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089 - Chris Jones - Building a Partner Centric Culture · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships and channels on a weekly basis.
• 0:14
  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, Chris.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Chris, how are you doing?
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I'm good, Alex.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I'm thrilled to be here.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good to have you and, for the uninitiated, I think it'd be great if you could just walk us through a little bit about who you are and where you've been, and then we can get into some questions.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: As I said, my name is Chris Jones, I work for AT&T and I'm part of our AT&T Partner Solutions organization and in that organization this is our indirect go-to-market strategy and I work with technology services distributors and the trusted advisors that sell through those distributors to sell both AT&T solutions as well as ACC Business Solutions, which is a DBA of AT&T, a unique niche brand that's really focused on and exclusively sold through indirect channels.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Awesome, and when I think of AT&T, I think of this huge direct business specializing in connectivity.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: I don't really think of channel first off, given how much of a powerful brand they are.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: I don't really think of channel first off, given how much of a powerful brand they are.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: It must have been quite an interesting role to both be selling AT&T to the channel but also, I'm assuming, selling the channel to AT&T.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: How was that for you?
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been quite a ride.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Obviously, at&t is a very large, very storied company.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: We've had historically a very large direct sales force and customers.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: We're used to customers coming to us to learn about, procure and talk about their technology needs and over the last I'd say 10 to 15 years, as technology has changed, the buying experience has changed and the customer experience has changed and a lot of those customers, instead of reaching out to a supplier directly, have started reaching out to indirect partners that are much more non-exclusive and they're more supplier agnostic and they can talk to customers about the pros and cons of technology and they can piece together multiple suppliers to meet the customer's need.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Where in the past it wasn't that way, no-transcript, before we could do anything in the marketplace, we actually had to sell.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Why do you want to do this inside of AT&T?
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Why does AT&T want to change the way we operate?
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Because, as probably most of your listeners know, most companies that decide they want to be indirect, they take all of their direct operational motions, their activities, their support model and they just say replace direct seller with indirect partner and boom, we're good to go.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: And they don't even contemplate what is it like accessing your systems and tools outside your firewall.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: What is it like when you're talking to someone who has multiple options?
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: They you know, an employee of AT&T can only sell AT&T solutions.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: An employee someone that's selling in the indirect space is going to sell someone.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: They have multiple options and if one supplier becomes more challenging, they're going to go somewhere else.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: And so we had to really convince people inside of AT&T that we had to change the way we looked at the business.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: We had to change the way we looked at partners.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: We had to change the way we did compensation.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: We had to change our processes.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: We had to change what it was like to do business with us.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: We had to change our contract right.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: We had to simplify our contract.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Some people back 10 years ago used to tell us you know, it was easier to negotiate with the government than it was to negotiate with us, and so we had to just make it so that people wanted to do business with us.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: And in some cases, what we really had to do is we had to explain inside of AT&T to our senior, most executives the amount of opportunity that we were missing out on because we weren't playing in the indirect space.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: And in those early days you really had to show people what business was transacting without us, because we are used to being at the center of every customer decision and we're used to being invited in to every conversation, and so we had to demonstrate how much business we were actually not participating in.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: So after we succeeded in making that sale, then we had to actually go out to the larger industry and convince them that we were serious about this AT&T.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of channel companies you hear of.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: They're new, they're logos that people have never heard of.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: They don't have history.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: They come out with some new technology that's cool and everyone wants to participate.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: There was nothing about AT&T that was new to the industry, to the customers, to technologists.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Everyone knew who we were, everyone knew what we did and we had a long history.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: We had a long reputation with the channel and it wasn't as a channel-friendly place to go, and so what we had to really do was go out to the market and earn their trust.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And one of the analogies I use is it's almost like a financial planner.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: When I think about indirect channel partners, I look at them as a person who is constantly being contacted by a financial planner and we as suppliers, are that financial planner right, and if someone calls you Alex, you're not going to just immediately move your nest egg to some financial planner because they cold called you and they had a good pitch.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: If you're even in the marketplace to have a new financial planner, you're going to test them.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: You're going to give them.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: You're even in the marketplace to have a new financial planner, you're going to test them.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: You're going to give them a little bit of money.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: You're going to see if they're serious.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: You're going to see if they're trustworthy.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: You're going to see if their strategies don't change.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: And that's what I tried to explain inside of the company.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: That's what we are to the partner community, because the suppliers that partners work with are responsible for their nest egg, they're responsible for their revenue streams, and they're not going to work with a supplier that they don't trust, that they don't understand the strategy, and so it's not something that happens overnight that you earn the trust of the channel, and you're also.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: One of the things that I learned in a hurry is, as the new person representing a brand, you're guilty of all the sins of your predecessors, and at AT&T there's a lot of turnover.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: We change jobs, we go from this job to that job.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: And so when we show up to a job, we're new, we have energy, we're enthusiastic and we're going to go off and talk to the partner community that way.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: The issue is, the partners have been running their partner firms for the last 20 years.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: They remember everything we did wrong.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: They remember when we changed rules of engagement, they remember if we had a compensation issue, they remember if we did them wrong with a customer, and they have very, very long memories and they don't care that Chris Jones is the new guy.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: They remember that their experience with AT&T wasn't positive and so we had to go out and earn the hearts and minds of the partner community really one agent at a time, one partner at a time and try and change their experience with AT&T and demonstrate.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: First you have to use words, but then you have to make sure that your actions support the words, and partners will give you a little bit, but then they want to make sure that you can live up to it.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: And so it's been a journey over the last six years of making sure that we walk it sounds hokey to say, but that you walk the walk and you talk the talk right, to make sure that everything we're saying we want to do.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: A company like AT&T is big and there's a lot of moving parts that you need to come together to create the partner experience.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: So it's been a wild ride and it's really it's a big change of mentality and of culture, right.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: And one of the things I always tell everyone is, as a corporate person, you always think inside out.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: You think about your company and you assume everyone thinks about you the same way you think about things.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: And I would tell you on my journey, where it really changed for me is when I started thinking outside in.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: I had to stop thinking as an AT&T person.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: I had to start thinking of the partner.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: How does a partner choose the suppliers are going to work with?
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: What is the experience like of working with AT&T?
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: What is the experience like of working with a competitor of ours and then start changing the process, changing the way it feels and the way you operate with a partner, thinking about it from their perspective.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: And that's as hard as it is to get partners to trust AT&T, it's equally hard to get your internal culture to think about thinking from the outside in and that's been the real transformation.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: It's been what keeps me off the street at night keeps me very focused on what we need to do, because there's a lot of partners we need to deliver the message to, and there's a lot of folks inside of AT&T that we need to continue to deliver that message with.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: Chris, I absolutely love that answer and I think I'm about to make you blush because Channel Future's named you Channel Influencer of the Year.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: My view is, when you need to make very systemic change, there's sort of three levers that you can pull, and that's process, culture and talent and your answer there and channel futures, when they nominated you spoke about your ability to influence culture within your own business and to the market.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: What sort of culture do you have to build to create that outside, in perspective, for our, for our leaders out there?
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: What should they be doing?
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: How should they be thinking to influence their I think there's a story I tell lots of people and it's going to confuse probably some of the listeners at first.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: But if you haven't heard of it I encourage everyone to go Google the Savannah Bananas.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: And the Savannah Bananas are a I'll call them a minor league baseball team, but they're not even really a minor league baseball team, but they're in Savannah, Georgia and they play something called Banana Ball and the genesis of it.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: If I give it long story short, there's a guy, the current owner of the Savannah Bananas.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: He bought this single A baseball team that was in Savannah.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: They had a really old stadium.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Single A baseball plays in the summer.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: It's not a really big marketplace and he was trying to figure out what to do with the business and he kind of he did something really fascinating.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: He looked at the baseball marketplace and tried to figure out how do you make the baseball marketplace different.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: And if you think of, baseball has been around for you know, I don't know 80, 90 years.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: It's a nine inning game.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: If you've ever been to an American baseball game for many of your listeners I'm sure have it's boring.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: It takes a long time.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of sitting around.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of watching guys do whatever.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: And so the owner of the Savannah Bananas decided everything had to change.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: He created, I think, it's a two-hour time limit.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: The game has to be over in two hours.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: There's a pitch clock.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: The pitchers have to pitch so fast the innings.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: If you win an inning, the inning ends.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: He's changed the rules.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: The other thing that he's done is he's created it's all about the fans, it's all about the fan experience, and the baseball game is almost a separate experience.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: And so last summer I had an opportunity to take my family to a Savannah Bananas game and I tell this story all the time.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: It was like part Harlem Globetrotters, part Ringling Brothers, Barnum Bailey Circus, part rock concert, with like a baseball game as the sideshow.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: It was noisy, it was loud, it was constant activity that, as a fan, you were never given an opportunity to get bored in your seat.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: It was constant fan focus.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: And what made our game so much, so unique was there were actually two rain delays and ultimately the game was rained out.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: But if you were to ask my kids did they what was the best sporting event I've ever taken them to?
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: They would talk about the Savannah Bananas, and the game didn't even happen and I probably couldn't even tell you, nor today, who won the game game or who lost the game.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: But the entire experience was so unbelievable and I'll just give you two stories and then I'll talk about why.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Does this have anything to do with indirect channels and the cultural change that we're trying to draw?
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: But you know, there was a rain delay.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: Half of the players went on the field to pull the tarp over the field.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Rain delay Half of the players went on the field to pull the tarp over the field.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: The other half of the players went into the stands to engage with the audience, to engage with the fans, and, if you think about it, there was the classic situation where fans were getting autographs from the players.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: But what even caught my attention even more is the players were getting autographs from the fans and it changed everything right and it demonstrated players were getting autographs from the fans and it changed everything right and it demonstrated you know autographs tend to be about, you know, adoration and stardom and those sort of things, and the players wanted the autographs of the fans.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: It's just, it puts it all, changes it all on its head.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: The other thing I would tell you is when the game was ultimately rained out, the owner and all the managers and all the players went into the tunnel and as we were leaving, they were all there giving the fans high fives and thanking the fans for coming, and all those sorts of things, which, again, is backwards of what you would normally expect.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: You generally see fans adoring the participants, not the reverse, but as we got out into the parking lot, there was all of a sudden, there was a player that had an umbrella and he was walking a family to the car, to their car, and then I noticed there were multiple players out there and I thought I actually took a picture of it and I said that's unbelievable, that players are doing that.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Well, the next day, or it was maybe a week later, I followed them on LinkedIn and the owner of the Savannah Bananas actually wrote about this and he talked about when you empower your employees to do what's right by customers, they do amazing things.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: And he talked about the players that had the umbrellas walking players to the car.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: That was their own idea.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: It wasn't something they were asked to do.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: It was something that they realized.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: That said, and the whole culture of the Savannah Bananas is it's all about the fans.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And so, as I left and I thought about that, I thought about how does that apply to what we do, how does that apply to what my team does in support of partners?
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: And what we've tried to create is a culture and an environment where we try to we talk about be like the Savannah bananas right, Instead of having rules and process and things that you constantly have a reason to say no, you have constantly have a reason to disappoint the fans, to disappoint the partner.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: What we tried to create is an environment that says do what's right for the partner and create an environment that says you know, there are some basic rules.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: You can't go outside of the basic foundational things that are non-negotiable.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: But beyond that, if you focus on the partner, if you focus on in the Savannah Banana mentality, Focus on the partner, If you focus on, in the Savannah Banana mentality, the customer who is the fan, no matter what happens good, bad things you can't control all of those things.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: You can overshadow by an experience the sheer fact that I could go to a baseball game, spend two hours there.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: We got there two hours early, so we were there for four hours.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: We watched half a baseball game.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: It rained out and it's my kid's single greatest sporting event they've ever experienced is a testament to that sort of fan first mentality.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: And I think if we all can take that partner first mentality and say bad things are going to happen when you work for a big company, process is going to break, Things are going to go wrong, but empower people to think about it, to say I'm going to put the partner first and if I put the partner first, we are going to succeed.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: And I tell you, Alex, the moral to that story and I could be off on my data, so someone's probably going to fact check me as I say this but the Savannah Bananas play in a stadium in Savannah, Georgia I think it has 3,000 seats.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: They can sell 3,000 tickets.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: The last I heard there were 500,000 people on a wait list to buy season tickets.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: They've now gone on a national tour.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: They played in Houston and they sold out the Houston Astros Stadium.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: I think there were 45,000 people there.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: I think one and a half million people applied to buy tickets.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: They've become this phenomenon and what I would encourage everyone is go learn about them because they're fun.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: But then think about how that mentality can be applied to your business and how you treat your partners, and it kind of turns everything on your head in terms of how you engage with people, the kind of culture you create, and how do you get people to change their thinking about you in a very fast sort of way?
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: What I love about that story is an old mentor of mine.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: He once told me all good lessons are really obvious, are really obvious.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: And what I love about that that story is you go well, well, yes, because the fans pay the players salary, so obviously you should really treat the fans as the center and because they're the ones who play the player's salary.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: And what I love is you just go oh my god, this really clever business owner and the strategy and they went no, no, but the ones that look after you.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: Look after them and make sure that they are extremely well looked after.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: And then you extrapolate that to exactly your story around how should we treat channel partners?
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: And you go well, they're our mechanism for us to pay the mortgage, so we should really make sure that we look after them and, in fact, our entire focus, broadly speaking, should be to make them successful, make them happy and really protect them, because that's how we get our bread.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: And as long as you have that outside-in philosophy, which I think goes all the way back to the culture you're trying to build at AT&T, we are prioritizing our partners and we are empowering a culture to prioritize our partners, and in doing so, we will be wildly successful.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: We will provide such value to them that we will gain such value.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: And I think, as all good lessons are really obvious once you frame it in that context, it's obviously how we should be building business.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: It's funny, my team sort of jokes with me, but the Savannah bananas are like a part of every conversation I have.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: They're like Don they send me like banana splits for Christmas or whatever, right, but but I think it.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: I think it is to.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: You made the comment.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Sometimes the most impactful lessons are the most obvious and you find them in the weirdest places and and just, we all act like this is rocket science.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: And I think what's really important is this isn't rocket science, this is very commonsensical.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: And if you create an environment that someone wants to work with you, wants to work with your company, wants to work with your team, because at the end of the day, a lot of people forget there's big logos and big brands in the channel, but the reality is it's people working with people.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: And if people trust, if you're trustworthy and you create that environment, people will work with you through challenging times because of that trust and relationship that you've built.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: And again, my team rolls their eyes every time I bring up the Savannah Bananas, but I talk about them nonstop because I can't think of a better corollary for people to think about as to how to change the way they operate out in the marketplace.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: Chris, I'm going to be wildly furious if it turns out you're actually just a major shareholder and this has just been a heavy pitch for the last five minutes.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: But to sort of extrapolate that point, um, you and your team gave the green light to put at&t on a platform called cable finder, a tool that automates quoting and pricing and saves partners time.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: Um, broadly speaking, I think it can be described as you went to the partners, you stopped mandating that hey, you need to come to a partner portal and we tried to meet the partner where the partner is.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: How can you sort of connect the culture of putting partners first and almost the process of putting partners first?
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: How do you sort of blend those two worlds together?
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: I think, the way we got there, if you think about it, I was with one of our distributors and we were talking about it.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: They work with roughly 400 suppliers and one of the things they shared with me is every one of those 400 suppliers has four to six portals that they want a supplier to operate in.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: And so, again, if you put yourself in that outside-in mentality, that means they have 1,600-plus portals, which means they have 1,600-plus logins, 1600 plus portals, which means they have 1600 plus logins, which means they're not going to have any level of sophistication or competency in anyone's portal because they're going to be portal hopping all day long.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: God, god, you know, think about like password control, you know, password logging, control and and that sort of, that sort of mess, right?
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: And so what we realized?
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: And then and then we started to think about if you want and to be the partner, if you want to be the supplier that the partner thinks about, first you need to be easy to work with, right?
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: And so there's a tool called Cable Finder, and the cable providers were all in there, and so there are tens of thousands of users on a monthly basis that are quoting connectivity, that are logging into a tool called Cable Finder to get their quotes for cable.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: They're logging into a tool called Cable Finder to get their quotes for cable and by not being there it meant that a partner had to then log into an AT&T portal behind our firewall, get through all the logins, go into that process, do a quote, which is we've simplified it, but it's still really much more for an employee.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: Processes for employees tend not to be as quick and seamless as you might do if you're doing it externally, and it just meant that in a lot of cases we weren't even being quoted.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: We weren't even getting to the table of who the partner was putting in front of the customer, and so we started on a journey.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: It was about two years ago that said you know what we want to get outside the firewall, we want to get into CableFinder, we want to be when someone is there to quote another supplier.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: We want to make it easy to quote us as well.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: It doesn't mean we're going to win all the business, but it means that we're going to get an actual seat at the table and we wanted to reduce the friction for a partner to put AT&T at the table.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: And there's many other friction points that you have to deal with.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: But one of the biggest friction points is just getting a quote done.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: Can you get a quote done and can you be part of the conversation?
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: And what CableFinder actually does is CableFinder.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: You live outside the firewall, it's all done through APIs and so it's all very systematic, but they've almost.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: You know, think about most of us in our personal lives.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: We all go to Amazon.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: We all have gone to this experience.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: You know it's three clicks and you can have whatever you need toilet paper, you know scotch tape, we you talk to people here in the States that they'll order the craziest things on Amazon because the experience is easy and it'll be here the next day, and and so what we had to do and what CableFinder has really done is because they're not any individual supplier.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: They have that mentality of how do you make it easy, how do they make a supplier easy to a partner?
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: And so what we had to work with them on is how do we take AT&T and fit it into their tool and how do they and they then simplify the experience of working with us.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: And you know, what I would tell you is the qualify through order handoff process, things that used to be measured in.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: You know, 30 to 40 minutes inside a cable finder, they can do it in three to four minutes.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: And so, again, it's the whole concept of if you want to work with indirect channel partners.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: You have to get that outside-in mentality.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: You have to figure out where are the places they go.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: People kept saying to me why do you want to be in CableFinder, why not do this tool?
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: It's a better tool.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: And the question was I want to go where the partners are.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: I don't want to try and draw the partners to me.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: I want to go where the partners are and then get into the workflow that the partners are used to doing.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: And if you work yourself into the partner workflow, your opportunities are going to increase.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: And if you can get your opportunities to increase, then it becomes.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: You know it's a game of percentages and then it gives you an opportunity.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: But you know as what Michael I think it was Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky, I can't remember who said it but they basically said but, you know you miss 100% of the shots you don't take and you know so.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: If we're not there, if we're not there, um, where the partner is going to get quotes, we're not going to win that big.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: And and so it was a really big deal to get AT&T built into Cable Finder.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: And now it's all about driving, utilization and those things.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: So it's kind of like you know you get on the Amazon.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Just because you're on Amazon doesn't mean you're going to sell, you know, a million rolls of toilet paper a month because you're not selling toilet paper on Amazon, but it gives you an opportunity, involves a toilet paper a month because you're not selling toilet paper on Amazon, but it gives you an opportunity.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: And now it's one more of those steps towards what I'm going to call respecting the partner.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: You have to respect the partner, you have to earn their trust and rather than say you will come to me, it's saying we're going to go to you, we're going to have that different approach that says if we're going to be successful in this indirect space, it's not all about us, we are reliant on that, on those partners, and you have to really focus on.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: If you focus on the partners and you make their life easier.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: You're going to get more opportunities, and that's how you grow.
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: But, chris, I think, I think not only is the analogy of Amazon so perfect for a couple of reasons, but the first is um, I've, there are almost no businesses as customer focused as amazon right, they are so focused on experience, ease of buying, removing the friction, all buzzwords that you've landed on, because the whole point and why I think this is even funnier for the channel as opposed to customers is because partners will continue to keep buying from you.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: The scaling factor of a partner is actually more than an individual consumer, and so the partner experience in fact becomes even more than the customer experience, because the idea is that if the partner experience is good once, they might continue to use you for a hundred new customers, and so that care and attention that you've taken and the culture that you're trying to wrap around it is exactly you know it.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: To me it seems obvious why you've had such success, because partner experience, at the end, is what creates the value you know, we we were, I was in a conversation last week in our in our headquarters, and one of the things that you know we tend we all in business we talk about ltv, right and generally when people talk about LTV, they're talking about LTV of a customer, and the conversation we were having is it's not LTV of the customer is great, but let's talk about LTV of the partner, right and generally, a partner.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: The first time a partner interacts with you, they're going to come in with a small order.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: It's a test order.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: It's a test.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: It's not a high value customer.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: They're testing you, they're testing the experience and if you succeed, they're going to give you another opportunity.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: They're going to give you another opportunity.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: They're going to give you another opportunity.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: And sometimes, because we look at LTV of a customer, you might say you know that's a bad deal or we don't want to do that, but you have to think about it.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: If a partner has a thousand orders in them, do you want to get one of the thousand orders or do you want to get 500 of the thousand orders?
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: And so I think that's an indirect mentality that people need to think about and that's a challenge for businesses to think it's LTV of a partner you don't generally think of like what's the LTV of my direct seller, right?
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: You look at your direct seller.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: They're like a cost, they're a fixed cost, they're built into my COGS, they're built into my SGMA, right?
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: But in a partner, if you think about the LTV of your partner, just like you think of the LTV of a customer, you're going to do things differently because you realize there's so much more opportunity and you have to think about it differently.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: And that's where you have to think about what are the tools?
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: How do you simplify yourself?
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: And I was on a panel earlier, I think it was this week.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: I was on the panel earlier this week and I just told everyone.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: I said you need to take yourself out of your company seat and go, try and transact whatever it is you sell as a partner.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: And then would you do it and I use this silly analogy but dry cleaners, for those people to still get their clothes dry cleaned.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: If you went to a dry cleaner that had really short hours they were open from 11am to 2pm and everything had a seven day turnaround and they didn't accept credit cards and they only took cash you would say this is too difficult.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: I'm going to go find another dry cleaner, and I think the things that a lot of us have to remember in the technology space is, as much as we're passionate about our technology, none of us have the exclusive solution that can't be purchased somewhere else.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: And we all have to have that sort of dry cleaner mentality that says you can't be crazy but you have to make sure that you're focused on.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: Are your hours the right hours?
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Is the process of picking up the clothes, you know?
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Do I come and stand in line for 25 minutes to get my pair of pants?
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: Do do I have to go to the bank and get cash before I come and meet you?
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: Right, we live in a world now if you, if you can't take an electronic payment, like people don't want to interact with you, and I think that that's what people need to do is that's back to that outside.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: In going and transact whatever it is you're selling with you and think about, would you put up with your own experience?
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: And that's where CableFinder really opened our eyes to how you can make the buying experience of connectivity wildly different.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: And once I saw the experience, I wanted to be in it and I wanted to get AT&T in it.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: And that's when we went on this journey to figure out how we could do it and how we could simplify the process so that the procurement of connectivity could become a three to four minute process for a partner, because that's again, that's respectful.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: Back to the partner.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: You know, if a partner makes a sale, do you really want to punish a salesperson with an hour and a half of paperwork when maybe you can do it in three or four minutes right of paperwork, when maybe you can do it in three or four minutes, right.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: So, um, again, it's all that cultural transformation, it's all saying you gotta, we're so used to building around the customer in in the world of indirect.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: You have to really build around the partner and then, if you do it right by the partner, that partner is going to bring you more customers and then it's a win-win I really like your dry cleaner analogy.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: I was always taught that in the restaurant industry, if you can get a customer to come back three times, there's a 90% likelihood they will come back.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: And so your entire experience focuses in creating an experience and a service so good that they hit that third time mark.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: And I think the same is true within the partner space.
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: Right, you've got to make that first order.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: Well, they're not going to book Christmas dinner or they're not going to book their big family coming over, but they might just come for Wednesday date night, and we've got to make that experience good.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: And the second one, and then the third one, and once you've got that flywheel turning, hey, you've locked them in.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: And just like the indirect space, the restaurant space, it's not Friday nights, right, it's Tuesday nights.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: That keeps them alive, it's you've got to get your repeat customers.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: And I think the same is true within the indirect space.
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: We've got to put so much focus on making that experience so flawless that there is no reason they're not going to come back for a third time.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I a lot of us, and we do this in direct, we do this in indirect.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: You focus on, I like to talk about partners, and when I sort of segment partners, you have dormant partners, you have passive partners, you have active partners, right, we tend to fixate, as channel people, on your active partners, the people that sell you every single month, multiple times a month, and they're much more tolerant.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: They understand your processes, they understand your strengths, they understand your weaknesses, they're willing to put up with your flaws because your business is actively connected to you.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: But the key is really the passive and the dormance.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: There's so much more business that they're doing that you're not, and that's where you have to earn it.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: And the conversation we always have is how can we get a dormant partner to be passive, right?
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: What do you do to take someone and just get them from not doing a deal with you for the last year to do a deal Right?
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: And if you get one deal now, you've got them in that sort of passive world.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: How do you then encourage them to do instead of one deal, now you've got them in that sort of passive world, how do you then encourage them to do, instead of one deal a year, get them to try and do two deals a year, get them to do three years a deal and then, if you do that the right way, you can work them from passive into the active, where they active partners are easier to manage.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: Passive and dormant partners are much harder to manage and that's where this whole outside-in mentality becomes that much more important.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: Because that's how do you get someone to want to do business with you, how do you get someone to view you as they want you to be their financial planner?
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: And it is again.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: I actually think that your active partners the partner experience is much less important to them because they're bought in, they're committed, they're going to deal with your pain and agony.
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: The dormant and the passive ones are the ones that are still working with others and you have to earn the opportunity to work with them.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: And I think outside in is important with all partners, but outside in really really matters for the people that aren't doing business with you.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: If they're driving flow share somewhere else, they're doing it for a reason.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: And the real question is how do you understand why?
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: And you know one of the things, alex, I would say early on, six, seven years ago we did something really hard.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: We called the distributors to an advisory session.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: We called partners to an advisory session and we did something that's really hard to do.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: We asked them why don't you do business with us?
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: And then we stopped and we listened and we had an edict with our team that was in the meeting that said you're going to listen with your ears.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: We all have a tendency to want to listen with our mouths and talk through the feedback.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: And I said the message to the team that was there is.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: It may be painful, they may be saying things that are wrong, they may be saying things that are inaccurate, but the gift they're giving us is they're telling us what it feels like to work with us and they're giving us a roadmap of what do we need to go off and address.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: And in Thomas to the Savannah banana analogy, there were things that were real pain points of working with us that we had no idea and we would have never seen them if it wasn't for completely and totally changing the dynamic and asking for feedback and then not being defensive and just listening, taking copious notes and then kind of holding yourself accountable to that feedback so that over the course of the next three to six, nine to 12 months, you go off and you address it.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: But you know, most of us like to think we're right and everyone else needs to bend to our ways.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: And once they, once they learn how to do business with us, they'll be much smarter and they'll do it our way.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: And what we really tried to do is say we're not going to force them to do it our way.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: We need to force ourselves to do it their way.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: And when we force ourselves to do it their way, that's when the business started growing, that's when partners started doing things with us.
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: And then what was really amazing is they continued to tell us what to do.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: And so, when we were successful, partners would come to us and say we can't believe what you've done.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: And I chuckled and I would say all we've done is listen to what you've told us to do.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: You gave us the roadmap.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: We just went and executed on the roadmap you gave us.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: So if we've ever done the wrong thing, you gave us the wrong feedback.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: Right, and it's sort of a funny thing, right to say that.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: But that's how you make a big impact in a short period of time.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: And you know, as I told the Channel Futures people when we were having that conversation, we never set out to make a big impact, we just set out to change the way we were perceived and we did it.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: In a way, I think that allowed us to take a lot of feedback in that we changed a lot and I think that surprised a lot of people.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: And I think that you know, that award that was like an accidental award.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: That wasn't something ever set out to do.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: It wasn't anything we ever I certainly never thought about.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: It happened by accident, but it happened by doing just trying to do what was right, trying to just use common sense, do what was right, listen to people's input and change it and be willing to try and say you know what the people we're going to change is not the external partner, it's the internal way we do things and as a result, by accident, we had a huge impact on the industry.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: I shouldn't say by accident, by accident, we won the award.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: It was intentional to grow business and do the things, but we didn't mean to.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: I certainly never said I'm going to go be channel influencer of the year.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: That's a level of arrogance that I just couldn't.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: But but it happened by accident because we were so focused on how do we change the partner experience.
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: Chris, that was an exceptional answer and and and certainly one of the, I think, one of the most enlightening podcasts I've ever recorded.
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: I think the focus on generating great partner experience first and then understanding that value, revenue and growth comes from, that, I think, is a a really important lesson.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: We wouldn't be a partnerships podcast without asking for a referral and we like to ask our guests who they think would be a great next guest.
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: Chris, who did you have in?
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: mind.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: One of my I'll say one of my industry friends that I've met while I'm on this journey in the indirect space is Craig Schlagbaum, who just recently stepped away from Comcast, but he in the TSD space.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: He is one of the legends of the TSD space and the channel and the telco space and he's helped a lot of people become very, very successful and I think that Craig would be incredible for your audience to hear from and learn about his journey.
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: He's been in indirect his whole career and I think he'd be really fascinating for your listeners to hear from.
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: Amazing Craig, we're coming from you.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: Chris, thank you so much for coming on.
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: It was an absolute pleasure.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: Thanks, alex, it was great to be here.