Name: Don Otvos

Title: VP of Business Development and Alliances

Company: LeanData

Industry:  Revenue Orchestration

“My belief is there is no such thing as a true inbound lead. Someone who comes to your website to request a demo is doing it for some reason. When we dig into our inbound leads, 85-90% of the time, they came in because a partner casually mentioned us to that prospect.” —Don Otvos, VP of Business Development and Alliances, LeanData

Don Otvos knows how to run an efficient sales cycle.

In his long career in revenue operations, he has buttoned up sales processes to achieve optimal revenue outcomes at companies including Yammer, data.ai, and SalesLoft. He helps create the similar outcomes at his current company LeanData, a Salesforce-native, revenue orchestration platform that can take any action on any field or object in Salesforce to centralize and streamline sales operations.

“In my initial role, I was the person running LeanData at LeanData,” he says.

With all of his experience in the revenue tech stack, he was soon asked to lead partnerships and alliances. This critical role manages relationships with Salesforce and the companies building complementary technologies that also touch Salesforce.

“We have a whole host of partners that we build out integrations for within the LeanData platform, and then work together on use-case collaborative selling,” he says. “Ecosystem-Led Growth is something we were already doing, but we didn’t have a name for it until about a year and a half ago.” Now Don’s team runs an efficient process that pushes partner data from Crossbeam into Salesforce and Slack, instantly notifying the right member of the sales team about overlaps they should pursue with partners and instructions on how to get it done.

Don’s background in RevOps makes him an extremely effective ELG practitioner because he knows how to reduce friction and streamline processes between partnerships and sales. “I can leverage the technology that I know exists to do things that maybe we’d never thought of doing before.”

Don’s ELG essentials

1. Think differently about your approach to revenue attribution

“A challenge of partnership teams in general is attribution,” says Don. “How much pipeline does partnerships bring? How much do they source? How much do they influence? Everyone wants to know that, but it's such a nebulous number. A deal could initially be worth 50 grand. Then it increases to 300 grand. Then the sales rep says it's going to  be a million dollars. Then it closes for $400,000. The partnership team is responsible for 15% of revenue, but that number is all over the place depending on when you run the report.”

Don decided that his team needed a more reliable and measurable KPI to reflect their contribution. He set up the tooling to measure the median value of deals in each business segment and set his team’s goal for that segment at 15% of the median. He then looked at how many deals it took on average to reach that dollar amount. Instead of trying to hit that number in actual dollars, which was nearly impossible to measure at any point in time, he proposed setting a threshold for the number of deals that had to get past a certain stage to roughly equal 15%. 

“I want to be directionally correct on getting to that 15% number — I don't care about hitting it, per se, I just want to know that the partner team is heading in that direction,” says Don. “To do that, I’m going to look at the number of deals that get past a certain stage rather than scrambling to track down every dollar for attribution. It becomes a much more objective number, because you look at the date a deal reached a certain stage and you count it or you don’t.”

Don’s new model meant his team could now spend more time driving relationships and making sure the deals happened rather than chasing ever-changing dollar amounts for attribution. 

“The one thing I always strive for is to make things as bone dead simple as possible, and automate as much as I can,” says Don. “Applying that philosophy to partnerships in terms of how we were measuring pipeline was a game-changer for us.”

2. Encourage a win-win philosophy across your ecosystem

“My belief is there is no such thing as a true inbound lead,” says Don. “Someone who comes to your website to request a demo is doing it for some reason. When we dig into our inbound leads, 85-90% of the time, they came in because a partner casually mentioned us to that prospect.”

The downside, says Don, is this information often isn’t captured during the deal cycle if it wasn’t a directly partner-sourced lead. Other times, a deal is heavily partner-influenced, but the lead itself came from elsewhere, so that’s where the attribution goes. For example, he says, LeanData won a big mid-six-figure deal from a lead generated at a trade show, but the customer was more inclined to build the solution themselves until a mutual trusted partner gave an enthusiastic recommendation.

The upside is the deal and many others closed because these casual referrals are so common in LeanData’s ecosystem. They create an atmosphere where partners actively want to provide registered leads and co-sales to each other. 

“Most of our partners are complementary technologies, so we're not trying to compete with each other,” says Don. “There's a genuine feeling of ‘let's go do this together’. Having that attitude, and preaching that attitude to the sales team, you get a much more favorable, cooperative organization. And, when you’re with another company with a similar approach, it ends up being a win-win.”

It also sets the stage for a regular exchange of leads and warm introductions to prospects. “That’s the hallmark of what we want to do as a partner team,” says Don. “Make as many of those happen as possible.”

3. Use your ecosystem from the earliest stages of the sales process

“I’ve asked our SDR (sales development representative) team, ‘would you rather make a cold call or get a warm introduction?’ and they all want the warm introduction,” says Don. “Nobody likes to cold call. It’s expensive and arduous.”

Don encourages SDRs, who are on the front lines of qualifying leads, to go straight to the partner data in Crossbeam as soon as they are assigned a lead. If there’s an overlap with a partner, he says, “I tell our SDRs to build a relationship with them, because more than likely, you’re going to get another one, and you’re going to want to return the favor. It’s much easier to crack an account through a partner relationship than it is to cold call into it yourself.” 

He continues, “My opinion is SDRs shouldn’t be cold-callers. Every call they make should be to a partner to talk about a customer of theirs who’s a prospect of ours.”

He does caution them, however, not to be too eager. 

“Don’t call a partner the day a LeanData prospect signs a partner contract and turns into a customer. That is not the day to be introducing LeanData,” says Don. “Wait, like 30 days, 60 days. Let things settle and then reach out. ‘I know this company has been a customer of yours for a couple of months, how's the onboarding going? Can we talk about it?’”