There’s always that one moment that changes everything.
For me, it was a happy hour I wasn’t invited to.
I consistently kept the #1 spot in a division and team I helped build from the ground up. Top performer. Accountable. All in. And yet, I still became the outsider.
A new leader had just been been promoted, from a sales leader in another division to the Senior Director over ours. One of his first moves? He gathered every male sales rep without their leaders from every team and took them out for drinks. Team building, he called it. Rooting out what needed to change to make this division better.
Not one woman was invited. Not even me, the #1 rep.
And let’s be honest: most of those men weren’t even performing. The women on the teams? We were the ones hitting and exceeding the number. But no one asked us what needed to change.
That moment wasn’t about drinks.
It was about access. It was about who got protected, who got included, and who got the inside track.
But looking back now it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
Because had I been brought into that circle… Had I been invited, included… Had I been part of his plan…
I might have never seen the vision of a new category.
Instead, I left for another leader quickly. I stepped into a brand new territory. New accounts. No relationships. No knowledge of those accounts. But I did have one thing: I knew the history of our partners’ companies.
Over the years, I had routed hundreds of leads to our partner companies. But in this new territory, I didn’t know a single seller at those companies. That was terrifying.
So I started from scratch. I begged the partner team for my territory aligned seller contacts at multiple partner companies. Some helped. Others “had to check on that.”
So I hit the pavement with tremendous focus. Every coffee. Every lunch. Every happy hour. I was building relationships from ground zero with my aligned partners. It was tedious. But within six weeks, I had a solid network of trusted partner sellers.
And with every inbound lead I received from marketing or my MDR, I looped in my partners immediately.
That’s when the flywheel kicked in: Give. Get. Sell. Repeat.
I now had a pipeline from inbound and my partners who were bringing me in. My deals closed faster and they were larger. My partners were co-selling with me. And somewhere in the middle of all that grind of account mapping, spreadsheets, being blocked by ineffective partner managers.
PartnerTap was born.
Because I didn’t just want to fix this problem for myself. I wanted to fix it for every seller out there.
No more spreadsheets. No more waiting on partner managers. No more chasing partner contacts that don’t match your patch. No more wasted time on people who will never help you close.
No more meetings with partners who don’t align on your accounts (I had too many of these to count)!
So yes, thank you. To the leader who made sure I knew I was being left out.
I love you and I’m grateful for you. Today, I’m publicly thanking you, because you helped me see something no one else saw. You lit the spark for a category no one had built yet.
And that was the moment the stakes changed for me. That moment lit the match, for PartnerTap, and the Fempire Ecosystem that would follow years later.