Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 023 - Partners Are NOT Coming To Your Portal Pt.1

Transcript

023 - Partners Are NOT Coming To Your Portal Pt.1 · Partnerships Unraveled

0:07
Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the Podcast, where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
0:16
My name is Rick van den Bosch and I'm the CEO and founder at Channext.
0:19
And I'm here together with Alex Whitford, VP Partnership Channext.
0:22
Alex, how are you doing today?
0:23
Yeah, really excited to be back.
0:25
It's good to have you back on the podcast after one week off.
0:27
Yeah, I'm very excited to be back indeed.
0:30
I was very ill last week, but luckily we had a great, great substitute with our CTO, Jens.
0:36
I listened to the podcast already and highly enjoyed it.
0:39
Yeah, for any of those who missed that episode, definitely go and check it out.
0:42
Jens had some great insights around tech partnerships and what they really mean for the future of the channel and partnerships together.
0:49
Yeah, I agree.
0:50
Think we spoke a lot about it from the commercial side, of course, and it's also great to hear from the technical side actually.
0:55
How does it work?
0:56
How do you connect the dots and bring it to market?
0:58
Yeah, absolutely.
0:58
I think for me it was eye opening.
1:00
I think we'll definitely be looking to get more special guests on the podcast because it can provide that unique insight that maybe me and you don't have.
1:07
Fully agree.
1:08
I think that's definitely something we're working towards.
1:10
Indeed.
1:10
Also for our listeners that we're going to add more guests both from inside Channext but also definitely experts from outside Channext.
1:16
So we get more and more point of views on our beautiful partnerships market.
1:20
Yeah.
1:20
If anyone's got any recommendations of who you think we should bring on, absolutely comment below.
1:25
It'd be really great to get your view and we can add them to the podcast.
1:30
Awesome.
1:30
Then I think over to the topic of today and while it feels really good to be back because I think this is maybe my most favorite topic in the world, partner portals.
1:39
And especially the things that are working about it, but also definitely the things that are not working.
1:45
And I think that's what we're going to dive into today, right?
1:48
Yeah, absolutely.
1:49
And it's funny, I think partner portals in some instances can work.
1:54
I think are running jokers that they're not partner portals.
1:56
They're vendor portals because they help the vendor but not the partner.
1:59
But there's loads of information out there and we've got great data to show that the majority of the time partner portals just don't work.
2:07
I think the most painful fact that we keep hearing time and time again and also seeing all the research is that partners are not using them right.
2:15
Like from a total partner base, usually the usage is less than 10% of the partners who is using those portals.
2:22
And I think maybe to start with today, would it be good to dive into why is that effect?
2:27
Because they are there to help the partners, but the partners are not using them?
2:32
Where does it arise from?
2:34
Yeah, so I think you've got to analyse what the portals are designed to do.
2:39
Are they achieving what they designed to do?
2:41
And is their value inherently there for the partner?
2:43
And I think the first thing that's important to discuss is what the partner portal is designed for, and it's to help drive the vendor information and tooling down to the partner ecosystem.
2:55
But I find the channel has changed over the last sort of ten to 15 years.
3:01
Channels used to, in my opinion, be very partner orientated towards the vendor.
3:06
Partners were desperate to sign with certain vendors because those vendors were driving a lot of the deal cycles.
3:13
The brand power of someone like a Cisco was so enormous, there was even a running joke in the It channel.
3:18
You're never fired for buying Cisco.
3:20
And so you really get an understanding that the vendor brand was tying together deals.
3:25
So if you were a partner, it was great.
3:27
It was like, oh, my God, I'm going to start selling Cisco, and then I'm going to win loads of deals.
3:31
And so the direction was ferry from partner to vendor that the buy in was at the vendor side.
3:37
I don't think that is the way anymore.
3:39
I think really the big land shift that we've seen now in today's channel is that the partners hold the keys to the kingdom, and the vendors are very aware of that.
3:47
The partners hold the relationships with the end users.
3:50
Some of those relationships are now years old.
3:52
So maybe 15 years ago, you might have sold Cisco to that customer, but now they've been your customer for 15 years.
3:58
Guess what?
3:58
You are the trusted advisor.
4:00
You hold the relationship.
4:02
You hold the keys to the kingdom.
4:04
And that's flipped the whole game on its head.
4:06
And really, partner portals are a legacy technology from the type of business that was handled 15 years ago and that's shifted to today, where actually the partners know everything, the partners have everything.
4:17
And so now it's, how do we work more proactively with the partner?
4:20
And I think that paradigm shift has led us to what we're hearing today, which is partners don't log into the vendors.
4:26
Is that comparable to I've read a lot of articles about that.
4:30
We shifted from a seller market to a buying market.
4:32
Is that the same that kind of happened, that we were like a very vendor oriented market and everything was built around those vendors, but now it's much more a partner market.
4:42
Yeah, I think that mind shift has changed.
4:45
I think obviously with buyers wanting to do a lot of their own research and not just trusting the big name out there, I think that's caused this big shift.
4:54
And now I see partners very often used almost like consultants, where people will go, I've got this problem.
4:59
I've done my research on this, this and this vendor.
5:01
Can you give me an indication on what you think is a valid solution.
5:05
But they've done a lot of the legwork themselves before speaking to the partner.
5:09
Long gone are the days that you're just buying because X brand name is out there.
5:13
In fact, I think for a lot of people, people don't trust those big brand names because actually you can't be great at everything.
5:20
And lots of these brands try and be great at everything and end up being a bit of a specialist of nothing.
5:24
And I think another thing I hear from a lot of partners is that more and more they want to make it a lot about themselves as well.
5:30
Right.
5:30
Like position their value proposition, tie together all the vendors into that specific thing and only just that one on one relationship with a portal where you get the information only from one specific point is probably not serving their needs the way they want to position it towards the market.
5:46
Yeah, I mean, 15 years ago, you were a real specialist if you sold Cisco infrastructure and you really knew what you were talking about.
5:53
Now lots of people sell those products and that means that partners are becoming far more competitive with each other.
5:59
And so those partners are having to sell and brand themselves in a very special way to compete against all the other competitors in their sphere.
6:08
And so partners now are focused on their own priorities, their own messaging, their own USPS, and not just selling the vendors brand.
6:16
And so what you want to make sure as a vendor is we're working in conjunction with that new workflow to help the partner be successful.
6:24
I was just thinking, we did a podcast previously trying to step into the shoes of the partner and really try to think, okay, what's important for them.
6:32
If we would do the same with this, like if we would analyse this problem of partners not visiting the portal, what do you think is the core issue that partners are not visiting or not using them?
6:42
Yeah, my first question is, what do you think is in the portal that's so valuable to the partner?
6:46
Right.
6:47
The unfortunate thing for most vendors out there is when they go and speak to their partners, they aren't the number one vendor for those partners.
6:56
Right.
6:56
So for example, you might be in attachment products into a wider ecosystem.
7:00
Play that partner might sell 20 to 30 vendors, which is pretty much market standard.
7:05
Well, they're not going to log into all 20 to 30 portals.
7:08
They're probably only logging into one or two.
7:10
And they'll be their most important vendors.
7:13
So the first question to ask yourself is, should they be logging into your portal?
7:16
And is there enough value within the portal to make them keep coming back?
7:20
If the answer is no?
7:21
Well, you've already got your answer.
7:23
It needs to be valuable for them.
7:25
So what's the reason they should be logging in what's the information inside that that's really going to help them be successful.
7:30
And if it's just a marketing content dump and that's it, well, guess what?
7:34
They're probably not going to use their content because they want to market their own services.
7:39
I think that's a valid point.
7:40
And that's the thing I hear a lot in the market as well, both from the vendor side as on the partner side.
7:45
Is that the content dump?
7:45
Right.
7:47
I think one of the key features of most portals is that you have one central place where your partners, distributors, resellers tech partners can find all the content and training materials they need about your brand.
8:00
But there's so much of it and the UX is oftentimes as well so hard for them to find the right things that partners literally don't know where to start.
8:08
Like they get into it, but then they are so overwhelmed that they just don't do anything.
8:13
And especially the type of users or the type of employees within the partner you want to utilize it.
8:18
So the marketing, the salespeople, et cetera, they are simply not doing it.
8:22
Yeah, exactly.
8:22
If you don't have the proper pathways built into the portal to make life easy for the partner, ie.
8:31
A differentiation between marketing content versus sales enablement or the difference between sales enablement and technical training for installation, you can't just dump content there because guess what, if I look in and I can't find the answer in 15 seconds, I'm not going to go in there again.
8:47
Google exists and distribution exists.
8:50
I'm much more likely to go and speak to someone if I can go and get the answer easily.
8:55
So having a well designed process that partners understand exactly what they need from the portal and how to get it is critical.
9:03
And frankly, there's just not been that much procedure put into training partners to use portals very effectively.
9:09
No, I agree there.
9:11
I think if you look at it and to summarize that the first reason is really almost all your partners are working with many vendors most of the time, 20 to 30.
9:20
Secondly, indeed, there's so much content per vendor that they feel overwhelmed a little bit.
9:25
And I think the third reason that's also indeed that we just touched upon a little bit is that there's very little possibilities for cross functional collaboration there.
9:35
So indeed, a partner that sells multiple brands, so to say, within a specific portal, it's only about that specific product, it's only about that specific vendor, which makes it very hard for the market where we are at today, where we want to combine and collaborate with a lot of things to actually do such a thing.
9:52
Yeah, exactly.
9:53
I think the way that the B to B market is going is it's very solution orientated.
9:58
And if your product is one bit of a multi vendor solution, I'm probably not going to log into the portal to get the information that I need or to do the deal reg or to get the marketing content to pull out because that's just a reactive service.
10:12
What I need is a far more proactive mindset because now the name of the game is driving partner engagement.
10:18
Right?
10:18
And very clearly we can see partner portals don't work.
10:21
Why?
10:21
Because the engagement rate is so low it's less than 10% and if we're being really honest even that 10% is almost a glowing reflection because most of the people within the partners aren't logging in.
10:33
So yes, okay, you might have your sales user or your marketing user but you don't have the business.
10:38
You don't have the sales, marketing, technical and operations all logging in for their different functions.
10:43
And realistically if you want to build that communication flow and that engagement process it has to be driven in a proactive way that gets rid of all of that friction that we're currently describing.
10:54
Yeah, that's a very valid point and I think that's maybe the final point why partners are not really using it a lot is they already have a lot of systems themselves.
11:03
They have a CRM, they have marketing automation, they have their social media channels and things like that.
11:09
So therefore the users who want to get into your portal are already managing that and then also have to do that for many other vendors.
11:16
And therefore as a result of that you see very often that oftentimes, for example, the buyers are logging into the portal but that's only once a deal has already been done.
11:25
For example for deal registration or doing MDF claims for budgets, et cetera.
11:30
And I think that's very important to get your core business processes in a structured way but it doesn't drive the behavior you want which is driving more revenue.
11:42
No.
11:43
And the last bit that I would say, and it's something I've learned a lot from a sort of customer success capability, is within customer success products.
11:51
You have a framework that takes people from A to Z, and we don't see that a lot in partner platforms, because what's happening instead is people are going, oh, here is just all the marketing content, or here's all the sales content.
12:03
It's like well no, if I log in as a first time user, as a sales I want to go through the training and then I want to see how I do deal reg and I want to be taken and guided through those processes, not just it's made available.
12:15
Because if I'm going to have to root around for it and I'm not really sure if that first experience is bad, I can promise you I'm never locking back in.
12:23
And I know this is true because when I was a polycom funded head I literally had to take partners through training courses on the portal.
12:31
Fortunately that portal actually worked fairly well but it was only because I was proactively pushing partners to make that happen continuously that it happened and if I didn't push again, they would never lock back in.
12:42
And that was a fairly well designed I've seen some absolute horror stories through the market.
12:46
What you need is a far more ingrained process that is dealing with partners and their time as if it's incredibly valuable and making sure any time spent within the partner portal is valuable to their process and their success and like you say, ultimately helping them grow revenue.
13:03
Yeah, you always need to put the partner experience first and the first impression is super important.
13:08
Indeed.
13:09
If you bring them into the portal while it's completely not the experience they expected, then you've lost them forever, probably.
13:15
Yeah, exactly.
13:16
And I think we're used to, well, we used to Google, we used to even Chat GPT now.
13:21
We used to just typing in a question and getting the answer that we need.
13:25
I'm not going to go combing through data sheets, that whole world is dying now.
13:30
And now we've got far, far higher expectations.
13:33
And if you're not able to give me the answer and the information that I need quickly, I'm far more likely to sell your competitive product because probably I sell both brands and suddenly that's a very clear example for how a poorly designed process will end up leading to churn.
13:49
Because if I can find the answer easier or in a more enjoyable way somewhere else, I'm just more likely to sell that product.
13:55
Yeah, we see that happening more and more now.
13:58
I was just thinking maybe interesting as well, like we looked at it from the partner perspective now, but maybe one step backwards as well.
14:05
What is the reasons or what are the reasons for a vendor to buy a partner portal?
14:10
Yeah, I mean the three key pillars are how do I scale effectively, how do I drive partner engagement and ultimately, how do I grow revenue?
14:18
Right, at the end of the day, the ROI metric that we're always after is time and all money.
14:24
And so time is in your scalability and your engagement and obviously money is in your revenue process.
14:29
And so for me, the best thing I can do is take the really well designed tools that I've built and take them en masse to the entire channel so that the partners proactively use those tools to help them become more engaged, to understand the products more effectively and help them sell more.
14:45
Yeah, I agree there.
14:46
And I think if I look at those three pillars, indeed, if I look at the first one, I think that's the main one that portals are actually doing a good job at and that is actually necessary if you're scaling your channel to do such a thing.
15:00
So for example, things like lead and deal registration, MDF budget claims and payments, et cetera, content library, those were the things pre portal.
15:10
So to say that we're all in separate spreadsheets in Google Drive or Microsoft SharePoint, whatever, it's been all over the place.
15:19
And we really needed one central place for the partners to do such interactions with the vendors and to make sure that it's all aligned in the correct process.
15:29
And I think indeed from that perspective there, the portals are actually necessary, right?
15:33
Like those type of functionality, you need that in such a way.
15:37
Yeah, you need good data capture and you need a way of passing down information.
15:43
Clearly now, like anything, the idea is fine.
15:46
It's all about the execution.
15:46
Right?
15:48
And that starts to be where you start to see some pieces of software or some pieces of execution are far better than others because yes, at some point it is just how do I get the name and the information of the partner?
15:59
How do I get them to download a price list?
16:01
How can I get them to download content, how can I get them to download sales enablement tools?
16:06
Yes, all of that stuff works because it allows me to just effectively dump content into a singular place and pass out very effectively.
16:14
Where I think we're now going to start to analyze performance and the possibilities of improvement is if you can do that very very well and proactively into partners and really streamline that process, suddenly you're going to drive engagement way up.
16:27
And we know engagement is directly correlated to revenue.
16:31
Yeah.
16:31
And I think that's where immediately we touch upon the main problem of a portal.
16:35
A portal has zero value add in driving engagement and eventually also growing your revenue.
16:41
And it always makes me think of I was last year I had a discussion, a panel together with Jay McBain, but also with Chip Rogers and Jimmy Hatzel was called The Death of Portals Live on Partner Hacker.
16:54
And there Jay said something which really resonated with me and he said the vendors have always thought like if we build it, they will come the partners.
17:02
But the reality is that they don't.
17:04
Because if you would remove the mandatory actions that a portal has to do.
17:08
So I always called it like the skill actions, lead and deal registration, MDF request, et cetera.
17:15
Then there would be zero logging left in the efforts portal.
17:18
And I think if you look at it from that perspective, then the portal is very reactive, right.
17:22
The partners come there once they have already done something, they've already worked on an idea for a campaign or they are very close to closing a deal and they need to register it now.
17:33
But it doesn't trigger the right behavior or enable your partners to drive them towards first engagement, but then very important towards revenue.
17:41
And what we always talk about self sustainable revenue.
17:44
And I think that's where the big gap is because partners are not coming.
17:47
And that's the thing.
17:49
As vendors, we really need to rethink.
17:51
If partners are not coming to us, how can we bring our content and our activities to them instead of them.
17:58
Yeah, I think I'll say it even easier.
18:00
Partner pool tools just don't work.
18:01
They really don't drive revenue the right way because frankly, I'm not logging in.
18:06
And I know this because I've worked within distribution and half of the logins that you're seeing are distributors logging in on the partner's behalf because what happens is go, oh, I don't know my password.
18:16
All right, I'll just send an email to the distributor to do the deal read for me.
18:19
And that happens constantly because there is no inherent value in just having a thing where I'm going to fill in a form.
18:27
You might as well use Google forms for it.
18:29
It just doesn't work because there's no intrinsic value, especially to salespeople.
18:34
And I've got to stress this point, the salespeople are the ones that you want because ultimately they're going to help control your revenue along with marketing.
18:42
And most of the partner portals are operational functions because they're poorly executed on.
18:48
And so if you want to drive revenue and therefore you need to drive engagement, the partner portal just doesn't make that happen.
18:55
I genuinely think you'd be better off sending a letter to someone's desk because they're far more likely to open it and read it.
19:01
Most of the content libraries, the people you actually want in there.
19:04
So the marketing people, the salespeople who needed to actually present it and bring it to the end user are not using that one.
19:11
No, exactly.
19:11
And I just think what you really need to understand and what we all need to be striving for is partner engagement.
19:18
Right.
19:18
Because if your partners are highly engaged, they understand not just who to sell to, but how to sell your product effectively.
19:25
They are more likely to quote it, they're more likely to spec it, they're more likely to be talking about your product and ultimately that will grow revenue, especially at a macro level.
19:33
And so you've got to orientate your portal decision and your portal process and your partner program design around that target.
19:41
You want to recruit and enable partners, ultimately get them to self sustaining revenue.
19:45
And your portal is an important part to making that happen at scale if well executed.
19:51
But if we're being really honest, 99% of them do not work because they're just not getting the logins.
19:57
10% is awful, especially considering even within the 10% it isn't the entire partner base.
20:03
It's going to be one or two people who are doing the mandatory actions like deal reg that you're talking about.
20:09
Yeah, and that's really where we need to rethink and are we approaching it in the right way?
20:15
And there I think there's a lot of improvements to be made because we've tried this now for 20 years.
20:21
I think probably already longer that's the time portals have been around.
20:25
But in essence, they are not fixing the problem that we want to be fixed.
20:29
That we have partners that come into our program and we help them as soon as possible to save sustaining revenue and from there and also make sure they keep expanding and they keep growing within our program.
20:40
Yeah, we were having a discussion with Alan Adler the other day and we were sort of talking around the importance of channel strategy.
20:48
In my view, channel strategy is very, very simple.
20:51
You want to get the maximum amount of partners you can to self sustaining revenue.
20:55
And by self sustaining revenue I mean they can find, close, manage and renew their own opportunities almost independently.
21:04
There's always an enable of reenablement and management that happens to your channel and you want that, but you want it to be as close, as self sustaining as possible.
21:13
Ask yourself does a portal get you there?
21:15
And you know the answer is no.
21:16
And so if that is the channel strategy which I firmly believe it is, then you know the portal is not the right tool to get you there.
21:24
So you've got to start asking questions around.
21:26
Okay, how do we get there?
21:27
Far more dynamically and realistically, it's a paradigm shift away from partner portals into something that far more engages with partners, drives genuine log ons, helps them to be successful and gets them to self sustaining revenue even faster.
21:44
I think the impact of the way we are handling it now is that we are losing so many of the partners in our program.
21:51
Like it keeps blowing my mind.
21:52
But in the average partner program 80% of partners is inactive.
21:56
So this means for every 100 partners we pour into the program ad is dropping out somewhere along that partner journey.
22:02
So whether it's in onboarding or in training, in co marketing, co-selling, we are losing them somewhere along the journey.
22:09
And therefore so many resources in the channel go wasted because we keep recruiting, we keep adding more partners but we're losing them at the same pace almost as that we are recruiting them.
22:19
And I think that really needs to shift because then we'll get so much more ROI out of our partner programs.
22:25
Yeah, I mean it's pretty obvious how you get to that number, right?
22:29
You go, I'm going to go and try and recruit 1000 partners.
22:32
Well you'll only really be able to get in front of let's say 50% of them.
22:35
So that's 500.
22:36
And then from onboarded to engaged to first deal to self sustaining revenue.
22:42
There's a failure rate in each one of those.
22:44
The shorter you can make to the point to self sustaining revenue the higher retention that you're going to have of your channel.
22:51
The benefits of high retention channels, they're leaner.
22:53
You have to recruit less partners to be successful.
22:56
Those partners are more bought in because they're not having to share the pie as wide.
23:00
There's enough deals to keep everyone happy and everyone excited.
23:03
You can hire less cams.
23:05
You have better touch everyone's bought in.
23:07
It's faster, it's much more agile.
23:09
If you need to pivot and change direction, you want to run a lean channel and a lean channel is a self sustaining channel.
23:15
And so for me, the strategy is ultimately clear.
23:18
How do I get and deliver as quickly as possible a self sustaining channel?
23:23
And for that you're not going to use a partner portal.
23:26
So I think the conversation that we all need to be having as channel leaders is, is there a better way?
23:31
Yeah, I agree because if we find that better way, then we will get more out of our existing partners.
23:36
It will help us to more easily attract new partners as well that fit into your program and have your right ideal partner profile.
23:44
And from there I'll really give you all the insights so you can keep optimizing and grow your channel as a whole.
23:49
Yeah, you want better data.
23:51
You want to be helping proactively your partners to be successful.
23:54
I've never met a channel that wasn't successful when they prioritised their partner success.
24:00
So they really understood the partners go to market, they understood how they fit into it, they understood what sales and marketing tools they needed to provide to help them to be successful.
24:08
You can understand that's completely different language than I'm going to register you.
24:12
Please, can you then sign up to my portal and then please, can you download the content that you think is good and then use it maybe?
24:18
And then maybe we'll be successful together.
24:20
That's not a partnership.
24:22
Let's be blunt.
24:23
You're just hoping they're going to download content and be successful.
24:26
That's not a way to build a continuous channel strategy and it's certainly not going to deliver self sustaining revenue, which is the goal.
24:33
So we have to relook at how we deliver it.
24:36
Yeah, I think that's a great way to wrap up this episode because the next week's episode we're actually going to dive in, what, three shifts we need to make to actually get our partners to self sustainable revenue.
24:48
But more specifically, once we get them into our program to immediately give them the proactive support and enablement they need to guide them through that partner journey as well.
24:57
So today we discussed why partners are not visiting the portal.
25:01
Also what the actual purpose is of why vendors are buying a portal where portals are working, or what functionality is actually of a portal you need within your partner program.
25:12
But also very important, where are the portals failing to really bring your partner program to success and to bring your partners to self sustainable revenue.
25:21
So I'm really looking forward to next week's episode where we're going to dive into the three shifts that we need to make to get our partner program to the next level and to really help our partners from the get go once they enter your program.
25:34
So thanks for today Alex, and thanks to our listeners.
25:36
And very much looking forward to the next one.