This article is part of our Q1 spotlight on Partner Program Planning, Goal Setting, and Forecasting. Learn more in the series introduction.
Thorunn Devoy has spent the better part of a decade in partnerships. She began her career in the industry doing partner development at Contentful and was able to grow there into a Partner Manager role, before moving laterally to become a Partner Marketing Manager. In May of 2021, Thorunn joined the Talon.One team, where she’s building out the partner team and partner program.
Today, Thorunn joins us to share her insights on using OKRs to provide visibility into her efforts to grow the Talon.One partner program.
Using OKRs & Tech to Provide Transparency
When Thorunn Devoy joined the Talon.One team, there were less than 50 people in the organization and the VP of Sales had only joined a month prior. Now that there are over 100 people on the team, Thorunn has worked closely with the growing Revenue Operations team to develop a structure for measuring the impact of partnerships. Thorunn explained, “We use Salesforce, but there wasn’t a field or any way to show the partner was involved. So, that was the first thing we did. Once we started tracking, we started building out the functionality in Salesforce to track if partners were registering and bringing the deal (sourced) or involved in the deal (influence). We started tracking that data in August, and used three months of data from August to October as our baseline to determine goals for 2022.”
Thorunn worked with her team to use that baseline data to determine what they should work toward. “We came up with three different scenarios – bad, good, best case. We’re aiming for somewhere in the middle of good and best case for the revenue goals. The partner team is measured on sourced revenue and we also track influenced revenue.”
Salesforce has been a powerful tool to track and share progress toward the team’s goals. Thorunn shared, “I just got a really nice Salesforce dashboard set up recently. It’s fantastic to have a central place that everyone has access to and can see what progress is happening. The dashboard tracks the pipeline of open opportunities as well as closed-won revenue compared to our goals for each quarter.”
Implementing OKRs for Partner Marketing
Faryal Maryam Tareen joined the Talon.One team as their Partner Marketing Manager in October of 2021. Thorunn explained, “While she was still onboarding, we didn’t want to put any metrics on partner marketing. Starting in Q1, we have a number of leads generated from marketing activities goal. Then, we track the leads and have the team implement lead scoring. The idea is to work backward and know which leads are coming from partner activities and how does that compare to the traditional inbound motion. We worked with our Demand Gen team to understand how they measured the conversion rate from lead to MQL to sales accepted lead, to opportunity.
“We are going to use that number for Q1 and we’ll analyze and track how we’re doing and adjust,” Thorunn shared. “We put a very ambitious goal for leads. It’s not necessarily tied to compensation; it’s about having a vision and something to work to. Implementing these ambitious goals improves focus and ensures we’re spending our time on co-marketing activities that bring value to both partners.”
Setting OKRs at Talon.One
Like most organizations, OKRs at Talon.One trickle down from the leadership team. “There are company-wide goals for how much revenue we want to generate as a business in 2022. Then, the leadership team looks at the different revenue sources. We have a Customer Success team that takes care of the customers, they’re responsible for expansion opportunities (upselling), then we have Partnerships which is sourcing new opportunities and starting an outbound motion.”
The overarching revenue goal gets broken down, based on baseline information from past results. “We anticipate X% will come from each different arm. We are a global company with offices in Boston, Berlin, and Singapore. As a result, the revenue goal is broken down based on different departments, types of partners, and geographic regions.”
Advice for Getting Started with OKRs
Thorunn shared a few pieces of advice for anyone looking to improve their OKRs or implement them for the first time. “There is always a qualitative goal that you want to achieve — whether it’s to create more awareness, go deeper, enter a new market, expand your business, or grow revenue. It’s important to align your OKRs with the bigger vision that you have. Especially in partnerships, you sit in the middle of sales, marketing, product, and customer success. Speak to the managers or leaders in those areas of the business and align on what the other teams are going to be measured on. If there’s a transparent way to track it, do it. If they’re not aligned on the individual level, there will be friction. You need to make sure you have similar goals and aren’t working against each other.”
Thorunn explained, “When we were determining OKRs for partner marketing, we sat down with marketing to get their buy-in and align with their goals. Sales is responsible for bringing in new revenue. We make sure Partnerships is helping them and focus less on the expansion. As a business, although it’s important, it’s not our number one priority.”
OKRs for 2022
Now that Thorunn has established a baseline for the Talon.One partner program, she has set big goals for 2022. “I can’t share specific details, but we’re looking at the number of opportunities sourced by partners and the dollar amount of closed-won. On the marketing side, we decided to take MQLs as an indicator of the performance of the marketing activities since they’re not just a lead, but a prospect who has shown more interest. Then, we can do more to help with the evaluation.”
Thorunn and her team have a big year ahead of them as they continue to build their partner program. If you’re interested in joining Thorunn’s team, be sure to check out their open US Partner Manager role. Learn more about getting started with OKRs at your organization when you download Strategies for Achieving your Partnerships Goals.
Experienced partnership professionals will join us over the next few weeks to share their insights on planning, goal setting, and forecasting. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to catch all of the interviews as they’re published.
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