Jay McBain, Global Advisor at Channel Mechanics, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss shadow channels and the shift from IT buying power, verticalization (or hyperfocused vectorization), the future of the channel and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Jen: Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, I am Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And today, I'm joined by Jay McBain who co-founded the company ChannelEyes, currently serves as Chairman Emeritus of the CompTIA Vendor Advisory Council and Managed Services Community. He is a Board member of the Channel Vanguard Council, the Ziff Davis Leadership Council, and CRN Channel Intelligence Council. In short, this man knows channel. Welcome, Jay.

Jay: Thanks, Jen, really appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Jen: Absolutely. Well, it's good to have you. And especially, really wanting to get caught up with you and what's going on in your world and I'm sure our listeners are also really interested about five months ago, you took on a free agent status. You said, "Okay, I'm leaving ChannelEyes," which was the channel tech startup that you helped co-found. So catch us up, what's had your attention the last year or so?

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I had spent the last while at ChannelEyes as CEO and they're working on some really interesting stuff around predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. And I think in the next three to five years, most of us in the channel will be using computers to help us do our daily tasks...help us with our daily tasks and get us to the finish line faster. And I think now that the company transitions to a CEO that can better position the company with some of the leading CRM players in the market like Salesforce and Microsoft. And who knows, further down the road, to really make something happen.

Jen: Great, great. So what are you focused on right now as a channel professional in your world?

Jay: That's a great question and I was at CompTIA last week and probably answered the question at least 100 times so...

Jen: I'm sure. I'm sure.

Jay: One of the answers is I spent almost 20 years working at IBM and Lenovo in different channel roles including channel chief roles. And they were always Americas based, either North America or full Americas, and I never really got a lot of exposure to Europe and Australia and Asia-Pacific. And what I've decided to do in the last five months is work closely. I've been to Australia and going back again working with a very large telco there, I’m working with this great company in Ireland which is where I'm sitting right now in Ireland. The company is called Channel Mechanics and they've really looked at the channel management space and they've done some really innovative things. So looking internationally but also looking obviously to work with some very interesting challenges, which I'm sure we'll touch on on this podcast.

Jen: Great. So let's, dig in to some of that. I’ve followed a lot of what you've been writing about specifically around channel, something that you previously called out, is that a large number of channel programs that tend to get stuck in the exact same place. And you wield it down to two key conclusions. So one, that some vendors will simply win because their product wins. And then two, that other vendors will win because they know how to influence the channel. So I'd like to know, what do you mean by that?

Jay: Yeah, this is one of my kind of personal passions and I think it started when I read the book "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. He's got this great chapter early on in the book. I think it's chapter 2, about Paul Revere. What a great connector Paul Revere was in 1776 and why that won the day more so than riding a horse through all these towns, and why the other person who left on horseback that night wasn't successful. And this idea of influencers or connectors and super connectors, when I moved to the United States from Canada in 2009, I looked at the market and looked at the millions of people that participate in the channel and I didn't have 15 years to catch up to the relationships that I had in Canada at the time. So I kind of boiled it down and said, "What is this influence and how would you measure it?" And in 2009, I generated a list of the top 100 most influential people in the global channel and I did it again, actually, about 4 months ago on my blog. And seven or eight years had passed and it's interesting to see people have changed positions and everything else. But it's a very analytical numeric way of assigning scores for people's influence.

And just to give a quick synopsis is back in 2009, I figured out that there are 16 magazines that channel people read. There's 150 trade shows globally that channel people go to. There's thousands of vendors. There's dozens of distributors. There's bloggers, thought-leaders, associations, analysts. When you look around this web of influencing sites, what people read, where they go, and who they follow, it's across different mediums but they're all available. So I took and read every magazine. I wrote down every name of everyone in the magazines. I went to most of the trade shows in my first year and took note of who the keynote speakers, and the advisory council, and the board members, and all the key people at these events. I did the same for peer groups. I did the same for the associations and analysts. And as I came around, I came to about 1,000 names. But what was more important to me is how visible they were across multiple different communities.

In our channel, it's so wide and diverse. But more importantly, it's decentralized. Channel partners don't have the time to go and read 12 magazines. So they tend to focus on one community and at most, maybe two to get their information to reinforce their expertise and to really peer network. And we look at these organizations, there's about 30 of them in North America that they're a part of. And I was really looking at how many people influenced in more of these 30 communities. And really, for me, reach was more important than maybe... that's all I could find out on Google. I couldn't find out how important they were in each community but I could definitely measure their reach.

And so, I just added this really simple spreadsheet, and I just started adding check marks beside each name every time I saw them more than once. And after 1,000 names and thousands and thousands of check marks, I just sorted by whoever had the most check marks. And interestingly enough, in 2009, Larry Walsh, who was long time CRN editor, kind of patriarch of the channel, but he ranked number one and I didn't know who Larry Walsh was but I knew I had to go meet him.

And then, all the way down the list I wanted to meet. And as I met probably 20 to 30 of the top 100 people, the other 70 came rushing to me. Not because I was important but because they sensed that I was doing this and talking to these important people and maybe I was important. But to a connector, they don't want to be left in the dark. So it's really important to them to know what's going on and to be able to kind of stay on the inside of things. So it was kind of really fascinating and over the last seven or eight years, I've written a lot and I've studied the level of influence that people have in the channel and there's a direct correlation between people having a high influence and carrying their company to great new heights.

Jen: I think that holds true, regardless of what sort of industry or what segment of the market you're in, especially from that leadership perspective. I think it's also interesting, we talk to a lot of folks who are not your traditional type of channel organization, not your traditional enterprise IT company. Maybe they're a small or more mid-market size organization, software company, ready to kind of build a channel. A lot of folks are looking at an agency-based program. Upcoming on a future podcast episode, I'm going to be interviewing Pete Caputa from HubSpot who's now at Databox and has assured us that he's building the agency partner program to end all partner programs.

And so when I think about influence, I think about an individual like that. So would you say that this concept of influencing the channel is just as strong in the evolution of where channel is going? Is it even more important than ever? I mean, what is your take on it because looking at 2017 compared to 2008, not that much time has gone by but there's been a lot of change in that time period?

Jay: Well, there absolutely has, and some of the things I wrote about later last year, I call them shadow channels. But I've got this personal belief that your average vendor, their channel program is going to grow by at least 5X in the next three or four years. And the reason really goes back to the customer buy-in journey. And people at HubSpot know this very, very well but over the last 10 years, 90% of all IT decisions 10 years ago were made in the IT department. Makes sense, CIO. And today, it's flipped completely where 72% of all decisions are made outside of the IT department. It's now the VP of sales and marketing, operations, and finance, and HR, and all the way down the line that are making big technology decisions that are business decisions. And what's happening to traditional vendors is sometimes they're not in the room. Well, most cases, they're not in the room. When a VP of marketing like yourself is making a technology decision, a lot of times you don't have the person who's fixing your printer in the room.

Jen: Wait, wait, hold on. Jay, I'm the person who fixes the printer here, so should it be someone else fixing...

Jay: Oh.

Jen: Just...

Jay: That's right. Startup life, you know.

Jen: Startup life. Yeah, I know, I’m sorry, I had to insert that. I had to insert that. But no, no, I agree with you 100% what you're saying, right? So I buy technology all the time and we do have someone here who's responsible for overseeing all technology and he has a zero influence on what I choose to buy to run our sales and marketing team.

Jay: Right. And so, in the sense of if you put yourself under traditional vendor's space and you're trying to install traditional hardware, like you're selling software or other services, and now you need to get in front of Jen Spencer and, you know, who are you using to influence you. You might have somebody from HubSpot or Marketo in the room. You probably have somebody from your industry in the room that's a tech expert on your industry. In some cases, this could be accountants. They could be legal firms. They could be digital agencies. In your case, it might be a digital agency in the room. You could also have other ISVs in the room that play in ecosystems like a Marketo or HubSpot or Pardot or whichever one you play in. They're going to be in there because they know how to drive more leads for a company specifically like yours. You may have a startup in the room that's built with piece of technology and you're going to be one of their early customers so they want to make sure it succeeds.

But you look at the five people in the room and it's not the printer person. It's not the person that installed your phones. So in other words, it's not the IT department. And so, if you're a traditional vendor spending all your time trying to recruit MSPs and solution providers and VARs from days gone by, guess what? You just missed out of a technology decision because your influence isn't in the room when it was made.

Jen: Right.

Jay: Now put yourself in the shoes of...let's talk VP of marketing and let's talk ambulatory care...healthcare clinic, midsized, 50 doctors, in the Northeast U.S. And in the room with that VP of marketing, again, it's probably that person from Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, whatever it is, Eloqua, probably somebody that is an expert in healthcare driving leads for midsized clinics who's had success in the past, with five other clinics of the same size and scope. But these five people are different five people than what the IT department would have in the room. And so, you're not talking about routers and PCs, and you're not talking about, traditional licensing and everything else. You're talking about driving more leads or you're talking about a marketing problem.

And to be relevant, vendors either a) need to train their current channels to be valuable to the VP of marketing in the clinic, which is less likely to happen. It's more likely that they then have to go and recruit and nurture these five other types of partners, and you call them alliances. You can call them whatever you want but the incentive is different, the way you manage them and measure them is different. The entire relationship is different. But the point is, there's so many more rooms that you have to be influencing now that your channel program is just invariably going to grow.

Jen: So, you call these “shadow channels”, and when I think about like shadow marketing, shadow IT, usually, it's a very negative connotation to it. There's work going on that's outside of your viewpoint, that is in most cases negatively-impacting whatever the core function is. But what you just described doesn't sound negative, right? So are these shadow channels, is this the future? Is this a good thing for these organizations?

Jay: Yeah, well, there’s good and bad. And depending on the audience that I talk to, is which one I'll start with. The good news is businesspeople are now making business decisions around technology. All companies are becoming technology companies and all other professional organizations and industry, association, everything else, are becoming technology-based just because that's the way world works. All 27 industries now are pretty much 27 tech industries depending on agriculture, fisheries, or whatever they do. You know, that's become such a big role. So, the world has changed.

And the reason it was called shadow IT or rogue IT is back in the day, where 10%, and then it became 20%, and then 30% of decisions are made by these people who have no idea what's going on with technology and they don't understand security and they don't understand backups and disaster recovery and they're not of the adult in the room which, you know, the CIO or IT department would claim to be. And so they were rogue, they need to be stumped.

Well, the fact of the matter...and these are Gardener numbers, by the way, 72% of all the decisions today are now made outside of IT, so it's no longer rogue or shadow. It is literally the new normal. And the prediction by 2020 is that 90% of all decisions will be made outside of IT. So in 10 years, there's been pretty much a 180-degree turn in terms of where the decisions are made. And this isn't changing. And businesspeople are making business technology decisions and that's the way the world should work. It's been a big boom for SaaS companies. And it's been pretty hard for technology companies and hardware companies, specifically, because they're trying to still find their place in these conversations when these decisions are being made outside of their normal feasibility.

Jen: It makes perfect sense and it's a good opportunity for consultants, for people like yourself to let you go in and really help some of those organizations along this evolution of the way that channel and selling today, tech buyers today has definitely changed.

I want to ask you now about another topic that you've written about, that you spoke about. You talked about channel vectors or vectorization. And you said that verticalization is being replaced by hyperfocused vectorization. So I'm hoping perhaps you can clarify what you mean by that. And then, I want to explore, what today's executive needs to consider as he or she is scooping out plans to grow through channel over the next 5 years, because there are a lot of these organizations that maybe they've hit $10 million in annual recurring revenue and they're looking at, "How do we get to $100?" And they're looking at channel as a way to do that. So what do they need to know from this new vectorization perspective?

Jay: Yeah, it's another example of me making up a word and then all of a sudden...

Jen: I love it.

Jay: It's really good for Google SEO if you actually make up your own word. It's actually pretty cheap, first of all. But all kidding aside, let's go back to the healthcare VP marketing in a midsized clinic. And you're looking at the 5 people in the room and 10 years ago, for an IT provider, it was okay to say, "Hey, I got to move from being a generalist to a specialist." "Well, what are you going to do?" "Hey, well, I'm going to specialize in healthcare." "Well, that's fantastic." So what they do is they go out and read HIPAA and HITECH, and, they get a couple people certified, and they can talk their way out of a paper bag when it comes to patient records and compliancy and even some legal. But again, the world in this journey has changed things for them.

So if you're that VP of marketing at a midsized clinic and you have somebody in your office that says, "Hey, I know a lot about healthcare." You're like, "Well, that's great. That's one of the vectors. What would be even better is if you knew not only healthcare but midsized clinics, so the sub-industry. The fact that you put in a solution for a 500-doctor firm probably doesn't have a ton of relevance to me because I don't have those resources.

So that's another thing. The fact that you installed in Colorado may not be as relevant as it is in New York because of the different statewide bureaucracy and everything else. I mean, there's just that 50 different systems in 50 different states.

So if you start asking these questions, there's actually five vectors. And as a VP of marketing in a midsized clinic, you're not going to ever get that perfect person who has all five. "Listen, I've just done the last five clinics exactly your size, just down the street. I've just done your competitors. They're the guinea pigs. I know exactly what to do. Here's my price. I can get started right away." That would be perfect. That doesn't work.

So all you only end up doing is, "If somebody knows healthcare that's better than not knowing healthcare." I put that in quotes, air quotes. But that's one vector. So, flipping it aside, "I want somebody who knows my business. I want somebody who's been successful in my sub-industry. I want to know somebody who's been successful in marketing. I don't care if you put in an accounting app, or I don't care if you put in an IT solution. I need the drive leads. I need you to be focused on my line of business. I need you to be focused on my sub-industry. I need you to focus on my region." So these are the types of things that you push back on. And if you can get two or three out of five, it's much better than just getting that generalist in the room who might have one out of five, or none out of five.

Jen: I think that's such a good kind of point to make and maybe even to end on here, because we've talked about how the channel is no longer just a channel. It's no longer just kind of a one-way street or even a two-way street. I mean it is a complete ecosystem. The story you just spun about healthcare IT, about being able to plug in to Salesforce to really put that on steroids to make it work for somebody to do their business, I mean that is absolutely our present and our future of the way that sales ecosystems are growing. And organizations that embrace it, organizations like Salesforce, organizations like Microsoft, that embrace that type of channel environment are reaping the rewards of it, the benefits of that in addition to their partners as well. So I love it. I'm glad you invented the word vectorization. I'll have to start using it.

Jay: Great to participate. I've actually wanted to do this since you started. But one of the key things is you asked me to look forward five years.

Jen: Yeah, absolutely.

Jay: Vendors need to look at the toolset that they're using. And many of the tools that they're currently managing the current triangle of gold and silver and bronze partners they have the same program they built 20 years ago, they need to refresh their tools. If they're going to grow their channel by 5X, they need to seriously look at a tool like GoalBot, take collaboration to a completely different level. They need to look at a tool like Channel Mechanics. They need to look at new, fresh thinking around how to do this because if you try to force-fit your old ecosystem, your old infrastructure into this new world, it's going to be very, very difficult. And many vendors are now realizing that and looking for those right SaaS companies and others to plug together, to kind of manage these new channels, measure these new channels and set these new channels. And in the end grow with these new channels.

Jen: Absolutely. I mean, it's that old saying that, "What got you to where you are today may not be what's going to get you to where you want to go tomorrow." And so, I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. Thank you so much. I'm not going to let you go just yet, though, Jay. So since you said you listened to the podcast, you've been excited about being on it, then I'm going to ask you some other questions. So you already know this is coming.

Jay: I know it.

Jen: Okay. All right. So, yeah. Well, I'd like to ask some more personal questions just so we can kind of shake things up and get to know a little bit more about you as a person. So first question I want to start with is what's your favorite city?

Jay: Oh, that's a good one. I have traveled to 27 countries now. All of that spent on vacation, one of the blogs I write is "Rollerblades and Red Bull," the idea is to get to every country in the world. Right now, it would be tough to say the absolute but I would say Prague.

Jen: Prague, awesome. I haven't been there but I've heard amazing things about it. So I heard it's a really beautiful city.

Jay: Very, very difficult to rollerblade in, by the way.

Jen: Okay, I won't try that, at least not the first time I go. Okay. Question number two, are you an animal lover? Yes or no?

Jay: Yes, we have...we just actually...we had two dogs and one cat. And they were all 13 or 14 years old and we lost them all within 6 months. But, we're kind of in that mode now. We've got two young daughters as well I've got two daughters in college. But we're thinking about the family pets now and looking at different breeds so very excited to rescue some new pets.

Jen: Oh, good. Well, you have to keep us posted. We love pets at Allbound. Our pets have an Instagram account called "Allbound Critters." So when you do have a new pet join your family, you have to let me know so I can give you guys a shout-out there.

Jay: Will do.

Jen: Okay, next question for you, Mac or PC?

Jay: Well, being a 20-year IBM and Lenovo guy, the answer's going to shock you, I'm 95% Apple. So from iPhones to Watch to the laptop I'm on right now, everything, except for real work, is on an Apple. When I talked about analyzing the thousands of people that run this industry and running all these AI and macros and heavy, heavy lifting, I have one super-powered, liquid-cooled, top-end gaming machine at home that I do serious work on. But everything else is Apple.

Jen: Everything else is Apple. All right. All right. There you go. And last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to?

Jay: That's a good question. So back to visiting every country in the world, the next, probably Middle Africa.

Jen: Oh, what interests you about Middle Africa?

Jay: A) that I haven't been there.

Jen: Okay, yeah.

Jay: I've been to most regions... You know, when I see the weather report that has 50 or 60 cities, most of them...well, almost of them I've been to. So now, I'm in the mode of, "I've got to go to dangerous places now." You can't go to the Middle East. A lot of Africa is off-limits. But it gets much harder to travel once you've knocked off the easy ones. Now you've got to start knocking off ones that have government warnings, or can add a little bit of risk. So that's what entices me about going to Middle Africa and maybe at Uganda, or Kenya, and help build schools or do something good for the world.

Jen: Sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for joining me, for sharing some of your time with us, especially calling in from Ireland where I know it's late at night. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally, what's the best way for them to connect with you? If folks want to talk about going to Kenya with you, or they want to talk about fixing their channel, how should they reach you?

Jay: Absolutely. My website, my blog that most of what we've talked about today, is jaymcbain.com. It's jaymcbain.com. There is at least 50 ways on there that you can contact me through every social and my cellphone and everything else. If you just want to hit me with a quick tweet. It's the letter "J" mcbain, M-C-B-A-I-N, so jmcbain. Hit me there and we can go from there.

Jen: Perfect. Well, thanks again, Jay. Thanks, everyone else, for tuning in, and catch us next week for an all-new episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the Resource Center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone

Kyle Burnett, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Allbound, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss the birth and growth of the partner portal, navigating channel tech, integrations, SaaS partner programs and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Jen: Hi everybody. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And if you're a regular listener of the podcast, you know I don't typically sound quite this froggy. I'm getting over a cold, I actually sound way worse than I feel. And I'm actually in a pretty great mood, and one of the reasons why is today's guest is none other than Allbound's own Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Kyle Burnett. Welcome, Kyle.

Kyle: Hi Jen. I think your voice sounds awesome and after this, we're going to karaoke because I think you've probably got a pretty good voice for it right now.

Jen: Oh my gosh, I think if I do that I'll have no voice at all in the coming weeks. After this podcast, I think I'm going to go on a vocal rest. Is that what artists call it? Vocal rest? So this is going to be super fun. Typically on the podcast, we have folks in sales or marketing and always with a channeled focus, of course. But I want to add your voice to the mix because there's a pretty big role that technology plays in the channel. And, also I think you're pretty awesome.

Kyle: Well, thank you. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a fun topic, too, because technology in every sector of business is kind of at the forefront. It's hard to turn on news and not see stories about technology, technology companies, what they're doing, what's trending. And what I do love about your podcast is you're a great resource and support for sales and marketing people because it's not the headlines that you see every day. Technology winds up being the focus. So it'd be kind of fun to swing this back around a little bit and see if we can really focus on the cross section of those two.

Jen: Absolutely. So let's just dive right in. I want to start with a Channel Partner word that I honestly kind of have a love/hate relationship with. It's the word "portal" or "partner portal," and I can explain a little bit later on why I have this love/hate relationship with it. But Kyle, can you put on your professor hat for us here and kinda walk us through the birth and the growth of the partner portal? Because every person who I have on the podcast, almost all of them...they either have or want to have or talk begrudgingly about their partner portal.

Kyle: I'm sure. Yeah, I'm kind of like the wiki on that, and I think that sometimes the word's so loaded and we can take pieces of it and maybe think about it positively or negatively. But I think if you just back up the story and where the portal came from, it's really no different than every other portal that exists on the internet.

You know, pre-internet, how did you communicate with partners, with business partners? You printed and mailed things to them, newsletters, for example. And you had to print and mail other collateral and information that you needed them to have - data sheets, board papers, case studies - whatever you needed your partners to have, and that was print and mail.

Pretty soon that turned into digital files that are online, so instead of sending a newsletter you can email a newsletter. Instead of sending files, you can email files or links to files. And pretty soon you start aggregating that into one location online into, well, a portal.

And now you can actually switch and have that be more of an on-demand scenario where partners can come and get it when they need it. And it pretty much just follows the history of the internet in general, having information that you wanted to share and how do you just get it all congregated, aggregated to one location so that it's there on-demand, and that's kind of where the portal came from and actually where it just ends to where it exists today.

And I think to hone in on the love/hate piece of this, what we don't like about where portals exist today is that still implies that it was the portal that came in 1997 when the internet started to really take off. It feels like it got left in time, vs. software, which is ever evolving, changing, and growing. And I think that's kind of where Allbound sits is right there, and where a lot of companies, you know, what they're looking to in the channels to try to figure out how to actually use technology and how to actually use software and they still call it a portal. And so we look at that and we want to address that and say, "Wait, are you thinking the portal? Or are you actually just thinking software?" But that's where it came from and it's, to some degree, better or worse, where it still largely sits today.

Jen: So, when I think about why I have this weird feeling about partner portals is, I love the idea that organizations are investing in making a resource, allocating a resource for their partners, and providing their partners with the location to go to to be able to access information, I love that. What I hate is that I feel like portals are this place where marketing collateral kind of goes to die.

And the other thing is I don't think I've ever talked to anybody who says, "Oh my gosh. We have the best partner portal ever. It's amazing. I love it." It's like, not to follow this house or room theme too much, but it's like this room. And there's all this furniture in this room and artwork, and none of it really goes together, but it's all there. Is it better to just to have the room? Would it be better not to have it at all? And so, that's where my conflict, I think, comes into play.

Kyle: Well, maybe there's a bunch of gothy millennials who have moved into the channel now and they really like this idea, and they like the idea that there's this really dark portal that's like a cemetery of marketing content and so they just want to hang out there and smoke some cloves. Maybe we're onto something. Maybe we should keep going with the portal because it'll become trendy and cool again.

But you're right, it is that feeling that it is a wasteland. And to some degree, it's kind of true. It's like you put content up there, you make it accessible to somebody. And that's great. The first time they go get it, they pull it up, they're like, "Awesome, great. This served this need that I have right now." But it does become very transactional. And it kind of lives and dies by the need of the transaction. And it doesn't really take on any other life form of its own. It just sits there, it just waits. And that serves its purpose, but that is, in scale and in scope, a very limited purpose and that's painful for the business-minded marketers, such as yourself, that actually want to invest your precious resources in something that's got a bigger, longer, more valuable life span than just transactions.

Jen: And there's this other piece about it that kind of leads me into the next question I want to ask you about, and it has to do with technology. And I want to ask you about integration. But before I do that... So, the other way that portals are used, besides just to hold content, right, it's almost like a place to go to then access other systems.

So maybe I go into the portal and then I can access a lead or deal registration system, or then I can access a marketing campaign type of system. And I start thinking about from the user experience perspective, like how do you make sure that you're able to maintain a consistent user experience? Or are you leading someone through this portal and they're, like, literally going through this magical kind of realm and then they end up in this other system? And how can they cleanly get back to where they started? And I think that's one of the other challenges that I've seen come into play besides just the content piece.

Kyle: Yeah, it's like they need a treasure chest map, a crayon to help work their way through it. But when we invest in technology, especially in the channel largely for two reasons. I think the other challenge is that the channel leaders are looking to bring systems together and perhaps portal is kind of this place where they start to think, "Well, I've got a portal. Can I also add this there? Can I also add that there?"

But if you simplify it, back up to, like, two commonalities there, one is, they are looking to simplify process. And they're also looking to speed up and simplify their own lives and that of the lives of their partners. And so, once they move beyond, "I've got content," and things to share with them, they do start to say, "Well, I also have this process. I've got this."

So it starts to balloon out from there and it's tricky. I mean, as a person who likes to build systems and tie systems together, I know that it's very easy to engage in that scope creep and engage in that idea creep to go, "Well, just one more thing, just one more thing, just one more thing," but that is how most people's portals and systems were built, was just one more thing over a couple of years, over a couple of different regimes, over a couple of different technologies. And pretty soon you do have, as you've alluded to, that house of horrors and rooms and things tied together and no one even remembers why they got added on and why that was put there. It just becomes very weird when the guest shows up and is not quite sure how to navigate it. So it can definitely become legacy very quickly. And those challenges exist, but that was born out of great intentions, and that was born out of great promise and it was born out of great opportunity, but it does need to be revisited. It can have a very limited lifespan if you're not careful.

Jen: So, when you're working with a customer and you'll come into the conversation because there are systems that need to communicate with each other, at their core, what are some of those challenges? You mentioned aligning different processes. Let's lay it out there. Like, what are those processes that the majority of channel teams are looking to overcome by integrating their systems?

Kyle: That's a good question. So, what I think is consultants...what you always like to do is focus on the business objectives. You really try to back the story up and say, "All right. So how is your business? What's the state of your business? What's the size of your business? What are your objectives to help grow that business? What are your metrics where you gauge?" You are trying to back that up to the investment they're looking to make and the resources that they need to accomplish their job and then what would they use to measure success, what constitutes success.

Well, the ROI of business technology using channel is pretty much about simplification of process and maximizing of their limited resources. So that's definitely a commonality. And the problems that kind of prevent you really trying to help focus on simplifying that is that they have lots of systems, they're disconnected, there's too many features. In the channel it's really easy to say, "I also need this, I also need this, I also need this." So if your feature list gets really long, that's a challenge that channel chiefs face.

Then, because there's the waft of technology kind of takes together those repetitive feature sets or competitive feature sets, then you get different technical stakeholders of each of those systems, and you've got all of this that you're trying to maximize and make the most out of with budget constraints. And that's quite a challenge. And it's a lot of a challenge for somebody to face who, inside of their own channel, has kind of their own core values in what they do and what they bring to the channel. And it's probably not navigating all of those problems to achieve this technical outcome when really they're like, "I'm here to lead people and lead teams towards business objectives, not figure how to get this system to talk to that system and get past the people who own those things."

So that's quite a challenge. And that's actually a fun one. What I really enjoy and what my team really enjoys as technical consultants is working with smart marketers and smart business people to analyze what they've got, and just sit down and draw it out, and draw up the process, and draw up the flow, and keep focusing on kind of their core business objectives and their metrics for success, and really focusing in on the ROI that they need off of their investment. And that ROI more often than not, is simplified down in terms of that it takes less resources to accomplish the processes that they need to show that what they're spending then works.

Jen: I know when you're integrating systems, you're typically integrating with an organization's CRM. What is the typical use case that you're looking at? What type of data are organizations needing to move from one place to the other? So, what's kind of standard? And then maybe can you share something really cool that either you've seen someone do or that you're anxious to see someone do? That would be kind of neat to hear.

Kyle: Sure. I think that really what the channel's trying to accomplish is the same thing that direct sales is trying to accomplish. And sometimes we lose track of that. We lose focus of that because of the disconnect, because instead of my sales people being right across the aisle, and instead of us all being in the same break room, we're in different locations. Well, big organizations have lots of sales teams working across cities, across countries even. So it's actually not all that widely different, except that technology hasn't really kept up with that style of relationship. So CRMs haven't kept up with that.

The cost of growing through your channel, doesn't align with the way that you can scale a CRM with your business. They figured out the CRM price point based off businesses scaling, and the market teams to be okay with that. That doesn't carry over to the channel. And so I think what winds up happening is the channel is kind of stuck there needing, essentially, a lot of the same CRMish functionality, specifically since they're sharing leads and registering deals back and forth and co-selling with partners. Whether that happens on one side or the other, leads being referred in for the supplier to be working through to a successful sale, and then just kind of reporting back to the partner where it is, or asking them out, letting the partner work and report it back in. Either way, they just need this collaborative effort going and sharing of information along the way of "Where is this? How is it going? How can I help?" CRMs haven't really helped with that when you're having people outside of your organization performing those activities with you.

So largely, what channel teams that we work with need is, they need the ability to collaborate with their partners on prospects from gathering them, to educating them, getting them up to speed, moving them along through the process, converting them to customers and then supporting them after they become customers, and keeping that relationship alive with all three of those parties involved. And that's what they're trying to solve for with a handful of different systems, and not necessarily the resources in house, not necessarily the descriptions that they needed the technology to help with that, and possibly not with the technical resources they need.

So that's what we see. And when we get to come in and help with that, it is to help them understand what it is that they've got now with tools they could be using now and how they could augment that tool set and fill in some of those gaps and really leverage a handful of different technologies to accomplish what they've got, some of those technologies they already have, and maybe some of them they have and don't even need. It's a fun discovery process. But you process-flow that out with them and it really helps them wrap their head around this data that's moving between systems and between organizations that is largely invisible otherwise.

Jen: And I threw two questions at once, which is annoying, so kind of the second part of that was just if you have any kind of anecdote, like anything really nifty, like a really cool example of something that you're seeing folks do with integration or what you'd like to see someone do?

Kyle: Oh yeah. So I guess there's kind of a positive and negative I'd throw at that, which is that technology, where it sits today and where integration sits today, gives all of us this idea that it can all be done. I think we were visiting a client here recently and they were talking about their technology being "not Hollywood-ready." So they have opted to focus on selling into businesses because businesses understand what the reality is of technology right now, vs. the rest of us who go watch a film and just think that Iron Man could build his suit very quickly over the weekend to be ready for the aliens coming in.

So we have this expectation that everything is horribly complex and really terrible and really important and all of these, like, superlatives, all of these really strong words, but then can also be really accomplished very simply and just, "I'll get this system and talk to that system and do that," so there's a lot of magic inside of there that should just happen. So I think the work implies that the best thing is when they have this realistic understanding that anything is possible, but also understanding what you really need to be doing and focusing on that.

The things that I really love is when we see simplicity, something as simple as tying together your marketing automation system - and I won't use the word portal - and tying in your channel software that you may not even need to necessarily have APIs talking to APIs and moving a ton of data back and forth, because there just may be simple stuff that you can do with existing tracking technology that your marketing automation system already does. Like, if you can track all of your leads and see that they're visiting a page of your website, why can't you track your partners and your partner's leads using the same existing technology? This is already there. It's been proven out. It works really well when you have really smart, skilled marketers using that technology. That can permeate through your partner software and through your partner relationships and actually give you all of those great data points that you use in direct sales, you can use it in your partnerships and your indirect sales as well.

And so I get super geeked by working with teams to tie some of this stuff together and find these really elegant, simple solutions that accomplish what you need with what you already have. It doesn't mean you have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn't mean you have to invest in new R and D. It doesn't mean to buy more software. Sometimes there's just really, really simple answers, and you feel really good about it when you stumble upon those working with your customers.

Jen: It's such a good message about simplicity, and technology's so funny because most of us have these pretty powerful tools at our disposal, and yet, because they are powerful and they're complex in their nature, we can very easily overcomplicate them.

And, I'm just kind of laughing in my head because one of my team members was working on a project, and it was taking her like a lot longer than I anticipated it was going to take her. But then when I checked in with her on it, I looked at what she had been doing and she had overcomplicated it for herself like times five, there was a much simpler path from A to B than she had taken, because the technology was so great, because the technology was awesome. But she missed it, and I saw how very, very easy it is for even sophisticated sales and marketing and channel professionals to follow down that path and start overcomplicating a system that's already kind of there and alive and working for them.

Kyle: Yeah, we talked a lot about giving people too much rope. I think that's probably an analogy you use when raising kids. You're like, "Give them too much freedom and what's gonna happen?" So it's kind of the same thing, that just because you can add more features and just because you can do more stuff doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

I think the flip side is a really interesting scenario is watching what Apple's doing. And I'm not a fanboy, so when I say this, this is with a ton of objective respect. I love that they're hitting delete on things. I love that they're removing items, that they're removing stuff. That simplicity is hard. I mean, can you imagine that have to happen within that organization to convince everybody that it's a good idea to keep deleting ports on the machine and keep throwing stuff away? And yet, they keep selling, they're selling strong, new things keep going, innovation keeps happening and people keep going with it, and come to find out, you didn't necessarily need it after all. You could get away with less. That's hard. I mean, they're in a fortunate place to be a market leader and be able to drive that, and that's hard for a lot of people kind of in their daily lives to be able to sell that, I think because aren't we kinda bred to be with the idea that more is better?

Jen: Right.

Kyle: Everything about us is about "consumption of more," you know? And I'm not trying to get down that little societal rabbit hole, but we think that way. We think, "Oh, well, like, let me go look at a chart and line up this software and look at features. Well, they have more check boxes on the left, so it must be better." But really? I mean, can you make use of all of that?

I think that's one of the challenges that the channel faces is the idea that they've been told for so long that they need more. You can't even make use of more. You can't make use of most of those things that are fullest. It’s the same reason why Apple can delete all these extra ports, because most people weren't using them or didn't need them anyways. And it kinda goes the same with feature sets on software, feature sets on need. I've got this little joke around here that my ideal keyboard would have half of your keyboard with a big delete button and then there's just a couple of letters on the other side. I don't even need uppercase letters. I don't even want the shift key. It's known around here. It's like, if someone says, "I deleted something." I just like cheer and hand them some stock. "Here you go."

Jen: Oh, I think we'll have a Kyle keyboard in your future. I can see it.

Kyle: Yeah, and I'm not some minimalist. Don't get me wrong. I'm not some minimalist, right? You know me, Jen. I've got too many cars and projects and objectives and things I'm trying to do in life. I keep on top of working. I have no business doing all of that. So I'm definitely guilty as the rest of them of acquisition of things and the features and ideas. I throw out ideas, I use our prospect pages in Allbound and I'm like, "Dang it, I really need this other feature," and I go into our Slack group to talk about it and the thing jumps on me right away, it's a bit quiet.

So, I'm as guilty as the rest of them. It's most definitely a decided practice that you engage in over time to question what do you really need to really focus and really accomplish what you want? And the focus to grow applies from top-down, and it applies to every aspect of business, and less is a really, really beautiful thing.

And so it totally geeks me when I get to work with clients and we get to focus in on some of that, of removing extra needs and removing things that may have seemed like a good idea but actually, in the end, wind up just being something else to own, extra baggage, extra weight, extra responsibility that doesn't really generate value.

Jen: I was about to say, "I have one more question for you," and I'm looking at my question that I wrote down for myself and there's multiple question marks in that question, so I guess it's more than one question. But one more area I want to cover, it's specifically about SaaS companies, because there are a lot of SaaS comp

Annette Iafrate, VP of Alliances and Partners for Vidyard, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss channel alignment, building trust, defining rules of engagement and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.
 

Jen: Oh, it's so great to have you on. And for those of you listening who haven't experienced Vidyard yet, Vidyard is a video platform and they provide video hosting, enablement and some pretty awesome analytics. I know you joined the Vidyard team only about six months ago, but you've been negotiating partnerships at Constant Contact, you were helping drive partner revenue at SharpSpring. I mean, you've been connected to this concept of the partner channel for the last six years. And I really wanted to dive into a lot of that channel experience but before we do that, tell us a little bit about Vidyard, about Vidyard's value proposition so we get a sense of why you joined this team.

Annette: Sure, great. Appreciate it. I think the short answer is Vidyard helps companies drive more revenue through the strategic use of video. So, what does that mean? At the moment, the video economy is driving new expectations. Expectations around immediacy, transparency, authenticity, both in the workplace and the marketplace. So, video is now expected content and the statistics are actually staggering. Facebook gets 8 billion views per day for video, 8 billion. Isn't that amazing? But I think what's even more impressive is in B2B technology, 72% of B2B purchasers today are viewing video somewhere in their customer journey, and 50% of them are looking at at least 30 minutes of video. So, for those companies and leaders that want to keep up with the market, if they're not already doing video, they really need to embrace this new communication paradigm, and quickly. And for specific reasons, because it works. What we're seeing is, by having a video appear in your search results, you get 41% higher click-through rates. I think even more impressive is, if you have a video on your landing page or your website and your driving people there, you get an 80% increase in conversion and all of this with a 20% lower cost for leads. So, it's an opportunity that people should be leveraging right now, whether it's from the C-suite, through management, down to the front lines. Video is a very powerful tool, whether it's for communicating with customers, building brand awareness, encouraging employee advocacy or just in general, engaging with the market. And what Vidyard does is we help companies harness this power of video and use it to drive business growth, which is why I'm so excited about joining the team.

Jen: Wonderful. It sounds like you're pretty passionate about the use of video and I love it. I mean, when you're passionate about what you do and about what your organization does, it doesn't feel like work and it's exciting.

Annette: Absolutely, and it's just so powerful. You can see the impact on everyone's business, your own business, the channel business, as well as the end user business, so it's fun having that impact.

Jen: So, when you're looking at, really, the big picture of goals that Vidyard has, just looking at the next year, maybe even the next five years, what role will Vidyard's Alliances and Partner program actually play in helping achieve those goals? Because, Vidyard's a really rapidly growing organization. You guys are taking the the martech world by storm here. Where's channel going to come in this picture?

Annette: Right. Significant. Because the market's growing so quickly and because the company is growing quickly, you really need to prepare to start to leverage channels in order to scale the business. The market is growing, the market's massive. And at some point, you can only scale the direct model so quickly. The other reason is, in some cases, channels are really the best way to get to specific markets. So, there's a significant opportunity and I give the company a lot of credit in investing in channels early. Some companies I think wait a bit too long, because it does take some investment and some time to really ramp up a channel, as you've seen. You know, the recruitment, the alignment, the ramping. And so, in addition to that, the channels themselves just help accelerate the growth of the company. They extend the reach, give us access to more customers and prospects, whether it's through strategic alliances and their base, or market coverage, whether it's coverage of additional use cases, market segments and even geos. So there's a significant opportunity in the explosion of the market itself, and we've started primarily in the marketing and sales segments in use cases, but video goes across. It goes across industries, across market segments, their use cases including things like internal communications and support. So, trying to build a business that can attack all of those at once without leveraging channels is difficult. And as I mentioned, in some markets, particularly geo markets, the preferred mechanism for purchasing is actually through partners. If you're looking at iXAPACK or even LATAM and, to some extent, EMEA, customers prefer working with a trusted advisor that tends to be a partner. So, there's a significant role for the channels to play and, again, there's a variety of roles to be leveraged.

Jen: Hi, everybody. Welcome to "The Allbound Podcast." I'm Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And today, I am joined by Tim Harmon, Managing Director at Nuvello. Welcome, Tim.

Tim: Well, thank you, Jen. How are you?

Jen: I'm doing great. I'm loving living in Arizona in February. It is gorgeous. So my apologies to any listener who is knee-deep in snow right now. Come on out to Phoenix. It's beautiful. You know, Tim, so glad to have you here on this podcast. You know, most people in the channel space know you as being a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. But then, earlier this year, you announced this new endeavor, that you've launched a new analyst consulting firm called Nuvello. So this is really exciting for us in the channel technology space. Tell us more. What's this all about?

Tim: Well, it is. I did leave Forrester in January and I am building Nuvello, which is essentially a new type of analyst consulting community and a new type of analyst consulting network really focused very much on channels. When I say network, the reason I use that term is because I don't profess to do everything that's knowingly in the Nuvello vision or plan all by my lonesome. And there are a plethora of very, very good and sharp independent channel consultants, I think, across the globe, and the intention is to bring them into the Nuvello network and to, in essence, create a more, you know, concerted analyst and consulting capability for, you know, both the chan-tech vendors that are attempting to support the primary target in our channel professionals.

Now, I use, also, the term, community. So the reason I did that is because the tech vendors themselves are going to have, hopefully, a lot of involvement in Nuvello. I'll just give you one example. I have believed for a long time myself that some tech vendors, a lot of tech vendors create a wealth of very good content, educational, you know, content. And I saw what you guys published in the last couple of weeks in terms of your own study and benchmark. I think that's a great example. So we want to source tech vendors' content to nuvello.com. You know, you could consider, for example, Jen, yourself, as another [inaudible 00:03:35] channel for your content, where, you know, Nuvello will ultimately, hopefully, become the ultimate go-to resource or channel professionals and practitioners, you know, for knowledge, tools, and benchmarks.

Jen: I think that's great. I mean, I know...I was speaking with one of the product marketing managers over at Salesforce a couple of months ago, and he was asking me, you know, "Where do people go to learn about, you know, channels sales and marketing? Where do they go to [inaudible 00:04:07] best practices and hear, you know, from each other?" You know, and I looked at him, I said, "Well, we're trying to create that ourselves, right?" So there hasn't been, really, a really strong kind of third-party resource for a channel professional to consume, you know, current content. So I think it's awesome. I think it's a really great resource that this community truly needs.

Tim: Well, thanks. You know, so combined with, you know, the knowledge content that Nuvello produces and the Nuvello network produces along with that the tech vendors produce, a lot of it is...well, in fact, all of it, for 2017, is going to be, you know, free. And, you know, ultimately, if we get to the point maybe next year where, you know, some of the Nuvello research, you know, might be, out [inaudible 00:05:17] associate with it, it's still gonna be, you know, very, very inexpensive. We're targeting companies really \$50 million and above in revenue. So, again, one of the goals of Nuvello is to reach what we call the mass mid-market, which is different than other approaches, you know, taken in the industry.

Jen: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, I have you here. I wanna pick your brain about a couple of topics related to channel and related to, you know, sales and marketing technology. The first is that, you know, you've been, over the years, very passionate about the fact that far too many channel organizations underutilize technology and enablement and growth of their channel partners. So, you know, I wanna dig in a little bit. What have you seen or what have you experienced that's particularly concerning about this?

Tim: So I had the opportunity...just giving you an example, Jen. I had the opportunity, a couple weeks ago, to moderate a panel at a channels conference. And one of the things that I did, I ran it kinda like a jeopardy game, at least [inaudible 00:06:33] beginnning. I asked, you know, digital transformation, you know, and so that was the answer. You know, what is the question? And you could well imagine that, you know, the three panelists came up with three, you know, quite different definitions for digital transformation, which tends, you know, to be the watch word of 2017, right, 2016, not [inaudible 00:06:55].

When I drilled down with folks that I'm working with and this particular topic comes up, it usually winds up being in the area of how we are going to, you know, change some of our process, just automate those process who's using modern technology for our customers. Almost always the case. It never comes up that we want to apply some of this digital transformation-thinking to our channel partners.

Now, what's ironic, though, is that if you...I mean, the same sort of benefits could be realized, right? So why do you want to affect digital transformation capability for your customers? To have more loyal customers, right, to have them do more business with you, to have them spread the word as advocates. You know, the same exact benefits and results can occur if you apply those sorts of principals and techniques and technologies to your channel ecosystem as well, more loyalty, more loyal channel partners, more invested channel partners, bigger advocates of what you do. And the very few examples I've seen of tech vendors and manufacturers and other B2B companies that have made this sort of chan-tech investment have reaped big benefits in doing so in terms of, you know, loyalty, productivity, and/or advocacy.

Jen: I think it's a really great...actually a great bridge to...I wanted to ask you next about customer success. And you've sort of hinted about, you know, building advocates and evangelists some under your channel partner group in SaaS in particular. When you think about like those \$50-million, you know, fast growing mid-market organizations looking at channel, a lot of those players are gonna be software as a service organization. There's a lot of talk in the SaaS industry about customer's success, you know, evolving beyond just like client services or support. So can you share a little bit about where do you think channel sales and customer success either have been or need to intersect, you know, like today and then moving forward into the future?

Tim: And it's a great question. One of the things that I would kind of warn against is there is...and I've heard there's starting to be a slight little backlash, for example, the managed services provider segment of the channel industry. The very reason is that customers are saying, "You know, we had a three-year contract with you and we never saw you," right? "You know, you may have done a good job but, you know, there's someone else that's come along with greater economies at scale who can do the same, apply the same service at a lower price." And you drive yourself into a commodity type of a business environment, which is where I think most SaaS vendors and most channel partners don't want to be.

So, you know, I think channel partners have a vital role in, you know, kind of what their original purpose was. And one of the original purposes was that they had reached into segments of the market. And I'm talking about physical live face-to-face reach in the segments of the market that a tech vendor perhaps did not. And, you know, automation is great. You know, digital transformation is great. But I think, you know, channel partners have to maintain that personal relationship and that full life cycle enablement of technology solutions from, you know, building the business case to, you know, driving adoption that is ultimately what's going to make the difference between customer success or not.

Jen: That's a really great point. I think, you know, the key that I see there is continual collaboration, you know, between the vendor nor the supplier and those partners. As those partners have that face time with those customers, ensuring that that knowledge is transferred from the partner back up to the supplier. You know, typically, when we talk about knowledge transfer challenges, we tend to be a little short-sighted and think about it only from the perspective of how do I get all of this information about my product to my partners versus also looking at how do I get feedback and how do I get, you know, consumption information from customers via partners back up to, you know, the supplier who's creating the product. So...

Tim: Yeah, I think that's a key point, Jen. Most solutions, I think, today going forward are going to be ecosystem-delivered and supported solutions, right? So it's not that, you know, a tech vendor...I mean, you know, you turn back the calendar five years and there was this great fear that cloud software as a service was going to disintermediate the intermediaries, right? Who needs the channel partner? But that's turned out not to be the case. And, you know, the solutions are so involved and, you know, have so many tentacles even beyond the software aspect itself that you need to have all of your ecosystem forces aligned so that it appears to be an ecosystem of one entity even though it's really not. And that's, I think, where technology can really benefit. And it's absolutely required to provide one aligned phase to the customer where multiple ecosystem parties actually maybe involved in delivering value to the customer.

Jen: You know, one of the questions I get asked by a lot of CEOs at SaaS startups, you know...people are listening to this podcast or they're consuming content and they're talking to their colleagues about, you know, building these ecosystems, and a lot of them say, you know, "When do I start to build a channel partner program? Like, is there a certain revenue size I need to be at? Is there a certain gross stage I should be at?" You know, I'm curious. Like, you know, what do you think? You know, for a company who's just thinking about going to market via a channel partner program, is there a better or a best time for them to actually execute? Any words or wisdom that you have? I know a lot of our listeners are more emerging companies. Maybe they're not at that like \$50-million a year stage yet. You know, what advice can you give them?

Tim: Well, and so that \$50-million number is kind of, you know, the magic mark, right? I think that's when most companies do start to consider channels. And I think the reality is that most companies wait too late to start building their channels strategy and their channel programs. And they only do that when they see, you know, this revenue curves begin to flatten out a little bit. They wanna keep it going in a true northerly direction. I actually think that companies should probably start, well, I would say at the \$20-million market peak mark. But, you know, if it was me, if I was the CEO of a SaaS startup, I'd start from day one. I'd have channel be part of my strategy. I don't know if you ever, you know, watch "Shark Tank" on [inaudible 00:15:12] or if any of the audience, but one of the common questions, you know, that Robert or Kevin or Mark will ask is, "What is your distribution strategy?" You know, and these are pretty small companies on "Shark Tank." So I think there's a lesson to be learned from that.

Jen: Yeah, you know, and I like to take a page out of [inaudible 00:15:37], you know, she asks, "How does your customer want to buy?" And I think, you know, that's something that I'll always kind of go back to those CEOs and say, you know, "How are people buying your product now? How are you supporting them right now? You know, what's working for you in this direct environment? And make the channel an extension, a natural extension of what you're already currently doing." And, you know, we're starting to see a lot of the companies, you know, building channel programs or thinking about building channel programs, you know, quite a bit earlier. You know, that's faster a few weeks ago. And it was a big topic of conversation which, for someone who geeks out on channel partners, that's awesome for me to hear. So I think we're gonna see that number, that kind of typical revenue number for starting. I think we're gonna see that drop especially with these companies that are just growing really fast and wanna maintain that momentum.

Tim: I think that would be good for all parties involved, tech vendors, channels partners, and particularly customers, if they did that. You know, the one thing that I would kinda leave on this note is think about some of the largest companies in the world, you know, consumer-oriented companies. Just take, you know, Coca-Cola. You know, one of the things about Coca-Cola is you can buy Coca-Cola products almost everywhere in the world through various different types of channels. And, you know, take a lesson away from that in that, and you said it, different customers want to buy in different ways from different entities in different geographies, and try to serve them all or as many as you can, you know, with the resources that you have at your [inaudible 00:17:30].

Jen: Perfect. That's a great example. So, Tim, you know, you're just introducing this firm, Nuvello. I know you've already got a few roadshow symposiums that are on the docket for this year. You've got one just kicking it off in San Francisco. You got it going to Boston, Atlanta, going over to London and Singapore. It's super exciting. So who's the right kind of person to attend one of these symposiums? And then, you know, if I am that kind of a person, you know, what can I anticipate by attending?

Tim: Well, yeah. So, again, we're hoping to help, you know, channel professionals and go-to market professionals in terms of, you know, their strategies, their models, their recruitment, their onboarding, their technology, utilization. That's gonna be a key, key factor. You know, those people that are involved in those sorts of decisions and the execution of those decisions. So, you know, we hope for a pretty broad audience. Different symposiums will have slightly different audience flavor.

I'll give you an example. You know, we'll address this later in the year. We are going to try to actually bring in a couple of ex-CEOs, retired CEOs that were at the helm when their companies became quite successful via their channels. You know, that might indicate a different type of audience, you know, slightly. But, you know, for the most part, particularly for these few roadshow symposiums, we're looking for those people that are, you know, really involved, I think, in, you know, the fairly early stages of their channel-taking and their channel-development.

Jen: Wonderful. And so if people are interested in, you know, taking a look at those symposiums, they just go to nuvello.com? Is that correct?

Tim: Yes. Yeah, that's right.

Jen: Perfect. Perfect. Well, so, before I let you go, Tim, you know, we talked channel, but I like to ask some more personal questions of all our podcasts guests here, just to learn a little bit more about you. Are you opened to that?

Tim: You should go for it.  

Jen: All right. Okay, so my first question for you is what is your favorite city?

Tim: My favorite city?

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Tim: I'm just going to...my favorite city...it's not Phoenix. I'm sorry, Jen.

Jen: That's okay. That's not mine either.

Tim: [Inaudible 00:20:26]. One of my favorite cities is Ottawa, Ontario.

Jen: Oh, nice. I have to dig. Okay, what do you love about Ottawa?

Tim: You know, I think it's like the [inaudible 00:20:43]. So it's not too big, it's not too small. You know, there's lots to do. The people are great. It's safe. It's a four-weather climate, obviously, which I like. And it's got, you know, a lot of culture in it and a lot of sports activities, so professional sports, participant sports. So it just had a lot of things, you know, going for that I like.

Jen: Awesome. I love it. Second question for you, are you an animal-lover?

Tim: Well, yes, in general. Yes. Yeah.

Jen: Okay. But you're not gonna be inviting any into your home anytime soon? Is that what I'm hearing?

Tim: I have a couple of animals, actually.

Jen: Oh, you do. Okay, question number three. Mac or PC?

Tim: I'm neutral on that. I have one of both and I actually use them both about 50% of the time. So I'm an agnostic when it comes to that.

Jen: Oh, nice. My last question for you is, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to?

Tim: Probably African Safari.

Jen: Sounds very nice. Well, thanks, Tim. And thanks for answering some of those more fun questions. Thanks for diving into some of those deeper questions about channel. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally after hearing this, what's the best way for them to do so?

Tim: You know, there's a contact us at nuvello.com which, you know, if they wanna email me, the phone numbers are there. And, you know, you can also book my calendar at nuvello.com as well. So if you wanna, you know, actually schedule a time to talk with me, I'm open to that as well.

Jen: Wonderful. That's a really good resource, and we'll go ahead to link to nuvello.com from this podcast. Again, thank you for your time. I greatly appreciate it, Tim. It's been great catching up with you. And thanks, everyone else, for tuning in. And check us out next week for an all-new episode of "The Allbound Podcast."

Wendell Black, Vice President of Channels for Five9, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss creating the optimal team to compete and win with the partner, prioritizing your partner needs, and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Five9 is a leading global provider of cloud-based contact center software for sales, marketing, and support, and they facilitate over three billion customer interactions annually.

Welcome, Wendell.

Wendell: Well, thanks, Jen. Glad to be here.

Jen: We're really happy to have you here today, particularly because Five9 has a really robust partner ecosystem, and I want to dig right into that. I mean, you guys have referral partners, system integrators, consultants, resellers, master agents. Is there a primary area of focus for growing that partner ecosystem this year or are you just going after everything all at once?

Wendell: Well, as much as I'd like to say we're just gonna go do it all, Jen, I've been told that you can't have more than three priorities or you don't have really any. So that said, Five9 is very focused in growing the book of business that we have in the master agent, sub-agent community, and growing our reseller partnerships is our two big focus areas. These two areas generated a lot of growth capacity last year, and we're looking to substantially grow our reach this year by continuing to focus on both of these channels to market. We've been very encouraged by the relationships that we've developed, and we look to further invest both time and finances in these communities in 2017.

Jen: Do all of these elements of your partner ecosystem fall under your purview? I know you're focused on growing a couple of these areas, but are you specifically focused on any of these areas individually? I guess what I'm getting to is what is the team makeup really look like over there?

Wendell: Sure. So my team is divided up really into the communities. So the systems integrators is one group, master agents and sub-agents, that line of business is another group, and then resellers is a third team, and all of those roll up to me. And our focus for that is on a global basis. So I have staff not only domestically here in the U.S., but also in Latin America, in Europe, and Asia as we grow in that direction as well.

Jen: Awesome. Now, a lot of times when I'm speaking with channel leaders, they’re very focused on, of course, growing revenue through that partner base. But the more that we've become a very recurring revenue-focused type of world, right, this marketplace, the way the markets change, now the conversation is really starting to transition into what value do all experiences, whether they're from direct sales teams or partner teams, play in that full life cycle customer experience? So, if I'm one of your Five9 customers, can you tell me how would one of your partners actually add value to my experience with your product beyond simply that, "I bought it from that partner"?

Wendell: Sure. So I think, as you know, Five9 has been delivering contact center solutions for 15 years now. But our partnerships, many of these resellers in particular that we're working with have been working in the contact center for twice that long. It's that breadth and depth of experience that the partners bring that is where the real value add is to what the Five9 product does and delivers to its customers. They provide that added value and insight to be able to help a customer really maximize that value. So a customer of a Five9 partner is not only getting the innovative omni channel solution that Five9 offers, but it's getting the years of been there, done that experience that the partner has to offer in this space. That's where the customer really wins.

Jen: Right. And, you talked about your resellers and you mentioned you have master agents, can you sort of talk us through how a master agent program differs from your reseller program? And keep in mind that some of our listeners, are just very new to the concept of Channel, they're just really starting to build out their partner programs, and this might be good for them to think about as they're kind of crafting that blueprint for what's to come in the future for themselves.

Wendell: Sure. So let me, first of all, tell you how they are similar. Both programs work with Five9 sales and sales engineering staff to ensure that we've provided the optimal team to compete and win in the market with the partner. The teaming of the Five9 experts with our partner experts makes for an unbeatable team. The programs are different, though, based on the scope of services that each type is really ready to deliver to a client. So in the agent or master agent kind of a program, they're really focused most of the time on the pre-sale side of a customer's selection of the solution and solving the need, bringing technology and different kind of solutions to bear on that customer problem.

The resale program not only does that, and works in that pre-sale process, but they also want to manage and deliver the solution, they want to train the customer, they want to own the operational consulting and ongoing support with the customer. I mean, the reseller really wants to have a day-to-day operational engagement with clients to continue to grow the success with a joint solution that they're bringing the services and the day-to-day engagement experience along with the Five9 product.

So, when you look at the two ways, one of them is the beginning to end relationship where the other one is really focused on the pre-sale engagement side, and that's why it's a great avenue for people to perhaps start as a referral relationship and be able to grow into the resale kind of soup to nuts delivery of the relationship over time. That makes it an easier way for all of us to get started.

Jen: So if I'm a customer and I come to purchase your product via that reseller program, do I ever have any interaction with anyone on the Five9 team, or is my only interaction with your product with that individual reseller?

Wendell: No, I mean, that's one of the things that, I think, is differentiated value for Five9 in that we team our sales and sales engineering, and frankly all the resources that those people can bring to bear with the partner to be able to put the best foot forward across both organizations. We want to get all the right resources available to ensure that when we're out there in the competitive market space, Five9 and the partner gets to win their unfair share of business.

Jen: I love that, unfair share, perfect. I don't think I have ever heard anyone say that. I think I might have to steal that from you, Wendell.

Wendell: That's okay.

Jen: So, one of the biggest challenges that we hear over here at Allbound when we're talking to organizations who have partner programs is they have a lack of engagement with their current partners. Can you share a little bit about some of the biggest challenges that you've had engaging with partners and maybe what steps you've taken to try to overcome those challenges?

Wendell: Sure. So, as you undoubtedly know, there's a lot of transition going on in the contact center infrastructure market these days. That is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity from where Five9 views what's going on. There's a lot of concern and questions in the minds of the reseller community that've had longstanding relationships with providers in the past but they're changing now. I mean, this is mainly because new ownership is making changes in programs and personnel that they've grown accustomed to and perfectly well understood previously.

So Five9 is the only company in the Gartner contact center as a service leader quadrant that's not currently being assimilated by another company. I believe this makes us a more stable and predictable partner for our resellers to engage with and to help them plan a path forward they can count on. So in helping our partner community be more successful, we're diligently working with them on all aspects of training for a better understanding of how to deliver value to their customers with Five9, and this starts with sales and marketing, it transitions into demand generation, and it continues all the way through implementation and customer service.

We're taking a holistic view of helping our reseller partners make the move to the cloud, and that's what I think really changes our engagement strategy and approach with partners today, because we believe we have to interact with them on every one of those functional areas and put the right people in place to help them in those roles.

Jen: That leads me really nicely on to the next question I have for you. When we look at what makes a successful partner ecosystem, a lot of making the channel part of a strategic part of the business, making sure that there's a culture of partnership within the organization, and really making sure that the partner teams are properly resourced. So can you share with me, what are some of the internal resources or team structures, anything that you've put in place that are there to support Five9's entire partner ecosystem to ensure that you can be successful in engaging with these partners and making this a strategic part of your business as a company?

Wendell: So one of the great things at Five9 is we're on a tremendous growth path over the last five years. I mean, we've been growing roughly 40% a year each of the last years, and that growth means we can hire people and put them in the right position to manage all aspects of our business growth. So we've been giving people that come into the company a partner tattoo as we bring them into our sales and sales engineering teams, also into sales operations, because there's always transactions that are going back and forth between us and our partners.

We've also brought partner resources into our marketing team, because frankly, we're pretty good at the marketing of cloud contact center, and many of our partners, this is a new set of stories to tell. So we can help them in telling a cloud monthly recurring kind of a story versus a premise perpetual licence kind of a story. So there's a lot of learning and experience that we can transition that way. It goes right into our professional services. I mean, we've had to align people in our PS organization to be the point of contact for partners, because as they take on those responsibilities, they need a go-to resource to be able to help them overcome challenges or obstacles.

Our guys have seen a lot of implementations of Five9 and other cloud technologies, and they can help share that insight with our partners. And then finally support. I mean, everything happens through the support organization after the sale, and we want to do a mind meld with our partners so they can deliver those kinds of services the same way we do, which got us the recognition in the Gartner Magic Quadrant as being one of the best at execution in this sector.

Jen: That knowledge transfer piece, I mean, everything you're talking about has to do with that knowledge transfer. How do you get information from one entity to another, especially when they don't work for you, they're not in your building, they're not on your payroll necessarily, and transferring your knowledge down to the partner but then getting the partner's expertise and their customer knowledge back up to you is so critical. So that's great that you were able to create an infrastructure to support that effective knowledge transfer.

Wendell: Yes.

Jen: Oh, go ahead.

Wendell: I was going to say you're right on target with it because it's all about collaboration and we can't ever leave a partner stranded. We've got to be there to provide the safety net for them and for the customer to ensure that we have a continuing great experience with our clients in the base, whether they've come to us directly or through a partner channel.

Jen: One more question for you, and it's kind of a big one, but we mostly are talking to software companies. What do you think is the software industry's greatest opportunity when it comes to Channel? Channel's traditionally been a very traditional sort of like hardware-focused type of industry. So what can software take advantage of with Channel?

Wendell: I've been in the contact center business for over 30 years and I've been in the cloud space for 17 years now. I think we're finally at a place that we've hoped for as evangelists for cloud services back 15 years ago. I mean, we knew we were trailblazing and we knew that we were fighting an uphill battle against the established norm, but the market is right, customers are ready, and the partner ecosystem is also ready to take on cloud services and deliver them to their customers.

The time is now to be able to take the transitional move from perpetual premise licensing to the cloud model and software as a service. So I personally think after my time in the space, it's finally time to write the tsunami of the cloud contact center into the new omni channel paradigm of 2017, and that's why partners are getting excited today, because they see that opportunity too with their customers and now where you had to sell...or in the past when you had to sell people to think about the cloud, now they're asking about the cloud first and having that as being their first choice.

Jen: Right, absolutely, absolutely. I think that's a great way for us to wrap this up, although I don't let anyone go kind of without bugging them with a couple of more personal questions. So, totally unrelated to what you do at Five9 or Channel or software, are you open to answering a couple of questions?

Wendell: Sure, I'm fine with that.

Jen: Okay. I promise they're not too hard. My first question for you is, what's your favorite city?

Wendell: Gosh, it's hard not to be Dallas-biased, and been my home for 30 years and I can't imagine living anywhere else, but I do very much like to visit San Francisco and London and Paris. So I'm kind of a world traveler and I have a lot of favorites for different reasons. So can I cop out on that question kind of like that?

Jen: Sure, sure. The whole point of this is to get to know a little bit more about you, so we did just that. The second question I have for you is, are you an animal lover? Yes or no?

Wendell: I am.

Jen: And do you happen to have any pets?

Wendell: Yes, a white lab that I love and adore. So she is a great friend and a member of the family in every way.

Jen: Awesome. What's her name?

Wendell: Millie.

Jen: Millie, it's a nice name. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC?

Wendell: Both, actually. I have a MacBook Air on one side of my desk and a Microsoft Surface on the other.

Jen: Really? Very interesting. Most people I talk to either like one or the other, right? Like their brain has now been trained to use one kind of device, so that's great. The last question I have for you, let's say I was able to offer you an all expenses paid trip, where would it be to?

Wendell: You know, I would...I think I like to go do Asian coast tour, and so I have a mind that...the Tibet, Vietnam, Cambodia area is one that I haven't spent much time in and would like to go get to know better. So I think that's what I would target today. But a year from now, it could be some place totally different.

Jen: Well, and who knows where the business will take you? You might find new and exciting places that you never even knew really existed. I think that's one of the beauties of Channel, Channel is so geographically dispersed, you get to experience so many different countries, cultures, experiences, so it gives you a lot of opportunity.

Wendell: Couldn't agree more.

Jen: Well, thank you so much for taking some time sharing your insights with us today, it was a pleasure. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally to follow up, ask you any questions, what's the best way for them to reach you?

Wendell: So my email is pretty easy, it's wblack@five9.com, and I would be delighted to engage with the partner community that way. I'm also on LinkedIn, Wendell Black, and would be happy to engage with people out there in the social world as well. Five9.com would be my third recommendation. You can find me in the partner section of our website and would be happy to get connected via that as well. So Jen, it's been a pleasure speaking with you today, and thank you so much for the opportunity.

Jen: Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for joining us and thanks, everyone, for tuning into The Allbound Podcast.

Male: 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.

Jeanne Hopkins, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Ipswitch, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss respecting partners’ time, the downfalls of un-aligned sales and marketing teams and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

It sounds like there's a lot of co-selling or collaboration that's happening between your internal teams and partners. Is that the way it's always been at Ipswitch, or has that evolved over the years?

It's not new. I think that we had some hiccups last year, where there were product introductions that were back to back to back to back - and you just don't do that with partners, right? We have updates to three very important products of ours coming up. I was looking at the timelines and one was early June, mid-June, and then end of June. I thought, "You know what, we can't do that to our partners. It's got to be a bundle." If it's going to be 2017 plus and it's going to be all these software upgrades, then we need to release it and be able to tell our partners all at once; because a channel partner has a lot of other customers.

We're important and valuable to our partners, but then on the other hand we might only account for $20,000, maybe $50,000, maybe $100,000 worth of revenue. They have big partners that they're working with and we can be an afterthought in many respects. We need to respect their time, we need to respect their need for communication in a very concise way and not keep them from being able to be successful with all the other businesses that they're dealing with.


I'm seeing this line blur between what's considered marketing and what's considered sales enablement. A lot of times I'm seeing people refer to sales enablement tools or resources and I'm thinking, "That's marketing." But it's a revenue focused, lead generation focused, demand driven focused marketing.

For a marketing team, you're creating all kinds of content, you're trying to get your direct team, your internal teams to engage and use them. That could be really magnified when you're talking about a channel. What are some of the challenges that you face at Ipswitch with getting partners to actually engage with those tools and resources that you're providing? You're doing a lot for them, are they using it all? Are they only using part of it?

Within our sales team we have a team of sales enablement people, who create videos and demo.

When I joined this company I noticed there were a remarkable amount of marketing projects or programs being done by the sales team. The very first thing that I saw when I joined was a 61 page catalog of 40 products - it was quite a big project. It was presented to the marketing department; they were told to print it. Our marketing team was looking at it saying, "What is this?"

Additionally, sales has their own e-mail program that they use. So they were sending this direct mail piece, sending e-mails to customers ... a whole host of things. It was this whole shadow marketing organization.

You have to ask yourself, "Why were they doing that?" It wasn't malicious. This shadow marketing was happening simply because sales was feeling that marketing was not helping them to achieve their objective. I've heard that there was a lot of “we can't”, and now we have a lot more “we can”, in terms of helping sales. I'm trying to grab hold of marketing and own it as a team.

I think back to this particular catalog that was printed in the middle of November. On the cover it said 2016. I said to the salesperson, "It's the middle of November. Why wouldn't you put 2017 on this?" They were trying to get something done, but they didn't have the marketing experience. It wasn't a bad thing, they didn't do anything wrong. However, if they had given us some visibility into the project ahead of time, we might have been able to help. Because after you print 5,000 of these things and suddenly it’s 2017, what are you going to do? Put a sticker on all of them?

Think about all the things that you try to do as an organization, in terms of helping. What I've noticed is that we have North America field marketing, we have rest of world field marketing and then e-mail field marketing. They're not necessarily aligned with each other, so we're not necessarily getting the scaling capabilities.

Channel partners are channel partners and they all need the same thing. They want margin, right? They want co-op dollars or some sort of MDF to be able to help them run their programs. They want leads. So, it's not necessarily content, Jen, it really is a financial relationship. But the inverse of that is what are your quotas? What are you delivering?

Sometimes the channel partner is used to being successful on their own and not necessarily tying it to the goals and objectives of their partner. One of the things I'm trying to help partners understand is that we are all in the business of sales. How are we going to help them be successful going forward?


What advice do you have for fellow marketing officers whose companies have partner programs and really want to increase their channel partners' contribution?

Get involved. What I've observed is most chief marketing officers don't get involved. As a CMO, I've offered to be in meetings, and even if I can only dial in having the credibility of having a C-level person at the table gives the channel manager or the director of channel management so much more power in the relationship.

Often you’re working with a lower level person and the channel partner is holding all the cards, beating the bejeebers out of that poor manager of yours. But if you're able to be on these calls with these billion dollar partners or distributors and say, "We're investing in this program and this is what we're going to do", you can help. I was able to help the director of channel management for North America in a conversation with a partner, where we were making an investment.

We received a spreadsheet with options “two of these, and one of those, and three of these...” and so we're going through it and saying, "That has no value, that has no value, that has no value. Can we trade two of these for one of those which is definitely going to have value?" It was something Joan, our channel partner manager, wouldn't have thought because she didn't think she had enough power. But for me to be able to say, " I want to help you Joan and I want to help us be successful with this relationship."

Whenever you make these investments in programs whether it's with MDF, co-op dollars, whatever, you want to make sure that they're used. So many times marketing people have no problem spending money, but don't figure out how to use money that is being handed to them on a platter. If you can make use of those dollars and make them more valuable, if that makes the channel partner happy, that is important as well.

I'm going to go back to the two words, get involved, be present, show support. Those are six words, but just trying to make a statement here. As the chief marketing officer, the channel is important to you. To actually be a part of it, is what's going to make a difference for the organization.  

Greg Goldstein, Senior Director of Global Channel Sales and Development for ON24, joins Jen Spencer to discuss mid-market and enterprise consulting partners, business planning for channel managers, partner exit interviews, and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Jen: I'm excited to have you with us, and I wanna share a little bit about ON24 before we dig into channel questions. You guys are the global leader in webinar marketing solutions that drive demand generation and customer engagement, which sounds exciting. I know you've recently joined the ON24 team, but you've spent the last 12 plus years developing channel programs for software companies. Can you tell us a little bit about ON24, about your value proposition, and what brought you to this new team?

Greg: Absolutely, for sure. ON24, as you mentioned, is a leader in webcasting technologies. Our overarching goal is to help marketers generate more leads and pipeline, as well as keeping existing customers up to speed on an organization's current deliverables, services and other offerings. Our platform is really about interactivity. It helps companies drive better engagement through that interactivity, and although interactivity and relationships are crucial, it's really how the platform can gather the data from those events, whether they're live events, on-demand events, or even semi-live events. And it's really crucial that as organizations spend time and effort to create these webcasts, that that data is pulled back into their organization and shared with their CRM and marketing automation platforms to really help the sales team just get more actionable activities and information about prospects and customers that they're engaged with.

Jen: Well, being a revenue-driven marketer myself, I can definitely see the value there. So let's talk about channel. When you look at those overarching goals that the ON24 team has for the year, that you have, that the executive team has, what role do you think your channel is going to play in helping achieve those goals, both in the next 12 months, but then, looking ahead to even the next five years?

Greg: That's a great question. As a channel person who's been in channel for 12 plus years, what's really crucial is, when an organization gets to that inflection point where they realize that channel is really that lever that's gonna help them extend their revenue stream, that they look at where they currently are with their channel. I think that like ON24, they realize that the channel is going to play that pivotal role. So how do you develop a channel in an organization that maybe not necessarily had a consulting partner channel but are looking to do that? And so, ON24 has several different channels, but specifically to this question, the consulting partner channel that I was brought in to develop is something that's going to help open up the market in the short-term and long-term.

In the short term, it's building out a channel program that will provide our new partners with a webcasting solution that they can include into their marketing stack. And that's something that we'll talk about a little bit later. But there's this new stack, there's a CRM component, there's a marketing automation component, and then there's the webcasting component that really all tie together to create a unified vision of people, customers and prospects that are engaging these organizations. So my goal in coming to ON24 was to create a channel and create channel partners' success programs that will help these partners develop the tools that they need to be successful. I think in the short-term, the ON24 new partner program, which we've titled SuccessOne, will give these new partners the tools to be successful by also providing ON24 the leverage of having a new and unique devoted channel that will help expand the brand that ON24 brings to the webcasting space. So for short-term, we're gonna be very focused on the partners, but in the long-term, the goal for the SuccessOne program is to really provide ON24 as an organization a larger route to the consumer market than they ever could before with the direct model.

Jen: So right now, I'm going to assume that you've got revenue goals that are associated with your partner program. Is that an accurate assumption?

Greg: Yeah, of course. All channels will have revenue goals. With the new SuccessOne partner program, this is really a buildout of a brand-new type of partner that ON24 really hasn't engaged in the past. These are mid-market enterprise consulting partners, and of course there are revenue targets. But when you're building a brand-new channel from scratch and you're coming in with a unique new line of business, the most important thing for a channel is that you have the enablement training and go-to market strategies encapsulated into a concept that partners can digest and execute, which is something that overrides the short-term revenue goals. It's really the enabling goals which are playing a more pivotal role.

Jen: Got it. So these new consulting partners, how do they differ from, or do they differ from a more traditional value-added reseller? Do you still have those VAR type of partners at ON24 or are you pivoting a traditional VAR program into more of a consultancy type of partner program?

Greg: That's another great question. So ON24 has a series of different types of channels, as do a lot of publishers. There's ISVs, OEMs, VARs. In the software world more, I like to call them consulting partners since not a lot of consulting firms like to be called value added resellers. They're truly consulting partners. And so, we do have ISVs, we do some OEM, we do have SIs, and those programs have been with ON24 for quite a while. Those programs will remain as they are. I'm working with the teams that are supporting those partners to look at their strategies, their go-to market strategies, their enablement strategies, their onboarding strategies. And there will be some enhancements to those programs.

My goal is to come in and bring in those mid-market, like I mentioned, mid-market and enterprise consulting partners. These are the partners that their predominate core practices revolve around CRM, marketing automation, and ERP. This is a new type of partner, consulting partner that ON24 hasn't truly engaged in the past. But in my history and in my experiences working with either publishers from GoldMine to Sage to SugarCRM to Act-On, these mid-market and enterprise consulting partners are truly the trusted advisors of the target audience that ON24 is going after.

Jen: So I wanted to ask you about that, about, some of your past experience. Some of those past experiences that you've mentioned, I mean, you've helped build some pretty phenomenal channel programs over the years, like you mentioned Sage, Sugar, Act-On. So when you first join a software company with that goal of either creating or further developing a channel program, where do you start?

Greg: Well, there's a lot of ways to approach this, and I think everybody who's been in channel will look at it from a different perspective. I think, most importantly, if you're channel person, you're looking at an opportunity based on how a partner would approach it. I think there's probably five pillars or five major buckets that you wanna look at. First is, what's the market for that opportunity? What's the market for that platform? Is it a market that is on a growth curve, is it in a maintenance curve, or is it kind of on a downswing? Now, that's a really crucial point when you look at, can a channel be built successfully around the product or services that the publisher is going to market with? That's number one.

Number two, fit for the partners. Is it a technology or a solution that the partners in your ecosystem aren't easily adaptable to? The market that I specifically fit into are more those partners that fit around the business applications, the CRM, the ERPs, marketing automation, those consulting firms that are out there to solve the problem for their consumers. So that's the second thing. Is there a fit for a partner channel for that service?

Third is what's the current ecosystem of that channel? So if you're talking about webcasting or marketing automation or CRM, what's the channel like? Is there a robust channel? Is it a product that's in demand, that partners realize that they wanna go out and they wanna exploit those needs in the marketplace? So is there a fit in the ecosystem for that product?

Fourth is partner profitability. Does that product or service provide the partner with a revenue stream with not only product sales but also in consultative services? These are businesses like all other organizations that have to profit, and they have to be able to utilize their staff to be profitable. So some products have a very low cost point but a high services rate. Other products have a really high price point but very little services. So you have to kind of weigh where you're at with margins and consultative services to really determine, is this a good fit for a partner?

And fifth, which to me is one of the most important ones, is partner commitment and organizational commitment. Does the publisher, or is the publisher committed to the success of a channel? If you have an organization, and ON24 has absolutely opened its arms to this new concept of building out a new partner channel, are they committed to doing this? Building a channel is not a one-quarter or two-quarter event, it's a marathon. And a marathon has many steps, right, as you know. It's enablement, it's recruitment, it's onboarding, it's building a strategy that helps partners be effective. But also, are partners committed to this? Do the partners realize or understand or need to be educated that their consumers need that product or service? Do they need it, do they want it? If they don't need it, do they need to be educated as to why they need it? There are a lot of partners, Jen, that look at products and go, "You know what, that's too far ahead of the adoption curve from my install in customer base." That's another component that you also have to consider. Where in the adoption curve is that product or service? So those are pretty much the big five.

Jen: These are all great questions to ask before you start digging and building out a program. I mean, you started a company, how do you go about getting answers to all of those questions? Do you have any tips for folks who might be in a similar situation?

Greg: I'd been doing this for a long time and that question has come up before. How do you find these questions out? How do you find out if it's an opportunity for a channel lead or a channel sales vendor? My best response is, go talk to partners that you have a great relationship with, find out what their customer base, the spectrum of applications that their customers are using, find out what they're asking their prospects. A lot of the times, partners don't do the due diligence in their own business development. One of the things that I've done in the past, and this is how I gather a lot of this information as to, "Is this a viable product," is when I coach partners or when I build channels, when I work with channels, I require partners to do exit interviews with companies that they've won deals and lost deals.

I don't think enough partners in this industry do exit surveys. Why did we not win this deal? Was it based on price? It should never be based on price why you lose a deal. I think exit surveys should ask do you feel that our organization provided you with the information to make an educated response to whether this application fitted your needs? When you start having partners that are at that level of competency of their own organization, go ask them, "Does webcasting fit your profile of applications that your prospects or your customers are asking for?" You really got to out and ask the questions to determine if it's the right fit or not.

Jen: That's a really great point, and some of those activities that you're bringing up are good activities, I think, for even direct sales teams to be doing as well. I think, having that open communication with your partners, and when you're saying talking to them, I'm assuming you mean actually either face-to-face or on the phone and not just sending out a survey. Am I correct in that assumption?

Greg: Absolutely. As much as I love technology, I am all about that personal touch. In the 15 years that I've been in this business, I have a Rolodex of, gosh, 300 to 500 partners that I know personally. It's been a long time in this industry, and I have another 500 that I can communicate with via electronic means. Communication is key. You really need to be able to understand what makes a partner tick. For all of us that do channels, channel partners are unique individuals, just like they're unique organizations. They all have specific needs that they need to satisfy, whether it's an application that they need to provide to their customers, or how they go to business and how they go to market, how do they engage their customers and prospects. Knowing your partners is not just sending out a survey or assuming that you know what they want, it's asking those questions. I'm a big, big fan of beta testing, and I've been doing that since I started in channels. I will come up with a channel strategy and I will bring in two or three of my closest channel allies, channel partner allies, and ask them, "What do you think of this strategy and can we pilot it with your firm?" Whether it's a marketing strategy, a sales strategy, whatever it may be, being in channel is a great opportunity, because you can test things, you can do A/B split testing on channel strategies. Never assume you know the answer, never assume, always ask the question and get a better response.

Jen: I think that's great. I think even from a consumer perspective, when I think about some of the technologies that I use, whenever I'm asked to try something, to be a beta to provide feedback, honestly, I feel special. I feel like, "Wow, my opinion really matters." I feel like I'm truly a trusted partner in that relationship. So it's a win-win, I think, for both parties.

Greg: Absolutely. I can tell you, there's dozens of partners that I've worked with that have followed me from even my days at GoldMine to Sage to SugarCRM to Act-On and now to ON24, that have followed me from publisher to publisher because I've made them money. When you make a partner money and make them successful, they trust you. In this industry, being in channel, being a channel leader, trust, integrity, there is nothing more important than that. If you go down that straight path with a channel partner and you tell them the good, the bad, and the ugly, then you're gonna be successful.

Remember, these partners that are selling applications, especially when they go from the old-school on-prem perpetual licensing model to a new cloud deployment with software as a service pricing model, their models have changed. That paradigm shift for them, a lot of them had a little trouble with that shift. And now that they've adopted to the new model and the new modern channel partners that are more assertive and aggressive with building out their practices, looking for those new platforms that fill their customers' and prospects' gaps in their solution stack, those are the ones that will be the most forthright with the channel leader to tell you, "You guys need to think about going to market this way, because my customers and prospects are looking at it from a different perspective than maybe the publisher's looking at it." And that's where that relationship and that conversation, Jen, is crucial in building out a successful channel.

Jen: So Greg, I have one more question for you, but it's actually two questions in one, I'm totally cheating. So, okay, so the first part of the question is, what do you think is the biggest challenge for sales professionals overseeing a channel program? And then my second, tying it to this question, question is, what do you see is the greatest opportunity for those same leaders? Sometimes those challenges and opportunities can be one and the same.

Greg: Yeah. The challenges and opportunities are the same, it's the same coin, opposite sides, where with partners, I always do, I try to do personal business development with my top partners and those partners that raise their hands. And I'm a big fan of old-school SWOT: strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat. And I really think not enough channel sales people, channel managers, channel leadership really understand where the partners are in their specific lifespan of their consulting firm. So when you say challenges, I'd probably say understanding what the partners are actually looking to achieve from their own perspective.

As a channel leader, I know what my company's looking to do. I know exactly what I am trying to do, build an effective selling machine that is self-sufficient and competent. Okay, so challenges, there's a lot of lackadaisical attitude in channel today and I don't personally understand it. I've been around for a long time and I've seen the most effective channels flutter when the day-to-day business development requirements are taken away from channel sales people. The channel needs to be understood, listened to, and when they have an issue or there's a gap in their go-to-market strategy, they need to be addressed. So I would say, the education from a channel sales perspective as to what each individual partner needs to be successful is probably, in my opinion from a business development standpoint, Jen, a big challenge today, a very big challenge.

Jen: Why do you think there's inertia in the channel? You know, because you touched on it, and I see it too. There's a lot of, I don't know if it's inertia, apathy, or if it's just this thing that exists in a company that folks maybe don't seem to wanna dig into. Do you have any thoughts on why that is?

Greg: Well, I'll use a phrase I use when I'm bringing on partners, and I mentioned a thing called channel self-sufficiency, which is something that I strive for, for partners to be self-sufficient. I really think there's this phrase, and I use it in a lot of my marketing and a lot of my recruitment, is competency breeds confidence. And I think today there's been a move from, in some areas, from publishers to not bring in people that have strong business backgrounds to manage partners. I think that is where the latency in success is happening, is you have channel sales people that don't take their role seriously. They don't understand the fact that they need to know business, they need to know business development, they need to know marketing, but on top of it all, they need to know the product that they sell. That, right, I can tell you numerous experiences where I've been at publishers where the channel person did not know their platform. I'm sorry, you can be a business development person, you can be a channel marketing person, you can have the best business strategy concepts in the world. But if you can't sit there and have at least an advanced sales rep's skillset around the platform you're selling, you're gonna show weakness to the channel partner.

Jen: Or because you...

Greg: You need to...go ahead.

Jen: No, sorry. I'm stepping...I'm trying to finish your sentence. I just let you finish your sentence. You're making, you're a business adviser in a way, you have to be able to communicate the value of your product or platform and show that channel partner what value that's gonna add to his or her own business. I mean, I agree 100%, you have to know how these systems work and you have to have that business acumen. I haven't had anybody kind of put their finger on that before. So I'm just kind of like bouncing in my chair a little bit. Like, this is it. Yes, Greg. Like, I agree 100%.

Greg: A couple of years ago, I did a dramatic change in direction on how I did business development and business planning with partners. And again, lots of publishers, lots of experiences. Business planning with partners is something that is overlooked. And I did an absolute 180 in my strategies. I actually tore up all the 20-page business plans that I had used in the past and I moved to something that I call the a la carte strategy where I actually have between 20 and 25 topics that a partner can actually choose from for their coaching. Of course, there are some mandatory things that I require, and I do a triage level of 1 to 4, right, 1 means we're working on it now, 2 means we're working on it in 60 to 90 days, 3 and 4, putting them in the parking lot.

But for partners that get my business planner with my team, they look at us and go, "My gosh, you guys really wanna understand what we are as an organization and where are the gaps." When you bring that type of channel leadership and channel management to the partner ecosystem, they're gonna pay attention to you. They're gonna give you that mindshare, Jen, that you need to be successful. Remember, and this is where channel managers and channel leaders kind of drift off. The top consulting partners, partners at the top 1%, Microsoft partners, Salesforce consulting partners, NetSuite partners, Sage partners, you name the publisher, their top partners, aside from those core applications that they sell, are selling another 20 to 50 other applications. How do you make yourself front-of-mind and get mindshare so that they represent your product before they think about another application that ties into Great Plains or Dynamics or Salesforce?

It is showing them that you're absolutely professional and that you're there to help them make money. You're there to help them be successful. You show that with your documentation, with your tools that you provide, your business planning tools, you're gonna get their mindshare. You're gonna get 25% of their marketing time. You're gonna get 25% of their sales time. You're gonna get 25% of their operational and organizational mindshare. You get those components, you get that type of mindshare, you're gonna have a successful channel. But you need to be hiring channel managers that are more business related than they are trying to sell software or sell services. I know that's kind of a shift in thinking, but in my experience, the best channel managers that I've ever had on teams of mine were those that were able to sit down and do business planning and understand what it takes for a partner to be successful.

Jen: I think it's really great advice, and I'm excited to see, the growth of the ON24 partner program, this whole ecosystem, as you dig in further. But before I let you go, I know I kind of riddled you with channel questions, I do have a couple of more personal questions for our listeners to get to know you a little bit better. Are you open to answering a couple of easy questions?

Greg: Absolutely, absolutely.

Jen: Alright, okay. So first question, what is your favorite city?

Greg: Favorite city, well, I'm a little biased. I'm gonna say the city that I live in, which is Newport Beach, California.

Jen: Well, you just happen to live in paradise. We can't all be so lucky. Question number two, are you an animal lover?

Greg: I am. I'm a huge animal lover. I have two crazy dogs that, love to sit in my home office and love to voice their opinions when they don't like what I hear. I also love horses. My little daughter is all about ponies right now. So we spend a lot of time up at a local ranch and she can pretend that she's a cowgirl and really enjoy that.

Jen: Lovely. Question number three, Mac or PC?

Greg: Oh, that's the big question. I am currently six years on Mac, spent my first 10 years in the industry on PC, and I can go either way.

Jen: Really, there's not like one thing you just love more than the other? I mean, if I stuck you on a plane for five hours and I had one in one hand and one in the other, which one would you take?

Greg: I'm going Mac. You got me on that one.

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

Greg: Wow, all-expenses-paid trip. Gosh, that is a great question. I would probably have to say, given that I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, a Disney cruise.

Jen: I hear those are really great.

Greg: If it was just my wife and I, I'd probably say Montreal. One of my favorite towns is Montreal.

Jen: Nice, nice. Well, I hear Disney cruises are pretty great for adults too, and they've got some daycare too. So that might not be such a bad trip.

Greg: Exactly.

Jen: Well, Greg, thank you so much for sharing your time, your insights with us today. If listeners would like to reach out to you directly, what's the best way for them to do so?

Greg: I recommend that you connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, Greg Goldstein, and I respond quickly to messages. And if you have questions about channel, questions about anything, in the industry, I'm always open to giving advice, having dialogue, conversation, love chatting. So if you wanna reach out, LinkedIn.

Jen: Perfect. And we'll go ahead and include some social media links to that when we publish this podcast as well. Again, Greg, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. And we look forward to delivering another episode of the Allbound podcast next week. Have a great day, everyone.

Thanks for tuning to the Allbound podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone.

Joe Durfey, Director Strategic Partnerships at Grow, joins me to discuss how to create and maintain successful referral partner relationships, the importance of content in the partner channel, and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Jen: Well, I'm glad to have you. You know, Grow's a really cool rapidly growing business intelligence company that's in Provo, Utah. I know you guys focus on small and medium-sized businesses, and you help them track metrics, and connect to various data sources, and then visualize that data, so some pretty cool stuff. When I say rapidly growing, Joe, when I was doing a little bit of digging, I found that Grow has grown, no pun intended, grown its sales team by 500% in the last year. That's insane. What's going on over there? And tell us a little bit about what you do.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Jen. So, yeah, 2016 was just tremendous for us. I think we performed in 2016 beyond any of our wildest expectations. We set some pretty aggressive goals at the beginning of the year, and blew even our stretch goals out of the water. You know, I think the product's really, really good. I think that from where it was when we started to where it is now, it's just amazing what our developers have been able to do. But the market that we're targeting and the way we're targeting is really different. We do target, as you mentioned, Jen, the SMB and the mid-market companies. Our mission is to bring affordable, functional, customizable, feature-rich BI to the mid-market space.

When we looked at the space, we saw a lot of really great enterprise providers, like Domo, Tableau, and Sisense, and their products are awesome. You can slice and dice the data a million different ways, lots of great integrations, etc. But for a mid-market company, it's often very cost prohibitive. And on the other end, you have kind of pre-canned dashboard software that's very, very affordable, it's just really stripped down in terms of the features, and the integrations, and the customization that you can do. So we kind of look at this middle space and just viewed a huge opportunity to really give mid-market companies and SMBs a BI solution that helps them become more data-driven and helps them create a business command center for the company and to do it in a way that we really didn't see anybody doing it for mid-market companies. So that's kind of our mission, and, you know, we're still a young company, but if we can just kind of keep the momentum that we started building in 2016 into 2017 and beyond, we'll be in a pretty good place.

Anyway, Jen, I don't even know what the question was. I kind of just went off there. My role is strategic partnerships, we're pretty early to the partnership and channel game here at Grow. It seems like most organizations don't start down this path until they're probably a few years further along than we are. We just flip data, and because of the product that we have, and all of the native integrations that we've already built out, there's just a huge opportunity for us to grow through partnerships and through channel. I've been with the company for about six months, and it's been a huge learning experience, but it has been awesome at the same time every step of the way. So we're learning a lot as we go, and maybe I've learned a few things that will be helpful to some of the listeners of this podcast.

Jen: Well, I think so. I think there are a lot of companies in the SaaS space that are young companies, maybe as young as Grow, maybe not, but perhaps in the same revenue size kind of place, and are looking to begin this journey with partners. So let's dig into that a little bit. Your partner program is comprised of referral partners, integration partners, and then you have a value-added reseller type of partner. When you look across your current partner base, are those roles evenly distributed? Do you lean towards onboarding one kind of partner over another? Do you have any initiatives for targeting a certain kind of partner? Share with us a little bit about what that partner makeup looks like.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. I need to go update our website, it really should be referral partners, technology integration partners, and value-added referral partners. We're young in building this out. One of the things that is important to us in this stage, and I think as we advance this will change, but right now we really want to be able to control a lot of the sales process and then all the way through the onboarding, and the implementation, and the support. We love to have our partners ride shotgun with us through that process, and that's really the best way that we’ve found at our stage to train our partners. So we're not doing a lot of true reseller partnerships right now. More of what we are focused on are value-added referral partners or partners that provide a complimentary service. For example, a company that goes in and helps prep data or helps organize data and get it in a good place, so that they can then plug it into a tool like Grow, those are great partners for us. Consultancy organizations, business coaches, you know, people that are really focused on the metrics, and the KPIs, and helping companies to become more data-driven, those are great partners for us. So that's one channel that's a priority right now.

The other big channel that's priority is technology integrations, and we do that two different ways. Sometimes we find companies, SaaS companies, that have great products, but they have a product gap in terms of the way that their product allows their users to interact with their data from a reporting standpoint and from a visualization standpoint. So we go in and help fill that gap, whether if it's through a somewhat embedded or OEM model, or by simply having a link to Grow and sending customers to set up their own accounts with Grow, where they can go and connect to that data source and then build the reports that they want. Both of those paths are really good paths for us. Then we also do a lot of what I would call, co-marketing partnerships with companies that we've built integrations with. So that's really been our focus and is our focus right now. I suspect over time that will remain the focus, but we'll probably add some new ones in there, some more layers to what we're doing right now.

Jen: That's great. I want to just commend you for recognizing the need to focus on the referral partners and doing those sort of ride-alongs during the sales process and then holding onto that customer through implementation, especially being a young company. I'm sure you're still making adjustments to a lot of your sales process, to your implementation process. I know that there are probably a lot of partners out there who would love to truly resell Grow's solution, and sometimes it's hard to say no and "Let's hold off. We're not quite there yet." You'll get there when and if you decide to get there. So that's great.

Joe: Yeah, it is. It's always a quandary, especially for the guy that's responsible for partnerships to have to say no, that's a hard thing. I think it's really important for companies to take inventory of where they're at in their company's history, where the product is, and if it's really ready to turn over and let somebody else go sell it and take opportunities from A to Zs, set the clause and kind of give that up. I know it works for a lot of companies, and Grow might be one of those companies someday, but we just feel like it's premature for us right now. And so it is sometimes hard to say no, but I think it's the right thing.

Jen: Oh, absolutely. So when you have a partner, a referral partner, or maybe it’s a technology partner, which is also going to in a way refer a new business, what are some of the tactics you've employed to help train those partners so they can be successful in sharing Grow's value proposition with prospects? You very clearly outlined, "Jen, this is what sets us apart from some of the other business intelligence tools that are out there." How do you transfer that knowledge to your partners?

Joe: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's a challenge that we talk about all the time. I think that the two most effective things that we found are, one, doing the ride-alongs and the co-selling together with our partners. One of the struggles that we've seen some partners have is feeling like they have to be experts on the platform to just tee up a conversation for us to get involved and help them close the deal. We talk to partners a lot about, "Hey, we're here for you, and nobody knows Grow better than we know Grow, and nobody can sell it better than we can sell it." So, we give them just a few talking points that we really like to focus on that we've found have been successful at teeing up conversations. We really like to have our partners learn and train as we go through the process with real clients. So, content is important and having things like the internal-facing battle cards for sales reps and CS reps, and public-facing battle cards for their customers and different content that they can use, that's all really important. What I’ve seen is we're all so busy with our primary job and our primary responsibility that even when we share these things with partners, some of them get in and really use it, others say "Hey, I just don't have a lot of time to really train and use all this content. I'd really just like to bring you guys in and let you guys do what you do best."

So the best thing that we found is the co-selling and just having our partners learn as we sell with them and as we onboard and implement with them. Then the second thing is we treat partners a lot like we do customers. Every one of our customers gets a dedicated CS rep. Every one of our partners gets a dedicated CS rep. Our CS reps are really experts on the platform, they're data analysts, and they're also very nice, friendly, and helpful. So every one of our partners gets one of these analysts that whenever there's a question on, "Hey, can the product do this, or can it do that?" they have a direct line to that rep. So a lot of what we've found to be successful in terms of the way we do our customer success, we've taken that and done the same thing with our partners. Those are the two things that I would probably say have been the biggest help to me in terms of getting our partners trained and knowledgeable on our platform.

Jen: That's great. What about those partners that you onboard and then they don't quite activate. What are some of the challenges you face actually engaging partners after they've signed on the dotted line? You've agreed this is a good partnership, you get their customer success or CS manager, do you ever have people that just kind of go dark?

Joe: Sure. Yeah. That's truthfully an area, Jen, where I think we can make a lot of strides in terms of doing better. We're new at this, we're truthfully casting a pretty wide net right now, and if somebody wants to partner with us and they want to refer leads and work with us, we pretty much accept all comers that fit into that referral partner box right now. And, yeah, we have a number of partners that have been really excited when I'm talking to them pre-signing a partner agreement, and then just sort of fizzle out. I knew that would be the case and expected it. We're building right now, we're doing a lot of trial and error and a lot of exploration. I know one of the things that we'll have to do in the future is kind of go back and clean up who we're partnered with so that we don't have just a lot of dead weight that's really a partner and name only. So, it's not a great answer to the question. I know we can do a lot better in terms of competing for mindshare with our partners and doing that through a content-driven strategy, and trying to make it easier for our partners to share information about Grow.

So, that's part of the building process that we're going through right now. I would say that right now we do fall into the 80-20, where already 6 months in, we have a number of partners that just aren't producing, and some of that is things that we can do better to support our partners, and some of it is just I don't think they'll ever produce. At some point, we'll have to go back and kind of filter out those that aren't ever really going to be effective partners.

Jen: Well, Joe, you don't like saying no to partners, just wait until you have to break up with them. So that conversation, will have to happen. On the podcast, Lisa Box from WP Engine, she talked about having that tough conversation with a partner where it just doesn't make sense anymore. But let's talk about the 80-20 rule. It's a problem that plagues many established channel partner programs, where 80% of revenue is coming from 20% of those partners. So you're aware of, "Okay, this is us. This is what's gonna happen, and we're gonna be stuck here." So what are you trying to put in place now, or what are you working on so that you can avoid this moving forward as you expand the program in the future?

Joe: Yeah. That's another really good question, Jen. I don't know that we've really settled that. We've talked about gamification and having minimum thresholds that partners need to meet and different levels and tiers where they get more resources, and support, and content as they produce and as they show that they're committed to the partnership. So right now those are things that we're thinking about, but, frankly, if your listeners and other people have great ideas on that, I'm all ears, because that's one that I haven't totally figured out yet.

Jen: Well, and it's that engagement factor, right? So I think part of it is just from listening to people who have come on this podcast or folks that we've interacted with here at Allbound, I know a lot of it starts with recruitment, right? It starts with who do you bring in, and who do you invest in, and what do you give them access to. It's a great topic of conversation, and I hope that our listeners will reach out to you and start a good conversation about that. You previously led enterprise sales teams, and before that, you were an individual contributor also in enterprise tech space. So this is a recent change to your career doing channel, right? What have you enjoyed about working with this partner program, working with channel partners?

Joe: Well, I would say just the biggest thing for me is the overall level of professionalism. I think as much as any group that I've ever been associated with, channel partners really embody a mentality of, "Let's find the mutual value. Let's work together to come up with solutions, and let's work together to drive revenue." I think channel people generally understand better than most groups that if there's not real value for both parties, it's just not going to work. So what I've really enjoyed is just the interactions and the type of people that I find that are in channel roles within their companies and they really do look for win-wins. And they really do work hard to try to drive value not only to their own company but to their partner's company. That's a lot different than sales or enterprise sales where you're just trying to do whatever you can to get a deal and to get the buyer to sign on the dotted line and then turn it over to CS and let them do their thing. There's a lot more that goes into it from a strategic standpoint and trying to solve problems. I just think overall the people that I've interacted with that are in a role similar to mine are just top grade, and really, really smart, and really thoughtful, and that's what I've enjoyed most going from enterprise sales and leading enterprise sales teams to doing channel.

Jen: Is there anything that you feel that you've brought with you from being in either a sales leadership role or an individual contributor role that you think has been really beneficial for you now in growing this partner program?

Joe: Yeah. In my last company, I had channel people calling me all the time, wanting to give my sales guys to promote their products. So I have this benefit of understanding. When I was running the sales team, and I would have another company calling on me and my reps saying, "Hey, we want you to sell our stuff and promote our stuff." and I was still concerned about my guys hitting our own numbers and the last thing I really want them to think about or be distracted with is learning somebody else's product so that they know when is the right time and opportunity to send along a referral or whatever else. So I approach that in this role, really delicately, because I relate to the pressures that go along with leading sales teams and with sales guys just trying to get their own quotas. I think it's made me think about it more creatively in terms of how do you make it frictionless, and how do you drive revenue and drive leads through partners without being a distraction to their sales teams and their CS teams? What are the co-marketing strategies and the conversion events that we can do together to drive those outcomes without having to go and convince an enterprise sales director that his sales guy should learn my product and then send me referrals? From what I've seen, that's a really hard thing to do, and I relate to that, because I was in that role. So I think it's helped me in this role to be creative about, "Okay, how do we do this to make it frictionless for our partners?"

Jen: That's great. I hear you so loud and clear, because, like you said, you understand what it's like to be carrying that quota or overseeing those salespeople who are trying to hit those numbers. In partnerships, you've got to look for those win-wins so that you're not interfering with the work that everyone else is doing. So that makes perfect sense. It's a great asset that you bring to the role.

Now, I have one more question for you before I get into some of my more fun personal questions. So, your first day on the job of building this partner program, what would you would have liked to tell yourself? What would you like to tell someone who is back six months in your shoes?

Joe: I would tell myself probably two things. One is, I thought coming in that I would need to be selective. I would go back and say that I need to be more selective and do even more work on partner profiling and partner personas to target the right partners. I mentioned earlier that we're casting a pretty wide net right now, and we're kind of doing that knowing that we're going to probably onboard partners that don't produce initially. But because we're building it, and we kind of want to make sure that we don't miss out on a partner persona that we didn't think about or we thought might be good, that's just sort of something that we've looked at and a risk that we're willing to take. But six months in now, I'm starting to see the types of partners that I think are going to be really, really good long-term partners for us are fewer and far between than I thought they probably were. I would tell myself to really be selective and really put in the time to identify the right kinds of partners before you really go too crazy just bringing on whoever wants to partner with us. So that's one.

The other one is, as a young company, and every company, I guess it doesn't matter whether you're young or not young, you have bottlenecks and you have resource constraints. One of the things that I didn't really think too much about was how important content is to the partner and channel relationships. A little plug here for the CO:LLABORATE conference that Allbound puts on that I went to earlier this year, and one of the things that I heard there that just really resonated after a few months in the job was content isn't the key, it's the kingdom. I can't remember who said it or what presentation it was, but that is something that I've just found to be so true with our partners. We have partners that are more than willing to help promote Grow, and what we do, and how it works well with their products, but they have the same bottlenecks and resource constraints that I do. So if I'm waiting for them to create a webinar outline, or write a blog post, or come up with some content or some messaging for targeted e-mails, it just doesn't happen, because they're so focused on their own businesses.

So, I think one of the things for anybody that's new coming into it is to think about that it’s really is more than a channel manager, it's an organization-wide commitment. I've got to work with my product team, and my dev team, and my marketing team to really give our partners the tools and the resources that they need to be successful. That's something that I don't think I fully grasped coming into this role.

Jen: Well, those are some really great, great insights and I think extremely valuable for folks who are in this place of maybe just thinking about getting started. So thank you. I appreciate you sharing that with us. Before I let you go, at the end of all of my podcasts, I like to put people through a little speed round, where I pepper you with a few questions. They're really more about you. Are you open to this?

Joe: Yeah, sure, as long as I have the veto authority to say “I'm gonna plead the Fifth.” No, let's do it. It'll be fun.

Jen: Alright. They're pretty easy. They're kindergarten level. You'll be okay. So question number one. What's your favorite city?

Joe: My favorite city to visit I would say is...oh, that's a good one. I really like San Francisco. I think San Francisco is a really, really cool city. So let's go with San Francisco.

Jen: I like that answer. That's my favorite city, too. Question number two. Are you an animal lover, yes or no?

Joe: I am an animal lover. I have a silver Lab for a pet. I also have four children, and sometimes I wonder why in the world we thought a dog would be a good idea on top of four young kids.

Jen: I thought you were calling your kids the animals.

Joe: No. Sometimes they are animals. I'm saying it's added responsibility on top of the four kids. So sometimes I wonder why we did it, but, we love our dog, and I am an animal lover. So, yeah, I would say for sure on that one.

Jen: I don't think I know what a silver Lab is. Is it like a silver-haired lab? Like a gray coat?

Joe: Yeah, it's got like a silver-grayish tint. They're not very common. They're really beautiful dogs, and yeah, it's a Lab, but it's silver.

Jen: Awesome, very cool. Okay, question number three, Mac or PC?

Joe: Mac all the way.

Jen: Perfect. Question number four, Uber or Lyft?

Joe: Well, I've actually never ridden Lyft. So let's say Uber, because I've used Uber many times.

Jen: Okay. And last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip. Where would it be to?

Joe: I'm really an outdoorsman. I'm an avid fisherman and I love hiking and all that stuff. So I would say somewhere like Alaska, or maybe like Peru to go do like Machu Picchu. My parents did that last year, and the pictures were unbelievable. So I don't know. I think something like that would be really cool.

Jen: Alright, sounds good. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for taking some time out of your day to share your insights of growing Grow's partner program. It was such a pleasure. If our listeners would like to reach out to you personally, maybe to connect with you about some of the questions that we were discussing or to ask anything else, what's the best way for them to reach you?

Joe: My e-mail address is really easy, it's Joe, J-O-E, @grow.com, joe@grow.com. Or can I give my phone number?

Jen: You can do whatever you want.

Joe: My phone number where you can reach me is 801-615-0633. Those are the two best ways to get a hold of me. And call, or text, or e-mail, whatever you want.

Jen: Wonderful. Yeah, joe@grow.com, that's got a nice ring to it. I'll probably never forget that e-mail address.

Joe: I lucked out with that one.

Jen: You certainly did. You certainly did. Well, thanks again so much for joining us, Joe.

Joe: Well, thank you, Jen, for the invitation. It's an honor to join you and talk a little bit about what we all love to do. So thank you so much, and I would love to come back sometime, maybe down the road when I've learned a little bit more.

Jen: Sounds like a plan. Thanks so much. And thanks, everyone else, for tuning in. Join us next week for an all-new episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Male voice: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbounds.com. And remember, never sell alone.

Dee Dee de Kenessey, Agency Partner Program Manager at Wistia, joins Jen Spencer on The Allbound Podcast to discuss the why behind creating a partner agency program, owning the customer relationship, and divvying up valuable time between partners.

I'm so happy to have you. For anyone who's not familiar with Wistia, Wistia provides professional video hosting for businesses, they help businesses add their videos to the web, track performance, and really find new ways to build and engage with their audiences using online video. Dee Dee, is there anything I missed there? Anything you want to add about Wistia? And then tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure. I think you hit the nail on Wistia. That's sort of it in a nutshell. I've been at Wistia for the past year, and I run our agency program over here. We work with a lot of agencies who are doing video for clients in all capacities; some of them are production shops, some of them are marketing agencies, some of them are large ad agencies, but we've got actually a lot of our customers do exactly that. So it's been really fun to come to Wistia in the last year and to launch and be running this program.

So you joined Wistia and the Partner Program a year ago. How long has the program itself been in place? Did it start when you arrived or was it something that you sort of adopted when you joined the company?

It started when I arrived. So Wistia brought me on to develop and run this. I came to Wistia just a year ago, January 2016, and we launched the program three weeks after I started.

Unbelievable.

It was pretty unbelievable. It was one of those things where I said, "I think the best way to do it is just to dive right in and build it as I go." And really what that allowed me to do was to really listen to our first round of agencies that signed up. So instead of building anything in a vacuum and crossing my fingers and hoping that it worked, it was great to be able to listen to that first cohort, ask them questions, and build what they needed. So it was a hectic beginning, but I'm glad we dove right in.

Why did it make sense for Wistia to begin an agency-based program? What was your executive team hoping to achieve by developing this kind of program and hiring you to come build this?

Well, most businesses, when they set out to make a video, hire someone to do that video for them. It's not unusual that you'll find businesses that have internal video teams, but most of the time it's an external hire to actually contract out or to get an agency or production shop to do that. So, again, that can be anyone from an independent videographer or a video-production studio, or a marketing agency that just offers video services. So, really, agencies are a natural fit for Wistia. In fact, many of Wistia's customers are, and have historically been, agencies. It really made sense for Wistia to dig deep into that cohort of its customers and to figure out if we could find a way to really partner with them and help them be more successful.

And what I've found and what I saw coming in is that there were sort of two huge opportunities within video for both the production shops and the broader marketing agencies. So, regardless of what type of an agency you are, agencies that are doing video have an opportunity to upsell their clients or just increase the size of the deals they're closing by adding video services to their existing portfolio. So either agencies are adding video on for the first time, maybe they offer services and now have an opportunity to increase that by adding video on top of the SEO or the social work or the e-mail marketing they might be doing, or, for those that already offer video, adding additional video services.

The real success comes when agencies go from just doing video production to running full video marketing campaigns. So instead of just making the video, the agency can own the strategy, and the planning, they can do the marketing around that video, and if they're using a platform like Wistia, they can measure and prove the success of that video. What we've found - what agencies found, partnering with us and starting to do this - is that their clients are willing to pay more for those services because they ensure the success of the video.

So part of our goal with starting this agency partner program is to educate the agencies that were already using Wistia about how to run these types of campaigns, and how do you you use Wistia to prove out the success of their videos, and then how to upsell, or sell larger deals.

The other opportunity lies in going from doing sort of one off video projects, to having a retainer model of work. Most people just sort of say, "Hey, we want one video for our home page, and that's it." That's sort of the equivalent of asking an agency to just write one blog post, and hope that it goes viral, or one tweet and hope it goes viral. And video can do so much more than just go on YouTube, or go on a home page. Video boosts results across the board for both marketing and sales initiatives, if it's lead nurturing, or closing deals, or whatever it is.

So, again, we saw another opportunity to help educate agencies about what the opportunities are that come with using video in different parts of the marketing and sales process for clients. Videos are also getting cheaper and cheaper. Wistia has a ton of great resources for our agencies about how to record on an iPhone, or make a lighting kit for under a hundred bucks. We wanted to help agencies also do more and better video, and then help them make the case to move to that retainer model, which is just a more sustainable source of income for them.

So really, our goal in creating a partner program is to help agencies do those two things. And of course it's a win-win, right? If video becomes an agency's core strength, if they're closing larger deals, if they're getting onto a retainer model and doing more and more video, then the more clients they'll introduce to Wistia and the longer those clients stick around. Being able to help agencies be successful in two ways was really the main driver.

Well I can definitely see how using a platform like Wistia can help an agency add value to that client for sure. From a very nitty-gritty partner program detail sort of perspective, who owns the customer? Are the agencies reselling Wistia, or are the agencies referring the business to Wistia? So who owns that customer relationship?

So the agencies are reselling Wistia. We decided to go the route of having an agency partner reseller program, as opposed to sort of having an affiliate program where people just get credit for links in to Wistia or referring leads because we wanted to own the end relationship with the client.

I actually came from HubSpot before Wistia and a lot of our inspiration for a successful model of a great agency program comes from Hotspot's agency program. I think they do great things with their agencies. One thing that is core of their model, which we've taken up and has been really valuable, is owning that end relationship with the client. Because at the end of the day, agencies and their clients, it's a temporary relationship. They might work together for a couple years, or a couple months, but at the end of the day, they usually part ways. You want to make sure that your company owns that end relationship so that when an agency disappears, they don't also take all their clients with them.

Right. So let's say - well, here I'm Allbound, right? So I'm Allbound and let's say I hire an agency to create all of my marketing content, which includes videos, and my agency then recommends that I host those videos in Wistia. Is that all wrapped into that one contract I sign with my agency? How do you handle it from a document perspective? So you stay in connection with that customer but the agency also still plays a supportive role in that customer relationship?

Absolutely. That's a great question. So the way that we have it structured is we ask our agencies to separate out the cost of Wistia from sort of the general charge, or to at least make it very clear within the contract that they're signing with their clients, that Wistia is a separate account, a separate charge. We ask that every agency signs their clients up with unique Wistia accounts, and we want the end client to own that account, basically to be the account holder, and own the billing. It's as simple as that. Every agency is made a manager on any client account, so that's how they have full access to the account, they can do all the work in the account, they have access to basically everything but billing. And that's also our way of tracking which agency is associated with which accounts, is whether or not they're manager on there.

We ask that either that the agency sign their clients up for Wistia, or just tell the client to sign up for Wistia, and as long as the agency makes themselves a manager in that account, then all that credit for that account, for the sign up, the resale, and sort of the future work goes to the agency.

Well, I mean, it's great to also hear that this is built into your product, right? It sounds to me like the Wistia platform was built with the intention, the plan, of going to market at least partially through partners. To be able to support that kind of a relationship which is great. I mean, it would be much more challenging for you to determine your success and to track that kind of engagement without that feature within the product.

Absolutely. I think it wasn't actually the initial intent. I don't think this was the plan all along. I'm not sure Wistia knew exactly what it was going to do, but they certainly knew that they had agencies in their ecosystems and that they wanted to have a specific type of user in the account that was a manager and that was different from just a normal user, was different from the account owner, and just had different sort of privileges and permissions mandated. That feature has really made the difference.

That makes a ton of sense. Now you brought these partners on, you just get started, you bring on that initial cohort like you said. I'm sure you've expanded since the initial recruitment that you've done. How do you determine which of your partners are going to earn that lion's share of your attention? Is it based on revenue that they generate? Is it based on their own potential for growth? A combination? How do you decide where you're going to spend your very valuable time?

That's actually the question that occupied me the most and probably still occupies me the most today, but especially when I was starting out the program. Wistia, the company is about 80 people right now, it was about 60 when I joined a year ago. Our agency team is fairly small. So, as I was building, not only was I thinking how can I make this a sustainable, scalable program within this business, but I was also thinking how can I build something that doesn't require a giant team to run it right off the bat? That could still scale up if it's just me or just a couple of us working on it.

So the way that we broke it down and sort of framed it out is every agency that signs up in our program has access to a really nice robust source of resources and training. I made sure that every single one of those things were built scalably and were fairly self sustaining. By scalable I mean that we have a resource center that we continually add new resources too. We stay top-of-mind not by having a weekly call with every agency, but by sending out a weekly newsletter. We've got a self-sustaining community in Slack that's attended to by the most active agencies in there. We use marketing automation to take care of our on-boarding process, the things like that.

Frankly, and most importantly, we eat our own dog food - we use a ton of video. So instead of having webinars or calls or just emails, video has actually been an incredible way, a really engaging way, to stay in touch with agencies and to have them get familiar with us, put a face to the name, and be able to communicate with them in a way that doesn't just feel like yet another email.

And then on top of that, we determine which agencies in particular we pay most attention to from our tiered program, which basically just rewards the top agencies by looking at a combo of the revenue they're bringing in every month and the account activity. We wanted to sort of reward them and pay attention not just to the ones that were reselling the most Wistia accounts, but that were actually actively getting in there and doing good work for their clients. And those agencies get sort of additional benefits, and part of that is some more one-on-one attention.

So they get a sales manager to help look at their client portfolios and help them close deals, and they get a customer success manager to help them use Wistia. When agencies reach a certain level, that's when we can justify and scalably and sustainably pay more attention to them.

So when you launched the program initially, did you launch with a tiered program, or was that something that came later?

That came later, maybe about six months in. I didn't want to build it initially, though it was in the plan all along, because I wanted to make sure that we were setting the tiers in a place that was reasonable, but also aspirational, right? So, I didn't want to set the tiers to some number of accounts or MRR or activity that no one would be able to get to, or that everyone would be able to get to, and then have to course correct from there. I wanted to see sort of who are our strongest agencies, and what are they doing on their own, before we set it up.

Makes sense. Engagement is going to be really important. You touched on so many different ways that you're transferring knowledge to your partners; leveraging video, obviously using marketing automation, creating this sort of cadence of communications. What's the biggest challenge that you have actually engaging your partners after they come onboard?

When I was doing my research as we were launching and as I was talking to people at other agency programs and doing some homework there, I kept hearing two things over and over again. The two biggest challenges for any - not only a new agency program but just for agencies that are in partner programs in general, the two biggest challenges are staying top-of-mind and helping those agencies make that first sale.

And I have found that is absolutely right. It is hard to stay top-of-mind because agencies do so much, right? Not only are they running every part of a business for themselves, but they're taking care of their clients or really it's switched. Oftentimes they take care of their clients first and have a tough time making time to run their business and do their own marketing and they're partnering with different people, they might also be a Marketo partner, might also be a Salesforce partner so staying top-of-mind is a tough one.

And also making that first sale. I have definitely seen that if they figure out how to sell Wistia once, then they got it. They understand, not only do they sort of understand what it takes to make that first sale and they got their spiel down, their pitch deck, whatever it is, but they also are then seeing actual dollar-value coming in for it and are incentivised to make that second sale, if see it helping them. So those two things are really tough and we try a bunch of different things to get at both of these things, and I think we do a fairly good job. Those are the two tough things and they're always tough.

Yeah. I think it's consistent. When we talk to other partner program leaders who are building agency-based programs. It is hard because, like you said, they are very focused on their customers as an agency. We say it's like the Cobbler's kids have no shoes, right?

That's right.

They put everything that they have all into their customers and then they kind of think about themselves last, so you're always going to be challenged with that. I also find that there are a lot of SaaS companies today that are vying for the attention of agencies and looking to agencies as a way to expand that customer reach. So if you've got one agency that you're partnering with they're probably partnering with other companies as well.

I'm just curious, have you noticed any sort of complementary technologies or complementary organizations where you have a lot of crossover? Maybe one of your agency partners is doing a lot of business with you and maybe another entity, or maybe a bridge that you hadn't previously identified.

Yeah. Absolutely. That's actually really been helpful for us because one of the easiest ways to stay top-of-mind with agencies is for them to really see value in the partnership with you. That sounds obvious, but say you've got a group of agencies and they are only Salesforce partners, then when that program grows, to a certain extent, it's hard to differentiate themselves. So they're then looking for that next opportunity so that they can be both a Salesforce and Wistia partner and then they can say to their clients, "Hey, I don't just offer Salesforce help, I also do this other thing. I'm different." It's a way for them to stand out. So if they can find the value in that, that really helps.

The partners, the other SaaS companies that we've found to be really great partners for us in that respect and we just share a lot of agencies, are the marketing automation ones. HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot are sort of in the big three partners for us and love working with all three of them. There's no competition there. The things that we offer are mutually beneficial and in fact partner really well on top of each other. We use other marketing automation platforms as well, it's not just those three. There are a lot of ones that just offer email, right? So sort of your MailChimps, etc., and that's also great for an agency to be able to say, "Hey, not only are we a MailChimp agency and can offer email services but we also offer video services - we're a Wistia agency." So again, for us it's all about sort of complimentary marketing services.

That makes perfect sense. Wistia is a very scalable product, so I can see how you have the opportunity to partner with organizations both on kind of the lower SMB part of the market and then go all the way up, up enterprise. So that makes perfect sense to me. It gives you a lot of opportunity, from a partnership perspective, to find organizations out there where you can nicely complement each other.

So, as you said, when we kind of first kicked this off, you've literally just wrapped up your first year building and overseeing Wistia's agency partner program. So if you could go back in time one year what advice would you give yourself?

What a great question this is. I love this one. In the last year we went from zero partners to over 500, and it's been a pretty incredible year. We set some pretty aggressive goals for sign up and revenue and hit them all, which was incredible. This past year, I couldn't help but worry or want to move faster. It's tough when you build something new and you're not sure exactly how it's going to go.

If I could give myself advice, it would have been to have a little bit more patience and to trust my intuitions. I knew, I really knew, that it was going to be successful from the homework I had done before coming to Wistia, to the sort of intuition I had about how things were going, and then the initial results the first few months in. It's hard to relax when you're building something new at a company, when you're still proving it out, both internally and externally. So my advice is to relax a little bit, which, of course, hindsight is 20/20. It's tough when something is your baby and you really want it to work, but at the end of the day, hard work goes a long way and pushing things forward goes a long way. I do believe that if something is the right fit, it's going to work. I knew from the get-go that this was the right fit, that this kind of a program was going to work for Wistia, it was going to work for the people at the agencies using Wistia. So I wish I had trusted myself just a little bit more.

That's great. That's really great advice to calm that self doubt.

Oh, it's so hard.

I know. Luckily, there are organizations like you mentioned HubSpot, and they built an amazing agency-based partner program where it's generating, I think, 40% of their revenue now. So it's been done. You had the building blocks. You got the head on your shoulders. You've got a great product. But patience, man. It all just takes time.

So before I let you go, I like to ask people just a couple of more personal questions - I have five - in a quick little speed round. Are you ready for this?

Sure.

Okay. Just so we can get to know you a little better. All right. So first question is what is your favorite city?

New York City. That is where I was born and raised. It's the best.

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

Oh, yes. I have two cats and I think they're great. I also love dogs, I don't discriminate. Dogs and cats, hopefully someday I'll have lots of both.

Good stuff. Question number three, Mac or PC?

Mac all the way. I wish it weren't true. I feel a little bad about it, but they're so sleek.

Okay wait. Why do you feel bad about it?

I don't know. I know that I am really, at the end of day, paying more just because it's prettier. That makes me a little sad, but they're so beautifully designed. Now that I'm on a Mac, I can't imagine ever not being on a Mac.

I know. I'm right there with you. Okay, question number four, Uber or Lyft?

Uber, but I--

You sound pained.

I do feel a little bad because I've used Lyft and Lyft is just as, I don't know - there's really no distinguishing difference. I think it's probably because the Uber app comes first in my phone before the Lyft app, even though they're side by side, but I guess it's Uber.

Alright. Last question, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to?

Oh, it would be to Morocco. Hopefully someday I'll be able to go to, that's where I would love to go.

Wonderful. Well, I would love to be able to send you.

That'd be great.

Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, Dee Dee. It was such a pleasure. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally and ask some additional questions, get to know you a little bit better, what's the best way for them to do so?

Easy way to do it is on LinkedIn. I'm on there, Dee Dee de Kenessey. Also, Twitter is easy, it's just @deedeedkc. If people want to get in touch with me in a sort of more direct way - although I do look at both of those, they can also email agency@wistia.com. I'm usually on the other end of that, certainly it would get to me if someone went through that way.

I’m absolutely welcome to people reaching out regardless of whether or not you're starting a new program, or are an agency, or are just running an agency partner program, want to do a little commiserating or brainstorming. I love that. Some of the most inspiring moments I've had this past year have been talking to other people who run other agency partner programs or who are starting out, and being able to brainstorm together has been great.

Wonderful. That's so great to hear. Again, thank you for your time. Thanks everyone else for tuning in and join us next week for a brand new episode of The Allbound Podcast.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gary Sheedy, Director of Commercial Partner Programming at DAQRI, joins host Jen Spencer on The Allbound Podcast to discuss how to find the right partners and build a solid partner program.

You operate in a highly technical, specialized industry, how do partnerships come about?

With DAQRI, it’s not a problem trying to get people interested in the technology. It's about bringing them out of the blue skies and showing them what's actually possible. We bring in partners and train them up on the use of technology and expertise, or in this case DAQRI's expertise, and deliver that to the market. This gives them a jump ahead from their competition in their market space by showing thought leadership and the use of augmented reality in their space, and also they are able to show significant return on investment to their customers and increased efficiency.

What checks does your team have in place to ensure it’s the right partnership for DAQRI?

We have a two pronged approach. One is working with large key accounts and understanding who they currently work with. Then we work with targeting specific expertise in the particular marketplace we would acquire. Finally we work with partners to get trained up with our partner program and with DAQRI’s strategies and goals.

If you've identified someone is not a fit, how do you politely turn them away?

It’s a continually evolving artform. We provide a scorecard which mixes technical and commercial expertise and line it up with our strategic goals and the various market segments we’re targeting. This allows us to compare the relative values of various partners. If they have a certain score then obviously we will engage directly, and get them up and going. What we typically do with those who don’t meet the initial criteria is work with them on marketing to make sure that they can get informed.

DAQRI doesn’t have a traditional reseller model. Why did you go the route of affiliate partners?

We have a seller model where we sell and warrant the software ourselves and then work with our partners to develop and support their business models. That way they can make good commercial results out of using the DAQRI platform and the applications they have developed on selling their customers. This would obviously migrate into a resellers model once we have some proven data in the market. We expect that will start happening sometime in the middle of the next year.

What tips do have for building a partner program?

Building a partner program is essentially creating another appendage of your company. For me, a successful partner program means operating and representing exactly how DAQRI wants to be represented in the market. When I started, the process has been about figuring out what that looks like and how to put a plan in place from a program and delivery perspective. Then it’s about developing the artifacts, the processes, the control manner and the mechanisms.  

Speed Round Questions:

What's your favorite city? Munich.

Are you an animal lover? Yes, dogs.

Mac or PC? Mac.

Uber or Lyft? Uber.

All expenses paid trip to where? Bern, Switzerland.

Sloan McCauley, Director of Channel Sales at Localytics, and Jen Spencer discuss educating clients, establishing trust and how nothing beats face-to-face time with partners on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

What do you do in your role?

I came into this role about two years ago. The first year was about figuring out our strategy. From there it has really been a year of what we consider a full partnership production. At this point we are influencing a part of our overall pipeline here at Localytics. Ultimately my goal in running this business would be to have it be a 50 / 50 split between channel and direct sales.  And hopefully it will continue to grow from there.

What major initiatives are you implementing to develop those relationships?

We’re aiming to provide as much education and support as possible, and that comes in many different forms. With a product like Localytics, because we are focused on the total lifecycle of users as it relates to the mobile application, we present an opportunity to have partners push their customer to think beyond the download, beyond standard media metrics, and have them  think about retention. How do we turn these users into a lifetime customer and ultimately these producers of our brand? Fortunately we have a platform that allows and equips agencies to push customers to think that way.  

How do you support knowledge transfer between Localytics and your partners?

These are incredibly busy folks, so it’s about delivering consistency –– being in front of your partners and being on call for them when they need information. It can be phone calls or in the form of weekly or biweekly newsletters. But I don't think anything replaces being front and center in person with partners.

What is the biggest challenge with actually engaging your partners?

Trying to build up our numbers. This was trial and error because Localytics didn’t have a defined partnership strategy yet. We tried to see who we could get in front of and tried to understand a wide array of partners. Quite honestly we onboarded a considerable amount of those folks this way. Definitely, coming out of the gate, start small and make sure that you establish an ongoing communication strategy with those folks.

Do you have any tips for establishing trust with partners?

You never want to enter into a business relationship with someone when you don’t understand what their endgame is. The same goes for partners. It is really important to understand what the core of their business is so that you can use that information to turn it into a mutually beneficial relationship. It ultimately builds trust that we are taking the time to look at your client's business.

Speed Round Questions:

Favorite city? San Francisco.

Are you an animal lover? Yes, a big time animal lover.

Mac or PC? Mac.

Uber or Lyft? Uber. Ride or die Uber.

All expenses paid trip to? Croatia.

Jack Kosakowski, global head of B2B sales execution at Creation Agency, joins Jen Spencer to discuss social selling, relationship development and the power of content in this episode of The Allbound Podcast. 

How do you define social selling?

Social selling is leveraging the communication channels where your buyers are living versus just communicating with them via phone and email. You're providing value and communicating on multiple channels to influence the sale along the way from online conversation to offline revenue close.

Should social sellers separate business from their personal life?

We live in the most digital age ever. If you're scared of someone seeing your lifestyle through your social channels, you should be careful how you share or how you live your life. You should inspire and motivate people on a personal and professional level, because hiding isn't going to get you anywhere in sales.

How can today's B2B account exec or business development rep use social networking to strengthen their phone and email strategies?

If you really want to get to that next level, you've got to understand who the individuals are in the accounts you want to sell. Everyone thinks it's all about business value, but really you've got to have some personal value, too. Nobody wants to be sold, but everybody wants to have a conversation, especially if they have something to talk about with somebody. But how do you know that if you're not leveraging the information you're given?

What challenges have you identified while working on digital strategies?

One challenge is that marketing is not tied to the revenue numbers, from a dollar amount. I think that marketers should get a base salary, but they should live and die on what kind of business comes in like salespeople do. Most marketers aren't in the weeds sitting with the customers –– they're sitting back and creating content based off articles the industry says they should be writing about. A lot of their content may be great but isn't going to help move the needle. When you're disconnected from the buyer, you are disconnected from sales.

What is an example of a tactic you used on a recent social selling success?

I’d been having some very preliminary conversations with a customer that I really, really wanted. I knew through one of our conversations that we could fix a major pain point for him. So I wrote a blog post on LinkedIn on the whole process of how this could be fixed then sent the link to him and said, “Hey, I wrote a blog post and I was thinking about you and our conversation, and how this might help.” He came back and said, “Jack, we need to take this conversation more seriously. That was brilliant. How can you do this for us?”

Most sales leaders don't understand the power of content, but here I leveraged my insight, created the content, and I sent it to the customer in a way that made it look like I wasn't selling. I was adding value to my audience, and content was the way that I got into that conversation. It’s called leading with value.

Speed Round Questions:

Favorite city? London.

Animal lover? Yes.

Mac or PC? PC all day.

Uber or Lyft? Uber.

All expenses paid trip to? Thailand.

Jill Rowley, social selling evangelist, talks with host Jen Spencer about the evolution of sales and the big changes coming down the pike in the latest episode of The Allbound Podcast.

What do you do as a social selling evangelist?

I didn’t start as a social selling evangelist. I tell people I’m a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. I spent two years at Salesforce, and then a decade on quota at Eloqua, and my buyer was marketing. It was about 2012 when I started to develop this reputation for what we were defining as “social selling”. I didn’t know it was a thing, I was just using social networks like Linkedin and Twitter to be where my buyers were and find out information about those buyers. 

I wanted to understand the world of my buyers. If I was going to be teaching them that they should be using this channel in marketing programs, I needed to understand it, and for me to understand it, I needed to use it. So it just became part of my toolkit as a sales professional.

How has the landscape changed since you were in that sales role, leveraging social media platforms to help you drive your sales process?

We’re using these social networks to do research on the buyer, the buying committee and the sphere of influence of the buyer. The thing about social selling that has me worried is people thinking it’s just a new technique, or just a new tactic or tool, because it’s so much more than that. Sales transformation is what needs to be occurring much more broadly than social selling. The reason is the buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than the past 100 years. Marketing has been evolving, but sales hasn't. No one really likes to buy product and we don't even really want to buy solutions. We want outcomes.

What impact do you think outsourced marketing and social automation have had on sales and marketing?

I recently had a call with an amazing company that is approaching $10B revenue, and I was speaking with the leader of the inbound SDR team. He said their playbook is a 10-year-old playbook, and it includes that every inbound gets 10 touches. Five calls, five emails. Every software company on the planet it seems, is running the same playbook, and so you have millions of salespeople making millions of calls, and sending millions of emails. More isn't better, more relevant is better. One of the things we teach is incorporating social into your mix.

So with this gentleman, I sent him a personal invite to connect on Linkedin, I followed him on Twitter. I retweeted something he tweeted, and he had shared a post on Linkedin, and I had commented on it. So when I sent him an email, I referenced the post that he had shared on Linkedin. I’d already made a pretty significant impression on him, because I had done research to be relevant, to build a relationship. But social is fluid. It is really difficult for sales leaders to wrap their heads around the fact that it isn't a channel that can be outsourced or automated. It has to be a behavior that’s taught. There's fluidity, not rigidity, in social.

What should sales and marketing professionals be doing to better serve their buyers?

How do you understand what’s relevant and what will resonate with those contacts in those specific accounts? How do you do personalized messaging and content? How do you orchestrate all that? This is a more educational approach to marketing, and it’s helpful to the buyers. It’s a lot of leading with the customers’ stories. I don't want to buy a product, I don't want to buy a solution, I want outcomes. I want to see people like me in the same job role, at a similarly sized company, in a similar industry doing what you're telling me I need to do with your product.

Where do you see the B2B sales profession headed in the next two years?

I think a lot more will be demanded of the sales professional. For a buyer to be willing to engage with a sales professional, there's going to have to be way more value exchange, and a whole lot more value exchange up front for them to invest any of their time.

The modern seller needs to be able to communicate very effectively because she’s going to have to get a group of people on a buying committee from cross functions to collaborate internally and reach consensus. Beyond that she has to think ecosystem, and how her solution fits into the overall ecosystem of the customer's world. She’s got to be tech savvy and social oriented. It’s frightening how little sales leaders are doing today to prepare their sales organization to sell the way that customers want to buy.

Speed Round Questions:

1. Favorite city? Aspen Colorado.
2. Animal lover, yes or no? Not until I got a maltipoo a year and a half ago, and he's changed me.
3. Mac or PC? Mac all the way.
4. Uber or Lyft? Uber.
5. All expenses paid trip to where? Thailand.

Learn how to vet, engage and grow partnerships with Lisa Box, Vice President of Business Development at WP Engine, in the latest episode of The Allbound Podcast, hosted by Jen Spencer.

How do you vet potential partners? What traits are you looking for?

The number one trait to look out for is values – specifically whether a potential partner’s corporate core values align with your company’s. Are your visions the same? What are your shared objectives? When partners aren’t about the win-win strategies, they are ultimately setting themselves up for failure. If their values and cultures align with yours, it’s a solid indicator of future success.

Have you ever experienced disconnect between partners in your organization?

Absolutely. It’s not because of ill will or not a good partnership, it’s that certain values don’t align. I’ve learned to look for good identifiers.

• What is their leadership team like?
• Who are other partners in their partnership cycle?
• What impact do they make in their industry?
• Also, check to see how they handle their employees and employee culture.

Have you been in a position that you’ve had to turn a partner away?

I’ve had to let existing partners go or had to postpone partnerships just because it was not the right time. Maybe the opportunities we originally thought may exist just did not exist at that point. Never be afraid of saying, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” Or “This is awesome so let’s keep going forward!”

How do you make sure your business development strategy rings through the entire organization?

One initiative that’s been very effective is looking at our core values, mapping out how the partnership will work and whether it supports each of our core values. This check-in tells us if a partnership is a good fit, if the timing is right time and whether this will help us achieve our overall vision.

What are some strategies you’ve implored to successfully onboard a new partner?

There is no partner program more important than your own. What we’ve done is approach onboarding in phased, digestible pieces. When you try to do too much all at once it can become a burden to a partner. Phasing onboarding into a step-by-step process is usually where we see the best benefit in getting partners onboarded.

What do you think keeps your partners engaged? How can you ensure a quality partnership between your organization and theirs?

Two things–one is the relevancy of the product you are providing and the second is the communication of that value. Make sure people understand what you are doing for them, how you are helping them with their clients and overall business impact. Then keep them up-to-date on business trends that can also help their company. It takes time but showing your value in their daily lives is how you become invaluable to your partners.

What kind of changes have you seen in the last decade of sales?

It blows my mind how many changes in inbound and inside sales have occurred - it has been extremely confusing but also full of huge opportunities. I think one of the ways to really disrupt is with an effective channel strategy. Sales acceleration tools are so helpful, especially the distribution of knowledge that social and video bring to educate consumers so they are ready to go as sales engage.

Speed Round Questions:

• What’s your favorite city? Barcelona.

• Animal lover - yes or no? Yes.

• Mac or PC? Mac.

• Uber or Lyft? Uber.

• All expenses paid trip to where? Italy.

Jared Fuller, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at PandaDoc, joins Jen Spencer to share how he scaled the channel program at PandaDoc from less than 1% of total revenue to over 13% in his first six months at the company.

What are a few key strategies you’ve implemented to make PandaDoc’s channel program such a success?

I reached out to channel leaders who have built something from scratch with a similar SaaS portfolio. I berated Pete Caputa, the VP of Sales at Hubspot, and convinced him to join our board of advisors and get on a weekly call with me. I found someone who was much better than me at building a channel program.

When it comes to boosting inbound leads, what types of content are you producing to do that, and what has been the biggest driver for PandaDoc?

There are two types of partners at PandaDoc that I’m responsible for: our channel program and our strategic alliances. How we drive inbound traffic is by co-hosting events ––thought leadership webinars, where we’ll bring out a topic, for instance, “The Sales Enablement Stack: How to Build a Process from Lead to Close.” We’ll evaluate best practices with a partner like Close.io. They bring the thought leadership on how to make sure deals don’t fall through in the pipeline and we’ll supplement it with how to put together the right content, how to send the right proposal, how to customize the content, etc., and we’ll deliver that to both of our customer bases and generate leads. Co-marketing for us has been key. It makes sense to do those same type of events with our channel partners.

How did you get your sales team bought-in to the PandaDoc vision?

I screen candidates for vision. I believe if you can’t find alignment in vision the rest of the deal is dead. I typically paint a very clear vision of why I believe in PandaDoc and see if they feel the same. We’re documents, which could be the most boring thing in the world, but if you can get excited about changing something that hasn’t been different since Microsoft Word launched 30 years ago...if you believe in that, the rest is incumbent upon the team and the process to ensure they’re successful.

How did you empower them to exceed quota?

I’ve come to realize there’s a massive difference between management and leadership. Management does things right. Leadership does the right things. I’m a horrible manager, but what I know I’m great at is trying to imbue a vision and a sense of passion, urgency and desire upon the people I work with. If you don’t have those, let’s part ways. So we’ve been doing a lot of training around that empowerment piece. They understand that the people who are successful at PandaDoc are doers.

For sales leaders trying to grow their strategic partnerships, what tips can you share with them?

When you’re starting a partner program, you have to understand people’s interests. You have your interests as a company, you have your partner’s interests, and you have your partner’s client’s interests. And of those, you think the best thing you can do is solve for your partner’s client’s interests. That is actually fundamentally flawed. You have to focus on your partner’s interests. How can you help them grow their business?

Want to hear more from Jared? Don't miss out — listen to the rest.

Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, joins Jen Spencer to talk about empowering sales teams in the SaaS industry in this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Tell us what you do as a Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist.

My number one focus every day is around customer success and evangelizing ways in which companies can leverage technology in new ways and reimagine the organization that is responsible for selling and bringing products to market. And more importantly, the entire experience that’s created by brands. Growth and innovation are the two things that many companies are focused on today, whether it’s a small business, medium or enterprise. So this was a great way for me to align to the broader remit that people were looking to accomplish this year.

What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in sales over the years?

For anyone who knows me, knows I love to call myself a recovering seller. What has really changed for me – and this may be cliche today – is that the customer really is different than they ever were even 10 years ago. When I was selling, people only had a PC on their desk, they didn’t have them at home. Not everyone had a cell phone and they would turn off that connection when they went home. But now there’s more power in the hand of the consumer than there was on their desk 10 years ago.

So much is being generated by this connection between social, mobile, cloud and information. And the speed at which that technology is changing has reshaped the way consumers interact with technology and the way in which they conduct commerce between themselves and a brand. And that was the catalyst for people to then change the way they wanted to consume and sell in their business lives. I think the learnings from B2C are what is really accelerating and challenging sales from a process perspective.

What do you think will continue to shape the way in which sales organizations function and succeed in this modern environment?

We get caught up in ‘technology is going to solve all the problems we’ve been facing.’ Technology to me is the enabling tool to help facilitate changes in people and process. If you just deploy technology, and you don’t rethink the metrics you’re tracking, the information you are able to gather, the kinds of behaviors that change because of the information gathered, how you should be allocating resources, etc. –– all of that has implications. If you just deploy technology to manage the team better and have more metrics, the relationship between the sales rep and that technology is not one of love. It’s more viewed as big brother, and that’s a people/process shift that should happen in tandem with any kind of deployment of technology.

We’ve seen how effective a customer-led sales organization can function, are more organizations starting to embrace this? How do you see them implementing it?

This is a big challenge. When you make a decision to put the customer at the true north of the decisions you make as an organization, you have to understand the gap between an executive making that decision and a person in the line of fire such as a customer service representative or a sales rep. They need to understand what it means to them.

If we’re going to become more customer centric, what does it change in my daily life? Do we do things differently, or are we just saying it and I’m behaving the same way. If you don’t have that connection point between strategically at the executive level and the entire company doesn’t understand what does that mean to their job, then you’ve really set yourself up for disappointment. You’ve got to get everyone rallied behind it. And it has to become a drumbeat of communication and engagement with all employees, because it really is about changing a mindset. And that is far more difficult than deploying new technology.

It will take mindset, executive sponsorship, and inspiring the entire organization to understand what it means to be a customer-centric company.

A couple of years ago you wrote a piece about how technology sales reps have “lost their mojo.” Since then have you noticed sales leaders getting better about empowering their sellers? Have the tech sales reps gotten their mojo back?

A lot of that had to do with finding a new way while still maintaining the things that made them (sales people) successful in the past. You can’t just forget everything, but you have to be willing to unlearn things we’ve done and relearn by using some of the new capabilities. While we’ve spent a lot of time helping the sales rep be a better seller, I think where we’ve got a blind spot is with the sales managers and they’re the ones that are working every day to teach and coach.

What’s the one thing an executive can do today to empower their sales managers?

Unfortunately, we live and die by metrics, and until leadership starts to say, “Hold on. If we’re really going to become a customer-driven organization, that can’t be the only thing we track.” Sales leaders have to start to think about the long-term game ––instead of going from lead to cash, you have to go from lead to advocacy.

If you want a customer to not only buy from you, and also become a raving fan and advocate on your behalf...it’s going to take more time. And if you’re held to the same metrics, it’s going to be really difficult. Sales managers have to work with their managers to advocate for more coaching and mentoring. Mindset is a huge component here and sales managers and leaders have to lead that charge by working with their team downstream different.

Have you noticed a shift in tech companies building their own reseller channels as opposed to going through large distributors?

You have to be able to solve against, who is the target customer at the end user level, and how does that end user actually like to buy the technology you sell? You can’t solve to everything, especially if you’re a small company, but you have to look for those hot spots. What are those two to three channels that satisfy the highest percentage of demand from your target end user? That’s how you develop your indirect or your go-to market strategy. It’s the “Bermuda Triangle of Segmentation.”

Speed round questions:

Favorite city? Somewhere in Hawaii

Animal lover…yes or no? Yes

Mac or PC? Both

Uber or Lyft? Uber

All expenses paid trip to where? I’d stay home!