Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Daniel Danielli - Scaling Growth Through Global Distribution
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Daniel Danielli, VP of Global Distribution at CrowdStrike, to explore how distribution can be transformed from a fulfillment engine into a true driver of growth.
Daniel shares his journey from growing up in a family of technology entrepreneurs to leading multi-hundred-million-dollar distribution relationships across the globe. Together, we unpack the nuances of building a global distribution strategy, including:
- Navigating regional complexities across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas
- Driving internal alignment around growth instead of mere fulfillment
- Creating scorecards that prioritize leading indicators for faster pivots and smarter scaling
- Building high-performing teams to manage strategic distributor relationships
- Leveraging AI to unlock new opportunities in channel and cybersecurity operations
This conversation is packed with insights for channel leaders, partner strategists, and anyone looking to future-proof their distribution strategy in an increasingly complex market.
Connect with Daniel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieldanielli/
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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 our special guest, dan. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Alex, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here with you doing excellent. Thank you, Alex. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:I'm excited to be here with you Doing excellent. Thank you Good. I'm excited for this one, dan. We often talk about the value of distribution, and it's one of the places that I was born in, grew my channel career in, and I know you've shared a similar story. Maybe, if that uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic. Well, alex, I'm currently the VP of Global Distribution at CrowdStrike. It's been an incredible 18 months here. I joined in February of last year. From a background standpoint, I grew up in my family technology businesses, which ranged from being white box builders of PCs. We had software companies, we had an IVF business. At one point my father was a serial entrepreneur and when we exited our point of sale mobility and data capture business, I stumbled into distribution with an incredible organization, distribution Central. I saw that you had Scott and Nick on just recently two incredible guys. And then from there I got pulled over to the US after Arrow Electronics acquired Distribution Central spent a few years working for Arrow in Colorado, then spent a couple of years at Avar Evotech headquartered out of San Diego which again was incredible working for Caesar and CISO and learning the machinations of that business model. And then, when tapped on the shoulder by DB here at CrowdStrike, to come and work on an opportunity here. I couldn't pass up on it and, like I said, having the time of my life.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I think one of the things that really jumps out to me is global distribution. I think one of the things that really jumps out to me is global distribution. I used to run EMEA distribution for Zoom and found it complicated because Europe doesn't quite work like the Middle East, doesn't quite work like Africa. You've got to deal with that at a global level. Talk us through some of the nuances around how you drive that strategy at scale in different regions, in different markets which have different lagging factors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I think from the outset, one of the things that we set out to do and when I say we, you know my peers who lead the alliance organisations for their respective theatres is that the value of distribution is different in the Americas as opposed to the rest of the world. Particularly for the rest of the world, we really wanted to lean on distribution to help us get into more conversations, but also help us localize some of our go-to markets. From a language standpoint, from a currency and a finance and a taxation standpoint, distribution plays a very key role there. But at the center of what distribution does the value that can be provided, the difference between fulfilment and growth. I think that was the grounding factor that we drove across all of our go-to-market efforts from a distribution standpoint, whether it was in LATAM or Europe or Asia or the Americas.
Speaker 1:We've really centered on making sure that our distribution strategy is very much centered on growth as opposed to a fulfillment focus for us, yeah, and I think the distribution, depending on who you speak to and what context, either has an amazing name or sometimes a terrible name, but I think it's for exactly that reason right. It very easily can turn into a fulfillment house, where then it's a bit hey, what's the real value? If, done right, you really can have it at the center of your scaling strategy partner acquisition, partner enablement and, ultimately, revenue. How do you ensure that you drive that transition? Because that can be a bit pushing water uphill, but it's very, very valuable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it starts with making sure that as an organization, as CrowdStrike, that we really want to embrace growth and, if I think about some of our key priorities, that we want to get into more and more customer conversations.
Speaker 2:Growth is absolutely front and center on our mindset. So, going back internally and educating the teams around, well, yes, distribution can just be leveraged as a filming engine, but when you think about our objectives around wanting to get into more conversations, george has this incredible saying that you've got to be present to win and we want to be present in more customer conversations. There is no better faction within the channel that has got more visibility to all of the customers that we're not in today than what distribution has. The reality is they've sold billions and billions of dollars of technology to all the customers that we're trying to access because of their broad portfolios and the broad reach that they've got across all the different partner ecosystems. So, from my perspective, when you go and paint that picture internally, the sales organizations, the go-to-market organizations, are very quick to see the value that distribution can provide beyond just being a fulfillment engine for us and really participating in our growth strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean distribution is at its core right. It's as many at-bats as humanly possible. So how do we get into the most partner conversations, which means the most end user conversations, which ultimately should be the widest scale that you can deliver? It's great, and it sounds like you've got a really good internal vision around what that should look like. Pivoting that externally, how do you encourage your teams effectively to take that message to market? Because it sometimes is a bit of a change of behavior right in the channel, and so you've got to encourage, push, demand. How do you encourage that behavior?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, firstly, it starts with the type of people that we bring into the business, these resources, the team members that we have running our distribution relationships. We're looking at these distribution relationships now as being multi-hundred million dollar relationships, and so you've got to bring in resources that have got a certain level of expertise and experience in being able to manage that. It's not just about managing a partnership, it's also about managing a team of resources that the distributors are building out, not just to be an extension of our business but to be an integrated part of our business, and so we need the people with the right sort of mindset and background and skill sets and experience, and so we've got former directors, former VPs that are coming in as individual contributors to manage these very strategic relationships for us.
Speaker 2:The second thing for me has been around creating a common scorecard, and I think that's one of the biggest areas that we can often come unstuck with is that a distributor might have certain priorities. Us, as a vendor, might have certain priorities. Individuals have got certain priorities. If we can get everyone centred on a scorecard that's not just focused on the lagging indicators, the revenue that we're driving, the new customers that you bring in, but is really focused on the leading indicators how we're generating pipeline, what sort of enablement we're driving, partner progression, deal registrations. We've created a lot of discipline around a focus scorecard that is able to create that consistency in how we're executing to a common set of objectives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd love to double click on that for a second, because I think it's one of the most misunderstood things in the channel, where we get so focused and people will tell me deal registration is the leading indicator and I'm like you're already months too late to make any change, because I see so often people close a really big deal terms of partner acquisition, enablement, buy-in, what's time to value. How do we accelerate that? What's time to third deal reg those moments allow you to make those changes early. Take us through an example where, because you measured a leading indicator, you were able to assimilate that understanding, make a pivot earlier than you would have done, and what caused that change?
Speaker 2:I've shared this story with you previously and it gives me goosebumps thinking about it, because it was probably one of the most exciting experiences that I went through In one of my previous organizations. I was asked to forget about everything that I'd learned about the US market and to go and try and establish a new partner segment for us, specifically focused around the SMB segment, and we did it with a whole bunch of kids straight out of college didn't have a lot of business experience, but we created a really strong discipline around the types of partners that we wanted to go and recruit, and so there was a lot of intelligence gathering that went into that. We built some key strategic ecosystem partnerships that could help us get into those conversations, and it was a maniacal daily process of regular stand-ups where we laid out for this team, which eventually grew to 50 ADRs, as we called them there, and they knew exactly what they need to execute. On every single day there was 150,000 outbound sales touch points a quarter. That was measured through systems and tools that we put in place.
Speaker 2:We analyzed it daily, and the best outcome of that is that we blew away all of our expectations. We grew from $0 to $100 million in 12 months and 28 days. I committed that it was going to be done in 12 months. I was 28 days late, but still to go from a standing start to $100 million, and I attribute a lot of that to the focus on like. We didn't even worry about the revenue aspects. We just focused on getting the leading indicators right, leveraging the intelligence that we had that, the ecosystem partners that they could bring to us and the execution on those drove the results that we ultimately needed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you touch on SMB in particular, and I think this is one of the mistakes that so many businesses make is that when we measure that lagging performance in the enterprise, that really is the most important, because you can put nine months of work and get nothing, or nine months of work and one week and you close a million pound deal and it is the difference between success or not success. But when we talk about a broad-based, hyperscale, smb, actually leading indicators, if you just turn all the leading indicators green, you're going to hit. There might be a bit of tolerance up or down, but you are going to hit because the sort of formula is built correctly. That's tremendous growth to go through. Maybe share? I've sat on a couple of rocket ships myself and it gets quite exciting. How was the feeling there when you start to build that momentum through a big team of young, hungry sales reps?
Speaker 2:It was palpable, I think, seeing the development of all of those individuals you know turn from literally kids that have just graduated from college to being able to hold meaningful partnership conversations with new partners and building big books of business. It was palpable watching the success that they were having. That was probably the most fulfilling aspect of it.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I think is really truly special about this industry, I think over and above a lot, is that distribution. I sort of in football terms, soccer terms for our American listeners I think distribution is often the academy right. It's where you bring these young, hungry sales professionals in, teach them the way. But then the great leaders really start to build out that black book and bring people with them. How has it been to see those young people that you sort of built their foundational parts of their career now entering the wider channel? I think a couple of you have even followed you to CrowdStrike today. How has that process been as a leader?
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, as a leader, seeing the success of those that you work with, that you've got the ability to help develop.
Speaker 2:That's the success any leader wants to achieve, beyond hitting results and financial metrics that the corporation is is driving you to. Some of those individuals have gone on to to get promoted within my previous organization and are now in leadership roles. Some of them have continued in individual contributor roles but are managing big books of business, meaningful books of business. I've had the the fortunate ability that some of them have followed me here to to crowdstrike and it's amazing, as I've moved across the CrowdStrike organization and gotten to know many of my peers and co-workers here, that the amount of people that have some sort of distribution background has been great and I think it's important because they know the best aspects of distribution and certainly what CrowdStrike is looking to leverage out of our distribution channel. To be able to get them driving the momentum in the strategy that we're looking to execute on has been really, really important. So it's the disty legacy people that they're littered everywhere across the channel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've had the fortune on this podcast. I think I've had. I've had a few maybe 10, 20 of the most senior channel people at whatever multi-billion dollar business that we have them from. I think about 40% of them were started in distribution. I think because it's so foundational, distribution is a unique place because you really understand the partner's perspective, you understand the vendor's perspective and balancing those two pieces together that's a challenging piece because you've got to be able to understand those. Is that something that you, when you started to hire those directors and bring them in to manage those partnerships that you were sort of very cogent on in that interview process to qualify, would they be able to handle the speed? Because I think distribution is one of the fastest places I've ever worked right. I often tell the story that I got to Zoom and we were doing 900% year-over-year growth and it was still slower than distribution. You just have to balance a lot all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a lot of parallels to distribution and also to a startup, and a lot of the people that I'm fortunate to work with here at CrowdStrike have been here from the very early days. I remember something that a leader of a large distribution business in APJ once said to me is that distribution is like flying a jumbo jet six inches off the ground. There's not a lot of margin for error, and you have to be innovative, you have to know how to bootstrap, and a lot of that culture exists in the startup world as well, and so I think there is a really nice pairing of the skill set that distributors bring and the people that we're bringing in to manage distribution and the entrepreneurial startup culture mentality that still sits here within CrowdStrike. Yes, we're a big company, but we're highly innovative, we're highly entrepreneurial, we're highly entrepreneurial. We're always looking to push the envelope of what's possible to meet the customer needs that we have, and so I think there's this beautiful pairing of that, and we've certainly looked to make sure that we've brought in those individuals.
Speaker 2:I will say that the pace of CrowdStrike is unlike anything that I've experienced before. The only difference to distribution is every single month was a quarter end. It's nice that we have our quarter ends and we've got our product set that we focus on, but man, the pace of CrowdStrike is unlike anything I've ever experienced before. It's incredible.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I know is going to play a factor into actually that pace increasing Sorry, dan, I might make your life slightly more hectic is how AI is changing. One, how fundamentally the channel works, but two CrowdStrike from an actual proposition Talk to me about how AI is translating your product, your operations, your go-to-market. How does that all work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're looking at how we use AI across all aspects of our business. Very front and center to what we're doing is Charlotte AI, and it's completely transforming the SOC and SOC operations. What used to take an analyst hours and hours and lots of cognitive thought to pull together the elements they need to produce the outputs that they needed for their company or regulatory requirements, we're now leveraging AI to do that in a matter of minutes and seconds, and so it's rapidly transforming the security operations, and our ability to contextualize and correlate at scale is transforming what we're doing in the SOC, for sure. And then, as I look across what we're doing inside of our business and how we're applying AI, I think the opportunities are still untapped.
Speaker 2:You know, I think about the wealth of intelligence that a distributor is sitting on. The questions we're asking internally is like how can we tap into AI to help automate how we make decisions around? What's the best route to market to get into these new customers or to enable these new partners or to entice these new partners to come on board? Come on the journey with us. The opportunity there. I think it's going to speed up the work that we do, but create so much more. Think it's going to speed up the work that we do, but create so much more opportunity that's going to keep us busy until the end of times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the thing that I'm sort of really excited about when I think about distribution is distribution is best place to leverage AI of anyone in the channel, because they have the most reach, therefore they have the most data and therefore they have the best models In the enterprise world. We talk a lot about intent signaling when it comes to end-user buying patterns, but I think the distributors that can work out intent signaling for new vendor acquisition and attachment sales. I think that's such a unique value that a distributor is going to find. I believe that if and when that is built, it's going to produce such a rapid competitive advantage. The rest of the market is really going to struggle to catch up, so I think it's going to be exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. The ecosystem vendors that the distributors distribute, that are in and amongst our ecosystem, the point products that the distributors have some insights and visibility into. These are all things that could be leveraged to drive better outcomes for customers, specifically with their cybersecurity environments. One of the biggest challenges that customers have is the complexity of all of these stitched together solutions that they've got, being able to leverage that and then being able to correlate that to how a platform like Falcon could rapidly improve a customer's cybersecurity posture, and to be able to do that in an automated way. I don't think we're too far away from getting there. It's exciting.
Speaker 1:Really exciting. Well, look, it's not just AI that I use to cheat, it's also our guests. I always like to get our current guest to recommend our next guest. Dan, who do you have in mind?
Speaker 2:Look, I spent a little bit of time thinking about this, Peter Ledger. He's an industry stalwart, a multi-generational industry stalwart. He's got a fascinating background. He's building an incredible business. I think he would be a very interesting chat for you.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I'm excited to have Peter on and Dan, thanks for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Thanks, Alex.