Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Jennifer Judy - How to Build a High-Impact Partner Enablement Program
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Jennifer Judy, a channel powerhouse with 25+ years of experience leading partner enablement, go-to-market strategy, and channel growth at HP.
Here’s what we unravel in this episode:
- The Four Pillars of Enablement – Jennifer breaks down her proven framework: content, communication, education, and accessibility—and why each plays a critical role in partner success.
- Inside-Out Approach to Partner Education – Why training your internal teams first is the key to driving credibility and adoption across the partner ecosystem.
- Bringing Dormant Partners Back to Life – The data-driven nurture campaign that revived non-transacting partners and generated $26 million in revenue—and how you can do the same.
- Navigating Mergers & Acquisitions in the Channel – Lessons from the Poly + HP integration: how to blend ecosystems, manage partner transitions, and maintain revenue without disruption.
- The Right Way to Launch New Products Through Partners – The #1 mistake vendors make when launching new products and services in the channel—and how to avoid rollout disasters.
Jennifer’s insights are practical, data-driven, and battle-tested—this episode is a must-listen for channel leaders, partner marketers, and enablement professionals looking to scale their impact.
Connect with Jennifer : https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferjudy/
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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'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanix and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, jennifer. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Doing great. Thanks so much for the invite. I was excited to be included in this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, excited to have you on. Doubly so, because our YouTube viewers should see your dog who's poking into the bottom corner, which makes for a wonderful podcast, obviously. But unfortunately we can't do an entire podcast about dogs. We have to talk about the channel. Maybe, for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are and where you've come from channel.
Speaker 1:Maybe for the uninitiated you could give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are and where you've come from. Yeah, so I've been in the channel for over 25 years. I know I started so young, at least I think so. Yeah, I've been in the channel for 25 years and my main focus has been on go-to-market and enablement and partner experience, because I do believe you know all of these are influencers and driving revenue to the partner community and sometimes you lose sight of this. And throughout my career I've evolved in my career and I've kind of glommed on to this whole enablement and all these influencing factors that could empower a partner to drive revenue. And I've done this in multiple groups in my career, doing portals, doing communications, education, and now I'm sort of wrapping all of those enablement experiences together and I'm driving this at HP for the software and services and video collaboration today.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, we spent a lot of time reminiscing because I used to be a Polycom funded head, which in some way is the business that you are now responsible for, so very close to my heart. I love those guys in the UK team, so it's nice to be able to chat shop with someone who's still part of that business. You touched on the fact that you have worked with the sort of different elements of enablement. One of the things that I think is really fascinating about enablement is there's lots of ways that you can make partners be more enabled, but there's obviously an order of priorities. Where would you start if you were building a program from scratch?
Speaker 1:order of priorities. Where would you start if you were building a program from scratch? So when you're looking at enablement and again, enablement's the hot buzzword of the past five years and you've heard it as go-to-market enablement readiness, so there's a lot of terms that you use but when you start, when you're asked to build such a program, the first thing you need to look at is what do you want to achieve? So this could be within a partner program, it could be an initiative. Enablement is a tactical plan that you're going to be pulling together to drive certain behaviors.
Speaker 1:So I do have four pillars when I talk about enablement, but I bookend them. So I'll tell you what my bookends are and then I'll talk about the foundation. So the first element when you're talking about enablement is and what you're trying to drive. Say you're trying to drive a sales initiative or a tactical plan and something you need to evaluate. What is your objective? What is the end game? What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to drive revenue in an ex-business, like a video business, for example? I'll start tying in because I'll circle back to some of these in a minute. But for video, like with my poly video collaboration, you need to have a discovery session and understand all of the facets of what you're trying to achieve what is your end goal, understand where you are today and then evaluate where you want to go.
Speaker 1:So that's the first part. Now I'm going to get into the four pillars when I start defining enablement and each person can define enablement in their own way, but I found these four pillars really help you build your plan Content. So I'll read them. It's content, communications, education and accessibility. How easy is it to find things? So, for content, when you're doing your discovery, you need to understand what are you going to develop? What are the materials? How are you going to formulate?
Speaker 1:the materials, making sure you have that carrot. Remember, you're not the only vendor that your partners are going to. How do you stand out? How do you draw them in? What is the value proposition? What is the carrot, as I allude to, that will make them want to drive and work in the business with you? How do they make money? It's down to profitability. That's how partners are going to choose. It's all about revenue. You want to make revenue, they want to make revenue. So how do you draw that in in your content? And also the thing when you're developing content.
Speaker 1:Nobody wants to read 50, 60 pages of content and I'm sure everybody's glorious writers and everybody wants to showcase their writing. But we're getting into an era well, we have been for quite some time on instant gratification. So you need to start thinking about when you're creating things clear, concise videos. Creating things Clear, concise videos, podcasts, things like this. People like the quick views to do things. So you need to start looking about this when you're creating your content. And you know there's always a double click when you go into content and you start analyzing all of these components.
Speaker 1:The next piece in the pillar is communication. When you create this content, you need to make sure you're really ample communication methods that are going out there and you have a facet when you're in the marketing groups. You have your newsletters, the staples, the foundational things. You have your emails, nurture campaigns, social media. All of these things you need to start bundling. What is your route to market? How are you going to amplify this great content that you've pulled together and how do you get that communication out there?
Speaker 1:The other piece, the third piece, is education, education. There's a lot of ways in which you could approach education. It could be your traditional webinars, it could be podcasts, it could be videos that your snippets that you're putting on the web. It could be certification programs. How do you build into your certification, into your partner program, specializations? All of these things could complement and add competency levels for your partners and ultimately you could weave it in to your partner program. It starts do more, get more as you get educated. You start up leveling in your tiering, if you have a tiering program. Those are really critical things because, remember, partners sell what they know and the easier you make it for them to learn these things, the more likely they're going to adopt it and if there's profitability in doing so.
Speaker 1:And then my last piece in my four-pillar foundation is accessibility. How easy is it to find it? We all know the lovely navigations of partner portals, and partner portals could be very simple or very complex. You have great content, but sometimes you need a decoder ring to find where in the layers of things to do. So it's something that goes into the partner experience. How easy is it for your partners to access this content experience? How easy is it for your partners to access this content? How accessible is it for them to get it and leverage it and use it and move forward? So that's the really important part of that four pillar.
Speaker 1:And then my last bookend just because you do those things, if you don't measure, if you don't have the analytics, you're never going to know Did that work? I don't know. We did all of those things, but if you don't have the measurement to understand all the components from communication, content and education and your portal accessibility, that's going to be impactful because you need to measure and then adjust the levers, change things. There's no one size fits all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a partner program to me is actually marketing right to some level and no marketeer, no CMO, no VP of marketing is ever going to go. Hey. So we're going to pour a load of money into this paid ads campaign but we're just not going to measure performance, because that person gets sacked very, very quickly. But I do find it crazy that lots of programs, people are rolling up their sleeves and doing a lot of work without having the understanding of did we deliver a 5% improvement, a 500% improvement somewhere in the middle? Because that is critical to understanding how you sort of iterate and improve from that.
Speaker 1:Couldn't agree more, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Maybe to double click. On education, you've spoken. We spoke before and you spoke about the importance of doing an outside or an inside out approach. I should say, starting with sellers before you engage partners. Why is that order of operation so important? Why is?
Speaker 1:that order of operation so important, the importance of inside out, and I do believe in this methodology. So the pillars and everything I talk about there, remember your partners are an extension of your sales organization and if you start educating your partners first, or your customers first, you really chip away at credibility. And it all comes down to credibility within your partners and your sellers. So if your partner said, oh yeah, there's this activity that your company is doing, and your seller, your account manager even when I think about the account manager they could say, oh my God, I've never heard about that Then you start chipping away at that credibility and they don't understand well, why am I going to you? I'm getting this information elsewhere. So you really need to make sure you maintain that because as you start doing the inside out, so your internal sellers, your account managers and your partners are your, as I said, an extension of your sales team. It even goes inside out in that.
Speaker 1:Think of your partner ecosystem. When you start talking about distributors, educate your distributors because they have a large reach of their resellers themselves. You want to arm them, to be educated and really drive this message to their partners. So it really does come down to the inside out, education, maintain credibility, and these people are helping you amplify and reiterate the message. That you're doing so. That's the wrapper that you really want to drive. That you're doing so. That's the wrapper that you really want to drive.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more. I think one of the things that is so important is understanding how, especially, distribution is going to play a really critical role, because you understand that they are your sort of scaling force when it comes to the sales motion, your scalability in terms of operations, and yet if you're not using them to help scale your enablement, you're just missing a huge value that distribution obviously provides.
Speaker 1:I always say distribution is people don't tap in to distribution the way that they should. Your distributors could help you really extend that net and be that extension to your sales organization. I always try and build in my plan to incorporate them to help amplify whatever you're trying to do.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I was paying particular attention to when it came to the merger between Polly and HP is I always find mergers incredibly interesting just from a business perspective. One of the things that I know is particularly challenging is when you take two very different partner ecosystems and try and bring those together. Maybe you can share a little bit of detail about some of the challenges that you had. What worked? How did you bring those two worlds together?
Speaker 1:Well, I wish there was an easy answer, because you're right when you have and I've been through in my career. It's hard to believe, but over seven integrations, acquisitions, divestitures, and it's interesting to see how maintaining a brand, maintaining your install base, and how you do that, that is an ongoing I will even tell you today, within HP and Poly, maintaining the Poly. That is a very complicated process, but the best advice that I could give anybody when you're dealing with an acquisition or a merger, m&a holistically over-communicate. Over-communication to your partners is critical. Bring them along this journey with you. Don't let it just be sitting in the background and them waiting for the shoe to drop.
Speaker 1:What does this mean to my business? What are the rules of engagement? Is my compensation going to change? Are you going? And I'll give some specific things is my inventory from a distributor? How is my inventory going to change? Do I have to swap out? What are we doing? Do we do relabeling? Are there new SKUs your partners have to worry about? Are there SKU changes?
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of complexity. I will say I do not have that simple way of a wand. It's that easy, but I could definitely tell you. Those are the areas that I'd focus on and really it comes down to that rules of engagement, because you may have unique partners to one organization than the other. You may have a common partner, so you're going to have to measure through who are your high performers in each, who are the ones that are common, your rules of engagement, how to manage that and common account managers internally. So there's a lot of things that need to be weighed and it's a constant thing that you're going to have to do, and ours has been over a year and a half. Actually it's been two years and it is still a constant process that you really need to work. That and again over. Communication is critical to help drive performance, because you don't want revenue dips and there are tactics you could use to help with revenue dips.
Speaker 2:One of the things that can really cause a revenue dip is one of the really challenging things about mergers is there's a lot of brand equity on both sides, right, and so if one brand is completely absorbed, that can sometimes disrupt a lot of long-term or medium-term revenue. How do you sort of see the optimal way to sort of bring brands together?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Bringing brands together when you have such dominant forces that people really embrace. That's something that your organization will need to evaluate is is it a blend? And I will tell you, I've seen it done both ways where they completely absorb and that other brand is just gone and then you really see the struggle of customers going oh, they're gone, well, okay, they have nowhere to buy and you get a serious dip. Where I've seen the resurrection trying to happen in some areas is a blend. It's like the front end is the one company and then it's a sub name, is the other sub brand name? And in fact HP is doing that with Polly specifically, so it's HP Polly. So there are ways that you could still have visibility. But it then comes down to keep the marketing going. Comes down to keep the marketing going, keep the advertisement going. You've got to stay relevant. You've got to really push it out there, because if you just kind of slide it by, people will notice. So you need to shout it from the rooftop. Stay relevant, stay top of mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I often think brands can pull that sort of blend too quickly, whereas actually I think maintaining the sort of brands glued together for a while just to get customers associated with the new name that's involved, I think that helps preserve brand equity in a lot of cases, unless obviously the brand that's purchasing is so dominant that actually that transfer of equity happens very easily. One of the things that I know is a key KPI for lots of partner programs is re-engaging dormant partners. I know you've done this very successfully using some nurture campaigns. Talk to me about how you sort of see re-engagement looking and what is sort of the impact that you can drive when it's done correctly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So and I'll give a specific example that we used when I was at Poly Within the partner organization you're going to have, it tends to have episodic partners when they're transacting. So there are times that you have that transacting partners that kind of fall off. You know, maybe for a quarter or two quarter we had a specific situation where we really wanted to drive video collaboration revenue and what we did this is where I always say have an analyst on hand. I believe in data is king and really having the ability to extract that data. This is where we were seeing these episodic partners dropping off from driving revenue for our video.
Speaker 1:So what I did is you had to kind of figure out where are you going to mark that threshold. So we had we defined and this is something that can be done in any industry look at what your marker is of how many partners have dropped off. Our measurement was for two quarters. We did not see revenue generated by these partners and we had a list of all the partners that did not drive revenue for two quarters. And what I did is I then took that partner, base those partners specifically, and put them in a nurture campaign.
Speaker 1:And when I talk about nurture campaign, it's re-engagement, it's how do I get back to be top of mind, how do I draw them in? And this goes back to the pillars that I talked about is all right. Well, what content do we have? Is there a promotion that we want to advertise? I don't want to just bombard them with random facts. Everybody's got random facts. They could read a white paper, they could read a data sheet, they could see you have a new product. But I wanted to draw them in with that carrot. What would that carrot be? Is there a promotion that there's X amount of dollars off or whatever thing that I could bring them back in on, you know, free demo gear, whatnot.
Speaker 1:So we started having I had my marketing team build snippets very short, bite-sized messages that would go to these partners and we did it. Every two weeks They'd get a new message and I'm talking two to three sentences and you want it very a draw to go oh my gosh, this is a great discount or this is some great thing that I could benefit from. And you always want it actionable, you don't want just random facts. So we made it actionable, brought it back to my partner portal, brought them back to a promotion flyer and how to activate. So again, you always need to think that full circle because it comes down to analytics. You want the analytics of your promotion, you want the analytics of your promotion, you want the analytics of your portal, you want to draw them back in.
Speaker 1:So this initiative that we did we sent these tagged messages to the partners and I will tell you we did get significant re-engagement and for the short time that we did this, we got $26 million of revenue of these non-transacting partners and as soon as a partner transacted, we dropped them out and we did our pool again of the two consecutive quarters and those partners would continue to get and obviously you have your opt out. People could opt out of these, but this was really important because, again, it goes back to staying top of mind get them in there. It's maybe not that they don't want to. They have other vendors, as I said. So how do you make it things that is profitable for them which drive their behavior?
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more. And obviously 22 million is an unbelievable performance, right, and it just shows that marketing and a partner program really is the same function, right it's how do we galvanize and drive the behavior from the internal and external masses? I think the real thing that a lot of companies bet very big on it takes a huge amount of time in R&D, a huge amount of time in marketing resources and enablement resources and sales resources is some sort of new product introduction. That's really complicated in a direct motion. You have to educate your sellers, you have to build new marketing and you have to take it out to customers.
Speaker 1:Really, complicated in a partner program. Talk to me about what you've learned orchestrating new product introductions. Yeah, so NXIs, which is, you know, right now I'm dealing with product as well as service introductions. So with an NXI it's interesting. In many companies I've been at and probably I think the last three or four I've been at everybody's got an NXI process of some sort. But what element? That is not usually in that core team which you get a lot of product. You get the product team, the marketing team and building their process. A lot of times my experience there was not a channel component in there. So in that wheel of those people that are launching an NXI, there was never a gating point to say, okay, channel's ready. So this is really important that I would encourage anybody. If you're doing an.
Speaker 1:NXI, be sure that in your process you have a mechanism to sign off saying, yep, the channel is ready with the content that you're providing. And then this goes back to when I go back to my pillars again. If you talk about content, you need to make sure that content has that value proposition in there. Why should a partner care? So when you're building this out, it's really important you build those components in there. So, from an NXI, you need to think about do I really need a thousand assets? Or what are the big items I need from a channel perspective to when a launch happens? What does a channel partner need to be successful?
Speaker 1:And one of the ways I did this, rather than just arbitrarily saying, oh, my years of experience, this is what they want. Yeah, I could think that, but I always believe in getting it from the partners themselves. So I've done focus groups and I encourage you to do a focus group with your partners and really understand. And I always use my famous question If you could have three items, what would they be? What would help move the needle for you? And it's interesting you collect these answers and figure out okay, from a go-to-market timing, what is the timing in which you need to roll things out and what is the type of content you need to have, because it might be eye-opening that what you think may not be exactly what your partners need. So, once you collect what those deliverables are, that's when you then insert that into your NXI process as your channel. And, ultimately, if you can build a go-no-go when you're ready to launch something that the channel has a voice to say we're not ready, we need this, this and this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I constantly come back with this story, but I think it's so sort of relevant to our listeners. The more I speak to really senior channel executives right, global channel chiefs and CROs, I'm amazed by how much time they spend on the road garnering partner feedback, like it's crazy. I spoke to Rob Ray, who is one of the executive leadership team at PAX 8. I think he said he'd sat down personally with 3,000 MSPs in three years and it's yeah, but for the exact reason like you need this go no-go moment. If you don't have that constant feedback, that's where you make huge mistakes. Because we love the channel huge scale. We're not the most agile bunch, right, it's really hard to turn the oil tanker around and so, if you don't have that feedback moment, you're going to start pushing something that ultimately is going to blow up and then that makes, you know, a huge mess everywhere for everyone involved.
Speaker 1:I agree. It's the voice of the channel. You got to get it 100%.
Speaker 2:Well, we also like getting the voice of the channel on this podcast. Jennifer, we always like to ask our current guest who they think we should have on next. Who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:I think Teresa Karagol, who is the CEO and founder of Achieve Unite. It's a partner performance consulting organization and I found so much value in what they bring to the table and talk about building trust with their partners and the AI aspect that they're starting to initiate. I've been working with them a lot and I've just find so much value in what they bring to the table and I think she would offer a lot of insights to your community here.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Well, we're very excited to have her on, Jennifer. Thank you so much for sharing your experience.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, appreciate it.