Vince Menzione on Why Partner Playbooks Expire, But Principles Transfer

All right. Welcome to another episode of the Partnership Mastermind Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Lavoie. Today we're joined by a fellow podcast host who's much more than just a podcast host, Vince Mendrillon, founder and CEO of Ultimate Partner and author of an upcoming book, The Ultimate Partner: Seven Principles for Winning in the Age of Ecosystems, AI, and Co-Sell, which we're gonna link, uh, when we publish this episode so you can grab a copy. Vince is a s- There you go. Vince is showing it on the screen.

I gotta peek, peek it up there.

Love it. Vince is a sales leader first. He helped scale Technologics from 6 million to 120-plus at a public exit. He's built government partner motion at Itronix, took a wearable computer from concept to Capitol Hill after 9/11, and then spent nearly a decade as Microsoft GM of US Public Sector Partners. I'm not done. Today we're getting into why partner playbooks expire but principles transfer, what real executive commitment looks like, and the question almost nobody asks about success, who you build it with, which I'm thrilled to get into. Vince, so thrilled to have you with us.

Chris, so great to be here. Uh, we're kindred souls. I'm so glad to be here with you today.

Likewise. Look, Vince, we've got a, a few important segments to get into, but we start each episode off with quick-hitting questions. It's an opportunity for our, our audience to get to know you a little bit better and give you an opportunity to warm up. You ready for that?

Sure. Absolutely.

All right. We're gonna talk about your sales, uh, leadership background first. What's one instinct from your early sales days that you still lean on every time you partner?

Wow. It's, it comes back to the work I did with Blue Sheets with Miller Heiman, strategic selling, and I just included partners in that equation. So anybody who doesn't know about this, this was, this was a way to frame a conversation or how your, your situation looked like with a customer. And to me it was always about, like, having coaches involved, having people within the organization that were on your side, that were w- w- Their, your win was their win, and partners are part of that, right? So when we start including our partners in that equation with the customer and trying to frame how we're doing in that account, that's the best way to see succ- success, and that's how I think about direct sales to partnership sales.

Love that. Let's go back even further then to, to your early roots. You know, you won rookie of the year, uh, you know, in your f- in one of your first stints in a New York City sales office. So what, what did that first year in that sales office teach you, uh, that you still hold to today?

It was tough, okay? So I got out of college. I got a marketing internship with a company. I was in the marketing training center, and a couple of the salespeople walk by, and the people I was working with, they're saying, "Oh, those are the top salespeople. They make the most money in the company." I'm like, "That's what I wanna do." [laughs] And so I found the, the, uh... He wasn't VP. He was the sales manager for the New York office, was there, and I asked to have a meeting with