Long-term partnerships guy. Thoughts are my own, from 20 years of sales and building experience.
Austin, Texas
Joined June 2011
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Partner math: an affiliate and a partner can send you the exact same customer. What you owe them isn't the same.
An affiliate sent a click. Pay on the first sale and you're square.
A partner keeps that customer happy and sends you the next one. Pay them like it was a click and you'll get click-level effort.
Size the payout to what they do after the sale.
Chris Fava retweeted
Ten million people have watched a comedian accidentally destroy the entire TED talk industry.
He filmed the talk once at TEDxNewYork in 2014 and openly admitted he had nothing to say.
Speaking coaches charge $5,000 to teach the exact tricks he used in 6 minutes to say nothing at all.
His name is Will Stephen. He is a comedian from Late Night with Seth Meyers who was invited to give a real TED talk and used it to prove the format is a costume anyone can wear.
Every TED speaker opens with a question, tells a personal story, cites a scientist, and shows a chart. Stephen did all four in six minutes with zero content.
His entire formula fits on a napkin.
Gesture with both hands. Ask the audience a question anyone can answer. Tell a mildly embarrassing story so they say aww. Point to a stranger on a slide and call them important. Flash a chart of random numbers. Wear glasses with no lenses. The audience will think you are brilliant.
That last trick alone has probably cost the public speaking coaching industry a hundred million dollars in sessions clients should have skipped.
"If you watched me on YouTube with the sound off, you would think I was a genius."
That is Will Stephen on the TED stage, three minutes into the talk he was paid to give. He wasn't lying.
Executives pay $15,000 for a keynote coach and still open with a joke the room never laughs at. Founders rehearse their pitch for weeks and still sound like Stephen at minute four, saying "wagga wah, gabba gabba" with authority.
The talk is free on YouTube. The method is written across every TED speaker's playbook for ten years.
Stephen still writes for Seth Meyers. Almost none of the ten million viewers have stopped nodding at empty slides since.
The formula is free. The willingness to actually say something before your next keynote, pitch, or townhall is the entire edge.
Pick one: a partner program with five tiers, or one tier and a clear rule for who owns the deal.
I take the clear rule.
Tiers don't help much if partners don't know they'll get credit. One tier and a written rule for who owns the deal lets a partner rep bring you up without checking with anyone first.
Earlier this week, we announced the @Numeral Partner Program. It's been really amazing to see how much our partnerships team has grown over the last few months.
With our new partner program, we are giving our partners more ways to grow their businesses and better support their clients.
If you're an accounting firm, fractional CFO, technology partner, or software provider, we'd love to work with you. + you'll get to work with our amazing partnerships team :)
"Just checking in" asks the buyer to remember why they took your call.
Send the recap instead. Same day, three lines:
What they said the problem is.
What happens if it doesn't get fixed.
The next step, with a date.
If they correct it, you learned something. If they forward it, you found your champion. If they ignore it, you know where the deal is.
Pick one: an open free trial, or a short pilot with success criteria written down before it starts.
I pick the pilot.
An open trial has no finish line. It ends when someone gets busy, and you hear "let me circle back."
A pilot starts with two things in writing: what has to be true at the end, and who signs if it is.
If they won't write either down, you just qualified them out.
Pick one: book the next meeting before the call ends, or "I'll send over some times."
Book it on the call.
"I'll send some times" turns a live yes into an inbox task. Now you're chasing someone who was nodding along ten minutes ago.
If they won't put a time on the calendar while you're both on the call, that's your answer. Better to learn it now than after three follow-ups.
Nobody puts approval rate in the processor RFP.
Merchants will negotiate basis points for a month. Then a good customer's card gets declined at checkout and the whole order is gone. Not a fraction of it. All of it.
Before you compare rates, ask:
What's my approval rate, by card type and country?
Can I see the decline codes?
Do soft declines get retried, or just dropped?
If they can't show you that, the rate is the only number you'll ever see.
Question for anyone running inbound:
Where do your best customers say they heard about you, and does your attribution report agree?
My guess: the free-text "how did you hear about us" box knows more than the dashboard. People type "a podcast" or "my old boss" and the report says direct.
Curious what yours shows.
Pick one: the processor with the lower rate, or the one that lets you take your card vault with you when you leave.
I take the vault.
Your customers' saved cards live as tokens the processor holds. If they won't export them, switching later means asking every customer to re-enter a card. Some won't.
That isn't a migration cost. It's churn you agreed to on day one.
Before you sign, ask: can I export the vault, to whom, and how long does it take?
Pick one: a demo form that books anyone, or one that asks a question someone can fail.
I take the one they can fail.
One hard question before the calendar: what are you using today, and what's breaking?
You get fewer meetings. The ones you get show up with a problem, and your rep spends the call on it instead of digging for it.
A full calendar of people who were never going to buy is a vanity number.
The most expensive line in a merchant's payments setup isn't the rate.
It's "your funds are under review."
Merchants compare basis points. Then a payout gets held the week payroll is due, or a chargeback shows up after the window to respond has closed.
Before you compare rates, ask:
How fast do funds land?
What triggers a hold, and who do I call when it happens?
Where do I see disputes before the deadline?
A cheap rate on money you can't reach isn't cheap.
Partner math: if you're a rounding error on the partner's average deal, their reps won't bring you up.
A rep gets a few minutes on every call. They spend them on whatever makes the deal bigger or closes it faster.
Show up as a small line item and you lose that fight, even with a good rev share.
So size it before you sign. What does adding you do to their deal: bigger, faster, or stickier? If you can't name one, you're a page in their partner directory.