SaaStr 297: Why Channel Partnerships Can Be The Biggest Accelerant To Your Business, How To Hire for Channel Partnerships and The Biggest Mistakes SaaS Founders Make In The Early Days with Bob Moore, Founder & CEO @ Crossbeam

Bob Moore is the Founder & CEO @ Crossbeam, the startup that helps companies find overlapping prospects and customers while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. To date Bob has raised over $15m with Crossbeam from friends of the show including Andy @ Uncork, Matt @ Firstmark, Bill @ First Round and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures, to name a few. Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018. Before that Bob co-founded RJ Metrics, where he built a global base of online retailers leading to their acquisition by Magento Commerce in 2016.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

• How Bob made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Crossbeam?
• As an entrepreneur, Bob has previously said, "no one is coming to save you". What did he mean by this? What were the core mistakes that he made with RJ Metrics? Is it the responsibility of the board to course correct at this early stage? How does Bob determine whether to be visionary and determined vs realising when something is not working?
• Does Bob agree with the notion that channel sales have completely died in the world of SaaS? Why is this? What are the drivers of it's death? How important is it to own the entire customer journey? At what scale does that become impossible? In terms of replacement, what does Bob believe will be the emerging trends in SaaS Go To Market that will replace it?
• How does Bob think about when is the right time to hire a Head of Partnerships? In the early days, partnerships can be a distraction, how does Bob determine between right and wrong when determining whether to engage in a partnership? Where do most startups go wrong both in hiring for partnerships and in the engagements themselves?

Bob's 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What is the hardest element of Bob's role with Crossbeam today?
2. What does Bob believe that most around him disbelieve?
3. What does Bob know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?

Read the transcript on our blog.

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:

Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Bob Moore

Did you know that if your network goes down it can cost you on average $5,600/minute? What if I also told you, you could have 100% confidence that your business data is secure and allow for new employees to be on-boarded with ease and offboarded securely in a few short clicks. Your employees automatically have the right applications installed with the right permissions and joy of joys, you never hear about printer issues. Plus it's all done through a first of its kind IT platform called Electric, delivering enterprise-grade IT support previously not available to small and medium-sized businesses at a fraction of the cost. So whether you have IT in-house or no IT at all, Electric solve it at lightning-fast speed either remotely or sending a certified partner to you. So if you're interested in deploying world-class IT which keeps your employees productive and data secure visit: www.electric.ai/saastr