How much time should you spend selling partnerships internally?
5, 10, 20, 30, 40 percent?!?
Wait, you have to sell internally?!?
In this incredible episode, Brittany Wroblewski VP of Partnerships at G2 takes us through how she sees internal selling as not only necessary but also a vital part of what it takes to be an effective partnerships professional.
Pro-tip: Changing your mindset on how and how much time you spend here can help unlock one of the secrets of why partnerships are so different. After watching this show, you'll feel refreshed that internal selling is really about creating leverage and alignment.
This episode is sponsored by Crossbeam. Crossbeam is a partner ecosystem platform. It acts as a data escrow service that finds overlapping customers and prospects with your partners while keeping the rest of your data private and secure. Sign up for free at Crossbeam.com .
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods!
Transcript
Jared Fuller 00:20
Kevin, what's the heck you got going on? He's got candles. He's got a sweater. This is not Christmas, my man.
Kevin Raheja 00:27
Right? I'm in the Midwest, and it's October. So I feel like candles and a sweater is appropriate.
Jared Fuller 00:35
Well, maybe, maybe, maybe Christmas did come early this year, because we're joined by an amazing guest. Welcome. Brittany, thank you so much for joining partner up.
Brittany Wroblewski 00:46
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I love the first couple episodes, I'm thrilled to be a guest.
Jared Fuller 00:52
Oh, amazing. That's so cool. It's fun to finally start to hear that feedback is the first five we've recorded, pre recorded so we had no idea if we were doing something right if this was going to be helpful. And we're super excited to dive in today into this topic with you about internal selling. Some of its like partnerships is not just about selling with partners, it's got to do a lot internal as well. But before we dive in, friendly reminder that this episode is sponsored by cross beam cross beam is a partner ecosystem platform that acts as a data escrow service that finds overlapping customers and prospects with your partners, while keeping the rest of your data private and secure. So you can sign up for free at cross beam COMM And I feel like in every episode they end up being talked about. So go listen to the episodes, you'll hear us talk about them even outside of the sponsorship. So Brittany, now there were three that I want to kick it off with, maybe you could tell me the story of when you realize that building a successful partner program is as much internal selling as it is, you know, selling to customers with partners.
Brittany Wroblewski 01:56
It's such a good question. For me, it was less of a specific moment in time. And it was more my time spent at LinkedIn as an individual contributor, working on various Overlay and cross functional teams. And LinkedIn is a company that moves super fast I was on many different teams during my time there different managers amazing to get different experiences different exposure. And I felt like as an Icee, my job was easier and easiest, I had the most resources. And the most importantly, other teams knew how to work with me, when my manager was really good at telling our team story, our team goals and what we were set out to do. So I started to feel sometimes the pains as an IC if the internal teams didn't know what we were doing and weren't aligned, versus how much easier it was to get my job done and do a good job whenever and was on the same page. So you know, when I when I joined you too and was tasked to build out the partnership team, I felt like the only way I could build and scale a good team is making sure top down leadership understands what our team is going to do, how we're going to be measured what we're going to focus on. It's it's the foundation that has to happen before you before you even talk to a partner, quite frankly.
Jared Fuller 03:15
Where did you start that? You said leadership? Let's talk about specifically, who were you like, we got to create alignment around the task at hand and start that internal sales process? Who specifically a GT with title?
Brittany Wroblewski 03:30
Yeah, well, gt was much smaller than it is today when I joined in 2017. So I started with the co founders who super cool experience to work side by side with co founders in Chicago. Tim, handlebar Cotard, Abel, Matt gorny came back at the time. And it was really this like open question of, can we? How do we build partners? Where's our value to partners? How do we think partners can add value and they gave me a bunch of these open questions. And they were like, why don't you go explore a bunch of things, figure it out. And it was super fun to come back and start to think about, we're launching new products that you two, which are opening up a whole idea for ecosystem, which was our buyer intent and product. And how do we, instead of reactively, creating integrations where customers are requesting it? How do we become more proactive and build an ecosystem where we can go to customers and say, This is how we see you using buyer intent data. These are the integrations that we're suggesting based on your company size, your company type your use case. I'll just share right now because especially the other partnership, people who are joining in like we're still working on this today. So it getting alignment is something that changes over time. It's something that you should revisit quarterly, and it's hard to remind yourself to go back and check those goals. Check the alignment, just give visibility into what you're working on, especially as if you're part of a company that's growing and scaling and more people are joining
Jared Fuller 05:00
It never stops. When you think it stops, then you've probably done something wrong. I mean, it goes pervasive. And like, you started the conversation on how you sort of came to that realization at LinkedIn. You started at GE two, and then it was like at the kind of at the founder level. And then like a quarterly reset, are you aligning this, you know, in this motion to, for example, at this stage that you're at now, to, let's say, you know, territory managers or directors VPS of sales? Are you aligning with like, customer success, like unpack kind of like the middle of the pack? You know, not frontline, not at the top? How are you working with management at the stage that you're in now?
Brittany Wroblewski 05:45
Yeah, I would say that layer just started more recently, I'm sure like many other companies, we're doing our planning for next fiscal, and a lot of that alignment is happening now. So starting to unpack, you know, how much is my team? spending time on support? How much are they partner facing versus customer facing? How much time are they spending with the product team? And where there's huge spikes, and that they're spending tons of time with those teams? It starts to work the question, Well, is there someone on that team who should be a direct cross functional partner and actually support that type of partnership or that bucket that we focus on? We've made a lot of headway there. And this has been, we now have partner marketing support jeetu, we have product partnerships supported jeetu. So it's been a process and a journey. And I think part of good internal selling is capitalizing on partnership wins. So just like you want to go to a customer with case studies, anecdotes, write success stories, I use those internally all the time, it's exciting. When we have a strong partnership, where we're seeing value, the partner is getting value, everyone's happy. Those are the stories that I turn around and tell product stakeholders, marketing stakeholders. And that happens casually in conversation. And it also happens very formally, like in a PowerPoint deck. So I think another good like delineation between always selling internally is sometimes it's really formal. And you're like calling a meeting with an agenda. And you're you're sitting them down saying this is I want to talk through what my team does, how we're going to do it, and how we're going to get there. And other times, it's more drawing attention to the good stuff that your team is working on. It's equally as important.
Jared Fuller 07:22
There's a, there's a tactical tip, I'll share this, I didn't know it would be important. It's very important. I created a Slack channel called partner wins. And all I do is like anytime there's a positive impact on someone that's not on this partner team, screenshot it and put it in here. And that's been used in so many presentations and like slack messages, and just, you know, bubbling up, right, saying Top of Mind, how have you gone about kind of consolidating and getting those kind of like wins from the team? It's just a mind share of like, hey, feed that back to me, or do you have something similar?
Brittany Wroblewski 07:56
Well, I love this action ideas. And now we're gonna have a Slack channel. We have an email folder where I file things away. You know, I, I have good relationships with my manager peers, and I tell them like, Hey, I'm really focused on this type of partnership, or this partner specifically, will you keep me in the loop if and when you hear wins, having good relationships with a ees who are on the front lines, sometimes pitching partner solutions or working on big renewals where partners play a role, I'll get some of that feedback directly. And then we do have a sales when Slack channel. And more times than not some type of integration or partnership is mentioned as a reason or as an influence, reason that somebody is renewing, expanding, etc. So yeah, and I, I screenshot those all the time to your point, and file them away on my own computer.
08:48
Amazing, amazing.
Jared Fuller 08:52
Let's understand a little bit more about your model. So we can some of the partner folks listening out there can understand kind of like the context of, you know, internal selling, so to speak. When you say partnerships at GE to let's unpack that. What does that mean, partnerships at GE to what kind of partners do you have? And how are they involved in, you know, typically a sales cycle?
Brittany Wroblewski 09:15
Yeah, it's a great question. So the first bucket that we support our integration partners, and we today have about 30 partners in that ecosystem. And these are partners that help our customers due to customers operationalized due to content or due to buyer intent. So just some examples of that are a more recent integration as with LinkedIn match audiences where a jeetu customer can push you to data and create ad campaigns. HubSpot, of course, is one of our partners, Marketo CRM. So that's our integration ecosystem. And I'll talk more about that. We do have what we call partner revenue, and these are strategic data licensing partners. A lot more similar to a traditional sales mix. on that piece, and then we do also have what we call tier one partners. And that runs a little bit more horizontal. So an integration partner, revenue generating partner, and there's sub buckets under that as well can be deemed a tier one partner, which gets more support, excuse me from my team.
Kevin Raheja 10:19
And then you also have you work with agency and you have agency relationships. Talk a little bit about that. How do you work with, with agencies as well?
Brittany Wroblewski 10:29
That's our most nascent part. So that's, I'd say, is the most unchartered water we have today. I think figuring out the agency model is like v3, of the partner ecosystem at jeetu. Yeah, and I want to just call out something that was really good advice that a mentor gave to me selling internally, externally, threes and fives, like, make your buckets short, make them sink, like how are you pitching yourself? My team? Like, I want to hear their elevator pitch on like, what do you do? What does our team do? Make it simple, make it short, make it sweet, make it clear? I hate like, It scares me. I don't like it when somebody internally jeetu is like, gosh, like I don't? What does your team do anymore? Like you guys do so much like, Well, of course, we do so much. But it's boiled down to these three things. And this is what we do is what we focus on is always what we focus on. So having your elevator pitch and being clear about what you do for honestly, that's well beyond partnerships. That's where anyone's role. I think it's super important.
Kevin Raheja 11:28
Yeah, I spend a lot of time doing this. And I'm just wondering, what percentage of your time Do you find that you're selling internally versus working externally with partners? I think like, people might be surprised how much time we spend selling internally versus externally. And so I just want to get validation from you that you're doing the same thing, are you? What percentage of time are you doing that internally versus
Brittany Wroblewski 11:57
um, when I started and the team was much smaller, we didn't have an ER a PAC teams, like I said, Everyone sat together in Chicago in a small office, I would say, honestly, like 10 to 15% of my time, it was really focused on like, go out there, like try things test fail, try again. Fast forward, you know, three plus years now we have London offices, Singapore offices, were all remote, of course, making it much harder. There's 300 people in our Chicago office, it's increased quite a bit, I would say 30 to 40%, our internal meetings and internal alignment on, you know, what initiative Are you working on, and sometimes it's, it's almost, if you will, like, sourcing right for your team, because if you're in an internal meeting, and I'll send you your CSM, and this actually just happened to me in real in my real life. You know, our VP of CS, Andrew is working on this big initiative around like helping customers increase speed, time to value. And there's three different ways that I think my team can help and plug in there. So it's also finding alignment isn't just going to someone and being like, Hi, here's my checklist of all the things I want to accomplish this quarter, it's actually going out and seeing like, Where does my list of things align to other people's lists of things, or maybe someone else's list, I should be aligned with that list, because that's a super interesting point. So sometimes I you can almost say Mo, like a BDR for my team, listening into other initiatives that my team should be involved in.
Kevin Raheja 13:32
So you've been a jeetu crowd for over three years. You You started as a director, you're now a VP? Did did? Did your role change at all? When you when you shifted? Was? Did you were you finding yourself doing more internal selling as a VP than a director? Or was there no change?
Brittany Wroblewski 13:54
Um, I actually, I started a level, I started a jitsu as a as an individual contributor, and quickly reorge, redefined partnerships. And I was given the opportunity to build something out and really lead it. So when I was a soul, when I was a one woman show, I did a lot less internal selling. I was, I was lucky in a lot of ways, because I felt that I had the buy in from my leadership team, which is, I'll touch on that point a minute, but that's huge. I had the buy in from my leadership team, like I said, to go test things, try things. Figure it out. Then when I I did internal selling, I ramped up in general selling to get headcount to help me. And then I felt like once I was responsible for other people's careers, and I lead a team, that's where I feel like it's it's the leaders true responsibility to be good at internal selling and know that it's part of your responsibilities because now, there's people on my team whose career paths and you know, their longevity of the company depends on my ability to show our value and make sure that our team is producing what the business needs, what I would say wasn't necessarily director to VP, it was icy to managing a team.
Jared Fuller 15:07
What's interesting there is like, there's always this consistent theme that is so difficult to apply in advance of, but it's always so clear in retrospective of that, as the company stage changes, right? And DCA drift talks about this a lot from like, you know, a family, to, you know, a tribe to a village to a city to a, you know, country, so to speak, right, these milestones of what your role is, has to change as well. And the degree to which you have to spend time with your teammates to create leverage, because whenever you're small, and it's just you, there's no leverage, right? It's like, prove this thing or the program's dead. Right? And then at this stage, now, it's like, if I'm not driving, you know, 10% 20% 30% of revenue in helping other people hit their numbers. You know, it's gonna be a lot harder, because typically BD teams, right are, how large is your team now Britney?
Brittany Wroblewski 16:05
including me, we're five.
Jared Fuller 16:07
Right? And, but your impact is oversized. Like typically, BD teams are driving a much larger impact on product adoption, right? Like people are buying things that are the result of partnerships. People are, you know, sales reps are selling, and getting to their number as a part of it whenever you activate agency or channel partnerships, right, they're directly contributing, you know, to source pipeline and closed dollars. Yep. So like this, the stage of the company really impacts the degree to which you need to, like hone this muscle and get really good at like, you know, internal selling, maybe maybe a take on this, because I love some of the tips and tricks that have been shared here is what are some of the methods you've used to like get someone to go? Oh, wow. Okay, I need to take action on this. So there's the formal meetings, of course. But if there be any strategies, tactics, Sun Tzu, Art of War stuff, where you've been like, this person was my enemy, so to speak, they were not on our team. And here's how I won them over.
Brittany Wroblewski 17:07
Yeah, it's all about just knowing your audience. And that's like a, right, that's a traditional sales point. But and this is something that, you know, I talk about with my team all the time, how you are explaining partnerships, internally, how to your point, you're asking someone to take action? It's all about what's their role? What do they do, and what do they care about. So if I'm talking to a sales team, it's not going deep into like, a partner's product and the technical, you know, if I'm talking about a connector, I'm going to leave out a lot of like, the technical jargon, and like, that's not what's going to get them super excited, what's gonna get them super excited is the three beta customers saw all this value, it's going to increase, you know, renewals, it's gonna it added all this value to a renewal conversation, like, lead with the value to who you're talking to, if I'm talking to leadership, for example, and someone who's maybe not deep into the day to day, I really tried to distill what I'm working on, or what I'm asking for, into themes, right. And like, this is the theme that I'm seeing, this is my specific ask. And if I get what I'm asking for, here's my predicted outcome. So it's, it's all about knowing your audience and all about making sure your narrative is, is relevant to that person.
Jared Fuller 18:26
When you're, whenever you're kind of training your team on this, and they're interacting, kind of like at the front line, are you leveraging anything like call recording or like a gong acorus anything to kind of get some frontline insight to let's say, there was a especially when they're everyone's remote. Let's say you have one of your teammates, you know, educating a CSM group or whatever. Have you gone through that process of like, actually getting people better at getting more leverage out of these types of conversations?
Brittany Wroblewski 18:57
Yes, I think it's a great call out, we can certainly be doing more of it. But it's funny that you mentioned call recordings. A few months ago, I actually presented to sales managers about an upcoming integration. And I played a snippet of me telling a customer that this integration is coming and how excited she was about it. And that was, you know, I guess another good point is like, if other people can help you tell your story, don't be the only one talking. It's like, I'm gonna play this clip to tell you why I'm so excited about this upcoming integration, like, Don't listen to me listen to the customer. So I love that.
Jared Fuller 19:33
That's, that's great. It goes back to like sharing those. Those wins, going back to like, Hey, here's what's working, whatever, that there needs to be like a space like cloud app, Gong, you know, whatever your favorite screenshot tool is, those those really no need to be your best friend to have that social proof. Because that's really going to be the thing that drives how you make an impact and impression on on your internal teams because mean, standard marketing, every website is going to have the customer list right up front, there's going to be social proof. Here's the customer. Here's the people that have been successful, here's how they've been successful. And you're taking that one step further by bringing, you know the audio into it. I think that's a fantastic way to use a call recordings. What about, you know, coaching on the team? So you can use it up the chain? What about for folks on your team? Have you done anything around? Hey, here's how to best get alignment with your teammates, and kind of like translate what you've kind of learned in internal selling to the folks that are on your team directly?
Brittany Wroblewski 20:38
Yeah, I think, yes. And, and I think part of being a leader, and I'm learning this in real time, every day, you mentioned a lot of change in organizations, like any, you know, hyper growth companies startup, there's been a lot of change in the world, obviously, like, there's been a lot of change happening. And I think I've been focusing on coaching my team on changes, more oftentimes, and not a good thing. And I think like a good leader doesn't get like deer in headlights about change, it's like this is a new opportunity to potentially change things for the better. So I'm going to tie that to your question about like, how do we help other people get alignment, when there's change in a company, it's a great opportunity to get time on that person's calendar and either realign, right, reinforce them, just use the opportunity to say, Hey, you know what, we're all remote right now. I know, I used to sit next to you, I used to stand in the lunch line with you. Like, I just wanted to update you, I'm working on these few things, I thought of you because I was on this phone call and they mentioned your customer. It's something that we talked about our team meeting, I'm encouraging my team to put time on people's calendars, who you would sometimes cross paths with in other meetings or in the office that you don't have the opportunity to do today?
Jared Fuller 21:50
have you encountered a traditional phrase of like it? Maybe not. But I'll ask channel conflict where someone was pursuing something on your team and maybe a partner was at odds with a seller?
Brittany Wroblewski 22:05
Um, it's an interesting question. We certainly there's been some of those. But I'd say what is more, more common is that sometimes my team will be going after a partner where there's some type of monetary exchange as well. And our sales team is in conversations with that same company, and we're talking to different people, their different use cases, my team doesn't sell anything that our core sales team sells. But thinking through how we handle that, and there was plenty of that that happened. You know, LinkedIn, just having different lines of business. So operating together, some are selling to HR departments, some are selling to marketers, and we're selling to the sales teams. So it's, it's a common thing. And again, like, when those things are brought to me, my attitude on that is like, this is normal, that's okay. It's understandable that we're having this, you know, temporary internal friction, we will figure it out, versus I've had managers who, you know, look really upset and kind of lose it right and have to go make their case, to me, it's like, Everyone calm down. This is normal. That's not a true tech sales team. If we don't have some type of internal conflict, we will figure it out. And I ask that my team has that trusted me that I'm going to go advocate for the facts of the situation, and everyone will get taken care of if we do ultimately what's best for the business.
Kevin Raheja 23:34
So you spoke earlier about aligning with other departments. And I'm curious because I deal with this a lot. Like we kind of work in like a nebulous department within the company, folks don't often know what we do. So what what was something that was kind of misaligned with between your department and the rest of the company that you had to work to? towards alignment?
Brittany Wroblewski 23:59
Great question. Um, right now, we were at a fork in the road where we're onboarding all these partners. Like I mentioned, we on the integration side, we have almost 30 partners. And how do we manage these partners? How do we onboard these partners? there? There have been conversations with, you know, our leader of customer success, where he has the talent profile of people who are experts at onboarding at supporting customers, like, how do we work together on that? Should I be building a team and hiring new headcount that's all about onboarding and support, or is there a way that we can work together and align where my team does a certain, you know, set of responsibilities on that note, and then his team helps as well. I think part of a successful partnership team as it grows is staying true to partnerships. You know, because if you start hiring for everything that you actually need, you will start to see that you're actually going to hire for your own little support team, your own little marketing team your own little right like Instead of hiring a marketer, a person who would do marketing and report to me on partnerships, I'd rather just align with marketing and say, You know who to hire for marketing, you have good marketers support, partner marketing, right? And give me a dedicated resource who's going to do blog post announcements, social shares, help write the case studies for partner success. So don't build, I've learned this, like, don't build your own little company inside of a company, use the company and use the resources around you. And to me, that's alignment.
Jared Fuller 25:29
Well, what is your, the the ICP of GE to in terms of most of the the go to market focus? Is it really spread across small business to enterprise? Or is there a focus in there?
Brittany Wroblewski 25:43
If the pie chart like couldn't be prettier, it's a third, a third, a third with our customer base, small business, mid market and enterprise. Okay. We're, we're mainly the core side of the business is typically selling to a marketing profile. And we've been expanding into the sales persona as well.
Jared Fuller 25:59
Gotcha. Because it's, I love what you said about like, don't build a company inside of a company, because you kind of always are in BD, the only time I've seen that really work building a company inside of a company is if you're truly, like, very small business in the TAM is just massive. It's hundreds of thousands of people. And you can actually like wall off, right, certain accounts and gardens and like a different motion. But in that situation where you're cross segment. That'd be that'd be a rough one. That'd be a roll off. tough one.
Brittany Wroblewski 26:26
Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's real value and beauty in a partnership team being small. Like I love being in partnerships, I see a very long career for myself here. That's what I want to do. It's what I want to continue to grow. And I don't, I don't have a goal to like manage an org of 20. People like that seems too big to me, though, the valuable partnership team is feeling scrappy, and feeling like there's not enough resources to get it done. And hiring good people is like putting someone in a situation where they just don't have, they don't have everything they have enough, but they don't have everything, and seeing how they use their entrepreneurial spirit and problem solving to get there. When I'm looking for people on my team, I'm looking for someone with that attention to detail and the ability to quickly understand, who am I talking to? What does this company do? How do they make money? And what do they care about? And how do I relate that to? Or is it interesting to me based on what we do, how we make money and what I slash the company cares about, like, the faster somebody can get to that point. That's about building partnerships and good partnerships are built when there's a real deep understanding of each other's business goals. And just really like how it works, how it how and why it makes sense.
Jared Fuller 27:40
I'm gonna go a little bit deeper into how some of your partnerships work, because I'm curious how you got this to come to be. So if I understand correctly, some of GTA is offering, you sell an intent product. And that intent product can be sold directly to like a marketing organization, right for giving them signals. Are you also packaging that and distributing it through other businesses, you're doing what we would call a partner motion.
Brittany Wroblewski 28:08
So not a not a reseller model. So like you alluded to jeetu is the leading b2b marketplace. For for technology. So we have 5 million monthly unique visitors coming to you to to shop for different software solutions. And we know which organizations are in market for what products because we see that traffic or that intent on our site. So to your point, we sell that as our buyer and 10 product to marketers, and also sales professionals. And early on in those days. We had customers immediately starting to ask right like, I love getting this data, can I have it in Salesforce? Can I get it and HubSpot? Can I use it in LinkedIn match audiences for an ad campaign? So that started this idea of, you know, how do we enable G to customers to interact with buyer intent data in the other systems that they live and breathe in every day? That started to expand when we would start to talk to sales professionals. And they said, Well, I wouldn't I would love to get this data in front of my BDR team. Do you guys integrate with sales offer outreach, right. And so I just named a bunch of integrations that we've added recently to enhance our customers experience with the product that they have, and then also organically expand to other departments outside of marketing that find value and intent data. To this point, like I mentioned, we've been pretty, you know, reactive is often seen as a negative word. We've been using market feedback to go after the right integrations, like we've been hearing what our customers want. We're now going to start to take a more proactive approach and thinking like how do we go after a category? How do we go after CRM, marketing automation, ABM, for example. So that's that's my goal for the team moving into the new year.
Jared Fuller 29:53
How do you go? Where does this start to move from like the integration partner side of things into monster tising your your your your partnerships, like indirectly versus directly or indirectly the integrations which you know, better customer retention, faster sales cycle all the stuff that we know. But where have you gone to our Have you gone into direct monetization of your partner ecosystem
Brittany Wroblewski 30:18
we have, but it's going to be a very unique jeetu use case. So it's not actually under that integration bucket yet. We are syndicating jeetu reviews and content to other marketplaces to help them drive engagement and conversion. So for example, if you go to the AWS marketplace, jeetu reviews, power, thousands of pages on AWS marketplace, we power 20,000 Review pages on CD AWS marketplace. So any marketplace where any site, you could say where a b2b buyer is evaluating and making decisions. All the third party data shows that pure experience feedback reviews has to be there to drive that conversion. Turns out reviews is a really hard game like gt has been at it for a long time, it is not easy to actually build like technically build the functionality to say write a review, easy to get people to spend the time to write the content, to then moderate that content on the back end and make sure people are writing appropriate things leaving, you know, good, good. Don't say good reviews, like positive reviews, but like good feedback, and informative feedback. That's really hard. So, you know, years ago, and this was actually far before I joined you, too. We were getting inbound questions from some of those large marketplace players saying, hey, jitsu, we have a writer review button on my site, no one's touched it in a very long time, can I take the great content that you have and just syndicate it to my marketplace? So when I joined I, I helped ramp that into a whole bucket of what my team supports today. That was that we had to rebuild API's.
Jared Fuller 31:56
That was the sumo that was a big one that put Brittany on the map at G two.
Kevin Raheja 32:02
I met actually was we were very interested in this product that at HubSpot, we were very interested in leveraging jeetu crowd reviews to power our app ecosystem and reviews of the integrations is
Jared Fuller 32:18
that is that something that we have a bunch of partner leaders listening to this is that something that they can come to jeetu today and go Hey, my partner directory sucks. My integration directory sucks. No one's using it. And my team my CSM, they don't know who to direct people to because everyone's listed the same. They're all zero star reviews. Can they come to jeetu today and use this product and buy this product?
Brittany Wroblewski 32:40
Yep, and you nailed like the two, two out of the three value props is one, your marketplace is a lame destination right now. So let's get content and engagement and information on those pages to your sales team and your support and success teams can start to use that information to make data driven recommendations to your customers. And thirdly, the partners love it because guess what, who wants to manage like 20 different directory listings if they already have reviews on jeetu? It takes all that effort off the partner we want to be the one stop shop that collects aggregates indicates b2b customer feedback. That's our Northstar,
Jared Fuller 33:18
does your direct team sell this product? Or is the partner team sell this product.
Brittany Wroblewski 33:24
I am the partner team and we sell that product. Oh,
Jared Fuller 33:26
interesting. So this this is actually separate from like if an inbound lead came in, it's not going to be routed to you know, an account executive.
Brittany Wroblewski 33:37
Correct, it goes to my team. And that's because it's more than just, I mean, the monetary exchange covers all the API enhancements and all the support that goes into the actual product that we're selling. There's a ton of value that both the partner and us get from it. So for example, Juju does not white label any of our data. So if you go to AWS or cw, you see that those reviews are powered by jeetu. And that helps the partner because people in the industry are not questioning this content. They jitsu has that trust process and that trust factor. And then for us, it's getting our brand out there and driving our credibility in the market. So there's so much more value beyond just money that we see within those partnerships.
Jared Fuller 34:19
Okay, so I have to say this because I feel like everyone should do this. I haven't done it yet. it drifts of Nick, Nick, Sal, when you whenever you hear this, this is what we need to do next. He's just joining drift next week, Nick, what I want to do is I want to get this and every single time that a partner does an implementation of drift, I want to send them I want to send the customer an NPS or like a partner NPS. And if it's less than an eight, I want to reach out to them and see what how that partner could have done better how we make them better. But if it's more than an eight, I want to send them to GE to to leave a review partner and set up this workflow to where it's all automated because I think that flywheel of like increasing Using partner visibility like that it kind of goes full circle to internal selling, like, if you can point your sales team or your, you know, customer success team to an ecosystem of how customers have interacted in the reviews that they're leaving. Wow. I mean, what more social proof? Could you want them that?
Brittany Wroblewski 35:19
Selling? Absolutely. And I love this product.
Jared Fuller 35:21
It's awesome. I want it.
Brittany Wroblewski 35:23
Yeah. Absolutely, yeah, no reviews are obviously easy to set out to help that, you know, immediate purchase. But we're seeing reviews play such a role in partner ecosystems and only implementing two solutions that have higher reviews, or when you're evaluating like a core solution to go to look at their integrations and how they rank. So, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting, because the integration side of what my team manages is so linked, like, I'm almost selling to my persona on the other side of the house. So that makes sense. Like, we have an integration hub, but jeetu, where we list all of our partners, how do we drive engagement on the hub? How do we drive, you know, ultimately, it's going to be a conversion on that hub. So it's been, it's been a really cool journey.
Kevin Raheja 36:13
So ironically, to today's topic, Britney has been doing a great job of selling externally today. But I'm wondering if you do have the capability to review the integration and actually
Jared Fuller 36:27
question, the software,
Kevin Raheja 36:28
is that something that the GTA can do is that's productized at all.
Brittany Wroblewski 36:34
We have it's in it is live, we have that ability. It depends on it depends on the marketplace, and what type of content thereafter. So we do have what we call an integration review. But interestingly enough, most marketplaces have really just syndicated the core product review,
Jared Fuller 36:52
it has to be a big, you know, a good size ecosystem, like where the top ones, it's like you're actually reviewing specific functionality that was built, like for the platform almost right, versus their, their core suite, right. Because because
Brittany Wroblewski 37:07
we're seeing great. Yeah, and I was gonna say we're seeing great success with partner marketplaces who integrate the idea of reviews as part of their onboarding process. So you become a new partner, right of the platform, you update your listing, and you go ahead and you reach out to, you know, 15 different customers to generate that review. So really, just making it part of the motion is, is the key to that sustainable review flywheel.
Jared Fuller 37:39
Because that expertise, like at the beginning, it's not gonna matter. But, you know, for example, let's say we start bringing on the big size. I know there's, um, I forget, there's there's another competitor that's tried that's had tried to do some of the consulting companies and like reviews of consulting companies, are you seeing the consulting companies come over to duty now as well? Like that size like they are? And they stuff like that?
Brittany Wroblewski 38:05
Yeah, sure. And they have pages on GE too. I would say g tos business focus has been pretty exclusively on software. But certainly we're seeing services come into the mix, because that's the next question, right? That's the next part of the funnel, you're looking for a piece of software, you find it and now it's like, Who's going to help me implement it, who's going to help me manage it? So definitely,
Jared Fuller 38:27
that's the definitely the next direction that we want to go is be able to point out like, who are really the experts based on reviews for you know, implementing marchetto is going to be very different than setting up CRM, Salesforce, for example, or building something custom or maybe they do fantastic advertising work, but they have no idea how to do demand generation. So there's like expertise and capabilities. I feel like I'm going through like a demo now. I'm like qualifying myself and can you do tags on partners and filter by tags? Did you always play certain people? Yeah.
Brittany Wroblewski 39:00
And region becomes super important, like localization with si so in order for us to truly productize that there's all those nuances that have to be baked in you're right like different experts. You can have a five star agency for example, but what it what is that expertise was it demand john was social. So getting those details are going to be very important to getting the type of feedback that's really high impact for size.
Jared Fuller 39:30
I love it. That's that's a fantastic it's like a it's an Inception partner product because like it was built by the partner team, and it's helping other partner and marketplaces and ecosystems. Have you read platform revolution?
Brittany Wroblewski 39:44
No, but someone mentioned on your on your on an episode, right? Yeah, I think in a past episode. Yeah.
Jared Fuller 39:51
Yeah, cuz I'm doing some really cool stuff that's like kind of right out of that book at jeetu that I find really Fascinating in terms of like, you know, are you a marketplace? Are you a platform? What are some of the nuances and differences from that? And whenever you are owning the marketplace for other people, it's like a marketplace of marketplaces. So it's a just there's a few things that the book kind of points out for frameworks that are. I think you're like ahead of the curve. This is kind of my point. I was like, have you read that? Because,
Kevin Raheja 40:23
yeah, Britney, you you don't, I don't know that. You would gain a ton from that book. But you're the rest of your team, like people in other departments in your company. If you can get them to read it. They'll be completely on board with your mission. And that was something that Sequoia made a one of our our lead investor at HubSpot made everybody at the company read was that book and it really helped get every other department on board with with our mission.
Brittany Wroblewski 40:51
I love it. I'm totally reading it. I'm in the middle of a sleep training book for my eight month old son. So after I got through that onto my tech book.
41:00
Oh, yeah. I think
Jared Fuller 41:02
you got the good boy was you said, Son,
Brittany Wroblewski 41:06
son. Yeah, boy.
Jared Fuller 41:07
Okay, gonna turn the corner any second. Eight months is like, I feel like I'm a new human. I have a 10 month in like, the last two months have been amazing. Okay, I'm gonna hold you to get you're gonna get there. What's the schedule? Like right now? Is it still middle of the night? Wake up?
Brittany Wroblewski 41:23
Yeah, like, you know, like a 435 o'clock, which I know isn't like that early, but we'll get them there.
Jared Fuller 41:30
I was finally started going to seven. And now it's like 730. So follow this live training sounds like vacation?
Brittany Wroblewski 41:38
Well, yeah, I think for anyone else listening. First of all, I'd love to connect with anyone, if you want to continue the conversation on LinkedIn, over email, but to me, clearly outlining what you're trying to do, even if it doesn't work. And even if it changes in three months, just having a framework that and I'm super visual. So I actually, some people are super anti slides like I'm I'm all for slides, because I'm a visual learner. And I like to see it I like to see three five buckets and the definition what they are and how they are related. outline it for the org. But I've also I've also always noticed that when I outline it for other people, it also grounds me, it helps me and it gives me my framework of what we're trying to do. Because partnership teams are tasked with a lot like I actually was talking to the partnership leader at a different company. And she and I were laughing that sometimes like when a lead comes in, and it's not marketing, it's not like anything that's other just kind of shows up on the partnerships desk like you don't, it's kind of interesting, but you don't know what to do with it partnerships. And it's about explaining to your boss, your peer, whoever it is that while this is interesting, this isn't something that is going to drive impact to the business because you're focused on these other things. Or maybe this was a great lead. Thanks for handing it over, it falls within this bucket that we're super focused on. So just internal selling, don't underestimate it. Don't think that people understand your job, don't unders, don't think people understand your struggles. outline it for them, distill it for them. Talk about themes related to your audience, if you're talking to a leader don't go to in detail, if you're talking to appear, like get into a little bit the details like they, you know, they're also feeling some of that same pain, you know, communicated and play to that to make sure that you get what you want. And then also just, you know, I asked for a lot of alignment. And I asked for a lot of things from a lot of teams. I'm sure some detours are laughing at that comment. On that same token, like when people ask me for things, I really try to support it. Like I really try to be that same partner back that I asked for, and, and, you know, expect in a lot of ways from my cross functional partners. So it's all about relationships, build those relationships, invest in those relationships. Sometimes I feel like getting lunch with a colleague, which I know is not relevant right now because of COVID. But I feel like getting lunch for an hour is sometimes equally as important as like an hour meeting where you're talking about like hard numbers, build those relationships, it makes the selling easier, right? Do you want to walk into a room and sell to a customer who churned and like, you know, had a horrible experience? Or do you want to walk in and sell to someone who loves your product, it's the same with internal selling, selling to friends and allies is way way easier. So invest in those relationships, make it simple. Know your audience and always be selling internal or externally.
Jared Fuller 44:30
You just had pointed exceptional advice. It's really good. just point out like the best possible silver lining to like to the episode it's like a helping is the new selling to right so help your colleagues. That's what we do in partnerships, right? Keep on helping show up to those demos, show up to those customer calls, carry the water get dirty and, you know, that's going to help build relationships and rapport. And then at the end of the day, the selling skills that you develop makes you a better you know partner practitioner or a partner leader. So instead of But carrying that burden as if Oh, it's 10% 25 40% of my time, it's actually making you better at your job. You know that feedback loop is essential, and I cannot think of a better way to end Brittany. This has been amazing before we go. friendly reminder, this episode is sponsored by cross being cross beam is a partner ecosystem platform platform that acts as a data escrow service that finds overlapping customers with your prospects while keeping the rest of your data private and secure. So you can sign up for free at cross beam.com Brittany, this was a this was a blast. You're just dropping bombs left and right.
Brittany Wroblewski 45:35
This was awesome. Thank you for having me. You guys. You guys are awesome.
Jared Fuller 45:38
And thanks for hanging out with us. Bernie we have to say too, right? I feel like this turned into a little section like a little sponsored by GQ. This wasn't sponsored by GQ. I just had genuinely geeked up not sponsored and I know you are too Kevin.
Brittany Wroblewski 45:52
I'm just always selling. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Kevin. You didn't tell me that. I could have had wine though. Oh, one on this podcast.
Kevin Raheja 46:01
Oh, yeah,
Jared Fuller 46:02
we try. We hit the last thing of it. No, no typically have a glass of wine.
Brittany Wroblewski 46:07
I love it. Cool, guys. Thanks for having me.
Jared Fuller 46:09
All right. Take care everyone. Leave us the ratings piece.
