What is up PartnerUp!
We’re joined by Rich Lewis-Jones and Stan Wasowicz from SmartRecruiters. Rich, VP of Sales, and Stan, Global Director Alliances, are the ultimate killer duo. From demo engineering to working with service partners to building processes to keep track of and share information about your partners’ org charts, Rich and Stan are covering so. Many. Partner. Bases.
They’re seeing results. As they detail in this call, the sales team recently closed a unicorn prospect and Rich (VP of Sales) is the FIRST to say - it was because of partners.
We thrash into the details of thinking of it as “our” ecosystem vs. “the” ecosystem. Rich and Stan discuss what’s worked for them in terms of taking on a trusted “advisor” or “consultant” role with prospects when recommending partner solutions.
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Full transcript:
Jared Fuller 0:00
Hey what is up partner up? I'm welcoming Stan and rich from smart recruiters, and both not from the partner team. One side partner one part one side sale. So, Stan, rich, welcome to partner up.
Rich Lewis-Jones 0:25
Thanks for having us,
Jared Fuller 0:27
Stan, in some of our pre call stuff that we were talking and kind of going back and forth. And I was like, hey, what's what's really the story here because I've heard some great stuff about the smart recruiters partner program and some of the success y'all are having. And Isaac and I both ironically, come from HR tech. So I was like very interested in this story. And you had the most glowing endorsement of this VP of Sales who's joining you today. And normally, partner leaders don't have a glowing endorsement of their VP of sales. So tell me, let's unpack that a little bit.
Stan Wasowicz 0:53
And then long story short, I tried to build what I call a culture crowd, collect with collaboration with our ecosystem, you know, become an extension of our ecosystems revenue org in exchange for them becoming that to us. But where it really happens, where the rubber meets the road, and those are those go to market teams collaborating. Books like rich make me look good.
Rich Lewis-Jones 1:18
Thank you very much, Stan, I think is a such an interesting space, the partnership paced. I obviously come from a Jared and Isaac, I come from a background where I worked as a practitioner in talent acquisitions, I've got a deep understanding of all the tools that are out there. But they're actually working hand in hand on the channel and partnerships front, so I actually used to work for one of our point solutions. Prior to joining SmartRecruiters, a reference checking platform called X Ref had an appreciation for what standards on the other side. And now obviously joining SmartRecruiters and the incredible work that stands done with the rest of the business to build out our partner ecosystem. The way that it's helped me grow our business down here in Asia Pacific has been phenomenal.
Isaac Morehouse 2:06
What are the partner types that you are working with, like who are give me some examples of the kinds of companies that you're bringing in
Stan Wasowicz 2:14
workers is ISVs is communities, it's individual consultants, it's his eyes, it's in our specific talent space recruiting process, outsourcing companies. And you know, anything else you can imagine that will help us drive by by more quickly support our customers more effectively, scale our business more rapidly? All those good things?
Rich Lewis-Jones 2:36
I think that is obviously the tools that our customers directly will use that drastically impact their business to help them drive efficiencies and productivity cost savings. You know, improving candidate experience recruiting, productivity, hiring, manager engagement, all of those things, right. So actually helping them hire faster, increase quality, and helping save time acquisitions, teams time. But I think when to standpoint, when you look at the who we're partnering with, from a consulting perspective, when we're looking at the the implementation partner, so the Yesyes, what I commonly call this is an here's a nice strategy, right? There is some I think that these businesses that we partner with are actually helping us increase our visibility. By actually working with businesses and being areas and eyes on who might be looking to make change out there in the market.
Jared Fuller 3:35
I'd love to hear about how that partner pill story to you some vernacular that we use is that, you know, the best of us partner, people can partner pill, if you will, a colleague or a counterpart or someone in the industry, and of those types. I'll start with you rich, and then I'll kick it back to you, Stan, rich, where do you think and across what partner types so to speak? Was it a consultant engagement? Was it a tech partner engagement? Like from your point of view from the sales angle? Where did you start to see value getting unlocked? First,
Rich Lewis-Jones 4:05
um, I think from the HR tech partner piece, to be perfectly honest. Reason being when we're talking to organizations, smart recruiters, you know, we have this ecosystem play right. I like to be able to go into a meeting room to talk with a prospect to almost get the whiteboard out now a virtual whiteboard mostly these days, but we go into a room we look at what their current state is, what are you using today? What would you like to use in the future? And then we look at you know, it's almost like a it's like a big collecting baseball cards, but it's not got that one. Got that one. Got that one. Haven't got that one. Let's get look to get them integrated. So it's actually being able to go in and look at what they're using today from an ecosystem perspective, what gaps they've got. So when you're looking across all of those different tools that they may or may not be using. reference checking video interviewing Tools, background checking partners, assessment vendors, all of these different types of it, there's a whole gamut of different tools, seeing where their gaps are to help them drive efficiencies, and then really digging into the way to SmartRecruiters fit in, and where do the rest of it come in as a layer on top, and then working with those partners. So you come away from a meeting, Jared? And you're like, right? Well, they're using these eight vendors, we've got six of them, let's go and get pre recorded demos of those products in our system, and then play them back to the customer, they start to see themselves. Like it's like their own system as it is today. And then we go and get an introduction to the two other partners that they're not using. And then we bring them into the ecosystem. Rinse and repeat.
Jared Fuller 5:45
You know, saying that as a VP of Sales makes me so happy because when I was VP sales at Panda Doc, I remember changing our entire demo structure to where I went out and got demo accounts of every CRM, right. So instead of creating documents and Panda doc and the proposal process, we would demo so it's like, oh, you use Insightly, use Pipedrive use ProsperWorks, use Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever it was, we would start the demo directly out of their workflow, right. And it just in that was such an easy, simple way for me to be tech partner pilled, if you will, kind of like that it was like, well done. I mean, why am I going to start from me, the vendor, like, check out all the cool, sweet stuff that we can do. It's like, Hey, let me show you how I can help you. It's just inverting that script,
Rich Lewis-Jones 6:32
is Stan, the person that really kind of brought this to life for me, but I think it's the whole relating to pain or what they're doing today, and then showing them a solution that's going to drastically improve what they're doing. And then actually showing how that's working for the business you're working to. Working with? Did I know that's like sales? 101. But I don't think enough salespeople actually do it. I think what, one of the things, again, Stan has done incredibly well, which is transformed. The way that my team worked with sales is this tool reveal, right reveal is unbelievable. I wish I had this in my previous life X Ref, being able to look at an account and be like, right, we can see what they're using today. Let's go out. So when we actually go into that first meeting with them, we can talk about almost like they're using our system as it is with all of these different tools that they're using. And then obviously work with those partners to make sure that the integration into SmartRecruiters is as seamless and as beautiful as possible. So that when they're getting almost doing like an indirect reference, they are, of course going to endorse us, because they like to get absolutely smart. Brilliant, because it's the best integration that they've got in the market.
Stan Wasowicz 7:43
So I want to chip in on that, to me, this should be partner policy, in my opinion, is should be part of job descriptions. You shouldn't be demoing, you shouldn't be going into any presentation meetings, before having gathered Intel, as much Intel as you can about the account. How can you really justify having done a deep discovery, if you haven't spoken that every partner on an account enriches implemented that and I've seen this guy get promoted to VP and when the best region belt. And I guarantee that if other teams emulate what he's been doing, whether it's in smart jurors or somewhere else that they will be more successful. Now I'm not saying you have to spend the same time with every partner. So there's this axis, right, there's the axis of deal influence versus the time you spent with these partners. But you need to quickly figure out about every partner on your account, how much deal influence they actually have on your deal, and spend more time with the ones that have more influence. And I mean, one of our favorite, one of our values is as one. And I love how you know, I'm able it's boardrooms with guys like rich and other people to translate it into our ecosystem, and actually come into these deals as one because I've used the term our ecosystem a few times already. And I think we should all step away from that there's a our ecosystem, you know, you're part of a ecosystem. And it's up to you to leverage that to your, to your extent, anytime we're on a deal. Most of these partners integrating with us are also integrated with all of our competitors. But people like Rich will make them value us more than the competitors. Because guess what, we actually reach out to them and talk about how we can win together and deliver together when most of the time our competitors won't even reach out. And that stuff is huge in the partner game.
Rich Lewis-Jones 9:31
I think we all know as well as Jared that our salespeople and I'm going to talk about it because I'm in sales. We can be such transactional bastards when we want to be but it's like you know, it's just like if I do one thing for you, I expect something in return. It is a long game is such a long game. So I think actually just having constant visibility with partners that you see adding value to your customers. You build up such good relationships and the stuff that you end up starting sharing with each other organically will actually help everybody win in the long run, including the customer as well. Because when you go into a meeting, you end up talking to the buyer in the way that they want to be spoken to. Because someone's giving you the heads up, not going in, like the brash salesperson that this person is just going to run a mile the first moment you say, like your opening tagline about your company. So it's, it's, it's amazing what it can do for you from a selling perspective as well.
Isaac Morehouse 10:26
I love that small step you talked about where once you kind of know what's in their stack, you're coming back with those custom pre recorded, you know, that is incorporating their specific stack. And it sounds so small Jared, and I had a call just last week with somebody who was talking through some stuff. And they had a demo, they were showing us a demo. And they had already gone and gotten all of this information I didn't even know they had on what we were specifically doing. And they had plugged it in. And they were like, yeah, so if you're using this, here's how you're gonna do and it had all of our stuff in there. And that, for one, it's like, oh, I can see myself in this. Now I can see how it could solve my problems, not just problems generically, but to the signal of care and time and attention that they took to go do that. It's like it's so easy to overlook. It'd be like, oh, yeah, we can integrate with everything. Yeah, we can work with your tech stack. Yeah, we can. And I think the difference is like, nobody likes to trust me, I have teenage kids. So I know this. Nobody likes to be told, here's what you're doing wrong. Right. Nobody likes to be told that. And I think that's often a sales tactic like, well, we got to help solve people's pain points. So first, we got to tell them, yeah, here's all this, here's why everything's not working. Here's why everything you're doing all these things wrong. Like, okay, they know that. But What's better is to say, Oh, I love what you're doing. Right? Like I love, okay, this is great. I love this, oh, I love that you're using this tech with that one is great, it works great. Oh, I love this and this. And then you tell them why the things that they're doing are actually good, and how here's a way you can make it better. Here's a connection point and like embracing what they're already interested. I mean, as we talked about all the time, people they already trust, right, bringing those in, I just, it's small, but it's big.
Rich Lewis-Jones 12:04
There's when you're gonna see some new sort of messaging coming out. We've sort of recalibrated ourselves on three key pillars, which is usability, flexibility, connectivity, right? And I think our marketplace partners tie into all of those key pillars, right? So we, to your point, either when we go into a demo, rocking up and being able to show someone that, right, we know that you use these five tools, those five tools have great and you're going to maximize the ROI from those because you know what, you can automatically kick out that reference check in a hiring workflow, without even having to do anything in SmartRecruiters it pre configured and guess what, if you want to change it, or move it into the hiring process somewhere differently, look how easy it is to do. And you just see people's Jaws dropping not only like you say they getting a branded, personalized demo environment, but they're seeing in real time, just how easy it is to configure or reconfigure those tools into whatever they're doing, whether it's at the front end, middle, or the back end of a hiring process. And I think that level of personalization, then leaning on partners to do it is superb.
Stan Wasowicz 13:19
Yeah, and it's not just a sales team. Here, I got a shout out there a pre sales team, we actually have a lady called Pat, who's our demo innovation director. And when she joined the business, this was the first time I ever heard about the rule like that. I was like, holy moly, I gotta get in touch with this lady. So for all of our key partners, like a go to partners, we're not doing pre recorded stuff. No, we have actual demo access. We've embedded these guys into our software into our narrative, we're able to demo them live. And more. So we've given them demo access. So we're when it when we're not in the room, they are able to demo us and most of our competitors can do that. They can even whip up a sandbox as easily as weekend due to the strategy that Richard has explained. And that's super powerful, you know, that people showing examples of how they integrate with anybody using your software that just creates these multiple digital touchpoints in this, you know, during the buyers cycle, and create so much more trust than you can see them or win rates that for the for the past
Jared Fuller 14:18
seven, eight minutes here, folks go back, rewind that and start kicking off around the 10 minute mark. Because that conversation and exchange between rich and Stan and us very important to understand the I think the the problem and challenge that Stan helped rich solve, which was not, you know, educate my team on the power of partners, it was effectively a better product. Right? So Stan, you knew that being able to show this value in a workflow in this environment. And of course, having demo engineers. I was actually going to bring that up as an aside as like I see there's demo engineers at Smart recruiters. I bet one of the roles of demo engineers is to be able to Case partner workflows so that way you're pitching a solution, not a point solution. Right? So I kind of assumed as much, I'm glad to hear that inter woven. But what you've been able to do with that pre sales organization, and then the partner narrative is give rich and his team, a better product to sell. Right, which is not just the product that the customer ends up using. It's the pre sales environment, it's the deck. It's the narrative. It's the fact that it's living where the customer is, like it rich, if you're evaluating, okay, I have internal slides, or I have this demo custom way that I can sell now, like, you're going this route every time right.
Rich Lewis-Jones 15:36
Yep. I think the the other interesting parts of that, right is the way I see it, having been on the talent acquisition, buying side, and now selling back to my former self, essentially, is people pay like crazy amounts of money to get advice on what should we be buying, right? So if you're actually talking to a prospect, and you're able to show them smarter cruisers, and they're like, We don't have anything for reference checking, today, we're doing it manually. You're like, right, well, we've, we work hard to make sure that we've got the best in the business plugged into SmartRecruiters, let's make some introductions for you, people would pay 20 grand for that kind of advice. Right. So it's, we actually what we're able to do is to sit and say that, you know, depending on what you're looking for, we can introduce you to 123, maybe even five partners to take a look at. So I think it's you kind of really start moving into this sort of trusted advisor role. Rather than I'm here to sell you SmartRecruiters, I'm going to shove as much of SmartRecruiters down your throat as possible. It's not what I'm here for, what I actually want to do is to make sure that we're Yes, selling you our product, we're making sure that we're connecting as much of the ecosystem that's going to provide you the return and investment that you're looking for. So that guess what, when it comes down to renewal time you renew with us. And guess what, when we play that card, we have a 97% customer renewal rate at smart gruters. So it's not just the new business side, I really like the fact that let's look at how we can grow out the ecosystem so that when new tech comes out, it's plugging into the SmartRecruiters ecosystem, we're staying best of breed, we're plugging in best of breed and customers never have to leave us because everybody's keeping up with the pace of innovation that our customers need. But there's the what's what, how would I put it just the pace of the trends and challenges that are being picked up in the talent acquisition space, not one vendor can keep up with them all.
Stan Wasowicz 17:27
You can innovate against the whole market. That's the other point that we really appreciate that, you know, if you think about it, if you're in sales, how often are you in Salesforce using Salesforce? How often are you you're using different tools around it integrate with it, or how often do teams have their own tools, your marketing is on Marketo, yo the product teams are reveal the sales team is on outreach, the customer success team is on things side, they may be spent minutes in a day using Salesforce. And most of you know we're a system of records for hiring. And we really appreciate that most of our users will spend hours more time in all these different types of solutions that they might even be spending in us. You know, we want to bring that stuff together in the most holistic, most user friendly way, and involve our partners in that. And that's why Jared going back to the years saying what are we selling, we are selling joint value propositions, the synergies between all these tools together, and not just like technology goals, interpersonal relationships that we create, with our partners, with the solution architects or the product teams or the sales teams, the success teams just allow us to provide a much better joint service than our competitors can. And because of that, we no more you know, a partner will often tell you stuff that even the customer or the prospect won't be telling you, right because they've heard and they have that relationship is interesting that that we often get better intel from partners selling into our customer or prospects, because they are uncovering pain points. But then again, our doesn't happen on it accounts for ages, they all the key stakeholders, they know all about the politics, who's what you know, they can help us build them stakeholder maps, Intel, the sheer intel that we get from those just tremendous. And that's another shout out to reveal you know, I've I've written LinkedIn about this, I've said this on our podcasts like we had this massive fixation activating partners to get referrals, pipeline sales from them, but actually the Intel piece broadly, so hard to attribute so hard to measure on the deal on a customer, but the invalid influence piece of the partner
Rich Lewis-Jones 19:25
is triggered by this as well. If you think about the power of being able to turn up to a prospect meeting and spend the first half of the meeting talking about everything else other than SmartRecruiters and then lead into SmartRecruiters you're going to show such a deep level of understanding for that business. So don't turn up and pitch turn up and talk about everything that you know so far that you've been able to gather, and I think sometimes as well. People are afraid to share that they've how they found this information that say look, it's my job to know we have these partners. We have nine of them. They're being used by you we have a fantastic relationship. with them, this is what they're able to tell us about your business. I'm here to help you. Now let's show you solutions in SmartRecruiters of those things that they don't fix.
Stan Wasowicz 20:07
I'm a partner leader, right? I'm getting goosebumps, to say this shit, because it's exactly this, I keep saying this our senior leadership to guys, like you guys a podcast, I really believe in sales, sales folks, Customer Success folks job to know this sort of stuff. And I didn't come up with his model. You know, by design, I came up with model because I was one partner guy essentially running the show globally, for for this unicorn, you know, and hundreds of go to market folks, before that, there were three, now that the company has shifted their strategy, we have a much more, you know, fleshed out ecosystem team, and we're stronger than ever, and we're going to do stuff this year, that's more incredible than ever, but I couldn't keep up with everything that was going on around me in the go to market org. So I needed to be supported by technology like reveal, that can actually allow our reps to leverage the partner channel and the partner power without relying on me to figuring out who's on their account. And that's actually created another really, really important thing that rich, the I believe, looking at rich, and what made them successful I want to share is that on a global strategic level, right, you usually have your most important partners based on their presence on your ICP, your customer overlaps with the potential channel they have for you, right, you want to go really deep with them. But then there might be local partners that are completely insignificant for you on the global level, but can be deal critical can be completely game changing on the account level on that specific enterprise deal that can make your regions budget or break it. Enrich has been absolutely acing picking out these partners locally for him using data and then giving them the white glove treatment, you know, they wouldn't they feel as if they are a strategic partner, because there's a local contact, creating an executive connection, introducing the old team getting connected on LinkedIn. But then also do the informal stuff, grabbing a beer talking some shit, having relationships, you know, there are other people I've got to call out, you're like there's a guy who Bruce Richards in Canada, who was an ace when it comes to this stuff. We have people in the CS team like a Steve Gordon and do all this stuff. They make it part of their habits part of their job. I believe we formalize it isn't yet, but the people that are doing this in our business. They're flying. And I and I know partners are a big reason for it.
Rich Lewis-Jones 22:38
Something that Stein said as well, I think just to sort of double down on what I think is also really important for sales. And again, something I said on the transactional side of things is there's some incredible tech that has launched out of Australia, right? There's HR tech startups doing some incredible stuff that are trying to break in other markets and vice versa, right. So there's great tech in the US. There's great tech in America that are trying to break into Australia. So you can also have conversations of trade off. It's like, hey, look, you know, I've got a great network, we've got a fantastic presence down here. My customer success leader Brett Potts, big shout out to him. He's running these partner inspiration sessions with customers at the moment. We've got partners from other regions that no one's even heard of, sort of coming in and running workshops with customers, not pitching, doing educational workshops of here is a problem that we know that you are having in your, in your role or in a particular part of your business, whether it's candidate experience, employee relations, whatever it might be, here's what we do. And here's how we can help you. And so the partners are coming in, and they're not just having one transaction with the customer. People are walking right sometimes. And then we've got five leader that,
Stan Wasowicz 23:53
yes, what happens they start sending leads back. Right, so, so point solutions, solutions, apps accounted for more than 30% of our referral pipeline last year, right? Which is really interesting for a system of records.
Rich Lewis-Jones 24:08
Everybody, everybody wins in that scenario, because if a customer gets value, right, it's, I think, again, going back to that piece of, you know, if you think about head of head of talent acquisition or a chief HR officer in our space, they are so busy keeping the lights on in their business at the moment, I think of myself as an asset to those people so that they can they can lean on me for advice. So it's like, hey, look, what we're going to do is we're going to bring a partner and we're going to put them in front of you. This is someone that we are seeing everywhere else that you're probably not looking at the moment take a look at it if you like it and then it's no like you don't have to buy it. You can just keep in touch right so it's they come in they educate the added value can they buy you now know can you in the future? Probably yes. Right. Off we go and it's constantly adding value. I want
Stan Wasowicz 24:57
to talk about another thing because we're talking about this I Three parts is going to be Roy a frickin love him I got into this game because because I'm kind of a tech nerd. But I want to talk about services partners, right? Because this is one of these topics. I've read about it, I hear these podcasts about them, like God, so hard to break in there. So we have this thing called hiring success, you know, which is a methodology and philosophy is a better way to get bums on seats on time and on budget, right. But in Rich's opinion, especially down under, it was very fluffy at some point like what what are we really talking about, but the actual thing, the actual thing that there was this is the closest you can come to actual consulting, you know, of people in the hiring process. Then we have this other thing called the hiring success business assessment, like in hiring success is Ha, there's a better way to hire, that the business assessment is the closest thing we come to Business Value Engineering, how do I stick up across four maturity levels to that new era of hiring? Well, what language Am I speaking now? Consulting, language, Business Value Engineering, you know, certifications, assessments, new models, digital transformation, this is what these companies, you know, earn earn money from and what would Rich's done incredibly well is what I'm trying to pitch to this company is the only way to the service partner will care about us is if we become their product. If they can make money identifying the need, they can make money, validating the need, and they can make money, either referring or potentially future reselling us than implementing us then, in many cases, even staffing, you know, the teams that use a tool, Richard and I had a 30 minute conversation about this when we coming in and actually being told slack, like I don't really believe in this approach. And meanwhile, this is my baby, you know, trying to set up new global service partnership by becoming might become humble enough to understand we won't be the most important thing for his company. But if we can get some of their strategy deemed by this, we can some of them implementation themes to buy into ripping and replacing essentially, our key target system of records, you know, these these old legacy legacy HCM software's recruitment module with us. Three weeks later, we're on a call at unfortunately, like, almost midnight, my time. And I can't I don't think I can mention them yet. But we're talking about the company hiring tour 2000 people as we speak, we probably won't trade them all go to market with a software. But we're in advanced conversation about training a few, right, and I'm incredibly bullish on this becoming a huge revenue driver as well for us, because last year is 70%, or 30%, was ISV 70% of our referral revenue came from service partners. But exactly the same stories with these ISVs. The only way that you can really make this fly is you if you have local champions, in the field where the rubber meets the road, collaborating with the leaders collaborating with the partners collect when I'm talking to somebody, these partners have these consulting firms exchanging knowledge and explaining to them articulating to them why they should be interested in us. Part of that is obviously the partner sales, you know, the partner sales process, but then the actual credibility comes from people like rich that are there locally, right? Not from that small partner team. And I'll be controversial here because I know there's loads of these, you know, partner account managers magic these accounts. But I even think that the biggest chunk of this partner account management service partner account management shoots in with those local leaders, local sales teams, local success teams, because they are the ones that will, again, be collaborating on the account level. And that's where the rubber meets the road. So I want I wanted to address that,
Rich Lewis-Jones 28:47
I think putting it in its simplest form as well, I've and I, especially in this market at the moment. If I was to ask my team that worked with me, my employees, would you rather, go and spend time with local partners, whether it's ISVs, or HR tech partners, to share information, build on your knowledge of a particular prospect, get a foot in the door and then work with them to one obviously drive revenue, make drive customer satisfaction, and then obviously drive revenue for the ISVs and HR tech partners? Or would you rather sit there making 500 calls and 500 emails a week waiting for someone to respond to you? What would you rather do? Like there's so many people that are sitting there monotonously out bounding to with adding no value I'm not even using all of the information is just right on the right in front of them. So I think yeah, Stan has done an incredible job of of that and I've just seen huge power and information from from these partners, whether they're Ice Ice V ISVs, consulting firms, SI Partners hate John tech. I just see it as a goldmine.
Isaac Morehouse 29:56
So I'm sitting here watching standard Rich, you guys are like finishing each other sentences giving each other goosebumps just nodding and cheering. And this is, this is not normal. We're a VP of sales and a head of partnerships. If if I were to transport you right now to a different company and rich, you're you're at your VP of sales at another company. Stan, you're your head of partnerships at another company. What would you do to try to create what you have here between sales and partnerships? Like most companies don't have this? What would you do? What does it take culturally to bring about that kind of relationship?
Rich Lewis-Jones 30:39
Yeah, I owe about the relationship side. I think we have enough store, obviously, I think in any business now, like there's one of my team recently won a major global unicorn. Deal. And I can tell you now, we would not have won it, unless he had ran with partners or lead with partners in that deal. So I'd tell that story. But I believe Yeah, I think using a tool like reveal, just to show you how much information is out there. First and foremost, would be something that would obviously just show account overlap. So that you can actually start to say, the thing that I love about reveal was it just eradicates the bullshit of spreadsheets. And it just allows you to kind of go in and beat up right, but I know exactly what where I stand from a current tech and tools being used. So I can go and lead with a very meaningful and impactful conversation with this prospect. So I think if we could get revere weigh in, that would be the first thing that I would probably likely do. Obviously, then working with someone like iStan, to go and get all of those partners connected,
Stan Wasowicz 31:51
I think, rich, rich answer the one really important piece of my answer are these and that's showing, showing the go to market teams the value. So if you have internal case studies, I was lucky enough to have a guy called Rob Simon's who was hired by himself in Europe with no marketing resources, those sales resources very similar to rich, so we had to rely on partners who's really, really bought in, and he had great success stories to share that I could use to get the wider org on board. Now I have rich, so I'm shopping rich around everywhere I can go like, like this podcasts, but those are internally and externally. If I would go somewhere else, I wouldn't have internal case studies, I could show it show the partner value, I would source them externally. But that's that's why I would start because I'm a huge either manager, or the manager that would say that that, you know, opinions are like, like assholes, everyone has them and they all stink. And on the other hand, you can't argue with data. So when you have a really strong case study, and then you have account mapping technology, like reveal that can show you the partner potential. The next two things that I would do are more around the people and the process, right? Because reveal is like a hammer. But if no one grabs it actually hits the nail on the head, nothing happens, right? It's a tool. So you need to create partner processes that allow you to really quickly effectively a great user experience type of way, you know, connect with partners and work with them. And then finally, the, the interpersonal piece usually needs to be kind of handheld at the beginning. You know, if you go like okay, hey, sale leader reach out to a bunch of these partners and rich would actually do it but many, many votes instantly they would they want to have some of these connections. So you know, just connecting people proactively jumping on the call together, getting the flywheel going as I like call it. But then once it gets going, referrals are being shared win rates are going up, customers are singing each other's praises these These themes are seeing success. Then you get that flywheel spinning that snowball effect, whatever you want to call it, and they get easier and easier and, and to be honest, I'd be lying if I said this was an easy journey. For me as a partner leader. It's hard cruising though I jumped through most of the hoops and most of my fellow partner leaders have to jump and add some fires extinguish some credibility losses and gains back but now right now I think people like rich and a few other success stories in my backpack. I feel like you know, again, we're we're stronger than ever expecting it to be easier and easier to drive more and more impact.
Rich Lewis-Jones 34:32
Even if you're like a, you know, VP coming into a startup and you're the first boots on the ground, like so four years ago, I joined the businesses and IE, I was the first time on the ground I had no support with three customers. But what I did know from my time at X Ref was that there was X Ref there was referee, there was high view there was modern high there was no border. There's all these partners, so and they were all in integrated into smart recruiters. So what I did is I then when I went when I met with them, and then I showed our product, their product in our environment, and I talked to them about why smart fixes. And I just basically transformed their sales teams into our channel sales teams. So all of a sudden, I had an army of people out there just talking good things about SmartRecruiters, because their integration into our platform was great. So I think if you're in a startup, or you're in a small business meeting with large business, go and find out who your key partners are, go and spend time with them, show them the value of what you're doing, and then they will start to sell for you. And look four years later, 110 customers who spent about $50,000 on marketing, and that is it. And we are 110 customers and growing right and not to put 35 on last year, and I would probably hedge my bets at about 50% of those deals with one because of relationships with partners.
Jared Fuller 35:53
Well, Stan, Rich, thank you so much. This is a heck of an episode to share with your sales counterparts on some of the story in the smart recruiters saga. Thank you so much. Partner up, peace out. We will see you all next time. Good to
Rich Lewis-Jones 36:07
meet you guys. Thanks very much.
