Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Addie Finch - How To Build Messaging That Moves Partners
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Addie Finch, VP of Channels, Americas at Cato Networks, whose journey from TV news anchor to channel leader offers a masterclass in the power of messaging and relationship-driven strategy.
Addie shares how her background in broadcast journalism gave her an edge in distilling complex solutions into clear, compelling narratives, a skill that’s now central to how Cato communicates its unique position in the SASE market. We explore the importance of short-form messaging, persona-based enablement, and the critical difference between partner satisfaction and partner success.
She also opens up about architecting a broad channel strategy that spans MSPs, VARs, GSIs, sub-agents, and more, as well as how Cato tailors its support to each route to market. From walking away from deals to protect partner trust, to redefining what “agility” means in a high-scale channel, this episode is packed with insights on leading with integrity, clarity, and speed.
If you’re designing channel strategies for scale or wrestling with how to earn and keep partner trust, this one is not to be missed
Connect with Addie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/addiebfinch/
_________________________
Learn more about Channext 👇
https://channext.com/
Watch on YouTube ►
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#channelmarketing #channelpartners
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, Addy. How are you doing? Hey, I'm great Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on Feeling slightly nervous because you have an interesting background that predates your channel career, which is you quite literally used to present the news. So I'm getting terrified in terms of my presenting capability. So be gentle with me.
Speaker 1:Promise to do that, yes.
Speaker 2:So, like I said, your career path has come from TV anchor to leading channel organizations. Now you mentioned to me that there were, weirdly, some transferable skills that have given you a competitive edge. Talk me through those.
Speaker 1:It's an odd number of transferable skills. I joke that I've gone from the TV channels to the technology channel and many skills transfer. I think the biggest skill I've taken from my TV news background is this passion and maybe even expertise around core messaging and delivering a core message. If you think about the news, I would go into a newsroom every morning and be handed an assignment, and it could be a new tax code one day, it could be a new law going through the statehouse the next day, but you basically had eight hours to get up to speed really, really quickly on that topic and then find a way to generate it out to the public in 60 seconds or less in a way that was really easy to consume and easy to understand. And I think when you take that into the technology world and there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of complexities, but if you can net out a message and take that to partners, I think you rise above the fray a bit, or at least a bit faster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was actually running a training session internally with my team earlier this week around the complexity of short messaging, right. Really, I think people misunderstand what writing, and copywriting in particular, is, where they think it's about length, and really it's about how do we build the most compelling, most accurate messaging into the fewest words possible, and I imagine, whether that is presenting in front of large groups or presenting in front of the TV, that is quite literally the same sort of concept, right?
Speaker 1:It absolutely is, and it's also all about understanding your audience right. So are you speaking to the masses? Are you speaking to maybe a more niche audience? Personas absolutely apply in the partnership world, just as they do selling to end users. But I think being able to take kind of a core foundational message and then understand the nuances of how to tweak it whether you're speaking to a partner you know, security or network practice leader, a partner CEO, a partner VP of sales or the partner sales rep out on the streets that's something I'm really passionate about and work a lot with our teams about to make sure we're delivering a really tight, crisp message and one that resonates with the audience they're speaking to.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I'm about to give a completely made up statistic, which is that 60% of great channel leaders are born in distribution. That's basically just based off about 60% of the people leaders are born in distribution. That's basically just based off. About 60% of the people I interview on this podcast seem to come from distribution, and we typically interview leaders. You spent, I think, more than six years at TD. What are some of the key takeaways that you learned from distribution that now influence your approach today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I spent six years at Cinex back then, now TD Cinex. But gosh, I think if every person could start their career in distribution it just accelerates the possibilities of success. I mean, if you think about it, you go in and you instantly get this really wide lens view of technology and the channel. So when I first started out I was touching wireless and security lines so I learned kind of the top five players at the time in those spaces. I then added UCC collaboration solutions to kind of my portfolio. I also learned not just the technologies and the markets that they were playing in, but I learned the breadth of partners that are out there right. And so you just, instead of maybe I think about a person starting their career in the channel, maybe they start out as a channel account manager for one vendor, they're only seeing the world through that vendor's lens and they're only learning the partners right in their own backyard, whereas I had this kind of 360 view of technology, the market and the players that were driving the sales of that technology.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing as well from a distribution perspective is you are threading sort of channel sales, channel marketing, messaging, all of it, and so there are actually multiple routes to success and seniority through distribution. We get lots of channel sales leaders, program leaders, marketing leaders, but they seem to all nestled in having that 360 view and how that sort of influences your growth through the market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean that's exactly how I ended up in the technology channel. Cinex at the time was looking at maybe five or so product lines that they felt like had a high propensity to grow. Yet they wanted to make sure their sales reps, who are selling hundreds if not thousands of solutions, could really quickly net out an elevator pitch, a message around those five top growth possibilities. And so I knew someone who knew someone who knew my skill set was messaging. And they said, hey, we know you don't know technology but you know messaging really well.
Speaker 1:And so I went over there kind of taking that messaging background into that world, and then my career just kind of evolved from then. From there it turned into hey, you can help sell new vendors that we're recruiting into our line card because they can see how you can quickly get their message out to market. And then it turned into hey, you've signed some interesting vendors, Maybe you should just keep running with them and managing those vendors on our line card. And then at that point I thought, hey, one thing I haven't done is I haven't actually sat in the vendor world, and so then that that pivoted me out into channels on the vendor side. But I think all in all, like everything, draws back to the start I got in distribution and the learnings I had in those first few years.
Speaker 2:An old mentor of me described building your career like making a stew Everyone's stew slightly different, made of different ingredients, but you can really understand from a distribution perspective because you have all of that different understanding. As you elevate your career into a sort of more architectural position where you are then able to utilize that different information, it can really power your career forward, which I think brings you sort of to where you are today. I think one of the things that's really hard for channel executives and it's a real skill set is to be able to articulate very clearly your message, because that message has to be understood by partners. It then has to be used by partners into end users, and so the ability to use clarity and messaging. How do you ensure that your SASE messaging at Cato really stands out and drives that engagement within your partner ecosystem?
Speaker 1:Thankfully, the product teams and R&D have made it really easy for me, because I do truly believe I'm not just saying this. The product is just insane, and so when you can get partners to get their hands on it, the engineers start to dig into it. It helps sell itself right. But you have to have a message that gets you in the door, and for us I'm really trying to net out hey, there's a lot of players in the market calling themselves SASE, but maybe they are a portfolio of stitched together acquisitions. That's not Cato.
Speaker 1:From day one, we built our platform from the ground up to be a true single network and security plane and a true single platform. And so when you can literally take that message right there to market, there are very few others who can actually say that. And so that sentence right there to market, there are very few others who can actually say that. And so that sentence right there helps start to cut through the mud, and then you can start to add some of the more nuanced elements of our platform and further help set us apart from the competition.
Speaker 2:And so from ground up products we get to ground up channel. I think one of the things that I'm always fascinated by I mean, I quite literally have a channel podcast is how do you build a multi-route channel right, whether that's through MSPs, vars, tsds, sub-agents, those are different routes to market that end users want to procure through. But it also means that you have to sort of architect your channel in a way that you have those multiple routes to market. How do you structure your team and resources to drive that success across a broad channel?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, if you look at Cato's partner ecosystem, our goal is to meet partners where they are and give them the option and the route to market that they prefer. So that may look like a GSI, a reseller, an integrator, an MSP, an MSSP, a service provider, and a trusted advisor or a subagent working through through TSDs. We have many options To your point. How do you serve them all? And I think it comes back to building a great bench of talent who understands that particular partner motion. So if you look at how Cato first went to market with its channel, first went to market with its channel, we had an amazing relationship with TSDs and trusted advisors and hired a team that came from that background and was really really adept at understanding that motion so that they could support those partner types in the best way Along the way.
Speaker 1:We've also begun to layer in, as I mentioned, resale integration partners, msps, and I think we now have that team and that skill set that again understands that motion, understands what makes that partner type tick. That's going to be all about services and the value wrappers that they can add to distinguish themselves in the market. The value wrappers that they can add to distinguish themselves in the market, and I think we've just got two incredible organizations within my one channel team that are just super skilled at really understanding the partner's businesses, and I think that's what's so key. If we don't understand what's important to the partner, we can't take that message that we talked about and attach it in a super relevant way. So, first and foremost, it's understanding what motivates the partner. We can't take that message that we talked about and attach it in a super relevant way. So, first and foremost, it's understanding what motivates the partner, understanding what their goals are, what makes them tick, and then we'll help them understand how our platform and how our go-to-market strategy can augment that.
Speaker 2:Let's dive into one of those routes to market in slightly more detail. So you touch on Cato and sort of MSP strategy and I know during our prep call you sort of said we need to walk before we can run and you're still in that walk phase when it comes to MSP, Talk me through what your vision is for this motion as it matures.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's maybe first kind of ground the conversation on what we did for MSPs, if that's okay. So if you think about our cloud native SASE platform, it is pulling together network and security services on one single platform for our end customers. That removes a lot of operational burden and overhead and improves efficiencies for the customer, drives greater visibility, drives greater clarity, reduces risk, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you think about an MSP, they have historically struggled with the exact same thing end customers have Data is siloed, they're having to manage many disparate point solutions, they're having to keep a bench of experts that know those different product lines and different point solutions. So what Cato did is we wanted to bring our SASE platform to market to MSPs and we wanted them to be able to take it to market in a really clean and efficient way, and so we built this multi-tenanted platform that helps them drive greater operational efficiencies, helps them have to only train and certify on one solution to deliver a number of network and security services.
Speaker 1:But when you talk about kind of that crawl, walk, run phase, I do agree we're in the walk phase and the reason for that is I would never say we're running until we've kind of sourced market feedback on what we put out Right. So if you think about the fact that last summer we took our managed SASE platform and offered it to MSPs, we've really spent kind of the past six to nine months listening to how is it working for them Not just the product they love the product but how are the commercials working for them, how's the transaction model working for them, how's the data we're providing them on the back end about their customers working for them? And so we're always kind of tweaking and turning knobs and pulling different levers to just continue to make this the best managed sassy offering in the market. And you know I'll call it running when all those bells and whistles are put on. It's a great solution today, but we are just always focused on how do we listen to the partner and make it even better to meet their needs.
Speaker 2:You're placing an enormous amount of trust in your MSPs. Their feedback is dictating your strategy. The trust is a two-way street and I know you made a statement that I mean it's one of the best statements I've heard a channel leader make which is we'll walk away from a deal before we hose a partner. It's easy to say, tough to enact. What does that philosophy look like in action?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's a lot of conversation and a lot of dialogue, and what I mean by that is the partners have a role in this. The partners have to sell their value to the customer too. Right, we will back them and support them and be alongside them all the way, but at the end of the day, partners also have to sell their value to the end customer. When I refer to we'll walk away from a deal before we'll hose a partner, I see a lot of our competitors who get down to a situation where margin is very squeezed and there's not enough dollars left on the table to fit in maybe a distribution partner and a resale partner, for instance, and they're sitting there forcing one or both out and just choosing to take a deal direct. That's what I mean by saying we will never hose a partner in that way. No one deal is worth taking that deal direct and risking the multitude of deals that that one partner can drive.
Speaker 1:Now what I will say is I think conversation and openness and transparency is so key to partnerships, and I actually enjoy a little channel conflict because I think that's where you see what the two sides are made of and how you're going to kind of stick to each other. So a lot of times we're able to find unique solutions right. I've been in situations where not just at Cato Networks but in the past maybe the partner couldn't get their paper in place in time and they actually preferred that we contract directly with the customer. That way when the renewal came up they could fit themselves in at that time, versus the alternative was we pass it to another partner and now they're probably locked out for good. But you can't come to those resolutions if you can't have an open, honest, transparent conversation with your partners, and I think that's really core to what I believe makes a good partnership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, message to our audience, a lot of which maybe some of the next generation, I think are channel leaders. I've always thought that your reputation is built in bad times, not good, especially in the channel. Your ability to sort of mediate and drive resolution through conflict, because it doesn't matter how well designed your program is, conflict's guaranteed right, right, like a distribution. Uh, or when I was at zoom, I think, three, four times a day when you're running an amir channel, you start to see okay, we've got to deal with this, we've got to deal with this, and we've got to deal with this.
Speaker 1:And I think you being able to have transparency through there, at least then you can treat that conflict with honesty yeah, yeah, I mean I always say, you know, in this day and age, like my, it's not my door, but my cell phone is always open, and so I'd so much rather someone pick up the phone when they are, you know, questioning how we're handling something, or maybe they're getting a different answer from the sales side than then and they want the channel leaders perspective, like I want to have those conversations. They're so important and you know, it's how collaboration is built and resentment or or a bad taste in a partner's mouth is avoided.
Speaker 2:And maybe double clicking on that, because I think there's one thing which is, hey, your phone is open, someone calls you and you sort of give your view, but what part of being a leader is being able to disseminate that trust into your own organization that they can handle those conflicts? When you're thinking in that mode, how does that affect your hiring practices? Your culture, your processes, to ensure that the people within your organization, within your team, are able to make an Addy-like decision, an Addy-like discussion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it is. You know, interviewing is has always been an interesting game for me, especially in the sales world. People are good at selling and having to cut through the noise and really get down to the authentic people, the people who are not just selling you, what you want to hear, is always a challenge. I'm always questioning. You know, are there different ways I want to approach these interviews? Are there new questions I want to ask? But I think the beauty of it is in the channel. It is a very close knit, closely integrated world and you are probably always one or two people away from being able to back channel and understand. Is this person credible, are they trustworthy, are they transparent, are they honest? You know we'll work in the interview process to understand are they the right fit for a Cato channel role? And then I'll work in the back channel to understand are they just a good human? Because partner people have to be good humans first and foremost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're in the longevity game, right, and I think it's not about winning today. It's about winning over a 10, 15, 20 year period, and if you're going to burn a bridge on day 30, that's going to come back around right. So I think your reputation is your strongest asset, especially in our market. Maybe, pivoting slightly into some more channel strategy stuff, one of the things that you called out is speed is a competitive advantage, especially in as competitive a market as SASE is, I think, the irony around when we talk about speed or agility, the channel isn't necessarily the most agile market. I think agility and hyperscale are almost complete opposites. So how do you maintain agility while trying to scale a broad channel?
Speaker 1:Yeah, fortunately, cato gave us a really great head start in this market. You know, if you look back to when Cato was founded in 2015, they invented the first SASE cloud native platform. The platform was in place before Gartner even coined the term SASE four years later, right, so we were so ahead of the market with the product and the solution we were bringing to bear almost ahead of our time, so to speak that we have such a leg up on the competition in terms of the product readiness and the product maturity. Now, where we have to always focus on acceleration is just the name game. Right, there are larger brands out there that we compete against very well, by the way, day in and day out, but we always have to be a scrappy group. Right, we have to fight to get that mindshare, to get that awareness.
Speaker 1:You have partners who have built their businesses on the backs of some brands for the past 10, 15 years, and accelerating is not just how quickly can we get that message to market, but it's how quickly can you convince a partner that they have got to start thinking about future-proofing their business. What I mean by that is partners that are kind of hooked on the drug of selling legacy on-prem, rigid, unflexible appliances. It is a shift for them, right? They've invested a lot of resources, a lot of engineering talent, a lot of certification time into those brands, but those who don't accelerate that pivot are going to find themselves left out in the cold right. And so it's not only about how quickly can our teams get the message out to market, but how quickly can those partners embrace a major transformation in their business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's always the piece that fascinates me about channel, which is it's one thing to talk about driving agility into your own company, which is a problem that basically every business in the world suffers with, but then you've got to drive agility into someone else's company. Who's got to drive agility and urgency into an end customer, which I think, if someone has the perfect answer, they're going to be doing extremely well. But it's awesome to hear how you're imparting that One thing that we're focused on. Oh sorry, go on Adi.
Speaker 1:Well, I was going to give you an analogy that I talked about at a channel partners conference and MSP summit last week. I'm standing in front of 500-ish people. It was the I think, 26th, 29th edition of channel Partners. So I was talking to the partners about. Think about the major inflection points you've seen in your career while sitting at this conference.
Speaker 1:Each year We've seen this audience have to shift, for instance, from PBX-based phone to VoIP phone systems. We have seen partners have to go from selling on-prem servers and filling racks and racks and data centers to selling cloud compute and, just most recently, post-covid. We've seen partners have to go from selling a bunch of phone systems and us all talking on the phone all day to selling Zoom and other platforms that enable video-based business calls day in and day out. And my challenge to the audience was were you ahead of your time or behind your time in those market inflection points? Because we are about to hit the next greatest transformation, this time in IT security, and I want people to be ahead of the curve. I want them to be ready for that. Not thinking man, I just missed it by a year or two.
Speaker 2:Well, we're always looking to be ahead of the curve as well, which means we like to box really smart and ask our current guest to recommend our next guest. Addy, who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:Okay, I thought a lot about this. I would recommend Bryce Groh, who's running channels over at SentinelOne. I think she's super, super intelligent, charismatic, passionate about the channel, and she's doing a lot of unique and interesting things to kind of build the channel of the future for SentinelOne, rewarding partners for value, not just the transaction, and so I think she'd be a really compelling interview.
Speaker 2:Awesome, bryce, we're coming for you. Addy, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thanks for having me.