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Ricky (00:00.264)
yeah. All right.
So I want to ask you about the tech side of things, because I know you've had a lot of experience on building a tech infrastructure specific to partner marketing. You know, how do you how do you prioritize in a tech stack? What are like the must-haves? What's your overall approach to tech when it comes to partner marketing? Yeah, I mean I think simplification is the best modus operandi here, isn't how how do we help our partners get to market as fast as possible?
with the tools that we're presenting into them. How do we help them find those programs and you know be able to access their MDF it very quickly, understand what kind of incentives they have, but also, you know, just really understand how to better market with us. those are the types of things that we're always trying to look at in order to to to help our partners, you know, succeed. And and so when I take a look at the tech stack, there's a ton of tools out there right now.
and there are some that are more important than others. There are some that are more used than others. And so coming here now, I have the hindsight of of having built out a a pretty robust tech stack where at ServiceNow we were really building a lead to revenue system and and that was a huge undertaking. and one that we did in a you know, a very short period of time. It was an aggressive timeline that I had put onto the team.
And it you know, we had to work cross-functionally, we had to work with our IT team, as you can imagine, and our programs team and our MDF team, and really link everything together. now with AI, you can imagine there's just so much more we can do. and there's new products that are coming out every three months, right? And so one of the things that I believe
Ricky (02:00.533)
we have to think about is how do we build in a modular fashion because there's always going to be new tools that are going to be presented in some better than others. And when you think about building in an in a modular fashion and create an orchestration model to an ecosystem, it makes it a lot easier for you to kind of rip and replace when a tool isn't working very well. But also slowly crawl walk run into
the robust infrastructure that you want to create in a in a future, right? And so I think making sure that you have a mapped
architecture of of what your critical priorities are today and then where you want to go with those and how do you expand on those. That's essentially how I would approach taking tech into a new organization. And that's essentially the way that we're assessing our current infrastructure. You know, we're also you oftentimes if you're walking into a new organization, there's already tech that exists. Some of it works, some of it doesn't, and you know really understanding what is working, what isn't.
and why, right? Sometimes it's the that tech is just not being leveraged in the right way, right? Yeah. It's it's it's funny. I was it I I came to that question from thinking like, you know, what are the priority technologies that partner marketers should be thinking about? But after I hear you saying it, it's more like what are your priorities and how do the tech solutions align to those? A hundred percent. What are your business priorities first and how can you help your partners build against those first and foremost? And so
It might just be a front door, right? You just might need a communication tool, a a two-partner communication tool so that you can properly organize all of the work that you have already set forth for your partners so that you're able to present that in, you're able to email them, and and the partners have a really strong experience with you in order to find things. it it becomes very reliable, right? otherwise.
Ricky (04:06.818)
There's, you know, if if you're a heavy bar or Dis D organization, you might want to ensure that you have, you know, a really strong TCMA tool, right? A a through partner channel automation tool, right? And so to me, it's really dependent on who you are, you know, what partners you're working with and what it is they need most from you.
Right. We always have to think about the partner first in these types of situations. By the way, I love the name Lead to Revenue. Yes, it's good, right? I know. In my company that so obviously alignment probably comes a lot into just thinking about that in terms of aligning with the business outcomes, the teams involved. What does alignment look like today for a successful
I mean as you know, partnership is so cross-functional, right? And there's you need alignment within the organization, but also outside of the organization. understanding who your stakeholders are and what is going to drive the business for those stakeholders, both internally and externally at the partnerships is so critical, right? so I think
as you're building out any type of partner marketing organization, you need to start at the top, right? Who are your your core stakeholders and in marketing oftentimes internally you have your CPO, you your CMO, and then you might have your sales teams, right? Those sales organization leads that you know are working with partners to build the business. But then at the partnerships, you also have very similar infrastructures where you have the alliance lead.
the lines of business. you know, all of these different folks that you need to align to to ensure that not only do they know about you, but they're thinking about you first. So, you know, as a partner marketer, it's not just about thinking, does my alliance lead know that my marketing exists? But we also need to make sure that our sellers, both internal and at the partner, know what we have and what what
Ricky (06:29.74)
they can leverage without even needing us, right? That's how you scale. Yeah. I wanna ask in terms of just like I know I asked a little bit about learnings earlier on, but surprises or things that haven't worked. And I know you've tried a lot, so I imagine not everything went perfectly. Anything really surprised you or maybe things stalled when you thought they would go great. I think we're still in a nas nascent stage with AI. You know, I I think
I think a lot of executives think that AI is going to fix and do everything that we do as marketers. And I've seen that at the content level. I've started to see it at the ops level. but the fact of the matter is, is the more I use it, the less reliable I think it is. I think at a content level it's getting better, but there is
something to be said about that human touch. And I'll ask you today if you go on LinkedIn, how much of your feed is AI generated? Too much. Too much. Right. And it's I'm starting to I'm starting to stop. I I just don't pay attention anymore because I'm not interested because it doesn't sound like somebody's actual voice. And I'm struggling with that as
a user of a platform, but also I'm struggling with it as a marketer, to ensure that the messages that we're bringing to market resonate with people because they're real. Yeah. and so I I know that from from like my perspective, you know I have a big ABM background. I'm bringing that back. I'm bringing direct mail back. Yeah. I'm bringing back the human touch because
I think people are craving that right now. And I think we have overindexed way too much on what AI can do. We've created so much noise that it's not resonating with anybody. And so the learning there is that I think we thought that AI was going to do it all very quickly. And we got scared into thinking that, right? what I have learned is that.
Ricky (08:54.188)
That is not true. You know, it at least not yet. And to be honest, I think humans are going to push back and we're starting to see that a little bit right now. Well, I mean, that's part of the reason we're having an event tonight. Yeah. You know, in real life. People connecting. That's it. That's it. You know, it's funny in in in preparing for that event tonight, I was going back through, so you know, we we run the private Slack community. Yep. And part of the application is we ask partner marketers some of their top priorities or challenges.
Yeah. And I just went through sixty applications and just kind of I took all those top challenges and I and I sorry, but I ran it through AI. Which is okay. But I wanted to summarize like what what's the common theme we're seeing across them all. And the number one was the inability to to measure a partner marketing, specifically around the things that are just hard to measure. So like pipeline influence or or or deal influence. And I'd love your just overall take as we think about partner marketing transformation.
You know, from your perspective, what is the value that partner marketing brings? And it's okay if we haven't totally figured it out yet, but where we are today, like how do you how do you tell executives the value of the partner marketing organization? I mean, it's the same story we have told for years. It's a force multiplier, right? And and it is. And you're creating an extension of your sales team and your sales organization with an entire new black book of customers, right? And
You know, anyone who doesn't recognize that, shame on them, right? Because the a lot of the partners that we work with have a front seat to massive transformations in an enterprise. whereas we don't, right? We're we're a small portion of that. We're just a security portion. we need to understand that holistic picture of of where an organization is going so that we can actually provide the right solutions.
across the entire ecosystem that they're gonna be challenged with, right? And so you know, from my perspective, that force multiplier is really how we can share ROI and and prove that the investment in partnerships is is worth, you know, a ten X return. The challenge today is that it's hard to track. I think the the industry has
Ricky (11:17.165)
has gone through a massive shift. I remember when when I started building out a lot of the tech infrastructure at at my old job, people thought I was crazy. They literally thought you can't they they told me you can't do that. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I understand you can't do that. Actually you can do that. partners won't do it. Well, I'm hearing the complete opposite because I think partners need it just as much as we need it.
And when you start to build transparency and a holistic picture of not only the work that we're doing together, the investments that we're making together in a one environment, I think that makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, that is the biggest shift that I'm seeing in in the market and in this space in particular. So there's a lot more willingness to provide more transparency and and be a true partner.
Because if you're leaning in, we've got to lean in together. We're building this business together, right? And and that's where you gain the trust. I wanna ask actually end with a question about you personally, just in terms of you know, look look at you. I mean, we're a big, big office complex palatinet networks. You're leading global partner marketing here. I personally, like, what do you think has been key to your success? What is hope to you get to this?
I mean, I don't think there's anything, you know, maybe it's luck, dumb luck. I think it's also for me, it's about the willingness to learn and pilot and test and work with people in the industry who know more than I do and learn from them, right? And and the more of that you do, the better off you are. And it's funny, you know, we're going through a massive transformation on my team, and I've been asking my team members to shift their roles.
To completely different roles to cover a completely different partner type. Why am I doing that? There's there's a power in learning about different routes to market. And in different partner types, we obviously have different routes to market. And there's another power, which is those triple plays. How do we bring
Ricky (13:35.736)
multiple partners to do an activity. We're we're right now we're rolling out some some really exciting programs with Anthropic and with our top GSIs for example, with our Frontier AI Alliance. And you know, we're building out some really incredible webinars that we're we're the three of us as as partnerships are going in together to talk about a really important issue, which is, you know, Frontier AI security.
And it it's helping all of us get in front of the right customer base and talk about the important issues as a as a as a whole, right? And so and we all provide a different type of value to that customer, both within expertise, within security and within the infrastructure, to be able to ensure that those those customers have
the best at play and can learn from us and protect themselves. I love it. I mean I think growth comes with being uncomfortable, right? A hundred percent. So it sounds like you've constantly put yourself in uncomfortable positions where you don't know where the outcome is. You're gonna pilot, you're gonna learn fail optimize. And it's okay to fail. And I think the you know the pilot side is is is critical. People are like, Well we've gotta make sure that every dollar counts and it's gonna it's gotta work. Well, there's gonna be times where we're you know, marketing today has changed. Yeah. You know?
It's not about SEO anymore. It's not about ad buying. It's totally different. Right. And we have to recognize that everything we do now is nothing like it was even three months ago. Yeah. It is. Well, listen, thank you so much for for taking the time out of your busy day to send us. Ricky. I've I've learned a lot. So thank you. Well, hopefully, I don't know. it's it's been great and it's great to be back after all this time. So thanks for having me. Thanks, Maisa. All right.
