Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Theresa Caragol - The Science of Partnering Success
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Theresa Caragol, founder and CEO of AchieveUnite, and bestselling author of Partnering Success. With decades of experience leading global channel strategies and integrations at firms like Extreme Networks and Ciena, Theresa brings deep expertise and a structured approach to unlocking the true value of partnerships. Her work, including pioneering metrics like Partner Lifetime Value, has reshaped how leading organizations build, scale, and measure partner ecosystems.
We dive into the science behind high-performing partner programs, exploring why long-term partner enablement beats transactional thinking, and how hyperscalers are rewriting the rules of engagement for ISVs and tech vendors alike. Theresa also shares how organizations can quantify their partner maturity, leverage psychometric tools to accelerate partner trust, and thoughtfully adopt AI to amplify partnership success. Whether you're building a new program or optimizing an existing one, this episode is packed with strategies that resonate with today's channel professionals navigating rapid change and increased expectations.
Tune in to hear why building trust, designing scalable frameworks, and taking an ecosystem-first approach is no longer optional
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, teresa. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm very well and thank you, Mary Beth, for recommending me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm very excited to have you on. You're obviously doing something well, because I think three different people in the space of two weeks recommended you, so it was really, really exciting to have you on. Maybe, for the uninitiated, you could give us an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, teresa Carragon, the founder and CEO of Achieve United, the partnering success company, and we have a book called Partnering Success the Force Multiplier for Exponential Growth. It has hit bestseller in 28 categories around the world and it's very exciting because we're doing a lot of team building and partner building and partner conferences around the topic of partnering and what's the science and the system for success.
Speaker 1:That is excellent, I think, obviously. Well, we're quite literally called Partnerships Unraveled. I've spent 10 years building channels and it's really great to hear someone sort of evangelizing both the fun reasons but a lot of the cynical reasons around why partnerships are so important and successful.
Speaker 2:And they're so important and they're now becoming an imperative for every single organization. From its inception, it needs to have a strategy for partnering, and I think that's what we have to really instill in companies for growth.
Speaker 1:So maybe let's dial it back. You obviously have had senior partnership roles in extreme networks and various other places. What are some of the experiences and challenges that you went through? That sort of meant oh hang on, I need to put this pen to paper and sort of explain how this does work, how this should work.
Speaker 2:I remember being in my early 20s and opening up a CRN magazine. It was a hard magazine and it was all these boys and they were channel chiefs and I said I'm going to be one of those someday. And so by the time I was 30, I think I was in those magazines and you felt good, right. And then you realize that and I had the privilege of doing business in 60 countries around the world and you know, negotiating amazing partnerships and alliances and those things over the years which lets me get to do this because I did that and integrating 11 different companies into either Sienna or Extreme or Nortel over the years, and yeah, and those are the kinds of things that shape now what I do and what our company does, because nobody really understood partnering. Then you know and, and we think we do, but until you actually live in the shoes of your partner, you don't Sure.
Speaker 1:One of the values that we spoke a lot about was partner lifetime value. Right, I think it's a metric that people maybe subconsciously think they understand or they think, well, I know what customer lifetime value, so I'm assuming partner lifetime value is just the continuation of that. Talk me through how people really or how that metric really should be conceived, and why it's so important.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a great question, alex. So partner lifetime value which we actually trademarked in 2018 and own the trademark on the concept of partner lifetime value, which everybody knows customer lifetime value Okay, great. You know, we treat a customer not just for the transaction or the thing we do with them. We treat them for the lifetime of working with them. So partner lifetime value is a force multiplier.
Speaker 2:So think about customer lifetime value but it's that on steroids and partner lifetime value is and what we proved in our study with the University of Glasgow, with 150 tech leaders around the world that the organizations that treated partnerships for invested for the long run, didn't treat them as a transaction, were very committed and very consistent, were the long run, didn't treat them as a transaction, were very committed and very consistent, were the most successful, the most profitable and actually had the highest growth. Now fast forward companies are really starting to get that and private equities are starting to get that and you know the VCs are starting to get that. So everybody knows they need an ecosystem for growth and that is, and the premise is, how do you build that to scale and how do you do it right the first time?
Speaker 1:I've always found the sort of best ideas are the ones that when you hear them, you just go, yeah, obviously. If I've never put it in that and and when you think of, like really well-run sales businesses, they're not. They don't have this huge leaky bucket of customers right, they're not. They're going, no, no. They don't have this huge leaky bucket of customers right there. They're not there going, no, no. What we care about is year one of the contract. The reason google and meta and all these companies are so valuable is because people keep buying from them, because they make really and the the same as to channel design right.
Speaker 1:if, if we're building great partnerships that are going to continue to be fruitful from day 30 to day 330 and go on, that tells me that, hey, we're doing something that is both valuable to the end user because otherwise why would they keep working with us is valuable to the partnership. Talk me through the experience that you've had in terms of explaining, narrating what feels very obvious, but also revolutionary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question because and there are gamuts of you know you start to be able to plot where organizations are and where people are in this journey. You know, are you a partnering novice or is your company a partnering novice? Because if you are, there are certain things that you have to do before you try to be over here. And I can also see now. We will assess organizations and we can tell when they're hitting the wall of where they have to go to the next level of maturity and certain things have to change in order for them to get the growth that they want. And then, you know, sometimes you'll have companies who are very good at partnering but the people inside it have to learn and ramp up, you know, especially when you get new people. But the most often I see are the people who are really good and they're in novice companies and they have to take them on the journey.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I think you know. I feel at this point, 200 executives and 10 years doing partnerships I feel like I really understand partnerships. And then AWS came along and turned everything upside down. Hyperscalers is obviously partnerships, but done to a degree that's sort of unimaginably powerful, because there's a partnership with hyperscaler and the end user, but that also flows then back through other types of partnerships and then there's ISV. So it feels like partnerships inception. Why is that so powerful? Maybe take us through the value set. Why is that so powerful for ISVs? Why is that so beneficial for end users? Talk us through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think these hyperscalers is the era you know, aws, microsoft, google and even meta coming on.
Speaker 2:Microsoft, google and even Meta coming on, these big aggregators is sort of like this next generation of what we used to think about as distribution or TSBs. They are the marketplace, and the degree to which these ISBs can learn to co-sell, can learn to leverage one another inside of the AWS ecosystem is where unbelievable power exists. And the other thing that's happened is these hyperscalers are changing the game. So the way that the sellers used to sell, the way that the marketers used to market, you can't do the same thing anymore. It's not going to work. And we know a lot of people that have been in this business and industry a long time who have to cross a whole chasm and they have to embrace a whole new way and I think that is really hard. I actually think it's easier for the younger companies that have a lot of like Gen Zers and they're already in that culture, versus the tech companies who've been doing stuff the same way, the old way. And yeah, these hyperscalers are changing the game and there's a new customer journey.
Speaker 1:And so when you're working with one of these companies that maybe is a little bit more legacy, a little bit more traditional, how do you, I suppose, even just quantify the scope of the change? Because I think that's one of the things I sat down with some really senior people NVIDIA, talking about AI and one of the things they were talking about was like, yeah, 40% of our job is just getting people to understand the enormity of what's about to happen. I imagine, Teresa, for you that's somewhat similar. Right, You're having to explain the scope of what an AWS is able to achieve. How do you really land that at people who just aren't really in that world?
Speaker 2:I don't know if you can land it if they're not there yet. You know, to be very honest, I think there has to be people that because I've really watched this and you have to go to places where they have the headspace and the brainpower to grasp what the full ecosystem looks like. And that is a journey, and so I can now tell the ones who are closer and who can get there and the ones that we have to either start at basics, or maybe they shouldn't even do it right now because they're so far away from understanding what's required for it, or they place like two bets instead of a full ecosystem bet. You know.
Speaker 1:And maybe then, like double clicking, you're speaking to someone and you go, okay, there's real appetite and intent there, but they want to test. Right, no one just goes, hey, we're going to sink a hundred million dollars into building this partnership and all our focus. So when people want to start testing the waters and measuring those incremental first results for partnering with a hyperscaler, what should that look like? What does that sort of conception feel?
Speaker 2:So we have a very comprehensive assessment that will tell an organization how ready they are to do this and how ready they are to do it with the hyperscalers, and it will tell us where our strengths are and where we will fail.
Speaker 2:And so we really usually run that. And the great thing is, now we can really benchmark organizations against others to figure out how mature and how ready they are, and we have a lot of best practices based on that. So we like to start at the assessment phase because then you can plot, and I think CEOs love that, because they can see where they are. They can see where they are relative to themselves, they can see where they are by region, they can see where they are by vertical, they can see where they are by partner type and they can see where they are relative to their competition. And then we start to take them on the journey and we can pinpoint what needs to happen in order for them to be successful. Is it the sales teams that are the weakest? Is it the program and infrastructure that has to get ready? Is it all of those things? And so then we can take them on the journey of what has to happen for success.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I always find that sort of competitor landscape that's always the one that I see resonates so much more tightly, because it's one thing going yeah, you're doing well, or we believe you're doing really well, and there's another to go you're 3% better than so-and-so. And then that's just such a gratifying feeling or terrifying feeling, depending on what the results are so that you can stabilize and drive change. Stabilize and drive change.
Speaker 2:I know, except the thing that, like as an example, this morning I was on the phone or I was on a Zoom with someone and the conversation was around she none of her competitors are doing partnering well. So in her case we had to go benchmark her against complementaries, best in classes that are in a different domain, because nobody in our space is good, you know, and you don't want to compare yourself to nobody that's good in partnering. You want to compare yourself to somewhere that you can get to the next level. And so really being careful about when we also love to do benchmarks that's one of our superpowers and really being careful about who you're benchmarking and why, and then how do you seize those results and build them into your strategy.
Speaker 1:And so we are. Obviously, it wouldn't be a podcast in 2025 unless I mentioned AI, and I'm going to start rolling my eyes because we have to.
Speaker 1:But one of the things I think is really interesting is partnerships typically has been very relationship led. It's about long-term relationships. How do I cultivate those? I'm going to get enormous leverage because we're going to build such trust and it's great. And then AI and automation come in. How do you see those two worlds sort of intersecting? Are they additive? Are they competitive? What is your sort of view there?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Ai is so additive, strategic, because it is such an opportunity to disrupt, to innovate, to streamline to, you know, increase productivity, like it has all these benefits. A thing is, though, is you have to, you have to bring AI into the organization and the right areas related to partnering, and don't try to foil the ocean. And then you have to bring the people on the journey and the competencies, and that is where you can't do one without the other, which is why we do advisory and people, because the training is just as important as the consulting and the strategy.
Speaker 1:And when you're trying to, because I 100% I think when we talk about partnerships or AI, some of it's winning the hearts and minds, right? Hey, trust me, it's going to be difficult for a while and then it's going to get a lot easier, and that's why we're all going to do this. How do you go about emotionally building that trust? You know, when we're talking about companies with thousands of people in 100 different countries, how do you go about taking them on that journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll use that. I won't name the name of the company, but it's very exciting because they are using our trust index, our psychometric index that measures trust, to build a common language across the entire company on how to build trust and accelerate trust. And then they're tying that with AI, talk about pioneering, and they're doing a whole campaign to take their organization on a mission around AI. And then they're using this, our trust, which is really fun and lively, and it's like the five love language is a business and you know it's just there's five profiles and everyone has a dime. And now we've done this with 5,000 people and we can see, like only three people out of 5,000 have had three profiles. You have one, maybe two profiles that are dominant. So that means that everyone in the world builds trust in one of these five ways and leads those trust muscles in one of these five ways.
Speaker 2:So imagine if everyone starts to have a common language, like body language. Like you start to understand, you're like, oh my goodness, I have a whole nother language. It's not just the English language, it's the body language. Like you start to understand, you're like, oh my goodness, I have a whole nother language. It's not just the English language, it's the body language, it's not just the English language, it's the trust language. And so there is as we, because as we accelerate AI, we have to accelerate trust, right side by side with it.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, Teresa, we've got a huge amount of trust on this podcast because we always ask our current guest to recommend our next guest. Who do you have in mind?
Speaker 2:I think Rachel Teller would be amazing, and I am looking forward to having her do the podcast with you. And then I have two others that I thought of during the day today that I'll send you separately, but Rachel's amazing, so start with her Amazing.
Speaker 1:Looking forward to having Rachel on Teresa. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome.
Speaker 2:Thanks, alex, have a wonderful day.