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109- Mayka Rosales-Peterson - Emerging Trends in Channel Marketing · 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 and I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext, and this week I'm really excited to welcome our special guest, Micah.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: How are you doing?
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Hi, how are you, Alex?
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I'm so excited to be here with you, Micah how are you doing?
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Hi, how are you, alex?
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: I'm so excited to be here with you.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's exciting.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: I've got another great guest here for today's episode.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Maybe for the uninitiated Micah.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: It'd be great if you could give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are and where you come from.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm Micah Rosales-Peterson and I currently live in Raleigh, north Carolina.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I am the president of Alliance of Channel Women, so a lot of your guests who are part of ACW probably recognize me from that.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: And I'm also the new vice president of marketing for Lava Technologies, which is a partner in IT consulting within the channel, so I'm super excited to be here.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: I've been in the channel for a while, started out working for suppliers leading their channel marketing program went off to a few high level TSDs.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: I know a lot of people probably recognize me from Intellisys.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: And now I'm here, my next step up right, working for a partner through the whole ecosystem, working for a partner through the whole ecosystem.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: We were joking before we started that you are the ecosystem.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: You literally represented everyone within the ecosystem, which I think is really exciting.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Obviously your role previous to this, you worked at Intellisys.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: You worked with over 400 partners in the last 12 months, which is an insane statistic.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: I think what's interesting to us because you've seen so many partners and worked and collaborated with them what's some of the biggest misconceptions you see partners having around marketing specifically?
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and that number is huge, right, but that's a combination of different type of engagements, with webinars, in-person meetings, consultations, all types of things.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: So one of the biggest misconceptions that I think that I see partners have in regards to marketing is that the good ones understand it and know that they need it in order to move the needle forward for their business, and the ones that don't are the ones that we're seeing in this weird space of not struggling, but they recognize that the market looks so much different to 20, 25 years ago, which a lot of behaviors that we see consumers have today are very much digital, right Digital behaviors.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: So I think partners are all through the spectrum realizing the importance of marketing in their ecosystem and in their business.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: So I think it's funny because I think in some ways we work in a really dynamic and sort of futuristic industry and in some ways we work in the same industry.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: That was basically the same 35 years ago.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Partners were pretty poor at marketing.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: However, they have started to adapt and understand how marketing can really change the game, both in terms of customer acquisition but, I think, the more important, how they sell more to their existing customer base.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: We previously talked about how marketing is the new sales.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: Why do you see that?
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: I mean it is right.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Everything that we do, I mean think about us, right, the consumers.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Everything that we do, the purchases that we make, are highly influenced by what the brand does, the quality of what they promote.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: You know things we see on social media.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: All of that is marketing, right.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: All of that is the digital behaviors of a consumer.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Marketing, right.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: All of that is the digital behaviors of a consumer.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: So I think marketing is the new sales, because without sales, there is no is moved, and that is through marketing, right.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Sales always comes in last, but to get the person in the door, there's so many things you have to do before, right, which is is the marketing fluffy stuff that partners don't like, but you have to do.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, um, I sort of see sales and marketing like a pendulum, right.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: The stronger the sales process and people are, the less you need to rely on marketing.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: But the inverse is also true.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: I've never spoken to an Apple salesperson in my life I think I've bought basically every product they've ever made and that's a function of just having the strongest brand in the world, right?
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: And so the bit that I find really interesting about the channel is that sort of diversification and responsibility.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: That's where marketing at true scale can happen, because suddenly you need less and less sales people, and so the stronger your brand is, the stronger you can leverage marketing.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: The easier it is for partners to be successful, the easier it is to acquire customers, and so that pendulum can swing all the way to the other side.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: If marketing really steps up and absolutely nails their job, we don't have to the other side.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: If marketing really steps up and absolutely nails their job, we don't have to listen to annoying people like me, right, you just want to sell.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know what our generation like we see now.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: You know millennials being decision makers and you know we're it's getting younger, right, with gen z coming in, they don't want to talk to anyone.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: That's the last thing they want to do, right?
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: So when I work with all my partners, I always talk to them about that right Making sure that your website and your things are robust so it can self-serve people, because people don't want to talk to other people anymore.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: They want to do as much education on themselves, and that's when marketing comes in in.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, is actually what we do here at channex.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: Right, we've we've worked out that most partners are brilliant engineering led businesses.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: Right, they get most of their businesses off referral and word of mouth because, they do an amazing job servicing their customers.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: What we've seen time and time again is you just pour a little bit of marketing in that and they explode because suddenly that power of word of mouth is reinforced with sort of scaled messaging and suddenly demand goes through the roof.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: I'd love to hear maybe a story of a partner you worked with who successfully transformed their marketing strategy what steps, yeah what steps did you take with them?
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: well, I mean, I worked with a lot, but, um, one of them in particular was one that didn't have marketing at all right, so he didn't do.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: He didn't even have a website.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: He didn't have marketing at all right, so he didn't even have a website.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: He didn't have a website, social presence, nothing.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: And one of the things that the partner was telling me was, hey, I'm cold calling folks and then folks don't believe that I'm real.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: So we went all the way down to step one, right, trying to figure out what is their brand story, who are they in the market?
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: How do they show up to their customers or potential customers?
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Who are those partner profiles?
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: And we started all the way, from the very beginning, of trying to understand the foundation of who they were and who they showed up, and then trickle that in with the website and trickle that in with social presence and content.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: And now one of those that partner is probably way better than they were earlier this year with sales, right, um, because I think that they were able to find their sweet spot, knowing that, um, you know, marketing was a big piece that needed to push forward the things that they were trying to promote, and so, and I often see sort of marketing pigeonholed as a sort of customer acquisition.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: How do you sort of see the relationship between marketing being used to help partners acquire new customers but also helping partners to cross sell into existing customers or to expand the sort of portfolio within their existing customer base?
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: Where do you see that balance?
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that's such a huge, huge thing that I think partners don't even think about.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Alex, I'm just going to tell you straight up, right, there's a lot of partners that I think are, um, you know, super focused on acquisition and then forget that they have customers that they have to nurture.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: And those are the ones that I wanted to pull my hair out, because I'm like there's so much money sitting here within your customer base that you can untap from a marketing perspective.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: And the coaching that I would provide to those partners is understanding who's in your customer base right, figuring out what are they doing, what are their behaviors, what do they purchase, when is their end date Right, when is their contracts over?
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: And then coming up with pain points that relate to them in ways that would that they care about Right Through email marketing, through having your team call them, check in on them Right Through doing newsletters Right, so that you can stay top of mind from a behavior branding perspective so many things that they need to do that has not been done.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And then, from an acquisition perspective, obviously, doing the prospecting events, the webinars, all the things for top funnel demand gen.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: And there's a delicate you have to do both.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: If you have customers and you are a partner, you have to do both.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: You have to have and you are a partner, you have to do both.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: You know you have to have two strategies.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of partners in our ecosystem that focus on one and then sometimes not the other, and then they're like crap, my biggest customer left.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Well, because you didn't talk to them for like a year.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: They didn't know you existed, right?
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: So that's when that's what marketing comes in and good CRM tools and tools that can let you be able to engage with those folks without you even noticing and realizing.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: So we sort of baselined the audience that marketing plays a critical role, especially when we talk about true scale within the channel.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: It helps you acquire new customers, but also helps you retain customers and sell more product to them.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: I think upshot marketing works, but what advice would you give to vendors looking to invest in partner marketing?
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: How can they really provide value to their partners?
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, like I said, at Intellisys, I worked with every single vendor supplier you can think about, because I was in a position that I was helping partners drive demand to their businesses and leveraging the programs that suppliers had.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: I think the biggest piece that I've heard from partners overall are resources and tools that suppliers can offer to them in regards to, like you know, mdf or support with um, with marketing, one pagers, email campaigns, things that can help them drive demand, and working with partners one-on-one to help them understand how they can drive pipeline to their business.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: Those are the suppliers, the vendors, the providers, whatever we have so many names that we call a vendor right Can push the needle a little bit with their partners.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: The ones that really show up from a demand gen perspective and have the programs that are in place to help them are the ones that I see that are winning in the market and even from a portal perspective right, there's so many portals, we have so many portals, so many different things that that suppliers have to offer to partners.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: But I think the ones that are doing it really really well are the ones that are um, providing that additional demand gen resource right and um and understanding the partners that they're serving and um making sure that they're offering the right value to the right partner.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: A hundred percent.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: I love that understanding the partner right, because yeah, we, we at channex work with thousands of partners automating marketing partner A hundred percent.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: I love that understanding the partner right, because we at ChanX work with thousands of partners automating marketing every single week and our view is that, you know, a partner portal is great.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: So it's a great repository, but I've never heard a partner turn around and say, oh, thank you, another partner portal.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what we need, right?
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: It's really about meeting the partner where they are, either by providing them tooling to help them go to market, or providing them assets in the form that they need to really use it.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: But just having this sort of dump where people can go and find resources themselves in the wrong language, in the wrong uh, in the wrong uh type of materials that they need to be able to actually use them, it's actually, while it feels like you're providing value, it's not really providing any true value to the partner it's not because you know to to my point earlier, every partner profile is completely different, right, a partner that's newer into the ecosystem might need more support, more help and more resources that are within the portal that you know a vendor might have.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: But a partner that's more seasoned and has been around for a long time might not meet.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Like they're not going to want, they're not going to want a one page, they're going to want it.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: They're going to want leads, right, like how can you, how can you get me a lead?
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: What can we do together to drive demand in the market?
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Like those are conversations for bigger partners, right, of things that they're looking for.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: So understanding your partner profile is important and then tying the activities to what those partners need is going to be important too, because not one size fits all.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: In terms of partner maturity, right, and I think vendors really misunderstand this often, where they view partner maturity as partner maturity with that particular brand.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: But that's also not true.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: Right, I can be new to selling you, but I've been in the market for 20 years.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: I then therefore have a different expectation about what your program is going to bring me, right, and so treating those partners with the understanding that, okay, we're actually playing with a serious heavy hitter now and so we need to provide different collateral, we need to provide different support, both in terms of personnel and tooling.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: That's going to be a hard requirement to get that partner to become as successful with you as they are with other brands, which is particularly important if they have a large wallet share right, which, if they've been around for 20 years, they do, so winning there is critical.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: How do you see brands really tackling those higher value partners with sort of increased focus?
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Who's doing that well today and why are they doing it well?
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: Oh gosh, I don't want to throw names out there because there are some that are doing it really, really, really well.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: I will say, just to throw a name out there, comcast Business.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: I worked with them at Intellisys.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: They did an amazing job of understanding partner profiles and what each partner needed, depending on the ask, right.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: So I think you know, if there's other vendors looking at what I'm saying here and Comcast might be a little upset, but they're the ones doing it right.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Go and check and see what they're doing.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: Nice.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: So they're segmenting their partners and then having a real understanding around hey, segment one needs this type of resource, segment two needs this, so they can sort of have a more granular focus on how to make those partners successful.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: So they have a granular focus.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Their programs are amazing, right.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: So they have marketing development funds for programs for partners that that help them drive activity.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: So obviously they're holding partners accountable, saying, hey, I'm going to give you these funds for your events.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: Or you know email campaigns.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: There was one that they they, they invested in a partner a big amount of MDF and they did a full blown digital marketing campaigns, bought ads, um, did a whole email.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Like we, we did a whole robust campaign.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: And I think big partners are looking for things like that, right, like activities that are more specific to their business, versus like, hey, I have a, I have a one pager that I need to co-brand, you know, even though those things are important, yeah.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: I certainly think, from a program perspective, we should be sort of over indexing on the customized plans, right?
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Because I hate when I hear, hey, we just spent 1500 USD on uh.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: I sent an email out and I'm like, okay, we think slightly more sort of value orientated.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: So I think it's great to hear when brands are like let's build this full digital marketing campaign.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: One, it's great to hear when brands are like let's build this full digital marketing campaign.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: Well, it's more interesting to work on.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: But two, if you're taking customers through that nurture and awareness and really converting them, well, that's really what I imagine when you're in your position, that's when you see the real sort of value differentiator.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, absolutely, and that's you know.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: But again it depends on the partner.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: It always goes back to that, you know.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: But again it depends on the partner.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: It always goes back to that.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the newer partner is going to be like, yeah, we need all these things, but if they don't have the basic marketing pieces in the foundation, it won't work yeah, if you don't have that core infrastructure right, we're talking a very different game.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Maybe pivoting slightly, then, what are the top trends in channel marketing that you believe are sort of going to shape the industry in the next few years?
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: I'm going to.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: I really think that there's going to be a really big customer focused trend, and when I say that, I think a lot of the activities that we've done in the channel traditionally have always been through you know TSDs and you know working through partners and you know helping them from an engagement perspective.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: But I think most of the strategy now, from what I've seen, even when I was at Intellisys, was vendors wanting to do more with partners' customers.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: So educating the customer at events, doing more webinars for customers, just getting more at the ground level, is where I see a lot of the activities going to be prospering in the next few years.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: It's happening now, but I think it's going to accelerate.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: So we've had a few sort of AWS senior leaders and people from either EMEA or from the US on the podcast and sort of AWS's evangelizing being the most customer obsessed company in the world, and it's amazing when I hear them talk about their program strategy and execution.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: It's always just pulled back from how do we help the customer to be most successful?
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: And to me it's not surprising.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: When you gear your program around making the customer successful, great things happen because you understand in detail what each customer needs and then you sort of orientate your partner strategy backwards.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: From there it sounds like you're sort of evangelizing the same the same I am.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: I think so because, even working at a partner now, the biggest pain point for us is customer experience.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: So if there's a way that vendors and suppliers and providers can morph their channel strategy to not only help support that pain point but help us be able to deliver that great experience for our customers, I think that's the sweet spot that I think everyone's going to head to.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: I completely agree.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: I think, when you focus in on customer value, I think that's one sort of key change that we're going to see in the next three years, and that's there's less brand and more brands, right?
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: So how stop talking about, hey, this is what we do as a singular brand, but hey, this is our attachment.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: This is how we are an ecosystem together, because that customer isn't after just one brand, they're after the full solution.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: So I think the faster that brands can take that unified and joint message to market together, those are the ones that are going to cause that really big difference, because that's really what the customer needs yeah, yeah, yeah and a hundred percent right.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: They care about the pain point.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: How are you solving the issue that I have at hand?
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: I don't care of your spectrum, go to whoever you are right.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: It's like how are you addressing the pain point?
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Partners are trying to wrap their heads around.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Customers are trying to figure out how to implement it to their business or how it's going to impact their businesses in the next few months.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Right, because it's changing and evolving so fast.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Ai is so, you know, just figuring out the pain points and getting closer to the customer and building programs that are closer to helping that CX experience with the customer, I think, is where it's headed.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: Amazing, Micah.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: That's been incredibly helpful talking about customer experience and how marketing trends are going to evolve.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: We went everywhere, Alex.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we covered the entire ecosystem in 20 minutes flat, which I think is fairly impressive.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Maybe just as one finish, there's one bit of the ecosystem we haven't touched and that's referrals.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: We always like to ask our current guest who they think we should have on next micah, who do you have in mind?
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: yeah, so I I would um recommend my vp of uh at at acw, who's also a phenomenal channel marketer, ak Akilah Morrell, and um, yeah, I hope that you guys can can get her on and hear her her wisdom.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: Amazing, akilah, we're coming from you.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: Micah, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: It's been wonderful experience for our listeners.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Awesome, thank you.