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.
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