From AE to Private Equity Practice Leader

After speaking on the topic of Private Equity Partnerships at Catalyst Boston & New York, I became inundated with networking requests by peers in Private Equity Business Development and companies looking to launch a PE GTM program. Private Equity has emerged as a GTM channel across sales and partner ecosystem teams at leading software and services firms. Here is my story of launching a PE Practice at Zuora and lessons to unlocked a powerful one to many portfolio company motion via PE partnerships. 

Winning in PE as an Account Executive

It was the spring of 2022, and I found myself nearly two years into a successful stint as an Enterprise Account Executive at Zuora. While I had been hitting my numbers on the backs of several private equity deals with M&A that resulted in an expanded Zuora footprint at PE owned accounts, my target account list was stale and I needed a catalyst for growth.

Enter Silver Lake which in March of 2022, injected $400M of capital into Zuora to fund acquisitions. Not only did this drive up awareness of Private Equity across all of Zuora, but with Silver Lake already owning a dozen Zuora customers, a need arose for someone to track and amplify the customer and new business activity across the over 100 technology companies in Silver Lake’s portfolio which exceeds $20B in AUM.

Having started my career in Growth Equity at H.I.G., I had prior experience on the buy side and knew the ins and outs of private equity’s approach to value creation. Furthermore, many of Zuora’s larger software customers were increasingly being acquired or taken private by Private Equity, and patterns of churn and vendor consolidation were limiting growth for Zuora across the portfolio companies of certain funds. In fact, back in 2019, Zuora attempted to stand up a Private Equity function within Customer Success focused on preventing churn when PE acquired a Zuora customer, but the motion never scaled and fizzled out a year later.

Inbound Lead from a Private Equity Firm!

And then sometimes we get lucky; like the time when I, as an AE, fielded an inbound lead which turned out to be a $10B+ AUM PE firm that wanted to know if Zuora was interested in a partnership to become a preferred vendor. At first, my SDR was hesitant to pass the lead on because they were not interested in purchasing Zuora software themselves. However, after seeing that this Private Equity firm owned several strategic Zuora customers, I decided to jump on a call with the PE firm’s head of Business Development to understand what they were looking to explore with Zuora. 

After learning that the PE firm wanted an aggressive discount rate in exchange for making Zuora a preferred vendor, I looped in a longtime VP of Alliances at Zuora to help me structure a new type partnership. While the PE firm was underwhelmed with our initial proposed discount rate which was less than some of the other Zuora customers they owned, we ended up landing on an attractive discount that the PE firm and Zuora field could support. We crafted a MOU with Zuora letterhead outlining the terms of the cadence and benefits we would offer the PE firm, and sent over a Zuora two pager outlining our core solutions in a packet that would be sent out to all CFOs across the firm’s 50+ portfolio companies. 

Within the first month of solidifying the 1 year “pilot partnership”, the PE firm had introduced me to the CFO of a multi-billion dollar in revenue technology company in Zuora’s ICP with a business issue that Zuora could mitigate. This CFO introduction came at a time when Zuora’s SDR organization was struggling to book meetings with finance leaders, so there was strong interest to see if this motion could be replicated at other portcos or PE firms. 

Private Equity Partnership Lessons

I learned two key lessons in structuring this first pilot partnership:

1. PE firms can provide faster access to power in actionable situations
2. You must know the PE portfolio inside and out before solidifying a partnership

As I entered the second half of 2022, I was conflicted between quota carrying duties as an enterprise account executive at Zuora, while on the side growing Zuora’s first PE Partnership. While my responsibility was to sell Zuora to my existing set of clients and new logo targets, my passion and entrepreneurial focus was pulling me towards Zuora’s emerging opportunity to grow via Private Equity relationships. 

With Zuora’s first PE partner having made several other C-level introductions to their portfolio companies, I found myself in a predicament as the companies were not in my Northeast patch, and my remit at the time was to grow Zuora in my own New England territory. Thankfully the VP of Sales I reported to at the time understood the potential of having a dedicated person focused on PE, and supported me cultivating PE relationships as a side project.

After proving that Private Equity partnerships could result in introductions that yielded qualified pipeline, my next step was to understand the TAM (Total Adressable Market) and ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) alignment for Zuora in the PE Universe. There are literally thousands of PE firms, but Zuora’s ICP is enterprise software companies with over $100M in revenue, and there are only a couple dozen heavily hitter PE firms making billion dollar technology acquisitions. After reviewing the portfolios of the largest PE funds such as Thoma Bravo, Vista and KKR, I identified nearly 100 Zuora customers with substantial ARR owned by the largest funds. Furthermore, Zuora’s new investor, Silver Lake, was one of these marquee PE firms and highly motivated to help Zuora grow in their portfolio.

Formalize Private Equity Program within Alliances

As we headed into Q4 in 2022, I had launched a successful pilot partnership and formed a data-driven perspective on the significant amount of PE influence affecting Zuora’s strategic customers, but I was still an Account Executive without any remit to focus on Private Equity. My next step was to figure out how to craft a PE GTM role within Zuora’s increasing focus of becoming a partner first organization.

With Private Equity as a new source of pipeline development, our new SVP of Alliances was eager to find a way to bring me onto his team. After a few executive conversations and creating a robust business plan, Private Equity was officially made a pillar within Zuora’s Global Partner Ecsoystem that I would lead starting in February of 2023.