Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Anthony Graziano - Transforming Distribution with D&H's Marketing
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we’re thrilled to host Anthony Graziano, SVP of Marketing at D&H Distributing, who brings a wealth of experience from decades in the channel. Anthony dives into the evolving role of distribution, highlighting how modern distributors like D&H drive value far beyond traditional fulfillment, acting as strategic enablers at every stage of the partner journey.
Anthony sheds light on how distributors are empowering vendors and partners to thrive, from leveraging advanced analytics to uncover new opportunities to enabling partners with marketing automation tools and multi-vendor solutions.
Key insights include:
- Dispelling misconceptions about distribution’s role in the channel.
- Activating and scaling the "long tail" of partners to diversify risk and drive growth.
- How D&H’s “market to grow” strategy delivers measurable ROI for vendors.
- The transformative role of AI in hyper-personalizing marketing and enabling partners to future-proof their businesses.
Whether you’re a channel leader, a partner strategist, or simply passionate about the future of distribution, this episode is packed with actionable strategies and future-focused insights.
Connect with Anthony Graziano: Connect with Anthony Graziano:https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonygrazianofla/
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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 Chanext and this week I am very excited to welcome our special guest, anthony. How are you doing Well? Thanks, alex. Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. Um, hopefully we don't get any background noise. Anthony was just showing me his new puppy, which is excellent, but we can't talk dogs, we have to talk channel. Maybe, for the uninitiated, you can give us a little bit of a background of where you've come from yeah, absolutely anthony graziano here, a simple dude from florida.
Speaker 2:I've spent my entire adult life in the channel uh, with roles in sales marketing both at regional and global levels, on both the distribution and vendor side. So, and currently I'm the SVP of marketing for D&H distribution awesome.
Speaker 1:well, we love distribution on this podcast and I always think that people who know the most about the channel have spent some level of time in distribution, because you understand partner and you understand vendor extremely well, so excited to get some insights today. What are some of the misconceptions around the sort of misalignments that happen between vendors and disties? Because I think sometimes there can be a little bit of friction, a little bit of misunderstanding around what the priorities look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Great question, alex, and I'll answer it from the distributor point of view. You know, believe it or not, I still sometimes hear that distribution is only leveraged merely for fulfillment, overlooking all the benefits and the capabilities that modern distributors like D&H, who drive demand at every stage of the partner journey demand at every stage of the partner journey, um I I. If I use an analogy, it's like uh, your first television and your tv today, right? So, your first television, it did the thing it was, and if you coin that to distribution, we're a warehouse and a bank. But today, you know, you stream, use it as a surveillance, it turns on your crock pot in some areas. So you know, as distributors now we act as an extension from pre-sales to post-sales and everything in between. Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:I really see that the people who love distribution get it and maybe the people who don't really have that sort of old-fashioned view. I love the sort of conception there that you have around driving demand at every level.
Speaker 2:Talk to me a little bit about where and how you you sort of view that demand generation yeah, well, when you think about um, when you're working with the channel today, there's different types of partners. They're not all the same, so taking a one-size-fits-all approach never works. But when you think about distribution our ability to scale the long tail, if you will, of partners that are selling your products every day, but you don't have the time and the resources to be able to, you know, handle each of those partners directly this is where distribution comes into play, definitely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think as well. Right, the real value that someone like D&H provides is finding those partners, even at the sort of beginning, right? I know so many vendors who go, oh, we need to mention Florida, we need to break into Florida more actively. How are we going to do that? And the answer is, oh, we have no idea. So how do we find, activate new partners and really keep driving them towards success which I know is something that you spent a lot of time sort of thinking and planning for them towards success, which I know is something that you've spent a lot of time sort of thinking and?
Speaker 2:planning for Right, because we have that view of you know all, we see what's selling, when the opportunity that we have is you know. Again, as we're delivering to market, most of it we drop ship directly to the end customer, so we get to help with all the verticalization and data analytics that can help a vendor really be surgical in their approach and their go-to-market, whether that's to get more win back or break, like you said, break into new markets and emerging markets as well.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I know CFOs pour a load of pressure into their channel leaders is about sort of diversifying the risk factor that comes with channel. I mean so many channels are sort of over indexed on the top four or five partners in each region. They pour all of their time and resources into making that a success. That makes CFOs very, very nervous. What happens if a partner just decides, hey, we're going to prioritize elsewhere? How do you help a vendor rebalance their priorities and sort of head down market more effectively?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's another one of the misalignment perspectives right, they sometimes allocate a disproportionate of the budget, which freaks vulnerability. Right, whether it's their experience, just pressure from a competitive side, they may be, others are coming to displace them. But what if that business large partners, business model changes or even falters? Right, so there's lots of risks there and where we definitely come into play is really diversifying their partner set. So, again, everybody beyond the top four, we're able to fulfill their business needs, enable them to sell more, help monetize their opportunity within their portfolio, within the partner, and we're able to do that at scale because we have all of the connection, the digital tools and platforms that allow the partners to interlock with us to build their businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can imagine that you see some sort of outcomes right when you turn on and activate that long tail. We see and hear lots of data around differences in churn performance, partner retention, rate of revenue improvements. Talk to me about some of the outcomes that you've seen that the vendors have gained once they redistribute that risk across a wider channel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no for sure. And I think, when you look at that broader network, specifically in that SMB space, we focus on programs that enhance co-selling capability, referral and rewards, training initiatives, net, new logo bonuses, and I think this approach that we focus on takes us beyond sort of those broad revenue-based metal tiers like platinum, gold and silver, into something where we look at the partner's point of value, because we take care of the partner at every level, intersection of the partner journey, which allows us, when we apply this method we've seen reduced churn, increased frequency and yield results.
Speaker 1:What I love about what you're doing there and I was saying just before the call we hear such positive things around what D&H bring into the market, but you're really methodically breaking down that partner journey and I think that's one of the things that most vendors really don't understand because they aren't the people that are doing this process. But partner acquisition to partner activation to partner retention requires different tool sets, different programs to sort of galvanize them on that element of the journey. You're really methodically breaking that down. I imagine it's driving huge change in partner performance in each of those categories.
Speaker 2:It is. And then, coming from the vendor side, feeling all of that pressure on the return on investment that they're spending in distribution, really inspired what I'll call our market to grow strategy. So we cover recruitment, enablement, activation, acceleration, customer success. We've even tackled, I would say, the return on investment around building out multi-touch attribution system where now we link all of our touchpoints with our partners in a way that we're able to now track, from a marketing perspective, influence, pipeline influence, booking. So imagine now going back to your CFO with those type of results, outside of the normal engagement metrics that we typically provide, but showing where you're seeing reach, frequency, yield and then pipeline contribution. So it's been really exciting. We really feel like we're setting a new benchmark for how we're engaging with our partners and, as you said, we are definitely seeing the results.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I think one of the things that is so complicated about being in vendor land or being that CFO as a vendor you have such limited data right You're seeing generic POS reporting and who knows about influence and so D&H and yourself, anthony, being able to provide that extra level of granularity that helps people understand really what's going on in the market, because it's easy to bash vendors but it's a really hard place to be when you don't know exactly what's going on.
Speaker 2:Correct. And I think the other part of that too is with our approach we really try to align to the market trends and how are we enabling our partners to monetize that effectively and anticipate future trends? So again, when we're coordinating with our vendor partners, it's really about how do we keep those solutions to market, deliver that in a two motion to them, how do we bridge the gap and make sure that they can have a strong, efficient with motion and then the through motion? So we provide all of those through channel marketing automation tools to allow them whether that's a kit, you know, a social post or a full stack marketing kinds of your services to allow partners to do that with their limited resources.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. We've had a few and I constantly narrate this story on the podcast but we've had a few really senior AWS executives and AWS really framed themselves about being the most customer obsessed company in the world. Right, they're all in on what the customer cares about. What I love about your marketing automation and your kits is the customer doesn't want a product, they want a whole solution, and that very rarely is one vendor. Right, that's multiple vendors together in a cohesive solution and you being able to not just give the products to the partners but give the marketing wraparound to the partners. That's really meeting the customer where they want to be met and sort of empowering them. How do you do that and enable training? Because those two things come together right. You've got to generate demand and the partner's got to know how to sell it and manage it. How do you pull those things together?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a couple of things. One, when we're looking at each of the partner segments, we're really trying to understand their business. So we have our people first, partner first mentality. So we take pride in our customer success, knowing their capabilities, and we're able to augment where we're able to. So we don't take that one size fits all approach. So if it's where they need to change their business model, like become an MSP, we help them do that. If they're already an MSP and they need to enable themselves on a new solution, we're able to do that. If we need to help them with technical, free sales or posts, even from the hang and bang scenario all the way to building out an advanced infrastructure with, you know, everyone's favorite two letters AI and helping them, you know better their business.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing too you mentioned it. You know, typically the marketing that's coming out is typically single vendor and you have to go to a portal to download it. And no disrespect to partner portals. But you know our partners don't sell one brand and they don't want to navigate the 30 portals and I don't care how good your portal is, no one's hanging out there. So what you know we like to do is try to take that information from our vendors, curate and and and challenge them if it doesn't have the right message, and then try to build where we know that the partners are actually going to use it and then help them deploy it in a way, um, you know that we both ultimately get results love that you're building marketing to meet the end customer where they need to be met, and you're building services and information where the partner needs to be met, which often is not in the partner portal for for that sort of multi-vendor reason.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things that, um, I find very interesting when we talk marketing strategy is how can vendors shift towards a more sustainable, marketing-driven investment, because so often budget is wrapped into sales leaders rather than marketing leaders, which maybe leads to some short-term decision-making.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of the channel budgets when you know my team were engaging.
Speaker 2:You know the channel account manager has lots of influence over the budget, which is great, because this which makes it very hard for us to implement a sustainable land and expand strategy.
Speaker 2:So what we do typically with all of our vendors a sales incentive will definitely be a part of that and we absolutely have to draw short term opportunities, but that can't be our whole strategy. So we really look at this 360 motion to make sure that we are building the right and addressing the right business problem that the end customer has, making sure that we're monetizing and highlighting what that brand has to offer, because most times those are net logo situations and the goal is often to disrupt a competitor or displace it. And the partner needs to understand the financial impact because oftentimes the vendor's going out to disrupt an investment community already. So we try to help that and help them maximize programs so they can understand that. And then you know we mentioned earlier we try to align our partner efforts all around the marketing partner's journey, because it's not a one size fits all at all and if you take that approach and you're not looking at each of the personas that are within the partner and meeting them where they are.
Speaker 1:They're just not going to engage the way that we want them to yeah, and that and that leads to a whole load of budget just being wasted. Right, if you're building a one-size-fits-all and this is the sort of counterintuitive thing you think, oh, that's really good because one-size-fits-all is fairly cheap to build. The problem is the utilization is so poor, because one-size-fits-all, ironically, fits almost no one, and so then the utilization is so poor, meaning you just burnt the budget anyway. Yes, yes. So as someone who's uh, you know, I know you're in partner communities. Um, so am I. I think one of the things that's really interesting when you're paying attention to come out partner communities what are the emerging trends? Talk to me about how you think channel marketing is going to change over the next few years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I'll say it again, those two favorite letters AI, ai, ai.
Speaker 2:And you know thinking about and it's more about how do channel marketers and partners become more efficient and productive. When you think about where you just said the one size fits all, because that's an easy route, it's cost effective and you know there's no, it's typically you know content and creative folks trying to build that and deploy it across the globe. So thinking about AI driven content creation that helps partners customize materials from multi-brands but also keep within the vendor's guidelines, wouldn't that be a great scenario and future ready so partners are able to deploy campaigns at scale? The marketers, channel marketers how do they use data to understand personalization based on behavior, purchase history, preferences, engagement, all of those things that today they usually sit in? So many different systems, and you know, from a resourcing perspective, ai could help them do that. And then you know, I think predictive analytics and AI machine learning, we're going to be able to help anticipate future customer needs and then aid those partners to save future forward and future proof their businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I think that increased customization is really going to be the thing, specifically from a marketing perspective. That's so important. We know if we could double and triple and quadruple the size of our marketing teams, we would take that one size fits all and make it really really specific for different buying personas, different verticals, different segments, different go-to-market flows. But we just don't have the resources to do that, and I think where marketeers need to box smart is that's really what ai is going to be great, and how do we put vanilla in and get 100 flavors the outside? But then everyone wants to try. That's going to be the goal of AI and the thing that I'm really bullish, that the channel's going to really buy into, because that hyper-personalization gets really complicated at scale. Yes, absolutely Awesome. Anthony, it's been awesome having you on to talk about all things distribution and networking, but we're big networkers. Here. We always like to finish by asking our current guests who they think we should have on next. Who did you have in mind?
Speaker 2:Jen Waltz. She's the VP and Global Channel Chief for Prawn Technologies.
Speaker 1:Awesome, jen, we're coming from you. Anthony, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.