Friends with Benefits
Welcome to Friends with Benefits, the business podcast about revenue-generating partnerships.
Not "business time" with friends.
This podcast is for those looking to build professional relationships that last and add tremendous value to your company and maybe even, you personally.
Join hosts Jason and Sam Yarborough, who happen to be married, as they talk with some of the best in the industry.
We will be tackling topics like what good partnerships looks like, how relationships can build immense value for your business, and why even though strategy, pipeline, and growth are the goals, it all comes down to relationships. Let’s face it, business is done person-to-person.
Discover how personal connections transcend the boundaries of business time. Come hang out with us for inspiring stories, actionable strategies, and valuable insights that will empower you to forge meaningful partnerships in today’s competitive landscape.
Because we all know, business time is personal.
Friends with Benefits
Bob Moore on Alignment, Data Sharing, and the Future of Ecosystem-Led Growth
Can the future of B2B partnerships be built on a foundation of trust and data sharing? Join us as we kick off season two of the Friends with Benefits podcast with Bob Moore, co-founder of Crossbeam, who shares invaluable insights from his journey in redefining the partner tech landscape. Listen to Bob's compelling story of Crossbeam's inception, navigating the GDPR challenges of 2018, and tackling the daunting "cold start problem" to build a thriving platform connecting over 30,000 companies today. Bob's experience sheds light on what it takes to overcome industry skepticism and achieve success against the odds.
Our conversation dives into the importance of aligning partnerships with revenue teams, a crucial component for maximizing the potential of partner ecosystems. We unpack the common pitfalls partner leaders face and the necessity of securing buy-in from sales leadership. The role of RevOps in integrating systems and metrics is emphasized, along with the strategic evolution of partner teams as force multipliers in the business world. In this rapidly changing environment, adapting from transactional roles to more strategic ones is key for maintaining relevance and driving growth.
Join us on this insightful journey into the future of partnerships and strategic growth.
Welcome to the Friends with Benefits podcast, a business podcast about revenue-generating partnerships, not a podcast about business time with friends. We're your co-hosting couple. I'm Jason.
Speaker 1:And I'm Sam. Welcome to the show, friends friends, family.
Speaker 2:We are back with season two yeah, friends with benefits. Welcome back to the show, sam.
Speaker 1:It's been a while it has been a while.
Speaker 2:I hope we still know how to do this I know I'm hoping that we're actually recording this, so we should see see what's going on. But man, season two is looking great. The guest lineup is already looking good. We're kicking off today with what I would consider probably the friend with the most benefits to all partner programs across the globe, mr Bob Moore, riding in on his glorious white horse called Crossbeam, aka Pam, to deliver this glorious partner day that we all longed for forever and ever. So, bob, welcome to the show, my friend.
Speaker 3:Great to be here. I've been watching. I'm one of those first-time caller, long-time listener types that have been following you all from episode one, so it's great to finally make it on.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I know we've been talking about it for quite some time. We weren't able to make it happen in first season, but here we are kicking off season two with you, and couldn't imagine a better way to start things off.
Speaker 3:Incredible, yeah, so pumped.
Speaker 2:Excellent.
Speaker 1:First off.
Speaker 2:We didn't. We didn't get a chance to say it last season, but I wanted to congratulate you on your book which is we tried to get you on during that time, but didn't get a chance to.
Speaker 3:So congratulations on ecosystem led growth. Don't worry, we'll talk about it, we'll get there. Yeah, it's been, uh, we can get into it, but it's been a very fun and surprising. At times, uh, ride kind of following the long tail of of that thing and where it's gone. So, uh, now it's actually maybe as good a time as any, cause now I have all the inside baseball and the uh, the stories of what happens when you release one of those things, so it's been great, though, thank you, we'll have some questions.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's dive in, cause I have so many questions for you and we don't have all the world time in the world. Um, obviously, if you don't know what crossbeam is and you're listening to the show, stop listening and go Google it immediately, but we're going to assume most of you do. So I want to start from the very beginning. Like founding crossbeam, like what? Now it's such an obvious problem and you know, everybody knows what it is and the problem that it solves. But I can assume that back then it maybe wasn't so obvious.
Speaker 1:Talk about that.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you all the reasons. I got laughed out of rooms in 2018. So I think there was a lot to crossbeam that just was kind of contrarian and a lot of things working against it. For one thing, 2018 was the year that GDPR showed up on the scene and was introduced. I think it was March 2018 that it was launched. If you look at the startup ecosystem from that year, there's a whole host, a whole generation of companies whose entire premise was compliance and lock down your data and make sure that there's these extra layers of protection that exists so that you're doing your appropriate due diligence to protect that information. And here I go showing up in venture capital offices saying, hey, I've got a great idea for a data sharing startup. It flies in the face of everything that was kind of like on brand or on trend. Then you multiply that against the fact that if you think about how Crossbeam works and anybody that's used it has experienced this the product gets better the more partners you have who are on it and because of that, in the state we're in now, with 30,000 companies on it, it's this great network effect, defensible moat, all these wonderful things.
Speaker 3:Right Back then it was known as the cold start problem, where if no one is on it and the only way to get value is by collaborating with other people who are on it, you're not going to have a really good time, like our first customer that signed up was guaranteed to have no value proposition and no good user experience. And there are plenty of examples of these network effects businesses where the activation energy to kind of bring the thing to life just never gets reached. It's too capital intensive. The immediate value proposition is too strong. You know, getting people to use it was basically asking them to spend their social capital, their business capital, their personal capital, in order to recruit other people to use it, just so that they could get their own benefit out, let alone us having a revenue model behind generating that. So it was a very long tail, big swing of the bat thing.
Speaker 3:And then, frankly, the third thing that is worth saying out loud is partner tech is historically just not a great market for technology investors. There are plenty of companies run by people that we love, who are fantastic humans, who build pretty darn good businesses, but venture capital firms don't make investments in pretty darn good businesses, right? They only look for situations where you can return your entire fund with every single deal needs to have that potential tail to it in order for the math to make sense, especially in very early stage firms. So you look at the universe of companies in quote unquote partner tech and there's not really a IPO scale business among them, right? There's not really a IPO scale business among them, right, like the best of the best, the absolute best, make it to the low eight figures of annual revenue and start growing 10 or 20% a year and maybe find exits to private equity firms. But that's not what venture firms are really signing up for.
Speaker 3:It's not to say they're not good businesses, but it required a little bit of a paradigm shift around what it could mean to be a quote unquote partner tech business, or perceived as being a partner tech in terms of what the upside looked like and where it could go. So, yeah, I found myself in 2018, you know kind of conceptualizing this thing that felt like it could be really big and defy the odds of all three of those category things, and that was kind of what my pitch deck became, which is like let me tell you why this terrible idea is actually the best idea you've seen this year and we were fortunate to find some investors who were really aligned with that and got on board and that started the first download.
Speaker 2:Did you have to find investors that believed in partnerships to begin with? That believed in partnerships to begin with.
Speaker 3:Honestly, no. I tell you what Crossbeam I often say is one of these companies that could have never been founded by a first-time founder. And, frankly, if you look at Reveal as well, who we recently merged with and came to the market with a very similar business model and we competed neck and neck with for years also founded by a repeat founder, someone who had built a business and exited that business. And there's a couple of reasons why. One of the repeat founder reasons is that the cold start problem ultimately was solved by my Rolodex, the first couple of companies that joined not just the first couple, the first 50 maybe that joined the reason we got them excited about the platform is because I had worked really closely with them or literally worked for or at those companies in my prior businesses.
Speaker 3:So the first company to ever sign up for CrossFit was Stitch Data, which was a company that I co-founded and was the board chair of, and we had just sold it to Talent. So who's Stitch Data's biggest partner? It's Looker. Well, looker signs up via Stitch Data, looker very soon after gets acquired by Google and is folded into GCP, and with Stitch getting acquired by Talent, we end up in the Talent ecosystem and you get these very interesting branches off my prior company before that I sold to Magento, which is now part of Adobe and is in the e-commerce ecosystem, and from that we're able to get into that e-commerce tech stack with just these initial personal relationships that are born out of long built trust with human beings inside those orgs. So that's one reason why.
Speaker 3:But, getting to the answer to your question, the second reason why I think this had to be a repeat founder business is if you look at the capital that went in to Crossbeam, more than half of the dollars in our seed round came from people who had just made money by virtue of me having sold my most recent company. It was repeat investors back to the till that I was working with again because we had been successful in in successful enough in in the last venture that I could get them excited about. Like I gotta be honest, I don't know that any of them were a partner tech investors or were particularly excited about partner tech. I think what they were excited about was the fact that they had just seen me go through 10 years of chewing glass to create an outcome in a business that wasn't always easy. They knew I didn't quit.
Speaker 2:You knew had to build a product.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think, like I had enough. They didn't know if it was going to work or not, but they knew they would at least have a team that had enough muscle memory and scar tissue to not make stupid mistakes and that was inherently de-risking. And I think that's a lot of the calculus for a lot of these early stage funds no-transcript.
Speaker 2:So I think we got introduced around 2018, 2019. And I remember Fabian Ekstrom, french, and I still a good friend of mine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:We tested out all the platforms and came across this one. I'm like all right, this is a great one, this is finally a good one, we can get out of spreadsheets. And this is finally a good one, we can get out of spreadsheets. And it saved us a world of trouble. So it was just mostly me and him mapping data back and forth between PFL and Madison Logic for about three months before other partners came on.
Speaker 3:But yeah, to watch it kind of grow and rise to what it is now incredible. Yeah, I remember those glory days and it's so funny because in building one of these things, you know you go through different kind of seasons of life as the company goes through different stages. But there's something about the first six months or so of the business that are just inherently unforgettable and I think I remember every single human being and every single company and like what their company ID number was and the original people and who they were connected to, people and who they were connected to. Like there was that time where the difference between making it and not making it was how good of a job we did. With this initial atomic network and these little individual, one one-on-one partnerships, Can we get it far enough along that the people involved are actually motivated to then go invite the rest of their partner ecosystem? Or, you know, when they, when they change jobs, they bring into the next company that they went to, which has also been a really huge kind of growth vector for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, no doubt, and for those of you at home who are listening and maybe not familiar with, crossbeam basically allows you to discover and leverage your partnerships by sharing data in a very secure way about who your customers are, their customers overlaps, et cetera, and stuff like that, aka account mapping. So, bob, my question to you, and kind of what I'm curious at, is like, now that you're a few years down the road, right, you've probably seen some people do great things, do bad things, but let's focus on right now, like what's, what's some of the biggest mistakes you're seeing partners leaders make when it comes to using some like partner data, especially that they're getting from Crossbeam?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think there's there's kind of, especially that they're getting from Crossbeam, yeah. So I think there's there's kind of there's a real big fork in the road that shows up in the course of I won't just I won't attach this to Crossbeam specifically, I think maybe I'll I'll say the journey of trying to try to do ecosystem like growth right, trying to drive revenue through your partner ecosystem and use your partner ecosystem as a source of leverage for your company ecosystem and use your partner ecosystem as a source of leverage for your company. And that big fork in the road is how tightly are the North Star metrics and the desired outcomes of the partnership team aligned with those of the revenue team?
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 3:I think it's very, very clear, looking at a given organization, if we come in on day zero and we kind of size it up, the best companies that use Crossbeam, the best that make the most of the data, are the ones where there's a very high amount of alignment that exists between the CRO, the revenue ops or sales ops team and the partnership organization, even if it's a pure play like ISV tech partner organization and not just a channel org.
Speaker 3:And where we start to see issues and gaps is when you've got partner teams that are incentivized to create behaviors that the sales leadership doesn't actually care about and that can trickle its way all the way to things that seem really important, like attribution right. I was meeting with the CRO of a publicly traded company last week who's a customer of ours, and every time I meet with their partner team and their partner leadership they say the most important thing on the roadmap for Crossbeam, we really want to adopt all your attribution features. We want to get credit where credit's due. We want to make sure that we understand every single time a partner has touched a deal or influenced a deal. We want to make sure that we can measure the impact of the partner ecosystem on the pipeline and I meet with the CRO and I mentioned that and he says I could not possibly care less about that as a priority.
Speaker 3:I just want more pipeline and I understand why the incentive systems are set up the way they are.
Speaker 3:But in the organizations that we see that have figured this out, there's enough intrinsic alignment and belief and buy-in from the sales and revenue leadership that these ecosystems are force multipliers that the bigger questions become okay, how do we actually arm the reps in the field? Reps in the field, how do we actually arm the folks that are deciding which companies make it into the pipeline and deciding on the messaging and the way in which we outreach to those companies, deciding how we qualify leads, deciding how we forecast? How does the data, this firehose of data, coming out of your partner's CRM systems through Crossbeam, this ecosystem data? How does it change the way we do that work for the better? How does it make us spend more time with the prospects that are more likely to close at higher ACVs on shorter timeframes? And then you can get into this universe where you can very clearly do the measurement to say, look, there's cohort A and cohort B of companies, one of which is deeply ingrained in your ecosystem and the other businesses that you collaborate with and one of which isn't, and you compare those cohorts and we've never seen a case where the data prefers the non-ecosystem qualified companies right, the number one informant of not just validating the existence of the partner ecosystem, but validating the relevancy of a sales playbook or a sales strategy.
Speaker 3:Partner ecosystem, but validating the relevancy of a sales playbook or a sales strategy, that's the directional focus that the best companies have, and I think, frankly, that's the difference between us, as a business, having 10 users at a company and having 1,000 users at a company Like we. The incentives are very well aligned there as well, because we want to get the reach of this data into the most places possible, and that just so happens that that's how the impact shows up as well.
Speaker 2:So if we go back to the CRO you were talking to right and there's that massive gap of misalignment, like, where do you think that's coming from? How is that created If a partner team is like, nope, this is the biggest strategic strategy we've got, biggest strategic impact we've got in the company CRO is like, well, that's bullshit. No, so where does that massive misalignment come from?
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is like a generational trauma, right? I feel like this goes back to look. There's the attempt to diagnose it, right, which I can certainly do, and then there's like the symptoms of it, which are very easy to spot, and maybe, maybe, both of those are worth.
Speaker 1:But even further, to like what can the partner leader do to combat that? Because we all want pipeline and we all want to be aligned. But I think it's one thing to say that, it's another thing to do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's. That's very true. So there's a really awesome chapter in the book. There's a guy by the name of Dave Goldstein over at Braze Love, dave, where you know, when you go through firefighter school, they teach you about this thing called the God.
Speaker 3:It's got an awesome name the tetrahedron, the fire tetrahedron and the idea is that there are these three things that always need to exist in order for fire to exist, like you need an ignition source, you need heat, or or you need oxygen and you need fuel, and when you get those things combined you end up with the ability to create fire.
Speaker 3:And he has a kind of an analog for that, which is you know how to create a highly functioning ELG organization, right Ecosystem-like growth organization.
Speaker 3:And it really is that you need not just this kind of spiritual alignment to exist between leadership and the partner org and the revenue org, but there's also a third leg of that tetrahedron, which is you need ops, and when it is not all speaking the same language or living inside the same systems or living alongside the same tools, where the jobs to be done are being done by these different teams, then you start to get this kind of continental drift away from each other, where people start speaking different languages, and Crossbeam is a really interesting focal point for that, because Crossbeam can be either of those If you're a partnership team, where you use Crossbeam as the partner team and it's your source of truth and it's what you look at for where there's intersections between you and partners and which deals have been influenced, but no one in the revenue org ever logs into it and looks at it and it's just kind of your tool of the trade inside of partnerships and the people that are logging into Clary, that are logging into Gong, that are logging into Name, whatever your tool is where you're capturing this knowledge about what the nuts and bolts of how the growth of the company is happening.
Speaker 3:So the work of making those two things actually the same thing is really a rev ops issue and it's a question of you know, you're not always going to be able to start with, hey, let's completely change the KPIs here, because you can't manage what you can't measure.
Speaker 3:But I think what you can do is you can take a really strong, intellectually honest look at how disparate and kind of air-gapped the different systems that different teams are using are are, and when you're living in these different worlds, it makes it very, very easy to have different KPIs.
Speaker 3:Because if you're looking at gain site, all day it's going to tell you that GRR is the most important metric that you could possibly have. If you're looking at Clary, it's going to be how much pipeline you've got, and if you're looking at Crossbeam, it's probably going to be source and influence revenue by the partner team. And these are all great metrics, but only certain ones end up making it in the board deck and I think the soul searching that a lot of partner teams very often go through is what is it going to take for us to be able to speak about the work we do in the language that actually shows up in the board deck, at the board level, because that's where it's going to really be measurable as the best impact, and you can't do that unless you're weaving your way back into the systems of record, namely the CRM.
Speaker 2:I think that's the most important piece of the puzzle right now. When we took CrossFame and pumped it into everything the revenue team was doing the marketing team was doing a drift Ops was like our white horse. We built, process and operationalized every bit of CrossFame that we could to make it work for the sales team as well as the marketing team, and that's what took our team, quite honestly, from being a group of glorified bdrs to to allow us to become more gtm strategist and working with our partners to actually build a program that could, you know, thrive and scale yeah, and this get you know.
Speaker 3:You raise a really great point there too, because there's this, this, this other thing that's a little counterintuitive about the really successful deployment of these strategies, which is that in some cases it can shrink partner teams or it can lead to partner teams being able to hold steady at a similar size but shift from being incremental to being strategic and being a force multiplier.
Speaker 3:So one of the traditional growth levers that leads to more hiring inside of a partner multiplier, so one of the traditional growth levers that leads to more hiring inside of a partner team is when you have these processes where some human being exists in the middle.
Speaker 3:Right, you've got some partner account manager or some partner manager that has a very direct and personal and human workflow that needs to be inserted anytime there's a partner assist on a deal or a partner collaboration on something that goes on in the pipeline, and I think what a lot of these companies are finding out is that sure, there's certainly a place for that, but that just scratches the surface on the playbooks that can be run with how you get leverage out of your ecosystem, and there are things that are very, very one-to-many.
Speaker 3:There are ways that you can arm sales reps and systems with data in a way where a human doesn't have to hand deliver that data every time. But you also don't have to give up all of the world's secrets to all of your junior, most employees, in order to do it. And the way to hold that glue together is just this very selective, deliberate construction of playbooks that lean on this stuff and kind of give people the context they need to make smarter decisions. Lean on this stuff and kind of give people the context they need to make smarter decisions and kind of turn your ecosystem into this giant fire hose of buying signal and kind of you know predictable intent that might exist inside of your you know your prospective buyer base and that doesn't require a human in the middle waving their hand on every single deal.
Speaker 1:Totally. You know you just said something that I think is really interesting and this might be something that has like matured with the, with the lifeline of of cross beam. But you know I've talked to partner leaders that are like, well, I don't want to just like give my sales team full control over that data, because then I lose the relationship and I lose the trust of the partner, when in reality it's. That's a shift of your role as the partner person. Like you just said it. You need to become strategic versus transactional.
Speaker 1:So, like how you know from a partner person. It's like, okay, well, if, if my sales team has this data, what can I do to make that scalable? And it's a shift in mindset for the partner person to be more effective in their role rather than a middleman, as you just mentioned.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you're very right and you pick up on something very astute, which is this is something that I think has come with maturity as Crossroom has scaled and as we've gotten into more, very successful, larger scale enterprise organizations and seen how extremely well-run companies know how to do this and do it well, and we've learned from them. We've learned from our customers on what it is that creates inputs and outputs that work. But there's one other thing, huge thing that's happened in the midst of that same timeframe, which is post-pandemic in the face of inflation, interest rates went from nothing to north of 5% and we went through the SaaS apocalypse, right, and every company in the B2B SaaS universe went through layoffs, and very often multiple rounds. And guess who was impacted in a lot of those rounds of layoffs? The partnership teams.
Speaker 3:In fact in the first waves of those rounds.
Speaker 3:So it forces you to, if you find yourself in one of these partner roles saying feeling angst about this idea of giving up control or giving up your ability to kind of have your hands in these processes, or not being able to get the right amount of direct credit for everything where it's due, you got to ask yourself the question of is my intervention in what would otherwise be a very fluid process within my business something that's actually helping the business, or is it designed to protect myself?
Speaker 3:Because I think what came out in those waves of layoffs is that senior executives making really hard decisions in times of crisis just didn't actually believe that these partner teams were adding significant incremental value to justify still having so many of them. And we've seen that at so many companies that we work with and it's a hard pill to swallow and every situation is a little different, but it's also a little bit of an unfortunate reality check where the teams that thrive and the folks that stayed are very often ones where they knew how to build systems and they knew how to create scale and leverage out of the work that they were doing, as opposed to scaling the number of human beings linearly with the amount of impact that they could create, because already in this conversation we've talked about quite a few personas, revops being maybe the latest and greatest but as a partner leader, it is your job and we've talked about this at Nausea on the podcast to build those internal partnerships with revenue, with now RevOps, with CS, all of those things.
Speaker 1:Yep, as Crossbeam entered the market, I'm going to make an assumption that your first persona was the partner leader.
Speaker 2:Totally accurate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And so now that's shifted to be the holistic go-to-market function, so including sales leader etc. So you kind of just alluded to this, but is that a result of the market? Is it because ELG is now the hot topic? The market? Is it because ELG is now the hot topic? Is it because, as you just mentioned, partner people aren't?
Speaker 3:getting the job done and we need to now expand the reach. What's your take on that? Yeah, so I think this is one of those things where you kind of need to hold multiple truths at the same time, because there are a lot of kind of conflating factors here. I do think there's a, you know, in the movie I think it's mean girls where one of the girls is trying to invent a new piece of slang. It's like fetch and they're like yeah it's a thing, right, I have this.
Speaker 3:This saying it was like stop trying to make ecosystem led growth a thing, right. Stop trying near bound to, says the author. Yeah, and this is this. Is the gut check, right? This is the like. Let's be intellectually honest. Which is the question of like? Is the? Are we doing this because we wish it exists, because it would benefit us specifically, or are we doing it because it is this continuous validation showing up from the market, where there is demand for some way to encapsulate this value story that's being told over and over and over again, but using different terms, using different language, using different jargon right?
Speaker 3:And I think the livelihood and the survival of ecosystem-like growth over what now is two plus years of it being out there, including a year of having the book in the market, is, I know when to quit. We've given up on plenty of failed features. We've given up on plenty of weird terms. We've given up on For a while we were called partner ecosystem platforms. I think a Gartner came up with that one and I used to call us an escrow service for data, which was a little too fintech for people, but I was into it. We've spent time doing this.
Speaker 3:Nothing has lasted as long as ELG has, and I think it's because we weren't trying to make fetch a thing Like the market created and demonstrated the existence of this pool. That really was a byproduct of all these other factors happening at the same time, and Crossbeam and the data that we surface is one of them. If we never existed, I'm certain some other company would have that did the same thing. So I don't think we deserve credit for anything other than great timing. But beyond that, you kind of enter into that same sass apocalypse period and you find that the, the playbooks that were working before, uh, if they still advertising targeting, or it is things like GDPR and CCPA having an impact on how people directly target folks.
Speaker 3:There is kind of this call for differentiated growth strategy that can no longer come from a bunch of third-party data scraping and cold calling. And also, not every company has the wealth of first-party data that they can just scrape the visitors to their own website all day and still grow at the rates that they want to grow. And this movement around second-party data right, not the first-party stuff from the pixels you drop on your properties, not the third-party stuff that you buy from the data broker businesses of the world of which we could all name a bunch but this stuff where it's second party, it's the knowledge of the people that you have a relationship with, that you are strategically aligned with. That, by definition, is very scalable because there are more and more of those as your business gets bigger. So the ecosystem grows as you grow. It's proprietary to you because nobody has the same ecosystem you have, and it's efficient because you're not actually paying for this data. This data is something that arrives as a direct result of this kind of one plus one equals three. Natural economic dynamic that exists out there in kind of the game theory of ecosystem building. Economic dynamic that exists out there in kind of the game theory of ecosystem building. So I think that evolution to get back to your question, right the evolution into the sales buyer as a persona, I think, showed up because we were economically incentivized to do it is the honest truth.
Speaker 3:You can sign up for CrossFit for a couple hundred bucks a month, right. You can plop down a credit card and buy our self-serve thing and it's like a classic PLG product. You can onboard very, very affordably. There's also a free tier. There's also a paid tier in the mid-market that gets you access to a lot of extremely cool, really high value stuff where the ACV is in the tens of thousands of dollars. There's a product for large enterprises where the ACV is in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars depending on the size of your deployment and some other factors. And what we saw time and time again was that you know those deals that grew from somebody plopping down a credit card to somebody using the mid-market use case, to somebody doing an enterprise-wide deployment. They only grew when the Dave Goldstein ELG tetrahedron was achieved.
Speaker 3:And if there wasn't this multi-threading, if there wasn't this cross-organizational alignment, we got stuck at a 20 or 30K ACV inside of companies where we just existed on Partnerships Island and where not enough bridges and tunnels have been built from Partnerships Island to the rest of that revenue org, not just for that partner team to be successful but for us as a business to be successful in our own internal deployments there, and we want our customers to be successful.
Speaker 3:We're very aligned in that way, like we're only successful if our customers are successful. So in that regard, I think the best thing that we could do to make the highest number of our 30,000 companies that use the platform as successful as possible is for us to be able to help and assist those partnership teams do the hard work of making their organization actually more fluidly value creating and interacting with the rest of the revenue organization. And that's what we decided to go with kind of a lot of the positioning and the roadmap, and it's the reason the book exists. It's the reason it's, you know, it's the place we put all this energy now, because I think it's the path of salvation for the entirety of our customer base in an era where nothing is easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Agreed. There's a lot to unpack there. Are you finding, as you're coming in offering that assist, that the revenue teams are becoming more open as you're coming in as a different party versus just the, the partner manager, trying to fight that battle?
Speaker 1:Validate their job.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and I think this is I, um, uh, uh. I'm actually having a lot of fun having these revenue team conversations, because what's what's neat is, in a extremely high percentage of cases, they've heard of cross beam, they're familiar with the brand, they've never seen the product and they don't totally get what it does. Uh and but in a lot of these cases, their company is like stood up on cross beam Even though it could be in their CRM, even though it does.
Speaker 2:But in a lot of these cases, their company is like stood up on cross Even though it could be in their CRM, even though it literally is already in their CRM. I talked to a ton of programs like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's so incredibly true. We're like literally the hardest. 90% of the work has already been done. The partner team has jumped through these incredible hurdles.
Speaker 3:But there's something about the enablement and the implementation details where it's almost impossible for partner teams to tell a sales team what to do, to tell a sales leader how to train their team, to tell them what tools and what data are going to influence it, and you can make the best case in the world.
Speaker 3:But there's something very interesting maybe in that generational trauma stuff of the relationship between partner teams and sales teams dating back to long before B2B SaaS. That is just an impediment to that being something that works in every case. So when we're able to go in and be fortunate enough to meet with some of these sales leaders and do some of that work, everybody wins, because the partner team looks like absolute heroes, because they've set this thing up and said, holy crap, our partner team did this, they've unlocked X, y and Z and this is available, and so the partner team is getting a bunch of high fives. But then the revenue team is actually able to say all right, this fits into. Everybody in the world is building V2 or V7 or whatever of their go-to-market strategy right now.
Speaker 3:I don't think there's a company out there right now that's not in the middle of rewriting their playbooks and rethinking how they go to market, and this stuff just kind of folds in really really nicely and organically with that. And I think that's the and it's being well-received. Frankly, I think because we're not in 2021 anymore and I think if we were in 2021, maybe we'd close a bunch of deals easily, because everybody was just throwing money at every single thing they could throw money at to try to grow their business. But it wouldn't have been long before.
Speaker 2:Everybody had super high valuations and cashflow income.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it really, it just you know it would have been a very different version of success, I think. But what I like about this version of success is that I think it's defensible and I think it's sustainable and I think we kind of earn we earn our spot on that roster of tools. Frankly, in the modern selling stack right Like there's, there's just a, there's a. There's a universe of technologies that are kind of the best in class stack and it's a bunch of great companies building a bunch of great tech and we were in it in a lot of these businesses and no one thinks of us as being sales technology, but we're in the sales stack in some really killer businesses.
Speaker 1:So in the early days of CraftsBeam and I certainly benefited from this, but you guys were the place to go to be educated on partnerships. Yeah, you know, Sean Blanda did a lights-out job for you guys that blog was like the best of the best, yeah.
Speaker 2:Next level Love know Sean Blanda did a lights out job for you guys, that blog was like the best of the best. Yeah, next level.
Speaker 1:Like Love you, sean. Yeah, and I think that there's an opportunity now because, as we're talking about, the partner leaders know the value of crossbeam, the partner leaders know the value of ecosystem led growth. There's so much opportunity for enablement. I think enablement and operations are the words for partner teams now moving forward, like if you can't enable you better, damn well, figure it out fast because you need to enable your revenue teams, you need to enable you know all those internal things you're talking about, and then you need to befriend your rev ops team quickly to get all this data in and out. So maybe there's a you know idea get Sean Blanda back from sabbatical and put him on that revenue leader enablement. But like I don't know, there's definitely a need in this in this space. I was just talking to Google this morning about their marketplace and they're like we need CROs on board with marketplace. Yeah, that's the future.
Speaker 3:I couldn't agree more and I think it's a good observation there. And I do want to give a shout out to Shawnee Hamer, who now runs the content marketing operation over at Crossbeam slash Reveal. Shawnee joined us from Reveal and we worked together over there With with the near bound team, with Jared and Isaac over there, who were also doing really, really fantastic work for a good stretch of time there in this space, and what Shawnee has been able to pull together is this big unified thing called ELG Insider, which is really a combination of our newsletters and our webinars and it's all of the near bound stuff plus all of the classic vintage crossbeam stuff, plus all of these new conversations and discussions exactly on these topics. Right, and I think we're one of the things. I posted a video about this on LinkedIn the other day is like I I find that I love the partnership leaders universe. It's so great and so supportive and like I know that if I want to go on a awesome rant on LinkedIn about some partnership related thing, there's like a guaranteed three to four people that are going to like it and
Speaker 3:applaud and like have great comments and it's like so cool, it's amazing to have. But I try to do thisin experiment where I actually muted and silenced just temporarily a bunch of like the loudest voices from that universe to try and pull out the people that I was connected to, that are in sales roles, that are in sales ops roles and like try and identify what the chatter is like is. Is all this stuff about partnerships just my own echo chamber and my own bubble that exists, or is it something that really is larger in the market? And I found that when I removed anybody that had the word partnerships or alliances or channel or ecosystem in their title, the reality is and the reality check is, nobody really is talking about partnerships or ecosystem.
Speaker 3:People are talking about sales automation. They're talking about how cool clay is. They're talking about partnerships or ecosystems? No, not at all. People are talking about sales automation. They're talking about how cool clay is. They're talking about all these modern strategies for kind of deeply integrating these sales systems to create automation.
Speaker 2:People are talking about AI, talking about something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it is the conversation about growth that we care so much about. When we talk about ecosystem-led growth, the operative word there is growth. The adjective matters way less right. Companies will use any blank growth that works. So when you go to the universe of folks talking about growth, there is a gap there. There's a big gap and I think we're all on partnerships island still to a large extent.
Speaker 3:So I think a lot of what I think about the evolution from the Sean Blanda days to ELG Insider. Today there is a little bit of this necessary popping of the echo chamber a little bit, but it means sometimes there's content that doesn't always warrant the rah-rah-rahs from the partnership leaders universe but might be really, really appealing and interesting to some sales ops folks that most of us aren't even connected to, to some sales ops folks that most of us aren't even connected to.
Speaker 2:And I think I'm glad you kind of went in this direction, because I was my next thing. I wanted to bring up that LinkedIn post because the three of us share a very same sentiment, right, which is partially why we did our event, arcadia, and invited 50% revenue leaders to be a part of it, because we wanted to create this intentional conversation and, to your point, I feel like we've got to pop that bubble or break out of the echo chamber and, you know, to make it relevant to the podcast. Like how do we build better friendships with those revenue leaders via content to get them to begin taking it in? What are you hearing, seeing, learning that our listeners you know the Antonios and Gregs and Wills of the world who I talk to on a daily basis like how can we better contribute content? That bust, that bubble, um?
Speaker 3:I my my reaction here is almost a little bit of like uh, just don't try to make fetch a thing right, it's, it's a, there's a. There's an element where, like this is a question of inputs and outputs. To me, like um is really good content, marketing and awareness coming from leaders of partnerships teams going to be the thing that causes revenue teams to care more or give more validity to, or ascribe more influence to the work of ecosystems and partners inside their organization? My guess is not. My guess is that a lot of the reason that you see a bunch of LinkedIn activity about why Clay is so cool right now is actually because Clay is really cool.
Speaker 3:And it's because it's an output of there being some kind of like you know structural or systemic change in the way in which work gets done, and that means that there can be new experts and new areas of expertise and those experts have things to talk about and people care about learning and becoming one of those experts themselves. And that's a beautiful cycle. And I think if we stay up in the kind of in the clouds philosophically about you know, even the, the, the ELG tetrahedron right, it sits up in the clouds a little bit the real question is like what are the actual playbooks that people are running? What are the actual integrations into Salesforce that matter? What are the training sessions that are happening internally to do enablement for sales reps to consume this stuff? Those are where the real work needs to happen.
Speaker 3:That's the kind of stuff you'll find in ELG Insider, but I don't think that we will see some kind of paradigm shift or mental shift happen among these other personas just because we start talking the right language. I think what needs to happen is that that hard work inside of these companies around the enablement and operations process that Sam was mentioning before, that's the work that needs to be done. That's where the energy ought to go to be done. That's where the energy ought to go, and I like, look like, log out of LinkedIn and look internally at yourselves and your company and go do that work and then open up LinkedIn a year later and maybe you'll see something different about the conversation going on there. But I, I I think it's an output, not an input.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's let's take another approach here. Like those of us, some of your more successful customers, the work that we did at Drift I think it was top notch Like, how can we make that work more prominent to those revenue leaders to better support the partner leaders that are actually out there doing the work?
Speaker 3:Yeah, now that's a great question and I think there's an internal version of that answer and an external version of that answer. So just to check the box on the internal thing, since I won't get off that soapbox, I do think that there is, especially as organizations get larger, and you don't need to be that large. I think once you're north of 150 people or something right, you're past Dunbar's number. It's like everybody doesn't know everybody.
Speaker 3:The power of storytelling is really profound, especially when you have really concrete things to point to and even if they are anecdotal individual deals or they are an individual rep that just outperforms all the others, that does things in a different way.
Speaker 3:I think when things internally that look like the model of how they ought to look happen, I think something that is really powerful is not just for partner teams themselves to ring the bell and say, look at this, look at this, but to use their relationships with their managers and their leaders and use their relationships inside the company to say, hey, can you help me get more attention on this thing Because I think it's really awesome, more attention on this thing, because I think it's really awesome, and to kind of cross-functionally drive this awareness and this culture of celebration around these kinds of outcomes when they happen, and that you know it's a.
Speaker 3:I hate that answer a little because it almost smells like politics or it smells like, you know, kind of the bureaucracy of modern work, but it's real, yeah, um, so so I wouldn't, uh, I wouldn't, you know, sleep on that either. Um, and then, from an external standpoint, I do think there's a um, uh, I am a big fan of um, finding um, just positivity and excitement in the broader narrative right now, in this period where there are still companies laying folks off, but B2B, saas, businesses like, start to wake up and recover from, you know, the doldrums of the, you know late 22, early 23 era Points are showing up on the board again and it says OK, we may have.
Speaker 3:There may be an opportunity for for some real phoenixes to rise from the ashes here of what's been going on in SaaS for the last couple of years, and celebrating that, I think, is something that we can do, whether it's got the, whether it sits inside of your echo chamber or not, and I think this may be where there's a better answer to your earlier question about you know, what can we do on on LinkedIn to kind of promote these things?
Speaker 3:Um, I don't know that it uh, I think what we can do is to try and be the change that we want to see, uh, by telling the stories when they exist, even if they are anonymized, uh, but they should be ones that are inherently cross-functional. Like, hey, I just did this great thing is the least powerful. My team just did this great thing is slightly more powerful. A cross-functional set of collaborators at my company just did this great thing starts to really, really matter. We've transformed our business in this way because we believe in this thing. Now we're talking and being able to kind of reinforce your talking point through the lens of trying to build a great cross-functional, multi-threaded operation inside your company, as opposed to you know something that's kind of intrinsic to yourself or some individual team. Those are, those are the stories. Not only that matter in changing the dialogue, but frankly that I think people want to hear a little bit more uh in the current age and maybe always.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I think you said something, maybe an action item for all of us, because we're all the three of us are all out on LinkedIn, so we'll take ownership in that. But finding, taking ownership and going and you know, connecting with more sales leaders, seeing what they're thinking about, learning their language and understanding like how we can fit into that and then elevate those around us, is definitely a way forward, and really that's what good partnerships are. So drink the cool, I think, to that point as well.
Speaker 2:like what you're saying. Like, spend time in the spaces they spend time in? Yeah Right, that's why I was focused on speaking at the B2B MXs, the B2B summits, the pavilions of the world. I was like they're spending time there and you can to to validate what you were saying, bob's.
Speaker 2:Like, I gave a talk at B2BMX earlier in the year and I kind of talked about the work we did with using Crossbeam when I was at Drift. But it wasn't about the work I did. It was about how we integrated that data into what marketing was doing on a daily basis, what the sales team was doing on a daily basis, and how we took the org from going partner curious to partner led, and that's what resonated like actually showing them the process that we built, the playbook that was put in place and how we took that crawl, walk, run approach. Then I had multiple GTM leaders coming up after. One was, you know, google came up after it and say, hey, this was one of the clearest directions of how to build a partner program and how to actually use some of this that I've seen and I think they just need to see it in action. But they're not going to come to our spaces, you may have to just infiltrate theirs I think that's a great point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, uh, I've spent, uh, we've partnered really closely with uh with pavilion and uh with gtm now and with a bunch of other orgs in in recent years exactly under that, that thesis, uh, which is I, I don't think we and, look frankly, it's also why we build products that embed directly into salesforce, right, because I don't think a sales rep's ever going to log into crossbeam and I don't think that should be my goal in life. To get everybody to. I wouldn't let them one more tool, right, yeah, yeah, who would? Um, so meeting them where they're at happens on every level, uh, and I think, and I think the reality is that there's work to be done and to the extent that we can identify what the most important work is and drive that forward, then we're all going to win and we're serving the same purpose.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Love it. Well, man, I know we're coming up on time. We're going to bring Newsom home. We're going to test out a new final question for the old Friends with Benefits. We had one last season. We're trying to change it up a little bit here and there, but this one we want to keep relevant to the show. So what is the benefit that comes along with being friends with Bob, which, alternatively, could be the name of the podcast FWB Friends with Bob? Friends with Bene could be the the the name of the podcast FWB friends with Bob. Friends with benefits.
Speaker 3:Oh, I like a great branding.
Speaker 2:I look forward to the the, the hoodie Um God I uh, so outside of work, like the the benefit of being friends with Bob, I come to Philadelphia.
Speaker 3:This is so I'll uh, I'll give you a deep cut here, Um, but it's going to be unsatisfying because I'm not going to show you this trick you got to catch it in the wild, which is I. For many years prior to Crossbeam, I was a competitive freestyle rap battler in Philadelphia and yeah. So I guess the benefit would be if you know you get caught in an impromptu cipher and you need somebody to represent and win a rap battle.
Speaker 1:How often does this?
Speaker 3:happen.
Speaker 3:So it's a weird, it's roundabout story, because the way I actually got pulled into it was I've always been a huge hip hop fan and I have always, like, had fun freestyling.
Speaker 3:But it wasn't until I started taking classes at the Philly Improv Theater and performing improv comedy which I did from 2013 to 2018, where I kind of got pulled into the improv comedy scene and I was on a house team at Philly Improv Theater performing for that five years and while I was in that scene I got connected to a bunch of other people in the improv community who host other kinds of like specialty shows.
Speaker 3:So, in addition to you know, kind of just your classic improv shows that we were doing as a team, you have all these novelty shows, and one of them was a freestyle rap battle show where they would get. It was kind of a freestyle tournament where half of the rappers were from the improv comedy community and half the rappers were like from the hip hop community and they would kind of give you. It was a little bit of like a roast battle style, but they would also give you different themes and topics to feed off of and I was this weird secret weapon because I was like the only one that was both a comedian and a freestyler and it was always my favorite show to do and it's still. Anytime they do a reunion show or anything, I always jump at the chance to get out there, but that's incredible.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 3:It's very fun, I get, I get a big kick out of it. But it's one of those things where if someone's like rap, for me that's not where it shows up. There's up, uh, there's a. There's a dime in a place in a moment. Uh and uh. I'll try and avoid the the cringe factor as much as I can.
Speaker 2:Uh. Well, next summer there's a little event happening here in bozeman called arcadia and we'll have a specialty show just for you. You got plenty of time to prepare amazing.
Speaker 3:No preparing, that's the whole point.
Speaker 2:There you go. You got time to think about it. There you go. Well, anyway, man, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for kicking off the new season with us.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thank you, Congrats on season two and I'll be tuning in.
Speaker 2:Excellent.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Bob Cheers. See you next time, friends.
Speaker 2:See y'all, bye, bye.