Fixing Partner Reporting & Attribution with Michael Venman

Rick Currier (00:01.618) Hey Mike, welcome to the show. Michael Venman (00:03.342) Hey, how's it going, Rick? Really good. How are you doing? Rick Currier (00:05.631) Well, you're my very first. I've done some guests in Europe, but only in London. You're my very first one in Spain, so that's exciting. Yeah, you and. Well, maybe next time. Yeah, maybe next time I'll have to get to Spain and we'll do this in person, so. Michael Venman (00:12.587) Well, happy to be the first. Hopefully there are many. And you keep going more international little by little. Hey, next time we can do it in person, I'll take you out for some pinchos or some tapas or whatever type of beautiful Spanish food I get to have all the time. Rick Currier (00:25.813) Well, man, I'm in Colorado and look, I love Colorado, but the food here is not something people come for. Michael Venman (00:35.072) Yeah, well, you got the mountains. You got the mountains. People come from the mountains. And the food can be okay if you got good mountains. Rick Currier (00:37.205) Yeah, that's it. That's it. So you clearly don't have a Spanish accent. So why don't we start with your background. Why don't you introduce yourself, where you work, and kind how you got to Spain, which is a cool story I heard. Michael Venman (00:51.694) Yeah, so I'm originally from Boston. I grew up right outside of Boston, went to school in Vermont, and then moved down to Austin and was part of the Austin boom of tech. So that's where I cut my teeth, working for startups and started in the job board space, moved into fintech, and then started building out SaaS startups. Did that a couple of times and then moved into consulting, where I worked with companies to merge their business systems. When private equity would buy multiple companies, I'd help take their multiple sales force instances, multiple marketing automation instances. and merge them together. And after doing that for a little bit, I, you know, thought it was a little bit of a time for a change. So I was able to give myself a gift and decided that that gift should be learning Spanish. So I ended up moving down to Ecuador, leaving Austin, leaving the whole United States behind and moving down and living with a couple of musicians. And after a year decided, OK, maybe Ecuador, not the right place anymore, but still want to practice my Spanish. ended up in lovely Barcelona. Yeah, it's been a wild ride, but thankfully I can continue to work on SaaS projects and Salesforce and HubSpot and marketing and sales projects. But I come from the sales side. So a lot of people that you'll talk to in rev ops might come from finance or from customer success, but I started from just a salesperson, tell sales, moved into sales leadership, but quickly just developed this passion. which is kind of geeky to say, about how to iterate on sales processes so that they become more successful, or marketing processes, how they become more successful. And after jumping into that, I realized, man, these people aren't communicating very well. And the deeper that I got, the more I realized that that was very common across every company that I've worked with. Michael Venman (02:57.354) Marketing will speak one language, sales will speak another, partners will speak another, partner channel teams will speak another, finance speaks another, customer success, and they all have different needs. living in that space, helping to be a translator has been a true joy and is something that I get to continue to do with the sales nerd now. Rick Currier (03:21.013) Very cool. So tell me a little bit about the sales nerd. What specifically do you do in that area? Michael Venman (03:26.702) Yeah, so a lot of companies reach out because they want to have better marketing results or have a better sales results, whatever it is. And one of the solves can be a tactical solve. OK, we want to implement AI, or we want to implement a new tool, or we want to implement these things. But the thing that we find most often is before you can do that, you have a communication problem in your team. And as a lead will pass from marketing into sales, whether that's partners or that's a direct sales motion, there's a breakdown in communication. And so much so that a system that marketing is using will not be in line with the systems that sales is using. So the primary work that we do at the Sales Nerd, sort of the first thing, is a foundational work. we'll make sure that the life cycle stages are correct, that the account statuses and contact statuses are correct and they're automated. So as whoever is working a lead or contact or deal works it in the system, it communicates with the other teams automatically. So usually that has to do with bringing everybody into a room and walking through the current process and then designing what we want as a future. And then we actually go in and build it for them. And then usually after that first phase, it then moves into those more tactical things, like whether it's additional builds or it's bringing in other tools or using AI. That's been what we've been doing for the past couple of years now. There's a lot to do after that. After the foundation is built, there's still a lot of tactical things that we come in and help with. Rick Currier (05:15.357) Yeah. And you have an interesting background coming from sales to, you know, then the op side. How has that shaped your approach to just go to market in general? Michael Venman (05:25.71) I think the thing that it gave me was a lot of empathy for the end user. Because I've been a salesperson, when I started my first sales job was 17, I was knocking on doors, selling environmental nonprofit memberships. Then once I started being a salesperson doing telesales, I had to use a CRM. And that sucked. You know, and I had a sales ops person who would say, hey, you need these fields filled in every time and every time. it's it made me less efficient. And and what what I now know when I work with sales teams or marketing teams is any time I ask something of them, I need to be giving something at least as valuable to them in return if they're actually going to do it. So I think the empathy side of being a builder and an architect in sales systems is what I gained from being a salesperson first. Yeah, it's probably the same in marketing. Rick Currier (06:25.205) That's super interesting because, yeah, I mean, it's super fascinating because, I mean, you're coming in and you're solving probably a lot of technical challenges, but you're approaching it from a place of empathy, right? And I think that that adds like a strategic lens that, you know, I think a lot of other technical people might be missing. Michael Venman (06:34.712) Yeah. Michael Venman (06:40.3) Yeah, yeah. When I worked for SAS Consulting Group, great firm based out of Austin, works a lot with Vista, ST6, TA, quite a few PE firms. They hired a lot of Salesforce developers. And they would come into these businesses and say, OK, what do you want me to build? What do you want me to build? I'll build whatever. I can do anything. I'm a magician with Salesforce, so I can do anything. And when I came in, I was a rev ops guy. I didn't ask them, Hey, what do want me to build? I said, no, like let's figure out together what we need to build. And I think that again, that empathy, um, that I sort of walk into the room with of, I've been where you are and I can do the Salesforce wizardry or whatever it is, um, made a pretty big impact. It was a different lens, a hundred percent of different ones. Rick Currier (07:35.093) Let me ask you about scale challenges because I know a of partner marketers I run into, their biggest challenge is when the companies are growing. And growth is a good thing, but that seems to be when all the problems are coming up. So what common challenges are you seeing with fast-paced growing organizations? Michael Venman (07:44.034) Mm-hmm. Michael Venman (07:53.038) Well, you know that saying of like, you build the plane while you're flying it. If there's a rev ops team or sales ops or whatever it is, marketing ops, they're just trying to keep the business running 90 % of the time. You're just trying to keep the business running. So little as you go, as you keep adding these things on, whether it's, you know, additional motions, many companies start with direct sales and then add on a partner motion. or they add on a new marketing strategy, like events, or they add on international sales. Maybe they just were domestic. Those additions end up being done quickly, because in order to get something out the door, in order to keep the plane in the air, you need to get it out quickly. And so you just start accumulating this technical depth. And, you know, for instance, Salesforce is my home. I love Salesforce. I'm a Salesforce guy. HubSpot, also wonderful, but I'm going to talk mostly in Salesforce terms. You know, you can have a thousand, around a thousand fields on an account. I walk into companies that have 900 fields, 999 fields on an account. And they're now pigeonholed. can't move because, they built in all these different directions and they built a certain way and they never addressed that technical problem. So I'd say that's the biggest challenge is you just keep addressing the problem in front of you without actually building in time to take a breath, maybe once a quarter. Rick Currier (09:07.957) Jeez. Michael Venman (09:30.252) and say, what have we built that we are not using? What have we built that maybe needs to get adjusted? How do we build on top of what we've built before, as opposed to continuously just build separate things? Most companies don't do that. And if someone gets hired on and is starting one of these news channels, they're often under supported until it becomes a fire. And then, They need to get it out right away, which again doesn't lead towards reducing technical debt. It leads towards continuing to build it. Rick Currier (10:07.353) It's interesting that you mentioned almost quarterly, whereas I think a lot of people that deal with that problem deal with it once. And my guess is that's not enough, right? It's almost got to be a continuous, a continual motion of addressing what is it that we have in place, justifying why, and then seeing if it's the most efficient way forward. Michael Venman (10:27.266) Yeah, I think it's, and I say quarterly, quarterly is ideal. Monthly is ideal. Weekly is ideal. Yeah. Rick Currier (10:32.179) Right. But you get that practice and motion of like, yeah. Let me ask you around deal registration and partner data, because I know that's another challenge I hear come up a lot. What are you seeing in terms of mistakes or best practices around deal registration? Michael Venman (10:49.752) So deal registration really depends on the tools that you have access to. So if you have a partner community, Salesforce has a version of that, then they have deal registrations that are built in, which then lead towards opportunities and tracking sort of goes all the way through the system. Other companies have a customer community, in which case there's a custom object build, something along those lines. And others don't have any of that, it's just manual. The biggest one is you need to have partner deal registrations in the system. Generally, these are separate from a lead or a contact, but you have to have that, you know, the top row of the funnel that everything will come down from. You need to have the partner deal registrations on top. That would be the biggest mistake that companies make is they don't have those partner deal registrations as a separate object or as a separate way of tracking those things. The next one is probably where they hold the partner information. So oftentimes companies will put the partner as the parent account, let's say of an account in Salesforce or whatever the CRM is. But in reality, If I'm working with, let's say, Walmart as an example, they might have a partner that you want to use and you'll put it as a parent of Walmart. But it's not in fact the parent of Walmart. The decisions don't come from the partner all the way down. And the partner can also change. So the second problem is where you're holding that partner relationship to the account. So the first one would be not having deal registrations. The second one is where you're holding that partner information as it associates to the account. Don't hold it on the account necessarily. It should be on the opportunity because a company can have many partner relationships, whether it's reseller referral. I always say this word wrong. Distributor. Did I get that right? Not distributor. Distributor. I always get it wrong. Rick Currier (12:59.965) Mm-hmm. Yep. Michael Venman (13:05.346) But those can change over time. And if they change on the account level, well, then that screws up your historical data. Totally screws it up. But if you hold it as a separate object, maybe even a joint object, like a joint object, where you have the partner account and the customer account and what type of relationship it is and whether or not it's active, that's actually strategically and architecturally the best way to build it in the system. Rick Currier (13:32.753) Now, you my guess is a lot of people don't have this ideal set up in place. You're probably going in a lot of organizations where it's a mess. How much do think this is holding people back? Like I'm trying to think of the implication if I'm working as a partner marketer or an organization where we didn't get this right. This is how we're running today. Like what's possible if I fix this? What's the implication if it's it's right versus wrong? Michael Venman (13:54.904) So to the first one, if you don't have deal registrations in your system, you need to put those in. That's the top of your funnel. If you don't have that, it's incredibly hard to see the conversion of anything that comes down. downstream. if you install a partner registration system, whatever it is, if it's a specific software that integrates or if it's some sort of custom build, that'll allow you to see, OK, I marketed to these people, whether it's through a marketing automation platform or whatever it is. If it's an event that's just I marketed to these people, I got some sort of successful result from that campaign, and then it resulted in this many deal registrations. That's what you'd be able to see. So from the marketing spend that I put towards this marketing effort, towards these specific accounts, this is the return on that investment that I got from the deal registration. And then following down the line even more, you'd be able to see of those deal registrations, how many of them actually produced revenue. And there are many different funnel steps in that that I just skipped over. But by implementing the deal registration process, you'd be able to see the companies that I marketed to, how many of them successfully responded to those campaigns, how many of those produced deal registrations, and then of those deal registrations, how many of them closed. From the second big mistake of where you hold the partner information, it's much more consistent, accurate data. And while it might be a little bit more separated, and you're putting in another step to be able to target specific accounts that have a partner relationship by having to go through that join object, it's a much better built long term. Michael Venman (15:50.926) So that's much more of an investment in the future. Yeah. Rick Currier (15:55.637) No, that's helpful. I want to switch gears a little bit to alignment, thinking about where we see breakdowns, whether that's between sales and partner teams or other alignment challenges you're seeing, or what are you seeing work well? I'll let you take it either way you want. Michael Venman (16:10.818) Yeah. So I mean, I'm sure everyone listening to this has had to deal with this before. A partner registers your deal on an account where a direct rep already has activity into it. Let's say in the last 30 days, whatever your SLA is. Or maybe you don't even have an SLA. That. Learning how to communicate with the direct sales team as a partner team is very important and all of the successful groups that I've worked with that do this well have a very defined standard operating procedure for what we do in each of these situations. That would be the biggest call out. is saying, OK, well, if a partner registers a deal, but there's already an open opportunity that a direct person is working, well, the company is going to get more margin if we work directly off them. So we should probably maintain that deal. But it has to meet certain qualifications, certain criteria. So the thing that a lot of successful teams do is they define these situations out in this situation. It's almost like a prenup. these certain situations, we are going to handle it like this. And then to follow that consistently so that there's a pattern of what to expect from the sales teams. Because as soon as the sales team see, well, an exception was made over there. And maybe an exception will be made here if I'm loud enough. If I'm a pain in the butt enough, then maybe an exception will be made here too. So the most successful sales partner, direct sales partner dynamics define those SLAs, define how you're going to work in all of these icky situations, and then follow them religiously. Yeah. Rick Currier (18:02.005) It's funny, it's from my perspective, it's not just being a good partner and being collaborative, but it's a programmatic approach with the SLAs in terms of like, we're going to document what good looks like, and then we're going to practice it. Michael Venman (18:15.086) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the best situations are when they work together. When this direct sales team will say, oh yeah, that kind of makes sense. Or there's even collaboration. I was working with one customer who Or one client of mine who was trying to find sales source or marketing sourced. They didn't have partners, but another one would be partner sourced and where they landed was we shouldn't define it as sourced by sales or sourced by marketing. It's who's leading the sourcing because it's just a team effort. So if you know, direct sales is calling out and then all of a sudden they get a, there's a partner deal registration on it. most likely or maybe not most likely, but there is a pretty significant chance that that information got passed along to the right person at the company and then they went through their distributor or their reseller. recognizing that that probably made an impact as well and then incorporating that into the comp structure or at least having that conversation so that you aren't hiding away from, from that uncomfortableness is really important. Rick Currier (19:30.005) It's funny how I think about so many people are running so fast, they're reactive deadline to deadline, but a lot of this comes back to just taking a breath, taking a moment, doing this quite often and thinking about what is our approach, how we document it, what's the technical setup to support it, right? And just doing some reflection, which I think is always good in life professionally and personally. I want to ask you a little bit about ownership in terms of investor ownership or private equity, just thinking about Michael Venman (19:45.304) Mm-hmm. Michael Venman (19:51.596) Yeah, yeah, I agree. Rick Currier (19:58.463) from their perspective, I know you've done a lot of work with some of these folks that go to market, specifically partnerships. Like what do they expect from partner teams? How should partner teams best be working and adding value through the lens of maybe a private equity firm or investors? Michael Venman (20:14.638) So a private equity firm, or if you have investors, what they want to see is that you have a repeatable way to develop revenue. They want to be able to see that you have a process for all of these things and that you report on them in a consistent way. So for a lot of private equity firms, that means, OK, if I'm throwing money at the top of the funnel, if I'm throwing money at spreading the word about how great our company is, what is the return on investment from that? And if your company was recently purchased by private equity, that's what they're expecting from the partner team. They're expecting to be able to see we spent this money in these specific places and this was the return and this is how we are expecting to increase that return over time. using these specific strategies. they become, it becomes instead of reporting to a CEO who potentially was a founder who doesn't necessarily understand the details of how a funnel should work or what good reporting looks like, when you're purchased by a private equity company, they know what good reporting looks like. And that will be the expectation. So oftentimes that leads to a lot of uncomfortable conversations because people have diverse incentives. You know, the partner team wants to get credit for all the partner work they're doing. The direct sales team wants to get credit for all that. Oftentimes marketing will be more focused on the direct side and they're responsible for developing, you know, 80 % of new business or whatever it is. So they're also hoping to get credit. So now you just have these three groups, sometimes four if you toss in success, that are trying to get credit for something. And so in preparation for that reporting requirement from PE, a lot of uncomfortable conversations need to be had. And if you found yourself just recently purchased or something along those lines, Michael Venman (22:14.534) you should have those conversations and you should approach those tables before you're asked to. That would be the key is have those, have those small, hard conversations before you have a big one. You show up to a board meeting and you have different numbers than, than the CRO has, because you never talked about reporting or attribution. have those hard conversations while they're still small, before you're put in a position where you have to continue to run or you're under pressure. Rick Currier (22:44.373) Yeah, it's funny. I'm always thinking about the conversation we just had with the sales team and the SLAs. I mean, you might not have an SLA with the private equity firm, but it doesn't mean you can't have a conversation to understand expectations. What does this look like? And almost like document it for yourself to make sure you're delivering on those expectations. Michael Venman (23:00.686) Yeah. And with a lot of the operating partners, they are incredibly open to show you what good looks like. So coming from a place of maybe, I don't know if being humble is the right word, but of being curious. Everyone wants to help. Every single person, if you go up to them and say, I have a challenge, I think you uniquely can help. Most people will help. Most people are good people. And private equity can be a little scary, know, asking for help. Rick Currier (23:31.645) Yeah, you know, it's no, think I think that's what it is. I think it is scary for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people kind of hide away from it. But, you know, at the end of and I've worked for two private equity firms in my past life, and I have a lot of people were scared to talk to them. But I knew at end of the day, they really want us to succeed because we are their investment. So, you know, they're willing to help us just from a financial standpoint, they have the incentive to help us. And so I think you're absolutely right. Reach out, try to understand what good looks like from their perspective. Michael Venman (24:01.41) Yeah, but usually it looks like I invested this much in this specific place. And then these are the funnel conversions. these are the things that I'm working on including in that funnel that may not be there yet. And then this is how I'm going to be approaching this process differently this quarter or this year. And this is how I'm going to be tracking those results over time. But again, it comes to the conversations with the rest of your team as to, well, if I say that I'm bringing in this, am I actually going to get credit across the board? Do we all have the same definitions so that I can say, you know, this is revenue that I brought to the table? Rick Currier (24:43.817) Yeah. Well, look, Mike, we've covered a lot. Is there anything you think we missed or anything else you really want to talk about? Michael Venman (24:50.51) Man, we talked about private equity, talked about systems. Yeah, I don't know. don't know. We could talk more about tapas, could talk more about patatas bravas and the fights that happen in the workforce. Rick Currier (24:58.259) We could go back to Spanish food. This is good. know, I, you know, it's, I talked to a lot of people and on the partner marketing side specifically, and they're just running from program to program because they have to, um, you know, but a lot of their success is this underlying, you know, technical setup, the SLAs, the way they're working across teams, you know, that's their foundation. And I think some of the struggles are because it's, it's, know, I don't want to say it's a faulty foundation, but it just kind of grown the way it's had grown. And I don't think people are necessarily taking a step back to look at it. analyze it until it's too late. And then it's like, well, now we have a giant project on our hands. Michael Venman (25:40.022) Yeah, I mean, if you think about the investment that goes into partners, a lot of the teams that I've worked with have a small partnership team. Sometimes you only have one partnership manager or partner manager. And if you have 20 salespeople, one person, three people, partner team, or maybe a 10th the size, all of the rev ops energy, all of the Salesforce admins, all of the technical people who can actually solve these problems are going to be looking at the areas where they can make the biggest impact. And oftentimes, they don't think that's partners. So the partnership process gets sort of buried. it's honestly because it's invisible in a lot of ways. And by making it more visible, by being louder, by saying, I'd like to be able to show this and this and this, and you go to your rev ops team. You advocating for that, you being proactive is sort of what's needed with the business systems team. Because it is so invisible and it is so set apart from the rest of the sales motion, often. Rick Currier (26:48.735) Yeah, no, it's so true. Any lasting advice for people as we leave them on this episode? Michael Venman (26:54.894) I'd say be curious, be humble. If you come from a place and if you realize that your system maybe doesn't work like it should, ask for help, ask for understanding, reach out, talk to someone who's done this before, knows what good looks like, and then be curious. Come with questions. And then most likely you'll get the help that you need. That'd be my advice. Rick Currier (27:20.925) I think that that's good life advice in general. If people want to learn more information about you or your organization, how you're helping people, where should they go? Michael Venman (27:29.388) Well, they should go to thesalesnerd.com, which is what I was called when I was leading my first sales team. I ended up making a business out of it. I also have a free book download. I wrote a book about a year ago called A Sales Funnel That Scales. If you go to thesalesnerd.com slash book, there's a free download link. And you can get an outline for. how to build a sales funnel and also how to have the conversation because so much of it is trying to map what people do inside of a system to that system or to a funnel which can be difficult. So go to the sales nerd.com and reach out, maybe download the book. Rick Currier (28:12.317) Awesome. We'll link to both in the show notes. Mike, thank you so much for coming on. This has, for me, been very educational and it's been a lot of fun. Michael Venman (28:18.166) Awesome. Yeah, super fun. Anytime. Rick Currier (28:21.781) Thanks. Michael Venman (28:22.862) Go.