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I’m Chris Messina, Founder and CEO of QuarqAI. We’re building the first AI platform that…
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Chris M. shared this𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 #𝟮: Your CFO calls tomorrow and says, "We've got $1M for partnerships; where should we invest it?" Could you answer? Probably. Could you defend the answer with numbers six months from now? Probably not...and that’s the problem. Most partner organizations can tell you where the money went. MDF, headcount, events, enablement, integrations, incentives, marketplace programs...we track DIRECT spend just fine. What we can almost never do is prove whether that spend actually created the return we expected. So the decision gets made on instinct, history, politics, partner size, or whoever has the strongest internal champion. Then six months later, we look at the pipeline and activity and convince ourselves it worked... ...except we're not the ones who need convincing. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, t𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗴𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗮 𝗯𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝘁. If partnerships are going to be treated like a real investment function, we need to be able to do two things: 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗴𝗼. Then prove whether that decision was right. Which partner created the return? Which motion actually paid back? How long did it take? What did it cost? What would have happened if we had put that money somewhere else? Those are investment questions. And right now, most partner leaders can’t answer them with enough confidence to survive serious CFO scrutiny. That’s the gap we’re building QuarqAI to close. So here’s the real Executive Question #2: 𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 $𝟭𝗠 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗼𝘄...𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘁, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝘅 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁? For most partner teams today, the answer is 𝗻𝗼. That has to change. BAFU, Chris #Partnerships #PartnerEcosystems #Channel #Leadership #B2B #AI
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Chris M. shared thisI've spent days writing, re-writing, and editing this piece, and the vast majority of the thinking and writing in it is mine, yet according to Substack's AI detector powered by Panagram, my next post (coming Monday, and it may be the most important piece I've ever written about partnerships) is 99% AI and only 1% me. Maybe I've started writing like an AI (I don't think I have... I make too many of my own rules), or maybe AI detection software for writing doesn't work.
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Chris M. shared thisYour CRM can split one deal across five of your own reps, down to a single percentage point...now try to record that a partner did X% of it. ⠀ There's nowhere to put that number, not in Salesforce, not in HubSpot, not anywhere I looked. ⠀ I went looking for why partnership measurement has been stuck for twenty years, and the data schemas in the tools we use most often to track partners seemed like the obvious place to start: Salesforce's object reference, HubSpot's object list, the AWS and Microsoft co-sell APIs, and whatever vendor admin docs I could pry loose. What's actually in the fields, rather than what the website says is possible. ⠀ Here's some of I found: ⠀ • Salesforce's OpportunitySplit carries a percent field validated to total 100%, and its owner field points to a User, meaning a seat, an employee, somebody with a login at your company. ⠀ • Where Salesforce models another company, in the object literally named Partner, the only quantitative field is a boolean, and the documentation is explicit that "only one account can be marked as primary for an opportunity." ⠀ • HubSpot ships 33 standard objects, and not one of them is a partner, which is a strange thing to be true of a company running one of the largest partner programs in software. ⠀ • Oracle does give you a partner percentage, and then defines it as credit "unrelated to the sale itself," exempt from the 100% rule and off by default. They built the field, then declared it doesn't count. ⠀ • Nobody answers the question that would actually settle any of this, which is whether the deal would have closed anyway without the partner. That question has a name, the counterfactual, and across four categories and dozens of primary documents, the word never appears once. ⠀ My favorite tell, though, is that Microsoft routes multi-partner deals out of automatic approval and into a human council because the rules can't resolve them. The most sophisticated partner-classification system on the planet breaks down at the exact point where value must be divided among more than one party. ⠀ Here's the tough part: none of this is incompetence. These are excellent systems, built by people, doing precisely what they were designed to do, and the apparatus for splitting value exists, works, and is enforced to conserve… right up until it stops dead at the property line. ⠀ The underlying signals are there; it's just that nothing...literally nothing...was built to look at them. ⠀ I build tools in this space, so read the specification section with your guard up, and know that I spend a good chunk of the piece arguing against myself, because the best objection to "just measure it faster" is that pharma tried exactly that, with regulators, for forty years, and mostly failed. ⠀ Part two of three, and the link's in the comments. ⠀ #PartnerEcosystems #ChannelPartners #B2BSaaS ⠀
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Chris M. shared thisI owe you Partner Truth #2. I meant to get this out last week, but I was camping with my son before I dropped him off to start college, and his journey into adulthood... there are moments when presence is more important than anything else, and this was one of those moments. So, picking this back up... One of the biggest misconceptions about partnerships is that measurement is the goal...It isn't...measurement only confirms whether the decisions we've made were worth it, so the goal isn't measurement; it's to identify the right way to make better decisions. Every budget is really a series of investment decisions...Is a partner program worth the investment? Which partners deserve my time? Which sellers are engaging? Which programs should we stop funding? Without measurable economics behind those decisions, strategy starts to turn into opinion, and the loudest voices and any kind of evidence usually win that fight. The best partner leaders I know aren't trying to prove they were busy. They're trying to understand where the next dollar, the next hour, and the next relationship will create the greatest return. That's a very different way of thinking. Measurement matters because it gives us the evidence to allocate capital with discipline. If we want partnerships to be treated like a strategic investment, we have to start making investment decisions with the same rigor the rest of the business expects. That's one of the reasons we've built QuarqAI the way we did... Not to give partner leaders more things to measure... To help them decide what to do next... BAFU, Chris #Partnerships #PartnerEcosystems #Channel #Leadership #B2B #AIone
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Chris M. shared thisThe gents over at The Channel Surfers have put together a solid piece with a lot of shared wisdom from their podcast guests. Not only am I honored by the mention, I also get to occupy an infographic with the incomparable Vaughn Mordecai !
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Chris M. shared thisOne of the biggest misconceptions about partnerships is that measurement is the goal. It isn't. The goal is making better decisions. Every budget is a series of investment decisions. Where do we put another dollar? Which partners deserve more attention? Which motions should we double down on? Which programs should we stop funding? Without measurable economics, those decisions become opinions. The loudest voice wins. The highest paid person in the room wins. The partner with the biggest logo wins. That's not strategy. That's guesswork. The best partner leaders I've met aren't trying to prove they were busy. They're trying to understand where the next dollar, the next hour, and the next relationship will create the greatest return. That's a fundamentally different way of thinking. Measurement isn't the destination. It's the prerequisite for intelligent capital allocation. If we want partnerships to be treated like a strategic investment, we have to start making investment decisions with the same discipline the rest of the business expects. That's the future we're building toward at QuarqAI. BAFU, Chris #Partnerships #PartnerEcosystems #Leadership #CapitalAllocation #B2B #AI
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Chris M. shared thisI've been citing a number that doesn't exist... so have many of you. Sixty to seventy percent of partnerships fail. Cool...what's the sample size? What are the sources? What were the controls? I can't answer those questions when investors ask, so I went looking for the sources, and I think I found the origin... November 2007, Harvard Business Review, "Simple Rules for Making Alliances Work." Second sentence: "Studies show... the failure rate for alliances hovers between 60% and 70%." "Studies show..." That's it. That's the source. No footnote. No named study. No sample. No definition of failure. No year, no industry, no geography. It gets worse eleven pages later, in the same damn article; the number quietly becomes "more than half." Semantics? Perhaps, but when you know the number, you don't equivocate; you point to it. The authors couldn't keep it steady in a single paper, and we've been quoting it for decades, but it gets worse. Line up the studies we all cite, and they aren't even measuring the same thing: - 50% never hit a market-share threshold the authors chose themselves - 58% self-graded "less than fully successful," with partial success folded into the failure column - 70% formally quit or just ghosted - 73% weren't "completely satisfied" (startups, DACH region, n=150) - 85% isn't a failure rate at all, it's a cause-of-failure classification inside a sample selected for having already failed Five numbers. Five definitions. One sentence we recite like scripture. I took statements for a living once (yes, I was a cop). I know what this is, and it's not evidence; it's opinion. It's a rumor with a business card. The third person to tell you a story is telling you the second person's story, and by the fifth telling, everybody swears they were in the room. Here's the part that should piss you off. That number was never measuring how often partnerships fail. It was measuring how often we couldn't prove they didn't. Once again for the people in the back: we have no idea if we're failing or not because we can't prove it one way or the other. Sales walks into the QBR with a pipeline report. Marketing brings an attribution model. Finance brings the ledger. We bring a thirty-year-old stat and vibes...and in that room you don't get acquitted for lack of evidence. You get convicted for it. We wrote our own indictment, filed it as research, and have been reading it aloud at conferences ever since. Thirty years and nobody checked. That's not a failure rate; it's a fucking cry for help. Part one of three is live. No fix in this one, on purpose. Sit in it. BAFU. #partnerships #ecosystems #partnerecosystem
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Chris M. shared thisThanks SuperbCrew, for featuring my interview on your front page...quite an honor for QuarqAI 🙏🏽
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Chris M. shared thisOne of the biggest mistakes we've made as a profession is letting everyone else define how partnerships should be measured. Sales has pipeline. Marketing has attribution. Customer Success has retention. Product has adoption. So we borrowed a little from each of them and called it partner ROI. The problem is...partner ecosystems don't create value in a straight line. A single technical integration might accelerate pipeline, increase product adoption, improve retention, reduce support costs, strengthen another partner relationship, and create expansion revenue...all at the same time. So who gets the credit? Usually everyone, which, in reality, means no one...especially anyone showing up without receipts. That's why so many partnership teams struggle to answer one simple question: **What did our ecosystem actually produce?** I think we've been asking the wrong questions... Attribution asks, **"Who gets the credit?"** Contribution asks, **"How was value created?"** Those aren't the same thing. Partner ecosystems are networks, not funnels. Value moves in multiple directions, compounds over time, and often shows up somewhere completely different from where it started. Trying to force that into a traditional attribution model is like trying to explain the stock market with a single trade's receipt. If partnerships is going to earn a permanent seat at the executive table, we have to stop borrowing everyone else's scorecard. It's time we had our own. That's one of the core ideas behind what we've built at QuarqAI. BAFU, Chris #Partnerships #PartnerEcosystems #Channel #Leadership #B2B #AI
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Chris M. reacted on thisChris M. reacted on thisThis is a very big deal. Exabeam has been named a Google Unified Security (GUS) recommended partner. What it means: Exabeam New-Scale Analytics is now a recommended behavioral analytics layer for Google Security Operations customers, available through the Google Cloud Marketplace, aligned with existing Google Cloud commitments. The ecosystem piece is what I keep coming back to. Security teams aren't short on tools. They're short on time, and too much of it gets burned on integration work that was never their problem to solve. AI agents form their own intent and reason their way to a goal. Every step can be authorized. The path is where the risk lives. Seeing that path is the whole point of Agent Behavior Analytics. New-Scale Analytics learns what normal looks like for every human and non-human insider, then surfaces the drift. Being named a Google Unified Security Recommended partner means Google SecOps customers get that layer without building it themselves. Exciting times for Google + Exabeam. https://lnkd.in/gQKDDGUa #exabeam #behaviorintelligence #googlecloud #securityoperations #cybersecurity | ExabeamExabeam Named a Google Unified Security Recommended PartnerExabeam Named a Google Unified Security Recommended Partner
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Chris M. liked thisChris M. liked thisTwo-thirds of global tech spend flows through partnerships. In cybersecurity, it's over 90%, the highest of any IT domain, per Omdia. But the maturity benchmark on stage at Catalyst 26 this morning showed that only 41% of organizations have an executive team that treats the partner ecosystem as core to strategy. Buyers already made their choice. Vendors are the ones behind. Leading with partnerships means organizing around how customers prefer to buy: one team instead of a direct side and an indirect side, one message that partners and sellers both carry into the same room, one number they're both measured against. Get that wrong, and you're not running a partner program. You're running two go-to-market motions that compete with each other and calling it an ecosystem. Thanks to my friend Asher Mathew for putting this one together, and my fellow panelist Maria Lechner, @ Partnership Leaders.
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Jeff Barr
Twenty years ago today I was vacationing in Cabo San Lucas with my family when word came through that it was finally time to open up the Amazon EC2 beta. I spent several hours poolside polishing up my draft blog post on the resort's Wi-Fi and pushed it live as soon as I got the go-ahead. Reading that original post I am struck by just how much the EC2 team was able to get right, and how the results of so many difficult decisions were reflected in my post. From the very concept of pay-as-you-go on-demand computing with billing by the hour, prebuilt machine images (AMIs), direct fast-path access to Amazon S3, and much more. I am also struck by the fact that we confidently launched with just enough features to allow developers to get started. It would be a while before we introduced important concepts like Regions and Availability Zones, or important features like EBS, CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing, VPCs, visual tools (ElasticFox and then the AWS Management Console) and the like. As you can see from the slide below, the original API was small yet powerful -- just enough to let you get started on your cloud computing journey. Read my original blog post at https://lnkd.in/gAJ6mqbi and let me know what you think.
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