Orchestrating Partnerships: GTM Strategy in Workday Ecosystem

The path to building a modern partnership function is rooted in connecting disparate business functions. Yana Kolmakova's diverse background, including roles in marketing, sales, and business development, naturally led to her current position because she realized partnerships were always about "bridging those connection gaps to others". In the past, organizations often operated in a siloed manner, which created friction and hindered cross-functional alignment. Today, however, cross-functional collaboration has become highly sophisticated, with Partner Alliances emerging as the essential "connective tissue" that links marketing, sales, and delivery to drive organizational growth. This transformation ensures that all efforts are aligned toward the same revenue goals.

The contemporary definition of Go-to-Market Strategy (GTM) is closely aligned with moving "revenue rocks" forward and determining what will have the most impact for the organization. A strong GTM plan must be broken down into immediate, addressable tactics and long-term methodologies. Crucially, the approach must involve partners to leverage and amplify brand messaging, ultimately helping to create more brand advocates in the market. The essence of modern GTM is identifying the partners' core competencies, avoiding the confusion of trying "to be everything for everyone," and precisely knowing when to pull the right partner in for the right opportunity. This methodical approach is critical for ensuring mutual success for all parties involved in the GTM tactic.

This complexity necessitates the concept of partner orchestration, which Yana aptly compares to working a puzzle where you must strategically decide which piece to pull in first. The VP of Partner Alliances' role involves the delicate act of orchestrating these puzzle pieces—knowing which groupings complement each other and work together—and strategically pulling them together to build the overall Go-to-Market Strategy. The transformation over the last decade is characterized by significantly greater cross-functional alignment, sophistication in execution, and the availability of technology tooling that facilitates quicker implementation. This constant drive to improve and "push that needle more and more" is what fuels exponential growth and success within the Workday Ecosystem.

TopBloc is positioned as a premier Workday implementation partner, distinguished by its strategic decision to be "single threaded" and solely focused on the Workday platform since 2018. This deep, singular focus has allowed them to become highly proficient experts in the technology, going not only wide but also deep within the Workday Ecosystem. This deep expertise benefits customers undergoing significant HRIS or ERP transformations, as they know they are engaging an expert who leverages prior system knowledge to enhance the Workday implementation process. Workday itself operates as a highly partner-centric organization, intimately involving partners from the very beginning of the sales and prospecting cycle, approaching the customer together in a unified front.

The customer journey in the Workday Ecosystem requires an extended set of "complementary partners" beyond just the core implementation services. TopBloc has cultivated strong relationships with these non-competitive partners who enhance the overall deployment opportunity for the customers. For instance, partners like OSV and ADP are crucial for payroll and HRIS functionality, while Kyriba and Trintech are key on the financial implementation side. This layer of partnership is essential due to the increasing complexity of modern technology solutions. The initial qualifier for forming these strong Partner Alliances is that they must already be intimately connected within the Workday Ecosystem and recognized by Workday. TopBloc's role involves strategic orchestration, which means giving everyone a fair chance but also knowing who is "really strong in what capacity" to simplify the process and strategically advise the customer.

This partner-centric approach continues throughout the entire customer lifecycle, extending far beyond the initial project completion. Partnerships are essential for ongoing success, transitioning from the initial build to the optimization and roadmap phases. When co-marketing with these complementary app partners, success hinges on clearly identifying the partner's specific strengths—whether that is a particular market segment or industry—and then formulating campaigns that highlight the partnership and value within the broader Workday Ecosystem. The ultimate goal is always to enhance the customer journey and simplify the transformation path. The key is to pick something specific to start with, measure success in the short term, and then build on that foundation to avoid the trap of trying to "boil the ocean".

Technology, particularly AI, is driving the next major shift in marketing and Channel Sales, freeing up human bandwidth for more strategic and impactful work. Yana Kolmakova emphasizes that when AI is "used correctly," it makes things significantly easier, allowing professionals to push the creative and tactical envelope. Instead of fearing it, professionals must educate themselves to use AI as an "enhancer and an amplifier," treating it as a tool in the day-to-day workflow. This wave of innovation, born out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now yielding significant rewards and driving continuous innovation in the Workday Ecosystem and beyond.

The practical use cases of AI span from campaign inception to content delivery and data measurement. AI can be leveraged to build partnership agents and specifically analyze target data and business insights, moving beyond simple dashboard campaign stats to know precisely where to focus marketing efforts. Copywriting, which was once a significant time constraint for marketers, has undergone a complete transformation. Marketers can now upload documentation about customer pain points into platforms like Gemini or ChatGPT and, through prompting, generate numerous pieces of collateral. This significantly reduces time and stress, allowing marketing teams to spend their time "reviewing the content and the data and analyzing how to leverage it within the customer journey" rather than focusing solely on the content creation itself.

From a delivery and measurement perspective, platforms like HubSpot are essential, as they have evolved to leverage AI and provide complete A-to-Z visibility into the customer journey. Such tools enable efficient management of the CRM, website, automated sequences, and measurement of campaign attribution, conversions, and revenue impact. This efficiency allows organizations to be very intentional with their resources—people, time, and money—attributed to various marketing and partnership events. However, Yana emphasizes that the human component remains vital; humans must evaluate the data, determine what is working and what is not, and focus on necessary organizational enablement and alignment. Success is truly found in the "beauty of how to leverage... AI and what humans do really well".