Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 107- Kathy Mazza - The Power of Trusted Advisors in Channel Partnerships
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis.
- 0:06Speaker 1: My name is Alex Whitford and I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext, and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, cathy.
- 0:13Speaker 1: How are you doing?
- 0:14Speaker 2: I'm fantastic.
- 0:15Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
- 0:16Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a real pleasure having you on.
- 0:17Speaker 1: Maybe for the uninitiated, it'd be great if you could give us a little rundown of who you are and where you've come from.
- 0:29Speaker 2: Awesome, thank you.
- 0:30Speaker 2: So I'm Kathy Mazza.
- 0:31Speaker 2: I'm head of channel sales at UMA and I know this is a global podcast, so I sit in Los Angeles, california.
- 0:34Speaker 2: I have been in technology just shy of 30 years, started in speeds and feeds and kind of went through the amalgamation UMA that I've been with for about a year and a half.
- 0:42Speaker 2: We are a hosted VoIP company at our core, 20 plus years in existence.
- 0:48Speaker 2: Our channel program is relatively new as it compares to, and so I was brought here to really expand the depth and the breadth of the indirect channels awesome now I have.
- 1:01Speaker 1: the listeners will know I used to for Zoom, which traditionally was a direct business, and then we built a channel on the side.
- 1:08Speaker 1: That can be sometimes a painful change for the business to recognize.
- 1:13Speaker 1: If you've been going direct for 20 years, how do you sort of manage that conflict between channel and direct?
- 1:19Speaker 2: I know it's a very fun little dance, I like to call it a dance.
- 1:24Speaker 2: It's a very fun little dance, I like to call it a dance.
- 1:26Speaker 2: So one of the first things and I know that our executive team really understands the one-to-many that indirect can bring to the conversation so have their buy-in at the top, which certainly helps.
- 1:39Speaker 2: But it's been really interesting from a marketing.
- 1:42Speaker 2: You know, a two customer messaging versus a two partner messaging really makes a big difference.
- 1:49Speaker 2: But one of the first things I did was how to sell to the channel.
- 1:52Speaker 2: You know, because we have a co-sell model, so my channel team manages the relationship, but then we have sellers that help with the actual sales cycle and it's so sometimes it's so easy as the nomenclature not my customer, it's our customer, and so you know we take those things for granted if we've been in the channel for a while.
- 2:11Speaker 2: But if you don't do this on a day to day basis, you know it's really it's those very, very, very basic building blocks.
- 2:22Speaker 2: So I started there and it's a day to day conversation every single day.
- 2:24Speaker 2: But I'm really I'm appreciative of the partnership and the support that I have from our staff.
- 2:31Speaker 1: I love that and I'm sat there grinning because I obviously made that mistake very bluntly to a partner right in the infancy of my sales career and he let's say, assertively corrected my uh, my language, speaking of sort of tough mistakes that you make that follow you, because I'm still actually good friends with this partner and he regularly brings it up with me.
- 2:52Speaker 1: One of the things I always sort of love talking about people who've had that extensive career is we all make some of those mistakes that follow us through as we build those relationships.
- 3:02Speaker 1: What's some of the things that, if you could go back and, you know, sort of knock Kathy in the side of the head 20 years ago and say, hey, don't do this, what?
- 3:09Speaker 1: What's some of those mistakes that you wish you could correct?
- 3:12Speaker 2: Yes, a lot of them, a lot.
- 3:14Speaker 2: But I do have to say to your point, the first partner that lit me a new one.
- 3:18Speaker 2: I'm still very good friends with him and it's interesting that, yes, yeah, it does come around.
- 3:26Speaker 2: It does come around.
- 3:26Speaker 2: So one of the things that it's trust but verify.
- 3:27Speaker 2: So we're the quarterback, so you know, as we relate to a channel organization, we're not really responsible for all of the different building blocks within the organization to get the widget out of the factory, and so it's the trust but verify.
- 3:41Speaker 2: I remember at a past company we basically did an apology roadshow and that was one of the first things that I said.
- 3:46Speaker 2: I can't do that here.
- 3:47Speaker 2: We have to be ready to.
- 3:50Speaker 2: You know, mass produce, mass scale, and you know you, you get one shot.
- 3:55Speaker 2: And I always tell everybody, if you sell direct, you kind of screw up on the implementation, on the implementation as an organization, you have likely three years for that customer contract to come up for renewal, to turn that whole support life cycle around.
- 4:10Speaker 2: But in the partner world, if we screw up and the partner's never bringing us their marquee customer, they're giving us the little opportunities, the little at-bats to prove that trust and respect.
- 4:20Speaker 2: So if we miss that, it's going to take my team 12 to 18 months to get another shot, so you can't make those mistakes.
- 4:29Speaker 2: So trusting and verifying is, you know, really critical in everything we do.
- 4:36Speaker 1: Yeah, I had Jason Beal, who's the channel chief for Barracuda, on it a few months ago and I think he spoke a lot about partner lifetime value dwarfs customer lifetime value.
- 4:46Speaker 1: Totally Right, and so I love your opportunity there.
- 4:50Speaker 1: Right it's?
- 4:51Speaker 1: If you mess up, yeah, you can turn a customer, but to your point, you actually have some time to fix it, whereas I only have to annoy one salesperson and one partner and my name is mud and we're not working with that partner again.
- 5:03Speaker 1: Right, and so that partner lifetime value is the entire reason that you want to work with partners, because partner lifetime value is so enormous.
- 5:09Speaker 1: But, as you say, keeping promises, managing expectations, following through and doing the basics extraordinarily well, fundamental to those relationships.
- 5:20Speaker 2: Yes, nothing that we do is unique, so there's a number of different suppliers out there.
- 5:25Speaker 2: You know we have differentiators and that's our job is to point out those differentiators.
- 5:30Speaker 2: But if we're not easy to do business with, then they can go get it from somewhere else.
- 5:36Speaker 1: Yeah, a mentor of mine said all great achievements come from doing the basics for an extraordinarily long time.
- 5:41Speaker 1: And it's so funny because a part of my brain always goes but we're going to come up with this like amazing plan, right, it's going to be so slick, no one's going to and it's all.
- 5:51Speaker 1: Or let's just call them build a really good relationship, work together really hard, do some really good things, and then follow up on everything we say we're going to do and you just realize that you do that for 20 years you're going to be in a really really good position.
- 6:05Speaker 2: I tell my team that all the time it's not one call and it all just rolls through.
- 6:10Speaker 2: It's fixing the little tiny things and you said, doing what you say, it's actually delivering in advance.
- 6:16Speaker 2: So you know, always making sure, if I think it's going to be tomorrow, I'm going to tell them it's going to be the next day so that I can over deliver.
- 6:24Speaker 2: Uh, just to ensure that nothing gets dropped along the way.
- 6:28Speaker 1: A hundred percent, and I think one of the real areas that I see as a as an enormous growth opportunity for cams, especially to help sort of drive forward, is actually marketing Cause what I think, what I think is so often overlooked, is we focus on relationships because usually you know you're too chatty, like me, and so we focus on relationships because that's what we do, but actually there's some real fundamentals to business that, if we get right, partners thrive.
- 6:55Speaker 1: I'd love to hear your thoughts on how marketing can drive partnerships forward.
- 6:59Speaker 2: Yeah, it was one of the first things that I, when I came to Uma, and I said you know, we have got to help our partners.
- 7:04Speaker 2: First things that I, when I came to Uma, and I said you know, we have got to help our partners.
- 7:07Speaker 2: I mean, our partners are sitting on the gold mine which I think is their, their customer base and their prospect base, and I can't tell you how many events I've been to on the main stage.
- 7:13Speaker 2: They say if every partner sold one additional service, that's equates to billions of dollars in revenue in the channel.
- 7:20Speaker 2: And so one of the first things that we did was we put together campaign kits, but it's really getting the partners to adopt those, and so we take all of the UMA stuff aside and you know it's all about the thought leadership and it's really in bite size.
- 7:35Speaker 2: So it doesn't matter.
- 7:36Speaker 2: You don't have to have a marketing engine.
- 7:37Speaker 2: You know you can be a one man organization and we'll give you some just emails that you can send out and get folks to just bite.
- 7:49Speaker 2: You know, like, as we talk about for UMA POTS replacement, it's the FCC deregulation, it's the high rising costs of the bills that are going on right now, and it may not sound sexy when everybody wants to sell AI and security and CX, but it's a real need.
- 8:04Speaker 2: I mean, we're we're finding white pager or funding white pages and we're taking all of the info out so that our partners can use that same data to go leverage and get out.
- 8:15Speaker 2: And, by the way, we have a partner portal, as does everybody, so you can put your list in and then we'll slap your, your brand, on it.
- 8:22Speaker 2: But most folks have a constant contact or something and we just want to provide the tools so that they can go out and message to their customers.
- 8:30Speaker 1: Yeah, to me.
- 8:31Speaker 1: I've always found this slightly daft.
- 8:34Speaker 1: In the direct world we have solved this problem.
- 8:37Speaker 1: We understand that actually the hardest bit is to generate interest.
- 8:41Speaker 1: The easy bit to manage is once interest is generated, how do we convert that consistently and yet in the channel.
- 8:47Speaker 1: I feel like we're trying to re redesign the world and we go, no, no, we don't need marketing.
- 8:51Speaker 1: I know everyone else has worked marketing out and apple has the strongest brand in the world and I've never spoken to an apple sales person but what we need to do is focus in on how do we actually provide maximal value for a partner and that is generating demand.
- 9:06Speaker 2: Yes, yes, one hundred percent.
- 9:08Speaker 2: We had.
- 9:08Speaker 2: We had a partner that again I talk about the adoption.
- 9:12Speaker 2: So I would say most suppliers out there have these tools and it's one of the things that folks that sit in my seat really want to make it easy so that they can go drum out that business.
- 9:23Speaker 2: We had a partner that leaned in, really leaned in.
- 9:27Speaker 2: We gave them the information, but they didn't even take all the pretty graphics, they literally sent out just a text email.
- 9:36Speaker 2: They were able to drive 80 new prospects, potential prospects, to a webinar, a 30 minute webinar.
- 9:44Speaker 2: In this day and age you just don't have that.
- 9:46Speaker 2: I mean, you know, folks are the time is very and we've now replicated that every single quarter and they're kind of pivoting and they're really specific about the technology that they're driving.
- 9:58Speaker 2: And now we've done three of them with the same success.
- 10:01Speaker 2: And so every single time I talk to a partner, I try to you know, message this story to get other folks to you know, to buy in and do something in the same vein, this story to get other folks to you know to buy in and do something in the same vein.
- 10:11Speaker 1: You are speaking my language, as my sort of role is VP of revenue.
- 10:14Speaker 1: It's what we do at ChenX, right, we drive content utilization and it's amazing because marketing works.
- 10:24Speaker 1: I don't know how to say it better than that.
- 10:25Speaker 1: But it turns out marketing really does work but no one no partner or no partner but partners at scale don't do marketing right, and so suddenly, because they've got this warm network and they're the trusted advisor, you just drop a bit of marketing in and you get this outpouring of sudden performance because that partner traditionally hasn't done marketing.
- 10:44Speaker 1: How has it been networking that story across the rest of your partners?
- 10:48Speaker 1: Are they responding well?
- 10:49Speaker 1: Are they gravitating towards it?
- 10:51Speaker 2: I I mean it's 50-50 to your point that you know getting somebody to do something, you know change and changing what they're doing, and so everybody, when I talk to them on the phone, you know they're like, oh yeah, please send that over to me.
- 11:04Speaker 2: But it's the follow up and how can I literally spoon feed it so that you can take advantage?
- 11:10Speaker 2: And I can't.
- 11:11Speaker 2: You know, I talked about that webinar.
- 11:12Speaker 2: The first webinar we did, blind lead came in.
- 11:18Speaker 2: We just signed, after an RFI, tens of thousands of dollars in services that that partner had never actually engaged, you know, with that customer before.
- 11:29Speaker 2: So you know there's a huge opportunity.
- 11:31Speaker 2: So I am starting to see some adoption.
- 11:33Speaker 2: We have been doing other webinars, we have been doing other campaigns and I tell my, I tell my team, tell our partners, we'll do the lift.
- 11:41Speaker 2: If you, if you hear an interest, we will turn this into mailbox money, like, quite literally, mailbox money.
- 11:47Speaker 2: Raise your hand, my team will vet it, we'll sell it and you, just as a partner, can cash the checks in the bank.
- 11:54Speaker 2: We just need them to go out to their prospects.
- 11:57Speaker 2: That is the gold mine.
- 11:58Speaker 2: Our partners are sitting on gold mines.
- 12:01Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think you absolutely have the right strategy here, because what I think is so often misunderstood is like no, no, but they're going to do all the sales work for us.
- 12:12Speaker 1: But actually the real opportunity in the partner landscape is to enable them to do the selling easier, and I think the real sweet spot that you're hitting is not only now do they say, hey, look, we can see all this money coming in, but you've also helped them create the demand, so the buy-in within the partner towards your brand becomes stronger and stronger and stronger, because they can see the inherent value there that you've provided.
- 12:38Speaker 2: Yep, 100%.
- 12:39Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's been great, it's been really good.
- 12:41Speaker 2: We've definitely up and to the right.
- 12:44Speaker 1: So one of the really challenging things I think about being a channel executive when you're running a direct organization, you have the feedback directly from your sales reps and the customers.
- 12:54Speaker 1: As you introduce the level of complexity that your reps are speaking to end users, but there's also partners involved, I imagine and not to get very political but there's a lot of disinformation, misinformation, confusion.
- 13:05Speaker 1: How do you help mitigate some of that?
- 13:08Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I look at one of my mentors along the way, and he had blocked out time in his calendar every single day to call partners, and so we see partners all the time, whether I'm at a show, whether I'm traveling, I'm in their office, and so I'm always getting that feedback.
- 13:26Speaker 2: But you know, those are usually as a result of, you know, something that was scheduled or I'm dealing with some sort of escalation or something, and so you know it's not the entire ecosystem of partners, and so you know, really setting aside time, one of the things that I'd like to do is get a partner advisory council, but I'm not there yet as an organization, and so I am reaching out and I'm pulling different lists every single month, every single quarter of partners to reach out to.
- 13:55Speaker 2: So right now, I'm currently on a list of, you know, partners that came into our program and registered within a certain period of time, had one opportunity, but nothing else since then, and so I want to understand.
- 14:07Speaker 2: You know, hey, how did you hear about us?
- 14:09Speaker 2: You know how has it been going.
- 14:11Speaker 2: You know whether we won or lost that opportunity, you know.
- 14:14Speaker 2: But what do we need and what can we provide them to be successful?
- 14:18Speaker 2: How do we help their business.
- 14:19Speaker 2: And so you know, framing up and this is, you know, something that we all get mired down in the day to day.
- 14:24Speaker 2: We're inundated with emails, we're inundated with, you know, just the operational and escalations, but setting aside time to go and get proactive feedback from the partners that you may not hear from all the time.
- 14:36Speaker 2: So you know, sometimes the loudest is not necessarily indicative of kind of the collective feedback.
- 14:42Speaker 1: Yeah, I love this.
- 14:44Speaker 1: I sort of drill my team on reactive work, proactive work and strategic work, and that we all get bogged down in reactive work and then we do a bit of proactive work and strategic work.
- 14:51Speaker 1: and that we all get bogged down in reactive work and then we do a bit of proactive work and maybe once a quarter we'll do something strategic and this just screams of strategic work because I, without maybe sharing sharing the skeletons, I I can imagine that you you have learned information that's radically changed your program design or strategy.
- 15:08Speaker 1: Talk to me about some of the things that you found were surprising to hear or how you feel this has influenced your sort of trajectory.
- 15:17Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what.
- 15:19Speaker 2: Honestly, every time I talk to somebody it's not super surprising.
- 15:22Speaker 2: I always tell my team we're not rocket scientists, we're not saving lives in what we're doing on a day to day basis.
- 15:29Speaker 2: And so, you know, usually it's it's such a noisy space in the channel.
- 15:35Speaker 2: There are 300, some odd suppliers out there all vying for partners attention, and at the end of the day, they really have to be in front of their customers and so getting them to just take off a little sliver to remember what we do best and how we can help them, and so it just really reaffirms to me that my team can't just show up and throw up.
- 16:04Speaker 2: They have to have a strategic, you know cadence of how they drip information, because you know you reaching out one time and giving a training and then expecting the flood, you know the floodgates to open is not the way it works.
- 16:11Speaker 2: And so you have to be able to have reasons to call partners, have something that you can share that's real, concrete data.
- 16:23Speaker 2: That relationship that the partner that calls or texts you at 2 am doesn't happen overnight.
- 16:28Speaker 2: It happens after years of you know building and working together and building your collective partnership.
- 16:35Speaker 2: And so you have to.
- 16:37Speaker 2: You have to have a way.
- 16:38Speaker 2: And you know, again, you have to have these touch points.
- 16:42Speaker 2: And so I tell my team I'm like, stop sending an email that has 10 attachments because nobody's looking at them.
- 16:48Speaker 2: That person is not looking at one attachment.
- 16:50Speaker 2: But if you can figure out how to do 10 touch points in different ways, whether it's LinkedIn, sharing something, you know all of the different ways that you know the mediums that we can hit our partners to help them.
- 17:05Speaker 1: So yeah, no, I love that because you're approaching it from a real value place.
- 17:09Speaker 1: Right?
- 17:09Speaker 1: I think it's so easy to go.
- 17:11Speaker 1: No, no, but I've got loads of emails to do so.
- 17:13Speaker 1: If I just stick 10 attachments in, it's off my plate.
- 17:16Speaker 2: Yes, off my plate.
- 17:17Speaker 1: Correct, but it doesn't actually help anyone because no one's reading it.
- 17:20Speaker 1: You're absolutely right, but if we're meeting the customer in EMEA, we use WhatsApp all the time and I was educating one of our reps that I think half the deals I've ever done have been closed, basically over text, because we have a strong relationship.
- 17:34Speaker 1: And so if I'm just pinging them like hey, where are we, what do you need from me?
- 17:37Speaker 1: That form that, that that communication is so personal, and then, shock, we actually have a relationship and we can actually partner up and consistently do great business together.
- 17:46Speaker 1: But if we're just sending out bulk emails so that I've done my work, we're not moving anything forward.
- 17:53Speaker 2: Nope, nope, no.
- 17:54Speaker 2: I mean most people have filters.
- 17:55Speaker 2: I mean it's not even getting there.
- 17:58Speaker 2: And so you know, we're about to do a partner survey for the first time.
- 18:02Speaker 2: You know a partner survey, and you know one of the questions we're going to ask is you know, do you find any value in our partner newsletter?
- 18:08Speaker 2: Now, I know the answer is going to be what newsletter?
- 18:11Speaker 2: And so then it's going to give me an opportunity for my team to go back and say, hey, we do this really small newsletter.
- 18:18Speaker 2: Just can you make sure that we, you know, hit your inbox.
- 18:21Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that.
- 18:22Speaker 1: Now maybe we can pivot and slightly look ahead, a slight look behind the curtain.
- 18:27Speaker 1: But we actually had a prep call ahead of this recording.
- 18:30Speaker 1: We spoke around how channel is changing and you specifically said something that I thought was really interesting around how the trusted advisor is changing.
- 18:40Speaker 1: Maybe you can elaborate yeah.
- 18:43Speaker 2: Yeah, and I hear it consistently the age of a direct sales rep, and everybody has a different opinion.
- 18:52Speaker 2: But I say the average life cycle of a direct sales rep is 18 to 24 months at the max, and customers are overwhelmed with options out there and so nobody trusts that if you sign a contract that that salesperson is going to be there when you fully implemented that, and so they're not going to a direct supplier.
- 19:11Speaker 2: They don't trust Nobody trusts me that says that Uma is the best at what we do.
- 19:16Speaker 2: But you know, what they're going to trust is they're going to trust you, alex, that you've worked with Uma and you can verify it and validate, validate.
- 19:29Speaker 2: And so I think that that the the role of the trusted advisor and I just listened to another podcast, because I'm a huge podcast listener that the direct salesperson is dead.
- 19:34Speaker 2: The you know in RFPs are dead.
- 19:36Speaker 2: All of these because they're going to trusted advisors and they're looking for guidance and they're looking to know and to make sure that they make the decisions.
- 19:44Speaker 2: You know, gone are the days with, you know, buying the top of the magic cart, you know top right of the magic Gartner Magic Quadrant.
- 19:51Speaker 2: That doesn't save somebody's job.
- 19:53Speaker 2: And so I really think that the trusted advisor community is continuing to grow, and it's not just one.
- 19:59Speaker 2: You know customers don't just have one partner in there.
- 20:02Speaker 2: You know most organizations have multiple buying points within their buying cycle, and so you know we need to be working with all of the different partners, because marketing is making decisions, it, you know, finance everybody's making different decisions, and so I don't think it's going away, I think it's getting bigger.
- 20:22Speaker 1: I love this.
- 20:23Speaker 1: I fully agree One of the things and don't hate me for saying this but most technology is pretty good, like, most technology will help most companies, and so this like world in like, let me tell you about why our tech is brilliant actually doesn't help anyone.
- 20:40Speaker 1: It's the wraparound, it's the support, it's the trust that comes with that.
- 20:44Speaker 1: And so as technology converges and goes from pretty good to great, actually the thing that really with that and so, as technology converges and goes from pretty good to great, actually the thing that really matters is I'm going to call Steve or I'm going to call Jane, because it's crashed on Sunday and I need help.
- 20:56Speaker 1: That's why I'm going to make the decision.
- 20:58Speaker 1: Whether the brand is pink or blue, it doesn't matter, right?
- 21:01Speaker 1: We are in a, in a great space, and I think that's where the trusted advisor will continue to grow and grow.
- 21:08Speaker 1: And as messaging and as ai takes over and as all of that becomes stronger, I think humanity is going to shrink back into you.
- 21:15Speaker 1: But I trust kathy because I know her yep, I agree, couldn't, couldn't agree more 100 so, in the view of a trusted advisor, I've got a segue into my last request, which is we always ask our current guest who they think we should have on next.
- 21:29Speaker 1: Kathy, who did you have in mind?
- 21:31Speaker 2: Yes, I'm shocked.
- 21:33Speaker 2: I mean I've listened to most of your episodes, but the person that I would recommend is Jasmina Mueller.
- 21:39Speaker 2: She has been somebody that I've worked with.
- 21:41Speaker 2: I've worked for, I've worked adjacent for a better part of 20 years of my career.
- 21:47Speaker 2: She's currently with Titan Cloud Storage.
- 21:50Speaker 2: She has been a huge advocate.
- 21:52Speaker 2: She is the reason I am in the channel.
- 21:54Speaker 2: So you know, she and I were direct sales reps once upon a time and you know there's a lot to be said there.
- 22:02Speaker 2: You know, not everybody moves very well into the channel, but she has been a trailblazer and she has really helped me expand out of what I do.
- 22:12Speaker 2: So I think you should talk to her.
- 22:14Speaker 1: Excellent, Jasmina.
- 22:15Speaker 1: We're coming for you.
- 22:16Speaker 1: Kathy, that was a real treat for me.
- 22:18Speaker 1: It's amazing to have you on and to learn from the insights that you've gained.
- 22:24Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
- 22:25Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure.
- 22:26Speaker 1: Thanks very much.