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Today’s show featured an interview with Theresa Caragol, Founder, and CEO at AchieveUnite. Attend the Next Gen Partnering Summit 2024 in Reston, Virginia. Register here. She is the author of Partnering Success: The Force Multiplier to Achieve Exponential Growth.
Find Theresa on LinkedIn.
THERESA’S’ TIP: “Partnerships have become more important than ever, with the rise of the influencer, and the rise of AI, and the rise of 35 touches in an enterprise opportunity. They might be transactional, they might be sales, they might be consulting, they might be advisory, they might be procurement, they might be inside of your organization. Every single company in the world needs to have a partnering strategy from day one.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m talking to the author of the book Partnering Success: The Force Multiplier to Achieve Exponential Growth, Theresa Caragol. She’s the leader at AchieveUnite and she is one of the true experts on partnerships. I’m excited to talk to you for a couple reasons. One is, I read your book, Partnering Success, and as I’m reading the book, for me, a lot of my background is in partnering. People have heard me say this before. My MBA thesis, believe it or not, was on channel theory and design. This was in the mid ‘90s, so it’s like 30 years ago. Who knows what’s changed? But as I’m reading your book, for me, it was a page-turner, and as I’m reading, I’m like, “Yes. Oh my God, yes.”
Then as I got halfway through, I said to myself every company has partnerships, and even the companies that are like, “We’re doing it on our own. We’re 100% direct sales.” Well, you got partners on the product, you got partners selling, some partners on the servicing side. First off, how does it feel to be a published author?
Theresa Caragol: It feels amazing. We hit the best-seller list in over 10 categories within the first few days of the launch. I feel very, very blessed that this is a really hot topic and a need in the market.
Fred Diamond: So much, man. As you know, we both have a couple of companies in common. We both do work with Carahsoft Technology Corporation, one of the most amazing companies out there that has over 10,000 partnerships. A lot of them participate in IES programs. I know you’re doing your conference there. We do all of our events at the Carahsoft Conference and Collaboration Center. As I’m reading your book, it touches on so many things.
I want to cover today, I just don’t want to do a why is partnership important? People can figure that out on the own or they can get the book. But let’s go a little bit deeper into helping the companies that have large partner networks or the partners to larger companies. How can they take their career to the next level and take their relationships up a notch? Which basically is what your book is doing from page 1 through page 200 and wherever it goes to. You’re an expert on partnerships. Give us a state of the union, where are we today? If you want to tell us a little bit about your company and some of the stuff you do with partnerships, that would be great too.
Theresa Caragol: Thank you so much for having me on. I’m thrilled to be here. From a state of the union of partnerships, number one is they have become more important than ever, with the rise of the influencer, and the rise of AI, and the rise of 35 touches in an enterprise opportunity, which you know better than anybody. Before it actually closes, you have to have partners. They might be transactional, they might be sales, they might be consulting, they might be advisory, they might be procurement, they might be inside of your organization. It’s really partnering at the broadest level. It is fundamental. Every single company in the world needs to have a partnering strategy from day one.
Fred Diamond: They need to be good.
Theresa Caragol: It needs to be right and it needs to be deliberate and it needs to be good. We also assert in the book that partnering is a way of life. One of the things I see in these large enterprises that are trying to have really strong partner ecosystems is that they don’t partner well internally and they’re in silos and their cross-functional partnering is really lacking. Partnering has to become a way of life at the executive level. It has to become a way of life in the way people work together inside the organizations and across the organizations into our customers and into our partners.
Fred Diamond: It’s interesting, the Institute for Excellence in Sales, every year we do an award event and we give out what’s called our Lifetime Achievement Award. This past year we gave it to a gentleman named Jim Kelly, who was the head of federal at Dell. As I mentioned before, Dell 30 years ago tried to do it alone. They had no partnerships on the selling side, 100% direct. When we did our event and recognized Jim Kelly, we must have had 30 partners there. They were talking about how critical their relationship was and how critical their buy-in into having the partners be successful.
As I’m reading your book, it reminded me of all these places where you partner. Just as a little bit of a twist, I also wrote a book on Lyme disease. The title of the book is Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know. I never really put two and two together until right now. You have a program called the PQi. Tell us a little bit about that and tell us why it’s helpful.
Theresa Caragol: We spent three years building the PQi index, and PQi stands for Partnering Quotient Index. PQ, think EQ, think IQ, this is your PQ. It’s your ability and your skills to build partnering trust. What we know is that trust is the foundation to everything. Up until now, we’ve been in market about a year, there was never an index to measure trust, and a science-based index to measure trust. That’s what PQi is.
It actually diagnosis what your dominant trust-building profile is, and then iterates and helps you develop your trust building muscles. The way Fred builds trust, the way Theresa builds trust may not be the same. We start to be able to understand the five languages of trust, and how we recognize it in others, and how do we adapt our styles? Because if we can accelerate trust, we accelerate innovation, we accelerate collaboration, we accelerate productivity, we accelerate revenue, we accelerate customer success. Trust is everything. How can we deepen and accelerate it? It isn’t this abstract thing anymore. It is a real science and art. That’s what we focus on in the first part of the book is these business relationships and just how important they are and how to deepen them and more authentically create them.
Fred Diamond: It comes up when you go through the assessment. Is that a good word to use?
Theresa Caragol: The psychometric assessment, you’re exactly right. All based on the different personality tests with university professors from Arizona State, Notre Dame, and the University of Glasgow. It was a major research undertaking, which also by the way, was over 18, all the way up to 70 across the globe in the research and multiple industries, nonprofits, and education. What it took to get to this very fast assessment was three years of work, and it has very high statistical reliability and validity. We’re really proud. It’s really making an impact in organizations, which is what I’m most proud of, and with people.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second. The result is five different types of partners that you are. If you’re able to, tell us the five, and maybe as you tell us each one, maybe tell us a way that if I identify that I am one of these five, what is something I can do to get better in developing my partner relationships?
Theresa Caragol: I’ll start with myself because I have two very dominant profiles. One is the energizer. The energizer is high energy. Loves to take initiative, loves to drive, but also can create a lot of change, because they’re very open to change. If I’m building partnerships, what do we sometimes not want to do? We can’t have too much change. The energizers have to really lead with their relationship building and balance the amount of change they do. Strategizers are very much oriented towards data, information, and strategies. Data first, theory second is the mantra for the strategizer. They have to, oftentimes, because there’s only one profile that’s data first, theory second, the other are more on the EQ side, so recognizing how others build trust across customer bases. We’re starting to see some trends in industry and roles where strategizers are very strong. Recognizing how others build trust is really important for a strategizer.
You can never get a rise out of the harmonizer. The harmonizer is very even tempered. My CFO was, he’s still a friend, but he was with us for a period of time, and he was a harmonizer. I said, “Can we ever get a rise out of you? Can we ever get you emotional?” Because the energizers are very, very often. He said, “No, my wife always says the same thing. I never lose my temper or anything.” Very strong skill in partnering. Bringing harmonizers to very tough negotiations is a really good opportunity.
Then we have collaborators. In an advisory council, you’d want a collaborator. Collaborators can bring everybody’s thoughts into the room. They’re skilled at recognizing what’s happening in the room and pulling out multiple data points. Collaborators are really good at finding the nugget and bringing people and rallying people around it.
Then the last one is the exemplar. The author of our curriculum is an exemplar. I remember when we were first launching the curriculum and she said, “No, it’s not perfect yet. It’s not right.” The exemplars want to do everything right, high quality, that’s how they lead their trust building. I said, “We have to get to market. As the CEO of a company, that’s a growing business, we need to get to market.” You know what? She was right. We tested it further and we refined it further and we waited and she was 100% right.
But there was conflict during that because energizers and exemplars come at it from different ways. The more you build this language of these five profiles, you start to be able to recognize, “That’s your exemplar coming out. That’s your strategizer coming out. Let’s talk about this. How do we get it to another level?” It’s really become this common language for organizations and we’re seeing very leading-edge organizations picking this up and starting to adopt it across the companies. It’s fascinating. It’s so much fun.
Fred Diamond: It makes so much sense because in a lot of cases, a company is like, “Okay, we’re going to build a partner network and go sell my stuff. We’re going to call you at the end of the quarter to see where you are.” Some cases too, there’s historically been tension between the various places where partners are. Also, like you said too, there’s some of the characteristics that are pushing back. It’s like, “Hey, we need to improve upon this.” Like the exemplar saying, “We need to do this and we need to do this.”
What are some of your strategies for becoming a better “partner organization”? Why don’t you give us one or two internally, how internally we can get better, and then externally out to the network as well?
Theresa Caragol: It’s funny because part of the impetus for this book is Craig called me probably seven years ago and said, “Okay, I can’t figure this out. When companies don’t partner well, is it because the people aren’t the right people and they don’t have the right skills for partnering? Or is it because the company doesn’t know how to partner?” What we proved in the book over the last five years and all of our client engagements is it’s both. You have to have both in order to be a successful partnering organization. That means the company has to build a DNA of partnering into their skillset. Even the people that aren’t frontline-facing, they’ve got to be partner-oriented. They’ve got to be able to build partnerships, plus the people up the street, the sellers, they’ve got to have strong co-sell skills and strong partnering skills, and understand how to build long-term relationships with their customers and with their partners. That is critical. The people thing is really important.
Then the second thing is the company has to get a DNA of partnering. We call it the five Ps in the book. The partners who are your strategic partners, because you can’t be everything to everybody or you’re going to fail. That’s oftentimes why organizations fail, is because they haven’t properly prioritized who their partners are. The processes and the programs have to be in place. People say, why do partner programs exist? Partner programs exist to build trust at scale for companies, to build institutional scale and to deepen relationships so that they’re not only one-to-one. That whole piece has to be in place.
We are big fans of simple business planning. We talk in the book about what does effective business planning look like in this next era, especially with AI. By the way, AI is part of the book and AI continues to evolve. AI is going to flip upside down everything we know to be true about our partner programs, our processes, everything. We’re reinventing it all right now and I’m honored to be part of leading in that domain. Partner AI is going to help make partnering easier and make partnering be able to go faster. It’s incredible.
Fred Diamond: We have a lot of people who are partner alliance managers at vendor sites. They manage the partner network, maybe it’s a east/west thing, doesn’t really matter, but they work for the vendor, the company, and they’re in charge of ensuring that their partners are as optimal as possible. What’s some of your advice for things that that particular person can be doing to be more successful?
Theresa Caragol: We’ve trained over 8,000 partner managers across the globe over the last six years. We have a self-assessment of the 67 neo facets required for the partner managers of the future. Not everybody’s going to have everything, but how do you build both your PQ as well as your hard skills of partnering success? We bucket them into three big competencies and then underneath those are the specific skills and neo facets.
One is what we call the collaborative coach or the influencer, the real strong trust builder. That means they are able to build trust at all levels to achieve influence, to bring people together, both at the CEO level, all the way to the sales rep, the engineer, whoever in the organizations we need to build trust with, we’re natural coaches. The second one is the partnering expert. When you’re a partnering expert, you live the five Ps. You’re an unbelievable partner plan, or you’re an unbelievable ability to build joint North Stars, joint north visions, joint missions, and then execute goals aligned to those. By the way, it’s not just about my goals, it’s about our goals combined that hit both of our North Stars in order to be successful. That’s the partnering expert.
Then the third one is the growth consultant. Because if we’re going to partner, it’s got to be about growth. We assert at AchieveUnite, everything’s about growth. You’ve got to become a growth consultant. You’ve got to get really strong at what we call the cos, co-investing, co-selling, co-marketing, co-solutioning, what are the cos that you become strong and build for growth with your partners? Really strong at metric setting, really strong at QBRs, MBRs, reviewing and adjusting accordingly.
Fred Diamond: We’ve covered a lot of ground so far, and there’s so much more we can cover. I want to ask you one last question before I ask you for your final step. Give us the same thing, if a company is a partner, if they’re a partner out there, a selling partner, that’s what we’re focusing on today, what would be your advice for the partner to be more successful and to make the relationship stronger?
Theresa Caragol: With the vendor?
Fred Diamond: Yeah, let’s say I’m a reseller, or a VAR, or some type of solution provider for Dell, or for HPE, or for a company like that.
Theresa Caragol: The same rules apply for vendors as they do for partners. Partners need to segment their vendors. They need to segment the people and the business units inside of their vendors, because they can’t be everything to everybody. We talk about the quadrant of prioritization and who are your most importants that you need to be working with on a regular basis? Who are your biggest high potentials? If you’re a $3 million company, that can’t be 50 people. It’s got to be 5. Being very deliberate about who you’re focused on based on the size of organization you are and who your team is focused on, and ensuring that alignment so that you can grow is really important.
Then the complimentary partnerships, I think these selling partners, these partners have the ability to really help technology meet in the channel, partnerships grow. Taking that to a whole other level I would say is very, very critical. You might do your business planning with three vendors, not one, because time is not your friend. How do you work together with them to make one plus one plus one equal 10?
Fred Diamond: Actually, one of the key things with the partners is, is to let the other company know your skills that they may not know. They may just think you have access to this account or you have some skills in this particular piece of our technology, but as you are developing your skills, they need to be communicated again.
Once again, Theresa Caragol, the book is Partnering Success: The Force Multiplier to Achieve Exponential Growth. Before I ask you for a final action step, you’ve covered so much in the book. We only hit the tip of the iceberg as they say. Is there anything else that you want to share that you want to get across before I ask you for your final action step?
Theresa Caragol: I would just say there is a system for partnering success and it is based on this concept of treating partners for life and investing for the long run. I would just encourage you to look at the system, look at the business relationships, look at this partnering competency and business acceleration piece. The third piece is community, because partnering gets accelerated in communities and ecosystems. How do you do that? Every company needs to have this and get it right, and AI can help you get it right, we can help you get it right, but you have to have a strategy in this domain.
Fred Diamond: Actually, as you’re talking here, I’m thinking about some partnerships that I know of that have gone on for 30 years, and people may leave a company and go to another place. Then you could quickly get the next relationship going if it makes sense for your company and for their new company. But definitely having that strategy, it’s not just, “Great, we’re going to create some partnerships and next month we’re going to see a million dollars flow through.” Some cases a lot of work needs to be happening over years. Trust just doesn’t happen on a weekend, you’re talking about trust, how do you keep developing that?
Theresa Caragol, you’ve given us so many great ideas, so many action things people can do. Once again, pick up the book. I got it on Amazon. It’s a great read. For me, for someone who’s been in this space, it was a page-turner, where every page as I’m going through, it’s like, “Oh my God, that makes so much sense. You know what? I didn’t really think about that as being critical, but that’s such an important part.” As you think about what goes into making a relationship long-term successful, and like you also mentioned, which is the most important thing here, it’s how do we provide value to the end customer. How do we bring the end customer what they need to achieve their mission?
Give us a final action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, but something specific people should do right now after listening to the show or reading the transcript to take their performance to the next level.
Theresa Caragol: I would encourage you to contact us. We have all of this loaded in an AI engine, and you can bring this into your organization, in your team, in yourself, or in your entire company as a language. It’s pretty incredible what can be done. You’ll have it all at your fingertips.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo