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114 - Tina S. O'Dell - Democratizing 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, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channex and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, tina.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: How are you doing?
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: I'm great, Alex.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: How are you?
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: Well, this is, I think, one of the first times that I've had a fellow podcaster on the show, so I'm excited, hopefully, for a better quality of podcast, but I'm very excited to have you on.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Well, don't bring the pressure just yet.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: But yes for any listeners out there that may have heard me, the Channel Chats with Tina podcast is the podcast that we do and it's a podcast by a former channel marketer for channel marketers, so it's packed with professional tips on how to be a better channel marketer, but also just how to navigate work-life balance.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: You know how to set yourself up to progress in your career.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: We cover lots of things and it's a podcast not just for people that are in Juniper Networks, but anybody that is in the channel.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: There's something of value there At least.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: We work really hard to make sure that there is.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: Well, we've spoken a lot on this podcast, I think, around how channel marketing is the underutilized hero within the channel.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: I think we wildly over-index on channel strategies and cams and salespeople and under-index on, I think, the real power that marketing has.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: I think we understand marketing from a direct perspective is the sort of scaling mechanism to reach sorts of thousands of people and yet in the channel we seem to forget that and focus just on sort of CAMs and relationships.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: So, excited to get into some of those topics today.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: You've touched on Juniper.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Maybe with the uninitiated it'd be great if you could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and where you work.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Absolutely Thank you, and thanks for having me first of all appreciate that I am currently a director and chief of staff of global partner marketing at Juniper Networks.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: We are in the midst of being acquired by HPE so, depending on when this airs, I could be an employee of HPE.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: So that's fluid and changing.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: At the moment I have right around 25 years of experience all in high tech and all on one side or the other of channel.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: I like to say I started my career right out of college working for a software company that we sold through a channel.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: We eventually became acquired and part of what is Microsoft Dynamics today.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: So I got to spend early career starting at basically a software company that was not in early startup mode but sort of that mid phase and hyper growth phase, and then rolled right into Microsoft when they were about a 30,000 person company.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Today they're much larger than that.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: So lots of great experiences right out the gate, through some changes in career and starting a family.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: I took a step back and took a job for a local channel partner that sold technology and software and ran their own services as well.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: So that was interesting to be on the flip side of the channel and to be selling some hardware, which was not something I was familiar with at the time Certainly the services I was very comfortable with.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: And then, once the kids got a little bit older and I was back to being able to get in charge of growing my career again, I went back into a larger company and that's when I joined Juniper Networks, first in field marketing and then moved to global partner marketing a few years after being a field marketer in North America.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: So it's been a great journey.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Along the way met lots of great people, have learned a ton about the channel and have done all of that out of Findlay, ohio.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: So when I tell people that about my journey, they're like wait, you've been in tech for 25 years and you've always lived in Ohio.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Yes, I have.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: It is possible.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: We have tech companies here, lots of tech companies here as well.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: But it's been a fun journey and I really appreciate all the experiences I've had, the mentors along the way and just knowing what I know about channel.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: That's all I've ever known.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: But it's interesting when you go talk to other people who know nothing about channel.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: It's not normal to grow up in the channel and know so much about the channel, so I'm blessed to have that perspective yeah, I think.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: I think one of the things I was so excited about this particular podcast is you have a quite a unique cv and sort of background of experience is being both on the the partner side and the vendor side.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: Almost never happens, weirdly, for how sort of incestuous and close the, the channel sort of community can be.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: I think one of the things that's really the experience in the channel brings you is the understanding of almost how to play the game right.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: There are lots of opportunities and shortcuts you can make if you really understand that.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: Maybe what's your one piece of advice for channel partners on how to get the most value out of vendor programs like MDF?
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: It's absolutely what you just referred to.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: I definitely had an advantage, coming from the startup company and Microsoft and understanding how funding works at a big company when I went into working at the bar when I was at that partner.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: I understood MDF programs, I understood the need to show ROI internally.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: I understood the need to be able to capture which deal those dollars were driving in order to get additional dollars.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: So I did exactly that.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: I made sure that my reporting was crisp, that I understood every dollar that we spent, what it went towards what deals or meetings you know starting out with.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: These are the people that attended.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: These are the people we're following up with and having meetings.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: These are the deals you know that we have in place, and then even following up on the won and lost deals, because it's important to know that marketing's role in all of this is to get to that at bat, to get that opportunity, whether we win or lose.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: That's beyond marketing control.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: At that point you know there's influence that we have, but there's it's sort of like there's areas where you have control and then there's areas where you have influence and you have control.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: It starts out really big when you are generating leads and you're planning events and you're acquiring contacts.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: All of that is marketing, is primary responsibility.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: But then, as you hand off that baton to sales and someone goes into a meeting, you become in a supporting role.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: You're providing case studies, you're providing content, white papers, you're providing potentially other testimonials from customers, but it's really then the salesperson's responsibility to understand what's going on, to position the right products and services and to meet the needs and overcome the objections.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: So showing both the wins and losses and just documenting full ROI on the spend even when the ROI is bad, you know that's important to do too.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Not every campaign you run or every event that you run is going to knock it out of the ballpark.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: It doesn't do anyone any good to falsify records and to make something look better than it was.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Just acknowledge we thought this was going to be great and it just didn't go so well and have a little bit of an analysis on that.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Why didn't it go well?
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: What can we learn from this?
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: How can we do it differently?
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: But arming your provider of that MDF with data and details?
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: For me I was able to go from when I first joined the company that I joined.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: They were getting in total from all their technology vendors about $40,000 a year in MDF.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: When I left that company we were getting north of $200,000 a year of MDF from a variety of different partners that we worked with and we got that money because we would do our part in partnering with those marketing organizations and those companies and helping them see what the ROI was, what the outcome of their investment was.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a couple of sort of nuanced gold nuggets in there.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: I think someone I used to work very closely with, a guy called David Fisher, uh, uh, someone I used to work very closely with a guy called david fisher who I think now actually has my old job at zoom.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Uh, he used to work at polycom and we used to do a lot.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: I used to run the mdf sort of strategy for a distributor and he used to say the same thing I thought it was a really powerful piece of information which is alex, I don't care if we fail, but I need to know we failed.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: So it that that, okay, we're going to build this plan, we're going to run it.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Did it work?
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: If so, how do we do more of it?
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: And if it didn't work, that's fine, what are we doing instead?
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: But I think so many people within the channel, when the information's not good, they sort of avoid it, whereas I think I would rather put my money knowing we're trying and if we fail, we're going to try something else.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: That's where I want to invest, not in the sort of vague we did an event we're not quite sure on the follow-up and that means you're uninvestable down the line.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: So I think, if you can hammer in on that, did we fail, did we not?
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: What are we doing next?
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: That's how you get repeat spend from an MDF perspective.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: And I think, from a channel perspective, you have to be firm about pushing back too.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: I can recall instances where a technology company came to me and said you know, we want you to run and use your MDF to run this particular package.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: And I looked at the package that they were offering and I'm like there's no way that's going to generate business for us.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: And what larger technology companies don't understand is at Avar.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: You know, in this instance I was the only marketing resource.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: It was me, one person to run everything that we did.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: So if I put my time, my energy, my hours into a campaign, even if it's not costing my company money and it still is, because we have to front that money and then we get reimbursed but if it's not costing us money, at the end of the day it's not doing any good for us if it's also not driving leads and not building business.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: You know that's not a good way for me to invest my time and my cycles.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: And I came into that position with the benefit of, you know, having done marketing at, you know, a software company in Microsoft, for eight years and understanding campaigns and segmentation and what is a good campaign and what potentially isn't.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: And I pushed back and I said look, we cannot afford to invest these precious dollars that we have in something I don't believe in.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: I don't see the potential there.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: And I said, look, we cannot afford to invest these precious dollars that we have in something I don't believe in.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: I don't see the potential there.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: And it was interesting because the vendor came back and said if we gift you this package, will you try it and communicate to us how it's going, what's good and what's bad?
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: So we became a beta tester for it and that was something I could sign on for.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: You know, allow me to spend the precious MDF that we had on something that I believed in and I felt would drive ROI and I had to commit to.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: I'll prove to you, you know, that the way we're investing it is going to pay out.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: But then I worked with them on beta testing a package that they had.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Now, at this point I don't remember who was right, who was wrong, if that package worked well or didn't, but I knew that I did what was right for our company, which was we had goals to meet.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: We had clients or prospects that we were trying to win over in business.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: We were trying to grow, so we had to align that spend to what works for us.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: So have conversations.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: If you think something is not going to work for your company, don't just refuse to do it, but come back with alternatives and talk about what your goals are, because I think that's something that's missing today is that conversation about you as a VAR.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Have business goals and needs.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: You're trying to expand a geography, you're trying to go deeper in a technology, you're trying to cross-sell, up-sell within an existing customer base.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: We need to understand what that is so that we can match the right programs and the right spend and the right packages internally.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: So it all comes down to a two-way conversation, ideally with those channel marketers.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's with biz dev leaders that run that channel marketing function as well, but it's just really important to get into those details to make sure that we're matching what our priorities are and harnessing that energy to go in the same direction.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: And Tina, you were the only marketing headcount within the partner right, so that meant that it was almost incumbent of the brands around the importance of investing in smaller partners and actually some of the ROI differences that can happen when you invest in smaller partners.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: Maybe I can ask you a question, having you sat on both sides of the fence how do you sort of view that down market world in that smaller, mid-market SMB partner space?
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: How do you sort of envision that world today?
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Is that something that you spend a lot of time focusing in?
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Do you see the value in those partners and how does that sort of iterate your marketing strategy?
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: I absolutely do see the value in those partners.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: I think that a lot of companies discount smaller firms.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: They think that, oh, they're less than 20 people.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: You know what can they do?
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Well, we were less than 20 people when I joined the company and we had annual revenues of $4 million initially and when I left six years later, we were over $30 million of revenue.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: We were a smaller company but we had an amazing engineering bench and we started to build out sales and marketing later.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: And I think that's how a lot of your really good VARs start off.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: They have that technical expertise that they can be successful with.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: They have to learn the sales and marketing function.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: And guess what?
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: It's a lot easier to teach people sales and marketing than it is to build amazing engineers.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: So I would rather find and invest in those niche players than to always build for the larger partners.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: You have the opposite problem with the largest of partners.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: Like, we have some really great large partners, some that are larger than us.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: That creates an opposite problem.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Some that are larger than us that creates an opposite problem.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: We have to really fight hard for their attention.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: We have to fight to get them to understand and learn our product.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: There's opt-in, pay-to-play models.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: You know that.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: Come in to play there, you know, for lack of a better word, but you have to in order to participate in their SKOs or their events or to be part of a biz dev campaign.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: You have to come to them with funding to do that.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: With smaller partners that are hungry.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: They're just looking for expertise, they're looking to learn, they're willing to make things work with small amounts of MDF.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: They're very satisfied with a $50,000 to $100,000 deal and you need those.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: You need the mega deals, but you need a lot of the $50,000 to $100,000 deals too in order to grow and you need that reach that those partners can provide you.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: And when you can find partners that are representing your brand well from a technical perspective, finding ways to reach out and help them from a go-to-market perspective, you know, to improve their sales strategy, to improve their marketing, to utilize campaigns and resources that you package up for them, that becomes much easier than getting in front of them and training their technical staff and trying to create experts on your product that are going to minimize those frontline calls.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: So it's very important to cater to the entire channel, end of the day, and that's what we try to do with the marketing programs that we're building.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: We design for the smallest possible level that we can can to make that turnkey for someone that has only one marketing person or no dedicated marketing person.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: But we also try to design a lot of flexibility in being able to customize and and make those packages your own.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: For the larger partners that do have a marketing staff that just want to grab that package and pull out some messaging, pull out some key elements and use that.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: And that's the sweet spot that we found.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: You know, the least common denominator is make it as turnkey as possible.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: In our packages we actually like in our email sequences we highlight in bold all the places you at a need to make a change, but we also provide all the verbiage and allow for different art to be used.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: You change up the messaging, just lift the messaging and put it into your own CRM system, and I think that's really important.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Having come from a really small company that did have a CRM system, I was not one of those that used turnkey marketing packages.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: I would grab the package for the messaging, incorporate it into our messaging and send it out through our CRM so that I could track it, so that I could lead score so that we could do the follow-up.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: So we're trying to accommodate both in a similar vein.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: I think it's so excellent to hear Almost sort of philosophically, I love hearing when strategists build for the smaller partner up rather than the bigger partner down.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: I know I'm friends with so many partners, I know lots of people within this space and I think so often they're undervalued and underutilized.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: I'm going to quote Janet Shines, who was on the podcast a few months ago and the data is really clear.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: Actually the ROI in the smaller partners is actually significantly higher sometimes than the large partners because of the pay-to-play model, because it's so competitive in that space.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: So I think there's a real cynical reason why you should invest in smaller partners.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: The maths adds up in a great way.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: But also I just love to hear about big brands sort of protecting the little guy and supporting them in growing, because you know they've got mouths to feed, they've got houses to pay for as well.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Right, and it's great to sort of see that democratization almost of the MDF and the marketing spend and the investment going into those smaller partners, Maybe to pivot.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: Oh sorry, Tina, you were going to say yeah.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: I just have one thing to add there and I love Janet, by the way, huge fan of hers.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: The other thing to think about with those smaller partners is all of those larger partners are going after the largest customers, your smaller partners.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: If they're savvy and most of them are they go after a tier down or two tiers down of customers.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: And the beauty there is some of those customers a tier down or two tiers down.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: They're amazing customers.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Just like the partners aren't getting attention from the technology companies.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Those customers don't get a lot of great attention from all of the VARs out there trying to sell to them.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: So the competition is less for those customers.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: They still have the same challenges as many of larger customers do and no one's calling on them or not as many people.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: So as a smaller partner, your competition is less to go after that space.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Those customers, just like smaller partners, tend to have fewer people on staff.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: They have the same challenging network and security needs and they need support.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: They often also need services.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: So it's a brilliant opportunity for a savvy, smaller partner to go in and not go after all the whales that everybody's going after.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: That is a 18 to 24 month sales cycle but go after the smaller customers who are operating on shorter sales cycles less bureaucracy, smaller buying committee and cater to those.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: And if we partner with partners that are targeting at those, I believe that is part of why we get that better ROI, because you're going into shorter sales cycles, less bureaucracy, it takes less to sell into those places and they're typically happier at the end of the day because they're not as demanding, especially if you can provide services 100%.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: Just to add that last bit of detail.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: I sometimes like to talk because a lot of the people who listen to our podcasts are channel leaders, marketing leaders and and sort of channel account managers and marketing account managers.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: The thing I find really interesting about accessing this part of the market is in that super enterprise world you're very much indexed towards your sales people.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: Right, it's a very sales-led methodology.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: As you head down market, it's more of a marketing-led methodology and yet we're still over reliant on sales people within the channel, and so my sort of call out to the, the marketing leaders, is this is where you can provide most value.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: It's not in the high value of deals, it's in the high volume of deals.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: The?
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: The's in the high volume of deals.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: The example I always use on the podcast is I've never spoken to an Apple salesperson, but I've bought basically ever Apple products.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: That's the power of marketing.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: And I think, as you head down market, both in terms of customer size and partner size, that's where I really think marketing leaders should be in the forefront even over sales leaders, because they're really able to drive and influence that business.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: And how many companies spend the majority of their marketing teams, time and investment going after those mega customers?
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: You know, instead of the downstream stuff you know we have all of our salespeople trained on those targets we're putting our marketing dollars towards those targets, we're telling our top partners to go towards those, and then there's all this other stuff that we sort of leave to happenstance.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Definitely, we need to stop and think about our priorities.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: We are going to pivot wildly now because, Tina, I'm going to ask some selfish advice.
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: I have a baby due in three or four weeks.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: You on your podcast sometimes talk about work-life balance and advice for newer parents.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: Maybe you can speak right to me.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: What advice would you give to working parents who are trying to navigate the demands of both work life and family life?
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: I will repurpose and reshare some advice that was given to me shortly after I had my third child.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: So I was a working mom with two already and then we had our third child and that amps up the complexity significantly.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: But a female in the industry that I really valued and looked up to sat me down and said look, you're being too hard on yourself.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: You need to give yourself some grace.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: You cannot be all things to all people all the time.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: You know work-life balance is not I'm going to be a mom a third of the time, a professional a third of the time and a friend and a community person a third of the time.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: Work-life balance means you understand all the roles that you have, all the different hats that you wear, and you understand and prioritize how and when you need to show up and give one role 100% at a certain time and just feel okay and give yourself grace to do that.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: If I need to be all in on work 100% for this period of time, then that's what I need to do and I need to trust that I've got people and support around me that are picking up the other pieces.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: But when I need to be 100% mom if I've got kids at home sick and they need their mom.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: They often want their mom.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: You know when they're sick sometimes.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Instead, you need to be able to do that.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: You need to be put yourself in a situation where you know when you're going to draw the hard lines, you know when you have guidelines and when there's no lines, you know for how you're going to spend your time and and do that to balance out your day to day, and that can ebb and flow.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: It can be that during this four-hour period I'm going to be 100% focused on work, but during the next two-hour period, if I need to be 70% focused on work and 30% I got to respond to some emails or send some notes to school, allow yourself to do that.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: But ultimately you have to find what you can live with professionally and personally.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: As we said in the kickoff when I gave my bio, there was a period, right when I had my third child, that I took a couple of years and I stepped back and I did consulting two days a week just to keep my skills up, and I spent a year just at home with the youngest child and two days a week I would have her in daycare while I did consulting meetings with my clients, and then the other three days I would be at home with her and I had two other children, one that went to preschool part of the day and one that was in kindergarten, and we would play and do things.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: While they napped I would work on my work that I had from my consulting clients.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: After a year I felt like things were balanced back out.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: I was ready to get back to work, because I am the type of person that needs work.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: Work is a big part of my identity.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Um, so I started putting together the puzzle pieces to be able to step back in and go to work, and part of that's good childcare, good backup care, you know, having, um, a community and a system around you and where we live we don't have family that can step in and help.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Uh, not easily.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: They're an hour and a half away.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: So you can build that in your community and that's a really important part of it too is to have that community around you that can support you.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: But it's really very much a personal decision and I am really appreciative of some of the stay-at-home moms that are in my community that were there for me on the two-hour delay days or the snow days, when I needed to put work first and couldn't be the fun mom that took the kids sledding on a snow day and another mom or another dad you know that was able to step in to pick that up and do it.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: So give yourself grace, understand your priorities, understand you can't be all things to all people at one time and build your community are some of the tips that I have tina, that is, uh, wonderfully comforting to hear, I think, uh, it's certainly something me and my wife have been spending a lot of time uh, discussing, and I know something that brings me sometimes quite a lot of stress or anxiety someone who you know I really care about my job.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: I have a big team that I look after and then also having a family and a team at home to look after how to balance those things.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: I know it's kept me up late at night on a few separate occasions, really stressing about how am I going to be a present father, how am I also going to be the driver of the organization internally.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: It's great to hear that those are stresses that you've also dealt with and that there is a grace I like the word grace there is a graceful way to deal with those.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: And honestly, alex, you know you mentioned that you have a team.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: You have a responsibility, too, in how you step into fatherhood, because what you're modeling your team is seeing into fatherhood, because what you're modeling your team is seeing.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: So, what you do, whether or not you take paternity leave, whether or not you are willing to call in sick for a day because you have a sick child at home and you're going to be the caregiver that day, your team will see what you do and they will establish that as the culture of the team.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: If you are constantly showing up, even when you have a sick child, if you don't take paternity leave or any time off when your child is born, your team will see that and they will see that, as this is what's expected.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: This is what Alex did.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: So, more than anything, you also have a responsibility, and there's probably more responsibility on you than there would be myself in the same position, because people do still have different expectations of men in these positions than they do women.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: So you have a wonderful opportunity to set a really great example for your team and the thing that you will benefit from in years to come, and I firmly believe this people that establish a culture, a family culture, a culture of whether it's family, as in children, or family, as in pets, or family, as in parents, that people need to take care of.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: If you establish that and let your team know that it's okay to shift their priorities when they need to, they will show up for you when you need them in ways that you could never energize them and rally them to show up for you.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: For People are looking for that.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: They're looking for those places and those leaders that they can work that allow them to balance those priorities and have the time that they need to take care of loved ones but still contribute and do a good job.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Like.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: I needed my work identity.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: That's just super important to me.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: But I also needed to be a mom, and I have two daughters and a son, and I have conversations with them about that.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: Like for me, this was the choice that I made.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: I wanted to have a career.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: I have a lot that I can give back and help people, and this is how I do it and I want my daughters to know that they can have careers and have a family.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: I want my son to know that his wife can do that or, if he chooses, you know, to not have his wife work and be a stay-at-home, then there's a ton of responsibility that comes with that and a ton of work.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: That is not an easy road.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: You know, in doing that three days a week for a couple for a year or so, as I was consulting, probably the toughest job in the world is all those moms and dads that stay home and care for their children 100% of the time while the other spouse works.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Lots of props to those individuals.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: But you have a great opportunity to model what becoming a new parent will be like for others on your team.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: And just think about that as you step into that and think about how you want to set that example and set that bar.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: Tina, wonderfully, wonderfully said.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: I say that both as a host, but really just as a sort of recipient of advice and something I will certainly take into consideration and is in the plans over the next weeks, months, years.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: We always finish our podcast guests by asking our current guests do they feel we should?
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: have on next.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: I know you've got someone special in mind.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: I do.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: I have an individual that I met years ago and just adore this person.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Look up to them Jennifer Anaya.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: She's in distribution.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: She's the CMO at Ingram Micro.
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: She's also a Power 100 leader in Women of the Channel.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Jen's been there for me all along my nine-year journey at Juniper and even a few years before that when I was a VAR.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: We met at some Women in the Channel conferences and she's just full of wisdom.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: She also has some Ohio roots, so we have that in common.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: But in distribution she has just been doing a phenomenal job in her career there and I think she would be able to make some good addition to the podcast and drop some good wisdom on the listeners.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: Amazing.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: Well, Jennifer, we'll be booking you soon, I'm sure.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: And Tina, thank you so much for all the words of wisdom today.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: It's been great having you on.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: It was great to be here and I've enjoyed listening to the other guests you've had on and congrats on the new baby and take some time and lots of photos because it goes so fast.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: It's unbelievable.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm already on a weird side note.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: I'm already terrified because people tell me that the really really tiny stage only lasts like a few weeks, so I'm already nervous about that ending too soon.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: Thanks, Tina.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: The first year is the hardest, and then it gets easier.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what people are telling me.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: Thanks, tina, it's been amazing having you on.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: Thank you.