Asher Mathew

CEO at Partnership Leaders | Helping partnership and business leaders build modern businesses through partnerships

Join Partnership Leaders at www.partnershipleaders.com

Co-Founder & CEO

Joined full time in Feb 2023

Partnership Leaders is a private network built to elevate the role of partner teams in their companies. Partnership Leaders is the only organization designed exclusively to enable the success of 1,500+ of the world’s top partner professionals.

Apply at www.partnershipleaders.com

Another new high for Chief Partner Officer roles.

1187 on Feb 1.
1220 today.

The title is rising fast.

But a title does not create a Chief Partner Officer. Mandate does.

Two things determine whether the role is real or symbolic:

Budget.

You need direct ownership of capital.
Not borrowed dollars.
Not discretionary scraps.
Not marketing leftovers.

If you do not control budget, you do not control outcomes.

Authority.

Authority means the power to prioritize.
The power to decline.
The power to protect focus.

If you cannot say no, you are not leading. You are reacting.

Without budget and authority, the CPO is a coordinator with executive branding.

With them, the CPO becomes a growth operator.

The role rests on four pillars.

Build.
Market.
Sell.
Serve.

If partnerships do not drive all four, they are not embedded in the business model.

Titles are expanding.
Mandate must follow.

Something interesting is happening in deals right now.

In the past week I spoke with four services companies.

Each told me the same thing.

Customers are asking for the partner manager to join deal calls.

Why?

Because the deal no longer involves just one vendor.

There are multiple companies delivering the outcome:
• The platform
• The services partner
• The software (think app) partner
• Sometimes even the data or AI provider

Customers want someone coordinating the ecosystem.

Not just selling the product.

That role is increasingly falling to the partnerships team.

If this trend continues, it changes how we think about partnerships.

Partner managers are no longer behind the scenes.

They are becoming the orchestrators of multi-party deals. (I know James Hodgkinson will love this one). 

I am curious if others are seeing this too.

Are customers asking for partnerships teams to be present in complex deals? Pre-Close? Post-Sale?

Am I the only one thinking when will Anthropic launch Claude for #Partnerships?

anyone else?

Hire a Chief Partner Officer...Demo to Satya!

Way to go Marcel!

A new marketplace player enters the market!

Something interesting is happening.

Events are back.

Our London Summit is already at capacity, and NYC and SF are close behind.

What is different this year is who is showing up.

Catalyst is expanding beyond software to include leaders from services and hardware companies.

The conversations around ecosystems and partnerships are getting bigger.

If you plan to attend one of our Summits or the Catalyst Conference, register soon.

More info: join catalyst dot com

One way I think about Catalyst is this:

It’s the premier conference to recruit, re-engage, and retain partners.

Not just network.
Not just content.
Actual ecosystem building.

This year, we’re leaning into Services companies that unlock the enterprise.

Think SIs, agencies, and management consulting firms.
The partners you need in your mix if you want to tap into the $6.15T global IT spend.

We’ll still have strong content for early and mid career partnership leaders. That foundation matters.

But the next unlock is CPO readiness.

What does it take to move from running motions to owning ecosystem strategy?
From supporting revenue to shaping company direction?

That’s the conversation.

Catalyst is for the companies and leaders preparing to shape the next wave of tech through partnerships.

If you’re serious about building a modern partner ecosystem, this is where you should be.

Grab your ticket, early bird ends tomorrow!

Build. Market. Sell. Serve.

Partnerships summed up in 4 words.

Enterprise growth does not break because you lack features.

It breaks because you are not invited into the room where decisions get made.

And those rooms are crowded.

CIOs do not wake up looking for new vendors.
They listen to the firms already embedded in their transformation.

The SI running the cloud migration.
The consultancy redesigning the operating model.
The agency modernizing digital experience.

If you are not inside that orbit, you are fighting uphill.

That is the real partnership conversation.

Not badges.
Not tiers.
Not “ecosystem” as a buzzword.

Access.

Catalyst this year is centered on the companies that control that access.

Services firms that influence how the $6.15T in global IT spend actually gets deployed.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth:

You can build a great product and still lose
if the people shaping the enterprise narrative are not aligned with you.

We will still invest in rising partner leaders. Craft matters.

But the next unlock is bigger.

How do you move from running partner plays
to understanding enterprise power structures?

How do you stop thinking about partner sourced revenue
and start thinking about who shapes demand before the RFP exists?

That is the conversation.

Catalyst is not about partnerships as a department.

It is about partnerships as leverage.

If you want to play inside the enterprise,
you need to understand who already owns the room.

See you in NYC!

Sean Adams ™️

47% of knowledge workers are overwhelmed & unsure how to use their tech stack to do their jobs. 

Your organization has invested heavily into technology... but how many tools on your stack are actually fully utilized?

Customers & employees alike often lack the context & tangible guidance to unlock the effectiveness and the potentials of the tools available to them. 

iorad allows you to create interactive tutorials in seconds that engage learners by doing the process with real time guidance. 

We help L&D, Training, Enablement & Customer Ed professionals:

✅ Accelerated onboarding: Reduce ramp-up time for new hires and customers.
✅ Increase tool adoption: Maximize the value of your tech stack.
✅ Seamless knowledge transfer: Create a scalable, repeatable process for sharing expertise.
✅ Scale tool usage & version control: easily keep documentation up to date, enabling scalable, self-paced learning

Subscribe to our free news letter - The Adoption Curve to learn how other L&D and enablement experts are scaling their knowledge loop: https://book.iorad.com/adoption-curve-playbook

Head of Sales & Partnerships

Helping companies power their knowledge loop. Create lightning fast tutorials for effective training, onboarding and scaling. 

Never take another screenshot again
https://meetings.hubspot.com/sean-adams

Riverside is one of the few apps I’ve seen do this well:


Riverside is a video recording studio tool.

We use it to record our podcasts and interviews

But here’s what impressed me…

They know that a core jobs-to-be-done of their customers isn’t just “record a podcast.”

It’s:
→ Record long-form content
→ Turn it into short-form clips
→ Distribute it everywhere
→ Drive attention and growth

Most tools stop at the first step.

Riverside didn’t.

They built “Magic Clips.”

It uses AI to automatically pull what it believes are the best moments from your recording and turns them into short, ready-to-share clips.

No scrubbing through 60 minutes of footage.

No manual editing sessions.

No friction between recording and publishing.

That’s a real jobs-to-be-done mindset.

They didn’t just optimize the feature.

They optimized the workflow.

And that’s what adoption actually looks like.

Meet users where they are.

Anticipate the next step.

Reduce friction before they feel it.

Kudos to the Riverside team.

This is how you design for real usage, not just feature checklists.

For more real adoption stories and practical frameworks like this, subscribe to the Adoption Curve newsletter:

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The Battle

Asher Mathew

Sean Adams ™️

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Asher Mathew's LinkedIn Performance

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