Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 053 - Will Yafi of TIDWIT - Mastering Partner Enablement and the Ecosystem Landscape

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053 - Will Yafi of TIDWIT - Mastering Partner Enablement and the Ecosystem Landscape · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Rick van den Bosch: Welcome back to Parknships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of parknships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:15
  Rick van den Bosch: My name is Rick van der Bosch and I'm the CEO and founder of ChenEx, and I'm here together with Will Yafi, CEO and founder of TIDWIT.
• 0:22
  Rick van den Bosch: Will, how are you doing today?
• 0:24
  Will Yafi: Awesome, I'm loving Utrecht.
• 0:26
  Will Yafi: Thanks for inviting me.
• 0:27
  Rick van den Bosch: Yeah, you came here all the way from the US, or actually not right?
• 0:31
  Rick van den Bosch: You just came from your holiday.
• 0:32
  Rick van den Bosch: From what I heard, Holiday quote.
• 0:35
  Will Yafi: Unquote.
• 0:35
  Will Yafi: I was working my butt off but it was awesome, always nice to be in Europe and had the chance to be in Germany and in France and Spain, and partially on business, partially also for pleasure, so mixing it all up, but I love it?
• 0:50
  Rick van den Bosch: Yeah, so great to hear, but it's what always happens right when you're on holiday, but still there's so much other stuff to do as well.
• 0:56
  Rick van den Bosch: What's the?
• 0:56
  Will Yafi: life of an entrepreneur.
• 0:57
  Will Yafi: I mean, you know we're founders and very exciting times and in a segment and in industry like ecosystems, and so there's a lot happening and you know the word is spreading and so the really exciting thing, for me at least, is it's spreading beyond the IT and we can talk a little bit more about that later.
• 1:16
  Will Yafi: But now there's industries getting involved and so very exciting times.
• 1:20
  Will Yafi: It's hard to stay away, you know, for vacations, so no complaints.
• 1:26
  Rick van den Bosch: Yeah, so much is happening, right.
• 1:27
  Rick van den Bosch: Oh yeah, we're going to talk all about parking enablement today and we've been chatting a lot about this already, so I'm excited to share a bit more with our listeners.
• 1:35
  Rick van den Bosch: But maybe, before we dive into the topic, I'd love to share a bit more about you Will Like.
• 1:40
  Rick van den Bosch: Can you share a bit more?
• 1:41
  Rick van den Bosch: How did you get involved in the channel with partnerships and eventually with enablement, and now you're company tit with actually?
• 1:49
  Will Yafi: Yeah, it's really interesting.
• 1:50
  Will Yafi: I mean, my I've been, my entire career has been in IT and my basically it goes back to the first company I launched and I'm a serial entrepreneur and the first one I launched was in Latin America.
• 2:04
  Will Yafi: Believe it or not, straight out of an MBA in the US, I decided to move to Latin America and launch a business there and and that was my first introduction into the enterprise and specifically into a lot of the enablement workloads right, that's how eventually, I got into the partnering world, because I was a partner.
• 2:27
  Rick van den Bosch: And.
• 2:27
  Will Yafi: I was a partner to some of the largest IT companies the Microsofts of this world, the IBMs and the compacts at the time, etc.
• 2:35
  Will Yafi: File Nets and etc.
• 2:38
  Will Yafi: And that's kind of how I came to it.
• 2:41
  Will Yafi: Eventually, you know, I sold off the company and and then started to do it a few years later, after a sabbatical, and I decided to come at it from the partnering world, but using all the knowledge that I had gained from the enablement world, and the enablement experience I had gained had been very industry focused.
• 3:03
  Will Yafi: So it gave me kind of like a nice matrix, if you will, of partnering enablement and industry.
• 3:10
  Will Yafi: And that's really been, you know the I guess you know the seeds that planted and grew into what did with us today.
• 3:20
  Rick van den Bosch: And how would you explain partner enablement to people?
• 3:23
  Rick van den Bosch: What is the definition for you and why is it so important when you are working with partners?
• 3:29
  Will Yafi: So I would divide partner enablement into the two words right Partners and enablement, and so let's start with the latter one, which is enablement.
• 3:38
  Will Yafi: Enablement to me, is all the functions that are needed to support eventual transaction right.
• 3:45
  Will Yafi: So it could be before a transaction is realized, during and after.
• 3:49
  Will Yafi: So there's a you know, in business there's a continuous hum that is needed to accompany the transaction, and we're talking here transactions between organizations or between B2C or whatever.
• 4:03
  Will Yafi: There's always something that you know a buyer needs to learn about before they commit to a purchase.
• 4:10
  Will Yafi: And that could be a small purchase.
• 4:12
  Will Yafi: You know you or I going into the, a T-Mobile store or whatever a mobile company, and buying a phone that we want to research about first.
• 4:19
  Will Yafi: Or it could be an enterprise wanting to buy an entire solution stack that you know has IS PAS and 아이ception in request.
• 4:27
  Will Yafi: All of this requires kind of like knowledge to be gained and in the meantime you're interacting with a lot of people or with a lot of systems.
• 4:36
  Will Yafi: So, to me, enablement is everything that needs to happen to drive towards that enablement.
• 4:44
  Will Yafi: Excuse me, that transaction.
• 4:47
  Will Yafi: So it's the before, the during and the after.
• 4:51
  Will Yafi: Once you've sold, what is it that you're doing in order to support it technical, all that kind of stuff and to create new transactions.
• 4:58
  Will Yafi: That, to me, is enablement.
• 5:00
  Will Yafi: The partner element, which is the first part of partner enablement, is to try and do this through a channel, and the reason for this and here I'd like to do a quick parentheses is, I think, you know, the younger generations that came into the internet didn't really understand the partnering world very well, because they came into the internet world which was fundamentally BDC.
• 5:25
  Will Yafi: Amazon, kind of, was all BDC, ebay is all BDC, google is BDC, all of these huge names, facebook is BDC they're all BDC, and so the channel didn't really have a place.
• 5:37
  Will Yafi: But when the cloud came out now you know, you started having people needing to sell to other businesses and all that kind of stuff, and they said, well, we could sell direct, but that's kind of hard, and so we need to go back to the channel model.
• 5:53
  Will Yafi: And so you need to kind of enable or empower your partner in the same way that you would do your own organization and your staff, and so you bring those two words together and now you need to do a whole bunch of work, what we call workloads, including what you guys do, which is like marketing, for example and stuff like that, and what we do, which is like you know little learning and the skilling and all that kind of stuff, all the way to tech support and stuff like that you need to put it all in a package and be able to deliver it, but through your channel and you want to deliver it in the same effective way as you would in-house.
• 6:27
  Will Yafi: And that is a big challenge and we can talk about some of the challenges, but that is what Fundamentally, partner Enabled is all about.
• 6:34
  Rick van den Bosch: Yeah, I really liked that and I think that's indeed we also talk about this topic a lot in this podcast, and what we always talk about is you really need to look at it as the full customer journey and all the touch points that you have to get a prospect from first contact all the way until fully implemented, a happy customer, renewing upselling, et cetera and there's so many touch points there and I think what we see, indeed a lot, is that even from a if you are doing that purely from a direct sales perspective, it's already very complex, right?
• 7:06
  Rick van den Bosch: We also at GenX, at TITWID, we are also selling to customers.
• 7:09
  Rick van den Bosch: We're constantly mapping that.
• 7:11
  Rick van den Bosch: But if you then need to train all those elements to your partners, it brings a whole new set of complexities around that.
• 7:18
  Will Yafi: You bet and then you have to figure out okay, I have partners that are transactional, I have partners that are more on the consulting side, I have partners that are more on the technology partner, and so you start going to different segmentation of partners and each one needs to be really enabled very differently.
• 7:33
  Will Yafi: So, are you gonna do it with Excel sheets?
• 7:35
  Will Yafi: Are you gonna be doing it with email?
• 7:37
  Will Yafi: Are you gonna do it with portals, which you and I both kind of have our beef with, which is like you know?
• 7:43
  Will Yafi: I mean you can't really attract the droves of people to a portal.
• 7:48
  Will Yafi: I mean here's an example just to kind of land some things, and this might shock some people, like some of our.
• 7:55
  Will Yafi: You know, the ecosystems that we work with the enterprise ecosystem are massive in reach and this is one of the things that differentiates them from workloads like COSEL.
• 8:04
  Will Yafi: Cosel targets primarily sales and alliance managers, and that's a subset within an organization.
• 8:11
  Will Yafi: I mean, how many?
• 8:12
  Will Yafi: Let's say what percentage of your staff could be sales and alliance, for example?
• 8:17
  Will Yafi: Maybe 10%, maybe, if a lot, 15% you still have 85 people.
• 8:23
  Will Yafi: 85, excuse me, 85% of people that do other stuff.
• 8:28
  Will Yafi: So COSEL can only target those people.
• 8:32
  Will Yafi: But what about the 85%?
• 8:35
  Will Yafi: Well, those need to be enabled, right, with other workloads, right.
• 8:40
  Will Yafi: And so then you start looking at okay, what am I going to do to enable that?
• 8:44
  Will Yafi: And I love what you just said, which is that you know experience.
• 8:47
  Will Yafi: So just like there's a customer experience, there has to be a partner experience.
• 8:51
  Will Yafi: That partner experience cannot be delivered on your portal.
• 8:54
  Will Yafi: Everybody tries to do that and everybody's trying to sell their own partner experience, but it's impossible.
• 9:00
  Will Yafi: And I'll tell you why Because typically partners don't deal with one vendor, so it's a one to many relationship between that partner and multiple vendors.
• 9:11
  Will Yafi: If each one of those vendors is vying for the best partner experience, but completely isolated from all the other vendors and their best experience, the overall experience to that partner that has to go to 20 different portals, each one with a completely exogenous type of an experience, is not that optimal, and so it becomes really a disadvantage.
• 9:36
  Will Yafi: And I'd love to hear from you I mean, I know you've also kind of struggled to explain that to some of the customers as well- yeah, it's what really interests me now.
• 9:47
  Rick van den Bosch: and think also back to your introduction Then I'll give my opinion on it as well where you said, indeed, that your first business actually you were a partner of IBM, microsoft, etc.
• 9:57
  Rick van den Bosch: Did that come from a little bit of your own frustration there as well?
• 10:00
  Rick van den Bosch: That?
• 10:00
  Rick van den Bosch: You had to get all that enablement from different places and from multiple vendors 100%.
• 10:07
  Will Yafi: And you know I love partners and, like I said, we were a partner for the longest time back in my previous company and partners will give their heart out to the ISV, to their vendor.
• 10:21
  Will Yafi: They will.
• 10:21
  Will Yafi: But you have to kind of turn around and give them what they need.
• 10:26
  Will Yafi: If they're smaller partners, then you can give them a one size fits all solution.
• 10:31
  Will Yafi: Once you get into the medium, to the large partners, you can't do that.
• 10:36
  Will Yafi: If you do that, it's to your own disadvantage because that means you're suboptimally engaging with them.
• 10:43
  Will Yafi: Let me give you an example.
• 10:45
  Will Yafi: I was once having a conversation with Microsoft and HPE Two BMITs, two giants in our industry and the IT industry have been around forever and it was the alliance managers at global level having this conversation.
• 11:02
  Will Yafi: It was a three way conversation and I asked the HPE guy in front of the Microsoft guy how big is HPE?
• 11:10
  Will Yafi: He said 300,000 or 400,000.
• 11:13
  Will Yafi: So then I asked him well, how many people do you have going to Microsoft partner network, which was at the time called NPN?
• 11:20
  Will Yafi: He looked at that.
• 11:21
  Will Yafi: He said I think we have somewhere in the range of about 250 users.
• 11:25
  Will Yafi: I said you need 250,000.
• 11:27
  Will Yafi: He said no, no, 250.
• 11:28
  Will Yafi: I said 250.
• 11:30
  Will Yafi: So that's 0.1%.
• 11:32
  Will Yafi: So that means 99.9% of HPE ears that have a lot of interaction at some point or another with Microsoft Microsoft has no idea about and neither has HPE.
• 11:45
  Will Yafi: That to me, is a huge opportunity loss because that, to me, tells me that the two organizations are not ecosystemized enough to be able to have end to end visibility of the relationship.
• 11:58
  Will Yafi: That is the kind of solution or pain point that we're trying to help solve.
• 12:03
  Rick van den Bosch: Yeah, correct, I think.
• 12:05
  Rick van den Bosch: What I see there, indeed, is that we're always talking about that partner journey or customer journey and all the touch points, and we need to enable them in every aspect, but what it's actually all about is removing the friction everywhere.
• 12:16
  Rick van den Bosch: So how can we make it as easy as possible for partners to do business with us?
• 12:20
  Rick van den Bosch: And that just requires a whole new way of thinking.
• 12:23
  Rick van den Bosch: And how am I going to deliver the right information to the right partner at the right time and also make sure that I'm measuring what's working, yes or no, and therefore bringing them to the next level?
• 12:33
  Rick van den Bosch: Because that's it with enablement.
• 12:35
  Rick van den Bosch: It never stops.
• 12:36
  Rick van den Bosch: It's a continuous flow of updating your information, of creating better content, training and everything around that for your partner 100% and to what you said.
• 12:45
  Will Yafi: You said deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.
• 12:49
  Will Yafi: There's one fourth element I would add, which is in the right place, and that place, to me, is the place that is optimal for the partner.
• 13:00
  Will Yafi: Particularly when you're dealing with larger partners, you want to go where they are, because they're not going to come to where you are, and that has two advantages.
• 13:11
  Will Yafi: One is you're delivering that dynamism that you just explained constantly to them, because things are changing so rapidly now that the two to three year sales cycles that we had back in the early 2000s and 2010s no longer exist.
• 13:26
  Will Yafi: Now you have products being released every two weeks, every three weeks.
• 13:30
  Will Yafi: So to expect people to come back every week to your place to check what's new is delusional.
• 13:36
  Will Yafi: So the dynamism element is really key.
• 13:42
  Will Yafi: The second element that I would say is really, really important is the footprint.
• 13:46
  Will Yafi: There is no portal in the world that will attract as much people as where the partner already is.
• 13:56
  Will Yafi: So if the partner is, I don't know, 5,000 employees or 3,000, or whatever it they happen to be, or 10,000 or 100,000.
• 14:04
  Will Yafi: They will never send their droves, or their droves will never go to an outside portal in as much quantity as they will, their internal tools, and so the trick becomes to hit those two birds with a stone.
• 14:20
  Will Yafi: By delivering the enablement into their systems, they become dynamic up to date all the time, without that friction-free that you just described, which I love.
• 14:32
  Will Yafi: And the second is to maximize the footprint.
• 14:36
  Will Yafi: You're doing it where the partner already is.
• 14:39
  Rick van den Bosch: Yeah, when I think about that, you see in those very large partners, let's say the global system integrators, the IBMs, the Accentures, etc.
• 14:49
  Rick van den Bosch: They are so large, of course, that they have a lot of say in that as well that they can demand that from the vendors, Like I want it in my own environment there.
• 15:00
  Rick van den Bosch: But what I actually find interesting when I think about it is there you would almost say they are.
• 15:05
  Rick van den Bosch: They have such large departments, business units, completely focused towards that partner.
• 15:09
  Rick van den Bosch: You could say, hey, they might be more eager to go to a portal than, for example, the smaller partners, but you see that even they don't do it right, Because it's just too much to manage.
• 15:20
  Rick van den Bosch: But what I also really see is, even with the smaller partners there, we say, well, for them it works with one size fits all.
• 15:26
  Rick van den Bosch: We give them a portal and they can come to it, but they don't even have the resources to do so.
• 15:31
  Rick van den Bosch: Like they have even less resources to go there and to engage with everything.
• 15:35
  Rick van den Bosch: And I think that's an interesting thing to think about, Like how can we really look at that full partner ecosystem and enable them in the right way.
• 15:44
  Will Yafi: Yeah, I mean, I like how you kind of segmented the larger ones from the smaller ones.
• 15:49
  Will Yafi: I think they do have slightly different needs, but the end result is what you just described it as is being almost the same.
• 15:56
  Will Yafi: What I've noticed is that so the consumerization of IT that happened in the 2000s affected how IT gets purchased and that has major repercussions into enablement the partners that want to do the transactions completely on their own and their resellers and stuff like that.
• 16:22
  Will Yafi: Those kinds of guys can continue doing it the old fashioned way.
• 16:26
  Will Yafi: However, if you look at the trends, the global trends of where IT investment is going, it's moving towards the service providers.
• 16:35
  Will Yafi: A lot of money is moving away from those transactional and moving into those large service providers.
• 16:43
  Will Yafi: The service providers per se don't sell product.
• 16:46
  Will Yafi: So now Microsoft can say, okay, well, hey, listen, if you want to come and buy licenses, just buy them through your EA, your enterprise agreement, or buy them through my transactional portal or whatever.
• 16:58
  Will Yafi: But the customer is looking for the deployments and the servicing and all that kind of stuff.
• 17:06
  Will Yafi: So the transaction of the purchase becomes less important for that customer than all those servicing.
• 17:12
  Will Yafi: That is where the servicing becomes multi vendor or Multi solution because the extensions and the IBMs and even the smaller ones, the smaller I of SI's and some of the More avant-garde resellers, they're getting into solutions, which means they don't just sell a product, they sell a solution on top of that product.
• 17:32
  Will Yafi: That solution might require services, might require multiple vendors, etc.
• 17:36
  Will Yafi: Etc.
• 17:36
  Will Yafi: That automatically makes it almost impossible for them to transact, whether they're big or small, on a single portal with everything they need.
• 17:45
  Rick van den Bosch: It just doesn't work, no and I think that's where they need to need to be enabled also to make that step and that shift from that more resell to Service provider as well.
• 17:54
  Rick van den Bosch: That.
• 17:55
  Rick van den Bosch: There's one question and that came to mind that I hear a lot when I'm having conversations with vendors, with their EMEA and global teams.
• 18:02
  Rick van den Bosch: It's around enablement and content specifically, and there's multiple forms of enablement, of course marketing enablement, technical enablement, sales enablement and then they often say but we have so much difficulties, we don't have the resources to create enough content or personalized content based on verticals, product categories, etc.
• 18:19
  Rick van den Bosch: What kind of challenges do you hear there around the topic?
• 18:24
  Rick van den Bosch: A lot, and what, what could be solutions for that towards the future.
• 18:29
  Will Yafi: So I'll answer it in two ways.
• 18:30
  Will Yafi: One is so from a partner perspective, and then we can talk about from an ISV perspective.
• 18:38
  Will Yafi: So let's start with the partner perspective.
• 18:39
  Will Yafi: The partner is looking to minimize content development.
• 18:42
  Will Yafi: They can't keep up.
• 18:44
  Will Yafi: They can't that, you know.
• 18:47
  Will Yafi: They don't have the budget.
• 18:48
  Will Yafi: Content is expensive to create.
• 18:50
  Will Yafi: We're talking everything from a glossy all the way to a full blown course.
• 18:54
  Will Yafi: I mean, those cost a lot of money.
• 18:56
  Will Yafi: Partners don't have budgets for that, and so they're looking to minimize development of content.
• 19:03
  Will Yafi: So they want to get that from their correct vendors exactly, and so that's when Ecosystems start playing such a huge role, because they can save a ton of money, ton of time, a ton of resources.
• 19:16
  Will Yafi: To put together you know all those you know content like.
• 19:20
  Will Yafi: For example, at any one point, we have tens of thousands of digital assets flowing straight from Microsoft into a partner right.
• 19:29
  Will Yafi: Imagine if they had to create this first of all.
• 19:31
  Will Yafi: They're never going to be able to do it.
• 19:32
  Will Yafi: You're never going to be able to create as much content as the for as the vendor that actually owns the product right, and so why, why even do an effort?
• 19:40
  Will Yafi: Now what you can create is we kind of go with the 90 10 rule, right in Terms of content creation.
• 19:45
  Will Yafi: Get 90% of your content from your Provider and build on top of it the 10% that differentiates you, either your verticalization and stuff like that, but don't, don't go and invest in a hundred percent content, like it's just a waste of time and money and you're never going to be able to succeed.
• 20:00
  Will Yafi: So that's the partner side of things.
• 20:04
  Will Yafi: Right on the vendor side, where what we're seeing a lot of which is really really cool, and this is kind of like.
• 20:14
  Will Yafi: I don't want it to sound like a plug, but but in a way, it is the AI.
• 20:19
  Will Yafi: The generative stuff that we're seeing is fascinating.
• 20:22
  Will Yafi: Yeah, that's super interesting, really.
• 20:23
  Will Yafi: So now what we're seeing is because we have so much digital assets flowing through the tidbit ecosystem, we're applying AI on top of those assets.
• 20:33
  Will Yafi: So in the conversations that we've been having which is very different With your B2C AI, which you don't know where it's getting the data from you go to open AI comm and you put in something on chat, you PT, or you do it with a straight stack or an API.
• 20:50
  Will Yafi: You don't really know what the brain is doing.
• 20:55
  Will Yafi: With the tidbit AI, you do because you're basically curating the content on the node and you only apply AI to that node.
• 21:07
  Will Yafi: So you can, for example, have a ton of content flowing from AWS and we're directly connected to AWS and I'll mention why I'm saying AWS specifically and you can apply AI on AWS, which we have.
• 21:22
  Will Yafi: We're the first company in the world to apply AI on all of AWS's courseware.
• 21:27
  Will Yafi: It's nowhere else.
• 21:29
  Will Yafi: It was fairly easy for us to do because we were already integrated to the back ends.
• 21:35
  Will Yafi: Okay, now you can regenerate stuff, you could create assessments, you can create courseware, you could create, you could synthesize.
• 21:43
  Will Yafi: You could do a lot of that stuff.
• 21:47
  Will Yafi: The formula, the secret formula of what we did is not the AI.
• 21:50
  Will Yafi: The brain is there right.
• 21:52
  Will Yafi: The secret formula was in the processing of all the content which we had invested years in, and so the conclusion here is that we believe B2B AI goes hand in hand with content.
• 22:06
  Will Yafi: And you curate the content, you make it nodal right and then you apply AI on top and that, you know, gives what we call through walled gardens, the security, sanitization, accuracy, reliability, all that.
• 22:21
  Will Yafi: And then you can go to, you know, to your node that's pulling stuff from AWS, and you can ask who's Jeff Bezos.
• 22:26
  Will Yafi: It's going to tell you I have no idea.
• 22:28
  Will Yafi: I don't know, because unless Jeff Bezos appears in one of the courses and you know he's part of the content, otherwise it would just would not know.
• 22:35
  Will Yafi: And that's what customers which is really funny when we show them, you know who's like.