do, where we rank you, we tell you where ahead or behind. So it's really useful. Everyone that gets the assessment has found it to be pretty great. So if we go from there about where are we on this front, I think the biggest thing is that probably there are a lot of use cases that are already

Bill Crowley (14:04.994)

let's call them standard practice, But the rest of it is all in some varying stage of emerging. So on the right here, what we're saying is like in the AI assessment survey, we asked about literally 110 different use cases. And there were 14 use cases where more than 60 % of the respondents said they were using it increasingly or all the time.

So, in other words, you've got 14 uses of AI that most, that well over half of the people are saying, that's pretty much in my workflow almost all the time, or it is something I'm really aspiring to use all the time. So that gives you kind of a level set of where the usage is, but then you've got 20 more that 40 to 60 % of the people are using, 40 different use cases are using it increasingly or all the time. Now there's plenty of stuff out there that is like...

really out, you know, not being used. And a measure of that is of the 5,000 different responses, or 7,000 different responses we got, 5,000 of them were, I haven't, I don't even know what this is yet. I'm planning to use it. haven't. So there's a lot that is sort of, you know, on the bleeding edge, but there's a lot that you have to pay attention to that, like, pretty much everyone is doing. And so, let's level set about what those types of things are. You know, the stuff that is really in use,

are typically about individuals getting past the blank page, right? Where I'm just trying to get going. And so I am trying to take something I've written and improve the writing quality. So these are use cases where 80 % of the people in the survey said, I'm using it increasingly or all the time. And so that was improving writing quality, using it for a better version of web research. I'm using it to create content or using it to generate ideas.

So it's very personal, very writing oriented. Now you get out to the bleeding edge where less than 8 % of the people, then you get these kind of like more exotic stuff like dynamic pricing for e-commerce or crisis warnings. We're not really gonna focus on that, but just, you know, it sort of sets the level of like, you're gonna hear a lot about AI, but there's a lot that no one's doing. So you don't need to worry about that in some way. So if we get to the stuff that is, you know, how does this look from, you know,

Bill Crowley (16:25.886)

just in one area to characterize it, which is let's just talk about content creation scenarios. And that's kind of a good view of what AI adoption looks like and frankly, something that we're all doing. And so what I've got here is saying, in that use case, what percent of the respondents said we're using it increasingly or all the time. And so the scenarios that are around creation, like I'm using content to improve, to improve content, I'm using it for summarization.

You got like 87, 86 % of people doing it. But you take a big jump down where it's like, hey, improve the quality of this. And I don't just mean like the quality in terms of grammar, but the quality in terms of quality of thinking or strategic gaps. So we had your identify strategic gaps in analysis or draft my own strategies with data. There's many, many fewer people doing that, but those are some good opportunities when it comes to like the quality of your own work.

And then you get into these things of like, well, I'm going to really scale my content. And then you get even less adoption here, right? So I'm applying a brand voice to my content, something that's been standardized by my company. Or I'm building derivative versions off of content. So an example of that would be taking this webinar, turning it into four different blog posts and an infographic, right? So you get lower adoption there and places where you can still differentiate yourself.

And the final thing I'll give on terms of presentation of data here is let's talk about a couple of common partner marketing use cases. And I sort of picked this from different parts of the survey. And I think we said like the highest adoption stuff is draft for marketing content. But when we look at prospect overviews for sales, so in a partner marketing scenario, that might mean I want to know everything that we've got around a lead that is relevant to the partner and to the OEM.

to create a summary that is going to take the partner and the OEM value proposition and make it attuned to a lead. You know, we're only looking at about 40 % in a frequent use of that scenario when it comes to case study acceleration, which again is something that like, know, core to partner marketing is talk about like how we did this together, you know, and that might be something like I'm going to record a quick interview with somebody and then I'm going to turn this into a case study using AI, right? So we're down 36%.

Bill Crowley (18:55.982)

You're running a lot of campaigns. So where are we doing in terms of campaign effectiveness reporting? Less than a third. And so as you see, you can get to the more sophisticated stuff. It's relatively low adoption and places for people to catch up on. So this gives you a sense of a couple of things that people use that are commonly associated with use cases for partner marketing and give you a sense of your peer adoption on this.

Ryan and I had a chance to talk a bit beforehand about what he's using there, I was frankly dazzled by what this guy's doing and pretty cool. So he'll give you his perspective on it. But from backing up about the state of the market and where you are, wanted to give you the sense. And as I said, if you would like to see where you are or your department is relative to these results,

You can go to this advanced assessment and we're doing that specifically for Partner Vista guys where you can take the survey or you can just email me and answer it. But I'll be around, you know, to help participate in the survey to this point. You know, and I'm going to try and make sure I unshare my screen here and get us out of it.

Those are really great data points and we appreciate that Bill. That's awesome. So looking into the data points, like Ryan, since you're ground level, you're part of the marketer, you've been doing this for a while. Like what are you doing and what are you seeing from your cohort, from your peers?

Yeah, totally. On the specifics guy, right? Yeah, Bill alluded to it a little bit. We had the pleasure of catching up in Boston and we're just chatting about his assessment and what he's seeing. And then I kind of corroborate a lot of what he sees with what I'm seeing in the field in real life. And to Bill's point, a lot of people use AI in the sense of, write me this email, please make it sound happy, make it sound leadership-like, make it sound good.

Ryan de la Parra (21:00.642)

Right. And then send. And that's where AI stops for a lot of people. Right. And that is what Bill's assessment shows. but specifically with partner marketing and AI, some of the actual workflows and use cases that I'm using personally, and that I've kind of helped others use, and some people have taught me, are as follows. So in partner marketing, you are going to market as partners, right? So a lot of the time I love to take.

A content piece from a partner that they have speeds and feeds, ICPs, ideal customer profiles, and I'll merge it with my current ICP. And then we can have a joint solution brief that we want to go to market with. So that's like a content creation piece to Bill's point. Taking, a webinar like this recording and then using the transcript and grinding it out into how do I want to go to market with IT directors? How do I want to go to market with salute? essays, right?

And then having different email talk tracks that hit your brand voice, that match your ICP. And then you can flow that into an email outreach sequence is very powerful. And I think a lot of people manually doing this, you're losing a lot of time. And that's where you lose a lot of ROI, right? So you should always put this through a very fine tuned window of how you want to put this content out into the world.

You know, cause the age old saying of content is king in my personal opinion is dead. Like, I don't know if you've seen the movie Incredibles, if everyone's super, nobody is right. Everyone can use AI. Nobody's special. How do you make AI special for you? I said this in a podcast with partner Vista a while ago. So if you guys have watched that, you'll hear me kind of reiterating a couple of things here, but I think it's very important to have the human thumbprint in your work. So use it as the.

The thing that gets you 80 % of the way and then take it the rest of the 20, put your stamp on it. And the things that are unique to you, your experiences, the things that you've lived, how you think are very important to make sure that what you're putting out from a content point of view is yours versus slop. Examples of that are one of the things I like to do is I'll just talk to my phone. I like to use OpenAI's microphone feature on the phone.

Ryan de la Parra (23:20.32)

It uses whisper, which is the backend that does speech to text very well. think it's the best one out there that does it. And there's plenty of other tools that can do this too. Use a voice. Yep. just talk. How you talk, your cadence, your flow, the words you use, and just kind of like start putting that together, put it in a text document, put it into a GPT or into a project. If you use Claude, Claude, I believe they call them projects, chat, GPT's GPT. Gemini uses Gems. Put that in there as like examples.

I GPT does it as well.

Ryan de la Parra (23:50.318)

context so they understand your tone, the way you speak, the things that you often say, and then you can put that out into market and it will use your words, your flow, your context as a way of writing. And that really helps fine tune the content that you're putting out into market. And then consequentially you can do the same thing. You can take all your brand pieces and use those as examples. So if you're using a brand creator, so these are all like little bits and pieces and I can go on and on and use cases. I have a whole bunch of different workflows I can talk about here. So.

And if I don't touch on anything and if I'm sparking anyone's like interest, you want to DM me on LinkedIn, like put aside three hours because I will, I'll chat AI all day.

No, that's awesome. I love everything that you're sharing there. think you talked about it on the podcast, some of your quick win corner. I know that you touched on a few workflows, but what are some workflows that you believe have been helpful for you when you first started? I mean, content, you said content is king. I think a lot of the partner marketers on here are working with content a lot.

maybe beyond the content workflow, what's another workflow that someone can get started with?

Absolutely. I think it's really important for you to take the time to learn a little bit about how to structure a prompt, how to utilize prompts. I think some really good resources are if you go to ChatGBT, they call it their cookbook. They actually post blogs on like how to prompt in 5.1 that just came out. Gemini 3 just came out yesterday. This is like bleeding edge stuff. They have a whole entire white paper that's like.

Ryan de la Parra (25:29.422)

Uh, don't know, 60 pages long or something like that, that really has in depth way of prompting. They all this information is out there. You can take that. You can put it into notebook LM, which is a tool that will disseminate this information and give you that information quickly to learn about it. And that's kind of how I started. Um, I have a select group of content creators on Instagram, tick talk and discord that I like to follow, uh, finding the right ones that actually are telling you the truth versus the noise. And they just want to sell you something is something you should be cognizant of.

and I've learned a lot of tricks along the way, workflow that I'll just toss out there when I just literally use yesterday. Gemini is extremely good at creating, a infographic and the way you do this, if you have Gemini Pro, this isn't on the free version, but if you have Gemini Pro, you just put in, please create an infographic based on this. And I'll, a live example of what I just did yesterday. I have a chart of 30 field events that we have coming up in Q4, and I wanted an infographic of these.

This isn't PII, this is all just data, strict data. And I put this right into Gemini. I'm say, please develop an infographic based on this chart that has locations. It has the event type. It has all this information on, just in the grid. It's a picture. It's not even like an actual Excel thing. I dropped that picture of a screenshot into Gemini, develop an infographic of this. It will spit me out a beautiful infographic in a HTML format that I can then just screenshot and drop into my PowerPoint slide.

I can spend 45 minutes developing that exact same graphic and PowerPoint, or I can spend three minutes in Gemini and doing that. Quick, quick, quick. The time that you get back in using AI in such a way into your day makes you have more time to spend on the things that matter, not the admin work. So those are like little examples of things that I'll use AI for.

Okay, no, I love that. I think those are all great examples. I think you're touching on something around experimentation. So like, how do you balance experimentation with accountability to the role that you have and to the team and to your partners? So Bill, how do you balance or how should partner marketers balance experimentation with accountability when...

Hondo Lewis (27:45.44)

I would say that AI budgets are relatively small or possibly MDF driven. Is there anything to your data that speaks to experimentation and accountability?

You know, I think what's... So let me, before I get there, let me say, first of all, think Ryan's last use case is, you know, let's put where that is in context, is the image creation or use of like for infographics. First of all, from the tech target days, that stuff kills in lead gen, right? You put a graphic up or an infographic, you can tell them it, as opposed to a white paper, that's a really high performing thing, high click through, high rates of getting leads.

Historically, if you use, like, some of the ways you can use AI are terrible for creating graphics. Like, they create these things that are nonsensical. So the way that, you know, Ryan talked about it with the latest Gemini Pro stuff is important because actually, because of the sum of the times it puts this really sloppy type of stuff that comes out, the relative adoption of AI for creating graphics or...

creating visuals is much lower than you expect. It's like below a third of people are using it on increasing basis. So that's a place where you can, if you can get out with some of that right now and either for public stuff or internal work, you can be differentiated in how you're doing it. as far as the accountability side, the interesting thing about AI is that it is such a personal productivity tool to start, right? As a starting point, if you've got a license, there's a lot you can do, right?

I have to say, some of this is from my own experience, which is like, I think you want to test stuff on your own. Just start putting your own documents, your own white papers, your own presentation, your own data. Put it up in there, in your own personal space, in your tool that you've got, and start working with it. I would ask for permission later. And so, on this personal accountability thing, there's a lot of like, got to be really

Bill Crowley (29:49.774)

We don't want to be sharing this information. I'm like, just start doing it, right? Start using it on your own. But the accountability factor has got to be, don't assume the AI is going to get it right. You understand the taste, what is true to your company, what is true about your partner companies. And so, the accountability, think, that probably is most important thing, you have to have an AI, is not trusting what comes out.

is that you have got to take a look at what has been delivered to you and double check it, right? You've got to double check that it fits like what you know about your company, what you know about your partner, because it will really lean out into areas that are not true or not right. And hallucination is like the most friendly term you could ever come up with what it is. Sometimes it's wrong, right? It is wrong. And so you have to be checking yourself on that.

I think the idea is like, get risky and frisky with this stuff, but like make sure you're checking it yourself, right? Because that will, you know, different, you know, that will differentiate you professionally. It will differentiate your partnership because you're doing things that are advanced and, and in greater quantity, but you have to hold yourself to that quality standard of like, I know I did this, but you, if you get the sense of like, well, this isn't that great or

That kind of looks like some of the stuff. I'll give you an example of accountability that I don't see around this. There's been, for years and years with white papers, couldn't get at TechTri, we couldn't get people to do the white papers on topics that people really cared about. And now with AI, they're hitting all the topics. Their topics are being hidden by your vendors and by your own companies. But you click through and you're like, wow, it's pretty obvious this was AI generated. And so I think they're hitting the point

but they're not holding themselves accountable to quality, right? And mean, if I'm picking on a line with what Ryan said, content has become, you you can produce a lot of it faster and you need to, you absolutely need to because that's the competition there. But now, again, quality will become important again, right? Because now, if you want true engagement in a partner marketing scenario, people will be able to tell the difference between something that was AI generated and something that was

Bill Crowley (32:12.236)

had the personal quality on this very soon. So, I'm not sure if that's all the points. There's certainly many points of accountability, Hondo. Yeah. But those are the things that, to me, feel super important. You may have other accountability things that you're trying to go after there.

No, I just really want to just add, just to add onto that. And it's because you just said it. The one thing you know, how everyone's like, oh, there's an end dash and that's done by AI. And I know if I hear another, it's not insert something here. It's insert something here. Like it takes me right out of it. As soon as I'm reading that and I see like that it's current partner marketing isn't actually this it's actually this like that is such an AI ism.

And there's so many AI isms. If you look closely, you'll start seeing them. is just oftenly used. And that goes back to my earlier, point that it, if you train it on your, the way of writing and you tell it in your context window to don't do them dashes, don't use this architecture and these types of things, you're going to have content that is actually you speaking in a way that is way better than that. Then what, you know, Bill kind of just said, if you're reading something and it's just AI slop, it just, you lose all credibility.

It's just instantly out the window. And then when I read something and I see that architecture, I'm just like, roll my eyes, move on to the next.

No, I think that's fair enough. think we're seeing it out there. And I think to Bill's point, you know, it is, and to your point, Ryan, it is quality over quantity, but quantity is what we're seeing right now. We're seeing a lot of quantity. We're seeing a lot of content out there. I think people are using AI to your data.

Hondo Lewis (33:52.75)

to what your data was speaking to Bill is that people are getting familiar with AI through content development and through content workflows. So we are seeing a lot out there, but I think back to your point, Ryan, is that it just needs to be quality. It just really needs to be quality. And quality, I think in turn boils down to return on investment, to ROI. And I think from an ROI perspective, I think...

What we're saying here is that the data that we're putting in that we're feeding the AI has to be good, right? It has to be of quality. So from there, I'd love to hear more around that is like, how does an AI ready marketing team or partner organization look like? Like, what does that mean from like them? You know,

initiating and having clean data. what is an AI ready partner organization look like? If you want to jump in.

Sure. I'll take that first real quick. I think one of the biggest flaws that happen, whether you who are listening can influence this directly or indirectly is a standard way of talking or, and or training. So, I mean, everyone's out there to Bill's point out, they're doing their thing and figuring it out and somebody has a workflow and then another person has a workflow. But feel like a lot of organizations are like,

AI, right? Like we're going to use AI and they have this AI thing and they just throw it over the fence and they throw it into their organization. They say there we have AI, right? There's so much to be done and there's so much like chaos that can happen with just doing it that way without proper training, without structure, without here are examples without leadership in this space. You're not going to see ROI. You're just going to have a bunch of people running around with their heads cut off. And I think it's extremely important.

Ryan de la Parra (35:48.856)

to either a leader in your unit or the company as a whole, architect a way to have normality in the way that you use AI. And I mean that in the sense of, we use chat GPT at Myriad and we have an enterprise license and we can share GPTs that we create amongst our other coworkers. So I have a couple of GPTs that I've created for my specific team and I gave it to them. I said, here's how to use it. This is how I like you to enable.

Others to use it. This is the instruction behind it. And I built that out for them. So that way we're all speaking the same language. goes, it's like everything that you use in your organization. It, there needs to be that consistency. So I think that's right there in my mind, a big one.

Cool. Bill, anything to add there?

I you're on mute.

You're on mute, Bill.

Bill Crowley (36:39.15)

Thank you.

So let's talk about personal use. We talked about that. You're just diving in and trying it. If I'm thinking about this from a leadership perspective, first of all, you can think about what are the management practices that are being adopted to actually encourage AI adoption at the grassroots level? And we go into the survey about that. At a high level,

licenses for everyone, that's standard. That's like everyone has to do it, and you can't even track your team unless you're doing it. But then you start diving into how many people have actually given the people training or given them budget for training. It drops way down, right? And depending on webinars or podcasts like this for the training, it's really not that super comprehensive, right? And so you want some kind of a comprehensive training for more people so that they can feel comfortable with it.

Then the next tier down is, I working with other departments on AI projects? And so hackathons at software companies or hardware companies are pretty popular. Again, you see really few of them doing something with IT and marketing, that they are together trying to solve problems and exercising that muscle of doing it. So there's some things to think about from a management perspective, are you encouraging that? But if you're really getting strategic about

making this really work. And it is quite different across partnership or across a company border. That leads a different level of complexity there. But just outlining every process you have, if you're the leader of partner marketing and thinking about what are our core processes and data sources we have, and just literally listing them out and then thinking, like, okay, where are we going to try AI out on this?

Bill Crowley (38:33.888)

And some of them might not be until late 2026. But you really want to think about, is there an application that we should be trying here? And which of these can I do on my own? And which of these do I need someone else's help with? And just prioritizing it that way, right? So the content stuff is easy. You do it on your own. Lead scoring, effectively, across two different ICPs. OK, that might take a little bit. You could probably do that on your own. But things that are actually

accessing systems, you're probably gonna need to work over time. So I think it's sort of laying out every process you've got, thinking about, and just brutally prioritizing to the ones that I can control, I don't need the IT involved, but then thinking about the high value ones and being like, okay, I gotta get there because it's coming. And how do I get there is something you can talk broadly about the team. So don't make the quick wins be the enemy of like where you need to go, right?

think about it bit strategically and bring it up, bring it up a level to your boss or your CEO. I mean, like, hey, this is the roadmap I think we should be thinking about. And then engage with the rest of the organization. When we talk to people about adoption increase, though, we definitely say, let's start with the things that you don't need to talk to anybody about. You can just do on your own, right? start there, but like, let's not be fooled that that's the end game.

Thank you for that. We're moving through this very quickly, but I wanted to get to a couple of questions coming from the audience. How do you separate AI hype from practical reality? think Ryan, you touched on this a little bit, how do you bring it down to ground level and how can I get into implementation? it's buzzing around us every day, every second of the day.

Yeah, I look, I said this earlier, like look for the news or the noise and what I mean by that is I'm a skeptic at heart. I just really am. I've always been that way and I think like if you're looking, if you're listening to something and it ends with like comment this to learn more or I'll send you this, you know, it just be wary of those who are trying to sell you, right? Look for those who are trying to help and then I think that's where I learn a lot from, I've learned a lot from the community.

Ryan de la Parra (40:52.174)

Again, if you want to DM me on LinkedIn, I'm happy to share all the people that I'm learning from on Instagram. There's plenty of great content creators out there who are not trying to sell you anything, who just genuinely are teaching stuff. And you can learn a ton just by looking around. Now, because it's such a hype cycle and a big AI bubble, which, you know, there's a lot in the news now about AI being a bubble. I do believe it is from a market point of view, but there's an undeniable ability about the fact that it is a

engine that's moving us forward. Like it is a bubble to its like hypeness, but it is reality and we are moving forward. And this is something that is important in our, in our life right now is it's like a.com era. It's the.com era was a bubble that burst, but we have the internet, right? Like the AI is a bubble that may burst, but we will have a genetic AI and, and AGI. that, those are things that will happen. Stay on top of it. If you haven't vibe coded, vibe code, learn, learn this stuff, look into it.

Slack has a, I'm sure plenty of organizations use Slack. Slack has a bot or like a slice off environment that you can actually go and use JSON code to develop a formatted way to drop a Slack message into your environment, right? You ever like write something and then drop a picture and the picture's at the bottom. You can build it so that the picture's on the top and it looks all really nice in your environment, but you kind of need a code for that. You don't really need to learn how to code a JSON. Just tell Gemini or ChatGBT what you want to do. Tell it to give you the JSON.

on code, copy the code, drop it in the thing, push the Slack environment. It's that simple. So like, these are the things you should always kind of be looking to do and improving your, your workflows. And every time that in my mind that I can save time, I'm doing the right thing and I'm producing ROI because my time is the company's money.

Love it. That's great. I love the practicality there. Like I said, we're getting here towards the end. We've spent some good time here. We've got a couple more questions, but I wanna kind of wrap this up with kind of a look forward, if you will. for partner marketers who don't have a data science or ops team, like what's your advice on starting small? I know we've touched on it a little bit here, but like...

Hondo Lewis (43:06.742)

What are the low stakes workflows that, know, if you haven't delved into it, it's been buzzing around you, you're listening to this webinar, you're taking the advice from Ryan, you're taking the data from Bill, like what are some low stake workflows that they can look to, you know, start today?

I'll give two off the rip and then pass the bill. If you haven't made a GPT and Chad GPT or a project in Claude or a project in ChadGT or Gemini, Gem and Gemini, like I'm talking like really entry level stuff here, do that. Like that just start there. Like learn, learn what that is. Learn how to use AI in a way where it is fine tuned to the thing that you're looking to accomplish and just start there. I think that's a great start point.

And then the world will start opening up as to like getting real nice specifics out of AI.

Thank you, Bill.

I would say effective lead follow-up in a partner scenario. So I think that you got three sources. You got your value prop, you got the partner value prop, and you've got what do you know, and their ICPs, and historical strengths, and you've got what do you know about this person.

Bill Crowley (44:33.09)

That is probably one of the more common partner program scenarios is making sure that that first, second, third email takes all of those things and does it in a compelling and short way. And trying to pull those three data sources together, even on a onesie twosie basis, because sometimes a lot of partner programs, I know, you're not working with a lot of leads, right? You're working with a small one. So each one of them has to be pretty carefully followed up on, right?

And so it can be a really good use case for that to significantly improve the outreach and the calls that you do off of it. So, you know, I would, and that is certainly when you look at the sales adoption, the ability to create, the ability to create good pitches like that is something that should be coming out of AI. I don't actually see it when I get pitched up. I don't see like this stuff that's really compelling and targeted to me.

But like, I feel like that's a place that I would want to make sure I tick the box on because obviously if you're taking, if you can increase your yield rate, you know, lead to opportunity rate in a partner marketing program, that's a big win for you. Each one of those things is like hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I might put it in the middle there if I were going to think about one thing to start with.

No, I appreciate that. huge thanks to you, Bill and Ryan, and thank you all for joining.

We're getting here towards the end here. Don't want to keep you too long. But hopefully this was informative. Hopefully it was fun. This has definitely been great. I've learned a lot from you two just in this short amount of time. We look forward to your feedback. We're willing to answer any questions like Ryan was saying. Hit us in the DMs of LinkedIn. You can get our emails. You can just email us at partnervista at info at partnervista.co.

Hondo Lewis (46:30.608)

or again, drop a note in LinkedIn and we can get back to you. There will be a replay link in resources that will go out here in the next 24 to 48 hours. And of course, don't forget to claim your free AI benchmark report to see where you and your teams kind of stack up. I think that's coming to you directly after this, but at least in the next 24 hours. So thank you.

Thank you very much for being with us. Bill, Ryan, thank you.

Appreciate it. guys.