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The Partner Channel Podcast

In each episode of the Partner Channel Podcast we will focus on a channel leader’s experience, wins, and challenges. We'll also dive into their vision on the future of the channel ecosystem.
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Now displaying: January, 2017
Jan 30, 2017

Joseph Ulrich, Team Leader for US Channels at Hyland Software, joins me, Jen Spencer, on The Allbound Podcast to discuss channel engagement, training partners, and what may or may not be the reason why 80-90% of Hyland's customers are acquired through channel sales.

Hello, Jen. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

We're glad to have you. So, Joe, tell us a little bit about Hyland and about your technology OnBase. I know when I was doing my research before bringing you on the podcast, I'd type in Hyland, and I'd see OnBase come up. So share a little bit about the organization and the software that your company creates.

Sure. Happy to do so. So how our software works is we're the developers of OnBase, OnBase is our product, and we're headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. A lot of times we get the question of "what is OnBase?", people hear the word, they do Google searches and things like that, and they're not really sure what it is. Just in the simplest forms, OnBase is a single enterprise information platform for managing content processes and cases within our organization. All of the content an organization may have - maybe it's paper documents that are scanned electronically, or electronic fields into a line of business application - OnBase stores all that information in one central database and then presents it to the users when they need it. So that's what OnBase is, and Hyland software has been around since 1991. OnBase is the only thing that we developed and again, we've been doing it for a number of years now.

I know you've been at Hyland for over 12 years. So, has all of that time been in the channel division?

For the most part, it has. When I first joined Hyland, I was brought onboard to join the channel team. After my training concluded - every employee that joins Hyland goes through weeks long training to have a base understanding of the software - an opportunity came up at our government team, one of our vertical industries that we support. And a specific opportunity came up there for me to transition into that because they had an opening. I'll be quite honest, I didn't know much about the government space at the time, and after about six months in that role we were able to really bring on another resource of ours. We were able to hire one of our prospects who we'd been talking to at the state level, so a state CIO actually joined our team. We found out that she could do the job much better than I could. So then at that point I rejoined the channel, and then for the next 10 years or so I have been an account manager working with a number of our partners. Within the last couple of years, I've primarily been focusing on the partner recruitment. When I was an account manager, my territory was primarily in the upper Midwest states, states like Illinois and Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota. So really what I tried to do in terms of the travel involved - most of my travel seem to be between May and October of the calendar year - I tried to avoid those areas as much as I could during the winter months.

Getting back to your original question, I think that other than for about six months, I've spent 12 years of my 12 and a half here in the channel. That is correct.

So you mentioned that you're really focused now on recruitment and those activities that are associated with uncovering and welcoming new partners. Has your partner recruitment strategy changed much over the years, or is the essence basically the same?

No, I would say that it has probably changed quite a bit over the years. When we were first founded back in 1991, we had a need to really expand our presence fairly quickly and try and gain as much market penetration as we could. Any partners who are family, we affectionately call Team OnBase and really what we were looking for at that time were those partners that were capable of a broad range of capabilities. That was vitally important to us because again, we were just trying to expand our reach and expand the name of OnBase. A lot of these included not only our traditional partners but then some OEM organizations as well. As I mentioned before, we're based here in Cleveland, Ohio, so we did a really good job of getting a solid foundation of partners here in the Midwest. So we really did a fantastic job of selling OnBase solutions throughout the Midwest then. A lot of the partners who we brought onboard at that time were growing their businesses right along with us, and OnBase became one of their primary solutions that they were selling to their customers. More recently, I would say that we've become much more strategic, not only from a geographical perspective but maybe more so in the offerings and the specialization of the partners that we're looking for and who we want to add to our Team OnBase. What we’ve realized along with our partners is that having niche offering really allowed us to put a much more laser focus on our prospects and deliver repeatable solutions to them. We've got partners today that specialize in a wide variety of vertical industries, and over the years we have built OnBase solutions that meet needs for those specific industries. So the partners that really I'm focusing on today and talking to are the ones that either have expertise in a specific market, or they may have another business offering that complements our OnBase solution, or, they could offer a competitive product and they just are looking to replace that with OnBase. One of the things that is nice to have is a product that is an industry leader and is well known now for organizations looking to implement an information management solution. So for those partners that we're talking to that are looking to really replace something that they have today with OnBase, it really comes in handy. So really that's what we're looking at today, it’s getting much more laser focused in on types of partners, and what the offerings are that they have that we may not have a lot of coverage in today.

Do you find that you have potential partners coming to you more, just having this established organization and partner program, or are you still out hunting for specific types of partners to fill those needs?

Well, we actually do a lot of both. We do get a fair number of incoming calls for people that want to partner with us. It may be sometimes that they run into us in terms of a customer they are trying to sell and a customer that they might be a mutual customer of ours as well, and so they will reach out to us in terms of what it takes to be a partner of ours. I would say that every week we're getting a fair number of those types of inquiry calls coming in, but what we're trying to do is be much more, again, strategic, in terms of the partner community that we're trying to go after, and who it is that we're focusing on. I would say we’re doing more outbound and more laser focused outbound activities than we are incoming.

If you're looking really broadly, how big of a role does your channel play in the overall company's sales and marketing strategy? Is it the majority? Is it a minority? 50/50? Can you give us a little bit of a sense of what we're talking about when you're looking at that go-to-market strategy?

Are you talking more on the revenue side? Or number of customers? Things like that?

I mean, yes to both. Some organizations are very channel heavy, or even are committed to being eventually 100% channel in terms of how they go-to-market, others are really just starting to dip their toe into the water, and their partner sales that come in are on a much lower end. I'm just wanting to get a sense of how large of a role the channel plays for Hyland Software.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. Talking first from the revenue side of things, from a channel perspective, it's probably very close, maybe 60-40 I'd say, where 60% of our revenue comes in from the channel, and 40% comes in on our direct efforts. From the standpoint of just sheer number of customers that come in, we're averaging - since my time here again, for 12 years - probably adding between 500 to 700 customers per year. And it's probably upwards more of the 80% to 90% of those customers are coming in on the channel side. Just doing the math, I think it indicates that - there's obviously more of those, but the revenue might not be quite as large - our channel reach is much greater than our direct reach in terms of just the presence out there. We are definitely bringing in many more channel customers than we are on the direct side.

Well, that's the nature of the channel, right? You've got this geographically dispersed volunteer, we like to say workforce, people that are out there kind of selling on your behalf. So, you manage these recruitment activities, are you also involved in the onboarding and engagement activation of those partners as well?

Yes, absolutely. One of the great things in terms of my experience and working with the Hyland channel for as long as I have as an account manager, I think I have a pretty good idea of what it takes to be successful as a partner. So, I am heavily involved in our ramp-up program as well. Once a partner signs onboard with us, what we do is we walk them through a very structured process in terms of introducing them to the resources that are available to them now that they're part of the Team OnBase community. Then, we walk them through training. Training is one thing that we have found is vitally important for us and getting our partners up to speed quickly, and that's not just from a technical standpoint, but it's also from a sales training perspective too. We offer multiple opportunities for the partner's sales reps. to get up to speed on our product, our solutions, our selling methodologies and the demo itself. There's a lot of different things that we walk through in terms of the training from a sales perspective to get them up to speed. Then, on the technical side, one of the things that we do is offer tremendous opportunities from a training perspective. I don't mind bragging about this a little bit - but on our education services team in our company, Hyland Software - we have 41 individuals that are assigned to our education services department, and bar none they are one of the best in the software industry, I'd put them up against anybody from an education services sampling. They do a tremendous job of offering on the technical side, certifications to our partners. I think right now there are five different certifications that our partner on the technical side could achieve, and that goes from installing our software, or working with our APIs, or a number of other different areas that they can get their certification. So to get back to your original question, yes, I'm heavily involved on the ramp-up side because the training opportunities, and getting them up to speed, and getting them comfortable with the OnBase software solution is critically important to us in order to get them up to having a little bit more self-sufficiency, in terms of providing our solutions and showing those to their prospects.

This is great. First of all, the fact that as an organization you are providing resources to those partners is pretty significant. There's a lot of companies that partners are sort of left on their own, and only really paid attention to if revenue comes in, right?

Sure.

Then the second piece of what you shared about providing technical training on the product, which is critical, but also providing sales training, how to sell, what the Hyland methodology is as well, honestly, I don't hear that a lot. I talk to people in the channel all the time, and this is one of the few times I've heard a channel professional talk about training the partners on how to sell the solution, not just on the nuts and bolts of the solution. So kudos to you guys.

Well, thank you. Actually, since my time here we've been doing that the whole time, so that's really the only way that we know. So that's encouraging to hear, I'm glad to hear you say that. And one of the things to just expand on that sales training opportunity a little bit is, there's no cost to the partners either, other than their travel and expenses. There's no registration cost to actually attend any of our sales training, and we do two of those in-person here in Cleveland, we actually have one later this month. So the two that we do in Cleveland are two-day events with five or six different solution tracks that they can go to, and learn how to sell the software, what the different solutions are and what the latest enhancements are to the software itself. And then to supplement that, we also offer three times a year two-day courses online that people can attend as well, and it goes through a lot of the same material, but in a webinar fashion. So it's two full days offered three times a year, again, how to sell the OnBase solutions.

Excellent. Some of the people that we talk to and some of the listeners of this podcast are in a similar boat, in that they have some established channel programs, but quite a few don't even yet have channel programs. In fact, they might be tuning in listening to this because maybe a member of their board has said, "You really need to think about channel." Or their executive team has looked at their numbers and gone, "Okay. We're doing 10 million in ARR. We want to be at 100 million, what's the way to get there? Channel is a strategy, let's look into that.” So for someone who's really just starting to explore selling through channel partners, what are some of the things that you think they should consider before they jump in?

Well, that's a good question. I think really one of the biggest things that I would recommend is trying to be in alignment with them as much as possible. Each year we do this with all the partners that we have, we try to agree upon some set goals and objectives together, because that way you are on the same page with your partner in terms of what the expectations are, or setting quotas and the goals internally here at Hyland. It is extremely critical to know what our partners expect for them to do. So again, I think setting agreed upon goals and objectives together, and then there might be some other things that I look at too. If there are organizations out there who's just looking to bring on a channel program, think about it from a partner perspective, what size pipeline are they going to need when they first start offering up your product or solution? What does that look like maybe in terms of, number of opportunities, or look like in terms of sales revenue? If there's a specific number of net new customers that they can realistically expect to close in that first year or if they have an existing customer base how many of those customers can they sell into with add-on orders? What would that existing customer penetration rate might be?

Something else that I would really strongly have them consider is making sure that you, as an organization, have the infrastructure to support a partner program. Some of the questions that I would throw out there around that would be, do you have the sales resources available to support them? Internally here at Hyland, every partner is assigned a specific account manager, they have an inside support sales rep as well, they also have a solution architect that's assigned to them as well, to help with demos or customization of demos if need be. We also have vertical expertise, resources that are available to the partners as well. Make sure that you have training resources available to train them properly. As I've said before, we think training is critically important to us and that's one of the things that sets us apart from some of the other organizations that we compete with. And maybe just one or two of the other things that an organization might want to think about with your product or solution is does it have a price point that's actually going to work with bringing on a partner channel and is there enough margin within that? We've been doing this for a long time now, so I think we're pretty stable from that standpoint, but then also think about the vertical makeup of your existing customers. Maybe one recommendation I would make is seeing if there are any partner organizations out there that might have a vertical niche, a vertical market or presence that you don't currently sell into. It could be something that gives them an opportunity to be unique to your organization, but also you extend your reach as well. So, those are just some of the things I think that organizations should probably think heavily about before pursuing a channel program or for those that are thinking about it.

Those are some really great recommendations. What's been the most challenging aspect of actually growing a channel program?

I think it's finding the right partners, really. One thing that we do here really, really well is we do an awful lot of due diligence when we bring on a new partner, because we really want to ensure that it's going to be a win-win for both organizations. There are some partners that we've had over the years where it just was not a good fit, and recognizing that early is key as well, because we don't want to be a drain on their resources trying to to get OnBase online for them, but we also need to look at our internal resources as well. What we’ve found is, our most successful partners succeed when their owners and their executives are all in on building an OnBase practice. If we have top of mind with the principals at that partner organization, then we find that we're going to have the most success. So having the mind share within the partner community has been a challenge at times, but we've been making a lot of great progress with that.

Well, this has been so great. I appreciate you sharing so much of what you're doing at Hyland. It sounds like it's working really well. I love hearing this. Before I let you go, I have a couple of more personal questions I always like to ask all of my guests, just so we can get to know you a little bit more. Are you up for it?

Yeah, absolutely.

Alright so first question I have for you, what's your favorite city?

Got to be Cleavland, Ohio.

Very loyal.

I know.

Okay, question number two, are you an animal lover, yes or no?

Yes.

Okay, I'm going to ask question 2B then. What kind of pets do you have? Or do you have any pets?

We do actually. We have a ten-month-old puppy. I never thought my wife would ever want a dog, but she just fell in love with this one breed and we bit the bullet. The three kids - the three boys - that we have are very, very helpful.

Oh, that's great to hear. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC?

PC.

Number four, Uber or Lyft?

That'd be Uber.

And last question, let's say I was able to offer you an all expenses paid trip. Where would it be to?

I would say Maui. I’ve never been to Hawaii and that's on my bucket list.

Maui is beautiful, and it's a lot warmer than Cleveland right now.

I'll take your word for it.

Well, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your channel insights with us. Joe, if listeners would like to like to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do so?

Sure, LinkedIn is the best way and my Linkedin contact is Joseph M. Ulrich, and its U-L-R-I-C-H.

Wonderful. And we'll be promoting this on social media and people can go ahead and click right through and find you really easily. So we'll make sure that we make those connections as well. Again, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you all for listening and I look forward to the next episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Alright, thanks Jen.

Thanks for tuning into The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at Allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone.

Jan 23, 2017

Keith Lubner, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Channel EQ, joins me, Jen Spencer, on The Allbound Podcast to discuss determining company readiness for building a channel, and common pitfalls to avoid once your channel exists.

Thank you, Jen. I’m really, really glad to be here today.

 

Well I’m excited to have you here because Keith you’ve been in the channel world essentially your entire professional career, over 25 years. And you’ve worked with some of the most well-known channel organizations like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, some pretty heavy hitters in the channel space. I’m really curious to understand from your perspective what are some of the most significant changes that you’ve seen in channel organizations over this time period?

 

Interesting question, Jen. Yeah, I sort of date myself sometimes when I say that I’ve been in the industry for over 27 years. I’ve had our company for over 10 years now and there are a lot of really significant changes especially within the last 3-4 years in particular. The rate of change is absolutely increasing and it’s really the channels ability to keep up with the change which is one of the most significant things that we need to keep an eye on. Let me outline really two particular areas that we’ve seen a lot of change; one is internal and one is more external. When we look at channel organizations and I worked with a lot of the big ones as you indicated, but also a lot of startups, and I’ve seen a trend over the years in that internally years and years ago I call a static or  reactive mentality is what most channel organizations had, simply because of the function of how the marketplace was working. People within the vendor and people within the partner, they managed themselves, they managed partners and deals in a very reactive way. Pipeline management, recording, those were sort of the tasks that they were trying to accomplish, their roles, the functions that they were undertaking. Now there’s a dramatic shift into these organizations need to be more what I call “adaptable”. They need to adapt to their surroundings, they need to adapt to the customers, because the customers quite frankly are a lot smarter and they move a lot quicker.

 

So is it the customers that are driving this change and causing these organization to look ahead as opposed to always looking behind?

 

That’s a great question. Customers are a part of it, but really the root cause of it is technology itself. Technology itself is allowing a couple of things to occur. Number one, especially in the SaaS space environment you’re looking at a complete seismic shift in the way customers are buying now, and you’re looking at what we call the customer journey to be a lot different than it was years and years ago. And what that is causing a lot of channel organizations to have to do is they have to change themselves and be more adaptable to the customer and their journey, and the journey is different than it was before. Customers are going into more pilots now and they're going into more smaller projects and they are able to execute a lot faster. Customers are also able to get to a lot of information around a vendor and the offerings a lot easier than it was before. Now that vendors lost a lot of control they need to - especially from a sales perspective - adapt to the environment of that customer. Where there is the problem is that there’s a huge gap in skills. There’s a gap in skills from what they were years and years ago from being static or being reactive, to what they have to be now and being adaptive.

 

So, Keith when you say “they” need these skills, let's clarify who are you speaking about?

 

I’m talking about the vendors themselves, the vendors themselves and their partners. So, you’ve mentioned the big ones I’ve worked with; Oracle and Microsoft, Cisco, etc., any sort of vendor around that stream there, big or small, they need to adapt their internal people. Okay? The partners themselves they have to adapt as well because their interacting a lot of times with the customer as well. So, they need to be adaptive and not reactive in nature, sometimes it’s a really difficult shift for them to make.

 

Oh, I can imagine, absolutely. You mentioned an internal and external force or changes; did we cover those?

 

No, we didn’t haha.

 

I want to make sure we get to that goodness.

 

Yeah no we didn’t. The external force is actually the type of partner that is now needed. So, let’s look at the classic definition of a VAR. Twentysomething years ago a VAR - a value-added reseller - the business model was pretty cut and dry. Resell a vendor's’ product, make money on that margin, maybe on a little bit of services, and have maintenance on top of it. NOW the definition of a VAR is very different. That value add component has to take on a number of different variations, from services all the way through, and the revenue model for that type of partner is a lot different now as well. When you look at selling subscription based offerings they’re not really focused so much, nor should they be, on selling the subscription base, they need to rely on the vendor to do a lot of that, because in the end that partner is not going to make a lot of money, they’re not going to survive if they rely their entire business on that. So what they have to do is they have to look at the combinations even more so now. They have to look at how they can influence the subscription based sale with the vendor, so they need to partner a lot better on that front, but they really need to look at everything else around it that they really quite frankly can add value to. Externally the change has been in how they have to go to market and the type of partner that they are.

 

It was interesting talking about this value-added reseller and the change of this partner. You recently wrote this blog “The Value of a Third Party” and what I love about what you wrote is that too often executives see partners merely as just another source of leads, which we know they can be of course. Here at Allbound we generate leads from partners, but what additional value can partners bring particularly to these rapidly growing subscription based types of companies?

 

Great question, so really three areas. Services as in implementation services is obviously one component, and a partner to really make significant and a really nice margin if they take on that mentality, that’s one. But there are two other factors that sometimes partners don’t really look at where they can add a lot of value. One is brand awareness for the vendor, because they are essentially an extension of the vendor and the vendor's’ sale force in the entire marketplace. So the vendor needs to view them from a couple different perspectives, not just a selling organization but one that can extend the brand accordingly into the marketplace. And then the third thing is, and this is very important, in fact we did a project years ago when Cloud was just starting to come to the forefront around what do partners really need to do in the Cloud and how to transform. One of the findings of the study we did was that partners truly need to focus on domain expertise and become an expert in a certain area, whether that area is industry specific or geographically specific. What I’m getting at is the more the partner can be an expert in a certain area it’s better for the vendor, because that vendor can then rely on specialists that can impact a business a lot better because of that expertise in that particular area that that business may be in, so think financial services or manufacturing or health care. If the vendor is looking to implement a solution into one of those areas it's best to have somebody who is an absolute recognized expert in those areas that they can rely on, because the value they’ll bring to the customer is around the configuration and around how to best utilize the technology etc., and no vendor can be all things to all people and all customers, so they need to rely on the partners to be able to do that more so.

 

You know before I was here at Allbound I had worked at a software company where we had about 90% of our revenue actually coming through our channel. We had this pretty robust partner program but what I always found interesting was that we spent a lot of time and energy trying to ensure that our partners didn’t run into each other and that our partners had these sort of unique experiences and we didn’t have these exclusive types of partnerships. We didn’t openly talk about partners to each other, we didn’t bring them all in the same room together, we kind of didn’t want everyone to know we were dating someone else. And then a few weeks ago on this podcast I had Jared Weise from Cisco, and he was talking about the way that Cisco’s partner ecosystem really has evolved and how today in order for them to truly be successful in serving their customers they need to be actively creating opportunities for those partners to engage with each other to ultimately serve that customer. It was awesome hearing that from him, I’m curious in your interactions with the companies that you’re working with today, that Channel EQ is working with, are you seeing that more of an ecosystem type of approach to partner programs or do we have partner programs still operating in individual silos?

 

It’s interesting, and he’s absolutely right. We’ve done work with Cisco and its entirely critical for an ecosystem like Cisco to be able to have their partner community collaborate with one another. The answer to your question is yes, we’re seeing this and it’s a really important component. Three years ago when we were doing this study around Cloud and everything one of the key factors was to teach partners how to partner with other partners, so helping them build their ecosystem out, and that’s exactly what I think Jarrod is referring to. If they can create that then they can come to market with best of breed partners that don’t compete with one another per say, but just focus on one particular area and are just rock solid good at it, and that ultimately is what’s best for the customer. So yeah, we see that partnering mentality starting to rise up if you will.

 

A lot of the people that listen to the podcast don’t have partner programs yet. We talk to people all the time who and they’re thinking about it or considering it as a next step, maybe they’re a software company and they’re doing about 10 million in ARR and they’re ready to for that 100-million-dollar mark, and they think building a partner channel might be a way to do that. How do you determine if and when a company is ready to build a channel partner program?

 

That’s a really interesting question. What we talk a lot about is triangulating the truth, it’s a mouthful, triangulating the truth around three primary areas. Number one the technology has got to be rock solid. Technology has to be rock solid because people can bring technology to market a lot sooner than ever, ever before, so you need to compete. And if you need to compete for the mindshare of a partner it's really critical that this technology is just so good and better than anybody ever can have, that’s number one. Number two is commitment, you need to have an absolute commitment from the executives in order to make all of this happen. If you have that commitment then the executives are going to make the strategy and bring the strategy through a lot easier than you ever could. And then the third area is primarily around investment. This is one of the most critical ones, so if you have the first one checked off, great, if you have the second one checked off that’s very important because commitment from executives to make anything happen is important, but the third area, investment, is really where the rubber meets the road. Is the company willing to invest in the systems, the processes, and most importantly - from our viewpoint is - in the skillsets to make the channel happen. You can have the best product in the world and we’ve seen it time and time again, and you can have executives saying “yeah we are committed to doing this” but when it really comes to putting up for all this to happen it’s the investment they’re not willing to make. If they’re not willing to make the investment what will happen is the channel will just go very, very slowly and just won’t happen. So, those three things are really what we see as critical, like I said we call it triangulating the truth, if you check off those three points of the triangle then your chance of success goes up tremendously.

 

I think those are really great point and I can underscore that last piece. When I’m talking with individuals and they tend to be individuals, I mean I’m not talking about the Cisco’s of the world, I’m talking more about the 10-20-million-dollar software companies, people I might meet at a conference or people I might engage with on social media and you build that rapport and there trends to be this one man or one woman show that is supporting the channel and is responsible for recruitment, enablement, for onboarding. What always baffles me is the amount of revenue, the sheer quantity that these individuals are able to drive for their organization and yet they can’t get approval to have a piece of training content created, to add additional personal resources, to really grow and really enhance their channel program and it leaves me scratching my head, I mean what is going on? Can you shed any light on this, working with executives and working with channel professionals, why does there seem to be this massive gap in resources for the channel?

 

You know it’s interesting and I’ve seen it from every different angle over the course of my career, and you are absolutely right it’s head scratching, its mind boggling. And it’s really a lack of knowing and sometimes it’s just really needing to educate them more on here’s exactly what it takes. Even then after that education, I mean that’s why people hire us, because we’ve been doing this for so long, and even then, they're still not commitment and their still not willing to invest. So right away I think you know, you guys do this as well, you set that expectation right up front “here’s what it’s going to take”. We use the phrase “it’s a journey, it’s not an event”. A lot of times what happens is executives come from a sales driven environment, which is okay but its direct sales driven environment, so they’re used to owning the entire process. They’re used to owning each customer, they’re used to owning all of that and when they get into the dynamic of a partner channel they don’t understand the concept of leverage and letting go and understanding building around somebody else to get to the end customers, and they still think in the direct mentality and they think it’s more of an event. So, what happens a lot of times is that they find a customer, sometimes you know with a partner offhand, they get the customer, they sign the deal, they get it all done and they think “wow, this is easy” and they think it should happen like an event. And it never happens that way, they may get lucky in the first partner, but it never happens in the end, they don’t understand that it’s a journey to get to that point and the journey has to entail investment, has to entail skill development, has to entail processes, has to entail systems, has to entail all these different things in order for it to truly, truly work. So, this is the age-old problem in the channel and the people who want to build channel programs, and some people get it and some people want to invest and some people understand that mentality and others don’t, and the others that don’t never will. It’s where you and I will scratch our heads until the end of time because we know what it takes, and in the end the fruits of the labor are so much better than anything else but it’s hard to get that through to somebody and get them to understand that.

 

Besides this concept of just under resourced, what are some of the other mistakes you see executives make in the channel, maybe they’ve established a program and things are working okay, they’re chugging along, but what are some of the pitfalls the things our listeners can try to avoid?

 

Focus on systems, the processes and the people. The lessons are always keep an eye on those three particular things. Make sure you have systems, make sure you put the processes around the systems, make sure you have people aligned with the processes and the systems. If you keep an eye on those three things you’re fine. What happens and there’s a lot of mistakes that can be made, but what happens is the eye is taken off of one of those three things. So for instance we see it a lot, we see people go into implement systems and they put processes around that and then they just expect their people to operate efficiently and it never happens that way, they don’t train their people, they don’t get it up and running, they don’t enable them effectively. And then you can say the same thing around other areas, they get some people that are just rock stars when it comes to the channel and they understand it, but they don’t put the process and the systems in place to help support them, they just expect them to go out there and just magically build the whole thing. So the mistakes are they take their eye off of those three components, one or the other or a combination of two.

 

 

You don’t need to say what the name of your organization by any means, but I think it’d be great to hear a success story, it would be great to hear about an entity that you or your team have worked with that have just an awesome happy ending channel story? Do you have something like that you can share with us?

 

Oh, I have a ton of them actually. We need to make this podcast last for a long time, haha. Let me give you some real recent ones, I’ll give you two examples. So, the last couple years the transition of the Cloud has been a real difficult transition for partners in general. Right? So what we focused on from a channel perspective was not just building out the channel, we do that all the time with people, but this was a younger channel they had some components to it and what they wanted to do was enable their partners - they had a Cloud based offering – enable their partners to better understand how to sell in the Cloud basically, and how to sell subscription based offerings. The key to all of that was we had to understand basically where are they at now, their current state, and where are they going, their ideal state. Once we understood that we understood the gaps that were associated with getting them there and then what we did is we turned around and established a set of 30 tools basically, sounds like a lot but you’ll understand where I’m going. Once we had these tools assembled that focus on these different areas, then what we were able to do was take each partner that this vendor had and were able to run them through what we call “the maturity model”, help them understand where they stood as it relates to effectively selling Cloud solutions. What was their maturity in sales for instance, what was their maturity in marketing, what was their maturity in operations? And it was a scale and once we understood where they stood on the scale then we had the tools that we developed aligned to that. So therefore they were able to take a journey and very systematically start to do one thing after another. What I mean by one thing after another for instance is how do they ask better discovery questions as it relates to a subscription based software or a Cloud based software, what are the questions they need to ask and how can their salespeople ask those questions better? Very elementary tactical three things that they could do, and what happened was that they were able to close deals faster, they were able to find more customers because they started to go through the marketing part of it and understand how to market better, and their overall business became a lot more effective and efficient. Alright, so that’s one scenario with a vendor doing this. Now another one is around the concept of what we call “adaptive partnering”. So with adaptive partnering, that was one of the first things I mentioned in this podcast today is that it’s a problem, organizations are having a problem adapting. So we developed this workshop for somebody and we put it into the Channel EQ methodology in the platform if you will. We went in and we taught the vendor organizations, the vendor organization in this case was actually sponsored by two, a distributor and a top, top, top, very top big vendor that I can’t mention, but it was sponsored by them. And we taught these principles to all of their partner managers and we got partner managers to shift their old way of thinking into a new way of thinking with using this methodology of adaptive partnering. The result was absolutely mind boggling. What happened was one of the partner managers, and there’s a lot of them, one of them came back to us within a week and said that by using the techniques they were able to get from the workshop and reinforcement mechanisms that we put in place that they were able to find another partner. So they were able to recruit another partner, particularly value proposition better, ask the right questions of that partner, cement the relationship with that partner and in a weeks’ period of time they were able to get $250,000 worth of business from this partner by doing this.

 

In a weeks’ time?!

 

In a weeks’ time. Now do we get those results from everybody? No, I use that as an outlier. Right? Because I’m stunned and I have the quotes and I was stunned as well, I was like “you’ve got to be kidding me”. Now when you peel the onion back it was a new partner forum, they had them on the radar screen, but what happened was they used our techniques, they used the adaptive partnering and they hit them at the right moment with the right information and the right techniques and the right tactics and all this fell into place. I’m not saying everybody that comes to us is going to find that result or else I think I’d be retiring soon. What I’m saying is an outlier that’s pretty substantial as far as changing from the old ways to the new ways and what they have to do. Even if it’s not $250,000 in one week but if its incremental over time that’s what we all want in the end.

 

Well that’s such a great story of really aligning the people, those skills, the processes, all together, everything that you’ve been sharing and talking about, that all kind of coming together with one objective and then being able to success so it’s beautiful, that’s a great story.

 

Thanks, I like sharing it.

 

So Keith, before I let you go, you’ve been answering some pretty serious channel questions but I don’t like to let anybody leave the podcast without going through my speed round of personal questions so that we can learn a little bit more about you. So are you ready to answer some quick questions about yourself?

 

Absolutely! Let’s do it.

 

Okay. My first question is what is your favorite city?

 

Favorite city, Philadelphia.

 

Oh, that’s a good one, I haven’t heard that one yet.

 

Let me back that up. Favorite city that I lived in is Philadelphia. Favorite city number two is Charleston, South Carolina.

 

Alright, awesome. Question number two, are you an animal lover? Yes or no?

 

Yes.

 

Do you have any pets?

 

We have multiple pets. We have 18 horses, we have 6 cats, but we don’t have any chickens or goats.

 

Do you live on a farm?

 

Yes, I have a farm.

 

Question number three, Mac or PC?

 

Both.

 

Question four, Uber or Lyft?

 

Uber.

 

And question five, let’s say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be?

 

All expenses…wow this is a really great question that I don’t often think about. All expenses paid trip Kiawah Island, South Carolina.

 

Have you been there before?

 

I have.

 

Oh, okay so somewhere you’d like to go back.

 

I’m a golfer so it has the best of both worlds, it has the beach and it has the golf.

 

Got it. Well Keith it’s been so great getting to chat with you and listening to you, getting your insights and hearing some of these amazing stories that you’ve experienced at Channel EQ. If listeners would like to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to do so?

 

Sure, I’ll give you two, keith@channeleq.co or go to our website there’s a form there just fill the form out it will send it right off, I get copied on them as one of the founders we always make sure we’re in touch so I get copied on something like that. So, either send me an email directly or go there.

 

Alright! Well thank you so much and thank you all for listening. I hope you’ll join us next week for another episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Jan 16, 2017

Joe Barnes, Head of Channels at Cohesity, joins guest host Matt Hensler, Vice President of Customer Success at Allbound who is filling in for Jen Spencer, on The Allbound Podcast to discuss how to build and maintain a successful partner program from scratch. Welcome Joe.

Thanks Matt, I appreciate it and I hope Jen feels better soon.

 

So, Joe, I’ve mentioned your role and what Cohesity does at a really high level, but tell us a little bit more about the company and give our listeners some additional background on you.

 

Sure. So, a little about the company, Cohesity was founded about three and a half years ago. We launched our first product in general availability in late 2015, so we’ve had our product on the market for about a year. As you’ve mentioned, it’s a secondary storage platform that really is designed to consolidate a lot of the traditional data center architecture for companies. We have a platform with a single user interface, a single platform that can consolidate and archive Cloud workloads, test and development workloads, analytic workloads, and all of these different pieces of infrastructure that companies have to manage now can be greatly simplified and reduced into a single product platform with is Cohesity.  We were founded by a gentleman named Mohit Aron, Mohit was one of the technical founders of Nutanix, a successful startup here in Silicon Valley, and prior to that he was one of the lead engineers at Google that helped create Google’s file system. So, a long successful track record in building products like this, now we’re out to revolutionize the secondary storage market. A little bit about my background, I have been in the industry my whole career pretty much. About half of my career has been at partners, and the other half has been at different storage vendors, most recently with EMC and prior to that I was at NetApp. My responsibility at Cohesity is to set a channel strategy and develop a channel program that will allow us to scale into the next billion-dollar storage company.

 

You mentioned EMC and you mentioned NetApp, I think I also saw MicroAge on your resume.

 

Yeah, that goes back a while.

 

So, you’ve seen the channel and partner programs from a lot of different perspectives. Give us a sense of what you’ve took from all of those experiences that you’ve threaded into the channel program at a startup like Cohesity.

 

It has been valuable to have experience on the partner side of the equation to really understand what a partner goes through; trying to manage multiple vendors, trying to figure out what the best technology is for their customers, and constantly having to keep up with all the different technologies and innovations as well as the different relationships they have with different vendors. So, having that insight into what would make it easier for a partner has been extremely valuable in this role. The partners want simplicity, they want predictability, they want an easy path to adopt a new technology, help understanding how to be successful selling it, and that was where I saw Allbound’s partner portal was very complimentary to what we were trying to produce for our partners in terms of giving them an easy path to adopt our technology and understand how it supports and benefits customers and how they can get up to speed and be effective selling it.

 

You mentioned that Cohesity first came out with its product late in 2015. Was there a partner program in place at all when you joined Cohesity earlier this year, or were you building it from scratch?

 

Pretty much building it from scratch. They had a partner agreement and a handful of partners signed up before I started, but they really didn’t have a formal strategy or channel program defined. So, that was step one, creating a basic channel program that we could launch, we called it the “revolutionary channel network” and we launched that in February of 2016, and really the goal at this point - these were the early days of Cohesity and I’m going to fondly remember these days as time goes by -  there was no sense in over complicating the channel program at this stage. We were starting with entirely new relationships with partners, every partner is effectively equal and they are starting from no relationship with Cohesity, and have to learn the product, learn how to sell it, start to win business… and over time our program will mature and we will start to add different partner tiers and different ways to reward the top performing partners with additional rebates and co-ops and other such benefits.

 

Got it. So based on the experiences that you brought into developing the program, you touched on simplicity, what were some of the key themes of simplicity that you wove into the program? What were the things you tasked your team with doing to make sure partnering with Cohesity would be a simple endeavor?

 

I think the first step in any new relationship is establishing trust. Trust in our people that are going to be calling on the partners, establishing trust in the company and that even though we are a new company we are financially strong, we have a viable product and we are here building for the long term, and then ultimately trust in our product and our vision, the three of those have to be accomplished first. Then we move into how to help the partners be successful finding and qualifying new opportunities for us. Trying to do advanced training or teaching partners how to implement our technology at this early stage doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you have a lot of business there to focus on. So, the first step was the strategy in terms of keeping it simple, let’s give partners an understanding of the differentiation we provide and the value we provide to their end user customers, and then give them a real easy path to learn how to sell our product and how to look for new opportunities. At this point we are focused on simplicity, but our platform is really revolutionizing the way people architect their data center. It’s not an easy simple concept, it needs some degree of explanation and training to even have a discussion with the customer about what this would mean for their business and why it’s so completely different from the way they have approached it in the past. So, helping getting the partners up to speed quickly on what can be a very complex message and discussion, and trying to make that very simple for them to at least start the conversation. We aren’t going to turn our partners into experts overnight, it’s going to be a process and it’s going to take some time. We want to give them just enough to be very good at sniffing out those first opportunities and then coming to us quickly when they think they have one, and let us get involved at that point with our sales team to do a more detailed qualification and have a more complex discussion with the customer to figure out if there is a real opportunity there. So, in terms of your question about how do we try to keep this simple, we want to be sure we aren’t overwhelming our partners especially in these new relationships. If we try to give them too much information too quickly it starts to make things overly difficult and the adoption rate is going to be lower than we would want to see.

 

So, this first year, I would imagine in addition to building that early pipeline, it’s been about expanding your number of partners. What’s been the experience for you to try and recruit and sign on partners who already have a lot of technology on their line cards, new technology in a slightly different value proposition then they’re used to, tell us what your experience has been in convincing these overwhelmed partners that they should add another technology to their mix?

 

Yeah, that’s a great question and very relevant to what we are doing and what we face. Every solution provider that’s a part of our channel today sells multiple products from multiple vendors, and keeping up with that is no easy task for a vendor. Some partners sell literally 400-500 different vendors products, some are more focused or specialized and sell maybe 30-40 different vendors products; either way we’re competing with the status quo and the encumbrance with over half our relationships with those partners, and it’s a heavy lift on our shoulders. We’ve got to show those partners they can make money selling Cohesity and we’ve got to show them there’s a big opportunity and a reason to do it, but it’s on our shoulders to do the heavy lifting and to help prove that concept. It’s really not until we help a partner win two, or three, or sometimes even four or five new opportunities or new customers with Cohesity that it starts to pick up momentum on its own. You start to see the partner being willing to start to make investments back into the relationship to try to accelerate the relationship. You start to see the “me too effect” in the partners, where we start to see success with a rep or maybe two reps and you’ve got a partner with maybe 20 sales reps, and as soon as the rest of the reps see them making money with Cohesity or they see how easy we made it for those partners, or how big the deal was, then they want to do the same thing, so then they take an active interest in trying to learn our product and get involved and start to find opportunities. Winning a partner to me is very much similar to the technology adoption lifecycle, where you have early adopter customers and then mainstream, and then as the product matures it becomes a laggard in the industry and so on. There’s only a certain portion of the industry that’s going to buy into a new technology or an emerging technology, so Cohesity faces that with our products. Then what we face from a channel standpoint in developing a partner is very similar. We’ve got to start working with a partner and start looking for those really early adopter type agents at the partner, sometimes its salespeople, sometimes engineers - mostly engineers - that are a little bit more progressive and eager to pick on an emerging type technology and start to learn it and put themselves out there with customers and look for opportunities to sell that product. Once we have more opportunities to work on with these partners the enablement almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because they have interested customers they need to learn more about it so they can talk effectively with those customers about it. This is where having a great portal really comes in handy, because we’ve now got 125 partners, this will probably grow over the next couple years to 200 or 250 partners, and we’ve got to have a way to effectively allow those partner reps and engineers to get up to speed at their own pace, at their own desire, any time they are ready to put the time in to learn. We’ve got to make it easily available and accessible and they’ve got to be able to get to what they need at their fingertips, so way more than my team would be able to cover. We just did a recent analysis of our top ten partners in the West, and our top ten partners the East U.S, and looked at the number of contacts we were focused on enabling, just on the top ten customers in the East and West and it was almost 1,000 individuals, reps, engineers, executives and the partners that we need to try to bring up to speed and increase the knowledge about Cohesity. If we applied similar numbers out to the 125 partners we are in the 4,000 or 5,000 people that we would have to try and enable, it’s much more than I’m going to be able to staff for and effectively do with my team on a manual basis.

 

You don’t have 1,000 channel managers that can spend one-on-one time with every single one of those contacts?

Not yet, and probably not ever, haha.

 

We do encounter questions from prospects or customers or just people out in the channel about how to staff and build out a channel team. You built one from scratch so what are some of the key components you would suggest people get in place when it comes to staffing a channel organization?

 

That’s a great question, and probably other heads of channel are not going to love my answer because we as a company have been fiscally conservative with our staffing at this point. We’ve only had two rounds of venture capital funding, so we are not in the full scale out mode yet with the business where I can just hire out all the resources I’d like to on my channel team. I have a very lean and mean team, it’s myself, I have a channel director for the West U.S., I have a channel director for the East U.S. and Canada, and I have one over in Europe, and it’s literally just the four of us. I’m pulling in help from my marketing team as needed, from my sales operations team as needed, you compare that to other startups in our industry and typically they start with almost double the number of channel people, usually there’s a channel marketing person and more channel managers involved to help get this thing started. I am proud of what we have accomplished with such a lean team. We wouldn’t have been able to do this and grow in the last ten months to 125 new partners - break a record for the most revenue of any storage startup ever – we wouldn’t be able to have the success we’ve had if we didn’t have some good partners and tools in place, I give Allbound’s portal a huge compliment in being a key piece to this.

 

We do definitely position the system as providing some bandwidth to those lean teams like you were describing, so we are glad that we’ve been effective in that capacity. You mentioned some other departments that you reach out to for resources. Tell us a little about the culture of the channel for Cohesity. Would you say that the entire organization is aligned to that effort you’ve got in play to grow through channel? How do those teams help resource you to be effective at delivering the content and the training and some of those other materials you mentioned you needed to enable those thousands of contacts as it grows?

 

Yeah, there’s a common saying in a lot of companies that every employee is a salesperson for the company, it’s your job to help sell and make the company successful. If you’re not the salesperson you probably support the salesperson, so you’re effectively a part of the sales team in some form or fashion. I like to think of it as not only is everybody a salesperson, but everybody is a channel person. Cohesity is committed to becoming 100% channel, and we are only going to be successful if our partners are successful, and if our partners are successful they are going to help us drive and scale the business, keep the hypergrowth rate that we are predicting going. We are looking to be the next billion-dollar storage company on the market and we want to get there faster than anybody has before.

 

One of the interesting data points that I came across about your program - given the number of partners you’ve added this year and the limited number of resources you have at your disposal - I’ve read that 83% of your partners have active pipeline or closed one business with Cohesity. That level of engagement and activity is not common, but I think everyone that has a channel would aspire to reach that level of activity and engagement that early on. What do you attribute that level of success to?

 

When I realized that I’d be getting started with a relatively small team I realized there’s only so much ground we can cover. There are only so many partners that we can actively focus on enabling and getting up to speed, so it was critical we didn’t dilute our focus too much and try to work with everybody equally. From day one, even though we were starting with no partners I didn’t view partners as all equal. Some partners are going to gravitate towards our technology and have an early adopter mindset and be able to take on our message and do something with it and bring it out to evangelize it to their customers quickly. We really need to give priority focus to those type of partners. Right? If I step back and I look at the big partners we worked with at EMC or NetApp, or just other large and successful ones, I do have a number that are on my wishlist in the future, that I’m sure at some point if they're not calling on us we’ll be calling on them at some point, but probably with many of them that’s going to be when we become a more mainstream type of technology. What I need is the fastest path to revenue that I can find right now through the channel. I need partners that give me more scale and reach and that are going to help us build pipeline, and are going to introduce our technology to new customers, so I got to find those partners that are ready to take action quickly. That was the first cut at how we looked at creating a focus. The second thing we did was we didn’t want to over saturate any one sales territory. We found we could be more successful having just two or three strategic partnerships in each market. So once we got to two or three of those early adopter type partners we really stopped the recruiting in those markets. We want to put our effort in those cities into those strategic relationships. I would rather spend all day with one of those partners than spend a day having meetings at five or six different partners, because we’ll be able to accelerate the adoption and the learning much faster that way. So, having a limited focus on the number of partners in each market, and making sure those we are focused on are the early adopter type partners has really been the key to success and allowed us to accelerate our benefits. Now, from the partner side, partners love hearing that their going to have somewhat of an exclusive and that they’re not going to have to compete with 10 or 15 or 20 that they typically run into in their marketplace. It’s a way for them to differentiate their story knowing that they’ve got a better opportunity to be unique to their customers, to offer them something no one can offer also helps create a more margin rich opportunity for them.

 

So, there’s a quality over quantity philosophy?

 

Absolutely.

 

Sounds like you sort of have this new technology and grant some level of exclusivity and that was part of the value proposition that you took. When you look out into next year 2017, when you start to expand and scale the program what are some of the priorities that you’re going to take on as you go into the next fiscal?  

 

That’s a good question. I think the attitude right now is “if it’s not broken don’t try to fix it”. I'm eager to mature the partner program, I’m excited about when we get to the point where it makes sense to have a higher tier of partners, and we will add a new tier of premium partners, be able to create new rewards for those partners. We’ll get there at some point but there’s no sense trying to force our way into that and create complexity that doesn’t need to be there. So, we’re going to stick with keeping things simple, keeping the focus. The model of trying to stick with two or three strategic partnerships in each market where we have a sales team seems to be working really well, and that goes back to the productivity metric that you mentioned that 83% of our partners have either won a deal already or they're working on an active opportunity with us. We’ve got a very engaged partner channel, and it’s mainly because when we go into a market and hire a new sales rep to cover that territory we go into that market and look for those early adopter partners, and because they’re early adopters they’re more likely to start a discussion conversation right away and find an opportunity. We’re closing and winning our fair share of opportunities, so as long as we get the opportunities identified and into the pipeline we’re going to help our partners be successful and show them they can make money with us.

 

Joe, you’ve seen channel programs at the larger scale with organizations like EMC, you’ve started to build out your own program with Cohesity and you’re seeing that take off. For any of our listeners who are planning to start or build out a partner program for the first time, what are the top three tips you would tell them that they need to focus on to get started?

 

That’s a great question. I think having focus is absolutely critical. I think about what would have happened if we didn’t narrow our focus immediately on day one when we started this. Thinking about where we wanted to do business, who we wanted to do business with, the number of partners, the type of partners, but constantly keeping a narrow focus allows you to accelerate your results where you’re focused. And it’s a challenge in a fast growing startup to keep that focus. It’s almost a monthly or at least every other month exercise I've got to go through and step back and say “okay we are getting just naturally busy again, are we taking away from our focus, what should our focus be, what's working, where can we double down, what can we abandon or shift our available resources to better activities?” So, focus is number one for partners. I think if you're committed to building the channel or growing through the channel you want to make every person in your company feel like they can play a role. Take advantage, especially in the early days, of every available resource with whatever amount they can contribute. It’s funny when I go back up to our headquarters for a couple days, everyone sees me coming and they know I'm going to leave there after a day or two and they're going to have two or three things they’re going to be working on for the channel, it may not the main thing they were working on before but it's great. And I go out of my way to recognize people for helping, and I really do appreciate the help they give us and I make them feel like they’re building something. Include the company, don’t just limit your work to just your channel team, that would be number two. Number three I think is to look for ways to have leverage. The sooner you can put leverage in place for your team the better you’ll be. I look at the example with when we quickly realized we needed a really solid portal to be able to offer our partners as a way to give our partners means to get to collateral, information to get up to speed, training information, how to register deals and how to contact us quickly if they think they’ve found an opportunity. It couldn’t just be a phone call or email to the channel team or two or three us, we would quickly be a bottleneck to the business which I didn’t want. So, realizing that that was a priority because it takes time to know what you want in a portal and to put one in place, especially as a new company, but putting tools and resources like that in place helps give you leverage in your channel business, and that leverage is critical to keep driving the pace of the growth that you want.

 

Jen always closes out the podcast with what she calls the “Speed Round”. I’m going to pepper you with five questions and just give me your first thought response to them.

 

Let's go for it.

 

What’s your favorite city?

 

New York.

 

Animal lover? Yes or no?

 

Yes.

 

Mac or PC?

 

Oh, newly converted Mac actually.

 

Uber or Lyft?

 

Uber.

 

All expenses paid trip to where?

 

Italy.

 

 

Alright, so Joe I see a lot of your activity on LinkedIn, but for those who might be interested in reaching out to you in follow up to this podcast what's the best way for our listeners to connect with you?

 

Yeah, I would say look me up on LinkedIn, my contact information is posted there. If anybody is interested in learning more about Allbound and wants to hear about our experience and what we did or how great it has been working with the Allbound team I'm happy to share. I think it’s an important thing to go out of your way to help the people that are helping you, and the amount of help Allbound gives me and my team and Cohesity has been outstanding and I am happy to share that. You’ve already had me talk to a couple prospective customers and it's really been fun, because I enjoy getting to meet other people that are in heads of channel roles or channel marketing roles where they are trying to figure out these different challenges because it's valuable for me to, I always learn something from them during those conversations.

 

We are trying to build an ecosystem of collaborators and we are glad to have you as one of ours. Thank you for joining us today Joe, and thanks everyone for tuning in!

 

Thanks for tuning into The Allbound podcast. For past episodes and additional resources visit the resource center at Allbound.com, and remember Never Sell Alone.

Jan 9, 2017

Asher Mathew, Director of Strategic Alliances, and Liz Anderson, Senior Director of Partner Marketing at Avalara, join me, Jen Spencer, on The Allbound Podcast to discuss partner support and recruitment strategies.

Asher, can you tell us a little bit about what you do specifically at Avalara as Director of Strategic Alliances. Explain a little bit about Avalara’s channel program

ASHER: My role at Avalara is to manage a group of our high performing partners. And Avalara is a little unique because our partner program is built around referring rather than reselling. We have a very very small number of partners who we allow to resell for different reasons, but most of our partners are all referral agents and so it will be interesting as we expand on some of the questions through this podcast around the model that we’re using versus some of the other companies that may be listening to this podcast

What is your role in particular? You’re Director of Strategic Alliances, what does that really mean?

ASHER: I have a group of 8 alliance managers who work very very closely with some of our highest performing partners. And we worked with them - we’re basically account managers top to bottom in everything that we do with our partners.

Liz, how about you? Tell us a little bit about your role on the partner marketing side?

LIZ: As you mentioned I’m Senior Director of Partner Marketing at Avalara, and my team’s focus is around creating programs that allow us to monetize our relationships with our partners and ultimately scale the channel and all of that is done through turn-key marketing.

Great. Now, you’re both really involved in partner marketing, sales enablement, partner development. You’ve both been involved in these areas for a while now. I’m curious about what are some of the biggest shifts you’ve seen over the years. Maybe even, what are you doing differently today than you were say 5 years ago?

ASHER: As we look back at the channel, Liz and I have been in the channel almost over 10 years now, but as you look back at just the Avalara channel, we’ve narrowed it down to about 3 years of focus, one accountability, 2 automation, and 3 predictability. And accountability became the big focus for us, because just like other channel companies, we were asked, “hey what is the contribution of the partner business to our overall business” that forced us to look better at tracking and then look better at tools to help us analyze and prove that contribution, so ultimately where we ended up with that was we got away from anything influence oriented. So any metric, any report that had to do with anything partner influence, we got away with and we really started to focus on the source of that referral, and I know this is one of the hardest way, actually it’s probably the hardest way to look at the data because you have to look at it very very closely to figure out what’s happening with the dollars that you’re spending and what’s the outcome. So we had to take all of our dashboards, re-do them to track source of that opportunity and start stack ranking against our peers, start tracking progress towards our plan all through this lense of forced opportunity, versus influenced opportunity. Liz, your team manages tools Do you want to elaborate alittle on the automation side of things?

LIZ: Yea, thanks Asher. As he mentioned we’ve both worked in the channel for some time, and my personal self, I’ve been in the channel in some capacity for over 15 years, and when I think back about how partners were managed when I entered the channel, it really was an act of god because automation tools just didn’t exist to manage partners and help bridge that gap to ultimately allow us to scale programs. And so it was usually a one on one relationship, manage everything, you know Asher mentioned we have a team that manages these partner relationships, but in the past that’s all we had. And today that’s no longer the case. WE’re really able to use automation tools that helps us, to not only to scale our program, but also keep our partners in the loop, 24/7, anytime they want to engage with us. When I think about what we’ve done differently with automation, today we’re not only relying on those one on one relationships with those more strategic and top partners, but we also leverage this automation to scale those programs to reach what we call the long-tail partner. For example we have a partner portal, that is really the central hub of our current partner engagement, so that partners know they can go out there and get anything they need to engage with us. And when we first launched this portal, we only had information out there for how they referred a lead, and assets they could download. But there really wasn’t anything compelling to draw our partners back to this portal, to want to come back often and many times over. And so, now, when we have continued to enhance that portal, we have everything from leads to opps to deals, commission information. Everything on the front is integrated with our CRM we even have campaign information out there, and demand gen tools that really allow our partners to co-brand campaigns in less than five clicks. We plan to continue to enhance the portal and make it that one stop shop and leverage automation with tools that are readily available today, to enhance that experience for our partner make it available for them when they want to engage with it, and ultimately make it a great user experience, and something they are going to want to come back to in the future. As we continue to build this it out, is in the near future online training and being able to track that. So we can better understand where our partners are and segment them so we can nurture them based on their engagement with us. To circle back around to the point that Asher made, and the last point on the big shift we’re seeing around predictability Asher I’ll turn it back over to you, to talk about how it’s becoming more important to effectively manage and grow our channel.

ASHER: Once we’ve tackled the accountability piece and moved over to the automation piece, the question really is asked of us was, “how do you predict what a partner is going to do for Avalara” and so we sat down thinking, man that’s a tough one because, that requires us to go back and look at the data even more introspectively and then look at the behavior of those partners. So we came up with this methodology, that if our VP of Sales is building in Salesforce internally at Avalara, then we should go out and figure out how to build a virtual salesforce, and that required us to not really look at the account level, but look at the people level like, the nth level of that account and see what’s happening at that level, what type of conversations are happening, what type of referrals are taking place, if people are stuck in having those conversations what are we doing about that. So to start off we had to start org-charting those partner organizations. We had to track who’s trained and how many times were they trained. We had to track how many referrals we’re getting and then how many of those referrals were going to be closed out as deals. And so, those are the three macro level shifts that we’ve seen at least at Avalara, and I know speaking with some of the colleagues in the industry that they’re also tackling with some of these three things and to mainly accountability, automation, and then predictability. And, we’re not done yet, because this is a costly inter-WHAT-process, so I’m pretty sure when we all meet at the Allbound conference next year, we’ll actually talk about some other things that we’re focusing on, but these are the big things we’re focusing on today.

What I’ve heard both of you really talk about is this tracking, but then also the knowledge transfer, making sure you get the right information out to partners, and then you’re extracting the best information from them, so you can make better business decisions. And you’re in a fairly technical business, really doing task management automation solutions, so, I imagine there’s quite a bit of education that’s going to come when you’re onboarding a new partner. Can you share some of the strategies you’ve implemented for successfully onboarding partners? And even share with use the content you’re creating to educate partners so they can be most effective and you’re going to be able to get that ROI you’re looking for.

LIZ: Sure Jen, I can address that. You know, transactional task management, is very complex and because of that we think about our channels...referral channel, we strive to make it as easy as possible and as simple as possible for our partners to identify and refer prospects through our onboarding process. You know we don’t want...

Liz, I want to bring it back to you for a second, what are some of the strategies that you’ve implemented to help ensure that your team is actually building long-term relationships with those partners? Because you go through all of this work to get everyone onboarded, you’re segmenting, there’s so much going on. Just like a SaaS company worries about customers churning, that’s a lot of work that you’re putting in, a lot of resources you’re putting in to bring on those new partners. What are you doing to make sure they’re happy and staying with you?

LIZ: ...

Partners who are going to be successful are going to be happy. It comes down to well how do they determine success. I can see how you’re going to be able to best figure that out through having authentic relationships with those partners. Can you share how you support partners? Are there any promotional campaigns, promotional programs, materials, any marketing tools, things you regularly create that you feel help partners be more successful and be happy?

ASHER: We used to be a partner organization that believed in helping every partner all the time everywhere, and that model just didn’t scale. And so, over time, we’ve learned to better support our highest performing partners and then provide a self service experience for the rest. And when we did that, it was really important to come up with a solid framework that we’re going to operate against, and then Liz’s team comes in and provides some of the materials and the marketing tools but the framework that we use here at Avalara is very simple. We have an incubation stage, we have a monetization stage, and we have a scale stage. And the differences between the three stages are that when you sign up as a partner, we’ll go through preliminary marketing, preliminary sales enablement, preliminary value proposition matching and you’ll be launched. Once you’re launched you’re in a monetization stage, because we want to see how much business you will naturally do with us. And so if you are matching up with some of the higher tier partners that we have, you’ll automatically move into the “scale” segment and there you have a dedicated alliance manager (somebody on my team) that works diligently with you to be your single point of contact and we’ve seen some tremendous returns. We at Avalara worked off of the X to 3X to 10X model, and it’s something that I remember even in the earlier days (about 5 years ago) that this is what we thought of, and we’re like if we can just take a partner from X to 3X in revenue, and then if we could take them from 3X to 10X, how cool would that be? And it was an idea that we then took and we officially put a framework in place. Liz, do you want to share a little bit about the high quality partner promos you’ve put in place? I wanted to explain the framework so people understood what we’re working in, and then how you support them.

LIZ: When I think about the program’s and tools that we create, we kind of put them into four buckets. Sales enablement being the first bucket. We create a lot of tools as I mentioned briefly throughout the conversation today, one of those tools is a battle card, which is how a partner identifies a prospect. We’ve taken that battle card one step further and taken it away from just asking customers if they have a sales technique to how do they naturally bring up sales tasks in their conversations, so they can ultimately position themselves as a thought leader. People buy from people they trust, and sales tasks can be a really tough topic to have a conversation around, and so we want to help our partners naturally have that conversation. We have also created objection handling documents and I haven’t seen many of these created in the past in channels but they really do help our partners come up with how to respond to objections when they start having these conversations with their customers so that they know how to handle that prospect and get them on the right track again to having that conversation with us. We also create a lot of through-partner campaigns that are turnkey. You heard me mention early on that we have this demand gen tool through our partner portal, that our partners can essentially create campaigns in less than five clicks. And so, you know the second piece that I kind of bucket from the programs we create our turnkey partner marketing programs that partners can easily send out whether they're creating an email or sending out an email with a call to action that has a landing page where they can download an asset, or maybe they want to put some content on their website. We provide that all for them very easily through our turnkey marketing program. Thirdly, we also offer business development in marketing funds so that we can do custom campaigns with our partners, that are maybe more geared towards something they want to do that’s different than our turnkey programs. One of these programs we do is something called easy as pie, where we literally will send and an apple pie to our prospects through our partners to essentially let the customer know that hey managing sales tasks can be as easy as pie. Take a call from us and we’ll let you know more. So we used a lot of funds like that with our partners to help them get awareness out there and try and get that warm introduction with their customers. And last but not least, we do a lot of to-partner programs, and we’ve been talking a lot about segmenting our partner reps based on their interaction with us, who's been trained, who is referring leads, who has been closing deals. And we want to make sure that we nurture those partner reps based on their engagement with us, so that we’re ultimately giving them content that’s applicable to them and their sales cycle, or their sales engagement with us. And so we offer quarterly updates typically via webcast we offer online and in-person trainings, I also mentioned in the near future we’re hoping to offer trainings through our portal that are on-demand, and we also close out those to-partner programs with incentives and SPIFS so that whatever we’re teaching them, we’re then ultimately motivating them to respond and ask now so that they apply what we’re teaching them so that they can really get the most out of our partnership and provide the best value to their customers.

When it comes to building a solid partner program, we know recruiting the right partners is definitely going to be key, what have you both found to be an effective recruiting tool or strategy?

LIZ: If you read any book or talk to anybody who’s had a really successful channel having a great product always helps the recruit the right partners, through more traditional tactics such as attending trade shows and feet on the street and door-knocking based on who you’ve identified you want to partner with and cold-calling. However, Avalara has really taken a recruitment to the next level through identifying which partners and customers are advocates for our brand and leveraging those relationships to amplify our message and ultimately recruit partners for us. Some of the ways we started to incorporate this into our recruitment strategy is first and foremost though events. Avalara attends hundreds of events every year. And we are starting to be more proactive about working with our partners who are also at these events and identifying mutual customers that we can promote their success with, as an example or finding a partner that’s their that’s had great success with us. Asking them to maybe be in our booth or wear a t-shirt that talks about automating sales tasks. This summer we had t-shirts made for some of our tradeshows that say “keep calm and automate sales tasks - #AvalaraCalm” and helping those people that are not Avalara employees but are advocates for us, amplify that message for us and do recruitment for us that way. Similar approach to webinars, we’ll typically find customers that we can use to leverage on webinars to talk about our story to help them understand how easy we’ve made life for them since they’ve automated through our solution. We also are working on developing programs where we’re showing more appreciation for our partner reps for being advocates of our brand. One of the the things that we haven’t rolled out yet so I don’t want to talk about it too much, is the concept of an A-Team which are these partner reps who are really going above and beyond and referring a ton of leads our way and talking about us every chance they can get, and closing a lot of deals with us and we want to make sure figuring out ways to call out special attention to them not only in our partner community but also in their organizations, so we’ll continue to develop that program and roll that out. Those are some of the ways that we can use partners and customers to be advocates for us through our recruiting strategies. Strategically however we’ve also identified another recruiting approach that is near and dear to Asher’s heart.

 

ASHER: So this is basically going after the gold first, is what I call it and it’s a syndrome because when ISPs like ourselves, they get into an ecosystem or a channel or an industry or a category, they look for the largest player in that space and say “we’re going to go after that person with everything we’ve got, or that partner with everything we’ve got to recruit them and get them into our partner program.” While that works , it does show success, it takes a very long time. What we’ve done at Avalara is actually go after the emerging partners and keep an eye out for some characteristics like, for example, if you have an emerging partner whose employees are all ex-Oracle employees, then you know that that partner is ultimately going to do something well, and so, what we’ve done successfully at Avalara is look after emerging partners the same way we look after our larger partners, and then when we signed up those emerging partners and started to grow like 30-50% year over year, those larger partners that we hadn’t signed up, also signed up with us too. And then that’s a strategic mission that we had at Avalara that has worked really well.

Jan 2, 2017

Jarrod Weise, Partner Content Manager at Cisco, joins Jen Spencer on The Allbound Podcast to discuss partner enablement with content marketing and support from both sales and marketing.

 

Tell me a little be about your current role as Partner Content Manager at Cisco

I’ve been at Cisco for a little over two years. Until a few weeks ago I was focused primarily on the data center and cloud part of our portfolio and really go-to-market with our partners. Partners are over 90% of Cisco’s business, so, when it comes to very successful digital marketing we will not be successful without partners. I’ve always been a data center geek, I love the big expensive heavy iron that sits behind the glass, I’ve spent most of my career doing that, mostly because it was the really hard stuff that nobody in marketing wanted to touch and I’m a geek at heart so I love doing that kind of stuff.  And then it occurred to us through this transformation we’ve gone through was there’s really a bit of a need for a roll that can look across a lot different personas and a lot of different topics and solutions to kind of understand what the partner lense would be. So a few weeks ago I moved into this role as the Partner Content Manager for the Americas; a healthy amount of my focus right now is the US but I do take a lot of conversations with my Canadian counterparts, I have not completely learned all the Spanish I need to for LabTam but I have some great relationships there and we’re off and running. So a big part of what I’m doing now is looking across the portfolio but really through a content marketing view with and through partners to understand; what are their needs, how do they tell those stories, but how do they tell those stories with Cisco and are we delivering what we need to, to them for them to be successful. They tell their own stories, they create their own content but so much of what they do is with Cisco at the core that we’re trying to inject more relevance there to broader audiences than we have in the past.

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