Spotlight on Lauren Helstab
Lauren Helstab, Founder of More Than One Way, is a speaker at Women in Alliances annual summit. Lauren is the founder of More Than One Way in this article learn more about her.
Why did you agree to present at the Women in Alliances Annual Summit 2025?
As a woman who’s been fortunate to have many, very strong women leaders throughout my career who invested in me, taught me what they know, and helped me get to where I wanted to go — it’s really important for me to pay it forward. They say ‘rising tides lift all ships’ and I’m proud to be part of a community focused on learning and supporting women so we can all grow together.
How did you get into partnerships?
I cut my teeth in the advertising industry in Toronto working in various agencies developing creative campaigns for large CPG brands and retailers for several years. Then, one day, my dad encouraged me to check out a company in my hometown, saying ‘this is going to be a unicorn’. About a year later, in 2016, I joined Shopify’s growing agency partnerships team — and the rest is history! Now, together with Michelle, we help other SaaS companies activate their partnerships and drive high-impact, strategic partner programs.
What are the biggest challenges?
Showing ROI is one of the biggest challenges partnerships professionals experience. Not only because we often lack the data backbone to support our programs, or track individual alliances, but strategic alliances impact so many parts of an organization, it’s really difficult to tell the broad story.
One individual strategic alliance could improve market trust and awareness of your product or service, while reducing CAC due to increased brand awareness along with sending referred business your way, and while reducing time to value in sales, and increasing deal size, and improving close rates and reducing churn. That same alliance could attract you other similar partners that you’d otherwise have no chance of closing, and create a defendable strategic advantage for your business for the next 5-10 years.
Those are all massively valuable but, how do we track that accurately? And how do we then resource the company to double-down on creating even more of that same value?
What attributes make you good at your job in Partnerships?
Data-loving. I love data, I just always have. It’s natural to me to want to see quantitative data to help me inform decisions I need to make. In partnerships, it’s a very common challenge to show the ROI of our programs, partners, and our own work — to do this, we need to develop stronger data-backbones into our programs so it helps that I’m a bit of a data-nerd.
Zoom out, zoom in. We wear so many hats in partnerships: We’re part product manager, marketer, sales exec, Cx rep, RevOps, and data analyst. Being able to do a bit of all of it really helps you develop strategic partner programs, well-rounded partnerships, create impact without a ton of resources (the classic challenge in partnerships), and be a better collaborator with internal teams. Then being able to move from that 360 view, or the 10,000ft view, and execute in your 100ft view is equally important.
Perseverance and patience. The value we create with partnerships are long-game wins. They take consistent effort over extended periods of time (compared to sales for example), and ultimately we’re pairing with other people and companies where their priorities and decisions aren’t within our control. It’s just a reality that we have to navigate the ebbs and flows without losing motivation or steam.
How important do you think partnerships will be in the next five years?
IMHO? Very. With economic uncertainty, potential recession, and the changes in top-of-funnel acquisition and growth marketing, partnerships are becoming an evermore important GTM motion. Plus, we know that partnerships are a long-term game, so it’s actually the investment we see over the next 1-2 years will pay off majorly for companies over the next 2-5 years and into the future.
