93: בקצרה - הקמת תכנית שותפויות עסקיות (English)

Hey everyone, this is Matan Ben-Moshe, and you've reached a new recap episode in which we share meaningful insights in short form. The recordings you will hear in a moment are from Startup for Startups' latest Unplugged conference, which was held in November 2020 and was all about business partnerships. Let's begin with Asaf Radkin, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Monday.com. Asaf shares some of the things to know or think of when starting a partnership program. So first, before you begin, you must understand the mission statement or the goals you want to achieve. For us, it was another revenue channel. For other companies, it might be assistance with delivering their solutions. For other, it might be sales in a specific region. This is something that has to be very, very clear on the get-go. After you do that, you need to understand what types of partners are right for you. For us, we started from channel sales. This was the first program that we launched early 2018. In addition to that, we also really tried to understand what is the profile of those partners. The size of the company, what are other solutions they're selling, what is the culture of those organizations, what are the resources that we ask them to put in. At the get-go, there were several stuff that were pretty clear for us. It was really important for us, for the partners, to generate fast revenues. We understood that this way, we will get the resources from them and the mindshare. The last bullet point is having focus. It's still a startup, and that goes into everything that we're doing. But basically, when I talk about focus, I mean focusing on one thing that you want the partners to do. Right now, partners are companies. They do a lot of different stuff for us, from sales to marketing to professional services to customer success to pre-sale. All of those resources, they put into the partnership. But when you start, you need to focus on one thing. We wanted them to do sales. That's it. You just need to do sales. What if the customers will not retain with us in six months, in 12 months? That's fine. I mean, it's not fine, but we're not going to be focusing on that. It's more important that they will know to do that one thing really, really well. After figuring out what type of partnership we're looking for and focusing on a common goal, it's time to actually recruit partners to our program. Barak Zigdoun, Partnership and Global Resellers Manager at Monday.com, shares insights about targeting and reaching out to potential partners. It all starts with planning. So, you know, short and long-term, you know, partners' goals based on a go-to-market strategy, which markets you're going to attack. Assuming, let's say right now, you want to focus on countries where you don't have a good, you know, sales team present there, or you want to go to countries where there is a, I don't know, a vibe or there is a noise around your, you know, your solution. So, in my opinion, prior to the recruitment process, just really map out the entire world. You can't just say, I'm going right now all over. I'm recruiting in U.S., I'm recruiting in LATAM, I'm recruiting in APAC. In my opinion, it doesn't work like this. There needs to be a focus because once, you know, you start discussing with people from a specific territory, you also learn about this territory. You're going to, you know, take what you learned from this territory and, of course, apply it into your, you know, channel sales and sometimes even direct sales. So you need to define the right partner, define what size of partners. You understand at the beginning when you're small, you're not going to catch the big fish, right? It's going to be very, very hard for you to go and grab and speak and recruit the biggest one. So you have to really, you know, go to the smaller ones, medium-sized one. You have to understand, you know, if they're in the right geography, like you said, what are their capabilities, what other products they're selling, all right, how many years they're in business. But when you're looking at, you know, a partner or a reseller to resell your product, you have to understand they are selling 6, 7, 10 or sometimes even more products and you need to fight for their salespeople time. You need to, you know, go and, in my opinion, go first one to the companies or the resellers that usually don't sell too many products. They have a couple of products in their portfolio.

They're very focused on them and they're looking for additional product or additional software, you know, to diversify their portfolio so they can take what you do, integrate with what they do or set it as a bundle. You have a good value proposition for their existing clients. I think it's very, very important. When you start the recruitment process, we really believe in extensive research of, you know, who you're going to approach, what are the people that you're going to speak to. You know, they're always, if you're speaking about, let's say, companies around 30, 40, 50 people like resellers, usually you can go right to the C-level and speak to them. For companies that are bigger than that, it will be, you know, hard. So you need to identify like three to five people from that reseller you're going to target. Learn what they do, learn where they come from, you know, follow them on LinkedIn, look if there are any, I don't know, blog posts. And then like the next stage would be, you know, blitz via multiple channels. And I think that's one of the most important thing. When you are doing recruitment and you are, you know, going after, let's say, you're right now focusing on Poland, for example, or focusing on Spain, for example, and you mapped out all the companies that you want to tackle, right? And then you send all of them an email. And then also afterwards, you send them a LinkedIn, you know, through Sales Navigator or multiple channels, but then at the end of the day, you lose track of what you do. Use automation tools, marketing automation tools, do like a blitz. I feel that LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the most useful tools to use to recruit, you know, partners. You can do campaigns, you can use enrichment tools and so on and so forth. You know, we used to send like those, you know, approaches to people with like, I don't know, 30, 40 lines about what we do, who we are, why you need to partner with us. I think that's, you know, that was very wrong because never works. The response rate was very, very low. Your goal and your KPI when you actually, you know, send those blitz emails is to get a meeting. That's what you want. You want them to hear you. You want them to, you know, get to, you know, into a place where you can actually speak to them and show them why they need to partner with you. And that would be the, you know, the KPI. There were five insightful sessions in our latest Unplugged conference. You can find all of the videos at our website, startupforstartup.com. Also, if you have any professional questions, we have a special Ask Us Anything form also on our website. You just fill it out and we will make sure to connect you with the relevant people here at monday.com to give you the full answers. Thanks for listening.