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.