The overlooked part of growth is the pause. A promising partner registers, opens the training, means to return after lunch and vanishes into the soft upholstery of everyday life. The dashboard calls this a stalled lead. Alexandra Najaryan gave it a more generous interpretation: people can be interested and still need guidance. That modest distinction became the working idea behind a revealing public chapter of her career.
In October 2019, Najaryan launched the amoCRM Expert Partners program. The offer invited entrepreneurs, consultants, marketers and systems integrators to build businesses around the CRM, earning commission for sales while expanding the company's reach. The original team had two people. Their remit, as Najaryan described it, ran from strategy and marketing through sales, support and design, with even a little coding added to the heap. One imagines the job description was less a document than a cry for help written in a shared spreadsheet.
Yet small teams have one advantage: reality reaches them quickly. There are fewer meetings in which to protect a weak assumption. Najaryan and her colleague could see exactly where partner candidates lost momentum. Registration did not guarantee a complete profile. A complete profile did not guarantee training. Training did not guarantee an exam attempt. Enthusiasm, that famously perishable resource, needed a system around it.
01 / Name the frictionThe spreadsheet before the software
Najaryan began by mapping the partner journey in Google Sheets. The stages were deliberately plain: registered, qualified, started training, attempted certification, certified. Each label turned a vague complaint about conversion into a visible moment. Once a pause had a name, the team could decide what a useful nudge might look like.
This is the useful bit hiding beneath the CRM vocabulary. A pipeline is often treated as a forecast with colored boxes. In Najaryan's hands, it became an editorial calendar for attention. Someone who had just registered needed orientation. Someone who had begun training might need encouragement. Someone who narrowly missed the exam needed help, not another generic welcome email. The stage changed the message because the stage changed the person's problem.
“Even if potential partners are incredibly interested, life gets in the way, so you need to gently guide them along.”Alexandra Najaryan
The word “gently” does important work. Marketing systems are easily tempted by pressure: more sends, louder urgency, another countdown clock behaving as if midnight has personal feelings. Najaryan's playbook used restraint. No more than six text messages a month. Conversational language and emojis. A clear action for each stage. Above all, every message had to justify the interruption by offering something useful.
02 / Watch behaviorThe blind spot in the channel plan
The team's first channel assumption was sensible and wrong. They thought partners in the United States would favor free chat tools such as WhatsApp or Skype. Instead, text messaging was the neglected preference. Najaryan called SMS a blind spot. It is a fine phrase for the space between a marketer's tidy theory and another person's actual habits.
So the team changed the system. SMS follow-ups were connected to pipeline stages and time-based triggers. If a candidate remained in one stage for seven days, an appropriate message could go out. Email stayed in the mix for people who preferred it. Channel choice became less an article of faith and more a response to evidence.
Treat every channel belief as a testable assumption. Observe where people reply, then build the journey around their behavior rather than your convenience.
This seems obvious in retrospect, which is where obvious ideas prefer to live. In practice, organizations accumulate channels the way kitchen drawers accumulate mysterious cables. Najaryan's approach was cleaner: use the place where the conversation already works, set a reasonable frequency and give each message one job.
03 / Design the handoffLet the machine remember
Automation handled timing, but the team did not confuse consistency with understanding. When a candidate replied with a question, notifications allowed a person to step in. The software remembered that seven days had passed. A human could discover why.
That division of labor remains a central lesson in the case. Machines are good at noticing a condition and executing a rule. People are good at ambiguity, reassurance and the small improvisations that turn an exchange into a relationship. Najaryan built the system so each side did the work it could do well.
“We were already sending emails, but it wasn't really working. It was time to try something new.”Alexandra Najaryan
Within three months, the two-person team doubled the number of certified partners and increased response rate by 34 percent. Across eight months, the wider partner network doubled. Those figures carry the satisfying click of a case study, but the method matters more than the applause. The team found a bottleneck, described it precisely, changed the channel, limited the frequency, personalized the next step and protected the human handoff.
04 / Follow the operatorFrom partnerships to the C-suite
Najaryan's later titles make the 2019 project read like an early operating thesis. She went on to lead global partnerships, serve as global marketing director and, by 2024, appear publicly as Kommo's chief marketing officer. The sequence is telling. Her route to marketing leadership ran through the mechanics of recruitment, enablement, messaging and conversion. Brand and operations were never distant cousins forced together at a wedding. They shared the same spreadsheet.
Her academic listing adds another clue to the shape of that career. Najaryan studied at the Russian University of Economics named after G.V. Plekhanov from 2014 to 2018. Her public certifications cross managerial economics, online marketing, Figma, web development, data visualization and advanced Excel. It is an unusually practical cluster: numbers, interfaces, messages and how the machinery fits together.
She also lists Georgian and Russian at native or bilingual proficiency, English and Spanish at full professional proficiency, and French at limited working proficiency. For an executive whose work moved from an international partner network into global marketing, languages are more than résumé decoration. They sharpen the daily reminder that words land differently in different rooms.
At Kommo's Partners Award in São Paulo in December 2024, Najaryan spoke about the energy of the gathering and the direction ahead. The setting was grander than the two-person program of 2019: agency leaders, technology companies, prizes, a stage washed in purple light. The theme, however, was familiar. Partnerships were still the subject. Relationships were still the infrastructure.
The change in scale makes an instructive contrast. A partner program can begin as a sequence of individual reminders and grow into an ecosystem with events, integrations and regional relationships. The executive's job changes with it. She can no longer write every message or answer every question. She has to preserve the logic that made the small version work: clear stages, useful contact and quick access to a person when the script runs out. Growth adds distance. Good systems keep that distance from becoming indifference.
05 / Steal the systemA field guide to the messy middle
Najaryan's public story does not require mythology. Its useful details are small enough to borrow on Monday morning. Draw the real stages of a journey. Find the exact moment when momentum fades. Ask which channel the other person prefers. Cap the frequency. Make every interruption valuable. Automate the remembering. Keep a person close to the reply.
There is also a career lesson tucked inside the operating one. Executive range is often built by taking responsibility for the awkward joints between functions. In that first program, the work crossed marketing, sales, support, design and code. None of those boundaries mattered to a partner trying to pass an exam. The candidate simply needed the next step to make sense.
Good operators are suspicious of departmental theater for exactly this reason. Customers, partners and prospects experience one company, even when the company experiences twelve Slack channels. Najaryan's system stitched those fragments into a sequence. The prospect saw a timely message. Behind it sat a map, a trigger, a channel decision, a content rule and a teammate ready to answer.
The numbers also reward a closer look. A doubled certification count and a 34 percent response lift measure different things. One records the destination; the other records renewed conversation. Together they suggest that the intervention did more than produce clicks. It helped people resume a journey they had already chosen. That is a more durable ambition than chasing attention from strangers forever. The program concentrated on people who had raised a hand, then made good on the implied promise to help them continue.
Restraint made the mechanism credible. Six texts per month is still regular contact, but it is a boundary. A value requirement is a boundary too. These rules prevented automation from becoming a license for noise. In an era when software makes sending nearly free, judgment migrates to what an organization chooses not to send. Najaryan's playbook treated silence as part of the design.
That is the charm of the messy middle. It is full of unclaimed problems. Registration happened, certification did not. The email went out, the reply did not. Everyone can see the gap, but someone has to become curious about it. Najaryan did. The gap became a pipeline; the pipeline became a conversation; the conversation became growth.