Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Yuval Dvir - Navigating the Future of SaaS Channels
In this milestone episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we welcome Yuval Dvir, Global Director of Online Platforms and Ecosystems for Google, to explore how one of the world’s most iconic brands leverages channel partnerships to expand its reach and redefine productivity.
Yuval shares his remarkable journey, working with industry giants to drive transformative strategies and challenge the status quo With a deep focus on meeting customers where they are, Yuval unpacks Google’s innovative approach to scaling partnerships across diverse verticals such as eCommerce, OEM, retail, and online platforms. He also supports deeptech startups to adopt SaaS strategies to productionize and scale their products.
Key takeaways include:
- Building scalable, high-impact channel architectures.
- Strategically meeting customer needs at critical decision-making moments.
- Balancing short-term wins with long-term growth strategies.
- How emerging technologies like AI and quantum computing are reshaping the channel ecosystem.
Connect with Yuval Dvir:https://uk.linkedin.com/in/yuvaldv
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mystery about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chenext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, yuval. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Good. How are you Alex?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited, I think you are, I think this is correct the first person from Google to come on the podcast, which feels like a great milestone.
Speaker 2:Well, it's about time that Google appears in the podcast, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's got to be my fault, not yours. Maybe for the uninitiated I've given the game away in terms of Google, but you could give us a little bit of a rundown about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So I'm London-based, as you can see from the overcast behind me, Born and raised in Israel, spent, I guess, some of the elementary years in Melbourne, Australia, and lived and worked in Singapore, France, the US in various sort of industries and jobs, from a bartender, a Disney cast member and all the way to a digital transformation director at Microsoft and now managing the channel partnership for Google Workspace at Google. And I've been at Google now 11 years. The company has changed significantly over those 11 years and different sort of CEOs, management style, much bigger, bigger scale.
Speaker 2:But I think I've been able to carve quite sort of an interesting sort of niche within Google to build almost like an independent sort of an interesting sort of niche within Google to build almost like an independent sort of business from basically nothing into something which is very significant to the growth of some of our main SaaS products. So that's been rewarding. And obviously, having a global sort of mandate and meeting a lot of partners from vertical, from multiple verticals, is very exciting. You get energized by different people, different perspective. So that's what I do at Google. There's some other roles, but we'll get into that, I guess, later.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, you've somehow managed to get Disney, microsoft and Google all on your CV, nice name dropping.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're knocking down some key brands Maybe to focus in then on some more of the channel aspects. I know you've worked with OEM online retail. That's some quite diverse channel sort of architectures but I imagine there's some through thread that you can learn from all of those. Talk to me about what the critical elements are're thinking about sort of building via channel. We need to understand what the product is that we're trying sort of to distribute and manage through partnerships. In our case it was our productivity SaaS solution Google Workspace, the alternative to Office and Office 365.
Speaker 2:So what we had to look is where did we have sort of the largest affinity between buying a certain sort of product and then requiring a productivity suite and what we found out? That when you buy or when you build a website, that's when you have a strong affinity to then build also a productivity suite. We saw the same thing with domains, e-commerce and whatnot. So what we've done is look through the business lifecycle when you start off a business and what are the different sort of steps you step into and what are the suppliers in each one of those steps, which one has the highest probability of upselling Google Workspace, and that's what we partner with. So we started with the website builders.
Speaker 2:Industry looked who are the biggest players over there, partnered with them and then focused on the rest other industries, and that's how we moved to OEMs, because once you buy a device, that's when you get productivity and that's when we get retail and so on and so forth. So that has been our strategy and it's worked quite well. Obviously, with each vertical it's quite a different channel perspective. So in the OEM, as an example, it's a pay to play type dynamic, it's less on the integration of the API, whereas with DIY type of companies, such as, you know, a Wix or Shopify, it's fully digital back end integration, front end sort of bundling or add on, and that scales much faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I speak to a lot of executives on the podcast and I really have seen some through threads from listening to their experiences. But one of the ones that continues to surprise me about how obvious it is yet how underutilized it is is meeting the customer where they are right, and so a deep understanding of what the solution not the product they're after is, where they want to buy that, when they want to buy that, and how you wrap that up into a cohesive story. I think there's so much of that is sort of a deep understanding of what drives customer behavior, and we get so wrapped up in very complex strategies and routes to market and USPs and pricing models, but actually the real tangible bit is hey, when is the customer going to make this decision and how do we present ourselves right then. And if you get that right, you're almost following on from there no 100, and that's how we call it.
Speaker 2:I mean meet customers where they are and at the right sort of moment.
Speaker 2:I mean we're all so busy, whether it's a business or personal life, so we just make it convenient to people.
Speaker 2:So if you believe in your product or your solution so much, just make it easier for their end customers to get it now. Now all companies want to sell directly. They keep their highest margins, but the reality is that not everybody goes direct and you don't want to miss those opportunities because otherwise someone else would get into those opportunities or, in some cases, some companies that could have been great partners of yours would be forced to be competitors as a result, since you're not occupying that space. And lastly, I would say specifically, if we are thinking about an online channel, thinking about direct, a lot of people go into Google, but googlecom, if we think about workspacegooglecom, we don't have the same level of eyeballs, or mostly Google. But if we aggregate all the eyeballs that we get, all the unique visits of traffic all our partners get together, it's almost five and six times more than we get. So that's a massive opportunity of extending Google reach and creating not just purchase but awareness in a very few seconds, as the customers seize the offer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's why so many brands and as brands get bigger they invest more in brand marketing, right? Because it makes that jump from moment of purchase to purchase ever smaller and smaller. If Google is obviously one of the biggest brands in the world, there's a huge amount of brand equity and loyalty and understanding there within the consumer base, and so it's like, oh, I need a workspace tool, I want to buy one right now. Oh, and the google logo is that cool? That's, that's all the information that I really need, right, and that's why I think building that brand equity is so important and then pairing that with timing and location, where meeting the customer, where they're at is, is critical yeah, and I would say that google is, is a very sort of known brand, but I wouldn't say I would say that in certain areas in APAC it's not as known, and Google Workspace even less so.
Speaker 2:So there is some awareness upside that we get by partnering with some of the APAC partners or the global ones, because all of a sudden they hear okay, there's another sort of offer They've been grown to either no office or something else. Plus, there's a new market that's happening.
Speaker 2:You know, all the social creators or content creators creators, they don't really use the same sort of tools in order to communicate. They have maybe just one instagram page there through their chat. How do you help them mature their business into something sort of more, uh, scalable? Um, that's, uh. That's a challenge that we have, but you can't start start it without the awareness in place.
Speaker 1:I think maybe one of the things that's interesting when you attack the problem of meeting the customer where there is is sometimes that's really good for the customer but less good for you. Right, and you want to almost direct the long-term strategy and driving revenue through the right channels to help Google scale, but you also have to balance that with meeting the customer where they is. How do you sort of bring those two pieces together and ensure you make short-term and long-term decisions that are cohesive?
Speaker 2:So the way we think about it is, the world is our oyster. In a way, I think about a roulette. You have a certain number of numbers over there and we need to place our bets. So obviously they're the obvious bets that you would sort of place known sort of brands that we can sort of connect to industry leading in their verticals, you know, like a Shopify or like Squarespace is an example. But then there's a lot of others that you need to make sort of bets on. Some of them would be sort of more engaged, some less, but ultimately it's a balance of both getting sort of the revenue but also getting sort of the awareness, and there are some places that we have to be in.
Speaker 2:So, for example, retail may not be as scalable as online or OEM not be as scalable, but it's an area that we have to be there from an awareness perspective as well. In most cases we don't take a page from, I guess, our competitor, but in some cases it is beneficial to do that just to ensure that you cover on, in a way, all your bases. And also, if we think about the segments that we sort of cater to, different segments and different sort of companies purchase in different directions. We said meet customers where they are. Some of them go to a retail store physically and buy it, so we should be there, and maybe not as much as they go online. But we just need to sort of cover all the bases and at least give people a choice.
Speaker 1:So you touch on retail stores, which I think is interesting when I think about probably the most cloud-centric company in the world. Talking about retail stores, that area traditionally has been dominated by Office 365, if we want to call out a brand, most laptops come and that's an OEM and it's tied in. It's very, very tightly entrenched. Given Google's cloud-centric approach, having a strong brand equity in the cloud area, how do you then change and pivot your strategy to then win in the physical space? That must be quite complicated.
Speaker 2:Well, a few things, I think, have changed in a way in the physical space and even how we use devices. I mean, what are the devices that we use if not, you know, devices to connect to the Internet or to the cloud, right? So in a way, the advantage still remains with Google if we position it in a certain sort of way. So I think that's that's the approach that I'm sort of thinking of when I'm thinking about why, going into sort of retail and how to conduct that value proposition. Furthermore, the OEMs themselves I mean in the past most of their revenue came from selling devices and hardware. Now it's almost like 50-50 in terms of software and services. So there is a migration and change over there, and that's why companies such as us and other SaaS providers are actually welcome over there, because it's another revenue stream that we can potentially sort of offer to them.
Speaker 2:Now, furthermore and I recently sort of mentioned that sort of to the leadership team I mean, if someone goes to a retail store, for example, and buy a Chromebook which is a Chrome OS device, one of the first software that they're recommended to purchase is a Office or Office 365, in the case of Office, it doesn't even install a Chrome OS. So that's one of the things that, as a Google or as a brand, you talked about before. It's important for us to have and ensure and, in addition, everything and we talked with OEMs about this a lot it's all about providing users with a choice, and if we believe that our product is superior or at least alternative to the existing one, why not give that choice?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I completely agree. Right, I think it's one of those weird facets about enterprise. Business is, sometimes you build this great architecture and then you get exactly what you just said, which is software and device don't even pair properly, and yet the machine has just pushed it all together. How can we inform both suppliers and customers about the right decision making? And even that's one step further into the physical world becomes more and more complicated and I think I would say more.
Speaker 2:It's um. You know, I like to very much to challenge, in a way, the status quo, both internally at a company but also with how the market operates, because, you've mentioned before, for the longest time retail was pretty much dominant and OEMs were dominant by the competitor. Why is that? And can we think about this differently and not just continue in a certain way that no, that's just the way it is? So whenever someone tells me that's just the way it is, it builds the motivation to maybe consider changing it and demonstrating that there is a path over there. I mean, in the past it was pretty much closed. In some cases we wouldn't even be talked to because the partnership on the other side was so strong. But the choice that customers want is also a choice that a lot of companies want. Nobody wants to be locked in completely with one supplier, and that's where I think it benefits both sides and it's a win-win solution both for the consumer but also for the partner.
Speaker 1:That sort of first principles thinking is quite rare, I think. I think it's very sort of entrepreneurial and quite a specialized outfit. We spoke previously around how the hell do you build a partnerships team globally? I think that's a really nuanced CV profile, talent profile that you're looking for, and then you've also got to manage them from afar. Talk to me about this sort of vision in terms of building out your team, and how do you sort of identify the right traits to bring into your organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So because the team is quite sort of independent and entrepreneurial to a certain extent, then you would need people that are interested in making sort of real impact and not just sort of ride on a certain sort of impact. They want to see not just correlation but real causation between the activities that they do and the impact and the outcome that they see in the market and, as a result, they need to be sort of independent, self-motivated and empathetic and also authentic, go into the detail but be strategic enough. I think for the longest time, people who were operators that had great execution powers have considered to be very sort of junior type, not strategic enough. But I fail to see any sort of operations without a lot of thought and strategic planning in it. Many times when you go into the strategy level without the operational rigor or experience behind you, the strategy goes off the rails, particularly nowadays, when things change so frequently. Everything has to be with the strategic hat on. So I think that was what we were looking for. Obviously, we're spread sort of globally, so having in a way that regional expertise was great. Having someone maybe much stronger from an analytical perspective and someone with more interpersonal skills balances it out.
Speaker 2:I think there's always a conversation of having sort of eight players, which is true, but each one of them comes to the team with a different type sort of lens. I think that's the approach. I think in most cases we're right, some cases we weren't. And also, you know, just like with a team, there is a benefit of a team working together for a while. I think they know one another, they know how to work together. In some cases, you know, too long is also not great. So finding the right balance is is critical. Humans are dynamic as well. Uh, the management is not a static thing. You always need to change that, uh, and challenge people. Once people don't have the challenge, the mastery that they're not the a players next to them, they, they lose interest.
Speaker 1:I love that, because you sort of balance, I think, three things there, which is one hey, a players are A players, right? However, each of them has their own superpower and then forming that team is about getting those sort of matching superpowers together, and I think that's such an underrated thought when it comes to team building. I see so often leaders bring in the same profile of people because they know one profile works well. The problem with that is you never get a force multiplier because you've got too many type A's together and it's like, well, hang on a second, we could do with this to add some, you know, in a pure sales motion, we need some analytics and we need someone to slow down rather than everyone to kick the door in. Right, I think, how you build that team together.
Speaker 1:And then the third and this is a something we have spoken a lot about on this podcast I always get extremely nervous about people who over talk strategy and don't want to get their hands dirty, because I think it's so easy to work for an, a player brand, you know, have all of that brand equity talk, talk about vision, talk about 10 year strategy, talk about planning. And when I really say ones and zeros, what did you achieve? Sometimes the answer is a bit stuttering and quiet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say two things. The first two to a first point is it's risk management right From a. From that perspective, an executive is never going to be blamed. He says, hey, I brought the right person to have all the accolades, it just didn't work out. In some cases they make the same mistake over and over again, but they still make it because the organization in a way incentivizes that sort of conformity.
Speaker 2:On the other sort of point is yeah, without execution, executives are completely sort of useless, especially sort of today. So that is critical. The challenge that I see sometimes is that you have a lot of senior executives that haven't gone through the proper, in a way, execution experience and, as a result, they know that something is missing. You almost sense it in terms of the confidence level and the ability to speak through the detail. And because they know that they can't sort of admit it, they need to sort of, in a way, fake it. And that is a disaster to any sort of organization, because they can't really sort of understand how it works on the field. How does it work when you make deals, when you deal with partners with pushback, and as a result, they can't sort of manage well, even if they're thinking more of a strategic level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the real problem there is it's like a two year pain point, right, because especially in the channel partnerships, it's such a long view and in agile business model that it's like, ok, we've brought in the wrong leader, then who then goes and makes their hires and then we're going to go after this partnership and then after 18 months we start to see leading indicators of revenue performance, and then 24 to 28 months we really should see the road it's like, and if you only measure at that end point, oh, this isn't working. It's like, oh, we're two and a half years down the road and we've not really done anything. I that that making sure that you have a, an executive and a leader who you know is going to go and get their hands dirty from day one and build the plane as it's in the air. I think that's that's critical. Otherwise you, you run such a high risk I mean that's.
Speaker 2:That's a good point, because some of the partnerships that we've built over here have been over several years um hang on, let's uh it took quite a while.
Speaker 2:I think that's the the dog in the background. Um, so it does. It does take a while, and if you don't have that executive and the sponsor or the people on the ground to execute for a while, all these opportunities would have gone away and the business that we have right now, which is quite significant, would have not been this size, for sure maybe then a layering through to the next sort of phase of strategy.
Speaker 1:One of the key bits of strategy that is so important to get right at the outset is targeting your right verticals. I know that's something that you spent a lot of time thinking about and have really made directional changes to this sort of strategy. How do you choose the right vertical? How do you quantify and make sure that decision is correct, because it might be a 24 month bet?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So I think when we mentioned the different sort of verticals that we deal with and these are different sort of industries, different companies, the maturity level from a digital perspective is sometimes completely different, but they all have one thing in common, and the thing that they have in common, which is interest to me, is reach. They reach tens of millions, if not a hundred millions, of customers in different sort of regions. So from that perspective, that answers the key point that I have, which is scale, because I get paid to how many sort of seats I'm getting to be sold, and that's important for me. So that's why different verticals, but they all have the same ability to reach more customers and I think that's how we qualify them.
Speaker 2:So you qualify by either the visits of the traffic on their own, if they're online, or how many sort of customers that they have premium customers, premium and so on. So everything looks good on paper. But even if everything looks good on paper and you speak with the right sort of person and you don't get the same sort of level of engagement, that's when 24 months could go to waste. So if there's no engagement, if it doesn't sort of work out, move on, even if it looks perfect on paper which is something very difficult for people to do, especially people that haven't done that before because it looks so great on paper, why doesn't it happen in practice?
Speaker 1:but we know that reality sometimes is very different from the theoretical mind that we have yeah, we had a lease who runs global partnerships for crowd strike on the podcast a few weeks ago and she spoke about a phrase that I really liked the way she said it. She said philosophic apologies. She said philosophical partnerships, which is you're looking for that sort of mind meld with someone in another organization, cause it's one thing like you say, oh, all the ones in the zeros add up. Okay, mathematically this makes sense, but if there's not someone that you want to do business with someone, that you know is going to push through the pain barrier for you.
Speaker 1:Partnerships are so complicated. It's guaranteed to fail unless you really have that person that you can trust on the other side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. And I think and I mentioned that I was recently in a conference you know a lot of startups and they asked me sort of how to sort of forge a partnership, especially with a large organization. So I'm saying, listen, it's, it's, it's difficult because these organizations many times are siloed and each one has their own sort of focus and there's not a lot of incentive to think sort of beyond strategically of how everything sort of connects together, think sort of beyond strategically of how everything sort of connects together. So, but every once in a while you do find those people in it. They're there to help you, even if it helps fill their quota or if it doesn't. And if you're able to find that person, hold dearly to them because they can, they can be a significant sort of force multiplier to your business. Break down through the silos and get things done. Otherwise you're going to move from one fence to the other and you're not going to get anywhere.
Speaker 1:So I have Google on the podcast. We're talking strategy and sort of 10-year vision. It would be insane if I didn't talk about emerging technologies. Talk to me what you see coming down the line that you think is radically going to shift well, how humanity goes forward.
Speaker 2:I think there are sort of two letters that everybody's talking about. Right, it's an a and an I. Yeah, everything is about sort of uh ai, and I think for for good reasons, because I think finally it broke through the narrow applications of it and now it can sort of transform and deal with everything, sort of from words for letters to numbers, across all industries and verticals, and with a touch of a button or even our voice. So I think that's really going to transform everything and even, to a certain extent, the productivity suite. Maybe a lot of the I mean everything we talked about in cloud is all about abstraction layer, right, you don't know how all the hardware works beneath, it, just works for you.
Speaker 2:Same thing now with productivity. That's the application layer. But what if the abstraction layer goes even beyond that and we're faced just with a single window of interface and all those applications that we used to play with right now are no longer a thing of the past, just like hardware once was. So it is very sort of interesting. Um, I think it's not a hype, I think it's a real thing, but I also think that the innovations won't necessarily come just from the product and engineering function.
Speaker 2:It would come from the go-to-market function, because it's up to us to think about a new business model, innovation and how you can you take this technology and really transform everything, because we're not talking about incremental improvements and automation. We're talking about starting from scratch of this industry or a product or a solution, and that's why it's fascinating. On the other side, you have sort of technologies such as quantum, which I think is fascinating because, together with AI, what these two sort of technology can do is break away the artificial boundaries that humanity puts in place in order to understand nature, science. So we have physics and chemistry and biology. But who decides that we have biology over here and physics over there? We decided it because it's easier to understand With artificial intelligence what it does in quantum is just takes the technology a step further.
Speaker 2:So quantum is the science, in a way of the small, this atomic and subatomic particles, and that's where sort of those algorithms work better. And I think artificial intelligence allows us to increase the signal, reduce sort of noise and break through these boundaries and, as a result, all of a sudden, all these different sort of sciences can work together and really transform. I think that's further out. I think what we'll see first is a lot of changes in common, things changing completely as a result of generative AI and regular sort of AI sort of AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the soundbite that I always think is the most interesting when I try and explain to people my mum how big AI is going to be, is I think people sort of think of it like the internet and they go yeah, it's going to be as revolutionary as the internet, which it's not. It's going to be far more revolutionary. But I think the thing that people need to understand is, like the internet, it didn't just happen and then the world changed. It was how you used it right, and so the people who won through. You know the dot-com boom and whoever else it was. It was the application of the internet. What it did to how we communicate, uh, how we go to market, how we speak to anyone it was all of those shifts and understanding how that changed. The same will be true of ai, but just times 10, because the application is so much wider and deeper simultaneously.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure, and across multiple industries. So you have the infrastructure layer, you've got sort of the models layer that a lot of companies operate in, but the application layer goes far and wide and touches everything and in many cases that would drive the innovation, which would back, propagate to the models and ultimately the infrastructure. So I think the application is the one that would ultimately call the shots on how this technology evolves.
Speaker 1:Well, it's not just AI that wants to go far and wide, it's also this podcast. So we always ask our current guests to refer us into our next guest. Yuval, who do you have in mind?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think we talked about online, we talked about sort of oem and and so on. I think, uh, it'll be good to get sort of michael slinger from our chrome os, sort of uh team. Uh, that helped us a lot in in driving sort of workspace um across multiple sort of devices, with the oems, with relationships, so I think it'd be my recommendation michael, we're coming for you.
Speaker 1:Yuval, thank you so much. It's been awesome speaking to you today great thanks, alex.