Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Norman Guadagno - Why CMOs Must Champion Partner Marketing
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Norman Guadagno, former CMO of Mimecast and marketing leader with deep experience in B2B tech, cybersecurity, and partner-led growth. Norman shares why marketing teams continue to prioritize direct sales over channel partners and what needs to change.
🎯 Key insights from this episode:
- Why partner-first sales with direct-first marketing creates misalignment
- The three critical steps CMOs must take to fix partner marketing
- Why channel leaders should rethink their relationship with marketing
- The true role of marketing in generating partner-sourced pipeline
- How leading brands successfully integrate channel marketing into their GTM strategy
If you want practical advice on building a marketing strategy that truly supports partners, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss!
Connect with Norman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/normanguadagno/
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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 Channext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, norman. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Great Alex, so nice to be here with you. Thank you for having me on, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm really excited to get into this one because I think we're going to really discuss maybe the philosophical nature of how channels work and everything in between. It got very sort of almost mystical when we did our preparation call, so maybe, for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are and where you've been, who I am and what I am the mystical, philosophical marketer.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that title Very catchy. So I most recently just at the end of last year I left my role as chief marketing officer for Mimecast, a global cybersecurity company. Currently, I'm out working as a fractional marketing executive for a couple of companies. I'm out working as a fractional marketing executive for a couple of companies while I figure out my next decision in life. I guess that's the philosophical part. Prior to that, I've spent quite a bit of time in B2B tech. I was the founding CMO of the MarTech company Acoustic. I spent four plus years at Carbonite before it was ultimately acquired by OpenText. I've worked at quite a number of channel-driven, partner-driven businesses. I've also worked on the agency side, so I've helped advise companies on their go-to-market strategy and how they work. Earlier in my career I worked at Microsoft, spent a lot of time as part of Microsoft in the marketing organization, but also working with Microsoft's global channels. And you know, I think we're going to have a great conversation because it's not just philosophical, I think it'll be practical as well.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, maybe to dive into some of that practicality, my personal theory around how channels work is channels are built to do two main functions First off, enabling partners in how they service their customers, and that second function how do we actually generate demand? Marketing plays a critical role in, certainly, how you generate demand, but also, potentially, how you enable partners to service their customers. How do you see marketing fitting into those two pillars?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that that's a great way to look at it, right?
Speaker 1:So marketing has to think about its role in the business first and foremost. And marketing's role in the business and I'm super simple on this is ultimately to generate revenue, and oftentimes marketers think that it means generating revenue direct, and I think that the first thing we have to think about is we have to open up the aperture as wide as possible and say marketing job is to generate revenue, whether that come direct, whether that come through a partner, whether that come through a customer referral, whatever that may be, that's marketing's role. That's marketing's role, and marketing should start with the premise that we're going to create content, differentiation, motivation for everyone who can help the business generate revenue. And if we do that, we then see to the second, really, of your points there. The channel and our channel partners are the biggest amplification device we have for generating revenue, and all too often you see inside businesses this tension between direct and channel, and I feel that that's a tension that is detrimental ultimately to the business, that it exists within 100%.
Speaker 2:I think we were sort of giggling in our preparation call that I will speak to you know lots of global channel chiefs and they'll tell me hey, we have a partner first strategy and that's everything from sales to enablement and awesome. And then I'll speak about marketing and that is a direct first strategy, for some reason, which that sort of misalignment causes friction, causes tension, causes all sorts of maybe inefficiencies, maybe a two-part question why do you think this misalignment happens and how can we be doing it better?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So why does a misalignment happen? It's actually a really complex question when you think about it. Marketing has always been an organization that's built and usually incentivized by direct activity. That's just sort of built into the structure. And oftentimes marketing becomes so fixated on the pipeline that it generates or the number of leads it creates, and it doesn't start from the premise of marketing should be incentivized to drive revenue for the company, wherever it may be coming from, and marketers are deeply trained and schooled in. Direct marketing is the path to glory, for better or worse, and the reality is that direct marketing is important. I don't want to denigrate or dismiss the importance of doing direct it's critical but marketing for some reason has become hyperfixated on that.
Speaker 1:And how often have marketers seen, or even prepared, a deck? Here's our marketing strategy for Q2 or fiscal 26. And then you go through 117 pages and then there's one page and then here's the partner piece. That just doesn't make sense and it feels like and I want to be thoughtful about this because it's a challenge we've all faced, right, alex? If you just step back for a moment and you ask yourself I have I'll make a number I have 50 salespeople. I want to make sure they can tell the story. I have a customer database of 50,000 names. I want to make sure that I get out to them. I have a potential market of another 300,000 potential in my ICP and somehow you forget that that partner over there, which is probably three times your size or bigger, probably has all 300,000 of those ICP in their database. Why am I not figuring out how to embrace and extend?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've got a pet theory and you've sat on the other side of the aisle so you can maybe qualify. If it's true, I think one of the really simple answers is it's really bloody hard to do. Channeling is complicated, and so it's why I see so many organizations go direct first, which I sort of actually don't think is necessarily a bad strategy. You get loads of great feedback and data from customers if you go direct. The problem is, there comes a tipping point where you need to then either hire 10 000 sales reps and no one's going to give you the budget to do that so then you go okay, we need to build a channel. So we're going to build a channel.
Speaker 2:But because it's there is a hard cap to hiring, it becomes prohibitive to hire more sales people. But marketing maybe because they have that volume mindset, because they can put their images and messaging in front of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of end users they think, well, we'll just do it the same way, because that's the way we've always done it and we've got the direct data, et cetera, et cetera. But if the left hand and the right hand don't coordinate properly, we are just, you know, at first principles we're never hitting the level of effectiveness that I think we could hit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you're right when you say it is hard. It is really difficult to do some of these things. I recall back years ago I wanted to set up a program where we could allow our channel partners to have customized search advertisements for particular geo markets or other segments they were going after. On paper it should have worked. In talking with Google at the time, it should have worked. In practice it was just an insurmountable complex thing. This was a number of years ago.
Speaker 1:The tools get better, the platforms get better, but I think it's so easy for me to jump online and actually literally be able to launch a campaign direct today, like that, to launch a campaign in conjunction with or through someone else. It does take more work and sometimes that work is prohibitive, particularly within the context of budgets. And then you have well, is it my budget? Is it your budget? It's a complexity and it really causes me to step back and ask myself should marketing organizations rethink how and who is in charge of thinking about this from a different model than we have in place today?
Speaker 2:So we have just expounded on hey, partner-first sales, but not partner-first marketing doesn't seem to gel properly and I'm sure there are quite a few CMOs listening who've gone. I just read 120 page slide deck and you're right, there was only one partner first slide on it. Hang on, this is broken. We should change this. If you were speaking to them directly, directly, what are the first three things that they should do tomorrow to fix that one slide of 120?
Speaker 1:yeah, sure, and and to be fair, I want to be clear there are also organizations that get it really right. Right, so there's the other cmo or other marketing leader out there who's like we nailed this and they should be sharing far and wide their best practices, because both sides of this coin exist. But for that marketer who's looking at that deck and like wait, this is missing. There's a few things, three as you asked for, and we should think about that. So, first off, it does start at the top. If you're not speaking, as a marketing leader, about partners, about inclusiveness in the channel, then your team is not, or maybe it's a lone voice in the wilderness in your team that's doing it. So it has to start at the top. Talk about direct and partner. I'm going to talk about sales and the channel. I'm going to talk about all of this from the top down. That's thing one, and I think that's just a mindset change.
Speaker 1:Thing two is you have to make sure that your partner marketing organization, however it's defined in the context of your organization, has a seat at the table that is equal to your demand gen or revenue marketing organization, equal to your brands and comms organization.
Speaker 1:If you don't have them have a seat at the table and they're denigrated to maybe being pushed under portfolio or product marketing or somewhere else, then they're never going to be able to bring their material to the table. At the same time, planning campaigns means you plan campaigns for all audiences, not just for one audience. So that's thing two. And then thing three is you have to work with your peers internally, because that slide deck is not only a function of marketing, it's a function of the interactions between marketing and revenue, between marketing and finance, between marketing and operations. Teams Get all of the alignment internally. So everybody realizes that, wait, we've all been sort of pushing the partner thing to the back pages of the deck versus incorporating it into the entire flow of the deck. That, I think, are three things that everybody could do right away.
Speaker 2:So I have an intrinsic reason why I think people who are CMOs or sort of VPs in marketing should be more prescriptive in terms of how they build a partner first strategy. Another small pet theory of mine is that channel leaders are sales leaders, because, I don't know, that's how it's always been, but it sort of depends on how your segmentation works. I can very much understand, if you're a enterprise product, that your channel leader should be a sales leader because that's a sales first motion as you head down market. Smb is not a sales led motion, it is a marketing led motion. The example I always give I've bought basically every Apple product under the sun. I've never spoken to an Apple sales rep. That's because they are a marketing first organization, because they're a consumer organization primarily. The same is true for every B2B brand that focuses on SMB. Talk to me about how you conceptualize where senior marketing people's role is within that organization, depending on how those segments change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum because you're right, particularly as you move down market, but even true in mid-market and up, customers want to self-serve. Customers want to be able to have their journey, do their knowledge, discovery, trial a product where appropriate and be able to just download it and run with it, and they don't get involved in sales. The fact that the organizations that are trying to push salespeople on customers versus customers are like, hey, I don't want this, I just want to do it. I just went through this myself, actually as an example here, because I think it's a good one of purchasing some B2B software, b2 small business, as I wanted to set up some back-end accounting for the business I'm running myself right now and I could do it all self-serve. I did my own discovery self-serve and then, after I'd already given them my credit card, I got an email saying, hey, can we help you with some additional things. That's when it came in. So that connection comes in after the fact.
Speaker 1:Now, when you think about this in the context of organizations, how do you plan those journeys and how do you plan your marketing organizations such that they know when not just to hand off potentially to sales, but to also bring in a partner, particularly if it's an implementation partner or a delivery partner, right, and sometimes you just want to be able to purchase through a partner.
Speaker 1:So marketers have to actually do something that marketers don't do often enough, and I want to emphasize this Understand what happens after the initial marketing touch, understand the full flow of what happens and then work backwards from oh wait, two steps down the line a potential partner is going to look to them to be able to do fulfillment. How do we make sure we bring that experience and the knowledge of that into what we're doing in the earlier parts of the campaign, the earlier parts of the web experience, whatever it may be, to the earlier parts of the web experience, whatever it may be, such that we pay it off beautifully down the line? How many times have you seen partner finders on websites, which just becomes a? Here's a list of 12 partners which you're like okay, I knew who those 12 were, because there's only 12 that serve this business. Like what can you do? That's actually more helpful to me. That ending means you have to do marketing and sales have to have strong one-on-one relationships with all of their key partners.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the other piece as well that I think is so interesting. When you sort of consider that different segmentation is the velocity of the business right, and when we talk about SMB or even consumer, right, the velocity is extremely high. And so the function of marketing, or the prioritization of marketing, changes in that higher velocity model because more of the responsibility is driven towards marketing, because they have to carry on more in that sales cycle. If it's education and nurture, before they even speak to us, right, it's very brand stuff. Or it's aftercare, because it's hey, you should drive feature adoption which improves our NRR, marketing can take a greater and greater responsibility.
Speaker 2:And something and I've sat in those meetings it's something I don't see enough because we're too busy talking about. Here's our partner acquisition program and here's how our cams are going to do this spiff. And I'm like this isn't solving the one problem that I see in channels time and time again we don't have enough pipeline. It's the number one constraint on. Every partner globally says't have enough pipeline. It's the number one constraint on. Every partner globally says I want more pipeline. Give me leads is the number one request, and every brand says no, go away, build your own leads. And yet we sort of all have that conversation as sales leaders and yet no one thinks we should get marketing involved to work out how we can, you know, help generate leads or coordinate generating leads together. How do you think, again, if you're advising that CMO, how would you encourage that CMO to bring a plan to a CRO or to a channel chief to say, hey, we should be having a more important seat at the table or there should be more of us at the table?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's a complex question because when you think about so many B2B CMOs today, they're under tremendous pressure, typically from their boss and the board, to deliver, to deliver more direct leads, more direct pipeline. Their paycheck probably depends on it, their job, frankly, probably depends on it and it's fair. They have to be able to do that part of their job.
Speaker 1:The challenge, and maybe even the chasm that we have to cross here, is that, and maybe even the chasm that we have to cross here, is that oftentimes boards, ceos, even CROs, don't think of marketing generating pipeline as tightly connected to marketing generating pipeline for direct and for channel. They think of it as marketing generating pipeline for direct, and so I think there's actually a board level perspective that has to change and that the discussion has to be broader. Right that it's not seen as oh, sales will take care of the channel, marketing's going to take care of direct. In fact, the revenue has to come through that integrated go-to-market organization, and I think marketing leaders have to be aggressive in inserting themselves appropriately into the discussions. If you're a CMO, as a CMO role, make sure that you're having the right discussions that show how you impact all of the revenue that comes into the business and how the value of handing off leads to partners versus going and hiring more BDRs or SDRs or AEs is critical 100%.
Speaker 2:I think if we can sort of encapsulate that entire argument is partner source. Pipeline is a marketing metric, not a program metric, and so the CMOs that run towards that problem and understand that that is the most valuable problem not as a CMO but as a channel organization that you can solve, for you can triple the amount of direct leads and hand them down to CDW and SHI and all those great partners. I'm sure they'll be very grateful for them. Or you can work on how do you build pipeline with partners at scale, which, ironically, is a marketing approach, about marketing. If you can do that effectively, you will have partners who are more engaged to deliver more deals and who grow more effectively, and that is how you get a CRO and a CMO to really sort of walk in lockstep.
Speaker 1:I think so, and I think also one thing to double click on there is every partner is different, right? As you know, we talk about CDW, shi, like we throw these names out as if they're just interchangeable. They're not. They each have their own approach to their market. They each have the way in which they operate and it's important that you, as a vendor, marketing and sales, understand the nuances and the differentiation between them and therefore are able to build the right programs jointly to help them be successful. In marketing, you often see this sort of dismissive tone. I think that sometimes can happen inside vendors Like well, you know, they can just replace us with another vendor. Like what are we going to get from this engagement? And you want to turn that around into they could replace us with another vendor. How are we going to make sure that doesn't happen? How are we going to build the unique value relationship that we want to have here?
Speaker 2:yeah, and and to me and I think this is where we can sort of finish, unless you unless you wildly disagree with the next statement, but I don't think you will it comes down to the three p's, but I think we get them in the wrong order, which is people talk about product, which is very interchangeable, but what's not interchangeable is program and personnel, which is how well is your program set up to make that partner successful and how good are the people that interact with the partner, whether they be sales reps, marketing reps or whoever?
Speaker 2:If your program really brings value, they make a lot of money and they get a lot of leads because they've built them or you've given them. But there is some level of value coordination there and the people who are running that program into them are a joy to work with. That beats product every single day of the week. And yet I hear so many brands talk about hey, here's why our product is truly unique. And the honest answer is I don't care how good your product is, it's not as unique as you think it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this, this agree completely. This is the product delusion that we've all fallen victim to In the technology world. The reality is that there's a belief and there has to be a certain level of belief. My product is the best, my product is unique, and that's a good belief to have. However, we shouldn't allow it to get in the way of. I have to have the right programs, because the best product without the best programs, without the best price, without the best placement, without, without all those other things, just won't ultimately succeed.
Speaker 1:And and this has proven itself time and time again both the the belief in our own products we have to have it but understanding that that other magical partners like products are partners. Your customers like okay, but if your product is not accessible to me when I need it, I like we're going to move over to the next one. And that's just the harsh reality. And people think, oh, it's so special in technology. It is and it isn't like I'm I I see you drinking a fanta there like was that because it was easily within reach in the refrigerator or because you made the point of stocking up on it? That's just it. Sometimes it's just what's easily within reach, and that's as true for $50,000, $100,000 products as it is for $2 cans of pop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree. What's not interchangeable, Norman, although we do try, is our guests. So we always ask our current guests to recommend our next guest. Norman, who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:And I called out a name and he's going to say oh, I'm so glad, but I really want you to get a chance to talk to Dave Matthew at StaffBase a great company, brilliant channel marketing company leader, who has some real insights in how to go to market and do business.
Speaker 2:Awesome, dave, we're coming from you. Norman, thank you so much for sharing your mystical and mythical insights today. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1:It was as mystical and mythical as I could make it, but it was also super pragmatic and really appreciated the time. Alex, thank you, awesome Thanks, norman.