Customer Success Playbook Podcast Season 2 Episode 28 - Five9 - Partner Success

In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger delve into the often-overlooked realm of Partner Success within the SaaS industry. Joined by Pauline Van Backle, Partner Success Manager, and Karen Siddiqi, Senior Director of Partner Success at Five9, the discussion explores the strategic importance of Partner Success, the process of establishing this new function at Five9, and the impact it has on driving business value through education, enablement, and collaboration with partners.

Listeners will gain insights into the inception and development of Five9’s Partner Success program, the key challenges faced during its first year, and the critical role that listening and understanding partners’ needs play in building a successful program. Pauline and Karen share practical examples of how Five9’s Partner Success team supports and empowers its partners, offering actionable advice for organizations looking to implement similar initiatives.

Whether you're a SaaS leader, customer success professional, or interested in strategic partnerships, this episode offers valuable lessons on fostering long-term partner relationships and achieving mutual growth.

Detailed Analysis:

The episode shines a spotlight on the newly established Partner Success division at Five9, with Karen and Pauline offering an in-depth view of their roles and the strategic goals they aim to achieve.

Key points of discussion include the parallels between Customer Success and Partner Success, with a focus on driving retention and empowering partners to deliver exceptional value to their end customers. The dialogue underscores the importance of understanding partner needs, customizing approaches to fit different partners, and establishing a structured, yet flexible, framework for engagement.

The latter part of the episode provides actionable insights for organizations considering the creation of a Partner Success team. Karen and Pauline advocate for a foundational approach centered around listening to both internal stakeholders and partners, identifying key pain points and opportunities, and building a responsive and adaptable strategy from the ground up.

Key Insights:

• The critical importance of listening and understanding partner needs when establishing a Partner Success function.
• The value of creating tailored success plans and the role of continuous feedback in refining and scaling Partner Success initiatives.
• Practical advice on how to start small, focus on business objectives, and align activities to drive mutual success.

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You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:
YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcast
Twitter - @CS_Playbook

You can find Kevin at:
Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web site
Kevin Metzger on Linked In.

You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Transcript

Roman Trebon: 0:20

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. I'm Roman Trebon, and with me as always is my co host, Kevin Metzger. Please do us a huge favor and give our show a rating, subscribe, and like it so we can continue to grow our audience. Kevin, how you doing today?

Kevin Metzger: 0:37

And I'm doing great. It's been a exciting week. Move my daughter into college this past week. I came back to the house and it's me and my wife and my other 2 kids and, It feels weird.

Roman Trebon: 0:48

You're a, you're getting old. I can't say that next year. I can say I'm old cause I'll be keeping college. But right now I, you seem old to me. So we've got a great episode today. You excited about this?

Kevin Metzger: 0:58

Yeah, I'm very excited. We're a little going a little what tangental topic here today.

Roman Trebon: 1:05

Yeah. So I am going to open up with a bit of a disclaimer. So Kev, we don't typically talk about our companies on the show. You know, the show is really to have our guests on learn about their experiences and really pick their, their brains. But today we are going to talk to a partner of mine that I work with at Synoptics Teams Plus. We're going to talk about partner success, what that is. But this is like the first time we've had anyone on that we work with. And so for full transparency for our audience this is someone that I know, and that we work with on a day to day basis. So that is my little disclaimer. We've never had two guests on at the same time. And so we actually have two guests that are joining us today. And so we actually have the pleasure of speaking with Pauline van partner success manager and Karen Siddiqui, senior partner, senior director of partner success at Five9. Together with the rest of their team, they have built a partner success division at Five9, which is focused on delivering increased customer value through education, enablement, and empowering Five9 partners. They both have extensive experience in account management, customer success, strategic partnerships, and customer advocacy. Pauline and Karen are firm believers in leveraging the power of people and technology. And in this episode of the Customer Success Playbook, we're going to delve into the concept of partner success and its significance in the SaaS industry. Pauline and Karen will share insights on what partner success means, the reasons behind creating this new team, early wins, lessons learned from their journey so far, And with that, Karen and Pauline, welcome to the show.

Pauline Van Backle: 2:47

Awesome. Thank you.

Roman Trebon: 2:50

Yeah, it's awesome. All right. So I'm going to start, Karen, you can lead us off here for our audience. Can you define partner success? And what does that mean specifically for FiveKnot?

Karen Siddiqi: 3:03

Yeah, I think, you know, from a textbook definition, it's going to sound very similar to what you would say for customer success. our goal is to help our partners achieve their goals and to derive value from their partnership with us. For us, there's a line of demarcation. our work is specifically with partners like yourselves with synoptic, We don't touch the end customer. There are teams here at 59 who do engage through our partners within customers. But our sole focus is on our partners and helping them be successful specifically in day two. So with SAS companies, Who have a channel, you know, it's probably easiest to understand when it comes to resellers. They, the reseller owns the customer relationship. We have a channel team who helps launch the reseller, the partner and get their sales team trained, things like that. So our engagement comes after the partner has customers in production and what we want to do is help the partners be successful to deliver an outstanding day to experience for their end customers.

Kevin Metzger: 4:11

Yeah, thanks. And how did you guys decide to develop the program? A partner program out of 5 9.

Karen Siddiqi: 4:18

I have a long history with customer success. So I was introduced to customer success and I've been leading teams and customer success since really almost since its inception in the early aughts. I've had the benefit of working on both the partner and the provider side of the equation. So when the opportunity came, 5 9 was just looking at that we're really successful getting market share. We need to make sure that we're not just lucky on retention. We need to be intentional on retention. As with any SAS company, the channel is a really important route to market. So just like you would make sure that you're focused on retention within your own company, you have to make sure that you're enabling partners to do really well at retention, too. So when you have a channel partner, they're often selling a stack of services. So you have to be really focused and intentional and making sure that they, are empowered, enabled, and aware of how to deliver day two and drive retention within your subset of their solution stack.

Roman Trebon: 5:25

So I know you two are part of the team and you have a broader team that helped create this from the ground up, right? so walk us through, what does that look like? Are you guys hunker down in a room with a giant whiteboard? Like, how do you start building a partner success? From the ground up. And Pauline, I also want to hear from you, like you're doing something else in the organization. So when you get the call to do partner success, this new division, I'd love to know your thoughts, but we'll start with what does it look like as you start to create this?

Pauline Van Backle: 5:53

Yeah I was super excited when I got the call about partner success. I come from an account management background and really just enjoyed working strategically and consultatively with partners to meet end customer needs, grow them, retain them. And so I wanted to lean on that experience. It's a great way for us to be able to see the customer experience here, and jump over to work solely with partners, really to help them do exactly what we're doing on the account management customer success side, helping them grow their customer base, helping them retain their customer base. Making sure they have the correct, you know, optimal support structure in place to deliver a great for their customers and ensure that their customers are doing well with whatever technology or product it is.

Roman Trebon: 6:38

So how long did it take, like, so from the time this idea was in, in infancy to the time it actually is officially rolled out, like, what does that timeframe look like?

Karen Siddiqi: 6:48

Yeah, so we're not even a year old yet. We'll, we're about to hit our first birthday next month. So it's been, it's been interesting. I think what we've seen is at the beginning, we have a five, nine is not a new company. We weren't building this because we're a brand new company. We're a Company that's been around and maturing and this is just part of our maturation process, right? And in understanding how to do what we do even better. So we have these partners that have been partners with us for a long time. the 1st thing that we needed to do was just get in and understand what their day to experience has been. So a lot of what Pauline did was just go in and listen, get to know the partners, talk to them and understand what are you guys doing in day two? What are you doing really well that we need to know about? And we want to continue to empower you and amplify what you're doing really well already. And then where do you think that we can help you shore things up? What can we do? What's unique partner to partner? And then how can we take that in either amplify what's going great or enable where we see opportunity to do even better together.

Pauline Van Backle: 8:03

while we're talking with our partners and we're wanting to find out exactly what Karen said, what's working well, where are the areas of also internally getting feedback from your internal organization to understand what's going well, from their perspective, where do they see the areas of improvement so that we can refine our priorities to start to work with partners where it's going to add the most value. Yeah.

Kevin Metzger: 8:28

Now, were you able to take feedback from the partners and kind of establish best practices? that you were able to share across partners.

Karen Siddiqi: 8:38

I think we're getting to that point in the beginning. A lot of the, I don't know, Pauline, you might disagree with me. We had a lot of unique experiences partner to partner. I think we're getting to the point where we've sort of cleaned out the cobwebs and we can do more of that generalization and start. Standardizing our approach across all partners. But it was a good six months, at least of really individualized attention on each partner before we could start to establish any sort of rigor. And even now, like, for the last six months, we've been focused on. Okay. What are the metrics that matter? What really. shows up in the numbers of a healthy partner versus a partner who maybe has some growing to do. So we're, we're getting to that point where we could build a persona of an ideal partner and, and use that to benchmark and help other partners grow to that point.

Pauline Van Backle: 9:38

Yeah. And it has been really fun so far. You know, if there's an initiative that landed really well with a partner and I've got another partner of a similar makeup, I will mention that to the other partner and be like, Hey, I did this over here, would this be a value to you guys as well? And more often than not it is. Yeah, even if it's more recently, we are starting to see it and it's exciting because it just. It enhances the collaboration with how we're working with partners and streamlines it for sure.

Karen Siddiqi: 10:08

And we're doing that across the entire team too, right? So, when Pauline finds success and does something with one of her partners, that's great. Then we bring it to the team meeting and say, okay, guys, this is what we're doing. That's more proactive, less reactive, right? Because just like, Customer success we want partner success to be largely proactive largely strategic we don't want it to just be a reactive catch all for problems that crop up in day 2 so as we're doing one thing we're bringing it to the entire team Partner business, but across the entire team to then go, okay, what lands well across 75 percent or more of the partners. All right, let's make that part of what we do as a team and part of how we work. We have to build small. I think back to one of the questions you asked earlier how did we start? Some of it was the individualized attention. And then we had one of the very first things we did was just document how do we work best with this partner? Synoptic, she reached out and said, how do we work best with you? What are the processes that are important for us to follow when we're working with you? And let's write it down and educate all of five, nine on it so that when we're working with you, we're all following rules of engagement that help us do business well together. So we really started small that way. we listened a lot and then we just started small and built. Little bit by little bit.

Roman Trebon: 11:34

And it's, it's been great. So again, if it wasn't great, I probably wouldn't have you on as guests. Right. So it's but, but, you know, Kevin, I'm, I joined Synoptic Teams Plus at the beginning of the year. And that's when I met Pauline and, and they said, Hey, we have partner success and I'll be honest. I was a little doubtful. I didn't know, I'd never heard of it. I was like, Oh, what is this? But it's been tremendous. Like, and I want Pauline and Karen to talk about how you empower and, you know, enable partners, but just even kind of the shared lessons across partners, we already feel that, right? So Pauline worked with a partner. Said, Hey, Roman, we do this sort of email communication that talks about all the latest and greatest that we have going on webinars, et cetera. Would this be a value to, you know, synoptic? I was like, absolutely, absolutely. You know, it's time that saves us, like for us to go do that and put that together and market it and then go deliver it to clients. That is a ton of time. And we don't have the, you know, we're not the experts like Pauline and Tim are on that, right? So even that quick win that like us, our ability to leverage what other partners are doing, we are already starting this, you know, that we see that impact, which is, which is great. So on that Pauline, how are you working with partners to really help enable them and empower them? Like, what are some of the things that you have going on, on a day to day basis with partners?

Pauline Van Backle: 12:53

Yeah, I would say, well, my day to day work, it's focused on treating our partners as an extension of the company, right? Keeping you guys up to date on what's new with product, what's in it for the partners as you guys engage with us, value proposition, differentiators. Educating on the overall story so that you guys can be educated and advocate the same message to your end customers. So it really is all of the action drives from that. it's really, making sure that you guys are comfortable and confident with what we have to offer, how we're speaking about it and how it can add value to your end customer base. That was high level, but yeah,

Karen Siddiqi: 13:40

Pauline is incredible at this in particular at enabling her partner teams to go out and be successful. We know that there's a lot of different ways Services products that those teams are responsible for, for understanding how they work together, what value they bring to the end customer. So we want to make it easy. We want to get in front of your customer success teams and your account management teams and spell it out for them, make it easy for them to turn around and add value to the end customer with information that they might not have otherwise had time to before. Here's the white space in those accounts. This represents opportunity for you guys. We're happy to sort of spoon feed that. If it makes it easier for our partners teams to then go out and tackle that and go drive adoption and drive up selling and or on even the support side, we work a lot with customer support like break fix teams to make sure that they're empowered because they're part of that day to story for the customer to when the customer calls up, you know, we want their team that's delivering, you know, even if it's just first call, Okay. We want them to have easy access to information and knowledge that helps them deliver a good customer experience there. So Pauline does a lot of enabling on latest and greatest. What's competitive in the market? What's happening within that partners customer base?

Pauline Van Backle: 15:06

Yeah, I'll just

Roman Trebon: 15:07

add to this. I'll just say one thing that we're doing with Pauline, which is amazing, So my team, we meet every couple of weeks for a big team meeting now we have Pauline's team come in and educate us on their solution set, the challenges, how this is solving challenges for clients, what to listen for in terms of active listening the ROI on it all of these details to enable our team, And so we have a whole like learning series set up with them So we had our first one month ago, already starting to identify areas. This can be a value to our clients in starting to talk about this. to me, that's a direct correlation to that session that we set up. Because it's that sort of enable where you can actually ask questions, see a demo, talk about it. Really dig into the use cases. And then the team has confidence to say, Hey, I have clients that have those same issues. That sounds like a good idea to talk about that. And now we're starting to do that as well. Right. And so that's. just to expand on that, that education and enablement.

Pauline Van Backle: 16:08

Yeah. It's been really awesome working with you, Roman and the team so far. And I think, you know, the more that we can enable you guys, the more you can service your customer base more effectively, more efficiently, probably in half the time or less than you did prior. Just because we have that constant thread of communication and working. With you, to provide resources, education, whatever it may be so that you know, exactly how you can add value to your customer base. So, like Karen said, we're trying to make it easy, simple. So that, you know, easy, simple and scalable, really,

Roman Trebon: 16:43

I'm gonna make sure we don't lose that in the archives.

Kevin Metzger: 16:48

So, I mean, other than having. Roman give excellent testimonies here. How are you measuring the success of the program and the success with like, with the partners individually, and then as a program as all within, within five, nine?

Karen Siddiqi: 17:02

Yeah, I think there's a couple of different ways in number one is the question of our, are we delivering business value that matters to the partners? So Again, very similar to what you would hear in customer success. It's understanding what our partners business objectives are. One of the things that we do is create a partner success plan in that partner success plan. There's a column, which is business objective alignment. And what we've done is work with our partners to understand what are their business objectives. Are they looking to grow sales? Are they looking to expand the base? Drive retention could be something unrelated to that altogether, right? But we document it. And then within our partner success plan, we try to tie as many line items, all the activity we've got going on with a partner to a business objective so that we can look back and say partner told us these were the things that are important to them. These are the ways that we influence that we can come back with you guys and agree. Yes, we're adding value. Or maybe we look at it and say, gosh, we're in a era where We just need to get our house in good order. Then we can focus on that objective achievement thing. But then beyond that, we have a partner health dashboard and we're looking at a lot of the things that you guys would talk about in customer success. So adoption, net retention we look at the end customer experience when it comes to the break, fix, support. So we have some measurements that we look at in terms of When our partners have to escalate or choose to escalate to us for break, fix, support, what does that support experience look like? So it's a lot of the similar things that you would see in customer success. It's just that the partner is our customer instead of the end customer.

Kevin Metzger: 18:49

And do you have like metrics around how many partners do we have the partner success program for how many? Thank you. Goal, you know, how many goals are we achieving on the partner success program? Those kind of things.

Karen Siddiqi: 19:03

We're getting there. We're not quite there yet. We started small in the way of rigor in that strategic motion, but we took off at a sprint. Sprint in terms of hearing what our partners needed. So now we're sort of finally able to catch our breath and start to build that. So all the data is there. We haven't put it fully into a visual yet to get those answers of what does that impact rate look like?

Pauline Van Backle: 19:28

But similar to customer success, as we get more and more data, it's. All about benchmarking, right? Creating that baseline and then seeing the trends so that we can provide actionable insights to our partners as they evolve.

Roman Trebon: 19:43

So as you near your year birthday, the partner success birthday, what advice would you give to organizations that are looking to establish their own partner success team? If someone's looking to take this on, what advice. Would you lift up for them if they're thinking about taking a similar journey?

Karen Siddiqi: 20:02

So I had the benefit of coming from outside of five, nine, when we started partner success. So I was hired to help get this off the ground even if there's an internal individual taking this on within an organization, honestly, the best advice I can give you is just listen. So go in first with. Put your ideas on the back burner. I love ideating around this stuff. And like I said, I have a long history in customer success. So I had a bunch of big ideas, but I had to put that on pause and just go listen. So I set up. 30 one on ones with people in the organization and just asked, what's your experience working with partners at five, nine, what's difficult. What's great. Talk to me. And I just left it open ended and I just listened and I have an entire notebook full of notes that I took on those calls to understand. Okay. Where are the themes that. What should we tackle first? What's most painful or represents the biggest opportunity? And let's tackle that stuff first. So that honestly is the biggest piece of advice I can give is listen and understand that organizations experience with partners and history with partners. Don't come into it. With a bunch of ideas that may or may not be relevant. Just then some of the stuff that we've been thinking about for a year. We're only just now going to be able to get to because we had to address what was most important 1st. And the only way we knew that was by listening.

Pauline Van Backle: 21:33

I would say, you know, taking out your assumptions, putting those on the back burner. And. Listening to understand pain points and goals on both the partner side and your internal org side super important. So I would definitely start there.

Roman Trebon: 21:51

Awesome. So Kevin, before we get into the hard hitting questions, do you have any other questions for the five, nine partner success team?

Kevin Metzger: 22:00

I guess I am wondering if you are using any tools like similar to like a CS platform or something like that to facilitate the program or thinking about using it. If you're not there yet,

Karen Siddiqi: 22:16

we're starting out a little bit homegrown. So we have monday. com for our partner success plans. orgs that use. Gain site, things like that, that are more specific to customer success. I love those platforms, but you know, we're building, we're starting small and hopefully we'll get there.

Roman Trebon: 22:39

The good thing about Monday is we're a Monday shop too, and it is easy to use. So you can always grow from there.

Karen Siddiqi: 22:43

It's easy to collaborate on too. So we've shared it with partners. They can collaborate right with us in our success plans, which I think is always a great thing.

Roman Trebon: 22:54

Colleen, I'm taking a note about that for our next call. so now we're going to get into our rapid fire questions. these are nothing to prep for easy questions to get to know you guys a little bit better. I'm going to start with Karen and same question to both of you though. 1 place you'd like to travel that you've never been. Oh,

Karen Siddiqi: 23:12

Finland. Happiest place on earth.

Roman Trebon: 23:16

Love it. All right, Pauline, where are you headed?

Pauline Van Backle: 23:18

Fiji paradise.

Roman Trebon: 23:22

right. Kev, you got the next one?

Kevin Metzger: 23:23

Yeah. Yeah. So we'll start with Pauline and then go to Karen. So Pauline what What's a favorite sport to watch her play?

Pauline Van Backle: 23:31

Ooh, basketball. I love watching basketball. Grew up watching it. It's fast paced, entertaining. Can't go wrong.

Kevin Metzger: 23:41

who's your team?

Pauline Van Backle: 23:42

Who's my team? I've got to stay true. I would say the golden state warriors.

Roman Trebon: 23:48

Hopefully you saw Steph Curry play on the other day in that gold metal final. He was unbelievable. Yeah. That was an unbelievable finish. All right, Karen. Favorite sport to watch her play.

Karen Siddiqi: 23:57

So favorite sport to watch also basketball, especially if it's in person and I get like arena food is the way to go. But I I've taken up pickleball like the rest of the country lately and it's Tons of fun.

Kevin Metzger: 24:11

And I have to come out to our event on Friday.

Roman Trebon: 24:13

Oh, pickleball game, Karen. It's getting big. I mean, we can extend it to partner success too. There is no just success in general. You can come out. And so I will have to send details later on. So All right. How about a a favorite book or a book recommendation for our audience? I'll start with, we'll do snake draft. I'll go to Pauline and we'll go back to Karen.

Pauline Van Backle: 24:37

Ooh, I am reading one on mental toughness currently. Couldn't tell you the author, but mental toughness.

Roman Trebon: 24:44

Mental toughness. Okay. All right, Karen.

Karen Siddiqi: 24:48

One of my favorite books that I've read, business related books, is How to Lead When You're Not in Charge by Clay Scroggins. Just a great book about taking ownership of whatever is in front of you. We can't always control, even if you're the leader, you're not in charge of everything. So how to leave, you're not in charge is a great one.

Kevin Metzger: 25:10

I like that. Just wondering, does it have any references? I think it was the Dale Carnegie with the circles of influence.

Karen Siddiqi: 25:20

It's been a while since I read it. So I mean, it's kind of in that. In that same yeah realm. Very cool. Yeah. Although I will say also I love fiction If you haven't read defending jacob Excellent read don't watch the apple

Roman Trebon: 25:40

Okay, I was gonna say wasn't that an apple tv show?

Karen Siddiqi: 25:43

Yeah, but Apple butchered it. Read the book. If you're a reader.

Roman Trebon: 25:47

Yeah. If you're a reader, every movie and TV show butchers, every book in my opinion, but that's, that's just me.

Kevin Metzger: 25:54

All right.

Roman Trebon: 25:54

What do you got, Kev?

Kevin Metzger: 25:55

I was just going to say, as long as we were talking about TV shows and movies, let's go with a favorite movie or TV show.

Pauline Van Backle: 26:00

I love watching it. S H I T Creek. It is hilarious.

Karen Siddiqi: 26:07

That is a really good one. I love that one. I also loved Ozark. That was incredible and filmed by us in Atlanta. So there's that's right.

Roman Trebon: 26:19

That's right. Both good. I've I've watched both. Yeah, I'm teeing up the bear the new season of the bear If you've not seen that that's a good show too, especially if you've been in the restaurant industry. It's it's amazing. All right final question where can our audience find more about five nine and find more about partner success in five nine and yourselves?

Pauline Van Backle: 26:39

Yeah, I would say 1st place don't hesitate to check out our website 5, 9 dot com and just feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Pauline would love to continue the conversation.

Karen Siddiqi: 26:50

Yeah, same LinkedIn, Karen Saddiqi, not a lot of us with that names, but it should be easy.

Roman Trebon: 26:56

Awesome. Well, Karen and Pauline, thank you so much for joining us on the show and, and, and kudos to the partner success team. I, and as a partner, like I, you guys are a heck of a first year for sure. It's providing a lot of value to, I know the Synoptic team and thanks for coming on the show. And sharing your experience with us. And our audience thank you for listening as always. Again, do us a favor, subscribe, like, comment, let us know what other guests and topics you'd like to have for us to have on the show, you can find us on LinkedIn as well at Roman Trebon, Kevin Metzger, check out our customer success playbook page on LinkedIn. We have a page there and as always

Kevin Metzger: 27:38

keep on playing.