Tricia Shea on Why Partnerships Need More Sales Discipline

All right. Welcome to another episode of the Partnership Mastermind podcast. I'm your host, Chris Lavoie. Today, I am thrilled to be joined by Tricia Shea, who is currently heading up channel sales and partnerships at RAINN. Tricia cut her teeth in enterprise sales and learned early on that one well-placed partner relationship could open 10 doors faster than 100 cold calls. After driving growth at Square, Paylocity, and DailyPay, she now leads Rain's channel strategy combining sales rigor with ecosystem thinking to build partner programs that actually convert. Today, you can expect raw stories, strong opinions, and tactical gold as we dive into the real work behind building revenue-generating channels. Trisha, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Amazing. Well, look, I met you not too long ago and I was immediately impressed by just how disciplined you are and you have such a methodical approach to kind of building revenue programs. It was really cool to learn about how your sales background has really served you well in the partnerships landscape, which we're going to talk a lot about today. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, we always warm up our guests with five quick hitting questions just as a way to get you comfortable and help our audience get to know you a bit better. You ready for that?

You didn't warn me about this, but I'm ready.

All right. Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay. So the first question, this is about origin story. When did you realize partnerships were the higher leverage play versus pure cold outreach?

So I'd say early on, I definitely recognize that if you had strong partnerships, it could open a lot more doors than I could do with just cold calling and traditional prospecting kind of dialing for dollars. When I first got started in sales, I obviously did the traditional prospecting. grind, prospecting, trying to kick down doors one by one. And I still love a good prospecting session, but there was a time I remembered vividly that I was able to, I was trying to crack into a specific company and I realized that they kept pushing me off to this consultant. Every time I called them and emailed them, they'd be like, you need to talk to XYZ consultant. They help us. They'll bring all of this to us. And I started to think like, what could I do to get around this guy? Like, who could I go to? A CEO, there's gotta be someone higher that makes a decision other than the consultant that they keep pushing me off to. But then one day it hit me and I realized that if I could get that consultant on my side, I bet they had a lot more than this one client and they can probably open a lot more doors for me. So that's what I started to do and started to position myself in that realm. We're really working through relationships and relationships. making sure that I was building trust within partners. I could get more from one partner in a month than I probably could just cold calling on my own efforts. And it's even more true I feel like now because a lot of buyers are really overwhelmed by noise. and their inboxes are so flooded, right? So their guard is permanently up. And when you reach out cold, there's no trust whatsoever.