I’m a Customer Success, Partnerships, and Sales professional with over 12 years of SaaS and Ecommerce experience. I have a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) degree and a minor in Psychology from Carleton University in Ottawa. More personally, I was born in Serbia and am a Serbian citizen, although I grew up in Abu Dhabi and then moved to Canada for university and for my career. I have since become a Canadian citizen also and am a proud resident of our capital, Ottawa! I’m a huge fan of art, travel, books, movies/TV shows, music, and sports. I love to paint and have some of my own artwork displayed around my home. I have a passion for traveling to new places, reading books, and watching great movies or TV shows. I adore listening to amazing music and going to concerts/festivals. I also really love watching sports on TV as well as live, plus playing sports and staying active regularly. Finally, family and friends are very important to me and I love spending time with them.
I first started working with partners over a decade ago, in 2014, when I joined Klipfolio and helped partner agencies and brands provide real-time SaaS Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards to their clients/customers. From there I moved into the ecommerce world where I helped Rewind, a SaaS company that provides backups for Shopify and BigCommerce, to more than double their strategic partner count and drive significant revenue through those partners. After that I was in charge of partnerships at an international ecommerce agency called Calashock Commerce, where I helped drive significant partner-led revenue growth. Partnerships and partners have helped me and my customers grow and improve our businesses, so they are a big part of my strategy and career.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned working with SaaS partnerships is that those partnerships have to be based on trusted relationships and driving mutual value, which can often mean contributing net new revenue to each other. SaaS partnerships and partnerships in general have to benefit both partners involved, so helping drive revenue for your partners is generally the biggest value you can offer them. This can be in the form of providing them with leads, getting customers/clients to use and purchase your software, helping customers/clients implement partner software to achieve success, engaging in co-marketing activities to generate joint leads, etc. Once you provide value to your partners and form a trusted relationship with their team, you can work together to achieve common goals or metrics.
I see partnerships becoming more and more important in the SaaS world moving forward. Since partner leads have proven to convert better and tend to be stickier, I think organizations will see partnerships as more of a strategic initiative moving forward. Many strategic partnerships generate significant revenue for the organizations that engage in them, so I think that leadership at many more organizations will experiment with and implement partnership initiatives. I believe that the strategic importance of partnerships will become even more evident moving forward and that the partnerships function will become a deeply embedded one within all SaaS organizations. With better tooling such as PRMs and being able to track customer success, it’s easier to align on goals with partners and to work together to move the needle. This will only get easier and will help the partnerships space evolve.
An example of a partnership strategy that worked exceptionally well for me is when I was working with Rewind’s ecommerce agency partners to include Rewind’s SaaS backup solution in their customer contracts. I worked very closely with many ecommerce agency partners to develop trusting relationships based on driving mutual value, so that we could create this value-add option for their merchant customers. Through that, I was able to work with several of them on adding Rewind to their customer contracts as either a mandatory option, which was preferable, or as a strongly suggested option. Some of the agency partners wanted to have all of their customers backed up on Rewind, so all of their Shopify and/or BigCommerce data was backed up in case anything unexpected happened, while other agency partners strongly suggested that option and it was up to customers to decide. Having Rewind included within agency customer contracts as either mandatory or strongly suggested drove significant revenue through the partnerships channel for the organization. Being able to add Rewind to agency customer contracts increased visibility, drove net new partner revenue, and helped with retention and expansion since customers valued and often needed Rewind’s backup solution.
The most common mistake SaaS companies make with partnerships is treating them as a short-term sales tactic rather than a long-term strategic investment. Oftentimes leadership does not believe in partnerships enough to make the significant and required investment in their partnerships function. Partnerships in that case are not aligned with company goals, so they become siloed and it can be hard to track the success of the program. If the right ICP for partners is not found at the start then investments will be made to bring on partners that might not be the right fit, meaning they will be inactive and have wasted internal resources. When companies make the mistake of focusing on quantity of partnerships instead of quality then they might not be forming the right strategic partnerships that will drive mutual business value, potentially resulting in the program not being a success. It is essential to think about the long game in partnerships, plan everything out, track your success, and then iterate and improve on whatever you can.
As mentioned above, to measure success in partner-led growth you really do have to start tracking the influence of the partnerships function on net new revenue. Partners can provide leads and new deals that weren’t in the pipeline previously. Partners can also influence revenue through co-selling initiatives or they could help expand existing accounts by leveraging their influence. This is all net new partner-sourced or partner-influenced revenue, so organizations would do well to track the $ revenue amount contributed by partners. Organizations should also track their # of partners, how many of them are active and/or signing into the PRMs, how many of them contribute leads, how partner deals expand and churn, and so on. You can also track co-marketing initiatives with partners and their success, to determine the value of those initiatives and what can be improved. My advice is to track everything that you can, as that is when you can see where you are at and how you can become better.
I think the idea of ecosystem-led growth is very exciting in the SaaS partnership space nowadays. Many companies have begun to focus on designing their strategy around an interconnected system of partners, where each partner can contribute to creating deeper value for customers and driving better outcomes. A great example of this, and one close to my heart, is Shopify who is leading the ecosystem-led growth charge within ecommerce. They have so many partner solutions in their space that provide added value and that just work better together with Shopify. I’m also really excited about the improvement in tooling within the Partnerships space, where tools like PRMs and Crossbeam/Reveal are allowing partners to better track the success of their partnership programs and to work better together on leads and opportunities.
The best partnership I’ve ever witnessed has got to be the one between McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. I mean, can you imagine going to McDonald’s and ordering a Coca-Cola, only for them to say “sorry we don’t have Coca-Cola, is Pepsi okay?” I personally cannot imagine that, as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are synonymous and go hand-in-hand. I cannot imagine the amount of revenue they drive for each other, plus all of the other benefits of that partnership! Coca-Cola has an exclusivity agreement with McDonald’s, where you pretty much cannot drink anything but their products, so this certainly drives a ton of revenue for them. Also, McDonald’s serving Coca-Cola certainly helps them drive additional revenue, as Coca-Cola is a huge brand and helps bring customers into McDonald’s. From what I’ve heard, some people go to McDonald’s just for the Coca-Cola, as they say it is the best Coke they ever had. I’ve even heard that Coca-Cola offers a special syrup mix to McDonald’s that none of the other fast food chains get, while I’ve also heard that they deliver their syrup to McDonald’s in stainless steel containers instead of the regular plastic ones, making it taste better. What a partnership!
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