Smartsheet's Ecosystem Growth: Powered by PartnerOps Excellence

Rachael Travis's journey into leading global partner programs at Smartsheet is deeply rooted in her six years of service in the U.S. Army by way of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Her time at West Point focused on honing leadership capabilities and building high-performing teams, skills she has carried forward throughout her career. A pivotal experience was her 15-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2007, during a challenging period when resources were primarily focused on Iraq. This environment demanded immense grit, creativity, and the ability to work across nations and diverse cultures to achieve a common mission, teaching her critical lessons in leading with empathy and collaborating under immense pressure.

Her military experience provided invaluable transferable skills for her civilian career in partner operations. One key lesson was the ability to break down large, ambiguous missions into smaller, bite-sized tasks that individual teams can execute against. This is particularly relevant in partnerships, which often present comprehensive, strategic concepts that must be translated into actionable plans. Furthermore, the military taught her how to build relationships and influence others without direct authority, a crucial skill in complex partner ecosystems where success relies on rallying diverse stakeholders around a shared vision.

The transition from managing physical logistics and equipment in the military to dealing with bits and bytes in a pure-play software world revealed that while the "widgets" are different, the underlying concepts and frameworks for problem-solving remain consistent. This includes planning, deploying the best resources, and optimizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Her consulting background, which followed her military service, further solidified her understanding of go-to-market strategies and customer-centric growth, laying the foundation for her channel and partner operations expertise.

A core principle in designing a partner operations framework is making trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency, a concept often visualized through a two-by-two matrix. This means deciding whether a task requires deep expertise and the ability to "look around the corner" (effectiveness) or streamlined, scalable execution (efficiency). For example, responsibilities related to program operations, such as channel capacity planning, program analytics, performance measurements, and compensation design, demand a high degree of expertise and focus on effectiveness. These areas require specialized knowledge to ensure continuous improvement and deliver value to the business.

Conversely, tasks like partner recruitment, onboarding, and deal desk management, particularly at scale, prioritize efficiency. These functions require highly efficient global coverage to manage significant partner volume if executed correctly. This strategic distinction informs how teams are built and structured, ensuring that individuals are focused on tasks that align with their strengths and the business's needs for either deep expertise or rapid scalability. The goal is to plug into broader company leadership and strategy, ensuring alignment across all organizational functions from sales to marketing.

Within Smartsheet's partner operations, Rachael over-indexes on the two ends of the spectrum: initial strategy and ultimate measurement of results. Significant time is spent ensuring the approach correctly aligns with the broader sales organization and that the partner program is designed to deliver on those strategic needs. Getting the strategic pieces right informs who the ideal partners are for recruitment and what enablement resources they need for successful onboarding. This front-end work then dictates who partner account managers should recruit and how new partners are onboarded through role-based training and consistent check-ins. The back-end focus on leading and lagging indicators helps assess the effectiveness of these programs, informing necessary adjustments to either the strategy or its implementation.

Smartsheet's partner ecosystem has undergone a significant transformation over the past three and a half years, marked by a strategic "pruning" and subsequent growth. Initially, the ecosystem comprised approximately 800 partners, including traditional VARs, distributors, and solution/SI partners. However, a key realization was the need for partners who would proactively build a Smartsheet practice, focusing on implementation and actively selling software and generating their demand. This led to a bold decision to terminate about 60% of the partner base, reducing the active ecosystem to roughly 350 core, proactive, and high-producing partners.

Since then, Smartsheet has strategically grown its ecosystem back to approximately 775 partners with a more diversified and specialized composition since then. This expansion includes technology alliances, ISVs, developers, and new GSIs, recognizing the distinct and valuable roles each plays in the Smartsheet community. This evolution reflects a shift from a broad "anything is possible" approach, which boasted over 2,000 use cases, to a more focused strategy around specific investment areas like Project and Portfolio Management (PPM), PMO (Project Management Office), and digital transformation.

This strategic refocus has led to a bifurcation within the partner base. Some legacy partners prefer to continue serving the "flexible" use cases that Smartsheet has de-emphasized, filling that market gap and leveraging their generalist capabilities. Meanwhile, newer partners are much more specialized, either aligning with Smartsheet's core focus areas (e.g., becoming a PMO Center of Excellence for a specific industry) or focusing on process improvement and workflow automation for sectors like manufacturing. This specialization is a significant advantage for newer partners, making it easier for Smartsheet to proactively surface partners with specific expertise to customers and sellers using AI-powered tools.

Smartsheet has fundamentally changed its incentive structure to align with the evolving roles and value partners provide, recognizing that the customer ultimately dictates how they buy. In the past, partners could be penalized if a deal they influenced was ultimately procured directly by the customer or through a different channel (e.g., SHI, Insight, or AWS). To address this, Smartsheet now tracks all partner activity on every opportunity in its Salesforce environment, categorizing it by whether the partner sourced, transacted, or merely influenced the deal.

Based on these roles, partners receive different financial incentives, including upfront discounts, commission fees, backend rebates, and other special performance funds (SPFs) designed to drive specific behaviors. This flexible approach ensures that the incentives are tailored to the partner's business model and their value to the ecosystem. Beyond financial rewards, Smartsheet also focuses on non-financial incentives, such as providing partners with exposure to more customers and packaging customer success stories into demand-generation assets they can use. This helps partners scale their business by providing valuable marketing collateral and access to new opportunities.

The organizational structure has also evolved to support this outcome-based approach. The initial small and "scrappy" team has matured, with roles and responsibilities now aligned to specific "jobs to be done." This includes growing the partner account management team to specialize in managing particular partner types (e.g., GSIs, VARs, distributors) and understanding their unique business models and engagement preferences. Additionally, Smartsheet has invested in a dedicated enablement function for partner training and troubleshooting and building out robust operations, programs, and marketing teams that were previously very lean. These structural changes enable the company to serve different regions and scale its global partner ecosystem more effectively.

Smartsheet is actively exploring and deploying AI to accelerate productivity within its partner operations, particularly leveraging its Salesforce environment and "Agent Force" capabilities. The approach is not to replace human roles entirely but to augment them, using AI agents to surface information and solve problems faster and more efficiently for both customers and sellers. One key use case involves proactively integrating AI within the Smartsheet product to surface relevant partners. For instance, if a customer is building a solution, AI can identify a partner with known expertise, a pre-built template, or a bolt-on integration that addresses their specific need, proactively presenting this information in-app.

Similarly, AI is being deployed via Agent Force within Salesforce to assist sellers. Sales representatives frequently ask questions about partners who can meet specific needs, such as expertise in a particular use case or language capabilities. AI streamlines this process by proactively serving ideal partners, moving beyond a reactive model where a rep might only consider a partner after realizing a challenge. While these initial deployments are largely "need-based," Smartsheet also has a team member dedicated to defining the broader AI strategy for partner operations and the ecosystem, exploring how AI can further enhance partner success and overall growth.

Looking ahead, Smartsheet recognizes a massive opportunity to enhance its "market through" and "market with" motions using generative AI. This is a key lever to overcome current capacity limitations within the existing team. By automating content creation and other marketing tasks, generative AI can significantly enhance how Smartsheet markets with and through its partners, fostering greater scale and efficiency in demand generation efforts. This future focus highlights how AI is about internal efficiency, fundamentally transforming external go-to-market strategies, and enabling partners to achieve greater success.