Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 086 - Jason Beal - The Importance of Partner Empathy

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086 - Jason Beal - The Importance of Partner Empathy · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: My name is Alex Whitford, I am the VP of Revenue here at Channext and I'm really excited to welcome our special guest this week, jason.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Jason, how are you doing?
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Not bad.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: We had a great three-day weekend here in the States.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: It's good to be here.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: And for the uninitiated, it'd be great for you to give us a little bit of background about who you are and why we should be listening with such keen ears today.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: I'll endeavor to do that.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: So my name is Jason Beale.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: I'm the Vice President of Worldwide Partner Ecosystems at Barracuda Networks.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: I've been in the industry and in the channel for over 25 years.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: I'm based in Southern California.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: That's where I grew up, went to high school and then moved back after university.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: I've worked for a domestic value-added distributor focused on content management solutions.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: I've worked for the world's largest distributor, both in the United States and in Europe.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: I've worked for a few OEMs, including Palo Alto Networks, AvePoint and now Barracuda, Always been a huge advocate and big supporter of the channel and in various channel roles, from sales and services and operations management surrounding the channel ecosystem.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: So that's a little bit about me excellent.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Well, jason you, we've both worked in distribution, so you're man after my own heart, because I think that is the absolute best place to learn exactly what works and sometimes what doesn't work so well in the channel.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: But maybe as we pivot across to barracuda, we are hearing and we've spoken a lot about this on this podcast around how lots of technology stacks but specifically cybersecurity is heading down market and the complexities and opportunities involved with heading down market.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: How do you see targeting SMB and mid-market and what's different about going after that book of business?
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think the most pressing difference is the fact that the bad guys, the hackers, the AI, are also going downstream, if you will.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: They're democratizing their attacks all the way down to very small businesses, local retail, local schools, local healthcare clinics.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: And so we in the industry, we have a duty to help our end customers.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: In the past, I think, we had certain security solutions A lot of it you can remember, kind of an antivirus, or you wanted to protect the device itself, the phone or the computer.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Nowadays, with SMBs really relying on the cloud more and more, a lot of distributed environments for SMB, these are really the threat vectors for the bad guys.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: They're getting in through email, they're getting in through web applications, they're getting in through the virtual network, software-defined network.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: So I think again, we in the channel, we in the vendor ecosystem, we have an obligation, we have a duty and yes, it's a business opportunity but to be there to help the SMBs because they're vulnerable and unfortunately they just don't have the resources.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: A small business simply doesn't have the headcount, the specialized talent to do their own cyber defense internally, to plot the roadmap right.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: And so that's where we come in Our partner channel, whether you're a systems integrator or MSP, in combination with the vendors, to help defend the SMB and let them focus on their day-to-day businesses, but prevent the bad guys from going after people, applications and data but prevent the bad guys from going after people, applications and data.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: And what I really appreciate about what you're saying there is the value or the demand is so important to the sort of continuity of that SMB business.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: And obviously there has to be a business opportunity.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Right, we're not charities, but it sounds like because of that demand, there is a huge opportunity, but a very complex one, right?
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: The difference between locking down an enterprise of 10,000 employees who all work for the same company versus 10,000 employees who work for 5,000 different companies.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Right, that sounds like a much more operationally complicated go-to-market motion.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: What are the challenges in managing and building a channel designed to go after that SMB motion?
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: I think you know we would start with an individual end user.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Right, again, they may be a school, they may be a lipstick manufacturer they may be a you know small company that does pet grooming, for example, right, they just really haven't designed into the business and to the budget what's necessary in order to protect the business, but yet they're processing credit cards In some cases, they're holding personal data, right, there's a lot of information that they do need to secure.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: They just don't have the internal wherewithal or, again, the resources to do it.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: And so, for our partners who focus on small business, they need to be able to be that proverbial trust advisor to be able to really explain, evangelize and educate to these different SMBs how important it is to invest in their cyber defense.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: And then they need to be able to kind of customize some packages that meet the needs of the end customers To your point.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: How you're pricing and how you're providing services, for a 100% company is vastly different than a 10,000 user company.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: And so this concept we talk a lot about at Barracuda called partner agility.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: Our partners need to be able to meet the end customers where they are, how they procure, how they consume, how they can manage or co-manage their IT.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: These partners need the agility to do that.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Within the SMB environments, it's also quite interesting to think about the sophistication of what they need from a tech stack.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: An SMB it's really not that much different than enterprise.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Today, again, they're using clouds various hybrid clouds they are.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Also they need digital transformation, they need a mobile workforce, they need cybersecurity, they need to understand how to use AI now in the day-to-day.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: That's sophisticated for an SMb to try to take on again without complex and health staff.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: So the role of the partners is so important so, jason, you've spoken about the agility of managing lots of partners, or the requirement to have lots of agile partners, which, even saying that sentence, sounds complicated.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: How do you balance the requirement for the partners to be agile while also putting the framework and the structure around them that's going to allow them to be successful, given that they aren't just selling Barracuda, or maybe even aren't just selling cybersecurity.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: They're selling lots of different technology.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: There is always a balancing act between agility and structure.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: How do you get that right within your channel?
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: That's a really good point, alex.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: There is a difference between being able to meet individual and customer needs and customize solutions to meet the different end customer needs while at the same time having operational efficiency, having some standardization of internal processes and how they manage the customers.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: So you keep cost to sell and cost to serve down.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: That is difficult for partners, for managed service providers, for managed security service providers, because, yes, in order to win business and provide the best value to their clients, they do need to customize how they work, depending on the end customer network, the applications they use.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: But at the same time, profitability is paramount these days for the partner channel.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: So we've had partners who have tried having, let's call it, a one-size-fits-all offering.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: You know, I have three different bundles and our end customers need to take the bundles and there's no adaptation, no customization to those.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: I haven't seen that be successful.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: I think they could scale to a certain point, but then they lose some of their competitive advantage in the local industry.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: I think if you look at the MSPs, they're starting to become more sophisticated at how they're doing their internal operations, how they're integrated into various platforms, into their managed service, into the vendor partnerships.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: A lot of that integration feeds automation.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: A lot of that automation then helps to keep that cost to serve down.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: A lot of that automation then helps to keep that cost to serve down.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: At Barracuda, for example, we have a platform that we provide for all of our managed service providers.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: They can go right in self-provision licenses it's all done monthly.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: They can do their management.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: They can customize the management of an end customer depending on how much that the partner does versus how much an end customer might do, and then they can provide a suite of services throughout the entire customer lifecycle management.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: That's critical today, right?
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: We talk a lot about layer land, adopt, expand and renew, and our platform and our tools helps the managed service providers provide that full range of services while doing it quite efficiently, with a lot of automation built in.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: It's critical.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: So that's that balance between customizing your services for the end customer but still harmonizing, standardizing how you do it so that you have operational efficiencies and ultimately, more profitability.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: We speak a lot at channex we.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: We talk a lot about marketing for through SMB partners and the requirement for automation, because the more heavy lift each action is, the more of your partner base you are going to lose.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: When you talk about SMB, you know 10,000 partners become incredibly complicated.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: So I love what you're talking about there, because you've tried to make the operational mechanism so scalable that that isn't a friction point for a partner to think this isn't worth it.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: And then blending that with the ability to use some level of customization on a per end user deployment to allow them to still have the flexibility and the margin and the customization to be able to deploy the right solution.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: To be able to deploy the right solution While complicated.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: I imagine that drives huge stickiness with your partners because once they're in that mode, I imagine it's very hard for them to then pivot away from Barracuda as a brand.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: We like to say that we want to be the ingredient in the cake that our partners are selling.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: The more that we can get integrated, automated, be a piece of the solution that they're selling, then every time they sell those cakes, they're buying more ingredients from us no-transcript.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Perfect Barracuda is the eggs, I think, is your slogan for when we publish this.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: Awesome, maybe.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Pivoting then on to marketing and MDF and we sort of our worldview in terms of why marketing is so important for the SMB is because you know what keeps people interested, revenue right, it's opportunities coming in consistently, and so some brands have chosen to feed leads down not particularly scalable, and I think the best brands work with their partners to self-generate opportunities.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: Mdf and marketing are a critical vehicle to do that.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: How do you view Jason, marketing playing a role in generating demand for your partners?
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: I mean it's absolutely critical, particularly these days.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: I mean it's absolutely critical particularly these days.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: All forms, whether it's, you know, event marketing, corporate marketing, account based marketing, intent based marketing, digital in particular, is critical, given today's buyers.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Right, they say today's buyers do a ton of research on their own.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Buyers do a ton of research on their own.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: In many cases, they may have, you know, a kind of 60% down the way of a decision before they even interact with a partner or you know, or the supplier or the vendor.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: So marketing is absolutely critical.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: But if you look, if you take a step back and look at, hey, what is the fundamental, what are one of those fundamental value propositions of using a channel?
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Well, it's that proverbial, that's a force multiplier.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: I'm going to have partners all around the globe, boots on the ground, feet on the street, that are out there talking to end users, understanding, assessing their needs and then making recommendations for the OEM or the ISVs technology solution.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: So we absolutely need to have our partners out there creating demand.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: We can do that through relationship, through training, through awareness, where they're just naturally out there every single day talking about how our solutions can meet and end customer use case, and then we can do it formally through to your point.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Marketing programs, the use of MDF Partners, do a great job of identifying at a local level the right events.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: For example, a cybersecurity in the local education event.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Or we're going to have a bunch of CIOs from the legal or banking and finance industry meeting.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Great, let's go out and be there.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Do an annual customer appreciation, annual customer golf event.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: All these things are just ways that we can help and support our partners' efforts to get in front of their customers or their prospects.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: What I will say is that the industry distributors, vendors, partners themselves are being much more scrutinous around ROI of marketing spend.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: It's always been a challenge in marketing to track every dollar and what the impact is.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: But there used to be a time when the industry was just kind of naturally growing and the rising tide floated all boats that you could put money in.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: You can expect a really good return out of that.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I think it's harder now.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: I think it's really harder to always positively generate a strong ROI on that marketing.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: So at Barracuda we also are being more scrutinous.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: We're working closer with our partners to make sure that, one, they're submitting the right requests for funds and, two, they're doing the right activities.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: And then three, that there's a closed loop right, that there's absolutely a closed loop to track the impact of those marketing dollars will turn into pipeline and ultimately closed business.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I've heard some absolute distribution horror stories from the 90s about just how well some of the MDF was being spent.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: I think those days are long gone and the requirement now and I think not just from a vendor perspective but also partners right, so busy, so competitive, so many things to sell, they've got to keep the lights on themselves.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: They don't have time to be wasting activities, especially because they typically don't have the time or the resources to do lots of activities over a quarter.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: They might only do two or three marketing events or campaigns a quarter, so they are focused on maximizing ROI as well.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: I think the brands that can best support that are the ones that ultimately get that force multiplier because they're getting more and more partners with a cohesive message to market, educating the end users.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: And I really see that marketing and the SMB are so tightly linked for success, even sometimes over and above some of the other.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: You know, enablement or sales approach.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: I often reference this.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: At Zoom, we didn't have the most mature channel program.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: However, due to COVID, demand was through the roof right, and so partners were willing to put up with a little bit of friction elsewhere because the demand was so high, and so we are seeing sales leaders and marketing leaders focus in so heavily on how do we help partners generate the demand, knowing that when there's a little bit of operational friction or a bit of sales friction, we have that inbound demand, keeping us focused on why Barracuda is the best brand in the world to sell.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, if you look at what's happening in the channel ecosystem or in the industry at large, one is that there's a huge ecosystem around third-party companies that help the channel do marketing or help the vendors do marketing through the channel.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: There has been birthed in the last decade just an incredible amount of businesses around the world that are positioned there to say, hey, how do we help the partner community or the vendors generate?
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: And that wasn't the case 10 years ago.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: You didn't have too many options like that.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: So on the positive side, there's so many more options where you can get help to use that marketing dollar to generate pipeline.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: The other side, it's interesting, alex.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: You know I talk to partners every week traveling.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: I love talking to partners.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: You still, particularly with SMB partners.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: You know a partner that might have 50, 30 employees or below.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Many still do not have a dedicated marketing staff, not like, not one right Like the owner founder does the marketing right.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Interesting that they have that even still to this day, a decade later.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Since we resource the staff to kind of ingest those marketing funds or run a process or do that follow-up, the partners are going to miss out on those opportunities.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: The vendors, distributors, aren't going to select those partners for the program.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: We can help as much as we can from kind of an outsourcing perspective on behalf of those partners, but it still always surprises me just how many partners do not have dedicated in-house marketing staff.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you use the right term, force multiplier, right, Because I think if we all conceptually thought about businesses and they had zero salespeople and we went, well, that doesn't make sense, right?
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: Salespeople are so important to help drive business.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: But yet you're right Jay McBain, I think, quotes this statistic all the time.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: The requirement for an SMB partner to employ a dedicated full-time marketing headcount is 49 FTE, the average FTE 12.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: And so there is a mile difference, right, A huge amount of revenue required to get to that 50 person so that you can have one dedicated marketing user.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: But the force multiplier of activating all of those partners, suddenly that you know to have an extra thousand partners marketing every quarter, that you know, blow your mind what that would do to your, your, your revenue goals.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: And yet.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: So I think it's so important that businesses look at how do we really turn that on?
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: Because businesses typically, or partners typically, are sales led or engineering led, and then it's down to you know, the CEO tweeting every now and again that you know Barracuda is a great brand, not a particularly cohesive marketing strategy.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: So, a bit like your operational mechanism, it's not just about providing a good product and good enablement.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: What are the other things that we provide the partners so we can make their lives easier and more successful.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Yep Agreed.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: And then one of the things that we have found really an interesting subject for the SMB agility of, let's say, portfolio expansion.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: So Barracuda has a product line, you release a new product, how do you get the partners to understand that product?
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: How do you get them to position that product?
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: How do you get them to sell that product?
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: That's a very slow motion, especially if you're working with distribution.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: Right, You've got to train distribution.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: You've then got to train the partners.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: You've then got to train the end users.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: It can be quite an onerous thing.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: How do you ensure that there is agility in your portfolio expansion within your channel?
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: I'll always start with a phrase that I like to say a lot internally, and that is you have to win the hearts and minds of the partners.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Engineers first bring, through research and development, through an acquisition, through enhancements, the partner engineers getting their hands on it.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: Playing around in a sandbox doing the proof of concepts, doing the demos, like really getting them to see, wow, this is great technology and it will help our end customers.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: That's a bedrock, I mean.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: That is a foundation for the partners then being able to take your solutions to market right.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Don't ever, as a vendor, take for granted that you've got great technology and the partners think that the technology is great and want to take it to the end users.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: So I think it starts there.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: We've got to make sure that we've got all of the awareness and the enablement and really help our partners get their hands on our technology Again through NFR and demos and POCs and sandboxes.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: I think that's going to step one.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Second, you know we have an opportunity at Barracuda as a cybersecurity, a platform vendor where we truly have a trust platform from application security and email security and data protection and cloud and network security.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: It's truly a platform designed for 5,000 users and below.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: But we have to prove that you have both the efficacy and the efficiency that a platform should deliver for both the partner and the end customer, above and beyond what a collection of point products can do.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Because, as you know, alex, there is a bright, shiny object.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: There's a new cybersecurity startup every day coming out of somewhere around the world and they're well-funded and they're showing up at the trade shows and they're showing off their technology.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: If we have a partner and we want them to consume more of the platform and take more of our platform to market, we have to demonstrate those two key value props.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: So one again is security efficacy, and the second is that kind of user efficiency and user predictivity.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: Security efficacy means we really demonstrate that threat intelligence is shared right, that we have common machine learning and AI learning modules, right.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: That's training the technology in the same way.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: If we can show them, hey, this works better than a collection of point products that don't share ML and AI training modules that don't share security efficiencies and threat intelligence.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: And then again, the other side is the user.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: So for the managed service provider or for the end customer.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Can we demonstrate user experience and user productivity benefits?
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: Those typically come in the fact that you have a common reporting, common management dashboards, common user interface, a look and feel, than trying to manage 20 different solutions, smbn, customers, to truly demonstrate that it's better to work with a smaller amount of vendors than you know a lot, because then you have you're not sharing your threat intelligence, different management dashboards, different reports.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: So that's how we try to do it at Barracuda.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: Jason, that was gold dust.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: You probably saw me smiling because I like to think of myself as the world's laziest salesperson and we often talk a lot around.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: Engineers are your Trojan horse right, because they, more than any salesperson in the world, the engineer is the real trusted advisor.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: And so when an engineer speaks to an engineer, typically the end user says, hey, this product's really good and here's why it's really good, and they can really talk the ones and zeros of of of it much better than any salesperson.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: That's 90% of the sales work done right there.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: So I love you prioritizing getting the engineers on board, especially for cybersecurity or any technically heavy product that bits the gold dust that makes the sales life so, so easy, cause if it a product level and an engineering level, it makes sense.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: Everything else gets a lot simpler.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you said you mentioned working in distribution.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: So you've had this view of a ton of different OEMs and ISVs and how they go to market and things like battle cards and PDFs and decks.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Those are all great.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: We need those.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: We need to show the products and what it does and how it compares with competition and an engineer might look at those.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, if you can get an engineer into the sandbox playing around, that's where you're going to win those hearts and minds, to show them that the technology works and it delivers on all of the value propositions it's supposed to do.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen, I've seen, I've seen, have felt six months of sales work go up in smoke because an engineer wrote a two word, no, a two letter, no just being like no, and that was.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: It was like six months of work done because an engineer just went I'm not interested, and whereas and I've seen the role reversal right, where an engineer put it on their back and carried a deal and you again think of the force multiplier of it's not one engineer, it's a thousand engineers into 10 000 customers and and they really are the heart of how you can make sales work really go, because they are thinking with the customer in mind.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: Right, they are thinking because they're the ones who are going to have to get the calls at 3 am because something's happened.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: Right, they're defending their own sanity and so they are so, so harsh on routes to market.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: But they're on side, they're on side and you're in a really great position, perfect.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: And then, um, jason, uh, maybe to lift the curtain slightly, we had a pre-call about this recording and you said two words which I thought were powerful and represented the sort of philosophy for how you build the channel partner empathy.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: Can you talk about what that means and how that guides you through building channels and having relationships with partners.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: I'd love to.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: Partner empathy is at the heart of our channel ethos here at Barracuda.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: We've been a company that's been channel loyal, channel centric now for 20 years.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: So we've always worked with partners of all shapes and sizes and distributors around the world.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: I've also, as I mentioned earlier, I've been at small domestic distributors, large distributors.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: I've been at various vendors and in my time in the industry I came to uh, kind of see, have this observation of certain vendors and I said you know what?
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: These vendors are very myopic, right, only thinking about their own product, their own go-to-market, their own budgets, their own four walls.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: And I talked to partners a lot and they get listen.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: We got a vendor knocking on our door every day.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: We can go to a trade show, a webinar, a demo every single day for vendors and many of them show up and throw up and say, boy, you should be so lucky to take our technology to your end customers.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: Alex, we know that's not the way that it works, right, partners are running their own business, they're making choices and we should feel honored as Barracuda.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: We have partners that are willing to commit and invest and go to market with us every day.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: So partner empathy means that across our organization?
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: Are we putting ourselves in our partner's shoes?
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: Are we seeing the world through their eyes?
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Do we understand their brand, their go-to-market solutions, their budgets, their financial goals, their quota right?
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Do we understand their business enough so that when we sit down and we do the business planning or we do joint go-to-market, that it's going to be a true win-win for us and for them?
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: That's fundamentally different than just looking at the world through the vendor's perspective.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: So that's what partner empathy is.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: And I have a kind of a mathematical expression that I use to represent partner empathy that we talk about every single day at Barracuda and that is IQ plus EQ plus AQ equals SQ.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: Now you're thinking that's a lot of Qs, that's a fancy formula for a partner empathy.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: But let me explain IQ right, we want our partner managers, our teams, our salespeople make sure they understand the business.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: They understand that partner's business.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: We have acumen, we do smart planning.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Right On the EQ piece, can we connect?
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: Do we have that emotional quotient?
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Where we are building relationships, where we have that lens to see the business through their perspective, we become the trusted advisor.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Right, the AQ arrows in the quiver.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: We make a lot of resources available.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: Distribution makes a lot of resources available.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: The greater channel has a lot of resources that are available to partners.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Are we using all of those?
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: Are we helping our partners access those resources in order to grow the business?
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: So if we do all those things, we're going to SQ, we're going to smash our quotas.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: So that's what partner empathy is Really understand the partner, do a joint go-to market based on their business and then bring all of the right and of assets and approach the credibility that we can go and have success together cheap jason.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: Wow, that might be the best answer anyone's ever given on the podcast.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: That was yeah, that's excellent.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: Um, I, yeah, I'm stunned.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was sort of formulating a response there to sort of chime in and agree, but I think I've got nothing else to add.
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: That is a perfect guiding motion for how you should think about partners, how you should think about business, because the brands that are really in it for the partners and not in it for themselves, they're the ones that do have a channel that's 20 years old, right, and I have seen manage them at distribution, occasionally American.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: You know, san Francisco brand comes across the, comes across the UK and tells us how it's all going to work.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: And you know they meet one partner, typically called CDW.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: They don't speak to anyone else and then they fly back and they go.
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we really understand the UK and it just doesn't work.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: It doesn't work because if you don't really care and if you're not really outside in, it just dies to death.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: But that was a far more eloquent way of putting it that was a great answer and, alex, I'm sure, when you sat down with partners.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: It's interesting how many vendors don't ask a partner hey, what are your top three financial or strategic goals this year?
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: So if you understand, oh, this year we're trying to build our managed services, our recurring revenue.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: This year we're trying to build our cybersecurity practice.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: This year we want to penetrate the education community, our cybersecurity practice.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: This year we want to penetrate the education community.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: If you just don't ask that question to the partnership, what are your top three business strategic financial goals, then how can you build a plan?
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: How can you truly build a plan that not only helps the vendor sell more of its technology but helps the partner advance and have a successful year?
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: Start or just right to start with understanding what's important to them yeah, I, I, I completely agree, and it's sort of we open the conversation with why distribution is one of the best learnings for anyone who wants to build a career in channel, and I firmly believe it's the best place to start because you, you understand the vendor, you, you spend all day speaking to partners and the best bit about my job being a sort of young hungry, you know, 23 year old was I was sitting down with ceos and going can you tell me about how your business worked?
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: And that was my job.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: Right, it was to build relationships with, with partners, and I couldn't believe that I was earning a living by having a, a semi-strategic probably not at that time conversation around what they were trying to achieve.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: And then I would just see other people come in and go.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: Let me tell you why.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: This product's excellent and they go I don't care, we don't sell into healthcare.
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: So you showing me this case study about the NHS means nothing, because we have no interest in selling into healthcare.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: Why are you wasting?
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: And then they just hate you immediately because they're just like why are you here?
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: This is, yeah, it's just.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: You've got to have their perspective in mind.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, awesome, jason, that's been an absolute pleasure and I really do mean that.
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: I think that's my favorite answer ever.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: Sorry to all the previous guests, um, but we are a true partnerships podcast and we always like to finish by asking for a referral for who you think we should have on next, and I know you've got something in mind.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: Who do you think we should bring on next, jason?
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: uh, I'd invite you to reach out to scott gory, a friend of mine in the industry.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: He's started his it career 10 years at cisco and has had various um.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: He was at pure and he's currently at Sky High Security.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: Great guy does a ton of volunteer work both in the industry and outside of the industry as well.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: That's a good person, right.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: Interesting background.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: When you learn, you know his whole life story.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: But he also is somebody that has an incredible amount of empathy in how he approaches his partnerships and, again, how he gives back to the community, to the industry and then the community at large is something to be proud of.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: So I'd recommend bringing Scott on.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: Awesome, Scott.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: We're coming for you.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: Jason, it's an absolute pleasure.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: Alex.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate the opportunity, great conversation, so thank you so much.