John (00:01)
Well, hello, Toni. Welcome back to the Partnership Path, our opportunity to have another fun discussion about all things partnership. How are you today?

Toni (00:07)
Yes, yes, I’m

good, I’m good. We’re getting all things partnership. Always good, always good for these conversations.

John (00:12)
Good!

just kind of work on

my UK accent. love the way you say, good. I’m good. There’s something.

Toni (00:20)
with

Well, here’s just an aside. I got to sit next to a mayor of a region in the UK at a dinner and he said, do I detect a hint of Australian? went, no. So maybe I don’t say good like a British person does. I say it like an Australian.

John (00:43)
That could be,

maybe that’s what it is, is it’s a little Australian. That’s interesting.

Toni (00:49)
Good?

I don’t know. Yeah, I’m I did. So he thought I sounded Australian. I have no idea. I don’t even know who I am anymore, Anyway. Yes. Hmm. Which is good for you.

John (01:00)
All right, so our topic today is organic growth and This is weird,

what’s that?

Toni (01:10)
It’s good for you. Good.

John (01:12)
It’s good for

you. Good. It’s good. Yeah. So this is kind of a strange thing that popped into my head. when I was a young parent, there was this commercial about drinking milk. And it was these kids, little kids sitting there talking about, and maybe this was a Saturday Night Live. It must have been a parody commercial now that I’m saying this, but

Toni (01:24)
Mm.

Your sketch.

John (01:41)
And was these little kids, were, and they didn’t like their milk. They didn’t want to drink their milk. And their mom is like, you need to drink your milk. And they’re looking out the window at this neighbor, this kind of old guy neighbor. He’s not super old, but he’s older. And they’re like, well, neighbor Bob never drinks milk. And the mom isn’t exactly sure what to say. But then they.

kind of pan back a little and Bob reaches down with both hands to grab a barbell and to lift it. And when he stands up, both his arms come off of his body at the shoulder and are stuck to the barbell and he stands up. And so then they pan back to the kids and they’re like, you know, they’re guzzling their milk, you know, so that organic growth, you know, it’s important to, you know, be healthy and, you know, drink so you can grow and not lose your arms when you’re trying to lift weights.

Toni (02:12)
Alright.

Ha

Yeah, very important. Well, good for bone density if you’re going to be drinking. Yeah, I don’t even know where we’re going with this anymore, John. But probably, I tell you what, actually, there’s something in there about incremental gains and growing in a way that’s sustainable. So you don’t just go and try and rent your barbell up that you’ve never picked, you know, that’s much harder. It is much harder to go and pick up a 50

John (02:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Correct.

Toni (03:05)
kilogram barbell, if you’ve never picked one up before, then if you have worked towards it over a period of time and organically developed the ability to lift heavy weights.

John (03:18)
This is why you’re my co-host Toni, is you can rescue a terrible analogy for me into something meaningful. I love that. Yeah.

Toni (03:20)
Hahaha

I made hard work

out of it though I think.

John (03:28)
We’ll see what kind of response we get to that. Look, we’ve all seen the Harvard, kind of the classic Harvard business review model of growth, right? Which is, one axis is solutions from old to new and one axis is customers from existing to new. And so it ends up with four quadrants, right? You four different ways you can grow your business, right? You can sell more of what you already have.

Toni (03:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

John (03:56)
to the customers that you already have, which is essentially more of the same. You can sell more of what you already have to new customers, so trying to break into new targets, essentially. You can sell new solutions into your existing customers, so that’s new product, but into your old customers. Or you can sell

Toni (03:56)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John (04:25)
both new product and sell that into new customers. And so you got four options, right, of how you want to grow. And I think as partner managers, we have to approach our growth conversations with our partners the same way. How do we want to grow? And those are the four options. So.

Toni (04:29)
Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

and some are

more painful than others. I think… Harder.

John (04:47)
Well, for sure. Yeah,

they’re much more hard. So selling new product into new customers is essentially lifting that 50 kilogram weight when you haven’t done any of it before, right? It’s two very new things. It’s a whole new customer market and a whole new solution. And for most organizations, that’s very, very difficult to do. It’s much easier to do

Toni (05:01)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

John (05:17)
One of the other three, obviously more of the same is the easiest, but it’s also a question of saturation, right? There’s only so much I can do with that. And so then I’m faced with, I go a new product or do I sell more of what I’ve got into a new target market? And there, at least you’re exercising a muscle. Half of that muscle is one you’ve already got. You already know your customer or you already know your product, right?

Toni (05:22)
Mm.

Yeah. And one thing that strikes me though, is that, you know, the net new, new product, new, new customer is positioned as the kind of the ideal. You might have a vendor that says the accelerators are all on net new. We don’t need, we, you know, that needs to be a customer we’ve never touched. And so I think a challenge, if you’re a partner manager, channel manager, alliances manager is to.

kind of highlight the importance of choosing where to invest in that growth and understanding whether the partner is in a position and whether you as a vendor in a position to make that growth happen. Because you can’t just hit someone over the head saying, I want you to get a new customer with this brand new product that we’ve got.

John (06:37)
Yeah. Well, and I think, look to your point, I think in a lot of partnerships that emphasis on new customer is, it is the most prevalent primarily because in partnership we’re nervous that if we go the new solution route, what if that’s not us? It invites the possibility of competitive.

Toni (07:00)
Yeah.

John (07:03)
mind share loss, right? That they say, well, yeah, you’re right. We should have, we should sell us another solution and we’re going to go with some other partner for that solution. And so I think in partnerships, a lot of times we gravitate towards that new customer profile because we think it’s safer. It’s really not, but we think it is. And so that’s, I think that’s where we have a tendency to, to push. What

Toni (07:05)
Okay.

Mm.

Hmm.

And how

would you kind of plot that out if you were sitting with a partner and going, would you put it into the full segments and go, why don’t we work through what’s possible here?

John (07:39)
Yeah,

I do believe that that’s the right way to do it. Like, I think it’s really important to sit down with a partner and just be super transparent about, we both want to grow. Let’s talk about between where we want to go together over the long term, which one of these models or what combination of models actually makes the most sense for us and has the most opportunity for success.

Toni (07:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

John (08:08)
I mean, everyone knows the model, but I don’t think people like talk about it pragmatically, right? They try to make it more complicated than that. And the reality is, is if we just break it down into something super simple, it’s much easier for both parties to kind of get behind and be like, yeah, actually that makes more sense. Let’s do that. Yeah.

Toni (08:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And maybe, where is the appetite for growth as well? It might be that you have a plan that you want to sell into a new, you know, new customer area, but actually for the partner, they’re saying, well, we really want to invest in the existing customers we have to sell them, you know, a new service we’re going to onboard or something like that.

John (08:56)
Well, and I mean, that gets back to the, you know, the old research of, you know, is it more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an old customer, right? And the keeping the old customer is, hey, we just want to sell them more stuff, but not have to learn a whole new customer profile and, you know, be super competitive trying to get into a new area. And so I think there’s lots of business reasons why a partner might

Toni (09:06)
Mm.

Yeah.

Mm.

John (09:25)
say, we don’t really have an appetite for another customer segment or whatever. We’re going to stick with this segment, but we want to sell them more stuff. Yeah. It’s challenging. understanding that, having that conversation, it’s critical. Right? Like, how often do partner managers get pressured to convince their partners to do something?

Toni (09:35)
Hmm

John (09:53)
get after a new market, sell a new product or whatever. And I think as partner professionals, we just go and make the pitch instead of having this conversation, which is, hey, we’re both interested in growth. There’s a bunch of different ways we could do that. Let’s talk about what makes sense for your business, what makes sense for our business and see if we can find some common ground that actually meets what I’m being pressured to do, but at least come at it from a different angle.

Toni (09:54)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you can identify the kind of, you know, growing pains that might come with each of those. you know, to, to, it could be that people require cross training or they require marketing funding, or they need access to a resource or they need to go and see the solution in action and be able to take their customers to see it. So I think it is that you could say, yeah, this is the potential growth.

John (10:36)
Right?

Toni (10:50)
What are the associated growing pains? What can we do to mitigate that that would make that more likely or more successful?

John (10:57)
Totally.

Totally. And then I think the other thing that partner people struggle with is recognizing that the minute I’m trying to convince a partner to do something like that, I’m in a sales cycle. I am selling this idea, which means I have to evangelize a bit, right? Like if I’m taking, if I’m going to try and convince my partner to go after a new customer segment, or I’m going to have to

Toni (11:13)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

John (11:26)
convince them to sell a new product, a new solution that I have that they’ve never dabbled in before, I have to bring them a business case that says, hey, look, here’s what’s happening in the market. Here’s what is currently available in that market. Here’s how come we together could actually capture that market. Here’s how we could be successful. And here’s what it could be worth to your company and my company.

Toni (11:54)
Yeah.

John (11:54)
Like,

I have to sell that whole idea. And that requires me to do some work, right? I can’t just go, hey, I think you should sell product X for us. you know, I think the way for you to grow your business is to sell more of our X product or, you know, for you to become certified in X. that’s just, that just feels like I’m being told what to do. Sell me, right? Convince me that there’s a market opportunity that’s worth it for me.

Toni (11:57)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that that is such a good shout because if you just turn up and present at people but they don’t like it or they’re not going to listen or they’re going to go, well, that’s an hour of my time. I’m never getting back. Yeah.

John (12:38)
Right, right, because

they immediately discount it because they’re like, yeah, obviously this is your priority, right? You’ve been instructed to come tell me to do this and it has nothing to do with me. You haven’t even thought about whether it’s good for me or not, right? So we have to.

Toni (12:55)
Yeah. And I think,

I think given now the, you know, the research that we have access to at our fingertips, you know, there’s, there’s almost no excuse really for not going to see what the analysts are saying or to find out what’s happening in a market. And I think bringing some of that into sit around whatever your solution is or does, you know, is really

really, really important.

John (13:27)
Yeah. And then once we convince them to do it, once we agree that this is where we’re going to take the partnership, then that’s when the real work actually starts too, right? You mentioned before about kind of figuring out how it’s going to work. Do I have to train a bunch of people? Do I have to do I have to build more capacity? Like maybe I don’t have enough people to do what this new this new thing is, or I don’t have the right people to do it. And so how do I how do I go through that whole thing from a

Toni (13:42)
Yeah.

Hmm.

John (13:56)
marketing, a sales, a delivery or development and a customer service type of thing to, know, like I’m now I’m building a new part of my business. I got to make sure that I can actually support that, which we didn’t really spend a lot of time here, but it’s worth mentioning too, organizations in partnership that want to grow actually have to be healthy to grow. Like this takes us back to the milk thing, right? Which is if

Toni (14:09)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

John (14:26)
If I have a dysfunctional marketing operation in our partnership or I have a dysfunctional selling operation, I can’t grow. So I have to fix that stuff first before I can grow the partnership. And I think that’s the other thing that I think we make mistakes on sometimes is we push partners to grow who actually the partnership itself is dysfunctional. So of course it’s not going to work. Yeah.

Toni (14:34)
Mm-hmm. No.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think the whole, you know, aspect of this partnership path being something you walk together and building that from that initial first win, which came up in one of the in real life episodes, your first kind of proof point and establishing those relationships and really knowing what’s going on. You’re quite right. Cause if you build any, try and build anything on shaky foundations, it’s just gonna, it’s going to go horribly wrong.

John (14:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Toni (15:19)
It’s going to collapse. Yeah.

John (15:19)
Right. Right. And both of you will be frustrated. You’ll both end up. Yeah. Well, I’m anxious to hear what the community has to say about this one, too. This is a this is a. I think this is something that people get pressured to do all the time. And I think we are ill prepared to do it because we haven’t broken it down into the pragmatic sort of, hey, how how is this going to work? Are we ready? Can I put together a sales pitch that’s compelling?

Toni (15:25)
Yeah.

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

John (15:47)
And then can I do the work to actually build the capacity? This is not a if you build it, they will come scenario. You got to do the work first. anyway, I’ll be super curious to hear what the community has to say and get some real life examples of how people have helped their partners actually grow organically. Thanks, Toni. Yeah.

Toni (15:47)
Yeah.

No.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

Fantastic. Look forward to it. OK, thanks,

John.