Behavioral Analytics

Jessica Ly: I'm here with David Saxon, who is the VP of channel and partnerships at Heap. Welcome, David.

David Saxon: Thank you

Jessica Ly: I would like you to tell the audience what he does, please.

David Saxon: Yes, no worries. So a Heap is a product analytics solution. We've been around for about six years, just received our Series C financing.

Jessica Ly: Congratulations

David Saxon: Yes, thank you. But we're here. We provide a solution really to kind of like the product managers to really provide them with the kind of like the insights in the data and make it easy and accessible to the kind of like clean information from kind of the products are providing for their customers.

Jessica Ly: Right, Like that allows the SAS software.

David Saxon: Yeah.

Jessica Ly: For example, I think E-trade is a client of yours.

David Saxon: Yeah, that's right. E-trade is a great example of that you think about the product manager from E-trade when you log into that application, and you're managing all your money. That is that asset or that product is owned by the product team over in a trade. And so that's valuable information to how people interact with that solution, and then the application. That's feeding the product team to better understand kind of like insights of like, hey, how are they? Are they using these new features, you know? Are there some, do I have some kind of analysis that I want to do quickly to understand kind of how people are interacting with the application? They will need to provide better experiences.

Jessica Ly: I think there are a few of these types of analytics product solutions out there. What makes your product different?

David Saxon: Yeah, the biggest thing about Heap is we have this whole solution of auto-capture. So traditional analytics really is kind of, you know, for the last even last 20 years, a lot of the analytic solutions are really based on kind of hard coding and tracking that you have to instrument into the application. So it makes it a lot more difficult for, you know, any type of product updates and the development cycles you have to go in through and then the investment in time just to kind of get access to that data. And Heap really eliminates that. We have this concept of auto-capture where we just drop JavaScript in the application. And we automatically capture all the events and the tracking and the pageviews. All that information, we virtualize it. And we allow that to be very accessible to the owners of that data to kind of get insights from that.

Jessica Ly: Alright, so we're gonna talk about strategies for partnerships. And how you do it. You've worked at big companies or go Adobe, you know, partnership development and all of that. You worked at some smaller companies. Now, what would be very informative is, how do you go about crafting this strategy? And how do you go about executing?

David Saxon: Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, in particular, to kind of like there's, you know, obviously, 20 years ago, startups were kind of starting to become a thing during the.com days, right. But like, today, there's such an explosion of all these different SAS companies out there and starting up, and you're starting to see a rise of a lot of these companies investing in partnerships and channel strategies. And the biggest thing that I've discovered and kind of learned, you know, in battle scars to prove it over the years, is like, when you come on board to a company, and you start to kind of think about partnerships and strategy, you really have to get buy-in from across the board with everyone: the executive leadership, the product team, the marketing team, the sales team, and really kind of, you know, get their commitment to kind of embrace kind of a partner ecosystem. If one of those doesn’t accept it or embrace it, you know, you're definitely going to have some challenges down the road.

Jessica Ly: And then different types of partners are this is the technology partner, the reseller they integration kind of partner, like, it's not just one type of partner.

David Saxon: Right, and depending on the business model, and what solution that you know, the SaaS company is offering, that could be, you know, technology companies could be more important than an integration company could be more important than kind of like a solution or consultant agency. So it's all kind of comparative, the biggest thing that you really need to dig into is, and I wouldn't. I don't want to underemphasize this too much. But in regards to the kind of really understanding kind of like the business model, the customers, the company is trying to go after. Before you do any type of partners strategy and planning and ecosystem, you really want to kind of dig into that and understand the markets, who you're going after, what's an ideal customer profile, what success to them, and then you have to really dovetail into the partner strategy. Right, and you look at that whole customer journey of like those companies acquiring, you know, and converting, you know, and making them successful and getting them to be kind of raving lunatic fans of your solution. You have to kind of figure out where partners fit along each step of that journey and really kind of enable them and embrace them and work with them to be successful in those spots.

Jessica Ly: Let's talk about the current program you have. What is the partnership strategy and how do you go about executing?

David Saxon: Yeah, well, and Heap is it's such a fun stage right now for me as in my role in doing this, because, you know, partnerships I was brought on about 14 months ago. And there was, you know, we had partnerships, we had some other kind of relationships, I'll call them relationships, more so with different companies, but really had that ability to kind of take an embrace and work with the whole leadership team to kind of build up this whole partner ecosystem. So a lot of it was just even kind of like coming to market and saying, hey, we're open, you know, and creating kind of marketing content on our own kind of website to saying, hey, we have a partnership strategy here, some of the partners, we bifurcate between solution partners, which are traditionally services and consultancies, and then technology companies, to companies, we have kind of other software solutions we integrate with. And so, you know, in developing that, you know, that was just kind of a simple form of kind of creating some foundational stuff. And then from there, it's really kind of, you know, it's selling and working with the executive team we're going through, and companies, often of the size, we go through kind of like the exercise of like, hey, who is our ideal customer profile? Who are we selling to? What markets are we going after? You know, is it SMB? Is it mid-market? Is it enterprise? And that's really going to drive kind of like, hey, where are the best relationships? And what types of companies are involved with those types of customers as well. So until you define that, and, you know, you just kind of really emphasize of kind of like, hey, these are the better partners to kind of do this.

Jessica Ly: What are some of the common mistakes that you've seen, lessons learned? And you want to share?

David Saxon: Oh, how much time do we have? There is, well, the biggest thing is I was talking about earlier is really getting buy-in from that as early as possible with the executive team. And you know, there's a lot of there can be a lot of anxiety internally with, especially with the kind of, you know, when you're working traditionally, you work a lot with the sales managers and sales teams, there can be a lot of anxiety in getting kind of quick wins and quick results. So patients and being kind of very kind of, you know, really kind of direct and kind of just focused on building that up, because it does take 6 to 12 to 18, sometimes 24 months to really get the machine going where you have really solid technology partners and solution partners out there. So as long as you're kind of like have a very good defined strategy as it relates to the business and the customers you're going after, you start to identify and work with partners and make them successful. Because it's like anything, it's a relationship. This is going to take some time and effort to really kind of build up some good relationships with companies that you may have, from past experiences, worked with before, some of the companies I've worked with before at Adobe and Omniture, I was able to kind of bring into the fold and work with them, which was great. But there's going to be other new partners that you kind of have to embrace and kind of work in that whole ecosystem as well. But patience is a virtue. Keep very focused on the kind of partners that are very relative to make your customer successful. Because you don't want to make the biggest mistake is just you know, everyone wants to go after, for example, the big consulting firms to kind of like, hey, these are billion-dollar firms, and they sell billions of dollars worth of software. And it's like, alright, well, we're a startup in a very small company, even some of the bigger startups are the companies that are about to go IPO don't have practices with these firms. So you have to be realistic about what you can do with those companies. And, you know, start kind of, you know, with like-minded other companies to kind of build-up that ecosystem.

Jessica Ly: Okay. Let's talk about maybe the tools that it takes to scale. The kind of sales enablement tools, for example.

David Saxon: Yeah.

Jessica Ly: You know, I think that when you talk about partner sales enablement, you're saying it's should be very similar to your internal sales enablement for your own direct sales force. Right?

David Saxon: That’s right

Jessica Ly: Share your thoughts on that?

David Saxon: That's right, yeah, we're going through kind of a similar process of just kind of really, we have a sales enablement person, we have training and certification, we have a product marketing team. So we're going through this whole process of looking at a kind of like, you know, hey, what's the solution we need for our sales enablement. And we're actually looking at your solution as well. So that’s great.

Jessica Ly: Yes, thank you.

David Saxon: So excited about that. But you know, the biggest thing is, like, you know, companies are focused on a kind of enabling their sales team, but they also, that is very 100%, all of that content and information should be shared with your partners, right where it's relative. So a lot of that stuff is like when you're creating this stuff within your mind. You know, some of the stuff may be very sensitive, probably less than 10%. You would want to not share out there if it's competitive information that you want to be sensitive about. You just have to be smart about that. But the other side, you should be openly, wholeheartedly sharing that with your partners in mind. And going through that whole process with them and making sure and even incorporating some of your best partners in there to hey, you know, get their test because it's easy for a sales guy who's internally working at a company to like, you know, check the box or say it's like, Yeah, that's great, you know, that's good enough information. But unless you take that out to a partner or someone else and saying, hey, can we go through this content? What's missing? You know, you're probably going to miss a lot of stuff that you need to kind of make sure that your salespeople are very well aware of, if not your partners, and then eventually, you want to use that for your customers as well.

Jessica Ly: Jessica Ly: 10:35 Yes. And we're seeing that with some of the clients like, you know, VMware, BMC for example. You've got gated material for just internal company salespeople, and then you have partners. It’s the next group of people. And VMware they actually have it, where it's public. Anyone who wants to learn more about the different VMware products can learn and go through that middle funnel.

David Saxon: Yeah

Jessica Ly: And get converted over to the hands-on lab.

David Saxon: That's great.

Jessica Ly: I think that's one of the features that I think it's important to kind of look at is if the kind of openness where you can put it for internal partners, or even the public to consume the content and have the analytics to track conversion.

David Saxon: Yeah, that's great. That's great. One of the things that you bring up is a good point, and one of the things that I really love about Heap, and what we do is like we provide the kind of like people with, you know, the software for free to use. So we have a free version of the software that we're using. We're very transparent about like, really, the more we can help educate and kind of go out there to market and make everyone aware of your solution and give him as many tools that they can consume on their own to be successful. You know, companies like VMware are a great example of doing that. It's like, hey, they're going to be more embracing of your brand and your product, and probably better educated of kind of providing solutions for that, right.

Jessica Ly: Yes. Okay, so now, with the $55 million funding. What is exciting ahead for you?

David Saxon: Well, I think it's exciting ahead, we're going to, there are some recent announcements, we have some really key kind of executive leaders that are going to be joining the company. So more will be shared of that in the coming months from the company. So very excited about the leadership team. Robbie, and Mateen, the founders, are great. Some of the smartest guys I've ever worked with, and just very embracing of this whole kind of partner ecosystem in the channel ecosystem. And, but there's going to be some interesting things, obviously, you know, executive leadership is going to be key, but also expanding kind of more of our footprint outside of primarily North America to other markets as well.

Jessica Ly: Okay.

David Saxon: So, but we're gonna be very frugal about money. Not a lot of big .com parties ahead of us.

Jessica Ly: Okay, wonderful. Well, it's been great to have you share about Heap and what's happening on the partnership side of some of the best practices and lessons learned. Thank you very much, David, for being on the show.

David Saxon: Awesome. Thank you, Jessica.