29 - Structuring Partner Programs as an Entrepreneurial Pursuit: A Dissertation by Dorian R Kominek

Paul Bird: From channel manager to strategic Partnerships Manager to head of partnerships, our guest today has spanned the partnerships arena for some years before deciding to make an interesting contribution to those who have established partner programs or who are planning to establish one. Our guest realized that the pursuit of partnering in partner programs was in need of a foundational framework. So she set out to work on changing the minds of partnering organizations to rethink their approach to program development. She's here with us today to discuss the key ideas from her report channel Partner Program Development as an Entrepreneurial Pursuit.

Please welcome, Dorian Kominek to the show

Paul Bird: Please welcome Dorian Kominek. Welcome to the show, Dorian. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Dorian Kominek: Thanks, Paul. Yeah, I appreciate it. Happy to be here. Excited to share some of my research. Hopefully it's helpful.

Paul Bird: Fantastic.  So let's start with the basics. How did you start out in the channel and partnership?

Dorian Kominek: Boy, you know, I think, like, I've heard this story a million times from so many other people. It's very similar to a lot of partner professionals. You didn't set out to be a partner person, but then you became one. So I was an entrepreneur for the first half of my career, which is probably what brings my perspective to Channel Program development. And then I shifted in and sort of built a corporate career, not really knowing that in my entrepreneurial career, what I was doing was a lot in the partnership space. And then so in my corporate career, I kind of did a bunch of marketing and sales, both of those sides of things. And then when I flipped over into Tech, somebody recognized like, hey, you have a lot of partnery kind of stuff in your resume. Why don't you help us build our first partner program? I was like, all right, so then that's what I did. And then, as Tech does, has this way of obsessing and creating acronyms about things. So there's a lot of documentation about partnerships in the tech space. In a certain way, we like to think about partnerships, but actually partnerships are as old as commerce and just different terminology for these other things I was doing, like working with distribution partners with hard goods was the exact same thing. That's kind of how I ended up in the tech partner space.

Paul Bird: So tell us about your dissertation's mission. Who was it meant to serve and what was your thesis?

Dorian Kominek: I think as an entrepreneurial kind of person, I just tend to be a problem solver. If there's friction or things don't glide smoothly, it's like, well, how do we fix that? So to me, just making some observations in the pursuit of building partner programs and hearing from other partner professionals, it was like, okay, there's some issues here. How do we solve this? So I guess for me, I started my Master of Science kind of at the same time that I flipped over into the tech world. So I was kind of reinvigorating my brain with all of this stuff about entrepreneurship and innovation. And that was my framework for everything, and it kind of always has been. So from there, I had my I don't know, my thinking cap on or whatever. I was looking for, like, okay, well, how can we solve challenges or innovate or improve this? And I think my first experience with building and scaling a partner program was really great. And then there were challenges as the organization scaled where that experience changed. And then same with that subsequent organizations, there were certain challenges. That not the fault of the organization, but it was just, what is going on where there's so much friction here? And then I just kind of started serving the partner community and saying, like, hey, is it just me? And it wasn't. So it's like, all right, well, there's a bigger picture challenge here to solve. And that is we're making this claim that we want to do ecosystems or build channels or work with partners, yet we are reluctant to resource that pursuit or evangelize it, or actually endorse it, or actually live it. And it's like, why is that? What's that about? So that's where my research started.

Paul Bird: So in your paper, you write about how partner program development should be reframed as this entrepreneurial pursuit. So tell us more about that, and how can somebody go about doing this?

Dorian Kominek: Well, so the first part of the question, I guess, is, yeah, the concept of entrepreneurial, versus managerial thinking is as an organization scales and grows, it kind of naturally becomes more managerial. If you found product market fit and processes and systems are working, you want to protect that. So you take this managerial approach, which is about risk aversion and avoiding spending resources on things that you don't need to, and that type of thing. Entrepreneurial thinking is, very common at the founding of an organization where we're taking risks, we're thinking about testing, and iterating we're collaborating. We're not so sort of tight and competitive with our ideas. And so to me, this idea came about as, okay, well, you may have an established incumbent organization, or you may have a startup. It doesn't really matter. But if you're building a partner program within that organization, that partner program itself should be treated like a venture. It is a venture in and of itself. So you sort of can't apply this strict managerial thinking, okay, well, we've got our product market fit with our broader organization down. Let's control this partner function and make it be this way. You can't do that. You've got to bring this approach like, okay, well, we're starting a new business within the business. We need to go back to our roots as founders and think about how we did that with our actual broader organization and do that in our partner program. Yeah, organizations don't frame channel development that way. And there's a bunch of reasons why I think we should and there's a bunch of ways I think we should do that.

Paul Bird: So maybe we can start with how do you attain organizational alignment for supporting channel partner program development as an entrepreneurial venture?

Dorian Kominek: Yeah, I think that's a challenging question and I guess I'll say I have my own sort of maybe hypotheses about that, about how you would attain that alignment. But I'd say more what my research showed is that there is a lack of that entrepreneurial thinking and there is a lack of that alignment. So I'm at least showing evidence through data that this is actually a problem. We're not just all complaining about a phantom. So got you, like, we got to do something about it, right? But what do we do about it? That's a harder question, I guess. Personally, I would say what would you do as an entrepreneur? How do you find alignment? So I was talking to somebody else about this the other day. If you're building a business, what do you do? How do you get buy in from venture capitalists, say, or like from even angel investors or whatever, people who you want to have believe in your startup, even. So, what founders do is they create a pitch deck and they really refine their talking points. They've got slides about each of those things like who's our team? What's our product? Who are we going after? What's our value proposition? And really importantly, they have a financial model that shows here's what's possible over some timescale given these inputs. So if we think about it like that, it's like, okay, do that as if you're charged with developing a partner program. That's one way that you put on an entrepreneurial hat. And you can build sort of almost a pitch deck. And there are tools in the world of entrepreneurship and innovation you can bring over to help yourself with that. And then the other thing I would say is how are you trending to that business plan you've set out? So just like you would do with venture capitalists or investors, you've got to show them, here was my hockey stick graph of how great we think this is going to be. How do you trend to it and be accountable to it. So make sure that your activities are aligning to those KPIs you've set with yourself and make sure you're tracking everything and build a business case for your venture. So that would be what I would say, but I didn't research that so much, although that'd be an interesting project.

Paul Bird: So can you think of best practices that are necessary in the development of a channel partner program kind of in accordance or in alignment with entrepreneurial literature and industry knowledge?

Dorian Kominek: Yeah, for sure. So this is kind of going to be top down a little bit. So this might not be in the hands of the partner professional, although it might be depending on the stage of the organization. So step one is that realization around entrepreneurial versus managerial thinking. Or at least that's what I assert. right. It's like to have this realization that there's a difference between those styles of management and organization and to take the entrepreneurial approach. So kind of like tuning the organization to this idea that, hey, we're building a partner program. This is going to be a venture, we're going to have to invest in this properly, not just with capital, but with human resources and other types of supports and that we're going to allow room for some failure and trial and error and testing. I think people get scared of that idea, but it doesn't mean endless failure with no accountability. You have to find fit at some point and you have to be accountable for those failures too. That's kind of step one internally is that realization. And then the other part is what I just called in my people tuning just this mindset around managerial versus entrepreneurial. And then this other number two is this thing I called organizational tuning. So what's the structure of the organization? How have you set it up to enable building a partner program to succeed? Well, how can you know that? Well, there's a lot of research in the world of entrepreneurship and innovation that shows about corporate entrepreneurship. When, say, like an organization goes out to acquire a venture or they're building a new venture internally, what sort of factors are necessary to enable the success of that venture? So there's five factors that the research bears out and this is over. This research was done where a cross functional study was done of numerous other papers to sort of assess to see what are those factors. And from all of these other, like however many, I don't remember like 100 papers or whatever, these five factors emerged as necessary to enable innovation. Kind of showed with them you're going to do well or better, and without them you're definitely going to fail. So yes, I could talk about those factors if you wanted.

Paul Bird: Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to get an idea of how people can really embrace this entrepreneurial thinking to foster innovation when it comes to program development.

How do you organize your organization to help partner programs succeed?

Dorian Kominek: Yeah, so if you are, let's say you're a startup SaaS startup or something like that, right? And you're like, yeah, we want to do something with partners. Here's how you need to kind of organize your or tune your organization to enable that to succeed. So again, thinking about it like we're starting a business. So these five factors, by the way, you'll probably notice there's a trend where these are the things that partner professionals who are struggling complain that these are not present. So number one is management support. So that is at sort of mid level and especially all the way up to executive and CXO support. So the C Suite needs to be on board with the idea of building, a program. And so we hear that over and over again when partner professionals struggle. It's like, man, how do I get buy in from the C Suite? So I mean, this is this top down wise approach here. It's like, listen, if you're the C Suite and you're serious, then don't just sort of do a hand wavy thing about this and say, okay, we're going to hire one person and good luck. Take it seriously, support the idea and take it just as seriously as you treat your marketing silo or your direct silo, your operations silo. Otherwise just don't do it. The other thing is organizational structure. So here this is talking about like a flat hierarchy. You don't want to have barriers to leadership and decision making. So ideally, partner professional who's building a program for the first time would be aligned with the C Suite or whoever's making sort of global organization wide decisions and have direct access there. So limited bureaucracy, friction free environment, that's super important. The more layers you put in between, the less success you have with innovation, the next thing is work discretion. So this person that you put into this role needs. And so an organization should really consider hiring an entrepreneurial kind of a candidate to do this, to build a program. So if you're doing that and you've gone through the motions of screening and finding that person, and you've decided, yes, this is the person who's going to help us take our partnership program somewhere, you need to give them the autonomy to do that and not sort of be overly dogmatic and hamstering them to kind of do that work that you've hired them to do. If you've hired them, trust them and let them do that work. Obviously this doesn't mean like free rein with no accountability, but an entrepreneurial person is going to want to see the reward from their work just as much as you are.

Dorian Kominek: So then resources. So this is another one that we hear a lot of complaint, about. Not enough financial support is one or budgetary support. But also time is a huge one. Like I wasn't given enough time to build the structures that needed to be in place before this could take off. Or I was given KPIs from day one that weren't based on anything that were guesses. So time is a really important resource and then human resources, other people. So it might sound scary to an organization to think, well, if we're going to hire a person here in this role that's sort of at a higher director or whatever level, that implies that they have to have direct reports. And it doesn't imply that you can have a director or even C suite person who does not have direct reports, who is sort of resourced to build out a program for a certain amount of time before having direct reports. That doesn't mean they should have no support though, either. So think about dotted line in from maybe you borrow a few SDRs from the sales team or you borrow a marketing support person from the marketing side. So being able to kind of share the resources internally, don't silo this person and expect magic.

Dorian Kominek: And then the last thing is rewards and reinforcements. So at least in the innovation research that shows this is really important, if you're hiring an entrepreneurial person, you need to reward them and incentivize them to care. So of course they care about their own achievements and that's really gratifying to entrepreneurial people. But rewarding them with sort of it's the American dream. The harder you work, the better you do. And if you achieve this, you get that and good rewards. And one often overlooked reward is also the reward of acknowledgment and celebration. A lot of the time you'll see a partner program be developed and do well, and it's like, look what we did, look what our organization did. But you had some really entrepreneurial, innovative person behind that and they deserve to be uplifted because of it. And when they're not, they feel and this is just not my opinion, this is the research shows that, they leave. They'll leave the organization. They'll take all their great ideas and creativity somewhere else. So those are the five factors.

Paul Bird: And truth be told, those are absolutely 100% bang on. I've been in this industry for 20 plus years and I would have to agree with all of them 100%.

Another thing that you mentioned in your paper, and this was a, question, was how can we serve our partners as we serve our customers? And something that's overlooked by organizations seeking to develop partner programs and instead they tend to hyper focus on what their partners can do for them. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and what aspects of the partner experience you think is important for people to focus on?

Dorian Kominek: Oh yeah. So once you get that internal stuff right, the way we think about building a venture inside of an organization, the managerial versus entrepreneurial thinking, you've tuned your organization, you've considered those five factors. So that's internally facing. So now you got to look outside of the organization and go build this thing. And you're looking at your partners and the market and your competitors. so just like you would in building a business and finding product market fit in that business and developing a strong value proposition, hopefully if you figured out how to do that, you're not just guessing at what that value proposition is. You have some reason for building your business in the first place. You've seen that customers demand this. There's a gap, there's a need, whatever problem you're solving. So it's just the same if we're considering building a channel or a partner program as an entrepreneurial pursuit. It has its own product and it has its own value proposition. And the consumers of that value proposition are partners. So instead of just sort of guessing and saying, well, let's just make a referral program, I guess, which you could do, you could quickly throw that together. I'm not saying don't do that at all, maybe quickly throw that together. But you also need to go out and survey your partners because they are your customers, they're the consumers of your channel or partner program's value proposition. So really important to when you're figuring out just like your target customer persona, who's your target partner persona, you might have some ideas about that and you go talk to those different groups and you pitch them on ideas like hey, what do you think about this? We want to build a partner program and here's the value we think about offering, what do you think? And just ask them. So that's the very first step I think, in treating your partners like customers.

Paul Bird: So let's talk a little bit about some of your findings in the results of your surveys, what did you find were the most commonly cited entrepreneurial factors that are necessary for success?

Dorian Kominek: Those five factors. So what I did is I asked channel partner program managers and up what their experience was like with their partner programs or are they having success or not. And that's a little bit arbitrary, I realize, but how well do they feel that it's going? And then I asked them across those five factors and I kind of tried to veil it a little bit. Do you feel like factor one is present, factor two is present? Factor three, four, five. So then I correlated of the ones who said my partner program is going well, or when my partner program goes well, these factors are present versus when my partner program is not going well, or it's not going well, these factors are not present. So I looked at that. So the most common, it really correlated very strongly between the most favored of those five factors and the most complained about of those five factors. On the other side of it, so I'd say the organizational support, like managerial support, executive support and the organizational structure that having sort of a frictionless environment to innovate and having autonomy. Those were the top three that were cited by partner professionals when things were going well, although they were all cited with a lot of frequency. The ones that were when things were not going well, the most commonly cited just correlates really well here is lack of executive support. So lack of management support or executive support, c suite support and no resources. Those were the two most complained about. Although all of the five factors were cited as lacking when things weren't going well. I guess my research kind of only just furthered this idea that those factors are important and maybe gave credence to the idea that this is an entrepreneurial project that we're doing.

Paul Bird: And I would say that every channel leader in any industry is probably nodding their head and agreeing with you completely.

So, let's talk about what roles does partner segmentation play in the partner experience? That was in your dissertation as well.

Dorian Kominek: So I talk about that when you're going out. And we're treating our partners like customers. We're just reframing them to think of them like customers. Then what can we do? What kind of tools can we lift and shift from the world of entrepreneurship and innovation to use in developing our partner? You know, there's lots of tools. There's a really good one. I think it's from Strategizer and it's just a tool to kind of envision. It's typically used for customers, but in this case, use it for partners

What pains are your partners experiencing? What gains would they like to have? And that would make their job better? And what jobs are they doing? So what's their daily job like? What are they doing day in, day out, nine to five? So when you're thinking about your target partners, you've decided, okay, like, our target partners are MSPs, security consultants, whatever. So to, give a specific example, what are they doing from nine to five all day long? Who are they talking to? What kind of things are involved in their diary? Like, what's their work day? And then you'd start to think about, well, how can I help them with those jobs? How can I help them? Can I provide an assist anywhere in there with those jobs they're trying to get done, make it more efficient or easier or better through my partner program? What are their pains? So what are they struggling with? What's hard in their industry? Maybe it's competition. There's a lot of consultant MSP security consultants or something like that. And how do they differentiate? So, okay, so maybe you can help them with that. And what gains do they want to see? I think the go to that we always think about is revenue. Of course, everyone wants more revenue, but there's a bunch of gains that you might want depending on what you're doing in your business. Maybe you want more time or broader reach or a more expansive network. So in segmenting, that's what you do, segmenting your customers. You try to think about those things, do it with your partners, think about their pains, gains, jobs, and then how is your partner program going to remedy those pains or help with jobs, create those gains and lock in there?

Paul Bird: Were there any learnings that you have for us on how empathy plays a part in creating a partner program that really speaks to partners?

Dorian Kominek: So another big tool from the world of entrepreneurship and innovation is design thinking. So design thinking is just almost like you can think of it as like, agile development. So Design Thinking is a never ending loop that starts with empathy. So when you're designing a product or a program or a service or really anything using Design Thinking, you have this infinity loop starting with empathy. And this is making the assumption that if you're building something, it's because you're solving a problem. So who are you solving it for? So in this case, hopefully, we're solving it not only for our organization, but also for partners. We're building this partner program. The world's going to be better for it. Who are we being empathetic to? Our partners. So this is really, again, about going out and actually talking to your customers. In this case, partners, asking them, what they want, what they need, and dropping our assumptions. Like, maybe we think it's this and we can always propose our assumptions like, hey, just be really transparent. We thought these were our assumptions about what you might want. Are we right or is that way off base? What do you actually want? And then just listening. So that's where that design loop starts. Design thinking loop starts. And then from those answers that you glean in being empathetic, you're probably going to have some surprises because you can't possibly know everything about what everybody else is thinking until you ask them. And then you design your prototype around those responses. So the prototype in this case is a partner program. What kind of an offering do you put together based on those responses? And then the loop sort of cycles around where you test that prototype. You continue to sort of build it out and then you seek feedback and then the loop continues with empathy. So that's really the role empathy plays.

Paul Bird: So how does a partner program, as an entrepreneurial venture, deliver value to its partners? And more specifically, how does this help determine what kind of partners the partner program should target?

Dorian Kominek: That's just how do you deliver value to your partners? You make sure you ask them, like, is this valuable for you? Right? And it's very true that you might not get the answers you need. You might end up with the wrong answers. And you'll find that out when you test those responses. So you build a prototype, you test it and you see, oh, this isn't working well for us, maybe your organization, because you've got to also be empathetic to the organization and its goals and your own KPIs. Are we getting what we needed out of this program? if not, okay, so we need to make an adjustment. How do we align sort of our own goals with the partner's goals? And where do we find that balance? And you just sort of keep fine tuning until you get there. So how do you find value? I think it's going to be unique in each case. And the best thing you can do is go sort of speak to your partners, carve out some potential. We think this partner profile might be a good idea. Maybe this one, maybe this one. And then go talk to them and then go build a few prototypes and test it. And that's how you'll learn what value serves those partners. And sorry, I forgot what was the last half of the question?

Paul Bird: Oh, just how do you turn that into the kinds of partners that, you should target?

Dorian Kominek: Oh, yeah. So once you do that, I think this is the other thing to realize and why it's important to take an entrepreneurial approach here. You might be wrong about your initial guesses. Like, you might really think MSP security consultants are going to be the way to go, just as an example for your partner program. And maybe that's one group you thought would be great and you've got a couple other groups you thought about, but you're going to need to be ready to be wrong and go, okay, MSPs, this did not work. Not a good solution, but maybe you learned something out of that. So if you're paying attention, maybe you learn, like, actually if we pivot a little bit, this partner category is a better idea. So I think how does that help you realize what partners to target? That whole process of iteration and design thinking doesn't imply that you're going to be right. You might be wrong. And that's how you're going to get that answer. Who's the right partner? It might not be who's the right partner? The answer might be who's the wrong partner? And then you just have to try something else. But if you're going into this with a managerial mindset and it's like, well, who's the right partner? Well, my managed security MSP didn't work out. Now I'm really frustrated. Forget it all, let's throw it all in the garbage. That might be the approach if you've got a managerial thinking sort of approach because it's like, well, we've already wasted resources. We don't want to do this again. If you're doing entrepreneurial thinking, you're going to go, well, we need to try another group. Just because we were wrong doesn't mean that there's no answer. So hopefully the design thinking process bears that out.

Paul Bird: Okay. And how about some of the key resources required to run a successful channel program? Are there any interesting findings you can tell us about in that regard?

Dorian Kominek: So I can just say, like, the anecdotal some of the commentary that people gave in the surveying. So obviously funding was a big one. Like, if people think resources, they think money. Money can buy anything, so that's what we need. But another one that was cited a lot was just people like, I need more people on my team. Or it was just like, the ask is too big for the number of people we have. This is an unreasonable feat I've been given here. So either you're going to need to give that person more people and more human resources. Or you're going to need to change, dial down your expectations, which you can do either, but if you don't do either, it's not going to work. So human resources was a big one. I think even just time was definitely mentioned a few times. Again, that was on how reasonable is the timescale of, I've come into this role and I'm expected to do a thing, but I'm supposed to do it in two weeks and we want to see things on the scoreboard by my third week here. So time is a really important resource, and then I guess with time, like, you can imagine in an organization where there's a lack of time being afforded, there's also going to be pressure and expectation and a lack of autonomy and, more of a doctrinarian approach to like, hey, do this. What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? Come on, let's go. Versus giving that person space. Often time comes with autonomy. So those would be some of the resources, I'd say, other than the obvious one of just like, show me the money, for sure.

Paul Bird: So as we start to wrap things up, what impact do you hope this report will leave on organizations with partner programs?

Dorian Kominek: Yeah, well, I hope okay, so I guess one thing is we're not all delusional, hopefully partner professionals. Like, there's a bit of a sense of catharsis here, and I think that's why people like hearing me talk about this, because they're like, yeah, man, you feel my pain. And I think that's good. I think that's really important. It's like, yeah, you're not alone. We're together in this struggle, so now we got to figure out what to do about it. But you're not crazy. And there are sort of tried and tested methods from entrepreneurship and innovation that we can lift and shift to kind of help ourselves from the bottom up. And the other side is top down. I really hope that organizations who are setting out to pursue partnerships, or maybe they already have, and they're wondering, like, well, how can we get more out of our partner program? Or how come this isn't working in the way that we really wanted it to? Maybe they can look at this research and do sort of some introspection and consider their own approach and behavior and maybe just some fine tuning of that will yield better results. And also for those organizations that are it's like Dah, partner professionals, they're just a bunch of complainers. I hope that there's maybe like an AHA moment, maybe a bit of a realization, like, okay, all right, fine, I'm listening. What? This research is showing that there's actually a problem. How do we address it? It's not imaginary. Yeah. So that's what I hope to achieve.

Paul Bird: And what would you say the top or even top two most insightful learnings you had when conducting your research and writing this dissertation?

Dorian Kominek: Oh, boy. I always like, to cite this statistic that of, partner professionals surveyed across their entire career. So, 67% of partner professionals, so they were asked, what is the biggest challenge that you faced in your career, not just today in your job, but in your entire career as a partner professional? What's the biggest challenge that you faced? And 67% of partner professionals said the biggest challenges they faced were internal at their own organization. Okay, well, so what but if you think about that for a minute, imagine any other profession or role or whatever, where 67% of the people, their biggest source of pain and friction is their own organization that hired them to do the job that they're trying to do. It's kind of a crazy statistic. And by the way, twelve and a half percent said it was an even split between external factors and internal factors. So even there was a large margin who said it was kind of both. So, I mean, to me, that number should be zero. There should be nobody saying my own organization is my biggest problem in doing my job. So I found that kind of interesting and staggering.

Paul Bird: All ah. Right. Dorian well, thank you so much for being a guest on our show today. It's been a pleasure to have you here.

Dorian Kominek: Thank you. Really appreciate it.