Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Mark Conley - The Leadership Formula for Channel Excellence
This week on Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Mark Conley, North America Channel Chief at Cohesity, for a masterclass in navigating complexity, leading with clarity, and scaling through channel commitment. With decades of experience across industry giants like NetApp, Capgemini, and now Cohesity, Mark shares the foundational “Four Truths” that shape enduring partner relationships, spoiler alert: it starts with a smoking-hot solution but ends with trust.
From orchestrating the Veritas-Cohesity merger to upholding a truly 100% channel model, Mark offers practical wisdom for anyone building a modern channel strategy. Learn how to amplify what works, filter what doesn’t, and lead both internal teams and partner ecosystems with purpose. Plus, hear why blocking your calendar for “channel evangelism” might be the highest-leverage leadership habit you haven’t tried yet.
Whether you're a channel chief, partner leader, or aspiring channel strategist, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.
Connect with Mark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/channeljoe/
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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 at Channext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, mark. How are you doing? Oh, wonderful. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Alex, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm excited to this one. You're actually just giving me some words of wisdom, one to one, in terms of how to handle some complexities in my organization, so excited for you to be able to share the wisdom to a much wider audience. Maybe for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an introduction who you are and what you do.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, I've been in the industry the high technology industry my whole career. I started when PCs were still kind of new and they just fascinated me and I wanted to get into it and I tried a couple different times. The first time was unsuccessful, the second time worked and since that time I've really never looked back. I've been with data storage companies primarily. I've been with Sun Microsystems. I've been with NetApp. I've been with SolidFire that we sold to NetApp. I'm now with Cohesion. I'll come back to that in a second.
Speaker 1:The only departure from that storage-focused career path was I spent about a decade with Capgemini as the vice president for a business unit running their automotive practice. I lived in Detroit for many years. Today I run channels for Cohesity for North America. I've got responsibility for about 35 individuals that are focused on the largest channel partners. We have about a billion and a half in revenue that we're responsible for as a company In North America. It's on the trajectory of about a half billion to 600 million dollars. So at any rate, long story short is that we're working with the largest partners. We're working with WWT and CDW and SHI and Insight and folks like that and we're trying to develop some high trajectory growth partners. There's a lot of consolidation in the industry, as you probably know, and so we're keeping our eyes on that and making sure that we understand what our position is with these consolidating partners and how we can take advantage of that.
Speaker 2:Awesome. There's a few big names in there and there's some big numbers too. So I'm sure there's a lot that our audience can learn from you today, and you spoke to me in our preparation call about the four truths in partnerships. That's really helped sort of frame your philosophy and your career.
Speaker 1:Talk me through those truths and how people can apply it. Sure, I think of a channel partnership or maybe any partnership, as a pretty simple machine. It doesn't take a lot of variables to make it run correctly. And I've narrowed it down to four different factors that determine the value and the trajectory to use that same word again the trajectory of the relationship. Those four things are you've got to have a great solution. Number one you've got to have something that people want. You've got to have something that is competitive, that's not stale, that's something that people can, something that can be sold. Basically. So a good smoking hot solution is number one.
Speaker 1:Number two is, because we've got a partnership here, I've got to make sure that your profit opportunity is strong, not only the gross profit opportunity that motivates the seller on the front end, but also an organizational profit opportunity, or on the front end, but also an organizational profit opportunity. And so, as an example, in some of those kind of situations you've got rebates going back to the partner. You've got incentives organizationally, but you've also got incentives individually. So it's got to be a balanced approach. You can't have too much on the front end side of things, because then the company doesn't really benefit as much. You can't have too many things on the back end or else the salespeople don't you as much.
Speaker 1:The third thing that's really important is to simplify the process as much as you can. To simplify the sales process. You know, the quoting has to be simple, the lead generation has to be as simple as possible, the approval processes for registration has to be as simple as possible, and one of the things that's really where the human angle comes into play, because you know, oftentimes the channel managers are responsible for making that process as simple as possible. So those are the first three. The last one, and the most important, is the foundation of trust and integrity. You know, anytime that's strong, that makes the partnership strong. And since you've got those four variables, I wouldn't say they're all equal, but they all have a pretty strong component in the equation, a pretty strong component in the equation.
Speaker 1:And when any one of those is increased in value or decreased in value, it changes the relationship value equation dramatically. And so, as an example, let's say you're a company that experiences a very high turnover in their sales organization in the field. That's going to deteriorate that trust and integrity relationship with the partners. That's going to really hurt things. Let's say that your competitor comes up with a very lucrative incentive plan, or SPF, for salespeople, that's going to devalue your profitability picture for the partner. So those four things are very important to the relationship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely echo that. We talk a lot on this podcast about how you sort of build optimal channel programs and I often talk about the three P's product, program and personnel. Right, product, that's table stakes. It's the most important first and then afterwards it's actually, I think, the least important. There's lots of great companies who make lots of great products and you have to hit a minimum viable threshold to have a seat at the table. But once you have a seat at the table, then program and personnel take over.
Speaker 2:So, program being broadly, how easy is it to sell your products and how much money can we make doing so? Right, and that's everything from. How easy is it to build and quote and what marketing supports are you going to give me all the way through to then the last piece, which is personnel, which is, I have seen and I'm sure you have too, mark you can have a great product, a great program, and it can be horrible to deal with and you aren't able to be successful, and so I do really like your thing around it. I do view it as it's not about they're equally important, but I think there's a timing, there's an order of operations to get right.
Speaker 1:And I think that simplification of the sales process and also the relationship value. You know the channel managers are responsible for a big portion of that. And you know one of my hobbies I have a lot of hobbies, but one of my hobbies is I collect vintage audio file equipment. I listen to records every single day. I've got a system here you can probably see the speakers behind me and long story short is that you know, in old systems you've got an amplifier and then a preamplifier, and the job of the amplifier and the preamplifier are very, very simple. It's to amplify things, right, and that's the amplifier's job. The preamplifier's job is to filter things, make them sound just a little bit better. You tweak those things all the time and I always think of a channel manager's job as that it's to amplify and filter. It's to amplify the good things to the bad things, and sometimes the filtering is, like I said, simplifying a business process process, masking a business process. Sometimes filtering is is filtering, you know, bad behavior or or a bad culture or something like that.
Speaker 2:And so, if I can continue the analogy, your people are your feedback loop, right?
Speaker 2:There we go. That's so, uh, it's so important fundamentally to how you optimize and re-optimize, because any and I'm sure you tweak your audio setup right based on album and genre, because, hey, what sounds good today might not sound quite so good tomorrow. And so then, yeah, having the right, uh feedback loop from your team to drive the information back into central so that we can continue to optimize product and program, that's really what I think makes partnerships long-term successful Good point. Now, partnerships is really, I think, easy when working well, and then every so often the market will chuck a grenade in just to keep everyone really interesting, and sometimes that grenade comes in the form of a huge merger. Veritas and Cohesity joined forces and there was almost a 100% overlap in partners, but very different in programs. Talk to me about how you navigate, what I know can be extremely complicated, because you're bringing two businesses together and two channels together.
Speaker 1:Sure, and since we've just finished a quarter, I've seen the end of a quarter and the differences in the two companies very close up at hand. Let me back up about a year. As a matter of fact, about a year ago we announced the merger, or the intent to merge, the two companies together. It wasn't a complete merger because when we looked at Veritas it's a great company, it's been around for 45 years but they really had two different kinds of products. They had an enterprise class product, netbackup, and they had a more of commercial, mid-market sort of product Backup Exec. The Backup Exec really didn't appeal to us because we wanted to base things on a very broad foundation. We wanted to get access to those workloads that NetBackup had. They have 1,100 connectors to different workloads. It was a really exciting thing. So what we did is we split the company. We split off a backup exec into a separate company that's now called ArcTera and you know that's a separate organization. We completed the merger in December, december 10th of last year.
Speaker 1:In the first quarter of after the completion of the merger, we operated the two companies very independently. You know there was a red side and a green side, we called it and. But yeah, during that time. There's an awful lot of work to figure out, okay, so when we do start integration of the two companies, how do we do it? Where do we do it? Where do we not do it? What are the duplications of personnel and processes and programs, things like that? And the programs? Well, let me talk about two things. Let me talk about the programs and the systems.
Speaker 1:And reporting the programs is a long process and so what we decided to do with the programs integration is to run those separately as well. So if you're a partner and you're selling a Veritas net backup solution, you're going to use the same business processes you've been used to. You're going to get the same program benefits that you've been used to. You're going to have some of the same personnel you've been used to dealing with. So there's no change for most people up until August 1st of this year. That's our planned integration of the programs. And then, like I said, similar to on the Veritas side, if you're a Cohesity partner selling a Cohesity solution, you're going to benefit from the programs there. You're going to work in the same business process as you have then.
Speaker 1:But what we're doing is we're looking at the program evolution in two steps. In February 1st we'll bring the two programs together. We'll take, you know, the best of both programs as much as we possibly can and bring them into one program. So if you know I'm dealing with one of those customers or one of those partners I mentioned before, I'm going to be going to them. I'm going to say, okay, look, you know this program, you know that program. It's going to be a little bit different, more of a merger. You know a combination of the two, and so it's going to look like that.
Speaker 1:Not everybody's going to be happy with that Because I've talked to the partner executives at those customers. I've said you know, what do you like about the Veritas program? What do you like about the Cohesity program? If you had to choose one or the other, which would you choose? And I'm always thinking that they'll choose this one or this one, and they always come back and choose the. So I'm not going to make everybody happy when I do that, but that's going to happen August 1st and then what we're going to do is we're going to completely revamp and start things from a very different set of perspectives and revamp it again in the spring of 2026. And that's still being determined, still being worked out right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just had a couple of the senior team from Cisco on talking about how they're also rebuilding their partner program. They also touched on something that I thought was really interesting in terms of sort of that version one philosophy you do all of this work to build a program knowing that if we've done a great job, we're going to redesign basically half of it again, because again, you need that feedback loop, right, you need the partners to sit in it for a while to go okay, this is what we like, this is what we don't like, because sometimes what happens on the whiteboard or in a Figma doesn't quite translate as we thought, and we get new data and we continue to iterate. Is that something that you are looking at as a wider philosophy, that's something you sort of bake into, or is this purely for the program integration?
Speaker 1:It's really something we look at pretty broadly. I mean, one of the things we've got to take into consideration a good example is that on the Veritas side they had a small but important percentage of the business that was done direct. They had another small but important percentage that was done direct to partners. So in other words, there was no distribution partner involved in things. And so we've got to decide do we continue that model, do we keep that kind of business model or do we change it entirely? And so, as an example, what Cohesity has come out and said is that we're 100% channel model. We are a channel-driven organization. That's why we want to remain that.
Speaker 1:So all those direct business pieces of business, usually with the largest, largest customers, we're going to be migrating those to working with a channel. We've already done quite a few of those in the first quarter of the operation of the merged organizations. So that's something we're going forward with. We're finding that having a lot of different routes to market, having OEMs and having meet-in-the-channel sort of partnerships is important. But it means that you've got to be an expert in lots of different ologies. You've got to be an expert in HPE ology and Cisco ology and Lenovo ology and things like that. So when we're doing a transaction, like we were doing yesterday, where lenovo was involved, we had to understand that, as an example, their po's were going to be cut out of hong kong.
Speaker 2:So when we thought we had enough time to get this deal done, all of a sudden we're we're faced with a 12 hour time time swing um, and you, you just touched on that cohesive 100 channel only and I I love to hear you call out when you say 100%, it really is 100%, because I often hear we're a channel only business. Maybe apart from Nestle, which we have direct, or there'll be this one entity that, hey, that was a deal we did 10 years ago and it's just stuck around. What do you think is some of the sort of culture and operational ingredients you needed to make commitment stick, that 100 percent channel approach?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's challenging. I think the biggest problem is is not the business processes we can figure those out, that's just a definition of things it's the people Right. It's getting people on board with this kind of thing. Having people that are used to doing those things direct, as an example, thinking about the fact that they just can't do that, and having very hard conversations with them just to say those very things. You can't do this anymore. We are our largest, but I wouldn't say largest. But our first large, warmly direct customer that went indirect was is a name brand financial services organization, a worldwide, global financial services organization, and it was hard but it was big and it was important and it sent a clear message. We had two channel partners that were bidding on the business with the customer and it sent a clear message to both of them Look, we're serious about this, we're not just kidding around, we're not just saying things and talking into our hat. So you know that'll happen even more and more. We had a deal yesterday that happened.
Speaker 1:That went down at the very last minute. Again, that was with a formerly direct you know very large transportation company. So you know it's starting to happen. It feels good. I've worked for a lot of companies, Alex, in a channel position, channel leadership position, and I've never had that 100% channel gift. It's a gift that I can give myself, it's a gift I give to my partners and it's just one of those things that you know if you've got the threat of direct. It's just one of those things that you know if you've got, if you've got the threat of direct, it's always going to, it's always going to create anxiety in people's minds and the partner's minds. In my mind, and you know it's it's calories that we have to burn, that we don't have to burn a cohesive.
Speaker 2:It's just a nice thing yeah, and I always find it funny. I've worked at a few organizations that, um, either were quite a lot direct and then a couple which were, you know, a tiny bit direct, and I always just used to sit there and I go is that extra margin on those two or three deals worth the 1,500 conversations that happen across an organization into partners and end users a year to say, yeah, we are channel? Only? Apart from this edge case over here and, like you say, I like your calorie expenditure there's just none of that needed and I always just think from a first principles perspective. I think a lot of those businesses that have ended up 98.9% channel really wish that they could just draw a line under it.
Speaker 1:So it's awesome to see you guys making, making that and don't get me wrong, I mean I'm I'm a company man and I realized that doing that has a cost and there's a real financial cost to doing this and for the, for the leadership of the company, to say this is how we're going to move things, this is how we're going to do things going forward. You know, they're saying I'm going to give up this profit opportunity that I could have if I didn't do this, and that's a courageous thing to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's an investment, right, it's an investment into your channel and not just into that partner but into the wider partnerships that happen. Because I do think you know again, when we're talking about the three P's product I'm sure Cohesity has an amazing product and I'm sure some of your competitors also do but from a program differentiation, to be able to wholeheartedly say we are 100% channel, if you invest in us, we are fully committed, then I think that's a that's a powerful statement to be able to make you bet Awesome. So, uh, uh, one of the things that I really sort of am slightly obsessed with when it comes to channel leadership is you are a two-functional leader. You are a leader of your internal organization and your external organization and sometimes, unfortunately, I find a lot of leaders don't practice what they preach. They want their team to be super external and super customer-facing and be really connected, and maybe they aren't that connected, but I know you have a special Thursday channel block to evangelize internally, externally. Talk to me about how that impacts your business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I realized at one point in time that I wasn't advertising the value of the channel to my internal constituents like I needed to, and so to do better at that.
Speaker 1:I can do that ad hoc.
Speaker 1:I can see something coming across a win report, and I can amplify that, and I do those things on a regular basis, we all do.
Speaker 1:But I realized that I really need to think more deeply about how I can communicate to my peer group, my constituents inside the company, to say this is something the channel is doing, this is something that's good, and so what I did is I literally put an hour on my calendar every Thursday, happening about an hour and a half, which is to advertise the value of the channel. So I have come up with something that's going to advertise the value of the channel, something that's going to make sense for them. So that's something I do on a regular basis. One of the things that I also think is kind of important is that you know you talked about how we can get, how we can practice what we preach, how we can get people that work for us to do the things that are necessary, and, I think, most important, let me back up a half step from that and say the most important thing a person can know is who they are.
Speaker 1:Right, you know what they're good at what they're not good at, what they like doing, what they don't like doing, and then try to work within that context. You've got to stretch yourself to make yourself better all the time, but go with your strengths. In other words, and there's a book that came out in the 90s called the Discipline of Market Leaders. It was written by a couple of McKinsey smart guys and what they found is that the greatest companies had a character, they had a personality, and their personality was either focused on product excellence, on customer relationship excellence or on operational excellence. So you had to have a major and be better than your competitors in one of those three things and be pretty darn good at the other two.
Speaker 1:I think that's true for a person as well. So you got to look at yourself and say, okay, am I more of an operations sort of person? Am I more of a technical product sort of person, or am I more of a relationship management sort of person? And what I try to do is I'm more of a relationship management person. So what I try to do is where I think I can add value, in that personally, I can have a relationship with a person at one of our partners, where I can build a relationship with a person at one of our partners. I do that especially when I know that the person that works on my team doesn't have that as their most strong core competency, and I can help them along with that.
Speaker 2:And you've talked about how you can reinforce someone else's weaknesses. Maybe or weaknesses is a strong word maybe one of their not superpowers, let me phrase that slightly more positively Do you also, when you're building your organization, recognize that, hey, maybe operational excellence or technical excellence isn't your superpower, so you deliberately look to bring talent in that fares well with where your focus and superpower is well, you always want to have a bit of a yin for yang um relationship with people that work on your team.
Speaker 1:you know you can, you can help them and help them grow into things that they didn't know they could possibly do, and they can also teach you. I'm a big fan of learning from my team. I'm a big fan of diversity diversity and I know that's a cliche word these days, but I love seeking out people that have massively different points of view. You know, one of the people that I really cherish the most is an individual in my organization who's a technical leader. You know, because he is very technical, he's very analytical, he's very aware of things that I'm not aware of. So when I've got a problem or I've got an idea, I'll come to him and say, look, this is the idea I've got, stefan, what is your opinion on that? And he'll give me a point of view that I never would have thought of on my own. So I think an important part of being a leader is seeking out diversity and learning from different points of view.
Speaker 2:Awesome, mark, that is excellent.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the other points of view that I want to get from you today is we always ask our current guest to recommend our next guest, mark, who does he have in mind? There's a gentleman named Philip Privet and Philip is the Senior Vice President of Vendor Relations at TD Cinex and he's a very experienced guy. He's been in the channel for his whole life and so he understands an awful lot of things. But what I love about Philip is when I've got a problem and he's you know he's very high up there organization. But when I've got a problem, I text Philip and he gets right on it.
Speaker 1:We had a situation last week where we were trying to close one of those big deals I was talking about and you know we were going to have to ask Teeny Cynics to help us in the discounting of it because it was going to be a highly discounted solution for the customer. And I went to him literally I texted him at 7.30 in the morning on his time he's on central time and I said, philip, I need your help on this. Can you start working on this? Well, you know no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Awesome Thank you, alex, it's been fun.