The Profitable Partnership: Navigating Revenue-Generating Alliances

Intro VO  00:06

Welcome to revenue rehab, your one stop destination for collective solutions to the biggest challenges faced by marketing leaders today. Now head on over to the couch, make yourself comfortable and get ready to change the way you approach revenue. Leading your recovery is modern marketer, author, speaker and Chief Operating Officer at Tegrita Brandi Starr

Brandi Starr  00:34

Hello, hello hello and welcome to another episode of revenue rehab. I am your host Brandi Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today. I am joined by Jason Yarborough. Jason is a relationship builder, revenue growth strategist and podcast host passionate about people partnerships and purpose. Jason is a tenured VP of partnerships with experience scaling ecosystems, and now training failed field teams how to implement partner data and strategy into their daily activities. Jason lives in Montana with his wife, Sam and two kids and spend their free time hiking, fly fishing and skiing. Jason and his wife also hosts the partnerships podcast called Friends with benefits. Welcome to revenue rehab, Jason, your session begins now.

Jason Yarborough  01:26

Hey, super excited about it. Thank you so much. And thank you for that wonderful introduction. It's such a pleasure to finally be here.

Brandi Starr  01:33

Yeah, I am excited to have you. And we'll talk about the podcast later. Because I think it is really cool that you and your wife host a podcast together. But before we just jump in, I like to break the ice with a little Gusau moments that I call buzzword. banishment. So tell me what buzzword would you like to get rid of forever?

Jason Yarborough  01:58

Man, I've got to pick just one.

Brandi Starr  02:02

One, which is always the hard part. And there's

Jason Yarborough  02:08

so many. I'll try to throw away maybe it hasn't been used before. But like, the other day, I was on a call and someone mentioned the word bandwidth. Like I don't have the bandwidth. And I'm not sure why. But I was just like, oh, I kind of shudder when I heard that word. I'm like, we can just say no. Like, I feel like we just feel so uncomfortable saying like, No, I can't do that. We're like, No, I don't have the bandwidth. It's like, I don't know why that would rubbed me the wrong way. But it just did. And I could I could do without hearing that one. Again, my, my alternate would also be to let's would be sync up. Ah,

Brandi Starr  02:38

yes. The infamous sync up about our bandwidth. Yeah, it is funny, like, no is a complete sentence. And most people are really uncomfortable just putting the period after the word no, and not, you know, qualifying that with a reason. Because yeah, it's like, you know, I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the capacity. You know, there's there's all sorts of different buzzwords there that people get hung up on. And then usually it does require a sync so that we can figure out how do we give you the bandwidth?

Jason Yarborough  03:17

Bandwidth back, Jack? Just one more and like three strikes in your out?

Brandi Starr  03:22

Yes, yeah, we can get in all the buzzwords. So we won't talk about bandwidth or syncing up today, we can we can put that in the box and lock it and throw away the key for now. So now that we've gotten that off our chest, tell me what brings you to revenue rehab today?

Jason Yarborough  03:39

No, well, first have been a big fan of yours for quite some time. So happy to finally be on the show and be a guest. And today I'd you know stoked to be talking about something I'm super passionate about, which is partnerships. But not just you know, partnerships, which has also become somewhat of a great to hear buzzword these days. But partnerships in the context of like how it can become this, you know, not new, but more. So this enhance revenue channel for revenue leaders, right, we're finally getting to see the table the recognition we deserve. And partnerships are a, you know, a functioning revenue channel that I believe is going to be a bigger player in 2024 as you are seeing things like inbound and outbound beginning to dry up. So now these revenue leaders, at least the ones that I talked to, on a frequent basis, are looking for these new streams of pipeline and revenue and, you know, partnerships can come right now on their white horse now.

Brandi Starr  04:35

Well, I'm looking forward to this discussion early in my career. I was in partner marketing so got some experience in in how to tap into partnerships and then now being you know, consultancy, on the partner side and I see some places where I feel like the industry or is a bit broken or misguided. So looking forward to getting some of your perspective of But to start, I believe in setting intentions, it gives us focus, it gives us purpose. And most important, it gives our audience an expectation of what they will get away, take away from our conversation today. So what's your best intention? What's your hope for what people will walk away with?

Jason Yarborough  05:18

You know, I think for me, it'd be getting the sales and marketing leaders that are listening to, to fully embrace the partner motion being the data, the strategy, the relationships that they have access to, and fully embracing that and incorporating it into their team's daily activities. So to fully embrace a partner motion and no longer keep their partner team and programs siloed.

Brandi Starr  05:43

I love that. And I think that is a great place to start is I have seen in most organizations, the you know, partner teams, the channel teams are somewhat of their own entity. And quite often, nobody really knows what's happening over there. Like, they do stuff, they go to a lot of events, you know, they have this whole program, they do some marketing around, you know, driving net new partners, that's usually the big measure is how do we get more partners and make sure that those partners are active, but it's almost this, you know, separate thing. And so my first question is, why do you think that happens, like what's happening in business today? That is leading to that partner motion being so siloed?

Jason Yarborough  06:36

Yeah, so a somewhat joke, make it contextually relevant that we're like the Island of Misfit Toys, I no one really knows what to do with this, right? We do have a purpose. I was having this conversation not too long ago. And I think some of it boils down to a lot of your, your sales leaders, your marketing leaders come up in traditional sales motions and models. And those frameworks they're in and not a lot of the traditional sales models involve a partner. So when you come to a company that has a partner program, it's kind of like, okay, well, what do we do with this group here? What do we do here? How do we capitalize on it, and often seen as someone that, you know, just kind of let them go do their thing, let the partners work with the partners, because really, no one knows how to cosa with that partner, they don't know how to get involved with that partner. And some of the two is going to be on the partner leader, right to not doing not doing a good enough job of incorporating himself into what we call the Four Horsemen of products. Yes, sales and marketing. You know, as a partnership leader, I spend the majority of my time roughly 70%, working internally, to make sure that we have alignment and collaboration with all those teams. And so I think it's, you know, not understanding the partner motion from a traditional sales model, and not doing a good enough job of collaborating and getting that necessary buy in, across the board.

Brandi Starr  07:54

Okay, and so let's talk about what good looks like. So if we do get that alignment, where, you know, all of the I like the term, the four horsemen, you know, all of those revenue teams are very in sync with the partner teams. What is, you know, what does great look like? Like when a company does this really, really well? What does it look like? And what are the benefits to the organization.

Jason Yarborough  08:22

I mean, the benefits are massive, and that you get a huge lift in pipeline opportunities and revenue created. And not only that, but also retention, and customer satisfaction, like the list goes on. But great really looks like when you start to get your your sales team, your AES, your AM's and whatnot, actually working with partners, and establishing the list of accounts, they're prioritizing the accounts that they're going to work with partners on, instead of me or my team being what I call a glorified BDRs, that the script is flipped, and that the A's are now saying, Hey, I've got these, you know, 10 accounts, they're owned by these partners, I would like to work these accounts with these partners. And there's tools and data now that make that that list accessible, that makes that data accessible, you can use a crossbeam or reveal and go look and say, Okay, I've found my top five target accounts here. They're all owned by a partner. So instead of me trying to, you know, blast out 60 7080, you know, touch points to get one conversion. Let me go to a partner, and try to have a few conversations to get one conversion to an opportunity or go to call. And same thing with marketing. All right, how can marketing begin to utilize the data like when I was at Drift, you know, Justin Keller, and I put together some really great campaigns. But when I came to drift partners, were more of an afterthought to bring into, you know, a campaign or an offer, as they call it. They get about halfway three quarters of the way and say, Hey, we need more leads. We need more of this, can we get a partner help promote it? And I said, Okay, what if we started the beginning, and we brought a partner in and we built this whole thing around the partner and we began to tell our story and how they make our product in this motion better Like what happens, then what happened in was registration went way up, attendance went way up, opportunities went way up, we took the influence revenue and marketing qualified leads through the roof in the first year of incorporating those from the beginning. So you go, you have this theory that there's the partner effect, bigger, better, faster path to revenue. And that works across the board for sales, marketing, CES, everybody.

Brandi Starr  10:28

Okay, so what I'm hearing is that starting our marketing motion, aligned with the partner, and looking at their audiences, and really driving it that way. And then carrying that through all the way to sales is going to give you great success. Where I have seen, at least some of my clients that have partner motions struggle is, if you have a large partner community, there's always this, you know, who do we partner with for these efforts? Are we sliding these other partners? How do we be fair, you know, there's always this sort of political dynamic of if we do these things with this partner, you know, how does this impact the whole ecosystem? And you know, who's focusing on us? How do you address that when, you know, it's not just a handful of partners? How do you do those same motions and be able to scale them if you've got a larger ecosystem?

Jason Yarborough  11:31

Sure. And the truth is always in the data. So the data exists to, for us now to look at what's the overlap of mutual customers look like if you're looking at from a tech ecosystem, right? How many of our of our customers how many of our prospects are using ex partner, why Partner B partner, and begin to prioritize based off what the overlap looks like, what the TAM would look like working with a particular partner, you know, so when I was at the drift, again, I had 70 integrations, not necessarily weren't all partners. But when I first came in and took a look, that whole list sounds like, I'm just going to narrow it down to just two, I'm gonna focus on two right now. So that when we do begin to scale up, the team that understands how to work with partners, we've got a good fluid motion built. So we've worked with six cents and SalesLoft got it right with those guys begin to build out, go back into your channel program, there's a few different ways you can work there, maybe you've taken on a program, you've got a few that are already existing, if you've got tears, you know, the platinum, gold, the heavy metals, whatever you want to call it, the platinum partners are the ones that are producing, they're leaning in there, they're the people that have got certifications, you can also export your data through Salesforce and see which of your customers, right, if you've got a large customer base, which of your customers have some email addresses that don't necessarily align to their domain, look and see who's got some, some overlapping email addresses or domains that are assigned to agencies, and those that are already doing work within your customers, and begin to prioritize from that process that aspect because they they know the customer, they know the place. They Know It All right. And so then you get further into that, looking at it from an entire ecosystem. If you're looking at it from an agency, which agencies are already working with your top tech partners, how do you bring that that whole story together to make the customers that they're servicing for you and your tech partners way more successful, because they're looking at it from a bigger picture, while you the tech the product is looking at it from one perspective, they're looking at it from multiple. So when you begin to prioritize based off how that ecosystem lives and breathes together,

Brandi Starr  13:39

and I think you hit on something that's key here is because if you're, you know, if you're talking about who's got, like, you know, users that don't align to the their domain, then that means you're looking at your customers and have a strong retention play there. And am I interpreting that correct? Before I asked my question? Yeah,

Jason Yarborough  13:59

I mean, that is definitely 100% of motion, like so with with, with our tech partners in in particular, you know, we knew that if we had six or more integrations, we were likely to retain the customers 80% more. And so the goal would be to get more tech partners, more integrations connected, so that we can retain our customers. And then once we get them retained, learn how we're using the integrations or we're using the agency partners, we have a chance a better bigger chance to upsell.

Brandi Starr  14:28

Yeah, and I would agree completely and this is the place sort of my bone to pick with partnership teams is it seems like the that is the piece that doesn't get thought about like, you know, I see, if I look across the board at either clients we work with or people I talk to, the focus is really on how do we tap into our partners for driving net new customers? Yeah, and that's where you get to the data in like crossbeam And you know, systems like that, you know, where do we have shared targets? Or, you know, where do you have clients that I want, or I have clients that you want, like, that kind of motion seems to be where everyone focuses. And then on the retention side is where as I have conversations with people, it's kind of like, oh, yeah, that could be a good idea. But they don't really focus there. And, to me, it's like, that's a huge missed opportunity. Because, you know, you spend all this effort to get the customer if you're, you know, not making the effort to keep them. Why do you think people only focus on that front end?

Jason Yarborough  15:46

Yeah, we can get real spicy real quick on this one. I do see this a lot. And it's an interesting time, especially in tech, I've come from a few P back companies, right, and they're very heavily focused on net new, right, they're very heavily focused on the revenue, the number and they're just driving as hard as they possibly can hit that, because they've got these outlandish goals. Right, so there's a lot of pressure to hit that and to get that, you know, that Almighty, you know, 10 20% growth year over year. And so as a result, people push the partner program to go find that in a new bus hit, they think it's just some sort of magic wand. It can be it can be an easy button, if you if you support it correctly, and you resource it correctly. But also, like one of the things I loved about working with Justin Keller was that he always preached that retention is the new acquisition. And if that's the case, then like, we have to focus on like, where we can be extraordinarily strategic, and how we're retaining customers. And what better way to do that than through partners, who are who are also doing the exact same thing, especially your agency partners. They're trying to provide new services, upsell on new new motions, retain their clients, because you know, one last client who can destroy an entire team for an agency. So they're trying to save them into where they can and provide new services. Yeah, right. And so our partners, our agency partners are helping provide the necessary level of service to do more with the product like the product further. And also going back to what I said earlier, then tying it back into other products. The reason Salesforce has all these acquisitions in this huge partner ecosystem, is because once they know they get all those products intertwined within their customer base, those customers aren't leaving. It's way too hard, way too difficult. Right? So partners are kind of at that same motion for any of the ISVs out here. Yeah, right, the more the more integrations you can connect, less likely they are to turn, the more you can get an agency involved, the more strategic you can allow your customers to be within their own ecosystem. And so I think most are just looking at it as is just, you know, one one lens of just like revenue pipeline revenue pipeline, and there's not enough KPIs around how we're retaining. I've tried to get my team KPI on upsell retention, of got them to where they could be comped. But never really, you know, metrics at the end of the day are like what they should be focused on. Everybody just wants to see net new CFOs CFOs most often historically come from non partner backgrounds, they've been in the traditional CFO model. So they're just wonder like, black and white cut and dry. And you got a few out there now that are starting to look at it differently and see what it could be. You know, as I left, as I was leaving drift recently, like I was able to put partner attach rate on to the tech Partner Manager, which is a huge one because you're not just focused on like that source net new your focus on influence and upsell your focus you can you can really play across the board and wear multiple hats within the revenue scope of things.

Brandi Starr  19:05

Yeah, I agree completely. And I do love the the notion that, you know, CEOs and CFOs are starting to be educated on like, where the benefits are. And I think you hit on something key around KPIs. Because, you know, I believe that what gets measured gets done. So if we're measuring it, people will focus on it and try to influence those metrics in a positive way. And so the fact that there are less metrics around retention can also be a clear place because people look at like churn percent is kind of what I see most often. But not even from $1 perspective. It's just more like what percentage of customers are turning and you know, there's an assumption that there's always going to be some number and if they're comfortable with that number, it's like You know, great job. But, you know, it could be like your biggest clients turning and your revenue is going to and nobody's, you know, paying attention to it. So I do think you hit on something key there. And the fact that you're working with your teams on trying to, you know, have metrics around that is, you know, gives me hope that, that the industry will shift, because I do see, like, you know, such big opportunities of where other tech partners or services partners are really influencing client decisions. And, you know, there's some huge opportunity for, you know, the vendors to like, get ahead of challenges, if they were tapping in absolutely

Jason Yarborough  20:45

most tech partners, in my experience, and what I've built like a CES, people, whoever is like, it's always asking what's in it for the tech partners, like, are they being sucks? Most agency partners get a referral fee for what they send in. And most people think that's just like what they're after? Which is not the truth at all. We'll get to that later. Tech partners. On the other hand, if you go ask them, like, what's the incentive? What's in it for you? And most often, the ones that know what they're doing are going to say, we're just trying to, we're trying to build more towards retention. Right, I remember working with six students working with SalesLoft, we're all trying to get those integrations connected. Like we want to get our customers as sticky as possible. And we can only do that through getting more of our technology partners connected to our customer base.

Brandi Starr  21:27

Yeah, I would agree. So I definitely you mentioned we'll get into that in a minute. I'd definitely love to hear your perspective on, you know, because I agree that the referral fee for you know, an agency partner is not the objective, like we've kind of, you know, stopped entering into those agreements, because it creates this weird dynamic. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well, before I kind of shift gears.

Jason Yarborough  21:56

No, I think it's a nice to have, it is not the ultimate piece of value that the partners after, it's kind of a nice to have, and that if you're a smaller shop, you can get a little incremental income. And it really doesn't really start to make a difference unless you're, you know, the former HubSpot model where they were paying out, you know, quarterly dividends, basically. But for those agencies that are getting referral fees, and those sellers that think that's what they're after, they're dead wrong, they're after the service dollars, the more serviceable dollars they get, the more money they're making, they make way more money by servicing. And they do by referring. And so they're trying to get as much refer much of the service in dollars as they possibly can, which is why when I start out any any new program, I'm talking to agencies, what's going to make me the most valuable partner you've got? What are your expectations? Were the most get it wrong with you. And what are your business objectives outside of this partnership, is I want to align to what you're trying to accomplish and what you need as a partner so that at the end of the day, when I build this program you like, dang, that partnership with that guy is the most valuable thing I've got. So I think about it more holistically, as much as I can. And going back to like, where I tried to connect the whole ecosystem. So like agencies that drift, we were really good at making sure that our top agency partners, were also really close and working with our technology partners. Because sometimes your product doesn't allow for a ton of servicing drift to chatbot wasn't a whole lot of servicing to do once you build those playbooks out. But once you get it connected to a sixth sense, and a data provider, sales engagement platform, and maybe one other thing, there's all sorts of ways to begin to weave that that narrative and that story to begin to build bigger, better, more intelligent playbooks. Yeah. So you try that you try to connect them to as much value within your product in your ecosystem as possible, so they can make as much coin as possible.

Brandi Starr  23:43

Yeah, and I agree completely, because being involved, you know, we have one unofficial partnership relationship that has just happened, because we have two clients that are really big for a particular technology, and their CSMs have recognized like, oh, we need to be talking to them. Because when they talk to the client, they don't always recognize, you know, a new feature comes out client doesn't immediately recognize like, Oh, here's how this fits. But I'm on that call. And they're like, oh, you know, let me show you this. They do the song and dance of the new features. And I'm like, Oh, hey, Mr. Mrs. Client, you know, that thing we're planning, here's a place we could use that, or that thing we did really manually, you know, we could change this to now automate it or get better intelligence. And like, those sorts of things are where like, for me, the services revenue comes in. Because even though I'm not doing much, or hardly anything in that particular technology, now that we have this feature functionality, we got to rethink the strategy on some of these things, incorporate that in there to be smarter. And so and then it also creates the stickiness because the two clients I have on that they'll probably never leave, because we've got that Tech so ingrained in everything that they're doing, if they tried to move, like it would take more than a year to unravel. And it's a small, you know, kind of it's not drift, but kinda like a drift where it's a small piece of tech in the grand scheme of things. But it's so integrated into the strategy. And that's really where you talked about strategy at the beginning. That's kind of where I want to go next in our discussion is, you know, it is that strategy around how you tap into partnerships. And I think you've mentioned a couple of ways like some of you know, aligning with other technology partners. So for those that are thinking about implementing a partner strategy, they recognized either they don't have one or the one they have is weak. Like, where do you start thinking about how to tackle that? And what that should look like within your organization?

Jason Yarborough  25:55

Yeah, always think about it from the needs of the customer. Like what does, what does the customer need customer is going to talk about, if you ask them, if you just go ask the customer, what they want, what they need, what their expectations are, they'll tell you what the what they're looking for, what their what their problems are, what their pain points are, and pain points specific to your product. They're trying to do the best they can. They're trying to scale as fast as they can and move as fast as they can. So they've got ideas, hopefully. And so you know, I've come in uptake on new programs before and the first thing I do have done is gone in and talked to a few customers. Hey, what's your take on what you think about the product? How's it working for you? How's it providing? What are you what are you seeing great, who wants you working with what's important to you, kind of things are asking some questions to the partner to the customers. And maybe your your customer success team already has, you know, a knowledge base of what customer needs are, maybe they've got some air table board or some customer success request board that that you can pull from, when I came into, I think it was drift or reveal that there was a panda board or something that I could pull and had all these customer requests in it, I could begin to scour through like, okay, customers looking for these things, these things partners can solve for A, B, and M, let's go and attack those right now. Because that we have the most requests around that. So if you think about building something new, always start with the partners. Don't start with, you know, a gut instinct or a shiny sales pitch from another partner start with the customers needs are, where the customer is currently exist. There's really great tools you can use, like a built with or a clear bid. Or even you can even drill in to reveal the crossbeam. To understand like where your customer base exists from an integration standpoint, what they're currently in already using, and begin to go to those those technology vendors. Then again, you can try to pull the data to see where your agencies might exist and see where they're already working with agencies and or those agencies that exists within your ecosystem, maybe you're in more techie, or you're manufacturing or finance started, you know, building the target account list of partners that you want to have conversations with and see if it makes sense that if they're working with your ICP, or not just start having some discovery calls, seeing what they're up to who they're doing. Spend the first spend the first 90 days just doing some exploring and discovery to figure out what's going to work best for your customer base.

Brandi Starr  28:19

Okay, and so that's how to get started in you know, a partner program. Let's assume that there is a partner program in place, and I'm the head of marketing. How do I better tap into them? Like where, you know what, from a strategy perspective, if I've, you know, if they're kind of operating and doing their own thing and marketing's operating and doing their own thing? What what does a good strategy look like? For me, if there's a program in place already?

Jason Yarborough  28:53

Yeah, you're gonna be able to build out a strong business case as to why marketing should begin taking a look at, you know, the partner base, right. So I'll use the example of drift again, we had a lot of success building that program. So we came in, we took a show the team, alright, here's the opportunity we have with just six months alone. So here's my, here's my idea, right? We've got 800 mutual customers, we've got this amount of overlap, figurative numbers, right? We've got these massive overlap numbers. And so like if we did this, and we got, you know, just our standard amount of registration attendees, and we kind of follow the protocol that you have, here's what we're looking for. But it's going to be higher, because we've got a strong bear together story. We've got strong overlap already, and people want to use this integration. So what we did in Justin Keller was great to work with on this is that I said, hey, what if we just spent one quarter working with one partner? Let's not try to boil the ocean. Let's spend a quarter just working with sixth sense. Let's do a webinar. Let's do some some personalized chat playbooks that fire anytime a sixth sense customer or as extents, opportunity or prospect of ours, that is a sixth sense customer hit the website, let's build some some ebooks. And let's see if six hands can do the same on their page. Alright, let's get really purposeful in how we're working with one partner. And we did that and we've had huge, huge traction, so much so that instead of, you know, maybe playing with one partner here and there, Keller and team decided, alright, 75% of all of our marketing offers are going to involve a partner from the beginning. Because the lift was a was much easier because you had support coming from the partner, they were helping, they were driving, they were pushing stuff out, emails, ads, everything else. And so you're kind of splitting the responsibilities 5050 6040 Maybe. And so you're getting a much bigger lift and support, you're getting a much bigger lift and MQLs the last webinar we did with a partner, we set the company record for registrations and attendance. Wow, goes it was with a partner.

Brandi Starr  30:56

Yeah, and I think just you know, more anecdotally, having seen, you know, I've followed drift for a while having seen some of those. I also think it helps when you have two strong brands like that, and you do those co marketing efforts, it starts to become almost a subtle assumption that, like, I gotta buy both of these, like, you know, it's kind of, it's like, Oh, if I'm gonna go buy the shoes, I need the coordinating purse, like it just is one of those like, Yeah, this is great by itself. But now I've seen how amazing this is together. And so you create that mindset from the buyer of like, I gotta get budget for both of these things. Like, you know, this is what I'm trying to tell internally. So I can definitely see how that I mean, really, really effective.

Jason Yarborough  31:50

We, in partnership spent all this time building out these better together stories, these joint value props, these landing pages, and all these other supporting materials to attract those audiences, right, whether they, whether they are mutual customers that have yet to attach the integration, whether their target account of ours at the customer, there's, like we're building all this material to support and attract those things in because I mentioned it loosely earlier, but I think something like the gold standard of conversion, like touch points that conversions is like 120 to one. Wow, this theory that, you know, partners can drive that down closer to 20. To one, because it's all via relationship. We're selling based off relationship near boundaries, which is the coin that nearby.com and Revealer are pushing out there is all about selling to to your who's who like who do your, your people know who do this, who do you have relationships? And who do they know, that can introduce you to those people? Think about? You know, the last time you asked about a you know, you're curious about a restaurant, or you were curious about a piece of technology, chances are you probably reached out and asked somebody, you know, what do you know about this? Have you used this? Are you doing this? I'm constantly asking that about equipment and gear and stuff like that. So now we're buying based off relationship, something like 70% of all buyers now have made their decision before they even start talking to the company. Yeah, and that's what the value of going to market with strong partners and building these strong better together stories bring. They bring validation, they bring trust, right, they bring, you know, faster opportunity to pipeline and revenue. Velocity.

Brandi Starr  33:32

Well, this is all such good stuff. And I you know, love hearing the strengths, partnerships, because I do think it is a place that you know, more organizations need to tap into, especially when other channels start to underperform. I mean, I think it's always great to tap into partnerships, but becomes that much more valuable. And so talking about our challenges is just the first step and nothing changes if nothing changes. And so in traditional therapy, the therapist will give the client some homework, but here at revenue rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us some homework. And so for those that are listening, if you know what you've shared around partnerships, and tapping into partnerships that are profitable for both organizations, where what's your one thing where would you suggest someone start

Jason Yarborough  34:33

as far as digging into to get a better understanding of the possibility of partnerships?

Brandi Starr  34:37

Yes.

Jason Yarborough  34:39

Yeah, you know, I point people to crossbeams got really great content out there. Like they have everything from one on one to scaling and everything goes how to use and understand data. You know, I really am a big fan of Shawn Blinn, Blanda and the stuff he's putting out there. The blogs that they write, and the material and the support they provide. It's a it's a fantastic resource, I always encourage people just kind of start there. And you can begin to expand based off the relationships that they have nearby and.com has a lot of really great content and materials as well. I host a lot of open office hours to help people understand and provide some coaching to sellers and partner managers. There's a ton of people and resources out there right now, like Adam Pash does a good job of pulling people together. Partnership leaders is a really great community, just have that partnership leaders. So if you've got a partnership person in your company, or organization, that's not a part of that community, I highly encourage you to pay for their membership to be a part there, because there's invaluable infinite resources there.

Brandi Starr  35:46

Awesome, I love when the call to action is educating yourself. Because I do think that that is always a great place to start. There's no one size fits all for any organization. So all the resources that you listed are great place to figure out and I wrote a couple of those down. I've seen a lot of crossbeam stuff. But I hadn't looked at near bound. So that's all

Jason Yarborough  36:10

things that I wish I had when I was coming up in partnerships or coming up in a sales organization. It's like, we were just out there trying to hack stuff together and figure it out on our own and making all this stuff work. And now all this content is like yeah, that's that's what we did. So we weren't completely crazy, maybe you know, 30%. Bu

Brandi Starr  36:28

yeah, but I think it is those people who kind of went through the trenches, who are now able to produce that content to say like, let me you know, streamline this or give you a better way. Well, Jason, I have enjoyed our discussion so much. But that's our time for today. But before we go, tell our audience how they can connect with you and give us the shameless plug for friends with benefits. I want to hear about the podcast. And I'd also love to hear how you and your wife ended up starting it together, which I think is so cool.

Jason Yarborough  37:06

Yeah, so try to give you as much of the condensed version as possible. But my wife is also in tech partnerships. When, when you and I first met, I was at a company called PFL. And when I left there, they asked like, you know, we need to we really need to replace you. How do we do this? Because I was doing a lot of marketing, evangelism events, stuff like that. And I was like, You know what, my wife can do this in spades, you should hire her. And they laugh. And they were like, Wait a second. Yes, we know her. This is a good idea. So they actually hired her. And she took the program much further than than we ever could, which is awesome. And so she's been doing it for three years now. I'm pushing about seven years, we've got almost a decade of partner experience between us. And we always joke that we should do something together. Because we have a lot of the same conversations. I'll be in one meeting, and I'll look over 30 minutes later, she's normally sitting behind me. She's talking to the same person, I was just talking to her like, we should just like, record some of these conversations. And so we started joking around like a friends with a partnership up sorry, a podcast, called Friends with benefits would be hilarious, because there's so many like, you know, puns there, that she's my wife. We always joke with our family that like we were we get paid to make friends. And they're basically friends with benefits, because most people understand what partnerships is outside of tech. And so we started this partnership, this podcast called Friends with benefits, it's a revenue, it's a podcast about revenue generating partnerships. Specifically in the b2b space, we bring on some b2c guests as well, a lot of sales leaders, relationship leaders as well. So the whole premise is like, how do we were talking to people about how to build these purpose built relationships? And how does that affect and influence the business? Right? But not not all, not only the business, but also yourself? Right? How do these relationships influence you? And how do you bring that into the work that you do. And so we try to cover it from like a good, you know, business perspective and a personal relationship perspective as well. And we're having a ton of fun with it, getting some good traction and got a lot of really great guests coming on, and it's lined up. So this has been a lot of fun doing it with her. That

Brandi Starr  39:10

is so awesome. I love a good story. And especially when you can mix a love story with business. That that is so awesome. So we will make sure to link to friends with benefits. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, we'll make sure to link to it and also link to Jason so that you can stay connected. Well, Jason, I have enjoyed this so much. It was so good to catch up with you and you know, get a lot of insights into how partnerships can work so much better. Absolutely.

Jason Yarborough  39:45

This was a this was a great time. I really appreciate it. Awesome. Well, I

Brandi Starr  39:48

hope everyone has enjoyed my conversation with Jason. I can't believe we're at the end. We'll see you next time.

Outro VO  39:56

You've been listening to revenue rehab with your host Brandi Do your session is now over, but the learning has just begun. join our mailing list and catch up on all our shows at revenue rehab dot live. We're also on Twitter and Instagram at revenue we have. This concludes this week's session. We'll see you next week.