SalesTechStar Interview With Alexis Petrichos, Head of Technology Partnerships at Chili Piper, and Regional Leader for EMEA at Partnership Leaders

Alexis Petrichos, Head of Technology Partnerships at Chili Piper, and Regional Leader for EMEA at community network – Partnership Leaders takes us through few channel and sales tips in this short Q&A:

________

Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Alexis, tell us about yourself and your journey in the B2B tech market domain…

I’m currently the Head of Technology Partnerships for Chili Piper and the Regional Head of EMEA for Partnership Leaders and I live in Athens, Greece. My journey in the B2B tech market started about 3 years ago when I landed my first job as a Sales Development Representative (SDR) in one of the most prestigious Greek tech companies, Workable.

Then I moved to Chili Piper as a sales rep, before taking over technology partnerships. The last two years are a constant growth quest for me as I’ve been focusing on sharpening my skills in the partnerships world, while representing Chili Piper in the broader tech ecosystem.

Recently I was also named as the Regional Head of EMEA for Partnership Leaders, taking the opportunity to help my region’s partnership professionals be heard…

We’d love to hear more about the Partnership Leaders community and how it benefits industry professionals?

Partnership Leaders is a leading industry association for partnership, channel and business development leaders. As the industry’s premier community, Partnership Leaders empowers partner teams at top technology and services companies worldwide through an online community of over 1,000 professionals worldwide actively engaging in virtual events and insight sharing to drive personal and professional success.

Read More: VERB Announces New Program To Expand And Drive Revenue On MARKET.Live

As a partnership leader, what are some of the core practices/fundamentals that you feel help drive better ROI through this channel in the B2B market?

While going through a market downturn it’s extremely important to focus on metrics like cost of acquisition, average contract value, retention rate and sales cycle length. Partnerships can have a major positive impact on all four. By building links to the tech and services ecosystem around your company, you’re reassuring a sustainable revenue source and you’re also making sure your value proposition is being organically amplified, globally.

The fundamentals when it comes to working with technology partners is having an integration-first product roadmap that prioritizes powerful integrations over internal product development when it’s required. Teams that do that also require a partnerships leader to handle the relationship with the integration partners, but also communicate the integration’s impact internally at all the different departments.

How in your view can B2B sales teams capitalize more on partnership models to drive further business impact?

In order for sales teams to capitalize on their companies partnerships model, they first need to understand how it influences their deals.

Introducing a service partner during the sales cycle, or having an integration backing you up in the feature matrix and the integration partner vouching for your tool, will have an amazing influence in your deal. Trust me when I say that. It will increase your ACV, it will shorten your sales cycle and it will help your AM renew when the time comes down the line.

Now, how can you do that? Get in touch with your partnerships team if you have one. If you don’t, go tell your manager that you need one.

But here are some cool things that you can work on autonomously:

1. Use integrations as a way to personalise your outreach. Let’s say your tool integrates with Marketo. Go to your prospects’ website and check for the ones using Marketo. Then send them an email telling them you saw they’re using Marketo and how well your tool works with Marketo.
2. Prep for your discovery call by looking at what integration would your prospect be potentially looking at during the sales cycle. Be proactive about referring to it during your call.
3. Be friends with your integration partner’s reps. Tell them what your tool does and how it makes their tool better so they can bring you into deals. Reciprocate. Try to casually meet with them and do insight exchange on your accounts. You can help each other.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview With Laxman Papineni, CEO at Outplay

A few thoughts on the future of partnerships in the tech market?

Partnerships are starting to be recognized as one of the most important departments of modern tech companies and this will become even more apparent over the next months/years. Especially technology partnerships, with so many SaaS tools out there, and many more coming as reports show, companies need to learn to work together. If they don’t, they’ll fail.

And finally, a few views on salestech as a segment and how you feel this space will shape up over the next few years?

I think we will see many smaller companies being acquired and other companies working together to succeed. I’m a believer of the “work together” concept vs the “big fish eats little fish” one, but in any case it’s certain we’ll see an integration of the established providers and more, smaller providers arise. Every sales team is striving for productivity and sales techstack is the best way to get there.

Read More: Avoiding Over-Diversification of the Supply Chain in a Growing Network