The LeanScale Podcast · Episode 72

AI Search Is Changing Everything—Here’s the New Go-To-Market Playbook

PartnerStack CRO Mike Head on AEO, why LLMs trust third-party content, and how partnerships became the highest-leverage growth channel

Mike Head · Chief Revenue Officer, PartnerStack · PartnerStack Hosted by Anthony Enrico
Published Updated 00:49:34 37 min read 7,306 words
GTM Strategy AI in GTM Demand Generation Brand & Positioning Sales Leadership
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Executive Summary

The one-paragraph brief, extended

Why this conversation matters — and who should spend the hour.

AI has quietly rewired how buyers discover software — and most companies are optimizing for a world that no longer exists. Mike Head, CRO of PartnerStack (the world's largest B2B partner network), joins LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico to connect two of the biggest conversations in go-to-market: partnerships and AI. Mike's own arc frames the credibility: he joined Impact.com as employee #10, pre-revenue, spent 14 years building its sales org from scratch, left, returned as CRO, and helped scale it to a $1.5 billion valuation. His central claim reorders the marketing playbook — up to 85% of what AI recommends comes from third-party content, not your own website.

The first half is a clinic on AEO (AI Engine Optimization, sometimes GEO). AI-visibility platforms like AirOps, Profound, and Evertune reverse-engineer which prompts surface which vendors and which sources the LLMs actually read to build their shortlists. The answer is rarely your site: it's review platforms like G2 (where LLMs fact-check your claims against real customers), influencers and YouTube, digital publications writing about your category and competitors, and — critically — integration content that partners publish about how your products work together. Reddit spiked then cooled; LinkedIn keeps rising; but the majority of citations come from mid- and long-tail sites. Two rules define the new game: domain authority matters far less than it did in SEO, so breadth, freshness, and accuracy win; and AI punishes inauthentic, self-produced spam. Spin up a thousand AI-written landing pages and you drive your brand into a brick wall. After any pricing or product change, the job is to monitor and correct third-party content, because the LLMs will use it verbatim.

Partnerships are the through-line. Mike's move is to run the visibility analysis, find partners already being cited who you haven't built content with, and identify the content types you're missing (FAQs, thought leadership, demos, tutorials, reviews) — then build authentic joint content: podcasts, webinars, walkthroughs, co-promotion. The best first step is unique to each vendor's existing footprint; you attack your biggest gap, a competitor's advantage, negative brand sentiment, or a pivot the market hasn't caught up to. It is a long-term, compounding game, not a fad to hack.

The second half turns to proving partnership ROI — where Anthony and Mike trade operator scars. Mike's fix is to speak the same language as marketing and sales: model TAM, then persona overlap (account mapping is pointless if you own the technical buyer and your partner owns the marketing buyer), then penetration, pipeline conversion, and win rate. But the most-overlooked dimension is retention: PartnerStack's cross-portfolio data shows partner-managed revenue carries dramatically higher net dollar retention (roughly 130 vs. 105 on the core business) plus better gross retention and lower cost-to-serve. Anthony's Emailage story lands the point — he scaled from ~$4M to ~$40-45M and a ~$500M exit to LexisNexis, with 45% of revenue coming through partnerships that ultimately framed the acquisition itself. On staging: skip partnerships pre-PMF, then invest early but patiently; good programs deliver 30-40% of total revenue, and the classic failure is starting too late. As Radian Capital's Jordan Bettman told Anthony: run your business as if you're going to own it forever, or else you will.

The episode closes on reinvention and a forecast. Mike's mantra — 'the only thing I know is that I know nothing' — powers a beginner's mindset across roles and companies; the hardest discipline as you're promoted is to stop doing the job you did last year; and his stint moving from sales (selling the dream) to customer success (delivering it) made him a more complete CRO who now protects his calendar for systems and tooling four quarters out instead of getting sucked into deals. Anthony notes RevOps itself has been reinvented since 2021 — from implementing Salesforce and HubSpot to standing up Claude Code and automated workflows. Twelve months out, Mike expects an AEO roller coaster mirroring Google's algorithm era, a decisive tilt toward authenticity and trust, and — as the cost to build applications collapses — the ecosystem becoming the moat: the companies with the broadest bench of partner-evangelists win, while those relying solely on sales and marketing struggle. Who should listen: RevOps, marketing, and sales leaders, and founders designing a 2026 go-to-market.

Key Takeaways

13 things worth stealing

The load-bearing ideas, each with the business implication and who should care.

01

Up to 85% of what AI recommends comes from third-party content

According to AI-visibility platforms like AirOps, Profound, and Evertune, when an LLM answers a prompt such as 'best HR software for a 50-person company,' roughly 85% of what it sources and cites lives off your own website — review sites, influencers, publications, and partner content. Your first-party site is no longer the source of truth the buyer (or the model) trusts most.

Why it matters: Stop treating your website as the center of gravity. Audit where LLMs actually pull your category's recommendations from, and invest in being present — and accurate — across that third-party surface.

Marketing LeadersFoundersRevOps Leaders
02

Domain authority matters far less than it did in SEO

In the old SEO game you chased a handful of the highest-authority domains. In AEO the threshold is lower and the field is wider: LLMs draw heavily from mid- and long-tail sites, so breadth of coverage across many queries, FAQs, and content types beats concentrating on a few marquee domains. Reddit's citation weight has fallen while LinkedIn's keeps rising — the landscape is volatile.

Why it matters: Distribute widely across the sites talking about your category and competitors rather than over-indexing on a few high-authority placements, and expect the weightings to keep shifting.

Marketing LeadersRevOps Leaders
03

AI is an accelerant — pour it on a bad strategy and you hit a brick wall

The tempting move is to spin up a thousand AI-written landing pages and blogs on your own domain. But LLMs can tell that content is self-produced and AI-generated, and they weight organic, fresh, third-party validation far more heavily. Inauthentic, spam-style content will not be picked up long-term, in Mike's view.

Why it matters: Build for authenticity and the long term. Anchor content in real customer value and how customers actually use the product — not in whatever fad might win a short-term bump.

Marketing LeadersFounders
04

Partnerships are the highest-leverage AEO channel

The content LLMs trust most — integration blogs about how two products work together, joint webinars, co-hosted podcasts, YouTube walkthroughs demonstrating the technology — is exactly what partnerships produce. Third-party validation from a partner reads as a trusted review, not a brand talking about itself. LeanScale stumbled into this by co-creating content with partners before AEO was even a term.

Why it matters: Treat your partner ecosystem as an AI-visibility engine. Every joint content asset does double duty: it feeds the LLMs and it serves the ~85%-online human buyer's journey.

Marketing LeadersRevOps LeadersFounders
05

Start with an AI-visibility platform, then reverse-engineer your partnerships

Running a visibility analysis surfaces thousands of URLs you should be working with and the content types you're missing. The low-hanging fruit: a partner already being cited in recommendations that you've never built content with. From there you expand into the gaps — the FAQs, tutorials, or comparisons you don't yet have — keeping everything tied to the real use case.

Why it matters: Let the data inform the partnership roadmap. Prioritize partners and content that the models already reward, then fill the specific gaps the analysis exposes.

Marketing LeadersRevOps Leaders
06

The right first content move is unique to every vendor

Because everyone starts with a different baseline of existing content, there's no universal first step. Some companies show up strong on thought leadership but have no technical FAQs; others need to answer a better-ranked competitor, correct negative brand sentiment, or update the story after a pivot or new product. You fix your biggest gap, not a generic checklist.

Why it matters: Diagnose before you produce. Identify where you're weakest or most misrepresented in LLM rankings, and let the specific objective dictate the content strategy.

Marketing LeadersFounders
07

Prove partnership ROI in the board's language: TAM to penetration to win rate

Partnerships get stereotyped as fuzzy because teams either chase only long-term home runs or report metrics (like partner-influenced revenue) that a CRO chasing pipeline and bookings doesn't value. The fix is to model it like any other channel: TAM, then persona overlap, then a penetration assumption per quarter, pipeline conversion, and win rate into new bookings.

Why it matters: Frame partnerships with the same funnel math as marketing and outbound so leadership can compare it apples-to-apples — and stop losing the budget argument.

Revenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
08

Account mapping is pointless without persona overlap

Two partners can share thousands of overlapping accounts and still generate nothing if you have the technical buyer and they have the marketing buyer. The productive exercise is to look at TAM and personas the way the marketing team would, and quantify where the persona-level overlap actually is before counting logos.

Why it matters: Qualify partners on persona alignment, not just account overlap. Misaligned buyers make even a huge shared account list a dead end.

RevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
09

The most-overlooked ROI of partnerships is higher net dollar retention

Everyone measures top-of-funnel — leads, conversion, sales-cycle compression — and almost nobody measures retention. PartnerStack's cross-portfolio benchmarks show partner-managed revenue at roughly 130 NDR versus about 105 on the core business (and ~108 on partner-sourced), plus better gross retention and often lower cost-to-serve, because partners understand and expand the product.

Why it matters: Cohort your NDR and GDR by partner-sourced, partner-managed, and direct. If partners compound retention, you have a mathematical case that makes the whole strategy a no-brainer.

Customer SuccessRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
10

Segment your partners the way you segment customers — and weight the whole portfolio

Apply the same discipline you use on customers (ICP scores, tiers, segmentation) to the partners managing your business, and distinguish partners who refer but don't manage from those who manage but don't refer. A tiny customer inside a large partner's book is far more important than its standalone ARR suggests, because the partnership's integrity rides on it.

Why it matters: Align customer-success org design to the partnership strategy so support prioritizes accounts by their partner-portfolio value, not just their individual size.

Customer SuccessRevOps Leaders
11

Stage partnership investment: skip it pre-PMF, then invest early but patiently

From zero to roughly five, while you're still proving product-market fit, you usually don't need a partnerships hire (unless the vertical is partner-led by nature). Once you understand your best-fit customers and can map them to partners with access to that persona, you invest. Good partnership orgs eventually deliver 30-40% of total company revenue, alongside sales and marketing as a third pillar.

Why it matters: Don't dump 30% of GTM spend into partnerships on day one, but don't wait either — the number-one failure is starting too late, because partnerships take longer to incubate than a paid-marketing funnel.

FoundersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
12

Reinvention is the job — keep a beginner's mindset and stop doing last year's role

Mike's operating principle is 'the only thing I know is that I know nothing.' Experience helps but can also blind you to a new context. The hardest discipline as you get promoted is to stop doing the job you did the year before instead of carrying it forward with a new title — and, as a CRO, to resist getting sucked into deals so you can build systems, tooling, and framework four quarters out.

Why it matters: Each new role demands a deliberate step back to relearn the context. Protect time for the systems work only you can do, and treat constant change — including the AI shift — as the baseline, not the exception.

Revenue ExecutivesFoundersSales Leaders
13

As app-building costs collapse, the ecosystem becomes the moat

Twelve months out, Mike expects the AEO landscape to churn like Google's SEO-algorithm era, with ChatGPT and Claude weighting content differently, and a decisive move toward authenticity and trust. Because it's now cheap to build applications, product alone is a thinner moat — the durable advantage is a broad, diverse ecosystem of partner-evangelists.

Why it matters: Invest in ecosystem breadth now. Companies that rely solely on sales and marketing will have a harder time; those with the most partners championing them will win the AI-recommendation game.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesMarketing Leaders
Frameworks Discussed

10 named models

Every framework Jimmy names, defined and time-stamped.

AEO and the 85% Third-Party Content Rule

01:41

AI Engine Optimization (AEO/GEO): the discipline of improving how a brand is ranked and cited inside LLM recommendations. The defining stat is that up to 85% of what AI recommends comes from third-party content, not your own website.

AI-visibility platforms show which prompts surface which vendors and which sources the models read. Because most citations are off-site, the marketing job shifts from optimizing your domain to earning accurate presence across the third-party surface the LLMs trust.

The Third-Party Content Map

02:28

The categories of off-site content LLMs weight most: review sites (e.g., G2), small influencers and YouTube, digital publications and blogs covering your category and competitors, and integration content co-published with partners.

Each category is a distinct opportunity. Review sites let LLMs fact-check your claims against real customers; third-party videos read as trusted review; publications establish category presence; and partner integration blogs are among the most-cited sources — the bridge from AEO to partnerships.

Visibility Platform to Partnership Strategy

06:43

Run an AI-visibility analysis to surface the URLs you should be working with and the content types you lack, then use those two outputs to build the partnership and content roadmap.

The fastest win is a partner already being cited that you've never built content with. From there you expand into missing content (FAQs, comparisons, tutorials) while keeping everything tied to the real use case, so it survives long-term rather than reading as spam.

Content-Gap-First Content Strategy

11:50

There's no universal first step; you diagnose your existing content baseline and attack your biggest gap — whether that's missing technical FAQs, a better-ranked competitor, negative brand sentiment, or a story that's stale after a pivot or new product.

Because every vendor starts from a different footprint, the right first move (thought leadership, demos, FAQs, tutorials, reviews) depends entirely on the objective. You improve where you're weakest or most misrepresented in LLM rankings.

Partnership ROI as Channel Math

18:31

Model partnerships like any other channel: TAM, then persona overlap, then a per-quarter penetration assumption, pipeline conversion, and win rate into new bookings — the same funnel logic marketing and outbound use.

This lets a partnership leader speak leadership's language instead of defending fuzzy 'partner-influenced revenue.' Account mapping only counts if personas align — owning the technical buyer while the partner owns the marketing buyer generates nothing.

The Partnership NDR Premium

20:03

Partner-involved revenue retains and expands better than direct: PartnerStack benchmarks show ~130 NDR on partner-managed revenue vs. ~105 on the core business (and ~108 partner-sourced), plus better gross retention and lower cost-to-serve.

To capture it, segment partners like customers (tiers, ICP scores) and distinguish refer-only, manage-only, and refer-plus-manage relationships in every NDR cohort analysis. The retention lift is usually invisible until you cut the data this way.

Staging Partnership Investment

25:19

Zero-to-five (pre-PMF): usually no partnerships hire. Post-PMF: invest early but patiently, sizing partnerships as a third GTM pillar alongside sales and marketing, targeting 30-40% of total revenue over time.

Partnerships incubate slower than a paid-marketing funnel, so the dominant failure mode is starting too late. You don't front-load 30% of GTM spend, but you do stand up the strategy and set milestone expectations so leadership stays committed.

Selling the Dream vs. Delivering It

36:37

The defining shift from a sales org (where you sell the vision and the full range of what's possible) to a customer-success org (where you have to deliver on promises that are sometimes bigger than reality).

Mike calls his sales-to-CS move the most eye-opening experience of his career: it built the empathy and operational understanding across the customer lifecycle that later made him a more complete CRO who could take over CS.

Stop Doing Last Year's Job

39:34

The discipline, on every promotion, of deliberately stepping back to relearn a department and role rather than carrying your previous job forward under a new title.

It's easy to keep operating the way you did for the last eight years. The senior move is to get out of your own way, change your habits, and ask what this department actually needs from you now — the same beginner's-mindset relearning Mike applied stepping into PartnerStack.

The Ecosystem Is the Moat

47:11

As the cost to build applications collapses and AEO churns like the SEO-algorithm era, durable defensibility comes less from product and more from a broad, diverse ecosystem of partner-evangelists.

Mike's 12-month forecast: more authenticity and trust in what LLMs reward, ChatGPT and Claude diverging in how they weight content, and companies relying solely on sales and marketing falling behind those with the widest bench of partners championing them.

Best Quotes

17 lines worth clipping

Pulled verbatim. Copy or share any of them.

“85% of the time it can be off of your websites. And off of your websites is a very broad term — that's why we call it third-party content, as opposed to first-party, your own website.”
Mike Head 01:41
“Domain authority doesn't matter as much as it used to. You want to make sure you're very widely distributed across all the different types of content sites that are talking about your category and your competitors.”
Mike Head 05:16
“If you take bad strategy and throw the accelerant of AI on top of it, you could really start putting your brand into a brick wall.”
Anthony Enrico 04:30
“It's my belief that over time any of this inauthentic, spam-type content won't be picked up long-term. And so you want to be building for a long-term strategy.”
Mike Head 08:15
“I got there around 4 million in revenue, we got to 40 to 45 million in revenue, exited for half a billion to LexisNexis. And 45% of our revenue came through partnerships — referral, reseller, or affiliates.”
Anthony Enrico 16:13
“Try to emulate the same way that you would think about TAM, TAM penetration, pipeline, pipeline conversion rates with your partner program — the same way you would in prospecting or marketing.”
Mike Head 18:31
“We're seeing 105 for the core business and 130 for the partner-managed business. Typically you do see better gross dollar retention, and because of their knowledge of how to use your product, you actually see more expansion.”
Mike Head 23:51
“Good partnership organizations are delivering 30 to 40% of total company revenue. What I think companies fail at early stage is they don't do it early enough.”
Mike Head 26:49
“Run your business as if you're going to own it forever, or else you will.”
Anthony Enrico 27:33
“This investment isn't just, okay, how many leads did I get? No — it's touching every single component of the GTM lifecycle.”
Anthony Enrico 29:50
“If you get two companies holding each other accountable, mutually invested in your success, it's only good for you.”
Anthony Enrico 31:58
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing. Really just trying to always have that beginner's mindset has helped me go into different stages of different companies.”
Mike Head 34:18
“In sales you get to sell the dream — the amazing product vision. Going over to customer success, you're no longer selling the dream, you're trying to deliver it. That was probably the most eye-opening experience.”
Mike Head 36:37
“When I started LeanScale in 2021, RevOps was totally different. Back then it was, hey, you're implementing Salesforce and HubSpot. Now it's, are you implementing an instance of Claude Code and building these automated workflows?”
Anthony Enrico 38:51
“One of the hardest things as you're growing within an organization is to stop doing the job you did the year before, because it's so easy to take a promotion and just keep operating that way with a different title.”
Mike Head 39:34
“I love deals. But as a CRO of an organization of 250 or so, that's not my job. Make sure you're really thinking about systems, tooling, and what's going to happen four quarters from now — not this quarter.”
Mike Head 40:59
“An ecosystem will be a moat, and the more people you have within your partnership ecosystem who are evangelists, those are going to be the companies that are most successful. Those that solely rely on sales and marketing are going to have a much harder time.”
Mike Head 47:11
Practical Advice

What should you actually do?

The playbook, split by the seat you sit in.

Marketing Leaders

  • Reframe your content strategy around AEO: audit where LLMs actually source your category's recommendations, then earn accurate presence across review sites, YouTube, publications, and partner integration content — not just your own domain.
  • Resist the thousand-AI-landing-pages temptation. LLMs detect self-produced spam and reward organic, fresh, third-party validation; build authentic content anchored in real customer use cases.
  • Distribute widely rather than chasing a few high-authority domains — domain authority carries less weight in AI search, and citations come disproportionately from mid- and long-tail sites.
  • After any pricing or product change, monitor and correct third-party content, because the models will use it verbatim in their recommendations.

Founders

  • Don't wait to stand up partnerships — the top failure mode is starting too late. Skip it while proving PMF, then invest early but patiently as a third GTM pillar aimed at 30-40% of revenue.
  • Invest in ecosystem breadth as a moat: as app-building costs fall, a wide bench of partner-evangelists is more defensible than product alone.
  • Treat reinvention as the baseline. Keep a beginner's mindset through every stage and market shift, and lead from the front on AI rather than delegating the learning.

RevOps Leaders

  • Model partnerships with the same funnel math as any channel: TAM, persona overlap, penetration, pipeline conversion, win rate — so leadership can compare it apples-to-apples.
  • Qualify partners on persona overlap, not just account overlap; a huge shared account list is a dead end if you own the technical buyer and they own the marketing buyer.
  • Cohort NDR and GDR by partner-sourced, partner-managed, and direct to expose the partnership retention premium, and segment partners with the same tiers and ICP scores you apply to customers.

Customer Success

  • Weight accounts by their partner-portfolio value, not standalone ARR — a small customer inside a large partner's book carries the integrity of the whole relationship.
  • Align CS org design to the partnership strategy so support prioritizes mutual customers correctly and the retention/expansion premium actually shows up.
  • Lean into partner-managed accounts: they retain and expand better because partners understand and champion the product.

Revenue Executives

  • Make retention part of the partnership ROI case, not an afterthought — the NDR and cost-to-serve advantages often outweigh the top-of-funnel numbers leaders fixate on.
  • As a CRO, protect time for systems, tooling, and four-quarters-out thinking; resist getting pulled back into the deals you love at the expense of the leverage only you can build.
  • Value a customer-success stint as CRO preparation — it builds the lifecycle empathy and operational understanding that a pure-sales path misses.
AI Takeaways

How AI actually changes GTM

LeanScale's signature read on the AI-in-GTM question this episode wrestles with.

The thesis

AI has rewired discovery: LLMs now recommend vendors mostly from third-party content, which makes authentic partnerships and a broad ecosystem the new distribution and defensibility layer. AI is an accelerant that punishes spammy, self-produced strategy and rewards organic third-party validation — so the winners optimize for AI the way they once optimized for search.

AEO is the new SEO

Up to 85% of LLM recommendations come from third-party content. Domain authority matters less; breadth, freshness, and accuracy across many sites matter more, and the weightings (Reddit down, LinkedIn up) keep shifting.

AI punishes inauthentic content

Spinning up a thousand AI-written landing pages drives your brand into a brick wall. LLMs detect self-produced spam and weight organic, third-party validation far more heavily.

Partnerships are the AEO channel

Integration blogs, joint webinars, co-hosted podcasts, and partner YouTube walkthroughs are exactly what LLMs cite — a partner talking about you reads as trusted review, so partnerships double as AI-visibility strategy.

Keep machine-readable facts accurate

After a pricing or product change, monitor and correct third-party content, because the models will use it verbatim in recommendations.

Ecosystem as the AI-era moat

As the cost to build applications collapses, product is a thinner moat; a broad ecosystem of partner-evangelists is the durable one, while sales-and-marketing-only GTM struggles.

Agent & automation ideas

  • Run a continuous AI-visibility monitor (AirOps/Profound/Evertune-style) that tracks which prompts surface you, which third-party sources the LLMs cite, and where competitors out-rank you.
  • Auto-detect content gaps — missing FAQs, tutorials, comparison pages, integration content — versus competitors, and route joint-content briefs to the right partner.
  • Watch third-party sources for stale pricing or product claims after a launch and flag inaccurate citations for correction before they propagate into recommendations.
  • Cohort NDR/GDR by partner-sourced vs. partner-managed vs. direct on a schedule to quantify the partnership retention premium automatically.
Operations Takeaways

By function

The same conversation, filtered for RevOps, pipeline/marketing ops, and customer ops.

Revenue Operations

  • Measure partnerships like a channel. Model TAM → persona overlap → penetration → pipeline conversion → win rate so partnerships speak the board's language instead of defending 'partner-influenced revenue.'
  • Persona overlap beats account overlap. Account mapping is pointless if you hold the technical buyer and the partner holds the marketing buyer — quantify persona-level overlap before counting logos.
  • Cohort retention by partner involvement. Segment NDR/GDR by partner-sourced, partner-managed, and direct; the retention premium (up to ~130 vs. ~105) is invisible until you cut the data this way.
  • Stage the investment. Skip partnerships pre-PMF; invest early-but-patiently after; target 30-40% of revenue over time; the failure mode is starting too late.
  • RevOps keeps getting reinvented. From implementing Salesforce/HubSpot to standing up Claude Code and automated workflows — and from growth-at-all-costs to efficient growth that still satisfies investors.

Pipeline & Marketing Ops

  • Co-branded content lifts outbound. BDRs reaching customers of an integration partner convert better with joint content, and partner-targeted ads perform better too — AEO investment makes existing GTM more effective.
  • AEO doubles as demand gen. Fresh third-party content feeds both LLM recommendations and the ~85%-online human buyer's journey, so it works two funnels at once.
  • Fill the gap the models expose. Use the visibility analysis to find the specific content type you're missing (FAQ, tutorial, comparison) and build it with the partner already being cited.

Customer Operations

  • Partners lift retention. Partner-managed accounts show higher NDR (up to ~130 vs. ~105) and better gross retention; involving partners compounds retention and expansion.
  • Align CS design to partnerships. Weight a small account by the partner's whole portfolio, not its standalone ARR, so support prioritizes mutual customers correctly.
  • Two invested vendors equal accountability. When two companies are mutually invested, even the smallest at-risk account gets outsized resources because the partnership's integrity is on the line — good for the customer.
  • Segment partners like customers. Apply tiers, ICP scores, and refer-vs-manage distinctions to the partners managing your business, the same way you segment a customer portfolio.
Metrics Mentioned

The numbers, with context

Up to 85%
AI recommendations from third-party content

Per AI-visibility platforms (AirOps, Profound, Evertune), up to 85% of what LLMs cite and recommend comes from third-party content, not your own website.

~85%
Buyer's journey online

Mike notes the human buyer's journey is also ~85% online, so fresh third-party content serves both the LLMs and traditional buyers.

105 vs. 130
NDR: core vs. partner-managed

PartnerStack benchmarks — roughly 105 NDR on the core business, 108 on partner-sourced, and 130 on partner-managed revenue — evidence that partnerships lift retention and expansion.

30–40%
Partnerships' share of revenue

Good partnership organizations deliver roughly 30-40% of total company revenue, alongside sales and marketing as a third pillar.

$4M → $40–45M → ~$500M exit
Emailage trajectory

Anthony's scaling experience at Emailage, which exited to LexisNexis; partnerships also framed the acquisition.

45%
Emailage revenue via partnerships

45% of Emailage's revenue came through partnerships — referral, reseller, or affiliate.

Employee #10 → $1.5B valuation
Impact.com scale

Mike joined Impact.com pre-revenue as employee #10, spent 14 years, returned as CRO, and helped scale it to a $1.5 billion valuation.

Entities

Companies, people & tools mentioned

Auto-extracted and linked into the knowledge graph.

Companies

PartnerStackPartnerships / PRM

Mike's company — described as the world's largest B2B partner network and the only platform spanning both affiliate/influencer marketing and PRM/channel/co-sell; mission is 'change the way the world sells software,' now extended to distributing software through LLMs.

00:00 · 43:17Company →
impact.comPartnerships / Affiliate

Where Mike joined as employee #10, pre-revenue, spent 14 years building the sales org from scratch, then returned as CRO and helped scale it to a $1.5 billion valuation.

00:00Company →
EmailageRisk & Fraud

Anthony's scaling experience: he joined around $4M revenue, grew it to ~$40-45M, and exited to LexisNexis for roughly half a billion; 45% of revenue came through partnerships, which turned the acquisition into a competitive situation and framed the exit.

16:13Company →
LexisNexis Risk SolutionsData & Risk Analytics

Acquirer of Emailage in Anthony's story; partner relationships shaped the entire acquisition and exit dynamics.

16:13Company →
Radian CapitalGrowth Equity

Growth-equity partner whose VC Summit Anthony attended; its managing director Jordan Bettman's line — 'run your business as if you're going to own it forever, or else you will' — anchors the long-term-investment theme.

27:33 · 33:28Company →
Insight PartnersVenture Capital / Private Equity

Named alongside Radian Capital as an example of LeanScale's VC/PE partnership category — an issue with an Insight Partners portfolio customer implicates years of work on the whole partnership.

33:28Company →
LeanScaleGTM Operations

Anthony's firm (founded 2021); content plus partnerships is its core GTM, co-creating joint content with partners before AEO was a term, and its RevOps work has evolved from Salesforce/HubSpot builds to Claude Code and automated workflows.

06:07 · 38:51Company →

People

Mike Headguest

CRO of PartnerStack; spent 14 years scaling impact.com from employee #10 to a $1.5B valuation, and a leading voice on AEO, partnerships, and ecosystem-led GTM.

Chief Revenue Officer, PartnerStackProfile →
Anthony Enricohost

Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast.

Co-FounderProfile →

Tools & software

AirOpsAI Visibility / AEO

Named with Profound and Evertune as AI-visibility platforms whose purpose is improving how brands are ranked and cited in LLMs; the source of the 85%-third-party-content insight and of recommended sites and content gaps.

Website ↗
ProfoundAI Visibility / AEO

Cited with AirOps and Evertune as an AI-visibility platform that shows which prompts surface a vendor and which sources the LLMs read to build their shortlists.

Website ↗
EvertuneAI Visibility / AEO

Cited with AirOps and Profound as an AI-visibility/AEO analytics platform for tracking and improving LLM citations and recommendations.

Website ↗
G2Software Reviews

Example review site LLMs read to fact-check a vendor's claims against what customers actually say — validating the software's real-world performance.

Website ↗
RedditCommunity / Social

Cited as third-party content with a volatile arc — heavily cited by LLMs, then much less — illustrating how fast the AEO landscape shifts.

Website ↗
LinkedInSocial Platform

Contrasted with Reddit — its importance for LLM-read content keeps growing; also a core co-promotion channel for LeanScale's joint partner content.

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YouTubeVideo Platform

Called a huge AEO channel: LLMs read what's said in videos, and third-party or partner videos demonstrating a technology get weighted as trusted review.

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GeminiAI Assistant

Named with Google as a major LLM/search player reading YouTube and other content to source its recommendations.

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ChatGPTAI Assistant

Cited as likely to handle AEO differently from Claude — the AI-search landscape will keep shifting like Google's algorithm era.

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ClaudeAI Assistant

Referenced as an LLM that will weight content differently from ChatGPT, and as the AI PartnerStack's ELT is 'leading from the front' on internally.

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Claude CodeAI Dev Tool

Anthony's example of how RevOps has changed — from implementing Salesforce/HubSpot to standing up an instance of Claude Code and automated workflows (said in the transcript as 'cloud code').

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SalesforceCRM

Named with HubSpot as what RevOps used to mean — implementation work — before the Claude Code and automated-workflow era.

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HubSpotCRM

Named with Salesforce as the legacy RevOps implementation stack of 2021, before AI-driven workflows.

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Related LeanScale Services

Where this shows up in the work

AI for GTM

Agents and workflows that multiply operator throughput — the 'make humans superhuman' thesis, operationalized.

The episode is a field guide to AI-era discovery (AEO) — optimizing for how LLMs recommend vendors — and to standing up AI and automated workflows, squarely LeanScale's AI-for-GTM work.

Fractional RevOps

Embedded, field-facing RevOps leadership and execution — the operator model Jimmy describes, delivered as a service.

Anthony's lens throughout — staging RevOps and partnerships by company stage, measuring channels like a funnel, and cohorting retention by partner involvement — is exactly LeanScale's embedded field-operator RevOps work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers

Generated from the conversation, marked up for search and AI extraction.

What is AEO (AI Engine Optimization)?

AEO — sometimes called GEO — is the practice of improving how a brand is ranked and cited inside AI/LLM recommendations, the way SEO optimized for search engines. Specialized platforms like AirOps, Profound, and Evertune analyze which prompts surface which vendors and which sources the models read to build their shortlists, so companies can earn accurate presence across the content the LLMs actually trust.

Why do AI models recommend third-party content over your own website?

Because up to 85% of what an LLM cites when making a recommendation comes from off-site sources — review platforms like G2, YouTube and influencers, publications covering your category, and partner integration content. Third-party validation reads as a trusted review rather than a brand talking about itself, and models can detect and discount self-produced or AI-generated spam on your own domain.

Does domain authority still matter for AI search?

Much less than it did in SEO. In AI search the threshold is lower and the field is wider: LLMs draw heavily from mid- and long-tail sites, so broad coverage across many queries, FAQs, and content types beats concentrating on a few high-authority domains. The weightings are also volatile — Reddit's citation weight fell while LinkedIn's kept rising.

How do partnerships improve AI search visibility?

The content LLMs trust most — integration blogs about how two products work together, joint webinars, co-hosted podcasts, and partner YouTube walkthroughs — is exactly what a partner ecosystem produces. Run an AI-visibility analysis to find partners already being cited that you haven't built content with, then fill the specific content gaps the analysis exposes with authentic joint content tied to the real use case.

How do you prove the ROI of a partnership program?

Model it like any other channel so it speaks leadership's language: TAM, then persona overlap, then a per-quarter penetration assumption, pipeline conversion, and win rate into new bookings. Avoid relying on fuzzy 'partner-influenced revenue,' and remember that account mapping only counts when personas align — owning the technical buyer while your partner owns the marketing buyer produces nothing.

Do partnerships actually improve net dollar retention (NDR)?

Yes — and it's the most-overlooked part of the ROI case. PartnerStack's cross-portfolio benchmarks show partner-managed revenue at roughly 130 NDR versus about 105 on the core business (and ~108 on partner-sourced), plus better gross retention and often lower cost-to-serve, because partners understand and expand the product. Cohort your NDR and GDR by partner-sourced, partner-managed, and direct to see it.

When should a company start investing in partnerships?

Skip a dedicated partnerships hire from zero to roughly five while you're still proving product-market fit, unless the vertical is inherently partner-led. Once you understand your best-fit customers and can map them to partners with access to that persona, start investing — early but patiently. Good programs eventually deliver 30-40% of total revenue, and the number-one mistake is starting too late, because partnerships incubate slower than a paid-marketing funnel.

What will AI search and partnerships look like 12 months from now?

Expect an AEO roller coaster mirroring Google's SEO-algorithm era, with ChatGPT and Claude weighting content differently and the rules shifting fast. Mike Head forecasts a decisive move toward authenticity and trust in what LLMs reward, and — as the cost to build applications collapses — the ecosystem becoming the moat: companies with the broadest bench of partner-evangelists win, while those relying solely on sales and marketing struggle.

Timeline

Jump through the conversation

Click any chapter to open it in the transcript.

00:00Meet Mike Head: Impact.com #10 to PartnerStack CRO 00:48The 85% rule: AI recommends third-party content 02:28Where LLMs source: reviews, YouTube, publications, integrations 04:30Bad strategy + AI = a brick wall; organic beats spam 06:07Partnerships as the AEO channel: joint content 09:35Long-term strategy vs. chasing quick wins 11:50The best first content step is unique to you 14:49LeanScale's content-and-partnerships bet 15:36The ROI of partnerships & the Emailage story 17:00Making the ROI case like TAM math 20:03The overlooked dimension: partnerships lift NDR 24:37Staging a partnership program by company stage 27:33"Run your business as if you'll own it forever" 29:09Partnerships touch the whole GTM lifecycle 30:31Mutual accountability across partners 33:28Reinvention: "I know that I know nothing" 35:07Sales to customer success, and how RevOps changed 39:34Stop doing last year's job; stepping into the CRO seat 43:17PartnerStack's vision: the platform that does both 45:37The 12-month forecast: ecosystem as the moat 48:51Close
Full Transcript

The whole conversation

Broken into chapters, searchable, verbatim from the audio. Speakers inferred (not diarized).

Transcript as markdown ↓ Whole episode as markdown ↓
00:00Meet Mike Head: Impact.com #10 to PartnerStack CRO

0:00 Today I'm sitting down with Mike Head, the CRO at Partner Stack, the world's largest B2B partner network. Mike's story is wild. He joined Impact.com as employee number 10 when they were pre-revenue, spent 14 years there building the sales org from scratch, left, came back as CRO, and helped scale it to a $1.5 billion valuation. Now he's at Partner Stack, and we're going to get into something that connects two of the biggest conversations happening right now. Partnerships and AI. Specifically, how partnerships are becoming the way companies show up in AI search results. If you've been hearing about AEO or GEO and wondering what it actually means

00:48The 85% rule: AI recommends third-party content

0:48 for your go-to-market, this is the episode. Mike, you made an interesting comment that's really stuck with me, that up to 85% of what AI recommends comes from third-party content. Walk me through what that means and why it changes how companies think about marketing. Yeah, sounds good. The biggest change that we're seeing, and this data is coming from companies like AirOps, Profound, Evertune, that their sole purpose is helping companies improve when they're ranked and cited within the LLMs. They give insights into when certain prompts are happening, like what's the best HR software in the US for a 50-person

1:41 company. They are able to run analytics and show you what the LLMs are actually looking at to source their information, and then ultimately provide their short list of recommendations. And this is where 85% of the time it can be off of your websites. And off of your websites is a very broad term, that's why we call it third-party content as opposed to, you know, first-party your own website overall. That third-party content, you know, people are hearing about things like Reddit. And Reddit's had this crazy arc where it was being cited a lot, now it's being cited a lot less. LinkedIn is the opposite, where it continues to grow

02:28Where LLMs source: reviews, YouTube, publications, integrations

2:28 in importance in making sure that you have content there, because LLMs are able to read and utilize a bunch of that content that's put out. That said, a majority of it actually comes from mid- and long-tail sites. And so that means a number of different areas become very important opportunities for marketers to focus on. And we break them down into a couple of different categories. So of course you have to work with review sites. You know, review sites like a G2, quite often they're looking to see what customers are actually saying, they're incorporating that so they can understand really the validity of the

3:07 claims. You know, you say your software is good for certain things, let's fact check that with what users are actually saying about your software. It could be small influencers. YouTube is a huge channel for this. Not surprisingly, Google and Gemini obviously, you know, very very big player in the space right now. Being able to, the LLMs can read what's happening within those YouTube videos that you're putting out. And when you have a third party that's talking about it, it weights it pretty heavily because it looks like trusted third-party review as opposed to just what the brand is saying overall. There's also a number of

3:49 different digital publications, blogs that you can be on where they're writing about your category, they're writing about your competitors and you need to ultimately show up there. And then the final one and one of the areas where it really connects to partnerships is whenever you're doing integrations with other vendors, when you're writing blogs about one another and how the product works together, that's another area that's quite often cited and utilized by the LLM. So that was a lot. I'll take a pause there. No, I think it's really interesting because I've seen, just like anything, if you take bad strategy and

04:30Bad strategy + AI = a brick wall; organic beats spam

4:30 throw the accelerant of AI on top of it, you could really start putting your brand into a brick wall. And what I've seen a lot of companies do is say, "Okay, great. I have all these AI tools. Let me spin up a thousand landing pages and write a bunch of blogs on our own." And if I'm hearing what you're saying right, hey, AI is smart enough to know that that content is just produced by you. You can probably tell that it's AI produced as well. And what it's really looking for is the most organic type of content that they can find. Organic and fresh. And one of the things that also doesn't play as strong a role today as it did with SEO,

5:16 it could change because this face is evolving very rapidly, but domain authority doesn't matter as much as it used to. And so now because you don't have to just focus on those with the absolute highest amount of domain authority and you need to have a lot of different queries, FAQs, content really covered, you want to make sure you're very widely distributed across all the different types of content sites that are talking about your category and your competitors. And you mentioned an important thing around not just being there, you also want to make sure you're represented in the most accurate way. And

06:07Partnerships as the AEO channel: joint content

6:07 so that's why it's really important to make sure that you're monitoring this content, you understand what they're saying, if you've made product changes or pricing changes like many technology companies have over the last 12 months, it's really important to make sure that that content is accurate because it will be used by the alarms for these recommendations. And when you're tying this to partnerships, I feel like that's something, it's something here at Lean Scale we've actually invested in, we didn't do it thoughtfully with an AEO strategy necessarily, but we always thought one of the best ways we can

6:43 collaborate with our partners is putting together content. So working with the partners put together joint content pieces, whether it's a podcast, it's a webinar, it's a full walkthrough and then co-promoting on LinkedIn or any other channels that we have. It's been a really good strategy for us just for visibility, but how have you seen people take their partnership strategy, partnership approach to optimize for AEO? Yeah, I think so. We always look at, start with the AI visibility platform and use their recommendations on the sites that you should be working with overall. And so when you run an AI visibility

7:29 platform analysis, you can end up getting thousands of potential URLs that you probably should be working with in some way. And you also get recommendations on the types of content that you don't currently have that you should have. And so using those two things together can really help inform your partnership strategy. So something like super low-hanging fruit, you know, you notice you have a partnership somewhere, they're actually being cited in these recommendations. You haven't done content together. That's obviously a no-brainer to make sure that you then formulate a content strategy. More often than not, you

8:15 probably have some of that low-hanging fruit already. You can start to expand upon it by figuring out what content do you not have that you should be speaking about together. And you want to make sure it stays relevant to the actual use case and the partnership that you have formed, because it's my belief that over time any of this inauthentic spam-type content won't be picked up long-term. And so you want to be building for a long-term strategy, in my opinion. And so you can start to look at, well, oh, we don't have an FAQ. Our customers or our competitors do have an FAQ. I want to make sure that I am doing some joint collaboration with

8:56 my partners where we're helping answer questions about how it works together or maybe how their technology works or how our technology works. And the more that you start to think and work through those things, you can get some really good fresh content that not only helps inform the LLMs, but we all know humans, their buying journey, 85% online as well. And so making sure that you have more of that content out there also helps the traditional buyers journey. And one other thing that I'll say that I think is a really good example is going back to the YouTube and building content and talking about the value of a

09:35Long-term strategy vs. chasing quick wins

9:35 partnership together, demonstrating that technology and how it actually works together. If you're putting that out on YouTube or to your point on podcasts as well, that can also be really powerful content that is picked up by the LLMs. You said something earlier that I want to double click on. And I think this is true almost any aspect of your business, but investing in the long-term strategy. So I think a lot of people are always looking for quick wins. How can you start to lay the foundation the right way to where you're investing for the long term and you're not sabotaging yourself by doing something that you think is going

10:20 to get you a quick win? Always to me goes back to customer value and thinking about that buyer's journey with the customers ultimately care about how your customers are ultimately using your product and writing about things in a very authentic way. I think if you start to just try and attach yourself to something that is a fad or a hot trend for the current moment that doesn't really align with who you are as a company or an organization, long term that's not going to serve you. Maybe it'll get you a quick increase in the short term, but long term that won't be sustainable as well. I do think, you know,

11:10 I mentioned the domain authority and how it's a lower threshold right now. Making sure that you're also picking the right sites that you want to partner with long term. And there are some sites out there that, you know, they've realized this opportunity. They're willing to write about anyone and anything even if it doesn't fully align with their actual audience. I would expect over time those type of tactics to not work long term as well. Who knows I could be wrong, but so I would think about the content needs to be authentic, truly relevant to your actual products, customers use case overall and its publications and

11:50The best first content step is unique to you

11:50 partners that you want to work with and they're going to be going about this in the right way writing authentic content that also can sustain long term. And when you're thinking about building content with partnerships, maybe specifically if somebody's thinking about launching one of these programs, is it thought leadership content? Is it demoing products with each other? What's the best first step to take towards that direction of building that authentic content? Because I think some people have a tough time wrapping their heads around exactly what it might look like in practice. Sure, and this might

12:38 not be helpful, but the best first step ends up being pretty unique to the specific vendor because all of us have different content that's already out there. So everyone already has a baseline of content that's being picked up both from their website as well as from initiatives that they've already done to help with SEO and other content that is already out there. And so some may have great thought leadership that's already being picked up, but they don't have a lot of the technical FAQs. And so you most likely want to address that gap because you're showing up strong in one area and you need to actually improve

13:24 where you are in other areas overall. And so that's what I would look like, like the examples that you gave around thought leadership, demos, FAQs, tutorials, customer reviews, all of it broadly is incredibly important. And what you need to work on is where you have the biggest gaps. The other area that we see a lot of people wanting to start with is they have certain competitors where they feel like those competitors are showing up more highly in rankings where they actually believe they have a better solution. And so depending on what your ultimate strategy would be and where you want to start to see improvements in LLMs

14:09 and how they're raking you and recommending you, you will have a different content strategy that you need to deploy to be able to address those specific things. And then one other final piece like around the strategy, there could be a negative brand sentiment, you know, and you want to address that negative brand sentiment and that's most important to you. Or you've launched a new product or you've pivoted your company and so they're speaking about you in a way that is no longer true with who you are. And so this is why it's a very long-winded way of saying it's actually very unique to whatever

14:49LeanScale's content-and-partnerships bet

14:49 you want to achieve as a vendor or software company, you'll have different first steps that you need to address to improve in certain areas in LLM rankings. No it makes sense and I know it's really unique and even if I'm reflecting on our strategy here at LeanScale, we have invested heavily in content early on in our journey. So we started in 2021, in 2022 we were regularly producing content and it's really become our main strategy. It's content and partnerships so this is a timely conversation for me too. And it's a it's a long-term game. You have to, in my opinion, you have to just get started and just cranking volume and

15:36The ROI of partnerships & the Emailage story

15:36 then seeing what works and then you'll start to get good at it over time. But it does take a long a long time to start seeing the fruits of that labor. And I don't know about you, I'm assuming, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but sitting in a partner stack I'm sure a big conversation is around the ROI of partnerships. And in my experience there's two camps of people. There's people who just get it, they're not worried about you know tracking all the attribution and the details, they just intuitively understand the investment and then people who just can't wrap their heads around it. And to share an

16:13 experience I was at a company called Emailage. During the scaling process I got there around 4 million in revenue, we got to 40-45 million in revenue, exited for half a billion to LexisNexis. And throughout that journey two things happened. One, 45% of our revenue came through partnerships, whether it was referral reseller or affiliates. Two, at the end of the process during the acquisition it turned into a competitive situation between companies that we were partnering with. So it really framed our entire acquisition and exit strategy too. So I've seen it, I felt it and had experience with it. For those that maybe

17:00Making the ROI case like TAM math

17:00 haven't, how do you get the ROI conversation with the team? Yeah it's a fantastic question you know and I've personally been there where you can see the funnel on marketing and you can understand dollar in, X amount of dollars out you know similar in sales. You can see like sales level investments, bookings relative to those investments calculated in ROI very efficiently and partnerships for whatever reason and I think we've done it to ourselves in some ways isn't as easy to understand. And I think sometimes it's because it's one of two challenges. One, you only pick the long-term biggest possible home runs and

17:52 you set your partnership program up for failure. Two, you could also be looking at the metrics in the wrong way that you know a CRO or a CEO isn't necessarily looking at the funnel in the same way that the partnerships team is looking at. One of the biggest debates is around partner-influenced revenue, right? If you too much focus on partner-influenced revenue and you have a CRO who's looking at I need more pipeline, I need more bookings, influence is great but you're not helping us get to our ultimate number. That's where you start to have like friction around this overall. I think one of the best ways to think about

18:31 it is try to emulate the same way that you would think about a TAM, TAM penetration pipeline, pipeline conversion rates with your partner program and the same way that you would do it in thinking about upon prospecting or marketing. For example, here's how I think about partnerships overall. Of course we want to do account mapping and understand where we have overlap but if we're doing account mapping and I have access to the technical buyer, you have access to the marketing buyer, that's really a pointless exercise. You know maybe we'll have some success but we're so misaligned at the persona level that

19:19 it doesn't really show we'll have a great way to actually generate pipeline together and so I think you need to look at TAM and personas in the same way that the marketing team would be doing it and look at the overlap there. Then you can start to look at okay we have you know a thousand organizations where we have persona overlap we think for any given quarter we can get 5% of that and then we can convert of that 5%, 50% in the pipeline and then we'll convert that 30% win rate into actual new bookings. That's a way where I feel like if a partnership leader comes and they're talking to senior leadership or the board they can

20:03The overlooked dimension: partnerships lift NDR

20:03 much more effectively communicate the ROI of the investments and speak the same language that the other tactics and channels are speaking and help to help set yourself up for success. The other area where ROI I think is very important in my experience as well as you know our vantage point across a lot of partner programs at partner stack, net dollar retention is higher when you have partners involved and so if you can really show that not only you can have an efficient bookings formula, if you also can show that you have higher net dollar retention and potentially even reduced cost to service that customer

20:49 because partners are involved then you have a mathematical way to really prove that this strategy will be a no-brainer. That's a piece that almost everybody leaves out. Everybody's looking for the top of funnel, lead gen, conversion rate, reducing sales cycle. I rarely hear people talk about the net dollar retention component of partnerships. Can you and before doing RevOps I ran customer success too and often it's just an overlooked function and I think the power that you can have if you can keep churn really really low, you just keep compounding and stacking as you close new business. Can we double click

21:41 there and share a little bit of stats or where you see that coming up and how maybe a partnership team or a customer success team can lean into the partnership program more because I think that's when it gets a little bit more holistic across your entire GTM strategy. You're not solely thinking of this investment as how many leads did we get? You're now thinking of it as supporting the entire GTM lifecycle. Yeah so one I agree across the board NDR especially like 2010 to 2020 wasn't heavily weighted in go-to-market strategies. I think this decade we're starting to see more people talk about it, more investors

22:29 care about it, and understand the efficiency that if your existing customers can grow on their own what that does for the business overall. And so I do feel like more leaders are thinking about it, talking about it. That said your comments on customer success and just less investments there definitely resonates with me. I've you know led that team frequently in my career and I'm currently leading that here at partner stack overall. And so the way that you know we work with clients as well as you know we think about it here internally is just the same way that you would segment portfolios based

23:07 off of whether you have an ICP score, whether you have segmentation, whether you have different tiers for how you manage customers, you should be applying the same data set across partners that are managing your business. And I would look at it in two different ways. There are some partners who refer you business but don't manage the customer versus those that refer you the business and manage the customer. And potentially those that don't even refer you the business, they just manage the customer. And anytime you're doing your NDR cohort analysis, make sure that you're including those variables in the analysis overall.

23:51 I think it's just quite often an overlooked dimension that does if you actually take a look at it. You know we're seeing not flight gains like 105 is our benchmark for NDR and partner sourced or partner managed revenue is 108. We're seeing 105 for the core business and 130 for the partner managed business. Typically you do see across the board better GDR, gross dollar retention, so better churn overall. And because their knowledge and understanding of how to use your product you actually see more expansion that comes through it. Of course it's not always true across the board all

24:37Staging a partnership program by company stage

24:37 individual use cases but at an aggregate level and in my personal experience I have seen this. What's your recommendation for a company trying to build out a partnership team, a partnership program. We work with tons of companies that are maybe at that Series A, Series B stage and they're just starting to think about that partnership motion. And I get this question a lot about RevOps as well like how much RevOps do you need at each stage of company and who do you hire first. I think a lot of people just don't have the experience building out this type of function. So what if you were to stair-step it

25:19 throughout a company's growth journey, what does a proper investment in partnerships look like? Yeah zero to one maybe zero to five as you're figuring out PMF probably don't need a partnerships resource. You could if it's a certain vertical or industry where you know the primary go-to-market method is going to be through partnerships. But in general as you're trying to figure out your product market fit I think the founders, the smaller team, the technology team like you're really just trying to confirm that you have a product offering that can deliver value for customers. It's once you start to exit that phase

26:03 of the business and you can really understand more about the best fit type of customers and then map that to partners that make sense that have access to your persona overall then you can really start investing overall. I look at it as you know you have sales marketing and partnerships as your you know primary pillars of how you want to go to market. You know you mentioned the stat I think you said 45% or 40 somewhere around there. I've personally experienced that as well. You know but in general you do kind of see on average good partnership organizations are delivering 30 to 40% of total company

26:49 revenue. And so I would look at investing and thinking about it along those lines overall. What I think companies fail at early stage is they don't do it early enough. So whereas you can spend money on marketing and you can start to see that funnel relatively quickly, partnerships can take a little bit more patience and you have to make sure that you actually stick through to those investments. So I wouldn't invest 30% of your go-to-market spend initially when you're just exiting that product market fit validation but I would make sure that you are investing in it in some way so that you're starting to

27:33"Run your business as if you'll own it forever"

27:33 build that strategy for your business overall. I was at a VC Summit, Radian Capital was putting on we work with a lot of their portcos and their managing director Jordan Bettman said run your business as if you're going to own it forever or else you will. And I think of things like this where you know people are just looking for such a quick win, they're looking for immediate stats, like you have to make some bets for the long term and investments in the long term and give it time to come to fruition or else if you don't start early enough you're just never gonna have a chance to do it. Agreed and I think you can take

28:23 that mentality to the partnership program itself. So in general partnership program takes longer to incubate once it does start get getting up and running you can really see compounding very efficient impact and so making sure you're investing for the long term is important there but then also within your partnership strategy there are some home runs you should go for but you can't only go for those long-term home runs with the biggest players in your space. You have to complement that strategy with other types of partnerships that you believe won't take as long and can provide more traction

29:09Partnerships touch the whole GTM lifecycle

29:09 and more value in the short term. I also think making sure that you set up the right expectations with your leadership team on milestones and leading indicators that you want to hit along the way really help you manage the expectations and ensure that your leadership will stay committed to the strategy long term. Well and I think this is interesting what we've gone through to where people haven't really thought of the full value of partnerships so of course number one everybody's thinking lead gen pipeline helping the funnel metrics reduce sales cycle increase conversion rate but now when you throw in

29:50 another angle the increasing net dollar retention that's really interesting I am taking this back to our customers now and cohorting the turn analysis to see what it looks like for our customers I can't wait to see that data because then that's a really interesting thing and then now hey also you need to be invested in your partnerships to also create beneficial content for the market that will increase your AEO and now so now this investment isn't just okay how many leads did I get no it's touching every single component of the GTM lifecycle correct and other things I would add on content and things I've

30:31Mutual accountability across partners

30:31 personally experienced co-branded content helps make your BDRs more effective when they're reaching out to customers of your technology integration partners and so it's not even that it just helps with these new initiatives I've also seen it help make all the other go-to-market more effective if you have marketing and ads targeting customers of your partner talking about how your partnership works together those ads are also more effective well and I think at the core of it you have at least two companies that are invested in the customer success and can hold each other accountable because I cannot tell you

31:19 how many times when I was at emailage the head of partnerships there they actually created it you see it in some companies he was chief partnerships officer at that company and if there was anything going wrong with the smallest customer or the smallest account it wasn't really just about that account anymore it meant the integrity of the entire partnership so you saw us invest insane amount of resources that might you might not normally do for a smaller customer because so much more was at stake and I think at the end of the day as a customer if you get two companies holding each other accountable mutually

31:58 invested in your success it's only good for you yep agreed I have seen that as well and in my past it's also why when you think about customer success organizational design you can align that with your partnership strategy and the reason that you would want to do that is talk about the small customer maybe on their own they're not very important to your business overall of course every customer is important but in the grand scheme of your revenue they could be on the lower end but if you look at the portfolio and what that total partner is managing or working with you on then it becomes much more important and if you

32:44 have your success and support team aligned and they understand the value of that agency and the value of each customer within that portfolio you can actually provide a better experience for your mutual customers as well which ultimately can help mitigate some of those issues that may come up that your your chief partnerships officer was dealing with sure sure and we see it here too one of our main partnership categories is vcpe firms and if we have an issue going on with an insight partners customer or a radiant capital customer I mean it's a big deal because now everything that we've been working

33:28Reinvention: "I know that I know nothing"

33:28 on for years with that partnership could be at stake yeah yeah absolutely I want to transition a little bit into because I know this AEO thing is a new thing right now but you are not a stranger to reinventing yourself reinventing your role reinventing go-to-market strategy especially during your time at impact calm before coming over to partner stack I'm curious what's your approach and knowing that there's gonna be new new stuff coming in the future how do you stay ahead of it and what's your approach to tackling it every time it comes up yeah there was a quote that stuck with me and it's the only thing I

34:18 know is that I know nothing and so really just trying to always have that beginner's mindset be humble about the things that I am approaching has really helped me go into different stages of different companies as well as take on a wide variety of different roles overall so you of course want to lean on your experience and where you have experience it can potentially help you it can also blind you to certain things if you just take that oh this is how I did it in the past and so this is how we're gonna do it here and so having that right balance between I will have a beginner's mindset I will be flexible and adaptable to

35:07Sales to customer success, and how RevOps changed

35:07 change overall and I will use my experience where it makes sense I think is the right balance and really thinking about how you would go about change overall what are some of the biggest paradigms that have shifted throughout your career where you had to really overcome your biases what worked for you isn't gonna work now what are some of those examples and and how did you tackle so partner stack first impact 14 years at a company versus starting at a company that have been in business for 10 years and having all those people who knew everything about the company and so just the difference in mindset you know

35:54 I whenever I took a new role at impact I had such a strong baseline experience across teams people relationships all that stuff versus now needing to step into a new organization and so the way that I would step into it was obviously very different you know when I came into partner stack it had to be much more learn investigate consume get as much possible information because I didn't have that baseline overall I also had to like really monitor as much of well we did this before this is how we used to do it and make sure that I was always thinking about it from the new lens not the old ones overall I think one of the

36:37 other bigger shifts for me was when I went from sales to customer success and in sales you got to sell the dream like the amazing product vision all of that stuff you also have a certain type of persona that works in sales and not everyone's the same but they have some commonalities amongst them and then going over to a customer success organization where you're known for being in sales you're known for not really understanding what they do and now you're no longer selling the dream you're trying to deliver it and that was probably the most eye-opening experience like oh sell all the different

37:27 combinations and permutations of things that you can do and then get into success and delivery and now understanding wait this doesn't actually always work the way that it's intended and you have to really like temper those expectations and work with customers in a different way that that ability for my career to be across both to understand the dynamics understand the people understand like the nuances operationally all of that I think was really one of the most powerful things for me and like broadening my depth of understanding and my empathy for the different types of teams managing

38:06 customers at different life cycles it is a totally different mindset and I think you know wanting to maintain the integrity of the promises that were made and sometimes those promises are bigger than reality and then you're on the hook to deliver it can be remarkably challenging I think I think it's just knowing that you're gonna have these experiences though where you're going to have to reinvent yourself you're gonna have to reinvent your approach and the market is also gonna shift like things will change I when I started lean scale in 2021 RevOps was totally different than what RevOps means now like back then it

38:51 was hey you're implementing Salesforce and HubSpot now it's oh are you implementing you know an instance of cloud code and building these automated workflows and also back then was still kind of in that growth at all cost mindset and now it's hey how can we be as efficient as possible but investors still want lots of growth too so how do you marry those but it's just gonna keep happening too yeah yeah agreed yeah the change is constant you know and we're experiencing it at a rapid pace overall and so being flexible being willing to roll up your sleeves as a leader now I think is really important you know we

39:34Stop doing last year's job; stepping into the CRO seat

39:34 were even talking in our ELT meeting this morning about AI Claude specifically and how we need to be leading from the front and actually doing that and I think at any time in your career making sure that you know whatever role whatever initiative whatever thing you're doing and you're willing to roll up your sleeves and be shoulder-to-shoulder is really important especially during times of change one other framework I think one of the hardest things as you're growing within an organization is to stop doing the job you did the year before because it's so easy to take a promotion you have what you had been

40:22 doing and then now you just keep operating in that way with a different title you know but you really as you're taking these new roles do need to take a step back you know I mentioned the whole learning curve that I needed at partner stack but every time there was a new role I still would do that in some form at impact to make sure okay do I understand what's happening within this department do I understand what I need to do to help this department overall as opposed to just come in and this is how I've done things for the last eight years and I'm gonna continue to do it that way so I think getting out of your

40:59 own way changing your habits and taking that step back is also really important what was the biggest thing that was different for you when you first stepped into a chief revenue officer role I love deals love it I will sit there workshop focus on the narrative how are we gonna present it what does the customer care about I loved it but you know as a CRO of an organization of 250 or so at that point in time that's not my job I have other people that are supposed to do it so finding the right balance because I do think it's important make sure you do the things that fill your cup up that you enjoy but

41:50 only do it to a certain degree that it's not preventing you from really thinking about the systems of tooling the framework all of that stuff you know fortunately for me it wasn't a jump from sales manager directly to CRO so I had been kind of building to that path but I think that that's the biggest thing of don't always get sucked into the things that you gravitate towards you know make sure that you're really thinking about systems processes tooling what's gonna happen four quarters from now not what's gonna happen this quarter I think that's that's really wise and I think it's tough to change when you get in

42:36 those new roles and realize that your responsibility has broadened or shifted or changed and but I do I do love that you spend some time in customer success because it's pretty rare I I podcast with quite a few CRO's and very few have had a stint in that department but then they end up taking it over so hopefully that was a good experience that gave you that more holistic perspective yeah absolutely it was a fantastic experience absolutely tell me a little bit more about partner stack now the mission you're on the journey the vision that you have for where partner stack can be to preface we're huge fans we've done

43:17PartnerStack's vision: the platform that does both

43:17 multiple implementations of partner stack we think it's provided tremendous value for the companies that we've integrated it with we're huge believers in the partnership motion in general but what's what's the vision of partner stack now and what's happening next yeah sounds good so mission changed the way the world sells software it's been the same mission for the company of the entire 10 plus years in existence the interesting thing to me in stepping into the role is I think in the market they think about us either in one of two ways because we have two core use cases and usually you know us for one but not the

43:59 other one is to the marketing buyer and it is more around affiliate marketing and influencers so really fits with this AEO narrative around getting content and others to write about you overall and then the other side of the business which I think is what you're most familiar with which is around you know a PRM or channel or co-sell relationships we are the only platform that does both and so the way you can think about it is anyone who wants to send you traffic refer you business co-sell with you we are the single unified platform to be able to help you distribute your software through any of those channels

44:50 and then you add on top of it now we can help you distribute through robots or LLMs and so our whole focus is helping you drive more pipeline bookings higher NDR by connecting with any of the different partnership entities whether it's an influencer a youtuber a digital review site a RevOps agency you know global systems integrate or whatever it may be we are that unified platform to manage the discovery of finding those partners as well as all the workflows to ensure they're enabled productive sending you business and they get paid if there's a commercial relationship I think I think it's amazing and I think

45:37The 12-month forecast: ecosystem as the moat

45:37 you've partner stack has done a tremendous job of helping customers see the value and also I just appreciate the perspective on leaning into the partnership motion in general like I said we're big believers in it it's a big part of our own go-to-market motion it's the companies that we work with that do it well see incredible results so I think getting the right infrastructure to discover and manage that motion it's just critical to success agreed and we very much appreciate the partnership of course of course well we've covered a lot I was hoping to maybe pick your brain on one more thing you're sitting

46:25 at the intersection of AI and partnerships if we fast forward and I know things are changing so much so do your best but if we fast forward a year from now what do we think will be different in the B2B world when it comes to partnerships and AI what's your forecaster anticipation oh really good question overall so this whole aeo world is gonna evolve and I think the things we know right now will be very different if you take the parallel between Google Google SEO and their algorithm changes we just have to expect that there's gonna be a roller coaster and chat GPT is gonna handle things different than

47:11 Claude and so really the dynamics and the different types of content and how things are going to be recommended I think will be different 12 months from now overall I would expect the along the lines of more authentic like more trust I think it's gonna be going around that way versus just having content that a robot can read I think because of the prevalence of building applications now and the low cost to build applications that an ecosystem will be a moat and the more people that you have within your partnership ecosystem who are evangelists those are gonna be the companies that are most successful because they have

48:05 created such a diverse and broad moat overall I think those that solely rely on sales and marketing are gonna have a much harder time continuing to be successful in the market overall so I would expect the trend around more ecosystems more markets more focusing on partnership distribution channels will be much larger 12 months from now well time will tell but I think I agree with and I hope it leads towards more authenticity and finding ways to get companies working together to create a better experience for their customers and holding each other accountable and really being invested in each other to make that

48:51Close

48:51 happen so Mike this has been amazing thank you so much for sharing everything from how to leverage partnerships to optimize your entire go-to-market lifecycle it's not just lead gen it's not just pipeline it's increasing ndr it's increasing your aeo your story and reinvention cycles time and time again I'm sure this will not be the last time the only thing that's certain is things will change so being adaptable and agile to that is important and I just appreciate everything you're doing a partner stack and sharing everything you did today thank you for the time Anthony I appreciated the conversation and as I

49:30 mentioned appreciate the partnership with y'all likewise