Everyone Owns Pipeline: Inside Nasuni’s Co-Sell Culture

Ryan de la Parra, Head of Global Partner Marketing at Nasuni, sits down to reveal how a channel-only go-to-market model transforms when a company commits to genuine co-selling. Nasuni's evolution from traditional partner fulfillment to a culture where everyone owns pipeline demonstrates what's possible when leadership aligns incentives across the organization. The conversation explores the real mechanics of partner marketing at scale, examining how AI is being thoughtfully integrated into workflows without disrupting the human relationships that drive ch

Show Notes

Ryan De La Parra is Head of Global Partner Marketing at Nasuni, a file data platform that sits on top of cloud object storage. He joined six years ago when the company was around 100 employees and $35 million in ARR. It now runs roughly 770 people and crossed about $160 million last year, with Vista Equity Partners taking a major stake in September at a $1.2 billion valuation.

Nasuni sells entirely through partners. No direct sales, and never has.

From fulfillment to co-sell

Ryan came to Nasuni from the other side of the table — ten years at PC Connection, a VAR in Merrimack, New Hampshire. That gave him a clear view of what most vendors actually do with their partners, and it wasn't flattering.

"We really utilized them in this fulfillment motion. It was alright, we found a deal, we built the deal, and okay, let's sell it through a partner. And that's all well and good, but it can't be just all that."

The shift he's driven since is from fulfillment to genuine co-sell — finding and building deals together rather than routing completed ones through a partner at the end. That changes what partner marketing is for. His job now is to merge Nasuni's priorities with each partner's own:

"The secret sauce, realistically, is merging your priorities with their priorities."

Measuring a partner program properly

Most partner organizations measure deal registrations and revenue, then pour resources into whoever produces most. Ryan's view is that this quietly narrows your business.

Alongside pipeline and revenue, his team tracks partner engagement: portal logins, campaign downloads, deal registration flow, and movement between program tiers — how many partners climbed out of the bottom tier this year.

The reasoning is about two different kinds of partner:

"You have like, alright, here's the value of a partner. They might not be pumping out the most amount of revenue, but they have a practice that fits into what we're trying to accomplish, and they are able to get us into that one specific area... And then you have the volume players."

Both matter. Optimize only for revenue and "you're going to isolate yourself."

The scaling problem nobody warns you about

Ryan's current challenge isn't winning partners. It's that a partner isn't one relationship.

"One partner who is on the west coast and their California sales department is just a huge Nasuni advocate, but their east coast department doesn't even know us."

Getting from a pocket of advocates to national and global coverage inside the same partner is the work. And the tactic that built the business won't finish the job:

"It really much is hand-to-hand combat currently. But it can't always be hand-to-hand combat. You can't scale hand-to-hand combat. What got us here will not get us there."

His answer is to stop pushing and start listening — restructuring the partner program around what partners say they need, rather than what Nasuni finds convenient.

What "everyone owns pipeline" actually means

The phrase is painted on the walls at Nasuni headquarters, which Ryan is quick to say isn't the point. The point is the ripple effect.

"You're sitting in HR and you're concerned about employee happiness. Employee happiness is what drives pipeline. You're in engineering and you're building a product. Product is what the sellers need."

What makes it more than a slogan is transparency — one of five company values, and one Ryan says every incoming leader has held. Pipeline metrics are shared at town halls. Customers speak at the annual revenue kick-off. User groups feed criticism back into the business.

"Everyone at our company gets that finger-on-the-pulse feeling, and it makes them feel like they have that ownership."

Private equity, from the inside

Asked the obvious question about Vista, Ryan is unusually positive — and specific about why.

"With private equity comes the knowledge of multiple companies. They own a portfolio, and there are companies within their portfolio that do XYZ very good... So that's the strength and the value behind private equity, honestly — you get to understand and learn where your growth areas are."

On the pressure that usually accompanies that ownership, he doesn't pretend the gates don't exist. He frames them through accountability, another Nasuni value, and notes the gates come with backing rather than without it.

AI: pick the lever, then set the guardrail

Nasuni has built a company-wide RAG bot and lets departments run the tools that suit them — engineering on Cursor, marketing on research tools. Ryan's practical point is that AI is now embedded in everything you already own:

"Salesforce has AI, Slack has AI, Outlook has Copilot. AI is everywhere. So figure out which one of your tools you want to pull the levers on."

Governance sits with the CIO and CISO, and Ryan's warning cuts against the usual instinct:

"I think the more controls you put on AI, the less value you're going to see out of it. Understand where your barriers are, and then work within those parameters. But don't put too many constraints on your employees, because then you're just negating the value."

Where the next dollar goes

Asked where he'd spend one more marketing dollar, Ryan doesn't reach for demand generation. He'd build a partner advisory board and localized partner communities — east coast, west coast, EMEA.

"I really want to put a mesh network on the globe and just really pull that partner community tighter together."