Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Bryce Grow - Building Channel Depth with SentinelOne
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we dive deep into what it takes to build a channel engine that scales intelligently. Bryce Grow, VP of Americas Channel at SentinelOne, joins us to share a fresh perspective shaped by her shift from direct sales to channel leadership.
Bryce unpacks the mindset shift required to succeed in indirect sales and reveals how her team cut their partner base by more than half, while increasing impact. From building trust with internal sales teams to defining partner value through 30+ real-time KPIs, Bryce walks us through the strategies that drive alignment and accountability across SentinelOne’s partner ecosystem.
We explore:
- The underestimated importance of internal stakeholder buy-in
- Why fewer, deeper partnerships often outperform “going wide”
- How AI and data are shaping the next era of partner scoring
- The balance of harmony and fairness across GSIs, MSPs, VARs, and cloud alliances
- What it means to “earn” partner incumbency in today’s competitive market
If you’ve ever had to drive results through others, inside and outside your company, this episode is for you.
Connect with Bryce: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryce-grow/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of our partnerships and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channex and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest Bryce. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Hey Alex, how are you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm really really excited for this one. Hi Alex, how are you? Yeah, I'm really really excited for this one. We've had a few of your colleagues from Sentinel One on and I'm sort of fascinated by the rocket ship that Sentinel One is. Maybe for the uninitiated you could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 1:So, Bryce Groh, I lead America's channel here at Sentinel One. I've been here nine months. Prior to that I was with Zscaler. I think the most notable aspect of my background is really how much time I spent in a direct sales role. Really most of my career I was carrying a bag or leading sales teams, so that's been quite a pivot. Coming over to the channel side and seeing it from that perspective, hey channel is just beers and shiny dinners, right.
Speaker 2:That's a really easy transition to make For us in the channel. We know how not true that is. What were some of the mindset shifts that took you from direct to indirect?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's a few things, but you know, when you're in a direct sales role, it's always about the next deal, the next transaction, and that's very important. When you're in the channel, obviously you're concerned about the deals, but it's much bigger. Right, when any organization looks to establish a mature channel, it's about the scale the partners can provide and lowering your cost of sale. So you look at that from the standpoint of do we have the right partners? Are we working with the right partners? Are they enabled in such a way that they can carry our message? Right and I think for me that's the exciting part is I'm influencing entire go to market motions with these partners, and it's a lot bigger than a specific deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I you know. I think that one of the real complexities about being a channel person is having to balance short term and long termterm growth, because you're never going to make your year in the quarter but you can absolutely ruin your year in the quarter. How did you find some of that early transition into indirect and how you managed to balance those priorities?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one of the mistakes that a lot of channel leaders can make when you come into the role is focusing too early exclusively on the partner. Right? You think, hey, I'm going to go spend all my time with a partner, I'm going to enable them, I'm going to get them excited and it's all going to work. I mean that's important, but it's not the most important piece at the beginning. From my perspective, you've got to start from your internal stakeholders, right, and that means your sales executives and your sales teams, because I think the most important currency that any channel executive has is their ability to influence and impact the sales behavior right On both sides. Right, the partner side and the internal side. So you've got to start by building champions of your sales executives up through your CRO and CEO.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've always sort of likened it to. You're sitting in the middle of a sort of three circle Venn diagram. You've got to win your direct sellers, you've got to win your channel organization and you have to win the partners over and tying together that entire engagement. I think that's a complicated thing that people really don't understand. How to build that excitement? What was some of the early things that you did to win all those stakeholders over?
Speaker 1:I think you can't go in assuming that you understand the partner requirements or the requirements that your sales team has. So instead of going to your sales leadership saying these are the partners you should have and these are the partners you need to work with, it's hey, tell me about what's working and not working in our current channel strategy. Where are some gaps with our partners? Where are we doing well that we need to accelerate and do more of that and where do we see weakness? So you bring them in early to establishing what that strategy is going to look like, right.
Speaker 1:And then it's the enablement piece. Do the sales teams understand the unique value differentiation with all the partners, right, if I can tell you, I mean I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard the partner is not providing value, but we haven't defined value. So that's number one is what does value look like for us in this? You know this partner strategy. How do these different partners support that? And how do you create the enablement right and the ongoing enablement around how partners are adding that value? And then it's around recognizing the successes creating wind wires, right, doing interviews with the partners and our sales teams together so that they can explain how they won and how they were successful working together.
Speaker 2:Well, that's exactly the point right, which is, yes, we would love to have I'm sure you would love to have a thousand well-bought in, well-enabled, focused, driven, successful partners. That's, I'm sure, a long-term goal. But to get there, you don't get there by taking a thousand partners and leveling them up. You take them by taking a hundred partners and then adding more once they are fully leveled up. Is that something that you really sort of focus in from a strategic perspective? Encourage that from your team. How do you make sure you're getting that balance right?
Speaker 1:I think it goes back to having really quality KPIs and leading indicators for the channel, which has been very difficult in the past.
Speaker 1:Right, because historically we viewed partner value through the lens of origination resourcing.
Speaker 1:Right, and we use that almost exclusively in the past to make decisions and it's an important component, but it's not the only one. So, kind of getting back to my earlier response on how you identify those partners, if you have a scorecard, right, and then you think about the possibility of enabling that Right To give you a really time sensitive view of how partners are doing, real time, then you can start focusing in on the ones that are going to be most impactful. Right, just to certain elements. Right, and for us the adoption piece is really critical and what partners are able to do that effectively. Because when you look at the concept of like incumbency right, there's a philosophical discussion right now around earned incumbency versus implied incumbency, and I think the programs of the future are going to incorporate adoption as part of that and then tying that potentially to the protection or incumbency protection that that partner will receive. Because if you've got a platform that is over 90% adopted, then the upsell and cross-sell renewal is a foregone conclusion.
Speaker 2:So that's just one example where I think we're really putting a lot of focus for our partners what's, I think, amazingly complicated about what you're trying to build is we're talking about those three venn diagrams, but on top of that it's not one type of partner right. You've got MSPs, gsis, cloud tech alliances. The channel is a complicated beast. It works really well when it's done well. How do you drive harmony, fairness across that sort of wide breadth of go-to-market motion?
Speaker 1:I think it's two critical components and for us it's the program and compensation and you have to get those right or the harmony will not exist.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think we've all seen channel organizations where it was a little bit like Game of Thrones in terms of the teams not working collaboratively together. One of the things SentinelOne has done exceptionally well is we put our channel and our channel business manager in the center of this flywheel right. And we've got GSIs, we've with strategies, with all these different routes to market, and it's a win-win right. So there's no competition between our cloud team and our channel to work through AWS and do a CPPO transaction. So I think that's the piece that a lot of companies can miss is that if you put so much focus on trying to win internally right over one route to market over another, you're not putting the fight to the real competition, which is our external competition. So I think you've got to have a program that incents collaboration and you've got to have a program that does not put a tax on partners right, because if you perceive it from that standpoint, you will never get past the mindset that the channel is a tax.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you're fighting internally, you're losing externally. Right, it's just, it's just absolutely mandatory. So maybe then I think one of the places that a lot of our audience will find themselves is they've got this complex partner ecosystem complex go to market. They're having to win via other people, both internally and externally. Data is critical to sort of understanding how to navigate through that. You said something to me really interesting in the prep call about how you're leveraging data to drive behavior. Talk me through it, yeah.
Speaker 1:So we talked about the scorecard, right, and I think that's very important. And you know, back to the concept of historic metrics for channel. It was all around partner origination, partner sourcing. We've expanded that. I think we're up to 32 discrete different elements that we're measuring right now so we're able to make real-time decisions where it used to be an annual planning process, which is not nearly enough, right, you could be going very off course over the you know nine, 12 months before you realized you needed to make a shift. So it's giving that information to our channel leaders, channel managers, and they can make real-time decisions and real-time corrections when needed if we see things are happening.
Speaker 1:The second piece to this you know, when you talk about the diverse ecosystem right on the program side is when you look at different types of partner value. I'll just give you an example Influence is a really big one right now. How do you define and measure influence? Because that can be a very nebulous concept. How do you define and measure influence? Because that can be a very nebulous concept and if you don't get it right, it can be diluted because people are overusing it or it's not being tested in such a way that we can say that specifically led to this outcome. So if you have influence in your program, right to be able to quantify what aspects of partner contribution are valuable to us, right.
Speaker 1:And I'll give you a good example and a bad example. A good example is a partner-led POC right, you can look at that, you can see where it happened, you can see the outcome. That's a good, you know, objective measurement of partner value in the influence model. A bad one would be exchanging account intelligence, right, what does that mean? Right, I mean that's hard to quantify. That's a conversation. Right. What does that mean? Right, I mean, that's hard to quantify. That's a conversation, right? That's nebulous. So I think when you look at the levers for influence, you've got to make sure that they're objective and that they're easy to understand both internally and externally, around that value piece.
Speaker 2:And you've just added another layer of complexity there because we've got different types of partners, different stakeholders internal and external and now we have different revenue motions. And I fully agree If you're a consultancy partner and you are helping build a full POC and SOW like that is huge value. Partnerships should be remunerated for that. I think traditionally programs have really struggled to sort of include that and reinforce that behavior, which guess what means they'll spec anything and not really directionally towards you as channel leaders, such as yourself, to play the game in a much more complex and strategic way. Talk to me about what are some of the key moves that you're making to help navigate through that process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's a great question and I think all of us are evaluating this right now because we're at a very interesting point in the channel. You know, I think in the next five years you're going to see some very significant shifts in how we work with partners and what the programs need to evolve to to support that. I'm a big fan of Jay McBain over at Canalys and probably familiar with him. The channel of the future and he has this great analogy around partner strategy and that you need, you know, partners who are going to get your client to the dance, get them on the dance floor and keep them dancing. Your client to the dance, get them on the dance floor and keep them dancing.
Speaker 1:And I really love that construct and it, you know, informs a lot of the decisions and investments that we're making in the program. So I think you know it's about competing, not having competing elements for transacting and non-transacting partners. For example, you should not have an advisory partner that is competitive to a sourcing designation with a transact partner, right? So I think it's creating a much broader program and looking at where the partner is adding value and being able to capture that value in the program in such a way that it's collaborating with the disparate routes to market and not competing. So you would have an advisory partner on an opportunity that's influencing. You could have a transacting partner right that is, sourcing right in that sense and you could also have technology partners who are working and influencing and having the ability for one opportunity, programmatically to support all those motions, measure all those motions and ensure that the channel is being rewarded throughout that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've worked on and been involved in deals where you do have that sort of scoping partner the fulfillment partner, but also even the management partner right which is like we're going to take over the management of this deployment, we're going to manage it for its lifecycle, and you're absolutely right, While that is incredibly complicated to design, I'm a big fan of this sort of AWS mantra around working from the end user backwards. That's what the end customer needs, right? They need the right technical advisor who actually doesn't want to manage the deployment because they're just the technical advisor. They want someone to own the fulfillment that they already have great contractual process with, and then they need someone to manage that instance and working back from the end user in mind, I think it's sort of incumbent on yourself and program designers to go OK, if that's what the customer needs, how do we build back?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and being able to capture the data Right, yeah, and being able to capture the data Right I mean attribution is a huge element of this. Being able to have the systems in place that can capture and extract what that value is at different points in the opportunity cycle.
Speaker 2:Well, bryce added to this complexity. I'm also going to ask you one favor, which is we ask our current guest to recommend our next guest. Who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:Well, I would love to recommend you have a conversation with Christine McAlduff. She was my former boss at C-Scaler. She is now building a world-class channel over at Cloudflare Very smart lady and I think she would be a great guest.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I'm excited to have Christine on and Bryce, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thanks, alex, you have a great day.