What’s the future of channel marketing?
In this podcast episode, Allan Adler, Managing Partner at Digital Bridge Partners, shares his vision on how channel marketing will transform and how important an ecosystem approach is to make the transition successfully.
Allan shared a few tips to hop on the time machine:
Have you already made the shift? Please let us know, we love to hear success stories.
_________________________
Connect with the podcast hosts 👇
Connect with Channext 👇
https://bit.ly/channext-demo-request
Watch on YouTube ►
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#partnerrelationshipmanagement #channelmarketing #partnerenablement #Throughchannelmarketingautomation
What’s the future of channel marketing?
In this podcast episode, Allan Adler, Managing Partner at Digital Bridge Partners, shares his vision on how channel marketing will transform and how important an ecosystem approach is to make the transition successfully.
Allan shared a few tips to hop on the time machine:
Have you already made the shift? Please let us know, we love to hear success stories.
_________________________
Connect with the podcast hosts 👇
Connect with Channext 👇
https://bit.ly/channext-demo-request
Watch on YouTube ►
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#partnerrelationshipmanagement #channelmarketing #partnerenablement #Throughchannelmarketingautomation
Welcome back to partnerships unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Rick van de Bosch and I'm the CEO and founder at Chennext, and I'm here together with Alan Adler, managing partner at digital bridge partners. He's one of the most knowledgeable people I know in the partner ecosystem and I'm also happy to share that he's part of the supervisory board and advisory board of Chennext. Alan, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great, Rick. So good to be with you.
Speaker 2:Likewise, I think we have an interesting topic for today coming up, actually, and it's a topic that we are speaking about almost on a weekly basis at the moment, and it's about the future state of channel marketing. I think there's loads of topics within that, of course, but I think I'm very curious to hear from you, alan, what's the first thing that comes to mind with you when you think about the future state of channel marketing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we have to market at an ecosystem level, not at a vendor level, which means that the traditional channel business for like 50 years has been vendor to partner one way direction, and the channel and the partner and the vendor have thought of themselves as a unit. But the unit actually is the ecosystem, which the customer is seeing as the way they want to buy and be supported, and the partner sees the ecosystem as the way they want to go to the market. It's only up to the vendor to realize that they have to do it too. So it's really, if you put one word on it, it's multi-vendor or ecosystem, not single vendor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's immediately an interesting topic you're touching upon and the word ecosystem has been all out there in the last two years. Of course, like maybe could you take your listeners along the journey a little bit like what's your point of view of the ecosystem and why is it so important that we whether you are working at a vendor or at a channel partner or anything in between why it's so important to approach the end user with an ecosystem mindset?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, the biggest reason is because that's what they want. Customers buy integrated solutions and they want them to be coherent and they want to go to market and the support and everything around it to be ecosystematic. And every single vendor who goes to market by themselves, either directly or through a channel, and ignores the fact that the customer wants to buy an integrated solution is going against the grain of how the customer is. So if you just thought of the ecosystem as the collection of all the stuff the customer cares about, you'd be pretty close.
Speaker 2:So, summarizing, it's all about looking what does the end user want, what do they need, what's the desired outcome? We are driving for them and then bringing all the right parties around them to make sure we can actually fulfill that desired outcome and the promise that we are making, oftentimes to that end user.
Speaker 1:I think of it as simple as like. Why is there such a thing as a supermarket? Because when I go shopping I want to shop for all the things I need for my home. So if I am going around the supermarket I'm going around the customer and it's fine to have an end cap promoting your vendor product, but that end cap better be happening in the ecosystem of all the stuff that the customer wants. So the less ecosystematic the go to market is, the further we are away from the way the customer wants to buy.
Speaker 1:And what's really interesting about that is the channels. Get this? I mean, how many SMB channel partners are representing one company? Like practically zero. And yet each vendor treats that channel partner as a single four walls road to the customer and the channel partner breaks the four walls down, but the vendor keeps thinking in terms of portals and four walls. So this is why vendor go to market needs to become so much more integrated and ecosystematic, so when they reach the partner, the partner doesn't have to do the hard work of figuring out okay, this vendor's got this and that vendor's got that, and this vendor. Why don't the vendors do the work to figure out how the partner can have an easier way to go to market, and then they differentiate themselves because the vendors are now seeing partners are seeing the vendors as being empathetic to them and the customer. And guess who wins in that environment? So that's how. So I see the practicalities of this working out in the channel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think really around that, indeed, you have the end user. They are looking for a full, like one stop shop for their full solution. That's how they look at a channel partner or a partner in general. They want to work with a company that's solving their pain, their desired outcome or whatever. So they look at it almost. The end user looks at it from an ecosystem level all the time. But then, indeed, how vendors look at channel partners let's call channel partners for now how vendors look at channel partners, they actually look at it very one off and very siloed, whereas, like now, it's my channel partner and my channel partner only.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's interesting about that too, rick, is that we all know that every single major vendor has at least two or three different programs.
Speaker 1:They've got a channel program, but they also have an alliances program. So let's say you're Adobe, you have an alliances program with Microsoft, or you're SAP, you have an alliances program with OpenText or whatever it is, and all these programs that exists are disconnected from the channel. So you have the channel partners running around selling the vendor products and then the alliances teams, and there's no connection point, except when the channel figures out oh gee, my major vendor has an alliance with that company, and then they have to go to that company's portal and then they have to triangulate the marketing of product A with product B. Isn't that the job of the alliance program in the first place? To come up with a better together story? So ultimately, the opportunity here, if you want to be ecosystematic, is to connect the programs so that the channel can have a more connected experience, so that the customer can have a more connected experience, so that we are differentiated and we add more value. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I think, if I summarize what you're talking about right now, it's the vendors actually amongst each other are working very siloed, but they do have like a lot of I need to put it differently the vendors actually amongst each other have all kinds of alliance programs or, in sausage, often called tech partnerships, where they create joint propositions, where they create joint solutions which are very interesting for the end user, but they were completely siloed from the channel which is the distribution mechanism for almost all those big tech companies to get to the end user eventually, and therefore they're actually using a massive opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yes, and historically, what you've seen the work around of this has been we haven't talked about distributors yet has been the magic distributor bundle. You know that, particularly for the long tail, which is the second big thing we're going to talk about in trends in partner marketing, is that the is the unexploited opportunity in the long tail, the distributors, they put these bundles together and then they say to the partner they collect MDF funds from vendor one and MDF funds from vendor two and then market these things. But but it's it's a far cry from that being a holistic go to market and the partners are actually disconnected from it because they have to go to the vendor and it gets a lot of chaos and Disconnected threads and so ultimately, you know it's exciting to see solutions coming to market that are addressing that problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I think if you would look at the current state of the market and the current state of channel marketing, what roadblocks do you still see? Or why, where do you see the blockers for a lot of maybe also listeners from us who think like that sounds awesome. I would really love to do so and I would really like to go towards it more integrated, but I don't know where to start. Where would you advise them to look at if they want to make the first steps toward that desired end? State of ecosystem marketing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, at the level of connected the silos and the programs, I would say that it makes a strategic, lot of strategic sense to say, when we skew up better together stories and we create content that's linked between us and one or more of our alliances, partners, to figure out a mechanism to get that downstream to the channel, to create more efficiencies and more friendliness for the channel, who then can grab that corpus of value proposition and sell it to the customer with it, rather than the channel having to do the work. So that's, I think, one piece is connect the silos and the programs. But the other thing I'm excited about that I think is one of the biggest unexploited opportunities is SMB marketing, marketing to the SMB customer. And the reason why that's such an important observation is because you know fully, more than 40% I guess you know Ken Alice and others have said for the more than 40% of all it spend is happening in SMB and 90% of that is partner touched. So that's all everyone gets this but the unexploited opportunities.
Speaker 1:Well, who is the partner that's touching that SMB? Is it the long, is it the 80 20 partner? Who's the big partner of the vendor? Who gets all the love and attention? Who has built in marketing organizations and understands how to go to market, or is it the under resourced long tail partner who generally has a minimal marketing orientation and typically doesn't have the resources to be able to put together coherent campaigns? It's the latter, and so we have this disconnect between 40% of the market buying from partner assisted and no support for the long tail, and so that's the second strategy is invest in the long tail to figure out how to make, through automation and through various different platform technologies, how to create more value for that long tail so that you can be differentiated in that 40% of I just spent, and then that's trillions of dollars being spent where vendors have virtually no differentiation because they're not supporting the long tail. I mean, to me this is like a trillion dollar opportunity in tech, this almost completely ignored because no one's got a solution for the long tail Period.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's what I hear in a lot of conversation and I'm having as well, indeed, where they say Rick, I fully understand that as a group of partners, those SMB partners, they are so critical, like they are a big, very big chunk of my revenue. I want to grow in SMB, I want to move there and we want to put a lot of resources there as well. But the big challenge that I have is, as a group it's very big, but on an individual level it's very small, so we don't know how to build a program around that because we can't give that partner, the one to one, attention, etc. What are those challenges you recognize and do you hear them more often as well, and also what could eventually be an approach to solve part of that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think the first thing we have to do is we have to look at our mental models. We have to look at everything that if you want to do something differently, you have to come with a different mental model, otherwise you're going to end up with the same result. Einstein says this, everyone says this. We don't solve a problem with the same mental model that got us into the box. We're in the mental model and paradigm that needs to be changed is this canonical 80-20 Pareto that exists, where everybody says 80% of my revenues are going to come from 20% of my partners.
Speaker 1:I think that that has historically been pretty accurate. It's actually, I think, accurate, except when you have technologies that can essentially change the ratio. And it's not to say that the 80% goes down, it's to say that the 20% goes up. So wouldn't it be amazing if you said I'm going to maintain the same performance of the 80%, but I'm going to take the 20% up to 40%? So, instead of having 100 units of value, of 120 units of value, now it's 80-40, which doesn't add up to 100. That's only because the 80 didn't go down but the 20 went up. So it'll end up being more like 60-40, but the 60 is still as big as it was before and the 40 is twice as big.
Speaker 1:So there's an opportunity for I don't know what you think about the numbers, but I think that probably an opportunity to grow channel revenue fully by 20% just by fixing the long-tail problem Period. So the mental model becomes 80-40, 80-20, 80-40 or 80-20, 60-40. And when that mental model, you then say, ok, now we need a separate programmatic approach to giving the long-tail the attention through automation and through this multi-vendor approach that we discussed, to get that differentiation in the hands of the channel partner and to win more close one business. Because the channel partners now enabled and invariably what's gonna happen is the channel partners are gonna look at vendors to do this and they say you know, easy, easy doing business is probably one of the most important variables in the channel. Spin that way for years, years. How much easier gonna be if I can deliver campaign in a box, multi vendor campaign in a box to you and execute it through efficient social and outbound marketing and inbound marketing, with you not having to do a lot of work.
Speaker 2:I really like the way I really like the way you put that eighty forty out there, because indeed it's not about changing the distribution within your pie, but it's about growing the pie, and that's also a topic that we Talk about a lot in our podcast here. Where it's like it's way harder, let's say you work with the light and cdw and they are quite big partners for you. It's super hard within those partners to grow your revenue by ten percent in a year because you are like every vendor is fighting for their attention. They really, you really want to work with them. Other people want to work with them, so it's really hard to.
Speaker 2:How do you drive such performance and growth? I think that's way different in the SMB, of course, where there's so much growth potential on one side, so it's way more untapped market, but also on the other hand, there's so much growth potential because that combined group of SMB, there you can have much more like double digit growth etc. That's also what we see in partner programs that are being launched right now by the Cisco's, in the Microsoft's of this world, where they have way more aggressive growth targets for their SMB partner then for their enterprise segment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd say. The other thing too is that historically We've relied on three lovers to go to market product, pull and push. Historically I mean very simplified right, product and pull Are fairly active in SMB, but push is not, because the push is not enabled by the go to market. And what I'm going here is that the channel has to do all the work and therefore there's no differentiation for the vendor, even though their product and their pull is pretty good. If you want to get that extra differentiation, you have to add the push, and the push comes in automating partner marketing to the long tail so that they don't have to do the work and doing it on a multi vendor level. Those two things.
Speaker 1:And I would argue that if you're like a number two in a space where you either have not as good a product or as good a product but not as good a pull, then you have an opportunity to out compete without having to make your product better or make your marketing better Because you added push. And I would further argue that it is vastly less expensive To add push and it is to improve product or add pull. And so if you look at that economics, if I was a channel leader, I would say, oh my god, the SMB opportunity is our growth lever In twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five. And we can do so much more efficiently because we're not going to go back and say, make this feature, we're competitively disadvantaged, that's very expensive. Or Add another twenty five million in marketing so that there's more pull. So that's channel response.
Speaker 1:But by activating the push lover so that the partner can generate their own demand and leverage the existing poll, it's actually a multiplier effect. Right, it's not just push without pull, they go together. But to me that's a those, those two things get the multi vendor thing working. Eliminate the silos and activate the push lover. Those are, those are huge plays for a channel chief in twenty, twenty four, twenty five. And I'm seeing more of that, especially as they start to recognize that there's mechanisms like you have to have a lever to pull, otherwise it's just a good idea with no execution, and it's exciting to see companies coming along for the lever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I fully agree. I think it's interesting what you say around that push. I think if I would simplify, how do you get partners to market? It's either pay to play or do it for you, like there is no middle ground. I've seen it now.
Speaker 2:I've been doing channel marketing for almost ten years. Either you do everything for the park and you make it as easy as possible, or you pay them, especially the bit larger partners, and you pay them and the F and then from there they're going to utilize that market development fund to actually publish your campaigns, drive and usually month, etc. And I think that mindset is critical going forward towards the future state of channel marketing. Every type of activity you enroll needs to fall into either one of those buckets can I pay to play or can I do it for you, and I think that is also really how to build your programs. Like for your larger partners, it will remain pay to play.
Speaker 2:That's what I see time and time again. They are not fully automated. They want to have their own tone of voice, branding. It's also important to know that for them it's simply also partly a profit center because they need to drive that marketing through their business as well. But on the other hand, and then indeed tying it back to the SMB, there it's completely do it for you because pay to play, you can do that because they're too small to give them dedicated and the F. But you need to focus completely on do it for you and how can you make that as easy as possible for your partners.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would actually say that do it for you is the canonical problem of going fishing but not teach you someone how to fish. Like if you and I go fishing and I catch the fish for you great, you get to eat but if I'm not on the boat with you the next day, you're like I have no idea what to do. So what I really want to be doing is I want to be fishing with you so that you can fish, and the problem with that has been that the mechanisms for the width have been deficient for two reasons One, the tool set's not been there and two is the partners don't have the resources. So the traditional approach has been TCMA has been provide the resources, self-service, let the partner draw them down, but they don't have the in the, not fishing in the boat. They don't have the resources to do the draw down and build the campaign track, the results, do all that kind of work.
Speaker 1:So the tool has been deficient in regard to helping the width TCMA and I think what's exciting now is to see automation and tool sets that make it friendly for the partner but also lower their burden. So it's easy to access, you can get the multi-vendor content, you can easily set up campaigns, you can drive it through social. You can create that easy on button and monitor and access how it's going, how you want to tweak it. You could almost think of it like a TCMA engine for the partner, not the vendor, and it's kind of an interesting flip model, right, because TCMA has always been a tool for the vendor. You go to the TCMA vendor, you get the tool and then the vendor and the tool provider provide with the channel, but it's never built for the channel, it's built for the vendor. Yeah, you build it for the channel. You flip it around and you say it's not the vendor in the boat, it's the channel partner in the boat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's even in the name right. True channel marketing automation from the vendor through the channel Indeed. It should all be about how do you put the partner at the center there. I think that's an interesting one of Indeed doing it with the partner. I think that's the critical piece there. But I think that's also when I put my vendor cap on for a moment, I'm like, yeah, but Alan, how can I do that? Because, indeed, I have all those partners in the long tail. I can't give them one-to-one attention, so how can I learn them how to fish?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think that, without turning this into a, you know where to look if you're looking for the width, just say to simply that there needs to be an environment where the partner can find themselves and the vendors they care about. If you come back to the thing I said earlier right, I'm in the boat fishing. Am I fishing for one vendor, one vendor, if I put one vendor on the hook, or do I put my collection of vendors on the hook? Well, you know the answer I put my collection of them, but when I catch the fish, I wanted to bite the whole thing that I'm trying to sell them. It's usually one, two, three vendors with some services right in a classic SMB. So I got to put all those on the hook, including me, and stick the hook in the water. So the environment that the partner needs to come to is not an environment where there's only one thing. It's an environment where I can grab that, that that add my services, easily aggregated into campaigns that are campaign in a box, and then I have dashboard where I can see how is that working. Not one vendor, you know it's.
Speaker 1:I like to tell the story of, like you know, of the great error that was made in the most canonical part of channel business, which is deal registration. Right, and look at the history of deal registration from the perspective of a partner. It's kind of the deal registration is the mono vendor version of TCMA. Multi vendor level right, each if I sell six things to a customer, I have and I want to get the associated credit for those six things I have to register deals on six portals. Now I'm back in the boat. I have to have six boats but I'm only doing one thing, but I have to break it into six boats.
Speaker 1:Same thing with partner marketing. I have to have a boat for vendor one, a boat for vendor two, a boat for vendor three, and then I have to get the boats to sail together. Like that's really complicated and all again we're right back to pay to play for the big vendors. They can do that. They have marketing departments built to put the boats or the trains together. So the one train with multiple cars going to the market small partners are. They can't do it. Or if they can do it, they will arbitrarily pick which boat or which train, not by virtue of how good you are, but whatever is easiest for them. So that's again back to product pull push. Make the push partner friendly, not vendor friendly, and that's, I think we're getting to the some of the ways that that can happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that piece is critical. I was just thinking about one of the things you said earlier around how critical it is to get your programs closer aligned together your alliance program, your channel program, et cetera. One of the discussions that we had a while ago on this podcast was around who should own that within the vendor organization, because it needs to be orchestrated right Like. What's your point of view on that? Because we actually had some difficulties with answering that question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's not uncommon for those two programs to have different objectives, different metrics and sometimes different organizational structures. So, like you know, the tech partner program will sometimes report into the CPO and the channel partner program almost always reports into the CRO or the VP of sales, because channels are traditionally seen as sales and marketing vehicles. They're not innovation vehicles. So when you have that, you've got like good luck right With that. So, ultimately, I think the first question is going to be can we identify a group of overlapping metrics and overlapping objectives and overlapping motions that can allow us to create a two-in-a-box? And I'm seeing a lot of attention right now. Lots of companies are actually starting to try to pull their ISV programs and their services partners more into that overlapping Venn diagram and in that middle, to figure out, like, exactly what motions they're going to use to drive. Whether that's a strategic alliance or a tech partner. There's a whole bunch of different characteristics of what that pairing is, but it's typically two software companies coming together who both want to sell to a channel partner. And so the first question is going to be get your strategy right. The second one's going to be, you know, build your motions in your common programs so that you can achieve that repeatability, and then get the tactics built so that you can employ the right levers to get that to happen. Usually, there's going to need to be playbooks, there's going to need to be enablement, there's going to need to be tool sets that come together, but first and foremost, that has to be the building of business case, like a business case that you could take the leadership to say we got to connect these dots because we're missing out on huge opportunities. And I think the exciting part about that is that the data to support the business case is not much further than finding out what else your customer is buying. If you have a propensity data to say, when somebody buys my product, they also want to buy this, this and this.
Speaker 1:Or your sales rep tell you that I'm often told do you work with? Do you work with, do you work with? You know the combos. And then you ask your channel partners oh, by the way, what do you sell most frequently with me? So they have the answer you get it from your sales reps, you get it from your customers or you get it from your channel partners. They'll tell you what they want and then it's your job to deliver it. And I think it's quite actually unethical or certainly not very smart to continue to force your channel and your customers to buy from you in a way that they don't want to buy from you. I mean, it just makes no sense. Right Over time, if you want to say, I want to be friendly to the partner, I want to be friendly to the customer, and that's why these two ideas of bringing the multivendor happening together at the program level and then bringing multivendor to happen at the TCMA level, you get those two right and you got that 20% growth that we talked about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think any touching upon that. What is very critical if you look at the future state of channel or ecosystem marketing from that perspective is that you really start to get super serious about who your alliance is, who your key alliances are. So not just knowing from the relationship you have with that alliance, but indeed really from your partner and your customer level, where do we actually see the overlap? Which partners are actually selling us both, which end users are actually buying us? Because that is really going to drive a lot of the tactics and the strategies afterwards, and I think that's one of the things I would like to definitely also give to the listeners Become super specific around collecting that type of data.
Speaker 2:The better you understand let's keep it with channel partners, the better you understand your channel partners and what they are selling and to whom they are selling and why they are selling the other solutions as well. That's really going to drive the data that you need to eventually make the choices and double down on the alliance activities there, because that's such a critical piece. If you got that right, then your strategy is like. The likelihood of your strategy being right is so much higher if you have that type of data than if you build it from scratch or you build it on the relationship you have with your alliance. Do you agree there, alan?
Speaker 1:Totally, and in fact I would even go so far as to say that from a competitive intelligence perspective, market intelligence, marketing strategy perspective, you want to be as near bound to your partners and your customers as possible. Using the near bound term Because if I'm monitoring what my customers near bound influences, what my partners near bound influences, that is to say I know where my customers go for their trusted relationships and I know how much I've got in there. And then I know my partners and who they go where they go. The more I monitor those ecosystems around my partners and my customers, the more intelligence I have about where I actually am versus where I think I am. I always like to say you know, it's more important where you actually are than where you think you are. And usually the models that we deploy are too simplified and they tell us where we think we are but not where we actually are. And where we are always is in an ecosystem Our ecosystems, our partners' ecosystems, our customers. We're always in those ecosystems. We're not necessarily monitoring them at the holistic level to figure out, like, actually how things are going, but in the future, 2024 and beyond, the less ecosystematic you are and your knowledge of your customers and your partners, the less likelihood you have of knowing where you are, what you need to do and how you need to get there. And so it's one thing to say to your CRO and CPO hey, we need to do a bunch of market research. It's another thing to say we need to gradually increase our intelligence of the near bound network, which is another way of saying the ecosystems of our customers and our partners. Increase our intelligence and start measuring our impact ecosystematically, like this is another strategic question.
Speaker 1:If I were a CSO Chief Strategy Officer at any technology company right now, I would be establishing ecosystem intelligence as a cornerstone of competitive advantage going forward. And if you can get your Chief Strategy Officer to wake up to realize that 80% of all deals start with a referral from the ecosystem, and then realize that when we go direct or even through our channel partners, if we're not connected to the right level of influence, what was direct is actually indirect. Direct is to go to the influencer and indirect is to go by ourselves. So I always like to say this direct indirect thing is actually a misnomer entirely. If you go with the influencer of your customer, you're doing directly Because you're already there. If you're going directly and avoiding the influence of your customer. You're going around their near bound network and knocking on the door from outside. I don't know which one's more direct to you.
Speaker 2:So I think the ecosystem intelligence helps you to really know where you are within the ecosystem. So who are your most important alliances, who are your most important channel partners? Who are your most important customers? Who are the most important vendors from your channel partners and are they among your alliances? Who are the most important vendors from your end users, but also who are the channel partners from your alliances? Like really having that clearly inside.
Speaker 2:That's going to help you so much towards the future of channel marketing, because if you have that in place, then you know exactly where do we need to focus our content strategy. Do we have the right type of channel partners on board right now to play that ecosystem play? Do we actually know, based on the type of end users that our channel partners have, that we're going to build the right campaigns? That's the thing that I see often. You need to be crystal clear Is our channel at the moment like better equipped for the education market or for the healthcare market or for government? Because if it's very good in government, you want to create very strong content around government. Or if government is very important for you but you actually don't have that many channel partners yet in government, then you need to make sure you're going to recruit those, and the only way to do that is by having the ecosystem intelligence and knowing everything that's going on within your own ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I have a really practical way that you can do that and it addresses the question you raised earlier about like, how do you get these two partner types programs to come together. So say that you're the head of the channel partner program and you go and you meet up with the head of the alliances program. You say, hey, let's do an exercise where we bring our top alliances partners one by one into QBR. And one of the elements of the QBR is going to be let's examine our common channel partners, let's examine where we have common overlaps and let's then make a strategy that says we're going to take our better together stories and we're going to market them coherently to those top channel partners.
Speaker 1:This is still the 80-20. This is going to be targeted initially. But the reason this is such a cool idea is because if you get that right and you start showing that by marketing, together with the alliances partner, your top channel partners, how hard is it then to package that up and send it downstream to the long tail, when you've already verified and validated the value propositions, the touch points, all that kind of stuff, and you've built the corpus of content that now allows you to say, if you click on this campaign, you can have vendor A and B together. Channel partners let's go do that at scale. Use ChanEx, use other solutions to light that up in social channels. So that's a very practical way to say there's a short-term Q1 thing you can do right out of the gate using that kind of approach.
Speaker 2:I love that. I know that's always the feedback we get from our listeners. They love the technical stuff as well and I fully agree that this is a great one. Who, at the moment, have you internally identified as the most important alliances for your business? Have them into your business or you go to them and start with doing that type of analysis, because I think that's really going to drive both your alliances and your channel in the right direction. Maybe one last question. I see we're already running out of time and just like we always do when we're chatting, one final question that I had. What they always say right, like if multiple people own it, nobody owns it. If you would have to say one department or one role, or maybe we need to create a role, like every answer open to any answer, but who would you say should drive that motion?
Speaker 1:You're talking about the leader in the organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah for example, or the role that actually drives that, because of course we have like. What I see right now is that we have people who own the Alliance program, we have people who own the channel program, but there's no one who is like okay, but who drives the alignment between the two of them, or who's responsible for like, like what, what?
Speaker 1:do you Well, I think. I think ultimately that this is where I think this is an opportunity for the channel chief. Channel chiefs sometimes are reluctant to go over to the Alliance's space because it's a little squishy and they really like the simplicity of I am a vendor, the channel got the services bang. It's logical, it makes sense, it's a good fit. I would encourage the channel chiefs to go across the aisle to the Alliance's department and say I have an idea, I have a way that we can really spike our revenue both with the top of our partner stack and a long tail, by more creatively developing better together stories and then having a stepwise process to get from the top partners down to the long tail. What I'd love to do is make that an initiative and tie it to an OKR Some way. There's going to be an OKR that speaks about some aspect of growing business by offering more comprehensive solutions to customers and meeting their needs. Everyone's got some variation of that. Tie to an OKR and really get crisp with the Alliance partner and get them on board to then go to a common someone on the C-suite and say the channel partner and the Alliance partner programs are aligning together on this coherent initiative. I guarantee you that's a winner, because every leader in the C-suite is looking for their leaders to go across the aisle and work coherently and supposed to being in their silos, rather than trying to indent some kind of mythical new role in the hopes that we're going to have a person above.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, of course, we would say the ecosystem chief or the partner leader. Whatever the chief partner officer, the CPO is going to be the ideal person, because reporting to the CPO would be the channel, at least through a dotted line and the Alliance's program and the tech partner program. But if you don't have a CPO, be a entrepreneurial channel chief. I mean, just DM me. We can create a one, two, three bang. Take it to the leadership team.
Speaker 1:It's going to be very hard for them to say no, I don't want to talk about how to bring our programs together. I don't want to talk about how to be more empathetic to our channel partners. I don't want to talk about how to give our customers more value. I don't want to talk about how to become a more coherent provider. Have my go to market be differentiated?
Speaker 1:I think you could also say which is actually really cool is if we can show our CRO that, by virtue of this better together story that we're creating with the Alliance's program and the channel partner program, we're actually elevating the role of the channel, because now the channel is no longer just a seller of the individual products, they're a seller of a larger solution that could ultimately be the harbinger for teaching our AEs and our AMs and our CSMs, who are all the roles in the direct business underneath the CRO and the CCOO, how to do the same thing, which is, of course wouldn't you want that to happen? Right, I would say. This Alliance's program meets. The channel partner program is certainly going to have a channel impact, but it could also have a really wonderful impact on helping to develop the direct organization, which in many instances has 10x the 20x, 50x the spend, so we can make them more effective, and that would be a real win-win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely In software. We see that, indeed, that the direct is still very big there as well. The hardware, of course, is very channel driven usually, but I think in general that you're spot on there. I think the real job to do in the upcoming time is eventually, especially from a channel perspective, but also what you see in the C-suite everyone wants to see the revenue impact of it. I think that's so critical that we within the partner ecosystem and the channel ecosystem together really get together. How can we show that multi-vendor approach, that ecosystem approach, is actually leading to more revenue, quicker deal cycles, quicker Partner onboarding, happier partners, happier end users, etc. All those type of things where we know that it drives revenue? I think that's going to be a critical part of evangelizing that and also making sure that that reaches the C-suite Absolutely Awesome.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for making the time today, Alan. I really enjoyed talking with you. I'm getting you back on the pod later on and hope to see you next time. Okay, take good care.
Speaker 1:See you everybody.