307 – Service Now & WorkSpan Debunk The Co-Sell Myth: Why 50% of Sellers Decide Your Fate

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In this episode, Vince Menzione sits down with Amit Sinha from WorkSpan and Marc Monday from ServiceNow to dissect the rapid evolution of AI-native partnerships and the shifting dynamics of the channel ecosystem. They explore how the hyperscaler co-sell model has transformed into a complex strategy of asymmetrical collaboration that demands unprecedented speed, simplicity, and scale from publishers. By integrating AI agents to orchestrate workflows, manage high-risk renewals, and automate low-dollar deals, companies can activate their sellers and drive explosive, exponential growth in their partner programs.

Key Takeaways

• The partner channel is no longer just a piece of the strategy; it is the entire strategy for winning in 2026.
• Modern co-selling is an asymmetrical collaboration where publishers must often do more than fifty percent of the heavy lifting.
• Implementing AI agents within partnerships can lead to massive revenue impacts, such as a 24% higher lift on renewals for companies like Boomi.
• True scaling requires moving beyond traditional time-and-materials consulting toward outcome-based frameworks for customers.
• Activating sellers through continuous AI-driven account orchestration is the ultimate key to unlocking exponential ecosystem growth.
• The market is moving faster than ever, necessitating that partner enablement and roadmaps shift to agile, sprint-based cycles rather than long-term rigid plans.

If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community.

At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.

AI native, ecosystem shifting, hyperscalers, Work Span, ServiceNow, lifecycle incentives, cloud native, consumption led, DocuSign, Gong, Boomi, workflow orchestration, asymmetrical collaboration, CRM integration, marketplace private offers, high propensity, seller activation, agentic solution, outcome based consulting, LLM control tower.

Amit Sinha and Marc Monday Audio Episode

[00:00:00] Marc Monday: We have to be soup drop dead simple and we’re gonna talk about that nice. In this world. It has to be simple. Even though under the covers it’s very complicated,

[00:00:10] Vince Menzione: you can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us. The way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026.

[00:00:21] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy.

[00:00:43] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room

[00:00:46] Marc Monday: changes everything. Let’s start.

[00:00:52] Vince Menzione: And, uh, two incredible friends up on, uh, up on stage. But I think I’m just gonna have my, one of my first friends come up. Amit Sinha from Work Span, a great, great friend and supporter. We’ve been together since the beginning, since the very first ultimate partner in Dallas when we commandeered Microsoft facility.

[00:01:12] Amit Sinha: Yeah,

[00:01:12] Vince Menzione: you have a little bit that you’re gonna share first and then we’re all gonna come join you.

[00:01:16] Amit Sinha: Absolutely. And

[00:01:17] Vince Menzione: then we’re gonna have my other great friend, mark Monday on us on stage with us as well. So yeah,

[00:01:21] Amit Sinha: what a privilege. Uh, what a privilege. Vince, you do an amazing job as a community and, uh, incredible.

[00:01:27] Amit Sinha: Shout out to Alexandra. Uh, we work together at Cisco talking about lifecycle incentives across the whole lifecycle. So amazing work done there as well. So. Very quickly, I’m gonna talk to you about AI native partnerships. A quick motivation. That’s me. Of course, we are using Nano banana to cover that.

[00:01:45] Amit Sinha: That’s me looking up a Yellow Pages. I will date myself. That’s, uh, McDonald’s coming to India and me looking up, uh, the nearest McDonald’s, right? And this is me now booking Uber Eats Ma and I had this real experience yesterday night. I flew in from Sapphire in Orlando and I was hungry. Ma said, let’s, let’s get Uber Eats.

[00:02:06] Amit Sinha: And we had a great. De this is digital native, right? We had no idea the world would transform this way, but completely new ways of working. Okay. Um, and, uh, another great experience that Mike, my co-founder and CEO seated the back half, I spent a decade at SAP, uh, doing hana, which was a database product, but it was on premise.

[00:02:28] Amit Sinha: We had these racks and our whole gig was actually take an amazing HANA database with this server mounted, deployed. Wow. The CIO and the CFO, that this is the most amazing thing. And they would not say, Hey, you can’t take that box away, because it’s such a good insight that I get for my, uh, analytics product, right.

[00:02:47] Amit Sinha: So that’s the old way. And look at us. We are all cloud native, right? Cloud has gotten to a place where it’s not just about infrastructure, running things and meters and stuff like that in a scalable way. It is a also source of innovation. New capability, new business model, consumption led business model.

[00:03:07] Amit Sinha: Whole new way of working, right? So this comes to the new world now, what does AI need to look like? We heard all the amazing speakers talk about, uh, you know, the promise of ai, right? But you have a choice. Uh, you have a choice to do it yourself or, uh, especially as partnership professionals, right? When you do it yourself, you have this chat bots and stuff that you get from all the major.

[00:03:33] Amit Sinha: You can always get more productive, but that’s about half an hour saved. The bar is too low there. So this is an amazing piece of, uh, research put together by all the experts. Vince, thank you for doing that. Uh, we had Jay McBain lend his voice as well. We had Rob Moyer with all his, uh, decades of, you know, insight and wisdom as to what would the future with AI look like, uh, encapsulate in that.

[00:03:57] Amit Sinha: So go ahead, take a picture. Uh, this is not gated. Um, beautiful piece of content has also new insights from leading firms. AI native, I would dare say frontier firms who are like DocuSign or Gong who are really pioneering AI native partnerships, Boomi, and how they’re powering their renewal business case across AWS Google and Microsoft Marketplaces.

[00:04:21] Amit Sinha: Uh, this really talks about that. And here, uh, this is the thought leadership that we bring to the table. And again, this is not a vendor pitch. This is, you know, as you elevate from the low bar about making yourself productive where you’re cut and paste, uh, into a chatbot, your context so that you can get a better co-sell email out there.

[00:04:40] Amit Sinha: You DIY, this thing. But if you think of working with works span, these are three things that you should think about. First is imagine instead of cut and paste, you have your entire partnership context right there. And because the context is there, the right better together story, the right case study, the right partnership documents, the right opportunity and accounts that intelligence not only informs you, but also your team in a, in an extended way, and even your partnership in an extended way that’s fully automated.

[00:05:13] Amit Sinha: Second is it’s not just informing you or sensing you, it is also acting. And I think this is where there are, you know, death by a thousand cuts if happening in the world where all this time gets taken up, right? But if you have an agent that scales in ly, whether you are big mature partnership, you got lots and lots of accounts and opportunities to cover, the agent can do that.

[00:05:36] Amit Sinha: Or if you’re a new partnership, how do you get to market quickly? With the right assets, the right get to market content. This can work both ways. And lastly, how do you secure this partnership is done in trust. So you should have an agent for every partnership, uniquely your partnership with Microsoft, your partnership with ServiceNow, your partnership with uh, AWS and Google.

[00:05:59] Amit Sinha: They all get a different agent. And the point here is these agents can work in a circle of trust and the boundary that gets established. So via work span, come talk to us outside. And with that, Vince, let’s uh, bring Mark along. Come on, mark.

[00:06:17] Vince Menzione: Alright. I am gonna have you and then Mark, uh, yeah. Want mark in the middle?

[00:06:22] Marc Monday: Oh, uh oh.

[00:06:24] Vince Menzione: So, uh, let me move over so I get back to the picture slide. Look at those two handsome gentlemen up there. Uh, thrilled to have you Mark as well. Uh, for those of you who don’t, because you’ve been, you were just in Boca with us this Yeah. This winter.

[00:06:39] Marc Monday: That’s right.

[00:06:40] Vince Menzione: And, uh, tell us about your new role at ServiceNow.

[00:06:43] Marc Monday: Well, I have the absolute privilege of leading the partner channel at ServiceNow. Yeah. Um, it’s comprised of our partner programs, our program gives and gets, and importantly our five routes to market, our consulting and implementation partners, our resell partners, our service provider partners, our hyperscaler partners, and importantly our build partners.

[00:07:03] Vince Menzione: I love it. I love it. So let’s talk about the partner programs and why they’re so critical to ServiceNow right now.

[00:07:08] Marc Monday: I think in this world scale is everything, and so this profession has always been a bit mercurial and a little bit of a black box for organizations. What does the partner team do? What does that look like?

[00:07:21] Marc Monday: But what we have to continue to do is explain, this is your force multiplier. Working together in collaboration helps you scale beyond your individual numbers. And that’s really the thing that we’re focused on is how do we drive that? And I have three big things that we have to focus on is we have to be sup, drop dead simple, and we’re gonna talk about that

[00:07:40] Vince Menzione: nice.

[00:07:41] Marc Monday: In this world, it has to be simple. Even though under the covers it’s very complicated. We have to be incredibly fast. Agility is the key in this very moment. And then as I said, with that becomes the scaling element and the force multiplier.

[00:07:56] Vince Menzione: And you have spent many, you, well, we both worked at Microsoft together.

[00:07:59] Vince Menzione: It’s

[00:07:59] Marc Monday: true.

[00:07:59] Amit Sinha: Way back way.

[00:08:00] Marc Monday: I feel like you’re punking me having me right before lunch. Like I remember back at Microsoft, you did something to me, so I’m gonna have you right before lunch.

[00:08:07] Vince Menzione: It’s, no, it’s really terrific to have you. But, uh, so yeah, you, you mentioned about like the change and the specificity and the clarity around it.

[00:08:16] Vince Menzione: Amme you have, uh, broken the model, so to speak, working with ServiceNow, right? Yeah. You went from being a traditional. I’ll call it co-sell Engine Marketplace Company. Uh, tell us, tell us, tell us about the innovation that’s going on in the room. We’re working with ServiceNow.

[00:08:31] Amit Sinha: Absolutely. Uh, when you think of co-sell, the first mine goes to just co-sell with the hyperscalers, right?

[00:08:36] Amit Sinha: Because they kind of pioneered and started this in a unique way. We, of course, got started with Microsoft eight years ago, doing not just co-sell and P two P, but since then AW S and Google right. You would be surprised to know that we do about 10% of AWS sales through work, expand co-sale. Right. Just

[00:08:53] Vince Menzione: wow.

[00:08:53] Amit Sinha: But that’s where we started. Where we ended up is really looking at all partner types and all motion types and. Mark and I disagreed and he, he really pushed me hard on this. Yeah, and the point here is if you look at your build partner motion, it’s also a co-sell. You build, then you co-sell and go to market,

[00:09:11] Vince Menzione: right?

[00:09:12] Amit Sinha: If you think about your services partners, right? You have a product. They have amazing last mile services and digital transformation. Uh, capabilities, and again, there’s a coastal motion there. So where we world works span eventually was not just coastal with hyperscalers, but across all partner types. And Mark, thank you for pushing us on that.

[00:09:31] Amit Sinha: Yeah. And being a pioneering partner on works span with us. I really appreciate

[00:09:34] Marc Monday: this. It was a fun rumble we got there.

[00:09:37] Vince Menzione: So why does it matter now for ServiceNow specific?

[00:09:40] Marc Monday: Yeah. I mean the reality is, um, I’m gonna say something provocative. We’re, we’re all friends. Yeah. Um, Cosell iss probably a misnomer. It’s not a 50 50 coequal relationship.

[00:09:53] Vince Menzione: Yeah. You don’t walk in together holding it back.

[00:09:55] Marc Monday: It’s asymmetrical collaboration. I love that. And I want to put the stake in the ground. The co-sell motions that have been created by the hyperscalers are wonderful. The pipe has been opened, but the reality is the publisher. Has to do a lot of the work and the systems are there, but the key is not just connecting into partner center as an example.

[00:10:16] Marc Monday: Yeah. But building your own infrastructure and processes. That’s where the magic comes together, and that’s where we really drive scale. And so if we approach co-selling is asymmetrical collaboration and recognizing that you probably need to do more than 50%. When a, when a a team collaborates on co-authoring a book, it’s not like someone’s writing every other word, and it’s exactly 50%.

[00:10:40] Marc Monday: Or if a pilot, a co-pilot is with a pilot on a plane, they’re not doing exactly 50% of the work’s,

[00:10:46] Vince Menzione: right? No.

[00:10:47] Marc Monday: This asymmetric approach requires that we do a lot of the work on our side. Yeah. And that’s where AM and team have really helped us a ton.

[00:10:55] Vince Menzione: And ServiceNow was known as a ticketing solution back in the day.

[00:10:58] Vince Menzione: Right. And you’ve kind of, I mean, it it, it started that way.

[00:11:01] Marc Monday: We have a wonderful heritage 20 plus years Yeah. Of workflow orchestration. Yeah. And in a diggen world, what are we really doing? We’re orchestrating workflows, and importantly, we need to govern those workflows and we need to sequence them in a meaningful way.

[00:11:17] Marc Monday: And so our vision of a control tower across any hyperscaler, any LLM, any workflow, any system of record, any time, that’s the key to everything.

[00:11:27] Vince Menzione: And so now you’ve taken the work span approach and driven it across what I see, like taking, taking this. This stack, we’ll call it. Yeah, the tower. Yeah. And then applying all of the methodologies and best practices on what we’ve called co-selling and ecosystem orchestration, essentially is what it really is.

[00:11:46] Amit Sinha: Absolutely.

[00:11:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah.

[00:11:47] Amit Sinha: Yeah. And we are thrilled to partner with ServiceNow on this. So ServiceNow, as you guys know, uh, release their CRM product. So we got in at the ground floor on that opportunity and with the now assist agents as well. What we’ve really built is an integration between work span as a platform.

[00:12:03] Amit Sinha: And ServiceNow, CRM as well. So if anybody is using that all the way from ServiceNow opportunities to Marketplace private offers, you can a genetically do that. Of course you can do it on Salesforce Hub, spot and Dynamics, but now ServiceNow is an additional option on that. I wanna really double click though, mark, on your point around asymmetry around this, when we say six to seven partners are gonna surround the end customer, right?

[00:12:27] Amit Sinha: Yes. They will come at different points in time. Yes. Right? And they will also have different roles to play. So just as you think of a team, right? A soccer team for that matter, or a football team, pick your analogy right. Not everybody’s equal. Right? There’s always a qb. There’s always somebody who holds the prime on the deal.

[00:12:45] Amit Sinha: There’s always a role to play.

[00:12:46] Marc Monday: Yeah,

[00:12:47] Amit Sinha: and I think what’s beautiful about our partnership here is when you look at it applied to services partners, it’s about building billion dollar businesses around ServiceNow, using their competency, but knowing the kind of joint accounts you need to go pursue in order to.

[00:13:03] Amit Sinha: You know, burn down their inventory or, or co-sell alongside. If it’s the build partner, it’s about attacking an industry vertical or a joint account there. Right? So knowing very intelligently who to partner with and when to bring them on is the AI orchestration that is key in this partnership

[00:13:19] Vince Menzione: here. Yeah.

[00:13:19] Vince Menzione: So important. ’cause you, it isn’t single threaded this, this asymmetrical approach.

[00:13:24] Amit Sinha: Right. So

[00:13:25] Vince Menzione: incredible. You just ha you just finished your big event. I was hoping I did spare Share with us a little bit of your perspective on what’s been changing and how your ecosystem is evolving. Uh, I had Jen Odes in the studio.

[00:13:38] Vince Menzione: That’s right. As you know, back in the fall. Fall, go back and watch it again. Yeah, it’s available. Great. Great podcast interview. Yeah. And you’ve been on stage at our events before and we’ve had that as a podcast, but take us how things are changing from the partner type perspective. We have MSPs in the room.

[00:13:53] Vince Menzione: I know MSPs are, I know again, hands on the steering wheel. So important, right? Yeah. This technology is so complex. How are you thinking about ecosystem in your role?

[00:14:03] Marc Monday: Yeah, I said earlier it’s about simplicity, speed, and scale. Yeah. Last week we had our big customer event knowledge, and on the first day we had our partner event.

[00:14:13] Marc Monday: I think the biggest thing that’s happening right now is the pace of change is a bit overwhelming at times. And keeping pace with that is super critical. So what we’ve tried to do and what we announced last week was a lot of investment in giving our channel partners the exact same tools that we use in our business, right?

[00:14:32] Marc Monday: So we were really focused on. Um, delivering business value. And so we took our, the solution that we use or the tools that we use for, um, delivering, uh, business value through our partners. It’s an assessment tool. Um, we’ve syndicated that to our partners. We’ve made that available. We also put a little bit of a stake in the ground around what do customers expect right now?

[00:14:56] Marc Monday: Um, the time and materials business is gonna be under a tremendous amount of pressure. Some studies are predicting that it could be. Compressed by as much as 30% customers are looking for outcome based. Yeah. Um, they may stop on that journey and, and have something that’s fixed fee. But the reality is everyone is expecting value from the, the technology that they buy, and particularly from an agent perspective.

[00:15:21] Marc Monday: We really leaned in on that and published what I think is a pretty good framework mm-hmm. For, um, outcome-based consulting. And we had a couple partners co-author that with us, which was really wonderful. Nice. Um, and it was a nice piece of co-creation and I think I’m seeing more and more of that where we’re co-creating with our partners in ways that we’ve never done before.

[00:15:41] Marc Monday: And then I think importantly, security and reliability, um, and managing risk increasingly will be important. In an agentic world, we call it a control tower. We made two fairly big acquisitions in the last several months in terms of both the front door and the back door in terms of securing with the calls that are going into that agent or from that agent.

[00:16:04] Marc Monday: To your various data sources. And so for us trying to bring that all together with our strong history of workload flow, orchestration, and then importantly, governance, security, and risk, uh, in the environment today, when you have the potential for hundreds of thousands or even millions of agents touching your core systems of record,

[00:16:24] Vince Menzione: how are you thinking about both tiering your partners and also enabling your partners?

[00:16:30] Marc Monday: Yeah, I think this is also an, an an area where I’d love to benchmark with y’all, um, because, you know, historically most of us built a fairly robust learning plan for our partners. You’d have a certification and then you would have a competency, and then you, maybe you’d have a wrapper around that competency.

[00:16:48] Marc Monday: And it would take a long time, maybe 12 or 18 months to get to that highest level of certification. And it was incredibly robust and that’s wonderful. But when the roadmap is moving so fast that we’re releasing weekly, monthly, and every 90 days, does that type of training still hold water? So I’m proposing that we have both a volume view of how many trained individuals can we get as quickly as possible, and then value.

[00:17:16] Marc Monday: And so we don’t want to lose this rich history, what I would describe as the rear view mirror, how we got here, but we also need to approach the windscreen, the windshield, where are we going and what is that opportunity? Yeah, so we have to go a little bit faster when it comes to enablement,

[00:17:32] Vince Menzione: so. You, you were in a partnership, you, you call it a built on partnership.

[00:17:37] Vince Menzione: Is that, is that the approach that

[00:17:38] Amit Sinha: Yeah. ServiceNow has an ISV program called The Built On Partnership. Built On

[00:17:41] Vince Menzione: Partnership, yeah.

[00:17:42] Amit Sinha: Uh, so we sign onto that program, great accelerators to build lot of coaching and help to build on the ServiceNow platform. It’s not just the CRM integration, where it’s the opportunities and orders.

[00:17:54] Amit Sinha: And by the way, this is the best platform or order management out there. So if you think of, uh, of your, if you are a MSP or consulting partner, building orders for your customers, now you want them to land on the marketplace, right? You wanna build that highway. Think of work span, right? So that’s where we came in and we said that if we look at the large number of channel partners, MSPs, who need to do that and are using ServiceNow as a platform to do it, can they genetically do it right from the now CRM?

[00:18:24] Amit Sinha: Yeah, so that’s why we came in. The three big use cases we saw, number one was renewals. You talked about Alexandra doing it. Renewals is so

[00:18:31] Vince Menzione: important. Yeah.

[00:18:32] Amit Sinha: Oh my goodness. If you think about the renewals playbook

[00:18:34] Vince Menzione: was so huge,

[00:18:35] Amit Sinha: six months, nine, you know, uh, 90 days out, you wanna build that playbook. Mm-hmm. In an agent way when you reach out.

[00:18:43] Amit Sinha: And by the way, you heard, uh, die Talk about 462 billion of uncontested Cloud commits out there. Yep. You want your high risk renewals to go against the high propensity to buy accounts. Right. So imagine that matchmaking, if you were to do it humanly, it’ll take you days. If you had an agent to do it like the now assist agent, it can just be done like that.

[00:19:06] Amit Sinha: So that was the first use case we went after. Nice. The second one was the low dollar automation. We all have businesses that we land, right? Sub 50 K deals, so we have inside sales teams calling on those customers all day long. So now imagine a Gentech solution where you take all those low dollar deals and again, tie to the marketplace.

[00:19:26] Amit Sinha: How can you have express private offers, right, from your opportunities? So those were the two use cases that we went after first and boy, uh, we got some amazing results,

[00:19:36] Vince Menzione: I bet

[00:19:36] Amit Sinha: for one of these companies, Boomi, we showed that 24% higher lift on renewals. That’s like hundreds of millions in impact just in one year alone.

[00:19:46] Vince Menzione: And using AI internally as obviously you’re an AI company. Yeah. How are you thinking about how’s the impact of AI helping the partner function within ServiceNow?

[00:19:54] Marc Monday: I, I think there’s this really wonderful opportunity right now where in the short term, we’re taking busy work out of the partner management profession.

[00:20:05] Marc Monday: Um, partner managers historically have spent a lot of time chasing data and chasing information and really acting as an ombudsman for the partner within the organization. That work is very quickly. Getting identified. That’s phase one. The thing I’m actually a little more excited about is when it can expand the horizon to have different types of conversations, expanding the partnerships, expanding the multi-partner oppor opportunities.

[00:20:29] Marc Monday: That, for me is the next phase, but we, I believe we are the most progressive when it comes to using AI on ourselves and really trying to take the profession to the next level.

[00:20:40] Vince Menzione: Nice. Well, I was gonna, I was gonna, I want to go back to the platform again. ’cause you, you’re, you’re starting, you, you mentioned renewals, you’re mentioning some of the success.

[00:20:50] Vince Menzione: What else can you point to on the success side,

[00:20:52] Amit Sinha: there’s some, uh, amazing research that Sam here has done, uh, with all the data that Wepan has. So we looked at close to a million opportunities and, uh, looked at all the companies doing well. And we actually tabulated how many sellers are engaged on co-sell, not the partnering team, but how many end sellers.

[00:21:11] Amit Sinha: This shows the extent of the transformation that the company has gone through, and what we found was amazing. If more than 50% of your sellers have engaged on 10 or more deals, your ecosystem is exponential. It doesn’t need the kind of the doctoring or the prod or the push to kind of say, Hey, use partners.

[00:21:31] Amit Sinha: The sellers get it themselves, right? So we, we did this analysis and found like, wow, how can we then get sellers to activate? And the bottleneck that we found was. That there are not enough partner managers to assist every seller in the world. I think that seller activation is the unlock that AI can do.

[00:21:50] Amit Sinha: Imagine if you have a partner agent sitting on every account and every opportunity 24 by seven, right? As the world changes, as the world evolves, as the solutions come in. As you know, market events happen. These agents are listening, positioning the right. One of those six partners, or all six partners for that matter, in front of people.

[00:22:10] Amit Sinha: So I feel like that that big unlock is seller activation. Yeah. So if all partner managers do with ai, next is one. Of course, get yourself skilled up and yourself productive. But next, direct it to your own internal sales teams and get them activated on your partnerships because that’s where you will move the revenue lever the fastest, in my opinion.

[00:22:30] Vince Menzione: Fantastic. What advice do you have for whether they be ISV partners or other partners in the room? ’cause we have partners of all types here. Yeah. What would you have, what would you say to them that need to do differently or better?

[00:22:43] Marc Monday: Yeah.

[00:22:44] Vince Menzione: Starting today,

[00:22:46] Marc Monday: I, I don’t wanna be a broken record, but I would just say go faster.

[00:22:48] Marc Monday: However fast you think you’re going, it’s not enough. Yeah. Um, the reality is I think Bill McDermott says like, the market’s never been this fast before and it will never be this slow again. Oh. The reality is this is the pace we run at, and the only way we can run at this pace is if we have the agents doing much of the work for us.

[00:23:09] Marc Monday: So I would say go faster. The second thing I would say is automating a bad process is a bad process. So really go and interrogate the workflow that you’re actually thinking about identifying. I’ve seen too many instances from partners and partnerships where you’re taking a bad process and you’re trying to build automation.

[00:23:29] Marc Monday: Go back and deconstruct it or start fresh blank piece of paper. Um, again, to my metaphor of the rear view mirror and the wind screen, like it’s, we should honor the past. We’ve done a wonderful job in the last 30 years of building all of this stuff. It’s just not built for this speed. So we need to really stay focused on what’s in front of us.

[00:23:49] Vince Menzione: We talked a little bit earlier in one of the other sessions about the playbook and the three year plan, and then maybe moving to sprints. That’s right. How are you, how are you thinking? Are you thinking along the same lines? A

[00:23:59] Marc Monday: hundred percent. Uh, we need to move at the pace. Sorry, I’m, we need to move at the pace that the roadmap is moving.

[00:24:05] Marc Monday: So if we’re doing weekly, monthly, and quarter releases, we don’t wanna whipsaw the channel. We have to be careful of that. But the reality is, if we’re pivoting our product strategies or release strategies on a quarterly basis. We have to have that same level of agility. That’s where the people who’ve grown up in this profession taking really complicated stuff and making it simple is so critical.

[00:24:26] Vince Menzione: Ami, you touched on AI’s role in the partner function. But let’s expand on that. What, what’s it gonna look like in two years? If AI becomes, will it replace the partner function? What, what do you see happening?

[00:24:38] Amit Sinha: Absolutely not. I think, uh, we are seeing this evolution and, and you can see the parallels in the engineering organization.

[00:24:44] Amit Sinha: When Claude Cursor came along, you saw engineering completely transformed as to how products are now built. How they are, how product managers write PRDs, how engineers actually code this, you know, code the scaffolding all the way to the user experience, how it’s tested. Everything has fundamentally changed.

[00:25:01] Amit Sinha: So if you went and asked the engineering leader, how will your role change? Right? Imagine answering that question today, right? It’s fundamentally different. I feel like it’s coming to every function. Whether you want it or not, it’s coming to every function. And the partnership leader will look like the partnership operator that Rob talks about.

[00:25:19] Amit Sinha: Yes. It’ll be about orchestrating real time relationships at the account level, at the opportunity level, and being a hands-on person. Uh, i, I would say even at the leadership level or down to partner managers, how can you cover the breadth of accounts and opportunities that’s out there to, for you to prosecute?

[00:25:36] Amit Sinha: It’ll not look like I’m managing a partnership. It’ll not look like, Hey, I have to offer an MDF. It’ll not look like, Hey, let’s do A QBR, you know, and get all the teams engaged because that’ll be too late essentially. So this operator perspective is what’s gonna change just as it changed in engineering, it’s gonna happen in partnerships

[00:25:56] Vince Menzione: perspective as well.

[00:25:57] Marc Monday: Big plus one on what Rob’s talking about. I, I, I’m a big fan of that and I love this idea of using what’s happening in the developer world as an analog for where we’re going. Yeah. Um, I met a product manager last week and she was saying that she was producing 30 or 40 product requirement docs every week.

[00:26:14] Marc Monday: Um, that’s remarkable output and she can only do that because of the way she’s leveraging ai. The same will be true for a partner manager, a 10 x, a 20 x, a 30 x on each individual once we get to that stage, and it will happen very quickly.

[00:26:29] Amit Sinha: Yeah. Imagine putting a hundred joint account plans together in a day.

[00:26:33] Amit Sinha: Yep.

[00:26:33] Vince Menzione: Right. Incredible.

[00:26:34] Amit Sinha: Imagine putting like five connections on an opportunity just surrounding your deal right now. Right. Doing that.

[00:26:41] Vince Menzione: I couldn’t even, I, I couldn’t even imagine. I know you couldn’t even imagine when we were back in the days we were running PAMs and Yeah, totally. Those resources, what they had to do and what’s all totally automated today.

[00:26:52] Marc Monday: It. It’s true, it’s true. I was, um, I was bemoaning this, I’ve been on the road a lot lately and I was like telling my wife, like, I long for the days where you have one meeting and you go, you know, you go to New York and you do a two hour QBR and you go to a nice dinner and then maybe you walk around Central Park.

[00:27:06] Marc Monday: The reality is you’re doing a hundred of those every single day. It’s a different era. That’s where we need to get the tools to work for people.

[00:27:15] Amit Sinha: Mark, I love your analogy around the rear view mirror versus the windshield. Mm-hmm. You have to see through the windshield.

[00:27:20] Marc Monday: We do. We do. It’s amazing. Don’t be afraid.

[00:27:23] Marc Monday: I, I mean, I would just say do not be afraid. Be excited. We in this room, get to lead the path. Yeah. It is an absolute privilege.

[00:27:32] Vince Menzione: So insightful, gentlemen, you’ve been incredible to be on stage with today. Uh, I we have a le a little less than a minute. I was hoping maybe if there was like one question we could take.

[00:27:42] Vince Menzione: I got John with a mic and then it’s lunchtime after this, so

[00:27:48] Marc Monday: ask on because he can be more pithy.

[00:27:50] Vince Menzione: Yeah.

[00:27:55] Vince Menzione: Well, you’re both are gonna be around here. I hope

[00:27:57] Marc Monday: we will be here.

[00:27:58] Vince Menzione: Mark didn’t have you got to sleep in your own bed last night?

[00:28:00] Marc Monday: Uh, yeah. It was a long day, but yes. I thank you for, it was very late. Thank you so much. Let’s put this on the record. Marks down. We’re having the event in Bellevue. That was great.

[00:28:09] Marc Monday: We’re gonna

[00:28:09] Amit Sinha: bring it back. We’re gonna bring it back to Bellevue.

[00:28:12] Marc Monday: Seven mile commute is the best trip that I’ve had in many, many weeks.

[00:28:17] Amit Sinha: Thank you. Well, thank you, gentlemen. It

[00:28:19] was

[00:28:19] Marc Monday: incredible.

[00:28:20] Vince Menzione: Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network.

[00:28:28] Vince Menzione: Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the Ultimate partner.com for show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live event in Reston, Virginia,

[00:28:44] Marc Monday: October

[00:28:45] Vince Menzione: 26th through October 28th. Until next time. Keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.