Marco Papa (00:00):
Partnerships don't have to take a long time. There's so many, and that's where I guess placing the right bets is very important at the beginning. And some could land very quickly. And when I say very quickly, I mean four to six months, four to eight months, while others, they will take time.
Tyler Calder (00:17):
Welcome everybody to another episode of Get It Together. Today I am chatting with Marco Papa from a really interesting company and we're going to have a great conversation. He is the Director of Channels and Alliances at Metaflo Technologies. And today we're going to chat about what it looks to take a partner program from zero to one, especially in the early days as a team of one. And one of the things I'm really interested in chatting about is this idea of where do I place my bets? What types of partners should I be working with? So we're going to have a really interesting conversation. Get out your notebooks. There's going to be a lot of things to take away.
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Tyler Calder (01:21):
Marco, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Marco Papa (01:24):
Thank you, Tyler. Looking forward to it.
Tyler Calder (01:26):
I have a couple questions. One is just around having an economics background, what have you taken from that background in economics and brought into partnerships, if anything? Maybe there's nothing there, but I ask very candidly, and I'll tell you perhaps why this might be a little bit of a leading question. I find that within partnerships as a function, a little bit behind other go-to-market functions in their ability to talk about the financials of their program, really get into the weeds around the economics of how the program is performing, the financial impact it's having for the business. Did you find having a background in economics helpful at all or two very different things?
Marco Papa (02:14):
Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but now that I look back, yes, it is exactly because of that. To me, it was never something strange to lead with revenue and with the economics of the partnerships first. In fact, even in the first role as pre-sales, I was basically always looking at the economics behind the deals and margins and all of that. And also what is the quickest route to that? That has always been the leading way I though. So yes,
Tyler Calder (02:49):
This is your third official partnership role, correct?
Marco Papa (02:52):
That's correct.
Tyler Calder (02:53):
A lot to learn over the course of three roles, relatively global impact. I always like to start with this question. If you were standing in front of a group of 500 partner leaders and you're playing the role of educator lecturer, where would you start? What would you tell them?
Marco Papa (03:11):
So in the zero to one creation of a partner program or a partner motion, well, how do you ensure that you get it right? That's the first thing. And how do you ensure the other people in the company believe you are getting it right fast enough so that you can, one, keep your job and two, propel the company forward? That's what I will talk about because that's also what I've mostly lived through in the past few instances where I was in the shoes of a partnership manager.
Tyler Calder (03:44):
That statement of keeping your job, important one. I think most people want to keep their jobs. I never like to start with the negative, but I'm going to start with the negative. Why aren't, from your perspective, partner leaders keeping their jobs or at least having as long of a tenure as maybe some other go-to-market functions?
Marco Papa (04:07):
Intuitively, I would say that depends on the expectations that are set with the leadership when you begin working on partnerships. And I'm saying that because I want to take ownership of that or we should be owning as partnership managers and leaders. We need to own setting those expectations early and very clearly. But there's also the other side of the coin, which is impatience from the leadership, but also just plain not understanding of what it takes for a partner motion to actually take place. There's many more moving pieces compared to direct sales or other type of motions. So this is what comes to mind mostly.
Tyler Calder (04:59):
And I think that's very fair. I think expectation setting within partnerships is one of the harder things to do. It's not necessarily like other functions in marketing, as somebody in marketing. I can pretty easily build a plan that has us driving very short-term results while we can currently build for the long-term. And I think that makes it much easier to get internal buy-in with sales. Again, I can kind of do the same. I can drive short-term results while I build long-term predictability in my direct sales team. Partnerships can be a little bit more challenging. How do you go about setting those expectations when, again, generally speaking, leadership, they're not the most patient of people. How do you speak their language in a way that gets them to buy in for the long haul? And then I'll tack on a question, which is how much time should be given?
(06:00):
Because I'll admit I'm also an impatient person. So if you tell me something's going to take two to three years, I don't know how I feel about that. So what's a reasonable timeframe to set an expectation around?
Marco Papa (06:14):
So I lived through some of these impatience myself. So at the beginning, I guess I took it defensively and I guess it's an easy excuse to say, "Well, partnerships take time." I think I was fortunate enough to meet with other peers and partnership leaders that are much more experienced than me. And I learned that in reality, partnerships don't have to take a long time. There's so many, and that's where I guess placing the right bets is very important at the beginning. And some could land very quickly. And when I say very quickly, I mean four to six months, four to eight months, while others, they will take time. So I mean in my experience in building partnership, for example, with SAP back in the SaaS days, that takes time. So after 18 months, we started seeing the rewards, but it doesn't mean that all partnerships are like this.
(07:15):
And usually that is how I strike. There's two different motions that work in parallel. One is for the short term to show that what I'm saying actually makes sense, demonstrate that on the field, on the pipeline, on Salesforce. And the second one is to work for the longer term. So in the likes of, it could be SAP or the big ISVs or the hyperscalers. Now I'm talking SaaS world in reality in biotech right now, it's a little different, but not too much.
Tyler Calder (07:46):
Very fair. And so to say it back, it sounds like you're going to leadership and you're saying, "Hey, we're launching and building our program. These are the bets that I plan to make. Here's why." And then you're sort of setting the expectation that this bet we think will pay off within four to six months. Here's how we're going to look at it and measure it and make sure we're on the right track. And then here are the bets we're going to make, but it's going to take more time. Somebody like an SAP, it's not going to happen overnight. We got to build towards it. We might be 12, 18 months out, but you're being upfront about that and you're showing some shorter term impact to build the confidence that you can actually drive results and you can actually predict the timeframe for those results. Is that a fair way to paraphrase how you approached it?
Marco Papa (08:40):
It is 100% accurate and I found always positive feedback when I presented that way. It shows that I care for the company's P&L and the fact that they're looking for results fairly quickly, but at the same time I'm also investing in the future. One of my previous managers told me is partnership can be transformational. So probably the quick wins are not going to be the transformational partnerships, but maybe the long-term ones that require more time will be. So you need to play on both sides.
Tyler Calder (09:15):
I really like that framing of transformational because you're bang on, right? Quick wins are almost never going to be transformational for the business, but in my mind, you need those quick wins to give you the credibility internally to go after the transformational. And then I think from a language standpoint, every C-suite leader is in that role because they should be thinking about transformational change. And so to me, that's speaking their language, you're giving them the two things that they want. You're giving them the predictable short-term results, you're giving them the long-term transformation. That lands really well. That's cool. You talk about bets. How do you determine where to place those bets early on? Because again, I think that's something a lot of folks struggle with. They look at the world of partnerships and they think, "I could work with resellers. I could do some tech integrations.
(10:13):
I could find some co-sell partners. I could build a referral motion." In our world, you could run an affiliate program, an influencer program, you could be listing in marketplaces and working with hyperscalers. How do you look at that world of opportunity and say, "You know what? Here are the one, two, three places I'm going to place my bets."
Marco Papa (10:36):
Back in the days when I was working in FarEye with a team of seven in the niche we were operating, which was Last Mile Logistics, we could take on all. We just divide and conquer and then just see what works and what doesn't work. We had enough gunpower, I would say. Now the reality is that that's not my case right now, and that wasn't my case in my previous job as well. I was a team of one. A team of one doesn't mean I'm doing everything by myself, obviously, because I'm working daily with operations, with marketing, with sales. I like the way of partnerships as an overlay to every function, but I still need to take decisions because the majority of the strategy and the execution then will fall on me. I couldn't really go on and approach every type of partnership. So how do I pick the right one to follow?
(11:27):
So currently I report directly to the CEO. So I go to the CEO to begin with and I ask, "Well, what are the goals of the company for the next 12 months, 24, 36 months?" So from now to the next three years, what are the goals? Usually it's about increasing revenue, but what do you mean by increasing revenue? So does it mean do you want to do it within the same geography you are right now? In which segment? In which industry do you want to grow? Does it mean increasing revenue with current customers, new customers? So getting a little bit into the depth of this conversation, and once I have that clarity, then I look into, well, how can the partnership motion help achieve those goals and which ones could be the partnership that can help achieve those? So I start with this, and this naturally brings to ideal customer profile, ICP.
(12:32):
So which customers are we serving right now in which industries are they into? What is the tech stack that they're running? It's not much different from SaaS than to where I am in right now. Just the difference is that they may be running in SaaS world, I will be looking at the ERP and the e-com platform, at the transport management software, at the warehouse management software. Now instead I'm looking at a tunnel boring machine that they're using to make a tunnel for the metro because that will naturally surface an ecosystem compared to another. And obviously what's the sales cycle? So all I guess the framing that most partnership managers are familiar with around ICP. So that will be where I really start. Then I would move into the ideal partner profile. Another term that I guess everyone is familiar with, I need to formalize my hypothesis.
(13:29):
So based on the ICP, do we already have performing partners? Because in most cases when I joined, there were already some kind of partnerships formed. So do we already have some that perform? Let's find lookalikes. Let's analyze them and find lookalikes. I understand we look into capacity. Ideally, what size of sales team should a partner that we want to work with have? What are their capabilities? What kind of core business should they have? They need to sell to the same ICP, ideally to the same persona, not easy to find it out from the outside, from a website, especially in the industry I'm working in right now. Sometimes I find very low tech abilities, so it's difficult to find out information ahead of time. Commitment, overlapping customer. So I try to understand which potential partners will be the best fit for the results that we want to achieve.
(14:24):
So in most of my experience, that has been referral partners, a resell partners, ISV. Then there's a surprising to this, which is that is what I believed at the beginning. It doesn't always turn out to be that way. But then I form a hypothesis, as I said.
Tyler Calder (14:46):
This is Get It Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. What's your story? How did you end up in partnerships?
Marco Papa (15:03):
Like most people, I realized I ended up in partnership by accident. I didn't really know the first role I got into was partnerships. Right out of university when I was in Italy, studied in Venice, I got a call, the call that changes your life kind of thing that actually happened. And a software company, a small software company in Italy offered me to move to Singapore to launch the APAC market. And the role was actually pre-sales engineer or pre-sales manager, even though my background is economics, but I've always been a nerd and I took it. After the first eight months, which I will always be grateful for because I was in customer support and implementation to really get into the customer needs and understand exactly what sales and what's useful. After those initial months, then I moved to Singapore and my mandate was bring revenue home, as simple as that.
(16:04):
So how do you do that in a country, in a region, because it was much wide. It was the whole Asia Pacific. How do you do that? Well, that's actually working with partners. So we already established some initial conversations, but what I did at that stage, and I know it now, I didn't know it then, is that I was some kind of a funded head within all of these partners and I was their pre-sales resource. So I knew inside out how the customer worked, so I accelerated the most difficult part of bringing a partner on board, which is enablement. They didn't have to get enabled. They had me. So I was traveling with them everywhere, and I was both obviously bringing the knowledge around the solution for the reseller and at the same time also training the resellers, so I will bring them up. And this was my first job out of university and it was what formed me.
(17:00):
And from still today, the thing that all the technical knowledge I gained really gave me the frame for how important it is for a partner manager to help partners to sell the solutions from day one. So not just teaching them from outside, enabling them from the sidelines, but really get onto the field with the partners, go in front of the customer with the partners and really teach them. So that was a great experience. I was able to sell in Japan, in Malaysia, in India, in places where they don't even know. I didn't even know how to understand a word or what they were talking, and that was all thanks to partners. Then I moved into something completely different. I moved into marketing. Since I started marketing, I said I want to work with a big company, a big American company. So from probably sub a hundred million revenue company to a billion dollar company.
(17:58):
And there I worked mostly in marketing, completely different industry. It was still software, it was supply chain. They were just moving from selling licenses to SaaS. So that's where the partnership with Microsoft was really important. And again, because APAC, Asia Pacific, I was still in Singapore, I was actually the most advanced region in terms of partner revenue. When I joined, I think they had about 50% of the revenue coming in from partners. And by the time I left about four years after, they had about 75% of the revenue coming in from partners, just Asia Pacific. The rest of the company, so in the Americas and in EMEA, was on the 20, 25%. So they were really leading on the edge and I managed some part of the co-marketing agenda while I was at that company. Again, I didn't join really to run co-marketing, but then I ended up doing it because partners were so ingrained into everything the company did in Asia Pacific that I came out with that knowledge as well.
(19:06):
And only after this, I had my actual first role as partner manager once I moved back to Europe and it was in a pure SaaS company in the COVID age where free money was a thing. And there I had the privilege of having the VP of partnerships that hired me thanks to the CRO which joined from a previous company that know me very well. And I had a chance to really learn everything about how to manage partnerships at scale. It was a zero to one stage. We were a team of seven with various partner managers, pre-salespeople specifically for the partners, et cetera. So it was a good opportunity for me to really learn how to manage partnerships. And this was with FarEye, last mile SaaS solution. And then I moved into ScaleUp, which was smaller, still in the same industry. And there was the first partner manager they ever hired.
(20:09):
And it was the first time I built by myself from scratch. I actually, for the first time in 15 years, I went outside of software. I'm in biotech, biotechnology. So we sell physical products and I'm very proud of being part of this company because what we do is going to impact everyone's life. We are basically changing harsh chemicals that are used every day and we're replacing them with biopolymers that are organically derived for various types of industrial use cases. So that's an incredible experience for me and I really like to be part of it. And also in this case, I'm tasked to do the zero to one to create the partnership motion. So it started accidentally, then I kind of really liked what I saw and I'm diving deeper and deeper into what partnership means.
Tyler Calder (21:01):
Very cool. I love that story. I just want to put a spotlight on because you said it and you said it as though it's an obvious thing, which is, well, the first thing I did was talk to our CEO and figure out what the company objectives are. Again, I'm going to make a general statement, and I certainly don't mean that this is true for all partner orgs, but one of the things I see more often than I certainly expected when I started at PartnerStack seven years ago talking to customers is a lot of partner leaders come into a new role and they immediately start to think about executing on the playbook they had executed on previously. Previously, they ran a really successful tech partner program, very solid integrations, and that was sort of their route to market was technology partners. They start their new gig, they immediately start to look at that.
(22:02):
What other tech should we be integrating with? Where can we provide more value to our customers through these integrations? And they don't actually pause to ask, "Well, what is most important to the business?" And then work backwards from there. I've always thought about it as the curse of the playbook. Everybody tends to get hired for what they did in their previous role. And so then they assume, "Well, I'm just going to go and execute on what I did previously because that's why I got hired." That must be what the company wants. The company oftentimes make the assumption, "Well, we hired the senior partner leader. They know what they're doing. Let them do their thing." And then six, 12 months later, they realize, well, it didn't actually drive the impact that the business was interested in. And so again, you said it very quickly because I think it sounds like an obvious statement, which is I talked to the CEO.
(22:57):
I find not nearly enough people start there. What is it that is important to the business? Where do they want to be in three to five years? And then how can partnerships be a steward of that and that help direct where you focus your time? So I just wanted to spotlight that. Going back to what surprised you, so you placed your bets, you made some assumptions, what happened?
Marco Papa (23:18):
I'm going back into the different roles and companies I've worked with. Resellers has been always in the mix of the initial bets and it almost never proved to really cut it through. What really surprised me in the last two roles, so I'm going back not in the current role, is SIs. So that's where at the beginning I didn't think we'd really had a way to work with SIs, but combined with the SAP ecosystem, we were able to go to them and to their customers with a really strong value proposition because we found out that there were a group of SIs very specialized on what they're called the petals of the flower that is the SAP ERP. If you imagine it as a flowers, all the, I guess leaf, the petals, they were looking at a way to expand their business outside of SAP, but still with touch points to SAP.
(24:22):
We had a really strong value propositions to the end customer, and we also offered SIs a way to expand their business by keeping the touch points to SAP because we were a certified integration, but also expanding into new realms within their existing customer base. And we worked out a model that was like a hybrid between pure professional services revenue and also some kind of, I guess, augmented referral, and it worked really well. So I keep on having resellers into the initial mix, especially now because in the industry now is more traditional, so reseller is expected. They always prove to be much more difficult than I initially anticipated.
Tyler Calder (25:11):
I want to go into that, the reseller programs being a little bit more difficult than you anticipated. What makes them so challenging? What are some of the things that, and you touched on some I think, but for those that are either thinking about a reseller program or already have a reseller program that's struggling, what are the things that folks should be aware of in terms of building a reseller program, the challenges, obstacles? And then I think not necessarily how to overcome them, that's part of it, but how do you make a decision that we should stay on the path or we should get off it?
Marco Papa (25:48):
So in my past, I've actually converted resellers into referral partners, which is very counterintuitive. And that is because when I joined, those resellers were already there, but I could have made the same mistake. But the problem here is one of the things that I always tell to my teams of salespeople because they actually go out and also scout for potential partners is we need to qualify hard. We can't really just sign up a reseller because they have a great network of people. So there is these misconceptions that great network of people means that they're actually able to execute on a sales cycle and bring a deal to close, which is completely different. The other issue is that resellers need enablement. So I know what is the meaning of enabling a reseller because I did it successfully in my first job when I was shipped to Singapore to launch the APOG market.
(26:49):
So it took a long time and I was able to make it work because I was physically there and I know the solution inside out and I was doing the job for the reseller while they were training someone else that was sitting just beside me to pick up all those information. But for them to make the investment of having someone dedicated to learn a complex software and being able to explain it with confidence in front of a customer, that's not a given. There is this misconception that resellers are a fast way to market, but in reality, once you start diving deep, you find that qualification and the enablement ability are crucial. If they're not there, it's hard to pull off a reseller motion.
Tyler Calder (27:41):
How did those conversations go converting a reseller to a referral partner?
Marco Papa (27:47):
They are horrible. Yeah. No, I need to be honest. One of them was actually really good because sometimes there is an understanding on the other side that there is no feat. The customer or the prospects are not happy. We're not able to move forward. The reseller understands it and they're happy to step back in that sense, but then we still going to try to keep them whole for their transition and it works for them and it worked for us. In some other cases, that didn't go down well, but the reality is that we had to course correct something that should not have started. And I learned that sometimes you have to have tough conversation and those should not be postponed. In fact, I heard this from another partnership leaders, but I think it's deeply true. And if you think about the partnership motion being like a container ship, it is directed to partnership wonderland where it's 75% partner generated revenue and ecosystem place and everything is beautiful and wonderful.
(29:00):
If you make some mistakes in the partner motion and the ship just diverts five degrees, you can easily course correct it because you have a handful of partners on board. Once you get them all to agree, then you can course correct and you're back on track. If you already signed up, let's say 50 resellers, and then all of a sudden you find out that the margin, the economics of resellers don't work after losing a couple of deals and you have to restructure all those relationships, that's going to be hard. Those five degrees are going to end up in probably thousands of kilometers of difference and you're never going to reach that partnership wonderland. That is one of the, I guess, part of my playbook is don't scale too early. Prove that it works first and then scale. And that's one of the mistakes I see.
(29:56):
Well, I saw some early stage scale up Doing sometimes, try to go all in on tiering and platinum, gold, silver certification and all of that without really having a proven motion. Proven means there's two or three partners that generate revenue on repeat.
Tyler Calder (30:17):
A couple other things, just sort of rapid fire that I'd love to hit on as we start to wind down. I'd love to call it out a little bit more directly as a learning. So as you've moved through these experiences, different orgs, what has been a failure that stands out as being a pretty significant learning moment in your career?
Marco Papa (30:42):
It has been with reseller. So we actually lost a major customer and that was a customer that we won with our direct sales and then we handed over to our reseller for well account management and because we wanted to grow with this reseller. Again, I kind of inherited this and then I had to have the tough conversation. These things kind of continuously happen in my career. We have asked the reseller to bring up their industry knowledge, actually have somebody dedicated to the account or to the segment, to the industry segment that this customer was into, but they never really did it. We were probably too small for this reseller to really care, even though for us it was a major customer. And yeah, all of a sudden we realized that we are out and we didn't really get to know about it from the reseller.
(31:42):
We got to know about it from the network of companies where this customer is into. So there was, I guess, different things that were not right. It was not just that this customer got lost because of poor account management. There was never really investment from that partner side on us and on the industry. We had to basically fire the partner. That is why I go back to qualify hard. And if you can't, then it's very important to be on top of your partners. So regular cadence, never the regular cadence, but also the questions that are asked in the regular cadence are very important and then never postpone tough conversations.
Tyler Calder (32:28):
I think that's a very valuable lesson. Don't postpone those hard conversations.
Marco Papa (32:35):
It does seem like I had a lot of issues with resellers. The reality is that right now in Metaflo, we're picking up the reseller motion because I guess building up on all those failures, I kind of hopefully saw the right path through it.
Tyler Calder (32:51):
What about the flip side? So we talked about the failure. What about surprise and success?
Marco Papa (32:56):
The one that I remember vividly also because I'm in love with the country, it's been in Japan and I was in the early days where I didn't know I was playing the partner role. So we were already collaborating with a group, with a reseller group for the technology I was selling back there for broadcast media, so for TV stations. And we were already collaborating in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in India, in Malaysia, Indonesia. And this group also had an office in Japan. We never spoke to them before. They reached out and they said, "Hey, Marco, we have a few customers. Can you come over and teach us how the solution works and then show how it works and then bring us to some customers?" And when I traveled to Japan, it was my first time traveling to Japan, which is amazing, my favorite country in the world.
(33:48):
I sat down with a partner which had an incredibly good technical resource who could catch on the software and on the customer use case very quickly. Then I started, we did a first demo with two or three customers. One of them was interested to continue. And obviously the demo, I could only speak English then in the room, but everything had to be translated in Japanese in real time. So I guess the partner had enough trust built with that customer because selling into the Japanese market with a foreign technology is very complex. I guess there was enough trust built for them to move forward and the solution probably also looked good. So after that first demo, it took 15 other iterations in the span of 12 months. I didn't always have to go back to Japan for those, but we had to make multiple tweaks for the Japanese customer to be ready to say, "Okay, we're ready to buy." And thanks to the reseller there, thanks to the tech resource, we were able to make all of those successfully.
(34:58):
And without being there physically all the time, we were able to convey the right message, show that it worked. We actually had a pilot going on at their TV station. So eventually they buy after 12 months. So they kind of like, "Okay, you guys did the work. We see that it's valuable." And now I'm still connected to the company I was previously working for. I'm registered to the newsletter and I see that they are continuously releasing new case studies, new channels being launched within their TV stations with their technology. And that's 12 years after we initially sold that there. So to me, it's unbelievable, first of all, that 15 demos to sell a solution over 12 months, they bought and then 12 years after they're still buying, no longer there, but I guess the solution plus the partner on site that was able to do their job extremely well.
(35:59):
This is one of the cases where resell actually worked extremely well.
Tyler Calder (36:04):
Nice. That's really cool. That's awesome. It must be super cool working in global markets and being able to spend some time in Japan.That's cool. One of the benefits of working I think in partnerships. We can't end the conversation without talking about AI. We got to talk about AI. What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? Where do you think AI is taking partnerships?
Marco Papa (36:28):
You said it, I have a love and hate relationship with AI. So the love part is that I use it as a glue between all the different systems that I have in play, not the PRM yet, but CRM, mail, drive. So I kind of use it to have a quick overview of where I'm at without having to look into all the different systems, and that helps me a lot. I'm also finishing right now, I'm finishing an online master in AI and innovation. And with it, I'm looking to actually develop some kind of an agent. Well, before developing the agent, because of the industry we're living to, lots of the expertise that our company has is inside people's head. So back to the point on enabling resellers, which is one of the motions I'm really focusing on right now, I need to distill it from there.
(37:29):
So first of all, now we already have started to distill all those information, which because we are into specialty chemicals and biopolymers, there's a lot of information about dosages that needs to be used that change based on different variables. I'm looking at building a layer that will be able to interact with partners so that when they want to understand how they should actually look at positioning a specific solution and in which dosage and for which geology, then they can have an initial conversation with the AI agent and they can get a quick feedback based on actual case studies that were distilled from all our teams. So this is definitely the interesting part of it. It will help a lot for enablement. Of course, on top of this, we are selling into global markets thanks to partners now we entered into the European market, which basically means a whole new set of languages that needs to be spoken.
(38:37):
So we don't speak all of these languages, but AI can. So having enablement that can have all the information needed and also translate it into any language, that's going to be, again, transformational. That's the love side. On the hate side, there's a couple of things. Really the one that I'm the most worried about is what is called the decision depth. There's so much information, so many, I guess, options and AI, once you start brainstorming, it brings up even more and it becomes more and more crucial to be able to decide. So really bypass all the noise and being able to take a decision. So that I think will be fundamental going forward, not just for partner professional, I guess for everyone.
Tyler Calder (39:26):
I'm going to ask this follow-up question just tactically. When you're thinking about agents and building them, what does your tech stack look like?
Marco Papa (39:35):
We are running everything on Google, but from an AI perspective, I'm working with Claude, but the master I'm doing is all based on Microsoft, so looking at Power Platform and all of those. So now I'm at a stage where I need to understand how I can do what I'm learning, but with the stock that I have available, which is with Google and Cloud and not with Microsoft, because I can't really go out and have everything, every kind of technology available.
Tyler Calder (40:04):
I think that's fair. Cool. Well, this was awesome. Any closing thoughts? If you wanted to drop one line, one statement for partner leaders listening, what might it be?
Marco Papa (40:19):
The underlying to most of what I said today is get your qualification process right from the beginning. It's not bad to qualify out if you don't believe a partner can perform, because then when things happen, you'll have to go in and have the tough conversation. So it's better to get the expectations right from the get-go.
Tyler Calder (40:40):
Yeah, I think that one's pretty bang on. Well, this was great. I really appreciate the time, the insights. If folks wanted to get in touch, ask any follow-up questions, what's the best way to do that?
Marco Papa (40:52):
Yeah, I think the best way is in LinkedIn. They can find me just Marco Papa. I will show up. I will reply to anyone that really sends me a message. So happy to do that.
Tyler Calder (41:04):
Cool. Well, I'm sure folks are going to appreciate that and I certainly appreciate the time, like I said. Marco, thank you so much. It was a good conversation.
Marco Papa (41:12):
Thank you, Tyler. I appreciate as well.
Tyler Calder (41:14):
Thanks for listening to Get It Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools at partnerstack.com/getitogether.
Partnerships don't have to take a long time. There's so many, and that's where I guess placing the right bets is very important at the beginning. And some could land very quickly. And when I say very quickly, I mean four to six months, four to eight months, while others, they will take time.
Tyler Calder (00:17):
Welcome everybody to another episode of Get It Together. Today I am chatting with Marco Papa from a really interesting company and we're going to have a great conversation. He is the Director of Channels and Alliances at Metaflo Technologies. And today we're going to chat about what it looks to take a partner program from zero to one, especially in the early days as a team of one. And one of the things I'm really interested in chatting about is this idea of where do I place my bets? What types of partners should I be working with? So we're going to have a really interesting conversation. Get out your notebooks. There's going to be a lot of things to take away.
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Tyler Calder (01:21):
Marco, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Marco Papa (01:24):
Thank you, Tyler. Looking forward to it.
Tyler Calder (01:26):
I have a couple questions. One is just around having an economics background, what have you taken from that background in economics and brought into partnerships, if anything? Maybe there's nothing there, but I ask very candidly, and I'll tell you perhaps why this might be a little bit of a leading question. I find that within partnerships as a function, a little bit behind other go-to-market functions in their ability to talk about the financials of their program, really get into the weeds around the economics of how the program is performing, the financial impact it's having for the business. Did you find having a background in economics helpful at all or two very different things?
Marco Papa (02:14):
Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but now that I look back, yes, it is exactly because of that. To me, it was never something strange to lead with revenue and with the economics of the partnerships first. In fact, even in the first role as pre-sales, I was basically always looking at the economics behind the deals and margins and all of that. And also what is the quickest route to that? That has always been the leading way I though. So yes,
Tyler Calder (02:49):
This is your third official partnership role, correct?
Marco Papa (02:52):
That's correct.
Tyler Calder (02:53):
A lot to learn over the course of three roles, relatively global impact. I always like to start with this question. If you were standing in front of a group of 500 partner leaders and you're playing the role of educator lecturer, where would you start? What would you tell them?
Marco Papa (03:11):
So in the zero to one creation of a partner program or a partner motion, well, how do you ensure that you get it right? That's the first thing. And how do you ensure the other people in the company believe you are getting it right fast enough so that you can, one, keep your job and two, propel the company forward? That's what I will talk about because that's also what I've mostly lived through in the past few instances where I was in the shoes of a partnership manager.
Tyler Calder (03:44):
That statement of keeping your job, important one. I think most people want to keep their jobs. I never like to start with the negative, but I'm going to start with the negative. Why aren't, from your perspective, partner leaders keeping their jobs or at least having as long of a tenure as maybe some other go-to-market functions?
Marco Papa (04:07):
Intuitively, I would say that depends on the expectations that are set with the leadership when you begin working on partnerships. And I'm saying that because I want to take ownership of that or we should be owning as partnership managers and leaders. We need to own setting those expectations early and very clearly. But there's also the other side of the coin, which is impatience from the leadership, but also just plain not understanding of what it takes for a partner motion to actually take place. There's many more moving pieces compared to direct sales or other type of motions. So this is what comes to mind mostly.
Tyler Calder (04:59):
And I think that's very fair. I think expectation setting within partnerships is one of the harder things to do. It's not necessarily like other functions in marketing, as somebody in marketing. I can pretty easily build a plan that has us driving very short-term results while we can currently build for the long-term. And I think that makes it much easier to get internal buy-in with sales. Again, I can kind of do the same. I can drive short-term results while I build long-term predictability in my direct sales team. Partnerships can be a little bit more challenging. How do you go about setting those expectations when, again, generally speaking, leadership, they're not the most patient of people. How do you speak their language in a way that gets them to buy in for the long haul? And then I'll tack on a question, which is how much time should be given?
(06:00):
Because I'll admit I'm also an impatient person. So if you tell me something's going to take two to three years, I don't know how I feel about that. So what's a reasonable timeframe to set an expectation around?
Marco Papa (06:14):
So I lived through some of these impatience myself. So at the beginning, I guess I took it defensively and I guess it's an easy excuse to say, "Well, partnerships take time." I think I was fortunate enough to meet with other peers and partnership leaders that are much more experienced than me. And I learned that in reality, partnerships don't have to take a long time. There's so many, and that's where I guess placing the right bets is very important at the beginning. And some could land very quickly. And when I say very quickly, I mean four to six months, four to eight months, while others, they will take time. So I mean in my experience in building partnership, for example, with SAP back in the SaaS days, that takes time. So after 18 months, we started seeing the rewards, but it doesn't mean that all partnerships are like this.
(07:15):
And usually that is how I strike. There's two different motions that work in parallel. One is for the short term to show that what I'm saying actually makes sense, demonstrate that on the field, on the pipeline, on Salesforce. And the second one is to work for the longer term. So in the likes of, it could be SAP or the big ISVs or the hyperscalers. Now I'm talking SaaS world in reality in biotech right now, it's a little different, but not too much.
Tyler Calder (07:46):
Very fair. And so to say it back, it sounds like you're going to leadership and you're saying, "Hey, we're launching and building our program. These are the bets that I plan to make. Here's why." And then you're sort of setting the expectation that this bet we think will pay off within four to six months. Here's how we're going to look at it and measure it and make sure we're on the right track. And then here are the bets we're going to make, but it's going to take more time. Somebody like an SAP, it's not going to happen overnight. We got to build towards it. We might be 12, 18 months out, but you're being upfront about that and you're showing some shorter term impact to build the confidence that you can actually drive results and you can actually predict the timeframe for those results. Is that a fair way to paraphrase how you approached it?
Marco Papa (08:40):
It is 100% accurate and I found always positive feedback when I presented that way. It shows that I care for the company's P&L and the fact that they're looking for results fairly quickly, but at the same time I'm also investing in the future. One of my previous managers told me is partnership can be transformational. So probably the quick wins are not going to be the transformational partnerships, but maybe the long-term ones that require more time will be. So you need to play on both sides.
Tyler Calder (09:15):
I really like that framing of transformational because you're bang on, right? Quick wins are almost never going to be transformational for the business, but in my mind, you need those quick wins to give you the credibility internally to go after the transformational. And then I think from a language standpoint, every C-suite leader is in that role because they should be thinking about transformational change. And so to me, that's speaking their language, you're giving them the two things that they want. You're giving them the predictable short-term results, you're giving them the long-term transformation. That lands really well. That's cool. You talk about bets. How do you determine where to place those bets early on? Because again, I think that's something a lot of folks struggle with. They look at the world of partnerships and they think, "I could work with resellers. I could do some tech integrations.
(10:13):
I could find some co-sell partners. I could build a referral motion." In our world, you could run an affiliate program, an influencer program, you could be listing in marketplaces and working with hyperscalers. How do you look at that world of opportunity and say, "You know what? Here are the one, two, three places I'm going to place my bets."
Marco Papa (10:36):
Back in the days when I was working in FarEye with a team of seven in the niche we were operating, which was Last Mile Logistics, we could take on all. We just divide and conquer and then just see what works and what doesn't work. We had enough gunpower, I would say. Now the reality is that that's not my case right now, and that wasn't my case in my previous job as well. I was a team of one. A team of one doesn't mean I'm doing everything by myself, obviously, because I'm working daily with operations, with marketing, with sales. I like the way of partnerships as an overlay to every function, but I still need to take decisions because the majority of the strategy and the execution then will fall on me. I couldn't really go on and approach every type of partnership. So how do I pick the right one to follow?
(11:27):
So currently I report directly to the CEO. So I go to the CEO to begin with and I ask, "Well, what are the goals of the company for the next 12 months, 24, 36 months?" So from now to the next three years, what are the goals? Usually it's about increasing revenue, but what do you mean by increasing revenue? So does it mean do you want to do it within the same geography you are right now? In which segment? In which industry do you want to grow? Does it mean increasing revenue with current customers, new customers? So getting a little bit into the depth of this conversation, and once I have that clarity, then I look into, well, how can the partnership motion help achieve those goals and which ones could be the partnership that can help achieve those? So I start with this, and this naturally brings to ideal customer profile, ICP.
(12:32):
So which customers are we serving right now in which industries are they into? What is the tech stack that they're running? It's not much different from SaaS than to where I am in right now. Just the difference is that they may be running in SaaS world, I will be looking at the ERP and the e-com platform, at the transport management software, at the warehouse management software. Now instead I'm looking at a tunnel boring machine that they're using to make a tunnel for the metro because that will naturally surface an ecosystem compared to another. And obviously what's the sales cycle? So all I guess the framing that most partnership managers are familiar with around ICP. So that will be where I really start. Then I would move into the ideal partner profile. Another term that I guess everyone is familiar with, I need to formalize my hypothesis.
(13:29):
So based on the ICP, do we already have performing partners? Because in most cases when I joined, there were already some kind of partnerships formed. So do we already have some that perform? Let's find lookalikes. Let's analyze them and find lookalikes. I understand we look into capacity. Ideally, what size of sales team should a partner that we want to work with have? What are their capabilities? What kind of core business should they have? They need to sell to the same ICP, ideally to the same persona, not easy to find it out from the outside, from a website, especially in the industry I'm working in right now. Sometimes I find very low tech abilities, so it's difficult to find out information ahead of time. Commitment, overlapping customer. So I try to understand which potential partners will be the best fit for the results that we want to achieve.
(14:24):
So in most of my experience, that has been referral partners, a resell partners, ISV. Then there's a surprising to this, which is that is what I believed at the beginning. It doesn't always turn out to be that way. But then I form a hypothesis, as I said.
Tyler Calder (14:46):
This is Get It Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. What's your story? How did you end up in partnerships?
Marco Papa (15:03):
Like most people, I realized I ended up in partnership by accident. I didn't really know the first role I got into was partnerships. Right out of university when I was in Italy, studied in Venice, I got a call, the call that changes your life kind of thing that actually happened. And a software company, a small software company in Italy offered me to move to Singapore to launch the APAC market. And the role was actually pre-sales engineer or pre-sales manager, even though my background is economics, but I've always been a nerd and I took it. After the first eight months, which I will always be grateful for because I was in customer support and implementation to really get into the customer needs and understand exactly what sales and what's useful. After those initial months, then I moved to Singapore and my mandate was bring revenue home, as simple as that.
(16:04):
So how do you do that in a country, in a region, because it was much wide. It was the whole Asia Pacific. How do you do that? Well, that's actually working with partners. So we already established some initial conversations, but what I did at that stage, and I know it now, I didn't know it then, is that I was some kind of a funded head within all of these partners and I was their pre-sales resource. So I knew inside out how the customer worked, so I accelerated the most difficult part of bringing a partner on board, which is enablement. They didn't have to get enabled. They had me. So I was traveling with them everywhere, and I was both obviously bringing the knowledge around the solution for the reseller and at the same time also training the resellers, so I will bring them up. And this was my first job out of university and it was what formed me.
(17:00):
And from still today, the thing that all the technical knowledge I gained really gave me the frame for how important it is for a partner manager to help partners to sell the solutions from day one. So not just teaching them from outside, enabling them from the sidelines, but really get onto the field with the partners, go in front of the customer with the partners and really teach them. So that was a great experience. I was able to sell in Japan, in Malaysia, in India, in places where they don't even know. I didn't even know how to understand a word or what they were talking, and that was all thanks to partners. Then I moved into something completely different. I moved into marketing. Since I started marketing, I said I want to work with a big company, a big American company. So from probably sub a hundred million revenue company to a billion dollar company.
(17:58):
And there I worked mostly in marketing, completely different industry. It was still software, it was supply chain. They were just moving from selling licenses to SaaS. So that's where the partnership with Microsoft was really important. And again, because APAC, Asia Pacific, I was still in Singapore, I was actually the most advanced region in terms of partner revenue. When I joined, I think they had about 50% of the revenue coming in from partners. And by the time I left about four years after, they had about 75% of the revenue coming in from partners, just Asia Pacific. The rest of the company, so in the Americas and in EMEA, was on the 20, 25%. So they were really leading on the edge and I managed some part of the co-marketing agenda while I was at that company. Again, I didn't join really to run co-marketing, but then I ended up doing it because partners were so ingrained into everything the company did in Asia Pacific that I came out with that knowledge as well.
(19:06):
And only after this, I had my actual first role as partner manager once I moved back to Europe and it was in a pure SaaS company in the COVID age where free money was a thing. And there I had the privilege of having the VP of partnerships that hired me thanks to the CRO which joined from a previous company that know me very well. And I had a chance to really learn everything about how to manage partnerships at scale. It was a zero to one stage. We were a team of seven with various partner managers, pre-salespeople specifically for the partners, et cetera. So it was a good opportunity for me to really learn how to manage partnerships. And this was with FarEye, last mile SaaS solution. And then I moved into ScaleUp, which was smaller, still in the same industry. And there was the first partner manager they ever hired.
(20:09):
And it was the first time I built by myself from scratch. I actually, for the first time in 15 years, I went outside of software. I'm in biotech, biotechnology. So we sell physical products and I'm very proud of being part of this company because what we do is going to impact everyone's life. We are basically changing harsh chemicals that are used every day and we're replacing them with biopolymers that are organically derived for various types of industrial use cases. So that's an incredible experience for me and I really like to be part of it. And also in this case, I'm tasked to do the zero to one to create the partnership motion. So it started accidentally, then I kind of really liked what I saw and I'm diving deeper and deeper into what partnership means.
Tyler Calder (21:01):
Very cool. I love that story. I just want to put a spotlight on because you said it and you said it as though it's an obvious thing, which is, well, the first thing I did was talk to our CEO and figure out what the company objectives are. Again, I'm going to make a general statement, and I certainly don't mean that this is true for all partner orgs, but one of the things I see more often than I certainly expected when I started at PartnerStack seven years ago talking to customers is a lot of partner leaders come into a new role and they immediately start to think about executing on the playbook they had executed on previously. Previously, they ran a really successful tech partner program, very solid integrations, and that was sort of their route to market was technology partners. They start their new gig, they immediately start to look at that.
(22:02):
What other tech should we be integrating with? Where can we provide more value to our customers through these integrations? And they don't actually pause to ask, "Well, what is most important to the business?" And then work backwards from there. I've always thought about it as the curse of the playbook. Everybody tends to get hired for what they did in their previous role. And so then they assume, "Well, I'm just going to go and execute on what I did previously because that's why I got hired." That must be what the company wants. The company oftentimes make the assumption, "Well, we hired the senior partner leader. They know what they're doing. Let them do their thing." And then six, 12 months later, they realize, well, it didn't actually drive the impact that the business was interested in. And so again, you said it very quickly because I think it sounds like an obvious statement, which is I talked to the CEO.
(22:57):
I find not nearly enough people start there. What is it that is important to the business? Where do they want to be in three to five years? And then how can partnerships be a steward of that and that help direct where you focus your time? So I just wanted to spotlight that. Going back to what surprised you, so you placed your bets, you made some assumptions, what happened?
Marco Papa (23:18):
I'm going back into the different roles and companies I've worked with. Resellers has been always in the mix of the initial bets and it almost never proved to really cut it through. What really surprised me in the last two roles, so I'm going back not in the current role, is SIs. So that's where at the beginning I didn't think we'd really had a way to work with SIs, but combined with the SAP ecosystem, we were able to go to them and to their customers with a really strong value proposition because we found out that there were a group of SIs very specialized on what they're called the petals of the flower that is the SAP ERP. If you imagine it as a flowers, all the, I guess leaf, the petals, they were looking at a way to expand their business outside of SAP, but still with touch points to SAP.
(24:22):
We had a really strong value propositions to the end customer, and we also offered SIs a way to expand their business by keeping the touch points to SAP because we were a certified integration, but also expanding into new realms within their existing customer base. And we worked out a model that was like a hybrid between pure professional services revenue and also some kind of, I guess, augmented referral, and it worked really well. So I keep on having resellers into the initial mix, especially now because in the industry now is more traditional, so reseller is expected. They always prove to be much more difficult than I initially anticipated.
Tyler Calder (25:11):
I want to go into that, the reseller programs being a little bit more difficult than you anticipated. What makes them so challenging? What are some of the things that, and you touched on some I think, but for those that are either thinking about a reseller program or already have a reseller program that's struggling, what are the things that folks should be aware of in terms of building a reseller program, the challenges, obstacles? And then I think not necessarily how to overcome them, that's part of it, but how do you make a decision that we should stay on the path or we should get off it?
Marco Papa (25:48):
So in my past, I've actually converted resellers into referral partners, which is very counterintuitive. And that is because when I joined, those resellers were already there, but I could have made the same mistake. But the problem here is one of the things that I always tell to my teams of salespeople because they actually go out and also scout for potential partners is we need to qualify hard. We can't really just sign up a reseller because they have a great network of people. So there is these misconceptions that great network of people means that they're actually able to execute on a sales cycle and bring a deal to close, which is completely different. The other issue is that resellers need enablement. So I know what is the meaning of enabling a reseller because I did it successfully in my first job when I was shipped to Singapore to launch the APOG market.
(26:49):
So it took a long time and I was able to make it work because I was physically there and I know the solution inside out and I was doing the job for the reseller while they were training someone else that was sitting just beside me to pick up all those information. But for them to make the investment of having someone dedicated to learn a complex software and being able to explain it with confidence in front of a customer, that's not a given. There is this misconception that resellers are a fast way to market, but in reality, once you start diving deep, you find that qualification and the enablement ability are crucial. If they're not there, it's hard to pull off a reseller motion.
Tyler Calder (27:41):
How did those conversations go converting a reseller to a referral partner?
Marco Papa (27:47):
They are horrible. Yeah. No, I need to be honest. One of them was actually really good because sometimes there is an understanding on the other side that there is no feat. The customer or the prospects are not happy. We're not able to move forward. The reseller understands it and they're happy to step back in that sense, but then we still going to try to keep them whole for their transition and it works for them and it worked for us. In some other cases, that didn't go down well, but the reality is that we had to course correct something that should not have started. And I learned that sometimes you have to have tough conversation and those should not be postponed. In fact, I heard this from another partnership leaders, but I think it's deeply true. And if you think about the partnership motion being like a container ship, it is directed to partnership wonderland where it's 75% partner generated revenue and ecosystem place and everything is beautiful and wonderful.
(29:00):
If you make some mistakes in the partner motion and the ship just diverts five degrees, you can easily course correct it because you have a handful of partners on board. Once you get them all to agree, then you can course correct and you're back on track. If you already signed up, let's say 50 resellers, and then all of a sudden you find out that the margin, the economics of resellers don't work after losing a couple of deals and you have to restructure all those relationships, that's going to be hard. Those five degrees are going to end up in probably thousands of kilometers of difference and you're never going to reach that partnership wonderland. That is one of the, I guess, part of my playbook is don't scale too early. Prove that it works first and then scale. And that's one of the mistakes I see.
(29:56):
Well, I saw some early stage scale up Doing sometimes, try to go all in on tiering and platinum, gold, silver certification and all of that without really having a proven motion. Proven means there's two or three partners that generate revenue on repeat.
Tyler Calder (30:17):
A couple other things, just sort of rapid fire that I'd love to hit on as we start to wind down. I'd love to call it out a little bit more directly as a learning. So as you've moved through these experiences, different orgs, what has been a failure that stands out as being a pretty significant learning moment in your career?
Marco Papa (30:42):
It has been with reseller. So we actually lost a major customer and that was a customer that we won with our direct sales and then we handed over to our reseller for well account management and because we wanted to grow with this reseller. Again, I kind of inherited this and then I had to have the tough conversation. These things kind of continuously happen in my career. We have asked the reseller to bring up their industry knowledge, actually have somebody dedicated to the account or to the segment, to the industry segment that this customer was into, but they never really did it. We were probably too small for this reseller to really care, even though for us it was a major customer. And yeah, all of a sudden we realized that we are out and we didn't really get to know about it from the reseller.
(31:42):
We got to know about it from the network of companies where this customer is into. So there was, I guess, different things that were not right. It was not just that this customer got lost because of poor account management. There was never really investment from that partner side on us and on the industry. We had to basically fire the partner. That is why I go back to qualify hard. And if you can't, then it's very important to be on top of your partners. So regular cadence, never the regular cadence, but also the questions that are asked in the regular cadence are very important and then never postpone tough conversations.
Tyler Calder (32:28):
I think that's a very valuable lesson. Don't postpone those hard conversations.
Marco Papa (32:35):
It does seem like I had a lot of issues with resellers. The reality is that right now in Metaflo, we're picking up the reseller motion because I guess building up on all those failures, I kind of hopefully saw the right path through it.
Tyler Calder (32:51):
What about the flip side? So we talked about the failure. What about surprise and success?
Marco Papa (32:56):
The one that I remember vividly also because I'm in love with the country, it's been in Japan and I was in the early days where I didn't know I was playing the partner role. So we were already collaborating with a group, with a reseller group for the technology I was selling back there for broadcast media, so for TV stations. And we were already collaborating in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in India, in Malaysia, Indonesia. And this group also had an office in Japan. We never spoke to them before. They reached out and they said, "Hey, Marco, we have a few customers. Can you come over and teach us how the solution works and then show how it works and then bring us to some customers?" And when I traveled to Japan, it was my first time traveling to Japan, which is amazing, my favorite country in the world.
(33:48):
I sat down with a partner which had an incredibly good technical resource who could catch on the software and on the customer use case very quickly. Then I started, we did a first demo with two or three customers. One of them was interested to continue. And obviously the demo, I could only speak English then in the room, but everything had to be translated in Japanese in real time. So I guess the partner had enough trust built with that customer because selling into the Japanese market with a foreign technology is very complex. I guess there was enough trust built for them to move forward and the solution probably also looked good. So after that first demo, it took 15 other iterations in the span of 12 months. I didn't always have to go back to Japan for those, but we had to make multiple tweaks for the Japanese customer to be ready to say, "Okay, we're ready to buy." And thanks to the reseller there, thanks to the tech resource, we were able to make all of those successfully.
(34:58):
And without being there physically all the time, we were able to convey the right message, show that it worked. We actually had a pilot going on at their TV station. So eventually they buy after 12 months. So they kind of like, "Okay, you guys did the work. We see that it's valuable." And now I'm still connected to the company I was previously working for. I'm registered to the newsletter and I see that they are continuously releasing new case studies, new channels being launched within their TV stations with their technology. And that's 12 years after we initially sold that there. So to me, it's unbelievable, first of all, that 15 demos to sell a solution over 12 months, they bought and then 12 years after they're still buying, no longer there, but I guess the solution plus the partner on site that was able to do their job extremely well.
(35:59):
This is one of the cases where resell actually worked extremely well.
Tyler Calder (36:04):
Nice. That's really cool. That's awesome. It must be super cool working in global markets and being able to spend some time in Japan.That's cool. One of the benefits of working I think in partnerships. We can't end the conversation without talking about AI. We got to talk about AI. What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? Where do you think AI is taking partnerships?
Marco Papa (36:28):
You said it, I have a love and hate relationship with AI. So the love part is that I use it as a glue between all the different systems that I have in play, not the PRM yet, but CRM, mail, drive. So I kind of use it to have a quick overview of where I'm at without having to look into all the different systems, and that helps me a lot. I'm also finishing right now, I'm finishing an online master in AI and innovation. And with it, I'm looking to actually develop some kind of an agent. Well, before developing the agent, because of the industry we're living to, lots of the expertise that our company has is inside people's head. So back to the point on enabling resellers, which is one of the motions I'm really focusing on right now, I need to distill it from there.
(37:29):
So first of all, now we already have started to distill all those information, which because we are into specialty chemicals and biopolymers, there's a lot of information about dosages that needs to be used that change based on different variables. I'm looking at building a layer that will be able to interact with partners so that when they want to understand how they should actually look at positioning a specific solution and in which dosage and for which geology, then they can have an initial conversation with the AI agent and they can get a quick feedback based on actual case studies that were distilled from all our teams. So this is definitely the interesting part of it. It will help a lot for enablement. Of course, on top of this, we are selling into global markets thanks to partners now we entered into the European market, which basically means a whole new set of languages that needs to be spoken.
(38:37):
So we don't speak all of these languages, but AI can. So having enablement that can have all the information needed and also translate it into any language, that's going to be, again, transformational. That's the love side. On the hate side, there's a couple of things. Really the one that I'm the most worried about is what is called the decision depth. There's so much information, so many, I guess, options and AI, once you start brainstorming, it brings up even more and it becomes more and more crucial to be able to decide. So really bypass all the noise and being able to take a decision. So that I think will be fundamental going forward, not just for partner professional, I guess for everyone.
Tyler Calder (39:26):
I'm going to ask this follow-up question just tactically. When you're thinking about agents and building them, what does your tech stack look like?
Marco Papa (39:35):
We are running everything on Google, but from an AI perspective, I'm working with Claude, but the master I'm doing is all based on Microsoft, so looking at Power Platform and all of those. So now I'm at a stage where I need to understand how I can do what I'm learning, but with the stock that I have available, which is with Google and Cloud and not with Microsoft, because I can't really go out and have everything, every kind of technology available.
Tyler Calder (40:04):
I think that's fair. Cool. Well, this was awesome. Any closing thoughts? If you wanted to drop one line, one statement for partner leaders listening, what might it be?
Marco Papa (40:19):
The underlying to most of what I said today is get your qualification process right from the beginning. It's not bad to qualify out if you don't believe a partner can perform, because then when things happen, you'll have to go in and have the tough conversation. So it's better to get the expectations right from the get-go.
Tyler Calder (40:40):
Yeah, I think that one's pretty bang on. Well, this was great. I really appreciate the time, the insights. If folks wanted to get in touch, ask any follow-up questions, what's the best way to do that?
Marco Papa (40:52):
Yeah, I think the best way is in LinkedIn. They can find me just Marco Papa. I will show up. I will reply to anyone that really sends me a message. So happy to do that.
Tyler Calder (41:04):
Cool. Well, I'm sure folks are going to appreciate that and I certainly appreciate the time, like I said. Marco, thank you so much. It was a good conversation.
Marco Papa (41:12):
Thank you, Tyler. I appreciate as well.
Tyler Calder (41:14):
Thanks for listening to Get It Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools at partnerstack.com/getitogether.
