Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Drew Lydecker - The Trusted Advisor Movement
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we dive deep into the transformative power of trusted advisors in the channel with Drew Lydecker, Co-founder and President of AVANT Communications. With a career spanning influential roles at WorldCom, AT&T, and CDW, Drew has firsthand insights into how technology adoption and partner ecosystems have evolved into indispensable drivers of enterprise success.
Together, we explore:
- The shift from brand loyalty to best-of-breed solutions and its impact on decision-making.
- Why trusted advisors are becoming the cornerstone of IT strategy, navigating choice overload for CIOs and CTOs.
- The growing role of OpEx models in reshaping the market landscape.
- Predictions for the channel’s evolution over the next five years, and how vendors can align with this seismic shift.
Tune in for actionable strategies and Drew’s unique perspective on building partnerships that truly last.
Connect with Drew : https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-lydecker/
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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, I am the VP of Revenue here at Chanix and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest Drew. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Good, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing really, really good. I you are my very last podcast recording before my child turns up for the first time in the world, so uh, yeah, let's finish with a bang.
Speaker 1:All right, congratulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, buddy. Um now, uh, drew, maybe for the uninitiated, you've had one hell of a career so far.
Speaker 1:It'd be great to see if you could give us a bit of a highlight reel about what you do. Well, um, as fast as possible. I graduated from college, got recruited to go work for this insane company called worldcom. Uh, for those of you that know, I also know now your age.
Speaker 1:Um, but worldcom, being one of the greatest fraudulent companies of all time, was an incredible experience where I got to learn the good, the bad, the ugly, but fell in love with the industry and fell in love with the Internet, fell in love with technology, found my way to AT&T Thank goodness, because at that point I had found my future partner in business I'm Kenner and super thankful and lucky for those days.
Speaker 1:Goodness, because at that point I had found my future partner in business, ian Kinnegar, and super thankful and lucky for those days.
Speaker 1:As a matter of fact, I'm meeting today Jush Danielson, who is the head of AT&T now and for the channel, and she was my first boss at AT&T, so I can't wait to see her today, after like probably 20 years. From there, I found my way to the great CDW, one of the greatest juggernauts in technology today, a company that I got to see grow significantly and played a part in that with Ion. It was truly incredible. That's really where I learned the dark art of converting CapEx sellers into OpEx sellers and truly falling in love with this channel and what the potential could be. And from there was Avant, and so that's my quick story. And it's funny. I was just talking to somebody about this and it was like, wow, I've only really had four jobs in my whole life about this and it was like, wow, I've only really had four jobs in my whole life. Um, and they've all kind of played a part in each other and uh, yeah, super fortunate to be where I am now awesome.
Speaker 2:Uh drew, you're known as the champion of the trusted advisor. Can you explain why this role is has become sort of so essential to how the channel in the IT landscape looks today?
Speaker 1:I mean, I firmly believe that if you are in a decision-making power or you have any authority as an enterprise customer really anybody in business today and you are looking to capitalize on next-generation IT that has a real opportunity to fundamentally change companies, today you must be reaching out to a trusted advisor to unlock the potential of this world of choice that we live in today and I think it is going to become the de facto here soon.
Speaker 1:Based on our research and our research and analytics, I believe it's about 83, 84% of the CIOs and CTOs that we have interviewed have referenced that they'll be utilizing a TA within the next 12 months, which makes sense because it's impossible to navigate our huge ecosystem of choice. Huge ecosystem of choice and, like my old days at AT&T and at WorldCom, you know really Verizon. You know there really wasn't a lot of choice then. It was a totally fundamentally different world, and today there's such an opportunity to work with the best of the best of companies that can take you to a different place in every category of technology. And that is really where the trusted advisor sits in the middle of and us being the platform, really feeding them with all of the intellectual properties surrounding them, with engineers, surrounding them with resources. When you think about it, the channel, the ecosystem of support, the massive, massive velocity of all of the folks that are focused on outcomes makes the trusted advisor community in my personal opinion indispensable to anybody making big decisions you're touching upon.
Speaker 2:There is, I think, back in the early two thousands, maybe in the nineties it was hey, if you, you're never going to get sacked or fired from buying brand X, right, and there's a few jokes that fly around. I think you've got a very strong opinion in terms of how radically that shifted and how Brian rather than from brand brand, but best of sweet how has that disrupted the market?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, with explosive change comes explosive growth. And you know, if you look at really, the last 20 years, the first half of those 20 years, not a lot changed. You know it was for the most part. You know, for folks that have been in the world of networking and telecommunications, you know the predominant technologies were things like MPLS and ATM and point to points and you know basic plumbing. You know ahead it was, it was, it was instrumental at the time and it served its purpose.
Speaker 1:But now you have rapid rate of change and it's happening like almost on a weekly basis where things are changing, things are evolving. The internet has become something vastly different. It's become, you know, secure place. It's almost become like a place that most people want to live on top of now and you see things like MPLS that used to be in the $50 billion range collectively come all the way down the chain, probably losing $10 to $15 billion, $20 billion a year in just attrition.
Speaker 1:But everything is changing and what I believe is that back in the day you used to never get fired for going with a big blue because it was safe. You used to never get fired for going with a big blue because it was safe. And you know, today, I think, if you buy just about everything from a big blue, you know you're going to get fired because you have laser focused companies that do one to two to three things better than anybody else could, even sometimes any it staff could. And I do believe that you know racking and stacking and building complexity and fiefdoms within an organization is, you know, super 10 year old playbook and sometimes that you know I joke you know you're terminally ill when you're still playing that playbook.
Speaker 1:Today you can go and pick your digital twin in this world of the as a service space, the managed service space, the telecommunication space is vastly different than it used to be the data center space to get ready for, you know, ready for your AI journey and so on and so forth. I mean there are so many things and so many choices. You know, I think at Avant we represent over 350 in our ecosystem, plus over 1600 data centers around the world. The top cybersecurity, all the top as a service.
Speaker 2:And it's really difficult.
Speaker 1:To stay on top of that, you have to be in the game, in the trenches and then being able to feed that into the ecosystem, and I think that's the opportunity for any customer right now is to take advantage of that model.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think technology used to be led by the enterprise and then flow down to the consumer. That buying pattern's changed, right? I think the killer thing about the iPhone isn't the technology, it's the app store. I want the best app designed by the unique small team that really focuses on that app, but I get it housed and procured and owned in one easy to ship and manage products. And I think that's why Steve Jobs won so big right, Because he understood that ahead of everyone else. And I think what you guys have focused in on is how do we drive that same consumer value all the way back up to the enterprise? Because that's the sort of best in suite, best in stack, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would say, you know, to the consumer, to the enterprise. You know, look at in your life. You know how much you're utilizing new technology. Just think about it. You know I probably use Perplexity today, grammarly today. I probably use ChatGPT today. You know I use Zoom's AI tool today. And it's early, it's still, you know, over here it's only the afternoon. And so now think about the enterprise. And the thing about the enterprise is that the world of goodies and real change and real productivity and real fundamental gains through using technology it's here, but it's like impossible to keep up with all of that. You've got to surround yourself with an army, and that is the ecosystem and how it is built inside of the channel. You know, you look at the trusted advisor. They're the tip of the spear. They're connected to CIO, cto, cro. Head of HR whoever?
Speaker 1:And they're the concierge of this world of choice, this massive ecosystem that we live in, and behind them is an army you know over 250, for me over a thousand in our ecosystem and that's really tough to replicate on the direct side, let alone try to do it on your own, when you've got teams of like 65 analysts willing to go out and price the whole market out for you in each category. So it becomes that no brainer de facto. In my opinion, in the next year or so that the world will be utilizing next-generation IT through the trusted advisor movement.
Speaker 2:And so that vision makes so much sense. I think the thing that's really interesting for vendors who are having to hard pivot their route to markets, route to markets that they've spent years and millions investing in how can vendors align with that trusted advisor market?
Speaker 1:Well, you know it's interesting, that's a tough pivot right and I think that's something that a lot of vendors are starting to wake up to. You know you've got rapid change happening today. You've got, you know, traditional OEMs that have built models on the channel, but in a vastly different way, similar to, like a resale program Cisco I could use as a great example of that. It's evolved past that business where customers truly want to do business with the service providers, the ecosystem, the data center providers, the cloud providers. They want to have a contract, they want to have relationships directly, but they want the advising of the trusted advisor to help them understand what the best choices and then have that person and that massive team for the life of that contract, which is like, really, why I believe direct sales is dead, and I wrote an article about it in Profile Magazine and it went viral because I think the name was pretty good, but I also think the point was valid.
Speaker 1:I don't think direct sales is ever going to go completely away. There's always a need for it. But when you have massive choice and you've got, you know you used to have information asymmetry where, you know, when I worked at AT&T or I worked at, you know, verizon. That was most of the competition I held, most of the intellectual property. I was studying. It was difficult to Google, but today you've got information overload and you've got so much information and so many different tools that it's almost makes it worse.
Speaker 1:And so who do you rely on? You really rely on that trusted advisor who is in the trenches day in and day out and then surrounded by an army of intellectual property engineers and so on.
Speaker 2:And so, to challenge you, I understand that if I'm a CEO of a 5,000 person organization, I need that really nuanced understanding of my business, and I can understand how a team of analysts working to build the optimal solution that's going to be better than anything I can design in-house by buying one or two brands and plugging them together. Where's the tipping point, though? Because, as you head down market towards SMB that requirement for sort of nuance and customization the less people you have, the less that's required. How do you see trusted advisors playing a role in the SMB?
Speaker 1:You know, I personally believe this. I think that in a lot of ways, our business and the technology and the advancements in all the different stacks, one's moving around everybody's network making this meeting happen right now. The data center market, which is, you know, nuclear hot because of the AI movement and everybody's consolidating and there's repatriation and all kinds of things are happening there. The as a service base, which is as we know we're using it as we speak, and then the cybersecurity game, which is fundamentally changing. In all of those categories, the SMB, the mid-market, the enterprise and the largest of large companies all relatively need sometimes the same thing. They need better in every single one of those categories and nobody but the trusted advisor is in the trenches studying the ins and the outs.
Speaker 1:We provide things like a net promoter score, where we're actually holding, from verified sales, every provider's feet to the fire, based on the most critical humans on earth, the trusted advisor. Trust me, they're even more critical than the customer themselves a lot of the time, because their reputation is on the line. So you want somebody like that. That's the greatest insurance policy you could ever get. You want somebody like that to help you navigate that huge world of choice with firepower and impact that you can't hire, nor do you have the time to do, and so that is just one of the ignitions of the movement and why it's becoming kind of a no-brainer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's at the SMB, because you don't even have an IT staff sometimes. So why would you not rely on somebody who could teach you how to move into the managed service world? You know, look at like an Avant. We don't even have a server, right, we eat our own dog food, we use all of our own ecosystem. That is the potential in the smb, the mid-market.
Speaker 1:There's some type of a heavy blend there and then the, the largest of the large, are looking to do super unique things and constantly keep up with speed around that rate of change.
Speaker 2:yeah, I think the the thing that I find really interesting and it's one of the one of the conversations that I'm constantly having with sort of channel execs is there's customer lifetime value, which in that sort of unit economics rev ops world we fully understand. But then partner lifetime value or trusted advisor lifetime value to me is so much more valuable because you only you win one head and then you know the dog wags the tail right. If you can get that partner lifetime value right so that they really trust and believe in your brand, they're going to recommend your brand and build that brand into all of their customers because they believe in you, they believe in their own reputation. Those two worlds come together.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's like a giant telephone game. I mean, it's, uh, to a degree right, and I think a big part of what our responsibility is is to educate, you know, the trusted advisors on what is hot, what is not hot, what's, you know, not going really well right now, and we have a unique pulse on that. And that's why we really have built our research and analytics. We've built our Pathfinder tool. We've built our research to feed our Pathfinder tool with the most up-to-date, relevant information. We have the trusted advisors giving us feedback on what they're seeing in the marketplace, and that's thousands of people that are pounding on our tools day in and day out. And so we're creating this flywheel of information that truly, in my opinion, every single customer should want to plug into. I mean, it is the biggest no-brainer in my opinion, and the model just makes sense in terms of the support and the structure behind it. And so, yeah, you're right when you're hot, man, and this channel knows it.
Speaker 1:There is no better way to grow your company, your brand, in front of customers, and I think that's what's making the channel so unique too. You went back to that earlier question that you brought up earlier about I've been in sales forever. I've been doing it directly. I've been in this one mindset how do I take advantage of this channel? Well, think about the channel when you're really good and you really have a really good program. Think about the channel when you're really good and you really have a really good program. There is no way to go more viral throughout the IT community than through you know that massive ecosystem of trusted advisors.
Speaker 2:In my opinion, 100%. I think hyperscale is really hard to build and it's the best place in the world to be when it works right. I think I've seen it when channels do the right things and and they really get that recipe right. It's unbelievable when people and the irony is it sort of runs itself at that point right, there's always a bit of course correction, but once the boat is going, it's uh, it's a great place to be. That's sort of where the trusted advisor is today. But I'd love to hear which I? I think five years in the future is an impossible question, given the rate of change at the moment. But give us your predictions. What do you see changing and improving over the next few years?
Speaker 1:You know, I think you know, the trusted advisor will just become more and more instrumental.
Speaker 1:I believe in the next couple of years, couple of years, you will see a tipping point that takes place, where the general market will have an understanding that there are subject matter experts, the best of the best, that can navigate this massive ecosystem of change, and they can start to highlight that it revolves mostly around the OpEx market and it revolves along the lines of, generally, firms you've never, ever heard of in your entire life because they're relatively new. They've become a champion in a particular vertical. Maybe they're a microservice inside of AI that supports CX. It's truly impossible from an IT perspective to be able to be a subject matter expert across all of this ecosystem today, and so once the market realizes that it's the biggest no brainer in the world to bring in a trusted advisor, surrounded by that army of support and knowledge, it'll become a mainstream adoption and that's really where I believe you'll see next generation technology from the world of telecommunications and connectivity data center as a service in cybersecurity come from, and so that's coming.
Speaker 2:Awesome, drew. Well, in terms of a trusted advisor, I'm going to leverage you as a trusted advisor, because we always ask our current guests to recommend who they should have on next, so who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:you know, um, I think, uh, I have to nominate um because it's a great podcast and and I really appreciate you having me on today and I love the prep work. You guys uh really thought this thing out. It was good. And I think, uh, ian kinnegar I'll have to put him on the spot. He'll probably kill me right now, but I'll put ian kinnegar on my partner. I just think he brings a really unique perspective around some of these questions as well, and how big the industry could get with some statistical information that, I think, is pretty interesting for your viewers amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, Well, and we're coming through me, Drew. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 1:It's been awesome to have you on.