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050 - The role of Data and Automation in building Effective Channels · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Parknships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of parknships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: My name is Rick van der Bosch and I'm the CEO and founder at Chennext, and I'm here together with Alex Whitford, vp Parknship at Chennext.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Alex, how are you doing today?
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: I'm really excited.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Episode number 50 feels like an absolute landmark of a show.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, excited to be here.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: I can't believe it's already been 50 episodes yeah, insane.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Almost a year ago that we started recording.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, literally 50 weeks.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's crazy, right?
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: So in fact, no, because I think we recorded a whole bunch in one go, so we've actually probably been recording just over a year now, which, yeah, time flies, I agree, and we're not planning to stop anytime soon.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: No, no, bring on number 100.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: Two more weeks now and we have the one year anniversary One year anniversary.
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: Well, we'll do something special for you, can't wait.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: Excellent.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: And today we're actually already in the final episode of the series around how to build a channel.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Whether you're doing it from scratch or entering a new vertical or a new geography, there are certain fundamentals that you need to have in place to do that properly, and today we're going to touch upon the final pillar, which is actually data and measurements.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: So, once you've got everything set up.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: So we talked about strategy, we've talked about architecture, about compensation for the partner, about your team structure, and then it's very important how are you going to measure the full mechanism?
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: I think maybe, alex, you could take it away a bit.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Why is data and measurements so hard in the channel?
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean for me.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: It really speaks to me because I'm absolutely a numbers nerd.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: I think the data element of any high performing team is the critical aspect.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Right, if you take it all.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: I don't know football players, right, they track how many yards they run, how fast they run, how many passes they do.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: All of that stuff is really important because once you've got the calculations together, you know if you're going to win the match.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: And the idea behind driving a data driven team is do we have the leading indicators and the performance metrics that show ahead of revenue actually happening?
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Are we growing?
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: And I think most channels do a terrible job of managing data because it's so difficult to do, because it's not just your data, it's your distributors data, it's your partners data, it's your customers data and there's a whole load of pieces that you need to track outside of your business.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: But the businesses that do this will grow the fastest.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: So if you want to build a hyper successful channel, a channel that's scaling like crazy, think about how you implement the right data tooling and data measurement systems when your channel is nice and small, because you can do all the hard work before it gets arms and legs and grows really big.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: So implement it now, because it's going to set you up for success for the long term.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think what I hear a lot from vendors that are building that or that are working with the channel is that it's their data is quite reactive, so that a lot stays with the partner all the time, and then only they found out something happened when there's actual revenue there, which, of course, always is a happy moment.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: But you want to get a lot more grip onto what's happening before that, because that's the only way you can determine what you and your team need to execute on a daily basis to get the desired outcome you want in two to three months.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: And I think if we look at, for example, at sales models or direct sales, there it's already very common we need to do X amount of outreach to get to a certain number of intercalls, to eventually get to opportunities and closed one them.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: But together with our partners, we have a lot less grip on that because a lot of this is happening within the partners environment and systems, and I think the more data you get there and the more insights, the better you can actually steer your channel in the right direction.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly For me.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: I always want to know where to allocate resource right, and data is the best way to understand where to allocate resource, either proactively positively or proactively negatively.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Are there deals that we want to put weight behind and really drive forward?
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Are there partners who we think are at risk of churning out and therefore we need to recapture them and reignite them?
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Data is the leading indicator that allows me to allocate resource effectively, and it's particularly important for most channels, which are fairly lean and bootstrapped businesses.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: What you want to be doing is allocating the resource in the most effective way possible, and that means tracking as many data points in your own business and in your partner's business as possible, so that you know are there big deals coming down pipe and how can we support them, or is a partner at risk and how do we reignite them?
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: I think one of the things you want to prevent what a lot of channels have to do because of the lack of data is always a lot of backward looking analysis.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: So we look towards the last quarter or the last fiscal year so how much revenue did those partners do and did it progress upwards or downward over the year, over the quarter?
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: But that is not necessarily telling you how you're going to do next quarter or how you're going to do next fiscal year.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: And I think indeed, there, where you get laser focused on getting the right data measurement tooling but also processes in place, it will really help you to forecast and not indeed only allocate resources, but also forecast and budget resources in the future.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what's really funny about the look back model is actually it works.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: The problem is it works when you have 400,000 global partners.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Right, then you've got enough data and years and years of historical information that you can start to do forward looking benchmarks based off historic results.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: When you're building a new channel, you don't have any of that information, so instead you want to set the groundwork and the measurement infrastructure in a way that I can be predictive about growth, which the whole point of building a channel is that you're expecting to grow very, very quickly.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: So who cares about what you did a year ago, two years ago?
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: I want to know what's happening next quarter, and typically what we see is most businesses only really track about three key data points, which is number of partners, deal registers and revenue, and that is nowhere near enough data.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Right, there's no way.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: If I was building a direct sales organization, I would only track number of BDRs, intro calls booked and revenue.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: That's a terrible metric.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: There's about 40 data points through that deal stage that I'm missing, and you want to build that same level of architecture into your channel so that you know are we actually growing at the rate we think we're growing, or do we need to start allocating resources to certain partners to help drive growth, or where do we need to allocate that resource effectively?
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think maybe that's a nice thing to touch upon and, like what kind of metrics should you be tracking?
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: I think, indeed, you're already touching upon something interesting.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Like, if you only look at those three or maybe four metrics, then you're not really looking at okay, but you almost have to look at it like a funnel, right?
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: So what are we getting in at the top and how are we converting that towards revenue, including the conversion rates between every stage?
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: Because that's where you can optimize best in your process, because maybe your top level partner number has grown significantly, but if all the conversions afterwards are not at the right level, you will still not get to the desired outcome.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: And I think that's really the way to think about it when you're implementing.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: But maybe when you look at the organization, like there's internal KPIs that you're tracking, but also external KPIs together with your partners.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: What is the split there?
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: Like, do you have very different metrics for both of them, or how would you?
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: approach that, yeah, fundamentally I'm splitting my data down into two completely separate categories and one of those is channel categories.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: So how many partners am I recruiting?
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: What's my?
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: We've done a series on the recruitment to revenue gap.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: What's my time to value?
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: To take a partner from recruited up to self sustainable revenue and those metrics.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: But that's around building your channel out right.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: That's your partner metrics.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: You then have your revenue metrics, which are just as important, but a separate denomination, and that's going to be much more.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: How many meetings have we had?
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: How many demos have we done?
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: How many deal registers have we done?
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: How many proof of concepts have we signed?
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: You know that's all end user criteria for revenue growth.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: And I want to split my data metrics into two, because one tells me how much revenue am I going to do this quarter and one tells me how many, and the partner metrics tell me how much revenue I'm going to do in 12 months, 24 months time, because it takes a certain amount of time to bring partners on, get them engaged and drive revenue.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: But if you've only got one set of metrics, you might be able to tell what you're doing this quarter, but you can't tell me what you're going to do in four quarters, or vice versa.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: You can tell me yeah, we're expecting huge growth in four quarters, but I can't tell what I'm going to do this quarter.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: So you need to build your data architecture in a way that's going to be sustainable, tracking both.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: So maybe if we look at that specific partner area there you look at how many partners that we recruit this quarter, how many partners then got through the onboarding so fully onboarded, signed all the documents et cetera how many did we get certified and then really like the full partner journey towards getting them to that first revenue, because you know if they are certified properly and they have done everything they need to do, and especially if you've built up some more data in the past already, you can make an assumption how many of those partners will start generating end user leads and start the sales journey with the end user.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what co-marketing are we doing together?
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: What co-selling are we doing together?
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: The great thing about shortening that time to value for a newly recruited partner is that you're going to co-sell together, maybe even feed those leads.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: But if you're co-selling together, you've got the data because you know your cams are involved or your high touch team are involved, supporting that sales architecture.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: So you know that information.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: You can be super, super precise around that information and then you pivot into the next category, which is end user data, and very typically, what most business do is they track just deal reg and just revenue, and then they have a conversion metric which you know.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Whatever they close 50% of deal regs or whatever the metric is again works brilliantly when you've got years and years of data, but when you're newly starting, you don't have all of those metrics, and so instead you want to be getting far tighter information from your partner in terms of how many times will we position the solution, how many end users have we spoken, how many demos have we done?
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: And if you work very tightly with partners, especially when you're building a lean channel from scratch, partners will be willing to share that information, as long as they are brought into why you're doing it.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: And the really important thing to do there is to sell into the partner to say, hey, we want to track this metric so that we want to drive performance from you at scale, but we need to understand how we can support you best.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Is it booking more calls with end users?
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: Is it doing more proof of concepts?
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Is it doing demo licenses?
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Is it selling more deal or sending more deal Regis?
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Whatever that process is, you need to network into the partner to understand that full funnel.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: And I think that's also where you can think about from a program perspective how are we going to incentivize partners to do that properly?
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: So maybe if you really have a co-sell motion where you do the actual demos and the proof of concept, et cetera together, you can make it a requirement, for example, that the partner, when they do a lead registration, they have to do that first before your people can start working on it.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: Because I think that's one of the things that most channel people are really struggling with.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: Yes, we do have deal registration, but how do you get partners to actually fill those forms so we can start measuring and keep updating it?
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: And I think that really is thinking of it from a program and incentive perspective, to make sure that you incentivize the partners properly.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and you've got to incentivize the partners, but you've got to explain the logic behind it as well.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Right, I know so many partners who will log a deal Reg three days before the deals closed because they think, oh well, I won't log a deal Reg until I know that the deal is coming in, because that's a hassle for the vendor.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: And instead the vendor would actually rather that you log four times as many deal Regis, but with three months notice, because then they can have an understanding of pipeline and support them in the right way.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: But you've got to take that messaging to market right.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Partners will be far more willing to share the information with you If they understand.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: That means they're going to get a better price, they might get more rebate, they're going to have support within the sales cycle.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Whatever, the key criteria is to incentivize that behavior.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: You really have to map it out, but it will really reinforce the long-term success of your business.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: To educate your partners.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: This is the way we work.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: I think that's again where you can think from the program perspective and make sure that your partners are actually rewarded for that behavior.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: Just like you said, it's much more valuable for a vendor to know three months upfront versus a week.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: And then step one is explaining why it's also very relevant for that partner because they can get more support, more help throughout the deal, et cetera, from the channel account manager as well, and on top of that you will also get indeed more discount or more rebout if you have it three months upfront versus if you only have it two weeks upfront, and I think in such a way you can actually guide or steer your channel in the right direction to get much more data top of funnel.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know great brands, right, you have a three-month sale cycle and if you log a deal Reg two weeks before you close a deal, they just won't approve the extra level of discount because they say, well, you can't have opened and closed that opportunity in two weeks.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: We know it takes three months to close these opportunities.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: And so then they just say, well, no, you've stolen it off someone else, there's no way you've opened and closed that opportunity, and so you only have to have that conversation once before.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Suddenly, within the partner, it's absolutely mandatory to get a deal Reg, and especially if that means that that partner's protected against other partners, right, there's lots of ways that you can coach and incentivize your partners to make sure they're doing their due diligence and logging deal registration effectively or logging the information that you need.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: But the real benefit to you is you can have one, a far more accurate view on pipeline and, two, allocate resources to support that deal as well as possible and would you say that there is a lot of alignment between the metrics that you track internally and the metrics that you track externally with your partners?
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, to me.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Any organization that's direct builds the metrics that work best, and you want to apply that same philosophy to the channel.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: Now the channel has a scaling vector, so I think it's unreasonable to expect oh, a partner's going to tell me how many phone calls they made right, which you might track with the BDR.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: But we can track the key metrics in terms of how many intro calls have we done?
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: How many demos have we done?
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: How many proof of concepts have we signed off?
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: How many deal registers have we done.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: So you've got the key leading indicators.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Maybe not all of the activity metrics, but the other thing to pair that with is marketing right, because marketing can be very good from an ROI perspective and becomes even more top of funnel and you can start to track the marketing to sales conversion to closed one.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: And so that's really in the funnel, then.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: And then, besides that, together with your partner we've spoken about quarterly business reviews before there you can really build the full plan.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: So, okay, within, like, how many accounts do we want to open in the upcoming quarter, or what, how many people need to be certified, et cetera, and that then all ties into your internal metrics, which is then split up in partner and end user.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I can't tell you how many brands do this, and it drives me absolutely mad.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: There isn't a standardized methodology for a quarterly business review and then the information is just stored within slides instead of in the CRM, right?
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: So instead what should be happening is that you're tracking the information from your quarterly review in the CRM and you're tracking it quarter over quarter.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: So while you know a partner's never going to say hey, I made three phone calls today about your software, what they may say is okay, the plan for the upcoming quarter is to break into this many accounts.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: We store that information and then we track next quarter did we actually do what we were going to say, or how much of that did we do?
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: And then we're able to correlate that to revenue.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: You start to get predictive motion in place which drives a CAM's behavior really, really well, because they know last quarter we said we were going to break into 100 accounts.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: We broke into 70 and delivered this much revenue.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: This quarter we're going to try and break into 80.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: That'd be, you know, 12% more, something like that.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: That means we're expecting revenue to grow by that same increment.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: That's really useful information to drive can behavior.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: But if you don't have that data mindset, you're not tracking it in your CRM.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: You're just bound to fail.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: And it becomes specifically interesting if you align those external metrics very well which are internal, because then you are tracking and measuring your partners against the same metrics that eventually tie into your top down reporting and metrics etc.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: So you really have the right metrics feeding the data internally.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: And I think that's when you get into the best of both worlds, because then your reports, which your partners all tie, could tie together within your dashboards internally.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: And that's how you want to look at it and make sure you drive the behavior on the micro level within the partner but then on the macro level throughout your full channel.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and the great thing about data is it's the only way, in my opinion, you actually get true learnings right.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: So the best thing about a channel is that it's multi regional, multi functional.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: But what that can mean is, hey, this cam did something in France and it worked really well.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Now I want to replicate that strategy in the UK or in Germany.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, it worked really well.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: Right now I'm going to drive that globally, that that level of data analysis, and you're going to have a channel programs manager or channel ops manager analyzing that behavior, so that you're able to really double click on something to say, oh hang on, we did this in France and it's working really well.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: How can we replicate those successful strategies elsewhere?
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: But that only comes from having the measurement infrastructure in place and really tracking it all.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: And that's where you can get to the ultimate situation where you really build an operating model.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: I think we at Chennex started with that one and a half, two years ago.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: It's so interesting to see because then, really month over month, you are improving every step of the funnel and maybe to take our listeners a little bit within that story, towards the channel.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Let's say you have to close one million in channel revenue next year.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: What you want to do is actually reverse engineer all the way up to the top to how many partners do we need to recruit and use the conversion percentages of every phase.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: So let's say your opportunity close with one rate is 20%, then you need five million in pipeline.
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: If every deal is 100k, then you need 50 deals to actually get to that pipeline.
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: And then, for example, if you know that every certified partner does a number of deal registrations and so on and I think that's really where you want to go from the bottom to the top Super interesting to get all those measurements in place and then you really create a predictable model that oftentimes we don't really have right now.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: So now we are really looking okay, how many partners do we need to approximately?
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: And then work the other way around.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: But if you get real notion of what your numbers are in your metrics, then on one hand you become much more predictable and it becomes much more clear where you need to focus.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: If your close one rate is really low, then you know OK, that's the best part where we can optimize right now, because if we can to X that, then our revenue will significantly increase as well.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what I love about that model is typically, when you ask channel people, you know, how are you expecting to grow?
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: They'll say, oh, we're going to get more from this, this and this named partner.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: But actually, when you do a bottom up model calculation, you might say, hang on a second, we don't think we can get many more deal regs from these partners because we're actually at saturation point and our conversion is really really good.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Ok, the way we need to grow, then was that we need to add more partners, right, and it becomes a channel breath play.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Unless you've built that bottom up model, you can't be strategic in terms of where you allocate your resource effectively, meaning that you might hit your saturation point within your channel and you've hit your ceiling.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: And then the problem with that is takes months to recruit more partners, get them on board, drive more revenue, and if you only find out at the point that you miss oh Jesus, we needed another 30 partners and we've missed them it's going to take you 12 months to get those partners recruited, on boarded, enabled and to self sustainable revenue, meaning you're going to be behind for four quarters.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Channel people get sacked for less than that, right.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: So instead, what you want to be doing is being really precise with your analysis so that you know, ok, for the next two quarters we can do what we need to do with our existing partner base, but for next year, actually, we need to start recruiting already so that we've got the runway to be able to get the partners in, get all the time to value done right, get to self sustainable revenue and impact the revenue number that we need Q4 next year.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: This is a very valid point.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Actually, within an operating model you don't just look at the conversion percentages but also the time lag between every conversion.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: So let's say that you know that it always takes two months between a partner getting its certification and doing their first due registration.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: Then you want to take that into account within your model and I think if you get that information right, that's where it becomes really interesting, because then you know if you need a certain extra amount of revenue in four quarters that you actually need to recruit right now instead of in two quarters to get to that number.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: And I think that's when you get super strategic and proactive in your channel approach.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and, to be honest, when you're building a channel, you're going to have lean resource, right?
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: No one really gets to build a channel and they go oh, here's 30 cams and five marketing managers, right?
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: It's very rare that you get to do it that way.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: You have to bootstrap it to a degree and when you've got limited resource, accuracy becomes even more important, right?
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: So, having a real predictive understanding of what you need to achieve in the next three months, six months, nine months, 12 months and then 24, 36.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: For you to be able to do that very accurately, you need to have absolute, credible data that shows you your end user metrics, but also your channel breadth metrics, and if you get those two right, you'll understand.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, we need to pull this cam away from these high value accounts and start to get them more focused on recruitment activity, because we need to bring in a volume of partners and here's our conversion to get those partners on board and etc.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Etc.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: And the bottom up model is by far the best way to do that.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: And then I think for listeners as well like you don't have to create everything on your own.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: Yes, you can start in a spreadsheet, but there are lots of tools actually out there.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: Usually you call it the partner relationship management software, where you actually bring all your partners together, integrate with the right systems and then make sure that you track all those steps and the full funnel, because that's where you want to get eventually, to get to skill.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: Like maybe you're doing it with 10 partners right now, but you always need to have that mindset like how can we do this with 100 or how can we do this with 1000 partners so you can really get that skill into your channel.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, embed the metrics early, because it's so much harder to embed the metrics with 100 partners or 1000 partners than it is with 10 partners.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: So my advice always is invest in the tooling when you're lean, because one that will allow you to scale the limited resources that you do have further, but it will also get your business in a good mode of stop hiring people to grow instead, invest in tooling and automation, and then each new person that you add has the actual scaling vector of all those tools as well.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: So you're absolutely right.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: We talk a lot about digital partner success.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: This is digital partner success.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: It's.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: What can we automate to allow the limited resources we have to really focus on the exact steps within the bottom up model that they're required?
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's almost like your extra digital colleague or your PA of the channel team that literally supports and helps throughout the journey, because that's what you'll see if you scale your parking program.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Then a lot more partners are coming in.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: They have to go through the same type of steps, but you want to see immediately who is stuck where.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: Where do we need to escalate, where do we need to accelerate, and that will really help you drive it forward.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: And the only way to do that is by measuring everything, and I think that's the earlier you get into that modus, which your channel, the better it is.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: Completely agree, and I think that that brings us to the end, actually, of our series around building a channel, where we went through the five fundamentals of how do you build the channel and indeed, like doesn't matter if you're building a channel from scratch or if you're responsible for breaking into new geography or new vertical.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: The things you really need to get right are your channel strategy, your architecture, the compensation for your partners, the team structure and how are you going to measure everything with the right data?
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: Thanks again, Alex, for sharing today and the last couple of episodes around this topic.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: I hope our listeners enjoyed it as well.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: If they want to find out more, please check the description and see you at the next episode next week.