Revenue Renaissance: Why Marketing & Partnerships Will Lead Revenue in 2024

I’ll be speaking at the Nearbound Summit on November 8th, and I think you should register. Just check out the lineup of speakers, it’s bonkers. And it’s free.

My session is titled, you guessed it,?Revenue Renaissance: Why Marketing & Partnerships Will Lead Revenue in 2024.

Like everyone, I’ve been thinking about what the future of revenue leadership looks like and I'll try to unpack, or I should tease, what I plan to chat about on November 8th.

Here's the semi-short version:

The last 20 years has been dominated by Sales + Marketing leading the charge on revenue. That’s changing, and our data is showing that the new powerhouse is Partnerships + Marketing coming together to drive the type of efficient growth the market is demanding. Or at least this is the case with our best-performing customers.

I'm not suggesting direct sales doesn't play a role, it does, but there's something magical happening when Partnership + Marketing come together.

The problem? Investors and the C-Suite don’t believe the majority of partnership leaders are up for the challenge, and maybe, just maybe, there’s some merit to that.

We’ll walk through the data that backs up the claim, and the playbook our best-performing customers are executing on.

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Here's the long version, which forced me to turn a simple LinkedIn post into an article:?

I hit the workforce in 2007, and the market was fucked.

It was a financial crisis, but that crisis acted as a catalyst. Market forces came together to spawn the sharing economy. It was the beginning of smartphones and all of the app-based startups that followed. It led to financial reform…. Kind of.

It was also the moment that marketers had been begging for — a seat at the table.?

Companies needed to be more efficient, and the smart ones realized that marketing was so much more than just delivering eyeballs. Marketing, with the emergence of digital, could directly attribute their impact on revenue.?

And with that came the attention marketers had been craving from leadership. But most marketers weren’t ready to get what they wished for.?

Working agency side, I saw many of our clients swap out their Heads of Marketing. These marketers that were demanding the attention of leadership finally got it, but they weren’t ready for it. They went from complaining about not having a seat at the table, to complaining about being let go because leadership “didn’t get marketing”.

Here’s the thing — leadership got marketing. They understood the power of it. They just didn’t believe that the current crop of marketing leadership could deliver on it.

This is where the rise of ‘Growth Marketing’ came from. It was a simple reframing of the role to make it clear that the expectation of marketing was to drive business growth, and if you couldn’t deliver on that, you were out.

There was a shift from “Mad Men to Math Men” and it was likely too extreme of a shift where every company optimized around the same metrics, which meant every brand started to look and sound the same.

I believe there’s general acceptance now that you need both — creative freedom + analytical rigor — and if you’re executing on both, you’re going to deliver on targets and you’re going to continue to have a seat at the table.

Now here’s the parallel to partnerships. Partnerships feels like marketing did in 2007. We’re in a market that’s a little bit fucked. Companies are realizing that partnerships have been delivering the type of efficient growth the market demands, they just haven’t been doing it at scale.

Look at LinkedIn though. Partnership folks complaining leadership doesn’t understand partnerships. Demanding more budget. More people. More time to make it work.

Here’s the thing — leadership gets partnerships. They understand the power of it. They just don’t believe that the current crop of partner leadership can deliver on it.

A generalization? Sure. Unfair? Maybe.?

But that’s the sentiment I’ve heard from investors and startup founders. It’s absolutely a repeat of what I witnessed in 2007-2009 with marketing.

Partnerships is having its moment, but we need to show up. Some are, but in the eyes of investors and the C-Suite, most aren’t.

The most successful customers we have at PartnerStack are the ones that have connected Marketing and Partnerships, forming a powerhouse of a revenue engine. We can learn from what marketing went through in 2007-2009, and we can learn from the playbooks being executed today by the best of the best in SaaS.

That’s what this session is about. Hope to see you there.