Jurija Metovic on Building Partner Credibility Before You Have Brand Recognition

Ricky Currier (00:01.046) Okay, now give me your name for me, like your full name. Jurija (00:01.356) Hola! My name is Yudhya Madhavik. I go by U-D for short. So, Yudhya or U-D. Ricky Currier (00:07.058) UD, okay. Do you want me to introduce you as UD when I'm doing the intro? Or UD? Jurija (00:18.37) surprise me. Ricky Currier (00:19.562) Okay. Jurija (00:21.72) Whatever feels good. If at the end of this, I feel like UDF, roll with it. If at the end I feel like UD, roll with that. Ricky Currier (00:26.456) Okay. All right, very cool. All right, you ready to get going? Awesome. Jurija (00:31.234) Let's do it. That's hilarious. Ricky Currier (00:37.224) This is actually a good way to start. We're just giggling over over names. So I'm trying to yeah, trying to pronounce your name. Jurija (00:40.206) Great, My name is... You know what? No, thank you for asking me, okay? There are people who they don't ask and then there's people who take educated guesses and then there's the people who just outright guess and so I'm all sorts of things. I'm Georgia, I'm Julia, I'm Judy. For the littles in my life, I'm Beauty and I'm much... that's my favorite one. Beauty anytime, anyway, that's fine. Ricky Currier (01:08.556) But you'd I got that right. You'd. OK. Now I get the guessing thing is I'm a Richard. go by Ricky. My corporate name is Rick. But every now and then someone will call me Richard Richie. And I'm like, where did you get that from? I'm not a Richard Richie. And I just go with it. I'm like, OK, you be you. Why don't you do proper introduction? Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who you are, where you work, what you do? Jurija (01:09.854) UDS, UDS, you got it, you got it. Jurija (01:22.894) Sounds good. Sounds good. Jurija (01:31.074) Thanks, Ricky. Yes. So my name is Yudhya Medavik. I currently lead marketing and go-to-market strategy for SharePath AI. SharePath AI is a AI security and governance platform. Really simply put, it's been fun, but we were born out of the kind of block or allow generative AI era. So when ChatGPT really came on the scene, we came out and said, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a risky thingy people are using. Bad things can happen. We don't really understand those bad things. We don't understand how to protect those bad things and enter a SurePath AI. So about three years and go to market, maybe two years realistically, as I'm coming up on my two years there. Ricky Currier (02:16.268) Wow. So three years that still startup world, what does that look like? Yeah. Jurija (02:20.19) super startup world. What does it look like? my god, it doesn't look like the way it looked before. I actually came up through B2C sales and customer success. And I really learned how buyers bought. I moved into B2B tech maybe coming up on a decade. And so that's where I really started to experience startups being marketing higher number one, being marketing higher number one again. And what it looks like then versus what it looks like now, worlds apart. And can you guess what I'm about to say, why? Why do you think it doesn't look at all like it looked three years ago or 13 years ago? Ricky Currier (02:58.84) I mean, Jurija (03:01.55) AI. I'm now a team of five, but I'm really one human. the field has just changed incredibly and more so more than I ever could have seen coming in the past two, three years. Ricky Currier (03:06.968) Cheers. Ricky Currier (03:15.073) It sounds like the startup world kept pulling you back in even before AI. So why? What's been the attraction with the startup world for you? Jurija (03:21.71) Building, cliche, classic comment, but building. When you walk into a startup, you're not inheriting anything. There's nothing for you to inherit. When you're marketing higher number one, when you're the founder, go to market, right hand, there's nothing for you to inherit. You're going to build a process. You're going to build a team. You're going to build a solution. You're going to build a story. You're going to build a partner program. You're going to build whatever you're going to do, you're going to build. so that was the biggest thing. And for me, I operate best when something is working, but there's no system. And I get to come kind of apply these, I guess, guard rails. Maybe I say that too much in my current, my current marketing career. I get to like apply guard rails to what we're doing and what we're building. And then something I recently learned to articulate really well is you are so close to the customer. to the revenue and to real ownership at a startup. You're not degrees away from it. Like you are literally next to them all the time. Ricky Currier (04:28.598) Yeah, I think that's so important because I've worked obviously partner versus a small startup right now, but I've worked at a hundred million dollar organizations and I've seen what happens when people are multiple degrees away from a customer. was talking to a CRO the other day about this and how much he was struggling because just because people are not in sales doesn't mean they shouldn't understand what the customer is going through the challenges, how this impacts product and all the challenges he's now dealing with as a CRO because people are so many degrees away in the customer. Now he's trying to undo all of that. I Jurija (04:57.602) Yep. Yeah. Ricky Currier (04:58.332) I've seen both sides of it. me ask you in terms of being a partner marketer at a startup, you know, maybe limited budget, limited brand, you got to build everything from the ground up. Where do you start? How do you prioritize? What are the things that you focus on at the very beginning? Jurija (05:12.27) Well, going back to what I saying, I there's no program, there's no system, you're not inheriting anything. And when you ask that question, and even when I get it now, people ask me like, what do you do? Nobody knows who you are. You don't have a system. Let me give you an example of something that we did. So recently, and I'll use my current SurePath as the example, nobody knows who we are. We're in this new space, AI, new tech, right? This isn't firewalls. This isn't your keyboard, whatever. So we took a big bet. We said, okay, well, we don't really have a program, but let's take some bets on some key partners that we think have the relationships, have the authority in the space. And what we did is we showed up at a partner's go. We were a seed company and we said, we're going to go and you know, whoever's listening, watching, or is going, like, you know, it's not cheap and it's not nothing to walk in and say, we're going to show up at a place where nobody knows who we are. to go and position ourselves as a partner for them, as our partner. We don't have closed one deals yet, but we just have conviction and we want to go build that relationship. Like we placed that bet and that was not an easy sell. Like, let me be very clear. That's not an easy sell. It's not a cheap sell. But how I was able to position that is to say, okay, let's look at the market. If it's our priority is going to market to lead in partnering channels, right? In the ecosystem. Who out there already has our buyer's interest, their trust, who has the logos on this site? Who have we worked with as a group, right? We're strong professionals. What partners have we worked with before? Let's bring them forward. And then how do we get into real conversations fast? It's okay if they say, don't know what we're doing in AI. It's okay if they say, we don't have a solution, we don't have a budget. How can we just get into the conversation? And so I think coupling that for us was like where we needed to place a bet and say, well, we'd like to build from deals. They're not, they're not necessarily there when you first starting out, right? Or they don't look maybe the way that they're going to look today. They don't look the same way they did three years ago that they do today. And so, we're not looking at deals, repeatable motion program. We're like, okay, no, no. Like what, how do we flip, flop that around? Can we repeat it? And so that's what we did. Ricky Currier (07:35.978) Interesting. It's almost sounds like you need very, very well aligned, or should say executive alignment to pull that off. Right. So did you have to start there too, in terms of like just making it sounds like had to do a lot of internal selling, right. To do that. Jurija (07:49.23) You know, I'm fortunate that the team I've got or the team that we're with, this is a very partner first group. a lot of us have worked together, so I'm a little, I'm treated, you know, it's like a gift because I've worked with some of these people before and we knew that we needed to focus on the relationships to turn it into real deals. That wasn't something that was surprising. I think there was some friction and there was some pain points that we had to overcome because Like in any company, you'll get people who come from startups, you'll get people who come from big companies, the way that they think, the way they operate, what they bring to the table. Some of that had to be challenged and unpacked because this was a startup and we weren't building a program for us. were taking those relationships, like I said. So don't know that I had to sell as much, but I think I did have to sell on how operations would look different than maybe what we had experienced before. Ricky Currier (08:43.928) I'm going to ask you a little bit more about people coming from big corporations into the startup world. I'm seeing it a lot today, especially with with number of large organizations cutting down with the use of AI. A lot of people are going to startups for the very first time. From your experience, you know, what do people get wrong when they're coming from the big corporate world into these little startup partner marketing environments? Jurija (08:48.364) Yeah. Wow. Jurija (08:54.189) Yeah. Jurija (09:05.463) Okay, yeah, that's a good question, thanks. Brand credibility doesn't exist. When you come from a big company, right, you have the weight of the brand. And I say this a lot, this is hard for me too. I go to conferences and I see these big, beautiful booths and these booths that are just, like you see everybody at them. And I'm just like, wow. Right? Like they're the solution and they have all the customers and their brand credibility is so strong. That's something people get wrong when they come to startups. They think that they assume that brand credibility exists. It doesn't. You're trying to build it. And you can't optimize necessarily for scale as much as trying to be relevant, which goes back to the relationship thing, getting into conversations with people, partnering. And the other big thing I'll be honest that I see in it, I've seen this in a few of the startups that I've been with, is people will come in and they'll build, and I've been, okay, I shouldn't even say they, because I'm part of this. Like I'm part of this challenge to building decks and one-pagers and going and talking to partner portal companies, right? Like we gotta buy it. We got to build all this stuff. We got to buy it. We got to build the sales training. We got to build the partner program with the Spiffs. Credibility is there. So like we go do all this and it's like, you don't have signal. You have no credibility. You have no signal. You're not relevant. And that's painful, right? When it's like you're coming in, you're, have this baby and you're trying to build around this baby and keep this baby alive. That those are, those are brutal things to say out loud. But I think if you can recognize those upfront, you're better for it. You start building the signal faster. You get with the right partners. You're building the relevance and you're building the credibility. And so I think then that's when you start to see that scale motion move a lot faster. Ricky Currier (11:06.968) I want to ask you a little bit about partner incentives. You you mentioned making big bets, going to SCOs, partner conferences. SPFs, are they still working? If not, like what's working today in terms of helping partners, you know, carry your story forward? Jurija (11:12.525) Yeah. Jurija (11:21.27) I love that you asked me that. just had a call with one of our partner reps the other day and I said, hey, as a friend, just be a pal. Does like this spiff work? Cause we launched a spiff and he's like, I'm gonna be honest with you now. Like I don't care about your e-bike and your cash incentive. I'm like, well, well, well, why not? Like you could be riding on a new e-bike this summer. It's the perfect time. And he was like, it's just not the way that we think anymore. Right. And so the old model, I remember this myself. I remember I was at him. Ricky Currier (11:36.504) You Jurija (11:50.67) I was at a bar when I first came into the B2B space and I remember a partner was giving, this is gonna say a lot about me, but a partner was giving a trip at the very top. was like all expenses paid, Hawaii, blah, blah, And like the next one was a Louis Vuitton bag. And I was like, I'm gonna get a Louis Vuitton bag. I'm gonna be part of this. The old model was that. I think that was the old model. It was luxury of swag, it was trips. Ricky Currier (12:10.904) You Jurija (12:19.266) I think that died and it died a lot. saw the pivot with COVID. We're at home, we have our phones, we can access whatever, we can buy whatever. The economy might be even giving you, know, there was a time the economy was like, hey, here's a thousand dollar check for some of you lucky winners. Like go buy something, stimulate the economy. And so today what we have is as society, access to everything already. And so that's specific. If you think about partner reps, right? They have access to everything. And so aren't my job, How do I make it easier for them now to hit quota? How do I make it easier for them to look smarter and solve problems because that relationship thing is what's binding Everybody and so I think the motivation is just help me do my job do it. Well hit quota I don't need you to buy me a purse. I don't need you to send me into Hawaii I can do that myself or my company is doing it for me already right because you helped me hit quota and so I think for me it's just helping them hit or exceed their number. Ricky Currier (13:23.362) So like true collaboration is what is really valued. Yeah. Jurija (13:24.91) true collaboration, true partnership, true relationship, and everyone's not for everyone, right? And so going back to the point of I just asked a partner rep, like, do you even care about this e-bike? The fact that he could tell me, look, no, I don't. There might be someone on my team who cares. It's not me. And it's like, yeah, but you already bought in. Like we started some deals. We worked together well. We have some proof points. If that's not what's going to work for you, tell me what does. And it's like, no, let's keep doing this. And can we get this customer success story? Can we get a quote? so I can go share it with the next person. Okay, yeah, then let's do that. So I don't think it works, sadly. Ricky Currier (13:57.688) Let's talk a little bit. sorry, yeah, sorry to cut you off there. I want to talk a little bit more about how you're doing your job today. You say it looks a lot different today than it used to because of AI. So how are you utilizing AI and how is it helping you do a job of five? Jurija (14:13.326) Yeah, well, was only scared, I'm not gonna say bad words, I was only scared shitless for the first, you know, forever. I remember my last job, I had a boss and he said, if you don't start using AI, you're gonna get left behind. And I said, that's cool, that's fine. I'm down with being left behind. I don't care. And then obviously I got this job and I was like, I can't work in AI and not use AI. So. Ricky Currier (14:16.94) Yeah, of course you are. Jurija (14:38.008) how so that being said, have found that there is execution and speed and scale in it. So to give you a little bit more of a direct answer, what am I using? Of course, I'm using chat GPT. Yeah, I'm using chat GPT. I'm using Claude. I would say those ones are my they're my thought partners. As a as a one person marketing team, they're my thought partners. I need someone who can kind of help me massage content ideas. Take a quirky, fun idea and turn it into a bigger campaign. And so I'm using those to kind of help me unpack where those can go. Canva AI is another one I'm trying to be better about because I'm trying to get faster asset creation for things like social media in particular. I'm not exactly a graphic designer, so I'm using Canva to try to help. Our CRM, we're a HubSpot customer and I've actually been a HubSpot customer for over a decade now. There are ops and workflows. They've got their assistant inside of the tool. I'm using that. And then the biggest one, and I'm not paid for this. I always feel like I should be like, they should pay me for this. But the biggest one I use is swan. It's called GetSwan. And I use that to run a lot of our go to market rev ops revenue flows. So analysis of deals, how deals are moving or not moving. Yeah, iterating on some messaging there as well with Swann. So it doesn't replace, I've had to really say this out loud and I'm gonna say it here too, because maybe I'll hear myself back and believe myself more today. It doesn't replace strategy. It doesn't replace that I still have a relationship with my partner reps or my team or my CEO. And it surely does not replace my judgment. And yeah, I think just saying that felt kind of good too. So yes, it lets me operate like a team of five, but there's still the thinking and relationship side that's very human and very rewarding. And I'm making sure for me personally, Ricky, like it's a choice. I don't use AI to respond to my emails. I'm me, that's a choice, but I am using AI in other areas that might help me move faster. Ricky Currier (16:53.154) Yeah. Ricky Currier (16:57.144) This is a little bit of a rabbit hole, but I've been thinking a lot about this lately, just hearing you say about that judgment piece, right? I think we're in a position in our careers where we have a career history of not utilizing AI. And so we can see the outputs and then we can utilize our judgment of like, this is a good output or a bad output, right? And then go from there. I'm a little worried about people coming into the workforce now that are just using AI for everything where they don't have that history, that expertise to know what's good or bad. And they're kind of moving up and... Jurija (17:13.934) Mm-hmm. Ricky Currier (17:25.56) I don't know what that looks like in a couple of years. mean, we'll find out, but I mean, think we're very fortunate to just know what good looks like and we can work with AI and know what's good or bad and move forward. You know, there's a whole crop of people coming up in their careers that don't know what good or bad looks like. You know, they do from a textbook, but not in reality. And it's going to be interesting to see, you know, how they take those outputs and put it back into practice. Jurija (17:51.81) Yeah, it's the part that scares me the most because I could just I could say what I just said to you with some confidence, right? Hey, strategy relationship, judge me. But again, going back, it scares the shit out of me. Yeah, it works right now. I can couple it right now. But you're right. I don't know what it how it's gonna look in a few years. And I definitely don't know what it's gonna look like for the new generation or generation and training even. I know we've said tangent a little bit, but I mentor Ricky Currier (18:05.378) Yep. Jurija (18:20.142) on the side of it and it's typically through connections and people I work with and mentoring has just changed because the conversations have been like, I don't know what to do. It's just AI, AI, AI. And like, is that what work is? I don't have the answer. Ricky Currier (18:36.492) How much does community and mentorship play a role in what you do in the startup world? Jurija (18:42.006) It a huge role. It a huge role. It goes back to actually the earlier question you asked, what keeps pulling me back? A huge part of it was that. It was that I could mentor. It's that I could, I'm a connector. I'm a connector through and through. And so the startup space allowed me that. It allowed me an opportunity to meet people and connect with them, connect new hires into organizations. mean, I will say quite a few mentors too. I shouldn't say quite a few, two. gals that I've mentored in the past kind of five, six years, I've been able to help place into roles through a connection and community and startup and just giving an opportunity to like get gritty and just work. Like I want to work, I want to work hard. So it's played a huge, huge role. And that's something that we don't need to get into it here unless you really want to do, but that's completely changed. Like how I mentor and who, and if I can, like am I providing value to them? Can I right now? And it's just, that's a bigger question I don't have an answer to. It's been harder to answer and fill. Ricky Currier (19:46.892) Yeah, no, I mean, I've experienced it firsthand. mean, I've always been, I like to think of myself as a networker, you know, and built strong relationships, you know, corporate side for 20 years. But when I made the jump into the startup world and saw what like real community and real mentorship was, you know, people even, big competitors that would go out of their way to give me their time and expertise and, you know, nothing was in it for them. And I saw it firsthand and how, you know, valuable that was to me as a startup where I was doing a lot of things. I just didn't even know what I was doing. and people were stepping up wanting to help me. I felt that and now I want to give that back. So now I look for opportunities, like you said yourself, to like, where can I add value and can I even add value? Jurija (20:23.872) Yeah, not everything requires, I mean, I know we go to work, we go to work, so we get a paycheck and the paycheck affords us home and activities and kids sports and vacations and all these great things. And that's true, but we're taught that, right? Like we get a job and we're taught, go, go to work and you get a paycheck and like things become very transactional. And so when you peel off, you take the money off the table, what does that look like? What's the driver? And I think that's a lot of... The fun part and the rewarding part about mentorship and connection and community and networking is you're still mind sharing with humans and you're building rapport and maybe even friendship along the way. And that's often more meaningful than a paycheck every two weeks. Ricky Currier (21:05.304) That's so true. mean, so many friends I have now are just people I've met through the industry. I remember I spent three years, and I was telling you earlier, I spent three years in Chicago. I moved to Chicago to open our office for IDG at the time. Didn't know a soul. I was calling on the advertising agencies there, and they happened to be, was the time where a lot of the tech agencies were in Chicago. like Starcom had Microsoft, HP was at OMG, Intel was at OMD, and you just went down the list. And so I just started working with these people, and we'd go out and we'd have fun nights, and we'd have hard nights. Jurija (21:10.21) Yeah. Ricky Currier (21:34.562) you know, working on RFPs till midnight. but I, to this day, that was like, I got on a 16 years ago. These are still my friends. I'm getting baby pictures and we're texting and they're all, they're doing something different. I'm doing something different, but they're, they're true friends today. And we, we started just as a working relationship. Yeah. Jurija (21:50.83) Yeah, your community, the people that support you doing partner Vista, right? Or the people who are like, yeah, do a podcast. Yeah, do it. Yeah, I think that's we again, it's the human piece. It's that connection. It's the relationship. Yeah. Ricky Currier (21:56.425) Yeah Ricky Currier (22:05.112) Totally. Well, let's end with a piece of advice. You've done this a couple of times. You probably learned a lot of what to do differently. You know, if you had advice for someone that was coming into this for the first time or maybe telling your past self, what would you do differently? Like what's one piece of advice you want to give someone coming into this world? Jurija (22:22.48) my gosh. Well, if we're talking specific to partner marketers, right? Like the biggest thing is, you're not behind. I think so many times, right, when we're building these things, especially if you're coupling startup and partner programs. So in my unique case, right, it's, you're not behind. Like just focus on one to two partners. We're not trying to build a whole program and build the whole world. I'm not trying to build for scale before what I said earlier, right? The signal, you kind of want a couple bites of signal. You just need one or two partners at the table with you who can bring you into a deal and you will serve for something, right? That signal piece, that brand credibility piece. one partner, two partners, not a whole spreadsheet of them. Ricky Currier (23:16.714) I love it. And I think that's that couples well with the community side of things. Cause if you have a community of people that have done this before doing it, they'll provide you perspective. And I say that from my own experience where I've the last 14 months doing this, I, there's many times where I felt like I was behind and I've had other founders be like, dude, you're, you're crushing it. But for my little siloed, I'm like, I, I'm thinking 12 months, 18 months out. And I'm like, but we're so far behind. need to do more faster. Jurija (23:33.644) Yeah. Jurija (23:37.155) Nice. Jurija (23:40.546) Yeah, it's so true. you and your own were sending me and everyone says it right. And some of these things I'm saying are not special. These aren't special things. I've learned it from someone else who said it to them and said it to them. But you don't, we don't need perfect. Perfect is not, I think sometimes I wanted that as somebody who was like, I'm like a four point zero student. only want A pluses. I wanted to carry that through. And so that equal to the mentality of perfect, perfect messaging, perfect program. perfect one pager. I didn't want to deliver anything ugly. I don't want my brand to look any, and I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We just need to get into conversation. We need to get to get a seat at the table and then revenue will validate everything else I'm working on. So if I can get into one deal with one partner, that validates all that other stuff. So one day at a time, one piece at a time, not perfect. And all our versions are different. What perfect means to us, we're our own worst enemy and we have our own definition of everything. Reminding ourselves that is also important. Hey, this is my version of perfect and it's okay if today it's not as perfect I think it's okay. Nobody even your versions different than mine. I'll be okay Sorry Ricky Currier (24:46.744) It's okay. Well, I love it. I'm going to end with giving myself a pop quiz. Let's see if I can get the name right from the beginning. Udia. Did I get it? All right. All right. Cool. I thought about it for a split second. I was like, no, I don't want to. Jurija (24:53.87) Hmm so good. Yes. I mean, I was hoping you'd say beauty, but it's. Yeah, we'll just get like a niece, one of my nieces on the line next time. No, thank you. It's been so nice. Thank you. It's an honor. Bye. Bye. See ya. Ricky Currier (25:11.896) Well, you do. Thank you so much for joining us. Been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Take care.