Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Jason Beal & Andrew Warren -How Exclusive Networks Is Redefining Distribution
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Jason Beal and Andrew Warren of Exclusive Networks to explore the evolution of distribution from a transactional role to a strategic, service-driven engine for growth. With decades of experience across distribution and vendor leadership, Jason and Andrew unpack what it means to be a true channel services aggregator and why cybersecurity-first specialization is their edge.
We discuss:
- Why the “death of distribution” narrative misses the mark
- How Exclusive Networks is enabling partners across the full customer lifecycle
- The strategic value of a cybersecurity-first distribution model
- Building next-gen channel talent through their Cal Poly partnership
For channel leaders navigating shifting partner expectations and mounting complexity, this conversation is packed with forward-thinking strategies and grounded insights.
Connect with Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbeal/
Connect with Andrew: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewwarrensecuritysolutions/
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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 Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome two special guests Jason, Andrew, how are you doing Great Alex, how are you? I'm excited to do this one. I'm also slightly stressed. I'm not used to handling two guests simultaneously, so if you suddenly get me wide-eyed and fear-driven, you know why. Maybe for the uninitiated Andrew, kick us off. Talk us through your background.
Speaker 3:Sure Well, thanks for having us. I think we'll hopefully we don't talk over each other to make it this group of three, but I have 20 plus years in the channel, 15 of that in the distribution side, from everywhere, everything from carrying a bag on the street to running a $2.5 billion North American distributor prior to acquisition and excited to be here at Exclusive now and also, once we sold that organization and were acquired, spent the last five years with different vendors, either leading US, north American go-to-market teams or global channels. So I think it's great to be back in distribution because I think there's a unique opportunity right now, especially in the North American market, for organizations like Exclusive. So great to be here.
Speaker 2:Awesome. And Jason, you're back in two tenses of the word, because you're back in distribution and back on this channel. Maybe you can reintroduce yourself to our audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, alex, thanks for having me back. I guess that means I did not flop the first time, so I appreciate the invitation to come back in my new role here at Exclusive Networks. And, yeah, I've been back in distribution and at Exclusive Networks for about five months now. I came back to distribution in January. I had started my career in distribution, both at a domestic value-added distributor and then at a global distributor in multiple theaters, working both in the United States and in Europe. And then I too, like Andrew, worked at a number of different vendors in the cybersecurity and data management and data governance space and you know they're working in local and theater and then eventually in global roles and working with partners every day, building channel programs, working with MSPs, with distributors. So I never strayed too far from the roots. And, yeah, this is a great opportunity to come back in a leadership role at a company with an incredible culture, an incredible reputation, and then be able to bring on incredible people like Andrew to help take it to the next level.
Speaker 2:It's an exciting time, I think, for both of you. You're back in a place that you're very familiar with in distribution. However, I think it's also an interesting choice. There is lots of messaging, rumors, narrative around the fact that maybe traditional distribution is outdated, transactional. I think someone tries to ring the death knell on distribution in every six to 12 months. How do you respond to those critiques? Maybe Andrew coming to you first?
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, I think you know, I think it's it is a unique time, right, but I think if you look across the landscape, you know distribution is still growing and it's growing even faster than market, and I think there's a number of reasons you know why, and it's not just, yes, if you think of distribution as the traditional pick, pack and ship and having things on the shelf, then, yeah, I think that those days, while still valuable, we still carry stock. All of those things are important. That's not what's going to get you and continue growth and get you to the next level. I think you have to really think about where distribution sits and also how the end user is buying More and more.
Speaker 3:We were just at a partner conference and one of the speakers was talking about how, across the global IT landscape, more and more business is going through partners or partner influenced, and then how do you get to those partners and how do you get to those end users? So I think it's not about availability and credit While that still matters right, it still matters to our vendor partners and to our resellers it is more now about how do you get to the end user and how do you build pipeline. So, using those metrics. It's just a very different metric that I think the distribution landscape can support now, because we also have massive troves of data and it's also getting harder and harder, because everyone has a lot of data, to get your message in front of the right people at the right time, and I think we are in a unique position to help not only our reseller partners and integrator partners, but also our vendors, get their technology into the right people at the right time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'll add on. I mean, I, you know, successful businesses focus on execution, on their core competencies and competitive advantages, and then they outsource to specialty service providers those functions that are non-core, like said every single business book or business class in the history of mankind right, and we provide a very unique service, a set of services for both our partners and for our vendors, that allows them to focus on their core competencies and their competitive advantages. Oftentimes I have conversations with partners and they're looking at it only from the partner perspective and potentially only on an order-by-order basis on what's this value add that you're providing me? And then I try to frame it from the other perspective. Let me walk you through it from the other perspective is let me walk you through it from the vendors why do our ISVs, our OEM partners, use distribution? Look at all these things that we do for them so that they can focus on their core competencies, which is building really good code or good silicon, building their corporate brand and then hiring world-class sales teams to focus on top of the pyramid.
Speaker 1:Customers. That's what we want ISVs and OEMs to focus on, not chasing a lot of money, not recruiting a long-tail partner channel, not doing training, sometimes not even doing post-sales support, all of those different services that are not core to our vendors, we perform that allows them to again make great code or great products and push it to market through a world-class sales organization. So, regardless of the industry, regardless of the time, there's always a place for aggregators and there's always a place for outsourced specialty service providers, and that's what distribution is in this day and age, in the tech industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe double clicking there. Jason, I think you summed it up very eloquently in our prep call you called yourselves, more than a distributor, a channel services aggregator, which I think is a nice framing Maybe for the channel executives, channel leaders who listen to this podcast. What are some of those impactful services that maybe leaders don't realize that a modern distributor like Exclusive Networks really can deliver and support with?
Speaker 1:They're investing notably in their customer success capabilities and really trying to drive the entire customer lifecycle management or in the traditional acronym of more customers really drive adoption and utilization of their products. So then they have the permission to extend or expand their estates in those customers and then keep those as happy customers for life and distribution. We provide an entire range of these services throughout that entire life cycle. We land net new partners and help those partners land net new logos Through our business intelligence finding the right hypotensity partners, finding the right end users.
Speaker 1:That training that we do for our partners so that they can help drive adoption and provide services for the end customers do for our partners so that they can help drive adoption and provide services for the end customers to programs that help target the next logical product sale, or the, and reduce what we call that t to two, the time to second sale for our vendors. And then a whole set of services to ensure that we are retaining and doing renewals and expansion at point of renewal Pre-sale services, post-sale services, channel services, financing services, business development services. All of those across this entire lifecycle to help the vendors with their objectives of this, you know, extending the customers and driving higher LTV and getting more profitable and happy customers for life and happy customers for life.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, maybe Andrew coming to you. I think one of the things that is unique about Exclusive or maybe I should have done a pun there is you guys have really focused around cybersecurity as your strategic differentiator. How does building a distribution practice from that cybersecurity core change? How you approach partner enablement, partner strategy, partner execution, where maybe other distributors don't have that legacy or that foundational experience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I think I mean, you know, everyone's doing a little bit of cyber now, right, you can't not do a little bit of cyber? It's just, it's taken off. I remember, you know, years ago when I got into this space and everyone said, oh, come over and do storage. And I'm like, no, this is a lot of fun. And who would have thought that it would be what it is today? Right, but I think if you think about the services we can offer whether it's around our vendors or general cyber, understanding the market and spending, you know, 100% of our time in this market, we really become, you know, experts as a team on what is happening. And why is that important?
Speaker 3:Even if you look at the largest partners that are peer-play cyber partners, you know, in North America they're still selling 500 plus vendors. If they're a, you know, national player, 500 plus vendors. If they're a national player, right, Most of them have 500 vendors on their line card. So I mean, even them, even those that are pure play focused, have a very difficult time. And then think about the vendors trying to get to them on the large partners, and then you kind of scale down into, as Jason talked about, the mid and the long tail. It is very difficult for the vendors and the partners to kind of make sense of all of this.
Speaker 3:So, when you think about what we do, it's like we can go in. First of all, we understand the partners, we understand what they're doing from a cyber perspective, because that's all we talk about, right, and yes, you know that. Yes, you can say, okay, we don't have, we're not the Walmart and we're very good about that. Right, we're very niche, we're focused, you know, on this space, but it allows us to go in and have really deep conversations with our partners but also our vendors, when we talk about their problems and we think about you know Jason talked about world-class sales organizations, top of the pyramid.
Speaker 3:It's amazing how many vendors you will meet with they're still growing in the 20 to 40% range that have a long tail of partners that are doing one or two transactions a year. So, okay, you know that is a massive opportunity in a massive growth market, right? So? And it's so critical that they get to new logos. So that's where we think about our enablement, you know, from a sales enablement, but also from a technical enablement to help them go do that. You know again when they're ready and how they're ready. And that's also, I think, we're distribution, because we've got you've got thousands of partners out there at any given moment and being able to hit the right folks at the right time is critical and really a unique value add to our vendor partners and our reseller and integrator partners.
Speaker 2:Jason, anything to add to that? Do you think I'd love maybe to double click from a partner recruitment partner enablement standpoint how you think having that legacy and that history really supports that motion?
Speaker 1:Our expertise in cybersecurity is unrivaled and we take a great amount of pride in the employees that we hire, the amount of training that we do, our engineers, our salespeople. Really, we want to go deep. It is getting harder and harder and harder, alex, for the partners to be jacks of all trades, masters of all in cybersecurity. As Andrew mentioned, the amount of cybersecurity tools that are out there, the amount that are in an end user environment, and now the larger platform providers are asking their partners to sell more across their own platforms. We work with one particular cybersecurity platform vendor that has over 50 parts of its platform that a partner can train, can position, can sell, can service and can support. That's awfully hard for partners to do. So they can go deep in certain areas of their portfolio or of their vendors' platforms, but they just can't be jacks of all trades masters of all trades, ie. So they've got to lean on exclusive networks for a lot of that the pre-sales, doing demos, doing proof of concepts, doing the training, post-sales support, professional services.
Speaker 1:We are a Fortinet EPSP, a professional service provider, so we can be an extension to the bench of our partners. We just acquired a company called CloudRise, which is one of Netscope's largest professional service providers across the world. So there too, partners may find opportunities for Netscope but may not have the bench strength available. They can tap into exclusive networks and cloud rise bench. So it's just getting more and more difficult for partners to just be everything to everybody in cyber. When they can lean on us for expertise throughout the sales cycle and then throughout the delivery, that's really an incredible value proposition. And then back to your original question everything that I just said how much of that is traditional pick, pack and ship of hardware.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love the evolution. I think one of the things I'm always amazed by when I sit down with executives on this podcast is how many of them have come from distribution, and I don't think that's just a volume game, I think that's a value game. You learn so much being in distribution because you understand vendor priorities, you understand partner priorities. You understand partner priorities. You understand how to talk about value. You understand how to do a thousand things a day, which also helps what I find interesting about what you guys are doing in terms of building the next generation of sort of channel leaders. You've taken a partnership with Cal Poly. Maybe Andrew talk us through why that initiative and what impact that's having on the future of talent in the channel.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think this is a really unique thing and, as I've been here close to 90 days now, I think it's a really unique opportunity that has been built here by the exclusive team with Cal Poly, and you know it's having these students right, and it's we. You know, no matter what presentation you see, right, we always talk about this talent shortage of cyber. Whether it's 4 million or 2 million or whatever that number is, it doesn't really matter, right, it's a lot, and so I think it's really unique in what we have built here by bringing folks into the cyber arena. You know hiring them, right. They are, you know, on the payroll as students. You know, working part-time for exclusive networks, doing all sorts of different activities from technical to sales and marketing. You know everything across what you would think about in a traditional kind of channel operations, support type roles and then we use those individuals, you know, with certain vendors and as well as our partners, right, because everyone's having a hard time finding good people, and so by building the infrastructure here and being able to, again, this is another opportunity for our partners and for our vendors that you would not think is traditional distribution, so they can actually hire these folks.
Speaker 3:You know, either right out of college and because they've been with us for a couple of years doing things, or they can hire them while they're in university to do things like you know, marketing support and different technical and penetration testing, and I mean it really runs the gamut and I also think it's fascinating.
Speaker 3:I learn a lot from them as well. Right, when we think about AI and we think about some of these things, like some of the tools they're using, because they're right on that generation is growing up right in that space, I'm like, wow, that, what a great use case. So they're also, I think, teaching us quite a bit on different ways we can. We can think about our business, you know, in a different way and and use tools to to expand on that. So it's really a great program and I think you know we continue to when we meet with partners, you know, and and vendors. You know they're very and vendors, they're very interested in it, they're very interested in taking advantage of it, and so we continue to have the Cal Poly students, who are exclusive employees, placed at different vendors and different partners today.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, I think, one of the things that I found. I spent eight years in distribution before I headed into Vendorland. Once I got to vendor land, I earned a lot more money and somehow the job was significantly easier, I thought. I think vendor land is a breeze in comparison. What are some of the lessons that you've taken from vendor land and pushed back into into distribution and how that's evolved some of your strategy that you're implementing today, jason?
Speaker 1:coming to you first, you know, stephen Covey has this expression begin with the end in mind. I think my time in the vendor community really reinforced that. We have to begin with the end customer in mind and in some cases, if you've only worked in distribution, you have a perspective of working with the partners and the vendors on any given day, plus your own internal teams, and there might not be such a line of sight and a consideration for the end customer. And at the end of the day, we always say you've got to follow the money from the money right, from the investors all the way down through to signing the POs, which is the end customer.
Speaker 1:So that was one lesson. Is that the focus on the end customer? What are they buying? Why are they buying? What's the use case, what problems are we trying to solve? And then how do we put all those pieces together to make it the successful outcomes? And then the second is around sales alignment right. So we mentioned earlier that one of the core competencies in the big area of investments for vendors is building a world-class sales organization and the more that you can align there as a distributor, your partners aligning to the vendor sales teams that's really where the magic's going to happen down at a local level. So those are two lessons that I learned that I've now taken back to exclusive networks, and how do we go to market and how do we work together on a day-to-day basis with our vendor sales teams and our partner sales organizations.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Andrew, coming to you. You mentioned you're approaching day 90. I can imagine that means some of the lessons are very fresh. How does it impact your day?
Speaker 3:Well, you're not wrong, right, the grind and distribution is real and after my five-year hiatus, I am back to feeling that I think I forgot what that looks like day-to-day being strategic as well as working on the tactical day-to-day. But to go to this question, so yeah, that hit home a little too close, you know, on this Friday. But I think being able to, you know, sit down with a CMO, cro, vp of sales, vp of marketing, whoever it is, and know what they're going through, I think really matters right. Okay, you know I kind of started this whole conversation around pipeline, but how are you building your pipeline? What are your metrics? What do you need from a new logo perspective? You know, having been on their side of the table and gone through weekly pipeline reviews, you know attribution, all of those things. You know no disrespect to. You know all the folks that have built careers in distribution.
Speaker 3:But if you haven't done that, if you haven't lived on that side, it's really hard to say, yeah, I know what you're going through, but, and whether you're a large vendor at scale or a smaller vendor, that's your lifeline, right Is pipeline. So understanding what that looks like where we can add value as well, because even running a mid-size vendor channel organization globally. Getting to the long tail is really hard and understanding where the data sits. So being able to support our vendors and our partners on those type of things is really critical. So I think that's the biggest thing that I think I take back.
Speaker 3:Coming into this space is just an appreciation of a different kind of hard when you're sitting at the vendor, and especially in the cyberspace because we talked about that specialization it's super hard to get to the end users right now. So, and everyone's got a tech stack and everyone's got automation and everyone's got email where they, where they can send, you know, a thousand emails quickly, they can auto dial, right, they've all got these tools, but that just makes it even more muddy, right? So it allows us to get and be able to be very focused, you know, with our vendors and our partners in those aspects.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Andrew in those aspects. That's awesome, andrew. It's not often I get to voice my opinion on the podcast, mainly because I'm speaking to people who have more experience and maybe better opinions than myself, but let me champion what Exclusive are doing and what distributors are doing in general, and where I think the market's headed. Everyone is talking about that lovely buzzword, ai. Ai is as good as its data, and no one has better data than distribution. So I think anyone who's short betting distribution, uh is going to pay a real price. Um, because you guys have far better data than even your vendors, because the vendors data only extends to their customers and your partners and customers have far wider breadth. So, yeah, I think it's an exciting time and if I was making a strategic bet, I can understand why you've landed back in distribution.
Speaker 3:You've been up a great point on AI, right, and that is just a we're at the tip of the iceberg on what this looks like. But it's going to go fast too, right, so we have to be right out in front of that parade, so to speak in what we're doing.
Speaker 2:So agree, great. Now I'm going to be cheeky, because I like to live an easy life where possible, which means I like to ask my current guests to fill in my next guest. It's my version of pipeline, which is nice and easy.
Speaker 1:Jason, coming to you first, I think I had the honor and the pleasure of working alongside a former Barracuda colleague, jessica Kingham, who's based in England. She runs the EMEA channel of strategic partners currently for Barracuda. I was always super impressed with her approach, her relationships with partners, her journey and her career, so I would recommend that you reach out to Jess and get her on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Looking forward to getting Jess on and, andrew, I know you also had a recommendation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we're talking about data, we're talking about next-gen distribution, about next-gen distribution, and Exclusive Networks recently acquired a company called NextGen out of the Asia-Pacific region and somebody we're working very closely with and leveraging what they've built over the last 10-plus years is Jay Turner, who leads their OSpace team and it's all about end-user demand gen in distribution. You know OSpace team and it's all about end user demand gen in distribution and I think he would be a great, a great guest to kind of take some of the things we talked about at a very high level. You know into greater detail and it's really impressive what they've built and we're leveraging. That you know heavily, you know now here in North America, and so it's also, I think, when you, when you think about distribution and how people are doing strategic acquisitions, this is a a really good one where in one region, then we can we can take it globally. So I think Jay would be really good from that perspective.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you both for those recommendations and thanks for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome, all right.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. I appreciate the invite, Alex.