167 – How You Too Can Evolve into an Influential Partnership Leader?

An Influential Ecosystem Leader Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering So you recently took a partnership ecosystem role and are wondering where you can go to learn from what the best leaders in positions like yours are doing. You wonder, “how do I orchestrate across my organization and organize for success?” and “how do I overcome obstacles to my success that propel my career, evolve my career to one day become an influential partnership leader, perhaps in a category-leading organization?” In this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we will show you how you, too, can evolve into an influential partnership leader. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering brings 20 years of leadership experience in leading and building new revenue models at scale at leading organizations – including an organization whose very name has become synonymous with how we communicate in online meetings today. Laura Padilla, has built a successful career doing the uncomfortable and shares why hard work, integrity, competency, and a reputation for problem-solving have helped propel her career path. The learnings she shares are a great primer on how to evolve your career as an influential partnership leader. In Laura’s words Laura Padilla is currently the VP of Global Partners and Services at Airtable, building the partner and services delivery strategy. She brings over 20 years of leadership experience in leading/building complex business units and new revenue streams to scale small, private companies to +$1B post-IPO revenue, including Zoom, Nutanix, Box, and Riverbed. Leadership experience across marketing, alliances/business development, and partner/channel sales roles in the SaaS, Enterprise Software, and Hardware industries. She most recently was at Zoom, where she led the global partner and platform sales business unit composed of over 300 team members and over $500M in revenue. This included indirect sales with and through VARs, service providers/carriers, OEMs, referral partners, ISVs, and SI’s, and influenced revenue with technology partners such as Slack, Dropbox, Box, Okta, Five9, Twilio, and others. She is known as a function builder, and her strength is in scaling new organizations to drive incremental revenue and customer value.  What You’ll Learn in this Episode The most impactful personal growth comes from doing uncomfortable things (1:52) Airtable’s value and mission (6:44) A time like no other, leading Zoom’s Partner Program (13:56) How the role of the partner leader is different than ten years ago (17:31) What Laura sees from the best partnerships (23:10) Laura’s journey and the obstacle she overcame (26:35) Advice on how you can optimize for your success (36:29) Creating Ultimate Partnerships Let’s face it, we all have seen partnerships that look good on paper but never live up to their expected results. There are many reasons why partnerships fail, and at Ultimate Partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best prac