What does it take to turn a Global System Integrator into a true growth partner? In this episode, Vivek Venkatesh shares lessons learned from years leading partner marketing initiatives at Intel, Dell, and AWS, where partnerships with firms like Accenture, Deloitte, and Capgemini helped drive large-scale growth and customer adoption.

Vivek explains why GSI partner marketing is fundamentally different from other partner motions, how to identify and activate internal champions, and why the best partner marketers often operate like the CMO of the relationship. The conversation explores the role of storytelling, customer-focused case studies, ABM strategies, sales enablement, and the operational discipline required to track influence across long sales cycles and multi-million-dollar opportunities.

From startup products seeking credibility to enterprise-scale alliance programs, Vivek offers a practical framework for building partner momentum, earning internal advocacy, and creating go-to-market motions that scale far beyond your own sales team.

What happens when you’re asked to build a partner motion for a company nobody’s heard of—inside one of the fastest-moving markets in tech? In this episode, Jurija Metovic from SurePath AI breaks down what startup partner marketing actually looks like when there’s no inherited brand credibility, no repeatable playbook, and no time to wait for perfect.

Jurija shares why early-stage partner marketing is less about scale and more about signal: getting into the right conversations, placing smart bets on a handful of strategic partners, and building trust before pipeline even exists. The conversation dives into how AI is reshaping modern marketing teams, why partner incentives have shifted away from flashy rewards toward true collaboration, and what startup operators get wrong when they try to “build the whole program” too early.

There’s also an honest discussion about mentorship, community, startup pressure, and the very human side of building in public while AI changes the rules in real time.

Too many partner marketers are still treated as the team that runs the events, builds the co-branded one-pager, and executes the MDF spend. Nicole Steele wants that definition retired. A marketer who's worked at the intersection of field, digital, and partner at Sage, SAP, Aryaka, and F5 — where 95% of the business ran through partners — Nicole joins Rick to make the case that customers aren't buying products anymore, they're buying platforms, and platforms only deliver when there's an ecosystem behind them. That changes the job.

In this conversation, Nicole breaks down why field, digital, and partner can't keep running as silos, why the quarterly QBR cadence is killing partner relationships, and the business acumen skills that separate operators from strategists. The closing challenge: stop showing up as a support function and start operating as the ecosystem strategist your GTM motion actually needs.