Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
098 - Gaidar Magdanurov - Partner Sales and Marketing Enablement
Gaidar Magdanurov, President of Acronis, shares the innovative approach Acronis has taken to evolve from a backup company into a leader in cyber protection. Gaidar shares the essential steps Acronis is taking to empower their partners, including robust technical and sales training, enabling them to effectively communicate the value of holistic security solutions to their customers.
We also tackle the critical components for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to thrive, from customer acquisition to upselling strategies and the importance of a solid backup and recovery policy. Gaidar discusses the power of value-based marketing, showcasing how MSPs can frame their services in terms of customer value rather than technical jargon.
Connect with Gaidar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaidar/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford and I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channext, and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest Gaidar. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Thank you, alex, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really exciting to have you on. Maybe, for the uninitiated, it'd be great to get a little bit of a rundown of who you are, who you work for and why should we be listening to you today.
Speaker 1:I'm Gaidar. I'm a president at Acronis, a cyber protection company, and I held a variety of different positions. So I was doing strategy, I was doing marketing, I was doing sales, strategic projects and so on and so forth, and before that I was a scientist, software engineer, I was a developer ventures at Microsoft, so I had a lot of different ways to experience business. I even worked for a venture capital firm. So you know a little bit of everything. And I was a president at Acronis. I'm responsible for marketing, partner enablement, education, sales enablement so that's what I do Awesome.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you've had a fairly varied career, which I suppose gives you a lot of credence into now how you manage quite a complicated channel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and actually I think working with channel and specifically with managed service providers and it's one of our primary audiences requires really broad understanding of the market, understanding what people want, how to sell to them, how to work with them, how to market to them, and I'm very happy that I had a diverse experience before I got into this role.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So we were chatting ahead of this podcast, prepping for the right type of questions, teeing them up, making your life really, really easy, and you were explaining to me that a core component of Acronis' channel strategy is transforming partners from backup partners more to end-to-end security. Now there's one thing which is adding product and training training. But how do you enable and encourage partners to make such a drastic change?
Speaker 1:yeah, so I would. I would take a minute to explain the the road that acronyms had on the way to get here. So acronyms used to be a backup company, but back in 2013 we realized that backup without security doesn't make sense anymore and security without backup doesn't work anymore. So it it is one solution. So we were advocating for native integration between security and backup, and that's what we call cyber protection. It's kind of cybersecurity joined with data protection. So that's our vision and it seems to be that it's extremely important to have cybersecurity to include backup, and the recent incident with CrowdStrike was just a great example that a lot of people, a lot of partners and a lot of corporate IT professionals they would protect the servers with backup and then security solutions would be installed on the endpoints, but then endpoint goes down. There's no way to recover, especially if it's unbootable. So it is just one of the many ways to present the problem to the end customer that they have to have backup as an addition to security. So that's our vision and I believe more and more people in the world now support our vision.
Speaker 1:And then, when we talk about the partner enablement, there are a few things that I believe are important. So, first of all, you need to deliver product, and what Acronis did in 2013 is that we developed the vision for a single agent, single console, one single platform for all tools of a managed service provider, and we delivered on that vision. So we currently have one single console to manage everything. That provides a lot of efficiency, because you don't have to switch between different products, but also allow us to do some unique things. So, for example, because we are integrated between security and data protection, we can scan backups from malware and discover something that's very hard to discover in the production environment. We can remove malware from backups. We can patch on recovery, so you will go back not to the previous state, but to the clean state, and things like that.
Speaker 1:Not to mention that when you have one tool instead of multiple, you have lower chances for making an error when you configure and a lot of issues actually coming through the configuration challenges, and that's number one. That's number one thing we have the product that is suited for the partners. But then, from the enablement perspective, we need technical training, and that's what we do with Acronis Academy. We invested significant amount of resources to train people on technology, but then you also need to enable them on sales and marketing, because it's one thing to tell MSPs that they need to sell security they all want to do that but the other thing is to help them to actually sell it to their customers, because at the end of the day, if you add security product to your portfolio and offer it to your customer, you have to convince them that they will have to pay more to get more protection. So just to summarize, I would say it's a product and technology, it's technical enablement and it's sales and marketing enablement for the partners.
Speaker 2:I think that's a really excellent summation.
Speaker 2:Right, I've spoken to quite a few security brands and to hyperscalers around a very technically led channel, and what we really coherently see all the time is right we've got to build an amazing end user proposition.
Speaker 2:Then we've got to focus in on how do we get the partner to understand why that proposition is valuable, and I think your theory around MSPs want to be selling end-to-end security makes obviously a huge sense. One, it's important for the end userusers and two, it's extremely valuable. Then focusing on the technical element, that's where I see a lot of brands pouring time, because it's one thing selling a product, but if you don't have the technical ability to deploy and manage it, and then, by the way, if something goes really wrong and you aren't able to fix it, that's really the bread and butter of what an MSP is focused in. But you raised two interesting points. Which is technically led. Msps typically aren't usually very strong in marketing or usually very strong in sales, and so I'd love to understand why you think it's so important to invest in marketing and sales to support those MSPs to be successful.
Speaker 1:MSPs to be successful. So the life of a typical MSP starts with acquiring some customers through their own connection. So a lot of MSPs told me the stories and I've been talking to MSPs very actively for the last 10 years, so I had lots and lots of stories. They all begin with acquiring customers from the companies that they know. And then there's some word of mouth and they have customers coming to them. Initially they're not doing very proactive outreach and then at a certain point in time they just hit the plateau in their growth. They just cannot grow anymore through just natural word of mouth. They just don't have enough customers coming in. And then they start doing something about it and for majority of MSPs it's just going to events and maybe sending some emails and that's it.
Speaker 1:And the thing is that we don't know what we don't know. A lot of technical people just don't consider marketing a serious discipline. It's like, okay, marketing, we just need to put some information somewhere and people will come to us. And what happens is that quite often, whatever they do is not working at the scale they need to. And then the common issue is that they usually solve the problem by trying to hire some agency or some marketing professional, fractional CMO. But sadly I have to admit that most of those people quite often are charlatans. They're not bringing any value or they're just spending a lot of money but they're not delivering on their promises.
Speaker 1:And then MSPs after that they just get extremely upset. Marketing is not working. They don't understand why and they either stop doing that and just stop and growing in customer acquisition, or they just try to do something themselves and they try to do basic activities. But again, if they don't know what they need to do, that's one issue. The other issue is that marketing is the game you have to play consistently. You cannot just do some activity, get some customers and forget about it until you need to require more customers. You have to consistently do that, and we realized that that's a huge problem. From the conversation with partners, we learned that in most cases it's usually the owner or some business manager of an MSP that's doing all the sales and marketing and at the same time they have mostly technical skills. So what we did? We launched what we call MSP Academy, which is currently a very, very high level, entry level content about marketing and business, just kind of telling people what are the options. What else can you do.
Speaker 1:You can do digital marketing, search engine optimization, how you can update your website, how you can do events yourself instead of just attending some events, how you can do social responsibility activities like sponsoring a local team or working with a local school, so all of the things to kind of expand the number of tools that MSPs can use. And then the whole idea of this marketing and sales enablement is that for an MSP to grow you have to consistently keep acquiring customers or work with your existing customer base to upsell more tools, higher tier packages and so on and so forth. So it has to be a consistent activity and that's what we're trying to do. When we communicate to our partners, we do a lot of marketing evangelism. I would say that you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this, and we see that those partners who are taking it seriously, they're actually growing really fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really love your proposition because I think very often what I see brands do when they're focused on building thousands of partners right, not hundreds, but really thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of partners they focus in on the core elements. First, right, which is how do you process orders? How do you fulfill orders? Right, that's mandatory. You can have the best sales team in the world. If you can't fulfill orders, it's never going to work. Then it's very technically led, right. How do we train them? How do we enable them, how do we get them certified so that, when they fulfill orders, they can actually fulfill the orders properly?
Speaker 2:And then the bit that I think is going to be the next wave is how do you capture demand effectively from thousands of partners? Because, as you say, there are a few partners that do this really really well, and logic would dictate there's some MSPs that are very technically led. And then there's some MSPs are very technically led and have a great marketing person, right, the problem is, you can't copy that marketing person, put them in every MSP, and so instead you need to provide the right program, which is your education methodology, right, how do we educate them on the marketing possibilities? And then what we strongly believe at Chianix is you've also got to provide the right tooling right, so you can either teach a man how to fish or you can provide them a fishing machine and it will just do it automatically, right? And so I think that's the bit that we are so excited about, because we see such untapped potential.
Speaker 2:This is all these great engineering led companies, and they don't really believe in marketing or they don't know how to do marketing very well, or they don't have the time, resources or expertise to do it. And if you can get it right, we will see the same uptick that we saw once you implemented api ordering. It's like, oh, suddenly we can process loads of orders. It's like, yeah, if you can generate lots of demand, then suddenly and you've got this really slick deployment motion then we're in a really exciting position.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally agree with that, and what I would add here is that it's very important to give the right tools, like assets that the MSPs can take, just put the brand on it and send to their customers. And that's why it's important, because they don't have time to develop assets. They need something that they can quickly use and they come to vendors for that. And let's talk about a specific example. So we all remember about the recent incident with CrowdStrike. So what happened? Lots of machines were rendered unusable because of the faulty update and suddenly everybody realized that they need to have a policy and the process to recover for those thousands and millions of endpoints. And what happens? If you think about it, a lot of MSPs had the mindset that we need to back up the servers, we need to back up virtual machines and then endpoints, whatever happens with them. It to backup the servers, we need to backup virtual machines and then endpoints. Whatever happens with them, it doesn't really matter. We put some security product on it because we don't want the network to be penetrated, but we're not actually developing any kind of backup and recovery strategy for them. If something happens, we'll just re image the machine and then something major happens like a CrowdStrike event, machines go down. To recover, you have to do a lot of complicated steps and a lot of people cannot do that, so they just bring their machine to the IT guys, and I personally have seen lots of pictures of thousands of thousands of laptops brought to IT departments and MSPs are suffering because they have to go to customers and physically recover their machines. And suddenly all people realized that okay, we need a way to recover quickly without an IT guy being present, which basically allows any user, following a very simple instruction but in a few clicks, recover the system to the previous state from the backup that is available locally, and this is a great opportunity for us. But how do we leverage that with our partners? So what we've done? We made a simple set of recommendations of what you should do to avoid situations like this, like establishing a sandbox for testing updates, disabling auto-updates, making sure that before you roll out updates to everybody, you test them in your environment, and also have a backup policy and recovery policy. So we're not trying to blame CrowdStrike or whomever for anything. We just provide the recommendations how to avoid it, and then we give a very simple instruction to our account managers what they can tell to the partner, so the partner can reach out to the customer and explain them the situation and suggest them to use Acronis, of course, at some point, but suggest them to implement those policies that would help them to avoid the situation like what happened with CrowdStrike or will allow them to recover.
Speaker 1:And here's the way how we can really leverage the channel. We just give them a very simple story. They go to their customers, tell the story to the customer and then they receive orders and because we do all the business through the channel, they grow, we grow. It's a win-win situation. So that's a very good example on how you can work through the channel. You have to simplify the story, you have to give the ready-to-use asset and then, sadly but still, you have to get your account manager to talk to partners. Because even when you have all the materials available and our example would be our partner portal we have so much content in there but nobody really uses that because partners are busy doing other things. So somebody has to come to them and tell them hey, you do this, you do that, this is the way you do it, and then you can generate additional demand, you can upsell to the existing customers or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm fully in agreement.
Speaker 2:Guy, you're sort of hinting at what I spend my life outside of the podcast talking about, because we believe that, um, you can hope that assets get used, or you can drive them to be used or you can automate the usage right. And I think that's where it really gets exciting, because I'm fully in agreement. We have spent years as a channel ecosystem delivering operational excellence, technical excellence, but typically fairly poor marketing usage outside of your very top partners, where you've got direct marketing, account managers and mdf and all those please. But there's such untapped potential and if we can sort of democratize marketing, uh effectiveness, down to the masses, what will happen is those partners will see the biggest reward possible because they've never really been doing any marketing. Suddenly, once you start doing marketing, you start succeeding.
Speaker 2:I think where I'd like to pivot the conversation is we hear a lot about marketing from a new customer acquisition. The data in the channel will actually tell you that that's actually not the most optimum response, especially in the SMB channel or the smaller partners most optimum response, especially in the SMB channel or the smaller partners we actually see it leveraging in either upsell or cross-sell within existing accounts. How do you see marketing?
Speaker 1:playing a role there. Yes, it's an extremely important role, I would say so. A lot of MSPs. They have an upsell strategy to existing customer base. It's usually some kind of packages like silver, gold, platinum different type of software included, services included, maybe different SLA. Some upsell services. Let's say you have managed server but you can pay extra and you get backup so you can go back to business if whatever happens. Or you can pay a bit more. You get disaster recovery and so on and so forth. And some upsell like storage packages. You have backup, you have one terabyte, two terabytes, three terabytes.
Speaker 1:So at the end of the day, a lot of MSPs, they try to upsell to the existing customers. But it's extremely difficult because you already have an agreement and everything is kind of working. And then you go to the customer and tell them hey, mr or Mrs Customer, can you pay me more? And this is where we need to generate demand among the existing customers by telling the stories, by explaining why they need something that they are not using right now. And if we kind of go deep into the weeds, the thing is every MSP situation is very different. So some MSPs have complete control of the environment. Some MSPs actually share the responsibility with customers and I heard lots of, lots of stories where a customer has admin access to the systems and they can do something nasty to it and then MSP has to recover. So the situation is very different and the customers have very different level of IT knowledge. They may have some thoughts about what should be done, what's the right way to do things. So to get them to agree to an upsell, you have to have a marketing strategy where you explain customers where they are and where they can be.
Speaker 1:And here I'll be on the soapbox here, because most of the partners are trying to sell technology. They're not selling value, but customers. They don't care about technology. Most customers don't care about the technology you will deliver. So, for example, just I was literally two or three hours ago.
Speaker 1:I was talking to an MSP and they were trying to sell their services to a distributed network of stores in the United States and those stores have issues because they have post terminals with like local server that sync ups with the central server or the transaction data, and when something goes down, basically what happens is that the store cannot operate. So they're losing money, a lot of money, and the downtime can be hours. So the MSP tried to come to them and tell them look, we will sell you amazing disaster recovery solution Like five minutes. You'll be back online. And the customer would have to think, okay, what I'm going to pay for it, what I'm going to get in return. It was a very hard sell Up until the moment when the MSP did a very simple exercise they calculated how much the downtime costs.
Speaker 1:They calculated what's the average downtime, so let's say like an hour and like a $10,000 downtime. They basically came to them and say we will shrink that hour into five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, and you pay just a fraction of what you're actually losing. And then the business owner said oh wow, why nobody told me anything like that before? Why did they expect that? I need to understand what is disaster recovery, some servers spinning out of the cloud, and the thing is that MSP that sold to that chain of stores they were not the first one.
Speaker 1:There were a bunch of other MSPs that tried to sell to the same owner and they were all talking about replication of virtual machines, how they will set up VPNs, whatever. And the owner, even though he had some technical expertise, didn't have a clue about it. And that's a very simple example. You're trying to sell the technology. You're trying to sell to understand the benefits that you know to somebody who doesn't care, but the moment you switch towards selling the value, it works and that's what I'm telling to all the MSPs I'm coaching on marketing is that first define who are your customers, define those verticals, understand them really well and understand what are they looking for and then bring them exactly what they look for, not the technology. They want to do their business faster, cheaper, make their employees happy, whatever they want, but give them exactly what they want and they will buy it from you.
Speaker 2:Guido, you're talking absolute sense here, right? I often speak to both brands and partners about exactly this topic, and it's the inversion that it used to be. Brand provides value, and now it's inverted. It's value provided by brand right, and the messaging has to change. 30 years ago, because the way we consumed information, the way we bought products, was very different, so we saw a brand and we assumed value. The sales pitch has changed, right, which is now in the world of complexity, in the world of lots of great brands out there.
Speaker 2:I need to understand the value first and, by the way, that's how great marketing is done it's value first and then brand at end. If you look at every apple ad in the world, right, there's some logos and whatever, but it's basically lovely, lovely images, like great feelings, capture moments all. And then apple right, because that's what we actually care about. It's all of the value upfront, and then it's provided by a brand, and that's why they're the most valuable brand in the world, because they've understood that so intrinsically. And the problem is us, as salespeople, get so caught up in what we do, not what we deliver, right, and that's so, so important from a marketing perspective to invert that. And if you can get brands to do that consistently, or if you can get MSPs to do that consistently, you know that's what wins. And we're so keen to shove a brand in someone's face when actually it's the least important message? Because if they understand your thought leadership and then they associate your thought leadership to your brand, then you win.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I have to admit I'm coming from a technology background and science background, so for me it was easier to think about technology and the products. And when we started selling cyber protection, we were talking about the integration and how amazing it is, but in reality, nobody cared. Nobody cared. No partner, no customer cared about it. Because what they cared is how much time they will actually save. Instead of having multiple agents on the machine, they will have one agent. What does it mean? Okay, you don't have to install updates, you don't have to manage licenses separately, you don't have to have different user interface, you don't have to do multiple clicks. So it actually saves hours and hours every day for every technician, and that time can be used to support more customers. So this is what they care about, customers. They also don't care about the technology.
Speaker 1:In reality, most customers of most MSPs they don't even know what kind of technology the partner is using to protect them. What they care about is how long will it take for them to get back to business and if there's some security incident, will the partner be capable to handle it quickly? And that's all they care. And at the end of the day, they want to do business and the problem of most of the MSPs. They think that for the customer, having reliable infrastructure it's the ultimate goal. But in reality, no, they want to do business. But in reality, no, they want to do business. So when you sell let's say, microsoft 365, and you move everything to online and you set up all new processes, if you just tell them, hey, you will just move everything to cloud, everything will be nice and modern and it will be working every day instead of communicating with vendors, and this is how many hours they will save and they can do something else during that time, then the customer would get interested. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:It's the old adage people only buy time and money and so am I going to make more money, am I going to get my time back so that I can make more money? And this is what I love about B2B is we can have that discussion like directly, like we don't need to dance around it, we don't need to be subtle about it. It's like should we just have a conversation around how I can calculate downtime, how much that costs you and, if I minimize that, what that would cost and guess what my cost is less than that cost? So I'm providing value, right, we get super mathematical which always helps me, I feel quantify and close the value that we're providing and if we can focus in on that value, support MSPs to market more effectively and take them on that journey through your programs and tooling, I think we're in a really, really strong spot. Yeah, totally agree. Awesome, gaida.
Speaker 2:We are a channel podcast through and through, which means we ask for leads. We like to ask our current guest who they think we should have on next. Who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:You know, I would personally be interested to get a few people on your podcast if it will be possible. One person is Rob Ray from Apex 8. I was the guy who built the community for Datto and I think the MSPs loved him and that was a major driver for building the channel for them. I still meet a lot of partners who know him and would refer to him. And the other person I would recommend is Jason McGee, the CEO of ConnectWise. He has a huge amount of channel experience and a very interesting outlook on the channel, so I would personally watch that podcast Excellent.
Speaker 2:Well, there you go. That's a recommendation to Rob Jason. I will be chasing you down ruthlessly for the next week or so to get you on the podcast next Gaida. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, alex.