Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / Torben Sebens- Bridging Innovation and Legacy in the Channel

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Torben Sebens- Bridging Innovation and Legacy in the Channel · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: My name is Alex Whitford and I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanix, and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest Torben.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: How are you doing?
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: I'm very well.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: I'm super excited to be here with Partnership Unraveled and looking forward to a good conversation.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, look, I often joke that it's one of my favorite parts of the week because I get a free channel MBA and I can just get to grill people on channel.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: So maybe, torben for the uninitiated you could give us a little bit of background about where you've come from.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sure.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: So I've been in IT for three decades in fact, in a variety of roles, started in hardware and then later moved into software, and most recently I've been on the sales side and the client side of the equation.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: But for the entirety of my career I've always worked closely with partners and the wider ecosystem, in fact.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: So I think you have a bit of a unique view.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I always really enjoy speaking to salespeople who've come from an engineering background.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I always think that's a really interesting makeup, very analytical, very sort of process-minded.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Maybe.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: From that sort of analytical perspective, how do you view the role of partners in adding extra value and what do you believe is the best way to sort of keep partners engaged and on their toes?
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: So I mean I'd say you know, I've always been fascinated by technology.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: I have an engineering degree as a background, but I'm open on the sales and communication side of technology to explain to customers, to partners and in collaboration often with partners, what is the premise of this technology, what can it do to solve your challenges and pains that you have, and so on.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: And particularly around partnerships, I'd say that there are a few things.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: First and foremost, partners, in my view, have always been a multiplier of the intersection between the client and their pains and the technology vendors that I've worked for.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: So that means there is typically an existing IT landscape.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of complexity in that and in fact there's a big technical debt and legacy out there that needs to be managed right.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: So I think partners play a critical role in mapping those two ends together, particularly with the rate of innovation coming these days, that you can ensure that the customer ultimately gets that business outcome that they are looking for, but with the technology from a particular vendor or set of vendors and with a partner or multiple partners in the play to make sure that actually comes to fruition.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: So I think that that's number one for starters.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: I think the second point is around the landscape has changed enormously in the last few years, right?
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: I mean 10, 15 years ago we didn't have hyperscalers on the marketplace.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: They've come and risen to Stardom and becoming very big players there in the space and that means that on one side there's a consolidation that has gone on.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: You know, a lot of IT has been concentrated on fewer partners and bigger players, partly through growth, natural growth from some of these new newcomers, but also because existing larger partners are maybe acquiring smaller partners to acquire more specialist knowledge or better capabilities, ie having a wider portfolio.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: So I think that's number two.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: And number three is around.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: You know, what do a partner add to the equation on the client, right?
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: That's typically know-how, it's advisory, it's an intermediary who typically through working with multiple vendors, knowing what's going on with other clients, they can bring that back to a particular client situation and thus add value in the advisory part at the beginning of a sales cycle.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: But certainly also we see clients, particularly in the marketplace like it is today.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: It's a bit depressed the cost of a sales cycle.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: But certainly also we see clients particularly in the marketplace like it is today.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: It's a bit depressed, the cost of money is high.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: You know, I think clients are looking to partners to more be the single point of contact, for support for moving an application or workload to a particular place, or even just to carry some of the risk together with the client.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: So I think these are some of the things I hear particularly from clients at the moment, in the last couple of years, to be honest.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: So I think one of the things that's really interesting in terms of how this sort of landscape is going to continue to change.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: A lot of our guests talk a lot about the fact that there's just more and more brands who have high-quality technology right, and so maybe the worlds of 20, 30 years ago, where there was a few very key players and then not that many others, I think if you look even at sort of cybersecurity, there's 20, 30 cybersecurity brands who broadly all do very, very similar things and have very nuanced differences.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: I sort of see that the role of partners is becoming that, that trusted advisor, to a different degree.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: The old joke of you never get fired for buying cisco, I think, while still true to a certain degree, certainly in the enterprise, I think, as more technology comes to market, having that partner to have skin in the game with you to say, hey, we believe that this is the best solution in this sort of area, for this vertical, and here's our reasoning why and, like you say, taking on some of that responsibility of migration adoption that I think is sort of critical and I sort of see that growing over the next five years as more and more brands enter the market and have this sort of channel strategy.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: The partners are going to be this sort of mechanism to divert revenue from one place to another.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Is that sort of something that you've seen transition over the last 15 years?
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think I sometimes call it technology fatigue, right?
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: I mean, take the security space, for instance.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: There are thousands of vendors and thousands of products, right, and security in many respects have been added on and bolted on to existing solution and kind of mushrooming into something that looked like it's safe now, right.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: But with the current cyber threats that we see and the speed of them, right, it's actually quite difficult to manage, right?
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: So I think back to my first point.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: I think you know specialist knowledge consolidation these things may mean that you can, you can, you can advise a customer deeper, for instance on the security space.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: It could also be on other spaces as well, right, where the partner then plays that filter or that aggregator of knowledge and then actually become able to advise the customer.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: What is the best for that particular customer, which might be very different from customer A to customer B, because they have a different landscape, they have a different history, they've bought different things in the past, and so on.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: And I think that's where advisory partners have an increasingly important role to play, whether they're small, whether they're medium or whether they're large, right, but they need to have a breadth across a portfolio and multiple vendors to be able to advise a breadth across a portfolio and multiple vendors to be able to advise the customer in a balanced way.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: I think one of the other shifts that we discussed previously is how the role of sort of SIs and now even GSIs have really changed the market.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: I'd love if you could expand a little bit on how you've seen GSIs really sort of shift, that enterprise motion.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I've worked with all routes to market during my career over a long time, but particularly spent a very in-depth time over multiple years in multiple companies building the route of global SIs and SIs in various capacities.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: I think going way back maybe 15 years, 20 years, I mean SI route to market in my view, was considered a bit of luxury.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: There were many vendors that didn't have an SI route to market or something.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll get to that once we have the other, more classic distribution, reseller routes up and running and so on, and I was fortunate enough to be able to build with my team's programs and capability and recruiting partners where you need to speak to them in a different way.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: What I think has changed is that the clients focus differently today than they do just when you go a few years back, to be honest, right.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: So A I see two trends.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: One A trend is either they internalize a lot of the IT that they have and they really want to grow competence and so on, and they want to keep IT in-house.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: Now, that's not a new thought or radical in a sense, but there are some customers that really do that, also because of regulations, gdpr, and we need to keep our data close to us and we cannot put it into a public cloud, for instance.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: And the second trend is then other customers saying actually, it is not that core to my business.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: It's still essential, but there are people who can do that better and they would typically go to a partner.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: Now that could be a global SI, it can be a hyperscaler, it could be an outsourcer of some sort, right.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: So I think customers have become more aware of what they want to do with IT and how much they want to be in the control seat or driver's seat doing that, or rather not, and then give it away and pay for that.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: So I think that's one thing I've seen.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: The other thing is and maybe particularly in the larger partners, they're increasingly acquiring different players, smaller partners and so on, who have particular skills.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: So if you look at a GSI or a large SI today, skills right.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: So if you look at a GSI or large SI today, they probably do things that they were not at all capable or even prepared to do just five or 10 years ago, because the customers on one side also go out and say I cannot deal with a dozen of partners, I need to deal with less than a handful of partners, so the ones I choose to work with.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: They need to be able to do more than they used to be and they get more diversified into multiple vendors and domains of expertise and so on Right.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: And if you look at the smaller partners, at the same time they I'd say they need to constantly maintain their skills and grow their skills to stay current, right, but at the same time also they have the ability and I think that's an opportunity for them to develop domain expertise, be it again, in security, it could be in cloud migrations, it could be in application migration and development and so on, or AI even, for that matter, right.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: So I think it's important for every business leader inside a partner, whether it's a small, medium or big partner, figure out what you do really well and where you kind of have street cred, and then how do you double down on that?
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: Because the customers are going to increasingly come and ask for advisory and capabilities and they want to be well advised, obviously, and that gives you a chance also to be one of those few that a larger or midsize customer would actually choose to go with and stay with, excellent.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: I think one of the big shifts that we've seen which is sort of, I think, happened almost in parallel to GSI's really taking over and delivering a new market is how now hyperscalers have also done a radical shift and now are influencing everything from SMB all the way up to that super enterprise.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: How do you think hyperscalers impact the role of traditional partners and what advice would you give to those partners in terms of adapting to this new sort of influence?
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: So I mean hyperscalers are, you know, in IT terms, a relatively newcomer on the block.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: They've been here for a decade or so, right, and they've done incredible business and grown to become market players in general.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: The hyperscalers themselves if you look at what they're doing at the moment right, they are.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: I think they came in saying we can standardize and we can do things at scale, and that was attractive a few years ago, before COVID-19 and so on.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: A lot of customers looking at how do I go to the public cloud or how do I go to a hybrid cloud strategy, and so on.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: I think what we see now also with more regulatory controls, compliance and so on, coming in around data security and privacy and so on, they tend to be more going towards how can I create local data centers in local markets, within national borders, how do they advise around specific legislation and regulation that might be specific to within the EU or with the US or other markets, and so on.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: So I think for sure they have a play, yeah, but I think they realize that I cannot just be a mass factory.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: I actually need to be close to the customer and I need to comply with some of the things that are close to the customer and where the customer is more on the hook today than they were just a few years back.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: So that's one point right.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: For smaller partners, I'd say again, consultative advisory around choosing the right cloud provider.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: If you do decide, as a client, to go and put your data or part of your workloads to a cloud provider, which one is the right one?
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: What is it I need that gives me the most business benefit by outsourcing part of my IT or putting part of my IT out there.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: I think smaller partners have a role and a critical role to play there, and they need to then work with Google, amazon, ibm and so on in the sense that they can advise their customers in a balanced and neutral approach and make sure they come up with the best solution for the workload at hand.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: Right, this requires a number of things, obviously, right, and that's where the homework is, I would say.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: I mean you need technical expertise between cloud providers, you need legal and judicial understanding of local regulations and so on.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: You need some commercial savviness to understand how can I make money with that and also what's the benefit for the client, and also, for sure, can you help the customer actually with a how.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: How do you migrate?
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: How do you actually move their workloads or data to the appropriate cloud provider that is chosen then and maybe even also partly run it in some kind of outsourced or managed service capability?
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: Right, and rarely, I would say, a client has all that knowledge in-house single handedly.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: They will need to go and talk to people and figure out how do we cover our bases here, and I think that's where a partner plays a critical role.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: They see different type of customers, different type of industries and they work with different vendors on that.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: Right, so that.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: So that's that's key.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: And maybe last but not least so, cloud adoption is is mixed.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: Still today, it's still kind of a nascent technology.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: A lot has been moved to the cloud and things are moving back now, right, so, depending on both regulatory matters but also the culture of where you come from, I work with very mature regions Western Europe, the US and so on.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: I've also worked a lot with emerging markets and the culture and perception of do I really want to put IT and data out in a public cloud domain somewhere?
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: It's not as given or sure thing.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: Right, we're going to go do that.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: In fact, we might want to keep it in-house still and not go to cloud providers, right?
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: So I think that's also where a partner plays a role in figuring out what's the temperature of the market and how important is it for that client to actually go to cloud versus maybe building a private cloud on-premise.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: So in the partner space we've had GSIs as a sort of radical shift.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: In the vendor space we've had hyperscalers, then sort of elevate that shift even more.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: And I think the last one that is, I think we'd sort of be remiss if we didn't talk about the technological shift that sort of AI represents.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: How do you see this landscape?
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Sort of dictating part of the behavior?
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: So I mean there's no doubt.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: I mean generative AI and what all the promises associated to that, you know, is the next big thing.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: No doubt about it, and in fact it's going to change IT forever.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: Right, it will never be the same, but, you know, intelligence and machines being able to predict and suggest things that a human being had to do before is big and new.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: It's still very early days, I would say.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: I mean, I see similarities to having been three decades in IT.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Right, you have the initial hype, everybody gets excited, a few pre-invest and so on, but it takes a few years right before you really get to mainstream main stage of that, right.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: So today, in fact, you know, yes, there are lots of tests, there are a lot of bots out there doing simple things and so on, but the big projects, the big models, they are still missing, right, and that needs to be tested, not only you know, for the sake of testing them, but also at scale.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: And then they need to go and be deployed, right.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: So I think that's the next big step, I would say, and it's going to be super interesting.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: I'm very excited about that.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Personally, I'd say where partners have a shot right to be interesting in front of clients is, again, they typically talk to multiple vendors one, two, three, four, five.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: They hear the stories from different perspectives and they also talk to a lot of clients.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: So I think there is an opportunity there.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: Maybe I'll say hey form some small working teams, either within the company of a partner or even between colleagues, between different partners in the ecosystem.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Say how can we make something new out of that, to be creative and bold in front of clients who are struggling to catch up with even the generation of technology that were just before AI, right?
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: So I think that's where our partners really have an opportunity to get together, think some new thoughts about what this could be and what it could look like.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: And then, most importantly, I would say it's about show and tell, right.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: I mean, if you can show what you're talking about to a customer, I think that's a very hands-on way to be able to be meaningful to a customer.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: Here's the pain, here's the problem that we're trying to solve for that customer, right?
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: If you can tell a story around how you're going to fix that, you can demo a solution.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: And again, it might not be just one vendor and one partner, it might be a compilation of multiple players who will propose the right thing for that client, because problems are complex today.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: I think that is still king to be able to make it relatable and understandable for a client to see that and maybe even inspire them to say, oh, I hadn't thought about that.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: How can we do that even better together now that you tell me we can do such and such?
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: So I think that's the opportunity for partners today and I'd say, hey, don't be shy, be creative, take a bit of a risk and also maybe pre-invest a bit of money into creating some of these solutions and demoing them, even though there's no guarantee of winning.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: But I think that's one way of standing out in the crowd today Because, as you rightly said earlier, the offer on technology is big.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of people with roughly the same technologies that are competing.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: How do you stand out?
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: And I think that's one way of standing out being creative, not being shy, and being able to show what you're offering to the customer.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, in a pure sort of economics standpoint right, what the internet and technology gives you is that a few people generate enormous leverage and sort of win big.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: And I think the thing that's really interesting about the AI marketplace is that even fewer people will win even bigger.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: But there's always a bit of an upsetting.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: The apple cart, right, it's not the winner of pre-internet, isn't the winner of post-internet.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: And so I think the same is say will be even more true of AI, which is, the winners that were winning pre-AI are not necessarily the same ones that will win.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: I think you can almost guarantee they won't be.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: And so I think the thing that I find really interesting is there's a real build propositions and technologies and solve really deep and specific customer problems, and the ones that do that well and become very, very obsessed around how they provide that value to the market, they will accelerate so fast because of how complicated the solution is to solve, but how scalably you can solve it, because AI means that, hey, we have one hammer and we can crack many nuts, right, there's a way that we can do this in a very efficient, effective manner.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: So I'm very excited to sort of see how that percolates through the channel.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and to your point, I mean, it's the same with building a business, right.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: Whatever got you from zero to one million, or from one to 10 million or from 10 to 100 million, is not going to bring you from 10 to 100 of 100 to 500 million, right.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: It's a different recipe that you need, right?
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: And I have a quite extensive background in open source, for instance, and I'm a big believer not only from the software development model of open source, but also in how we go around trying to crack some of these very complex problems that the world is facing today.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: I see vendors, partners and clients be more or less on the same side of the table.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: Right, so you sit there and you try to solve the problem together as one team, and not hey, somebody wants to be first or somebody wants to make more money on solving that problem.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: I mean, the problems are too complex today, right, so the power of the open source principles in terms of how you address and your team to solve these problems, I think is the way forward first and foremost, and that's also back to channel programs and how you connect partners.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: I've been with several large brand companies in my career and it's always been difficult, but it's gotten better over time to connect partners within the network or within the ecosystem, to actually go and do something together.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: Clearly everybody wants to win the business separately, but actually typically the pie gets bigger and that means there's a cut for everybody so you can create more interesting solutions.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: Maybe you know also more complex solutions, but addressing these very complex problems and there's a there's a slice of the pie for more players and ultimately you'll end up probably with a happier customer and also a solution that probably can scale to other clients who have similar types of problems to solve.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we've had a few sort of AWS senior leaders on the podcast and I'm becoming quite obsessed with sort of AWS's framework for building business because I think it's so uniquely in, in some way unselfish, because it's like so customer focused, and so how do we do right by the customer and pinning everything back by that.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: But, like you say, when you have that obsession around great technology and customer obsession, the pie gets so enormous that it doesn't matter that you give away 85%.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: I remember hearing Jeff Bezos say you know I owned 18% of Amazon, but that meant I made 84% of the money for everyone else.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: But once you hit that huge amount of scale, it's like, well, who cares if you only own 18%, it sort of doesn't matter, right, it's 18% of a trillion dollars and you're very, very wealthy at the end of the game.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: And I sort of think in that mode of like, how do we just do what's right?
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Then the rewards come, and maybe that's the sort of right way to pivot onto our last question.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: So often the number one challenge in the channel is channel conflict between direct teams and AEs, partners versus partners, and it becomes very messy and we know what's right for the customer, which is to bring the customer the right experience.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: How do you sort of have that in your mind and then orientate direct and indirect sales teams to sort of foster that collaborative culture?
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: So before going into that, I have a good story on that I just want to recognize that I've saw partners in one of the companies coming out of VMware, where partners had some really open-minded leaders reaching out, sharing voluntarily some of the IP and what they are doing, where you could take dual approaches.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: One is I'm giving away the gold nuggets and the crown jewels of the company, but I think this partner that I have in mind have gotten tenfold back, probably, or more, right, and also that the same partner has been able to create partnerships with other players that are equally good, equally well certified, have all the accreditations and so on, and they were able to create new markets and go into new customers together.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: They even created companies you know joint companies together to do that.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: So I think it's powerful to see how far the partner ecosystem has evolved in terms of also being collaborative beyond your own.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: You know your own ledger and your own company front door and so on.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: So that's that to your question.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: Around.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: You know channel conflict and you know sales, sales people, I think.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: I think the salesperson being king or queen of the account is is dead since long time.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Selling is a team sport, right, but you will still come across channel conflicts for whatever reason.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: Either more systemic reasons like the rules and of engagement are unclear or not even formulated.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: That's a typical one.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: Another one is are the terms and conditions by route to market?
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Are they clear?
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: Are they fair?
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: And actually I've been in several companies where, because they were created at different times and either the OEM IHV route was the one that got created first, they got super benefits because the company was at an early stage and prepared to give more away.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: And then later you create T's and C's for other routes to market and they get more restricted because you're in a more comfortable position with where your business is when you start launching other routes to market and programs to market and programs right.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: So I think I've seen examples of you know fair T's and C's and where even you rework the T's and C's between the routes to market so you avoid some of the channel conflict you know in its own right and I think that that's the right way to do it, but it's incredibly hard to do.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: But if you do it you might end up having much more happy partners that are going to come to you for business right.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: And then I have a story around a particular account rep in one of my sales teams, not too far behind in history right, where I had a situation where he received a partner registration through the partner program for opportunity registration and so on.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: He was like I want to take this client direct, I don't want to collaborate with a partner, and so on and it's not that he per se was super channel unfriendly and so on.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: But he was like no, it's complicated and the complexity is bigger and so on and so on.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: And I just asked him one question really, and I was like how much of what needs to happen in this sales cycle and in in this project can you do on your own right?
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: Uh, can you do everything and are you prepared to do everything?
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: Then you can do.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: Then you can take it, you know, alone through the sales cycle and you can go win the client.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: It might be an okay project, uh, but at the same time, think about what time and value of your time is right in terms of does it make sense to team right?
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Does it make sense to actually have a conversation with this partner who have registered an opportunity and then figure out what does he or she do in that equation and what do you do?
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: And maybe you actually get to a better project, maybe even a bigger project and for sure, most of the time, actually a more happy customer who is content with the deliverable of that solution that ultimately gets delivered right.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: So this guy I was still in contact with him today.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: I mean he asked himself that question every time right, where do I scale better?
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: By having a partner involved, doing some of the things that either is not natural for me to do or is a little bit difficult to do, and frankly, I don't want to do it right.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: Whichever of the three is your preferred reason?
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: And then you see, you know, channel conflict gradually.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: You know, minimizing.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Will it go away forever?
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: No, it probably will not.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: There will always be someone or somebody who thinks they can do it better themselves and who wants to do it fast and quick.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: But last but not least, in that one I mean celebrate the joint wins.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: That's my recommendation.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: Celebrate and call out the joint wins and recognize who did what and that the project probably was a bigger success, was done faster, we learned a lot and we can go and replicate that with other customers.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: Right, so be be vocal and and and communicative about it.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: So others see that, okay, I didn't think that that ae would have been partner friendly and gone with a with a partner in that deal, and then suddenly you come back, you know, three, six months later and and you celebrate a joint success and you get the people who were questioning to uh to talk about it and, uh, the non-believers start believing.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: So that that's my recommendation there.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I, I I sort of share your, your sort of story, because I think the thing that I've always really tried to do when evangelizing, working with the channel is build cynical reasons for moral things.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: I, hey, the partners created the deal, yeah, but I want to take it direct and I'm always like perfect, here's what's going to happen.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: I'm going to persuade you mathematically that it's right to work with the partner.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: Like, hey, increased scale, instead of closing five deals direct, you're going to end doing 100 of the work.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: We're going to close seven deals indirect.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: And so there is a cynical mathematical reason, but also there's a moral reason.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Right, hey, these people are working just as hard as much as you believe.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: It's your customer, it's their customer too.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: If you go against them, you now have a competitor.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: You've added a competitor into a sales cycle, because if they're not positioning your product, they're going position a product.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: We can find a lot of moral reasons why, hey, we should include them, because they're providing value.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: And then we win with the cynical and the moral, and that's the best thing to do, because over time you do, you start to celebrate the wins, and even the people who are most cynical, who most hate working with the channel, you can win a large portion of them across because they start to see the sort of cynical upside in there.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: And I I always find that if you sort of over index on the morality part of it or you know, hey, we should do it because it's the right thing, it never wins well enough.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: Whereas if I can build the mathematical answer, that's where salespeople start to gravitate towards hey, this actually makes, this makes financial sense for me.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that makes absolutely sense.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: And in fact, if I can add to that, I mean I've challenged my sales reps who, you know, sometimes had not enough pipeline, to be honest.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: So they were very protective about the one, two, maybe three deals they had in a year, right, and they spent a lot of time on those deals.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: In fact, I want to challenge you to have an abundance of opportunities that there's not enough time in a day or in a week or in a month to actually work on all these opportunities at different stages.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: But if you work with partners, if you extend your sales team and your technical pre-sales team with people outside of the perimeter, you can actually work 20, 25 opportunities and they all move forward because people are doing different things.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: Your role as an AE, as an account executive, will change a little bit because you need to manage people indirectly You're not the manager of them and so on.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: But being protectionistic around one or two opportunities and that might be the strategy occasionally but having we all need more pipeline at any given time, right, having an abundance of pipeline that you physically run out of time unless you partner in your team to have people help work on some of these things when you don't, and I see that that's where partners fit in.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: If I have one wish to the CRM vendors and so on, that is to even make it easier for partners and vendors to work together on the same sales opportunities.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: So, again, sharing data and having interconnected system, it's become a lot better in recent years.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: But I mean you go a few years back and it was like our thing our system on our firewall and the partner there, and it was a nightmare to co-manage an opportunity through the sales stages and so on.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: It's getting better but I mean that's one of the practical applications of it.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: So an abundance of pipeline and better CRM systems to collaborate and co-manage sales opportunities.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: I think that's one of the ways forward to actually team to win more.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Awesome, torben, thank you so much.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: I think that's been a wonderful insight into sort of how the landscape's changed from a partner perspective, from a brand and a technology perspective, and we've also ended on a positive note about improved collaboration.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: It's been really enjoyable having you on perspective and we've also ended on a positive note about improved collaboration.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: Uh, thank you so much for your time.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: It's been really enjoyable having you on thank you for having me and, uh, good luck to everybody out there listening.
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: Thank you.