Driving Revenue Through 
Trusted Partners

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:30:54 ] * Do you want me to start there? Yeah, just the stage is yours. Let’s do it. All right. Let me go ahead and share my screen. Normally, I start this from my iPad, but that wasn’t working today. So we’re just going to start with standard slide decks. Let me just go and introduce myself. My name is Alex Buckles. I’m the CEO and co-founder of the company, which is a co-founder of Forecastable. And we are a managed services organization that helps B2B companies fill their pipeline and source pipeline from their partners in a professional network. So our outcome is pipeline-focused. We help reps fill their pipeline so you don’t have to go and do it, and do all the things that everybody’s trying to teach you to do, which you shouldn’t have to do.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:31:27 ] So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, go ahead and scan this QR code in the bottom right. I drop all kinds of stuff about sales and partnerships, and very passionate about autism too. I have an organization focused on helping those in the spectrum. So anybody that is impacted by autism as a result of this, please follow me on LinkedIn. Let me start out by talking a little bit about what we’re experiencing in the customer’s universe and in this world today. And you know, everybody, everybody kind of here on LinkedIn, people talking about cold outbound is dead and there’s all this like, you know, crap about it and debates about it. Right. And then every outbound consultant on the planet is like, no, it’s not, but I got a meeting last week.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:31:59 ] Right. But at the end of the day, let’s talk about what we’re actually seeing in market. And what are you, what are you having to do to get from the outside to the customer? Because if you’re sitting kind of here on the outside and you’re in the cold, kind of what we call lost in space, and you’re trying to get to this customer directly, you’re just hammering phones, you’re hammering email, you’re hammering LinkedIn. When in reality, there are all kinds of awesome, wonderful relationships around that customer, uh, starting with their mission-critical vendors that are already serving that customer. So if you’re a mission-critical vendor, whether you’re a services company like Accenture or Deloitte or some small niche company, or you’re an important provider like HubSpot or Salesforce, like that’s a mission-critical vendor.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:32:37 ] And they probably have access to the C-suite; they have all kinds of deep executive relationships with your, with your customer or your prospect. And then outside of that green ring, you have non-mission critical vendors. Like, let’s face it, like they’re, nobody’s really gonna be upset if, if this vendor goes out of business or their tool goes away. But at the end of the day, somebody bought that tool for a reason. Somebody there has a warm relationship with that prospect or that customer. So somebody there can probably introduce you to somebody that can kick off your cycle faster, increase your deal size, uh, ensure that you walk in the door with credibility, instead of just saying, Hey, I’m going to send them and like, please let me tell you about who I am.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:33:11 ] Like somebody tells you that tells them that in advance. And then there’s one additional layer that kind of trumps them all. It’s like, I don’t care who, you know, in here, if you happen to have somebody in kind of your professional network, that is, if I find out that somebody out here, you know, uh, is, you know, went to college at my organization with the CFO, my prospect, that’s really valuable intelligence. And chances are that person can get me in the door much faster than me getting, you know, on, on a cold call or sending out a cold email. And you only really need two warm calls to get one deal on the pipeline. That is really, really low compared to the number of cold touch points that you’ve got to have, but we’re fighting a battle here just as an, as, as an industry in general.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:33:49 ] And here’s the battle that we’re fighting and everybody in this room, if you’re in SAS, you’re in services. And, uh, I know that this audience is primarily, it sounds like sales audience. Uh, like this is what we were experiencing just yesterday when it was 2021, you know, and everybody had lots of funding and it was just a giant party. It’s like, boom, let’s hire 15 SDRs. Go cold call lots of people. Uh, we had, uh, you know, lots of marketing budget. Let’s just go buy a bunch and run a bunch of expensive hot sauce campaigns that don’t drive a whole lot of things. Right. But we can afford it. So let’s spend it. We have to spend it as a sales rep. I could spend unlimited money on going to dinners, flying all over the place.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:34:25 ] Like nobody cared what we spent. Why? Because I could spend $10,000 a month as an AE traveling and nobody cares because people were getting a hundred X top line valuations. Like nobody cared what you spent to get there because they were selling for so much money. And so not only could you spend that money because you had it, but everyone else could spend. So everybody you were selling to also had money. So they could buy your overly priced stuff that you were trying to hawk that wasn’t delivering the value that you were probably promising to even begin with. Right. So we had all these companies on this uncontrolled growth curve and they were like, ‘we want to be a unicorn’ and you get to be a unicorn. Right.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:35:00 ] And like, uh, and, but the thing is, it’s like, they, there are those that made it and sold for lots of money. And there are those that didn’t make it, ran out of cash. You made the wrong bets. And the thing is nobody cared in either situation. And nobody was thinking past that line: ‘that’s somebody else’s problem.’ If I fail, that’s my investor’s problem. It’s not my problem. People were walking away from it. No. And if I sell for lots of money, well, you know, I’m going to be on a beach somewhere. I’m going to take my earn out, walk away. Like that was it. But the reality hit, uh, you know, when the economy started going down, all these companies that were in this mode switched to an uncontrolled decline.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:35:34 ] So they switched from this uncontrolled growth down to an uncontrolled decline. Why? And how do you even know? You’re in this position? Well, it’s because you’re trying the same things you’ve always done. If you, if you know that you’re not getting the pipeline that you’re expecting day to day, and you know, your win rates, aren’t that great. And they weren’t what they used to be a year or two ago. And you know, you avoid partnerships because you think they’re going to get in the way of your cycle, or you have overlapping product roadmaps with partners and you’re having a hard time articulating the difference, right? Or, or you’re a sales leader and you’re like, where’s my leads. And you’re not getting anything from partnerships. You’re not getting those predictable outcomes.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:36:07 ] You’re in that uncontrolled decline. So whether you recognize it or not, I want you to stop and think about that after this, after the session and think about, are these things true? Because you are in that decline. Now, how do you get out of that decline? And how do you kind of make that leap to control growth? Well, control growth doesn’t mean you can go spend a bunch of marketing dollars and hire a bunch of SDRs and go crazy. Control growth means that you’re acquiring customers really quickly, inexpensively. And the best way to do that is through partnerships and through your professional network. And all we do at Forecastable is help people make that leap. To, from the red line to the green line and show them the path towards, towards this market position certainty.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:36:44 ] We’re like an outsourced SDR service, except all we do is get partner pipeline and pipeline from your professional network. And so I’m going to walk you through here, through here, right now, like what we do to go do these things, because it’s not rocket science. Everything we do is not, uh, is not special. It’s just, there are a lot of moving parts, and we’re really good at managing moving parts, but I’ll show you some tactics here in a moment on how to get there. Now, the challenge that most of you are going to face though, is that the leap from here to here is really small. Today, if you do nothing and keep pounding the pavement, pounding the phones over time, that leads to getting on this line; your competitors will already be there.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:37:15 ] They’re already be riding it, and it will become costlier and harder to make. And so I think that those companies that don’t make it will start dying off right about here. Now let’s get into what is it that we do. And then again, all stuff that you can do on your own, right? So, uh, in our case, we have, we basically allow customers B2B companies to rent our infrastructure, our execution infrastructure, and there’s three components to that infrastructure. And so component number one is we have senior advisors. So we have a whole network of sales trainers and coaches, people with, with revenue backgrounds that understand how to win deals. And they meet with you on a weekly basis and talk about what are we doing? Which partners are referring us business?

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:37:52 ] Who’s not, where do we need executive alignment? Where do we need to make adjustments? Like this is a very hands-on weekly meeting with a senior advisor talking about what we’re doing and what we’re producing. We also come with a full stack of, of, of technology that we built ourselves to track. We love the things that we do. We started out as a SaaS company seven years ago. So we have lots of technology. You don’t have to log into it. You don’t have to integrate with it. We just use this to kind of track and visualize all the activities that we’re doing in the field. So you don’t have to do it now. Uh, we also, everybody gets a full-time sales assistant.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:38:24 ] So for the same cost of hiring an outsourced SDR service, you get the full advisor, you get online workspaces, a bunch of other technology, and you get a 40 hour a week dedicated full-time sales assistant. That’s doing all the in-between things that you and I both know we don’t like doing as sales reps. I don’t want to follow up and have to chase a bunch of partner businesses. I don’t want to have to spend 45 minutes booking a calendar meeting with my partners on a deal. Like, there’s just so much benefit to having a sales assistant do that stuff. And you can go out there and spend more time closing business. Now, there, you know, um, with that, we come comes with, like I said, we’ve got a full network of, of the service providers, whether you need just the partnerships coaching, or maybe your company isn’t that great at selling enterprise deals yet.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:39:04 ] And you’re going up market. We have a whole network of enterprise sales coaches that can come in and provide you coaching on that too. So again, we can switch out this infrastructure for anything you need, depending on your situation. Now it’s what we do with the infrastructure. That’s important. And this is where I’m going to teach you how you can do this on your own as well. And so let’s talk about one type of campaign we run all the time. Okay. And everybody here can find org chart software. You don’t have to use our tech to go do this stuff and you can do the rest of it in terms of project management on spreadsheets, but most people don’t, which is why we exist.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:39:35 ] Now let’s talk about, let’s say you’re a seller and you’re selling in the SAP ecosystem and you want all those reps at SAP feeding you business, right? And so part of our service is we’ll visualize out the org chart, no different than a relationship. This is a relationship map of your partner. And we visually indicate who’s already in your corner, who’s referring you business, who’s against you and referring your competitor business, who, you know, have you not gotten to yet and gotten a single referral from you. And then we have, you know, very deep conversations about what are we doing to drive one-on-one engagement for our customers. So you guys with each of these stakeholders, because we know showing up to them what we do and just hoping for business isn’t going to work a hundred percent of the time, it doesn’t work.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:40:12 ] And so we need to keep an open relationship with these folks and nurture them, not in a salesy spammy kind of way. This is not like hooking up outreach and sales loft and spamming your partners. Like that’s not the answer. This is what we do. And this is nothing sexy about this. Nobody in this room is going to like this screen because it’s a mutual action plan, and most sales reps avoid these things apparently. But anyway, so this is our mutual action plan, but essentially for our partners. So when we just get in front of this team and we say, ‘What are we doing to keep in touch with each of these reps to keep your brand top of mind and keep those referrals flowing?’ We kind of organize who’s going to do what, when, who’s going to own it, you know, what are the expected outcomes.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:40:47 ] And we project manage every single team and every single partnership. So what we do is very, very manual and straightforward, very, very manual. And we do not introduce automation whatsoever into our process. So that’s just how we kind of manage, you know, partner development, you know, on a weekly basis, we ask, ‘What are we doing to get in touch with Kevin?’ Or what are we doing to get Julia executive alignment? Scott, because we got to get our VPs connected. And without that, we’re not going to get the right deal flow from this team. So again, this is not something that can be automated, you actually have to build real relationships. And all we do is provide bumper lanes infrastructure that keeps everybody focused on the right thing.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:41:24 ] So you get the right relationships activated. Now let’s switch gears. So that’s developing partnerships; we can guarantee pipeline in the first 60 to 90 days. So this is not like some long-tail partnerships fluffy thing we can develop; we can guarantee a loan from partner development to account development. This is a sales play that all of you can run on your own without my help, without my team self. But you can use the same infrastructure to do it. So now let’s pretend SAP is not our partner. This is a target account. Right? And I’m co-selling with, I don’t know, insert some some big company name; and when an SAP is in their target account list, what we want to do is when we’re running the account development play, and I can drop an article, you know, to to the team after this, everyone can can kind of see this play in action.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:42:06 ] We run that account development play, we, the play is, we go to those sales reps or that VP and say, ‘Look, I want your sales team to come give us as a partner. You’re the top five. I want you to name the top five or 10 accounts that you want to close in FY25.’ And what we’re going to do is we’re going to go in the background and we’re going to build the relationship maps. We’re going to map out the buying committee. We’re going to identify warm points of entry into who knows who, and how we’re going to get in touch with these stakeholders. We’re going to do a bunch of account research. And all we have to do is, we’re going to.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:42:31 ] Then we’re going to have our coastal alignment special schedule one hour meetings between our two sales reps to talk about each of these accounts and to talk about next steps and points of entry. Now, what sales rep do you know is going to turn down a bunch of account research on their accounts if you’re going to show up with all this work done for them? And so the name of the account, the name of the game in the account development play is really just be better sales reps than your partners and show up and do a bunch of the work. Now, most sales reps in the room don’t want to go and do a bunch of this work in the hope that somebody is going to feed them a So when we run this play, we bring a partner to the table.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:43:07 ] We have them pull up 100, 200 accounts. We do all the research. We build the maps. Sales reps show up. They talk about deals. They assign tasks and the coastal alignment specialist keeps track of it and moves on. So that’s two quick plays. This is how you leverage that infrastructure to run the partner development play and keep track of all your activities with partnerships. So if you don’t have a partner manager, this is how we also run the account planning and development play. Now, like I said, we bring with us a bunch of technology with it, with this stack. So if you’re already running Crossbeam or, you know, then we will take over that technology and start checking this data for you. If you’re not already running Crossbeam, then we will bring that technology with us.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:43:42 ] And for those of you that don’t know what it is, imagine if you could peek into your partner’s CRMs and see what open ops and customers they have. What would you do with that intel? Well, you may not have the answer today, but we definitely have the answer. And we know exactly how to serve that stuff up to you on a silver platter so you can get deals done faster. And once we identify what accounts we want to go after, we can then leverage ComSor, which ComSor raised sixty-five million dollars a couple of years ago. They like built LinkedIn sales and have on steroids. Like if you think that first-degree connection is not enough and you want to get into like relationship strength and does somebody actually know somebody, ComSor is the technology that we deploy and recommend for that.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:44:16 ] And so we deploy this full stack. And when we identify those accounts that we want to work with partners, we can then see, well, who actually knows the stakeholder or the buyer that needs to get in touch with and what’s the level of their relationship? Because we’re hooked into their email, we can actually see that the relationship strength is greater than zero. Right. So with that, I’m going to go ahead and wrap up here. So for those that that want to try this like there again, we can do [we] teach this stuff all day long and you can stand up on your own. But for the same cost as hiring an outsourced SDR service, we can run this for an entire year and keep this pipeline flowing for you.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:44:49 ] And then after a year, if you feel like you can operationalize it on your own, fine. But there’s no-there’s literally no reason in terms of like how much we cost for you to not run a managed service for the first year. Now, if you want to experience what we think we can produce for you, schedule 30 minutes. All this is for you to schedule it. Give us a lay of the land. Tell us what partners you have. We’ll ask some questions around that. By the end of that 30 minute call, we’ll have an idea of what types of campaigns we can run. And then our homework from there is we do a full business case bill with ROI, no other meetings needed. And we’ll calculate exactly what production we expect to do.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:45:20 ] * Timeline resource required, whether you use our resources or not. And for those of you who just want the education around this stuff and want tips and tricks and to run plays on your own, come join partnersource. com. That is going live big time in January. And we’re going to give some early access next month. So sign up, get on the waiting list, and we’re going to give you access to all kinds of educational content events. You’re going to meet other partners in your ecosystem and just start sourcing business from your partners in a much more, you know, intelligent, structured way. With that, I’ll wrap it up. Thank you so much, Alex. What an amazing offering. I’m curious to hear some success story that you’re most inspired about or just cool customer story.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:46:01 ] * Oh, yeah. Like there’s we’ve got lots of success stories. I mean, I’ll tell you one that’s just personal. Like when I was I was at Adobe and, you know, I’d been co-selling my whole career. I didn’t know that. I just figured out how to co-sell because I want a bunch of SAP reps feeding me business. So SAP was a real example. And I realized very quickly that they didn’t care about me and they weren’t going to feed me anything until I did something for them. And so I started getting really good, you know, at co-selling. And so when I got to the Adobe ecosystem, I was running the revenue function at a smaller services organization. They want to double revenue from seven million to fourteen million in two years with two reps and a front line salesman.

Alexandr Buckles [ 03:46:35 ] You know, within three months of us deploying the account development motion and we had over 40 enterprise account executives from Adobe like meeting with us. We had 20 or about 25 of them on site in Denver. We’re doing account planning sessions. We’re doing lots of their, you know, account development work for them. And before we ended up actually closing a single net new deal together with all those reps, we were flooded with installed base and customer business and things like that. Why? Because when you lean in in that fashion and you go in and you’re willing to put in the legwork and do the account development and build a buyer map and do all that stuff like they’re like, ‘Hey, you’re leaning in a way that most companies aren’t.’ And so you tend to get a lot of gifts.

Julia Nimchinski [ 03:47:14 ] * And so that’s why running this play, it’s like, yeah, you can stand it up on your own, but just have us do it for you. And it’s like the easy button for like for pipeline once you do it. Sounds like a dream. Justin Michael, what do you think? I think it’s great. I think it’s great. You can speak to ROI and a lot of these partner motions, ecosystem-led stuff. It’s a little murky. People don’t know how to do it. It’s a little murky. It’s a little murky. It’s a little murky. It’s a little murky. So, you know, trusting a third party makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Thanks for being on the show, Alex. And everybody follow Alex Buckles. And yeah. Well, what else we missed? All this day just flew by.

Julia Nimchinski [ 03:47:52 ] Yeah. The first day of a summit. A ton of engagement on Slack and lots of great feedback, great panels. We are going to come back tomorrow with day two, with Udi Latagore, Workforce Transformation, Mary Shea, and a lot of other exciting panels and tech. So please join us, join Slack. Alex, we shared all the screenshots in Slack as well so that make sure that people can scan the last slide that you shared. And yeah, what’s the best way to support you once again? And let’s wrap it up. Sure, best way to support me, you know, one is go to pathwaysforautism. org. That’s my number one priority. In two years from now, I plan on being fully dedicated, you know, to that organization and stuff like that. But if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just, you know, you can scan that QR code on slide one of the deck or just find me on LinkedIn under Alex Buckles and chat with me there. Awesome. Justin, last quote. See you tomorrow. See you guys. We will see you tomorrow. Cheers, everyone