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019 - Elevating Partner Marketing with Alliance Campaigns · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:15
  My name is Rick van den Bosch, and I'm the CEO and founder of Channext and I'm here together with Alex Withford, VP partners at Channext.
• 0:22
  Alex, how are you doing today?
• 0:24
  Yeah, really, really excited to be here discussing one of our favourite topics, one complex one in the channel, which is alliance marketing campaigns.
• 0:32
  I agree there.
• 0:33
  And also the studio is getting better and better, don't you think?
• 0:37
  Yeah, exactly.
• 0:38
  I think Juan and Britt are doing an amazing job on our end, really building out the set and yeah, excited for it to look even more professional so that people actually think we're real podcast hosts and not just playing at it.
• 0:50
  And of course another reason to check out the YouTube channel as well because if you want to see a very nice background of Partnerships Unraveled some pink light and that's your gem.
• 1:00
  Do have to look at our faces though, so there is a bit of a downside to go through that as well.
• 1:05
  Plus there's a minus.
• 1:07
  But no, definitely.
• 1:09
  I think already two episodes we went quite deep into alliance partnerships, so to say.
• 1:14
  So what's the benefit of it and how should you execute that?
• 1:18
  And for today we were discussing like, let's dive completely into the marketing side of it because if you want to put an alliance or a joint solution into the market, I think that's one of the most important things.
• 1:29
  And maybe before we dive into that, maybe a short summary of what alliance is, but also why is it so important for multiple stakeholders there?
• 1:39
  So alliances are the ability for multiple vendors to come together to build a sort of cohesive solution and they can either drive that directly into end-users or they can drive that through the channel into end-users, both a viable model.
• 1:53
  But the reason that we like channel alliances so much is you get all the end-user benefits of building a sort of bundled cohesive solution, but you get to do that at scale.
• 2:04
  And so really where we see partnerships and channel come together so heavily, as a great example would be in the Microsoft ecosystem.
• 2:11
  Microsoft have the biggest channel in the world, they also have thousands of integrations.
• 2:17
  And what some vendors do really well when they play with Microsoft is they build the incredible integration that drives a really strong end-user value and then they do a fantastic job scaling that through the channel.
• 2:27
  And that's really how you get the sort of turnkey hyper scale solution which most vendors, if not all, really should be aiming for.
• 2:35
  And the interesting part of such an approach is that all those partners are already selling Microsoft a lot and then if you bring in the right integration, you can actually help them go to market a lot easier, right?
• 2:46
  Yeah, exactly.
• 2:46
  And the idea would be better solution for the end-user, easier sales process for the partner, more revenue opportunities for everyone involved.
• 2:55
  You're getting to piggyback off Microsoft's Channel.
• 2:58
  There's some complexities, there's some competition that you have to navigate through and we'll discuss some of those today.
• 3:03
  But the upside is enormous.
• 3:07
  And for my money, if I was building a business around that ecosystem play, I would be very, very focused on how do I make Microsoft win more, how can I build my strategy into helping Microsoft and then how do we drive that at scale through the channel?
• 3:22
  Because if you can get those pieces done correctly, your leverage model i.e. the amount of hours you put in versus the reward you get is unbelievable.
• 3:31
  And I think that's ultimately the end of the day, the businesses that overperform and outperform everyone else are the businesses that understand leverage best.
• 3:40
  And the channel and partnerships in my mind are the best leverage models out there.
• 3:44
  Also very low risk, which means they're very recession proof.
• 3:48
  Very important nowadays.
• 3:48
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 3:51
  I think indeed when we look at alliance partnerships, we went very deep in a previous episode into what's in it for the vendor as well.
• 3:56
  But for who else?
• 3:57
  Are alliance partnerships interesting in the channel?
• 4:00
  Yeah, well the ideal and certainly my sort of philosophy on how you build cohesive business plans is look for the win win because those are the businesses that prosper.
• 4:11
  They're not just trying to milk their customer for as much money as possible, they're trying to live a value in return they grow and the channel is that times ten.
• 4:19
  So really, the best plan for everyone is how do I drive value to the end-user?
• 4:25
  How do I drive value to the partner?
• 4:27
  How do I drive value to the distributor?
• 4:28
  And how do I drive value to all of the vendors in the alliance bundle to try and construct your sales and marketing plan around?
• 4:37
  How do we deliver value up and down the channel?
• 4:41
  And alliance is a really interesting mechanism to attach and tackle each one of those segments.
• 4:46
  So I think we can discuss each one of those over the next sort of 5-10 minutes.
• 4:50
  Yeah looking forward to it.
• 4:52
  What would be the first segment that you would like to discuss?
• 4:54
  Let's work bottom up.
• 4:56
  So the best value for an end-user is, and let me repeat this so everyone hears it end-users don't care about product.
• 5:04
  Right?
• 5:04
  Sales that are focused around product lose all the times to sales that are focused around solution and value.
• 5:11
  And it's why, for example, Apple spend so much money investing in marketing is because they're not selling you a 16 megapixel camera.
• 5:20
  They're selling you the feeling of owning an Apple product and being part of that brand.
• 5:24
  And so that's the solution and the feeling that they drive.
• 5:27
  And so why ecosystem and alliance bundles are so effective is we stop focusing around our product and we start focusing around the problem that we're solving within the end-user.
• 5:38
  And most vendors don't have enough product to be able to fix an entire solution or an entire problem, I should say.
• 5:45
  So what you need to do is find vendors together, build a solution that really fixes a problem and start to market that at the end-user that's going to resonate far better.
• 5:57
  It's going to solve that problem, going to drive higher engagement, going to drive higher conversion.
• 6:01
  Yeah, I think what you see there are a lot indeed, if I think from marketing 1 on 1 is it's always about talk benefits and not features.
• 6:07
  And I think that's a great thing.
• 6:08
  When you start working with alliance partners that very quickly you already start thinking a lot more in terms of solution because you bring an end solution to the end-user versus just your specific product that only fixes a very specific part of what they want to have solved.
• 6:24
  And I think in such a way that's really where the alliance partnerships becomes so interesting for an end-user in your marketing as well, because you can completely focus on solving that solution and that's what the end-user wants eventually.
• 6:36
  So from all my own online marketing experience I have that has much higher conversion as well then when you talk product features, for example.
• 6:44
  Yeah, and look, dealer nursh is a real thing, right.
• 6:47
  Lots of end-users will see the benefit of one particular product, but if they don't understand how that really fixes their problem or they don't understand the other pieces of the puzzle to make that work, you are creating work for the end-user.
• 7:00
  So the most organic sale is to design one product that fixes their entire problem that's difficult, or partner with other vendors who are able to fix that problem together and then market the entire solution as the solve.
• 7:14
  Suddenly it makes their life easier because they're not talking about a camera, they're talking about a meeting room.
• 7:19
  And suddenly you're able to go, oh yeah, okay, I can completely visualize how that solves my entire problem.
• 7:25
  Now I'm into much more of a buying conversation around, okay, I just need to get that thing that solves everything I need and then I can work back into the partner and go, I've seen this piece of marketing.
• 7:37
  How do I buy this?
• 7:38
  And that sort of brings us onto the next value of the partner.
• 7:41
  They also get an easier sales cycle, which is absolutely the purpose of marketing.
• 7:45
  I think what you see a lot there is best of suite versus best of breathe.
• 7:49
  And I think a lot of end-users actually have a tendency towards best of suite to have a full solution that solves everything.
• 7:56
  But there's only a few companies that can actually deliver that.
• 7:59
  They very quickly go to the Oracle, the Microsoft, the SAPS, et cetera, of this world.
• 8:04
  So especially if you're a bit of an upcoming vendor, you can work together with other vendors with the right integrations and deliver the exact same thing, but probably even better because you are the best at what you do in your specific area.
• 8:18
  But because of your integrations and your alliance partnerships, you can provide that best of suite to the end-user.
• 8:24
  Yes, it's in fact logical.
• 8:24
  Right?
• 8:27
  Because if one team are very focused on just building their specialist product, they are going to build it better than a generalist.
• 8:35
  It's the same reason that Spotify outperforms Apple Music because Spotify's entire job is to just build one application for music as opposed to Apple, who are building lots of apps and lots of hardware.
• 8:47
  They've got to do diversify, focus and resource.
• 8:50
  They're never going to have the same level of specialization.
• 8:53
  And so, realistically, the reason that people go for the breed of product is because of easier purchasing cycles.
• 9:01
  So actually the problem that end-user having, they would much rather get the best class solution or the best class products and build that into a solution.
• 9:09
  But the buying cycle is more complicated, the marketing cycle is more complicated and what we're discussing today is how to solve both of those things very, very effectively.
• 9:18
  And once you can get an end-user to understand, hang on a second, I can have ten specialists altogether into the best in class solution.
• 9:27
  Okay, well that's what I want.
• 9:28
  You just need to be able to market that effectively and working with vendors on alliance and channel marketing campaigns is how you do that at scale.
• 9:36
  Yeah, because then when you involve the channel, then the partner comes in.
• 9:39
  And what is the advantage for the partner?
• 9:41
  Well, so for the partner, the first is easier sales cycle.
• 9:45
  Right.
• 9:45
  If you've generated demand to an end-user for a suite of solutions or suite of products, it's one solution.
• 9:51
  They know exactly what to expect.
• 9:52
  It's really easy for them to purchase, they get to drive scale.
• 9:56
  The other benefit is there's more revenue, right?
• 9:58
  If you're typically a specialist in just one or two of those products and then an end-user comes to you and says, well, I'd like three, four or five, well then great, I get extra revenue into that same deal cycle.
• 10:09
  Also I'm having management over the entire project.
• 10:12
  So I'm sticky with my customer because I'm no longer the guy that sells the camera, I'm the guy that sold the meeting room.
• 10:18
  That gives me an opportunity to drive more cross sell and upsell because there's other meeting rooms available.
• 10:22
  The benefit is inherently tied into the partner.
• 10:25
  The fourth benefit is I'm no longer just marketing one product.
• 10:31
  I'm now marketing a solution that drives a higher conversion at the end-user, but also it differentiates me from other partners.
• 10:40
  And partners very often find that their brand loses to the mega brand of the vendor because Microsoft's brand is always going to be stronger than our partners.
• 10:49
  But suddenly if I'm not just selling Microsoft I'm selling this suite of product.
• 10:53
  Now I've got a differentiator against the guy down the road.
• 10:56
  Yeah, I think it also really fits the trend within the market that everyone is going towards managed service providers and there you really see they want that.
• 11:05
  The partner wants to have a full solution, put their own services on top of it and then maybe even market it as their own solution.
• 11:13
  And by closely aligning with other alliances you're going to make that easier for your partners.
• 11:19
  Then they don't have to think about it themselves anymore.
• 11:22
  What am I going to combine?
• 11:23
  But they also kind of get a full solution just like the end-user.
• 11:29
  The benefit for the end-user is they're getting a full suite of products marketed and sold as a solution.
• 11:35
  That benefit ties straight into the partner as well.
• 11:38
  Especially if the partner doesn't sell the entire stack, only sells a portion.
• 11:42
  They're getting net new opportunities, an easier sale cycle and higher revenue opportunities that for a partner is critical.
• 11:50
  It's also far easier to tie services around a problem solution than a product and so they're able to put that under a managed service contract or installation costs or whatever the services are that's extra margin opportunity for the partner that they wouldn't be getting if they're just selling the singular product.
• 12:10
  So certainly for both end-users and partners there's a tremendous amount of value for the vendors to do the work at the top of the funnel to say how do we partner together and scale through channel.
• 12:21
  You're absolutely going to get a win win there.
• 12:23
  Yeah or like you said it before to me already a win win win.
• 12:28
  So the vendor wins, the partner wins and the end-user wins.
• 12:31
  Yeah exactly.
• 12:31
  And certainly from my perspective right, those are the deals that continue to be fruitful.
• 12:36
  I see partnerships fail all the time because best intentions we're going to go in, we're going to try really hard but one party is getting all the benefit and the other party is doing a lot of work and not really getting enough benefit.
• 12:49
  And that's why the partnerships and channels that work best have everyone's intentions in mind.
• 12:55
  Because they're trying to drive value down the whole stack.
• 12:58
  And then suddenly you're getting that self sufficient scaling mechanism because if you don't build enough value into the partner, what happens is the end-user gets lots of value and the vendors get lots of value, but the partner is not incentivized to do it.
• 13:11
  And so you've got to take everyone into consent into account including distribution.
• 13:16
  How can distribution play a value there?
• 13:18
  They're going to help you drive scale through partner recruitment, partner activation, marketing support.
• 13:23
  What can we do to build that in?
• 13:25
  And for them it's really simple.
• 13:26
  Increased revenue equals increased margin for the disti and increased rebate.
• 13:31
  So anything that you can do to help get them bought into this is going to drive an outsized return.
• 13:37
  That's how you don't just get a win win win, but you also add that win in the distributor level.
• 13:41
  Yeah, I think that's a very interesting one and especially to make selling a lot easier for your partners because the distribution is the only one who can actually combine the bundles in terms of buying it for the partner and then you really get that skill in terms of buying and selling as well for the partners.
• 13:57
  Yeah.
• 13:58
  And in fact, I've even heard of distributors like boxing everything together because it's actually being marketed.
• 14:03
  It's not just being sold as disparate products.
• 14:06
  It's actually been boxed and sold as a singular part code for global distribution.
• 14:10
  That then obviously drives a very effective sort of automation.
• 14:15
  Now the one caveat to that is that only works if the distributor sells the full bundle.
• 14:21
  And we'll come on later in the podcast around some of the challenges of setting this sort of cohabited marketing together.
• 14:27
  But even if the distributor only sells a portion of the entire suite, if suddenly they see the revenue spiking because the marketing is having such a good impact, they're going to be bought into that strategy.
• 14:40
  Yeah, I agree there.
• 14:42
  And I think if you look at alliance partnerships and especially from a marketing perspective, then so you have your alliance partnership, you have your joint solution, you're going to start marketing it.
• 14:52
  What opportunity is there to maybe even find new partners in such a way?
• 14:57
  Yeah.
• 14:57
  So the example I always like because when we discuss this with vendors and they sort of say, yeah, okay, conceptually I get it, it's better for the end-user, but how's it going to help grow our channel?
• 15:08
  We're just pouring our marketing budget to help other people grow.
• 15:12
  I like to discuss partner white space analysis.
• 15:14
  So if you imagine that there are four vendors who are building this partnership together, they each have 100 channel partners in the Netherlands.
• 15:23
  Okay, fine.
• 15:24
  Now there's no way that the crossover is 100%.
• 15:26
  There's no way that all of those 100 partners are exactly the same list.
• 15:30
  And if they are, well, great because then you've got a seamless scaling mechanism.
• 15:34
  But it never happens that way.
• 15:36
  Let's say there's just 25 partners in each sect that aren't crossed over.
• 15:40
  Well, okay, you've got organic expansion opportunities.
• 15:43
  You all agree that you're going to drive the bundle through your entire channel.
• 15:48
  And that means that all of those vendors are getting an extra 75 partners through their channel for doing nothing apart from partnership.
• 15:57
  At the top level, 75 extra partners is phenomenal because they organically, are going to understand how to sell your product because it's being sold as a bundle.
• 16:07
  Meaning the level of enablement required, the level of recruitment required is just diminished.
• 16:11
  So this in my mind, drives better conversion at the end-user level but it also drives partner growth which those are the two threads that you can pull to drive channel progress and you're organically building in both.
• 16:24
  Yeah, that's a great one because especially you get a warm referral into them because the other alliance partner you have, your alliance vendor is already working with that partner for a long time.
• 16:33
  Probably they've built a relationship and then they bring you in as like a warm contact and you're already much more ahead of all the other competitors.
• 16:42
  For example, once you get in into such a partner.
• 16:45
  Yeah.
• 16:45
  And remember the three key pillars of recruiting partners partner needs to know who do we sell to, how easy is it to sell and how much money am I going to make.
• 16:53
  Well, the who do we sell to and the how easy is it to sell are being defined within the marketing campaign.
• 16:58
  So the only question then is how much money am I going to make?
• 17:01
  And if you solve the first two very well, a simple explanation on pricing margin that's going to solve the third.
• 17:08
  You've got a really scalable way to recruit partners.
• 17:11
  Now we've just talked about a marketing campaign in the Netherlands, scale that out across EMEA, APAC, the Americas.
• 17:18
  Suddenly you might be talking about recruiting hundreds if not thousands of partners depending on how embedded that channel ecosystem is.
• 17:26
  Yeah and that's where it becomes really interesting.
• 17:28
  Of course, if you start having those like network effects on top of each other then you have alliance partnerships times the channel.
• 17:35
  Yeah.
• 17:35
  One of the you know, I've got a lot of friends who work in alliances for big, big vendors and that's their common frustration is they can see they're right on the cusp of making not small improvements, radical improvements to channel progression.
• 17:50
  But it's just so difficult to coordinate.
• 17:53
  And in my mind the best way to coordinate is to drive marketing because if you get the end-users wanting to buy the bundle, nine times out of ten the partners will say, okay, well we'll just sell that bundle.
• 18:04
  There's no point in switch selling you and then that ultimately flows down to the benefit of all the vendors.
• 18:09
  So that's why you've got to do the due diligence at the top end to deliver value to the end-user.
• 18:13
  And if there's value to the end-user, there's value to the partner, there's value to the disti and that's where you're getting all the wins up and down the channel.
• 18:20
  The full chain is winning then.
• 18:20
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 18:22
  Which has to be the goal.
• 18:24
  And my advice for any sort of program people, any go to market strategist in the channel don't just decide on how do I deliver value to the partner or how do I deliver value to the end-user.
• 18:35
  Build your program that delivers value up and down the chain and that's when you start to get the outsized returns against your competition.
• 18:42
  And there's also this interesting piece of where you can actually combine your resources and budgets.
• 18:47
  I think we all know that budgets are getting cut down everywhere and resources are limited.
• 18:52
  So if you do alliance campaigns, you can actually split the work between both your alliance teams and your marketing teams in creating a campaign.
• 19:00
  But also very interesting, combine your budgets that you do have, for example, for advertising to actually get that scaling mechanism into it.
• 19:08
  So let's say you are with those three vendors and usually you would just have maybe €10,000 for one campaign.
• 19:16
  But if you all three put that in, then you all of a sudden have €30,000 and you are marketing the full solution.
• 19:22
  So actually that full solution is being brought to market and you all have the equal opportunities with€30,000 to sell your product.
• 19:29
  So it's like triple the output there.
• 19:32
  Yeah, the, the irony is exactly what you're talking about.
• 19:35
  If we talk to digital marketers or who were specializing in paid advertising, they'll tell you, yeah, we spent 10K last quarter on this and the other vendors in that same bundle went and all spent that same amount of budget.
• 19:49
  Well, you could have run a deeper or longer campaign with more budget if you just pulled your resource and you're all marketing your own solutions anyway.
• 19:57
  But if you market the entire stack, you can really, really drive the depth that you need.
• 20:02
  So you're going to get an outsized return in terms of just a revenue opportunity.
• 20:07
  But also your conversion rate is higher.
• 20:10
  Then you have your alliance partnership.
• 20:12
  You've built a solution together.
• 20:14
  Where do you start when you need to bring it to market?
• 20:16
  And I think that's where the marketing is going to play a big role.
• 20:19
  It's your go to market plan together as an alliance partner.
• 20:22
  The ideal situation is you get the marketeers from the different vendors, round a table and you build a marketing campaign garnered towards the end-user.
• 20:32
  What's the value of the full proposition?
• 20:34
  What's pulling on the strength of the different vendors?
• 20:36
  How do we build that into a really, really compelling campaign?
• 20:40
  Almost take your sort of vendor hat off and be agnostic.
• 20:44
  How do we drive the maximum value to your ideal customer at the end-user level?
• 20:50
  Once you've got that, that's a really strong message.
• 20:54
  Now you need to worry about how do we scale that through our partners?
• 20:58
  What's the method we're going to use?
• 20:59
  Digital marketing, social?
• 21:01
  How are we going to scale it and then what are the partners we put that through?
• 21:04
  If you've got the right message, the right scaling vehicle, and the right partners to take it through, you've built a very, very successful campaign.
• 21:13
  The trick is just in the execution.
• 21:16
  If you need to do the execution.
• 21:17
  So you've got your value proposition, then the next step, I think is really looking through which partners are we going to market this.
• 21:25
  And where should you start if you want to find out who your partners are?
• 21:29
  Yeah.
• 21:29
  So you should do a white space analysis.
• 21:31
  Now, there are tools that will do that for you automatically.
• 21:34
  We at Channext, we have a capability to build that in.
• 21:38
  But you want to basically understand who are the partners and what's our IPP, because it might not be all of your partners.
• 21:44
  There might be a specialist type of partner that you want to market this through.
• 21:47
  Okay, now what are all our partners in all of the different vendors that we feel should market this proposition?
• 21:54
  Draw the white space analysis up and then start to push the content through them, remembering that there will not be perfect overlap.
• 22:02
  So how are you going to target the white space to make sure that those partners fully understand the proposition and fully understand the value of what you're trying to do?
• 22:12
  And there's also a very big role there for two partner communication because that's what it all starts with.
• 22:17
  As soon as you have your value proposition and you have done the white space analysis, then you want to drive your two partner communication towards each other's partners that you don't know yet, but also to the partners that you both know, of course, where you launch the campaign, et cetera.
• 22:31
  So that piece is very important once you start your alliance campaign, that you get that right in the beginning, what's in it for the partner, make that very clear for them in this specific campaign.
• 22:42
  So you get as much participation as possible.
• 22:44
  Yeah, exactly.
• 22:46
  And you've got to put the partner in mind first, get them to understand why you're doing what you're doing, and the second, they understand, okay, this is going to drive in keys conversion.
• 22:55
  It's going to bring in more inbound demand.
• 22:57
  It's going to help you close more effectively.
• 22:58
  We've specifically chosen these vendors together because we believe it's got a really tight solution at the end-user.
• 23:04
  We're all coordinating our efforts together to help you grow.
• 23:08
  Well, that's a message.
• 23:08
  If I'm running a partner, they'll go, oh, okay, well, this is fantastic.
• 23:11
  This is going to make my life easier.
• 23:13
  I'm going to hit target more effectively.
• 23:15
  That's the level of focus and drive that you want your vendors to be bringing.
• 23:19
  Not just product, but strategy.
• 23:22
  And I think what you also really need to look into is how do you make the campaign scalable when they are recurring?
• 23:28
  I think if you don't, what you don't want is with every campaign, you have to think, which partners might be interesting for this or where do we have our overlap?
• 23:37
  So if you actually know that from each other and you have a central source of truth where you know exactly which partners are selling what product categories from me, which partners are selling in which vertical, what other alliance vendors are they selling?
• 23:49
  Then you can scale that much quicker and you can purely focus on the strategy and the content and then really bring it to market efficiently.
• 23:57
  Yeah.
• 23:58
  That's why the investment in data is so important.
• 24:00
  Right.
• 24:00
  Because I remember a previous company, we wanted to do an alliance marketing campaign through partners, specifically around the education vertical.
• 24:10
  We both had budget and we couldn't get it done because we couldn't do the whitespace analysis and drive the content as easily as easily as we should have been done.
• 24:19
  And the irony is, if you've got the automation in place that means you can do this multiple times a quarter because the scaling is the thing that takes time.
• 24:28
  Once you've got the solutions and the tools there to scale quickly, it means you can go, well, let's do a vertical campaign for education for the next six weeks.
• 24:36
  After that we can pivot to finance, maybe we pivot some of the products we push and suddenly you've got this new avenue to market very effectively that drives better conversion at the end-user and drives better pull through at the partner.
• 24:48
  Which is exactly what the whole idea of the alliance marketing profile is.
• 24:53
  How do we scale and drive conversion at the same time?
• 24:57
  It's very rare to find a strategy that can deliver depth and breadth but this does both as long as you have the tools in place.
• 25:05
  Yeah, that's correct.
• 25:06
  And I think it really requires to know your partners extremely well.
• 25:10
  Like you need to build your database there.
• 25:12
  Indeed where for every channel partners you know exactly which other alliance partners they are selling from you in what verticals they do it in what regions, in what language and in such a way you can really skill that engine.
• 25:24
  Because the most work of an alliance campaign usually is thinking about which partners need to join this reaching out to them, whether they want to join, et cetera.
• 25:32
  And that's the process I think you really want to turn around.
• 25:35
  Yeah.
• 25:35
  And why in my mind, I can absolutely understand why budgets are being cut through recession.
• 25:41
  Right.
• 25:41
  All companies are going to have to do this.
• 25:43
  Thousands of layoffs happening every single day.
• 25:46
  However, the investment in better data is more important now than it's ever been because while budgets are cut, you need to up efficiency and data is the way to make that happen.
• 25:57
  So if you don't have the tools in place to really understand automatically what segments do your partners work in, what verticals do your partners work in, what's their product specializations and how can we market through them automatically invest now because targets are going up regardless of the recession.
• 26:15
  So you need to increase efficiency, especially if you've got layoffs.
• 26:20
  Yeah.
• 26:20
  And I think alliance campaigns or alliance partnerships in general are really the thing that can help you through that.
• 26:26
  Yeah, exactly.
• 26:27
  Because there's not a case of especially if and we're hearing around lots.
• 26:30
  Of companies who are losing a lot of resource.
• 26:33
  You can't just expect the remaining people just to run faster and make up the number you need to understand.
• 26:39
  Okay, well if we're going to have to do 30% more with 30% less so 60% delta, how do you make up 60% delta?
• 26:47
  You radically improve strategy and output through efficiency tools like data automation and marketing automation.
• 26:54
  Yes for our listeners, Alex, that are thinking about starting an alliance campaign, what would be the last thing he would have to say to them?
• 27:02
  Where should they start and where should they be heading?
• 27:04
  So first, focus at the end-user.
• 27:06
  So what problem can we really, really solve?
• 27:09
  Because if you solve the end-user problem, building the channel behind it's easy.
• 27:15
  What's very difficult is when you've poorly solved the end-user problem and you're going to rely on channel push.
• 27:20
  So is the alliance you're building because you're good mates and you go for beers all the time or is the alliance built your building based on the fact that this really solves a critical issue?
• 27:30
  Once you've solved that critical issue, work backwards, who are the right partners to take that to market from a sales and marketing perspective?
• 27:36
  And how can we really be scalable through that approach?
• 27:40
  Because if you get it right, one, you're going to look like a genius and everyone likes looking like a genius, but two, you're going to deliver the outsized return and budget reallocation through a recession is critical.
• 27:51
  Like great CFOs, understand, okay, we're spending this much here.
• 27:56
  If I move the money here, we're going to see the outsized return and alliances and partnerships I believe are going to be the big winner through the recessions because the ones that execute very well are going to get resource realigned underneath them and then that's how you're going to hit scale even in a challenging market.
• 28:13
  I love what you said about starting with the end-user and fixing that piece because indeed we talked a lot about scaling and automating and data in this podcast.
• 28:22
  But you should never scale what's not working.
• 28:25
  So getting the strategy right at the beginning with the end-user is what it's all about and then the scaling mechanism of your alliance will just scale that throughout the channel to the market.
• 28:35
  The irony is, and this is why, just playing smart and not hard, an end-user will have done the hard work for you, right?
• 28:43
  If you go and speak to enough of your end-users, they'll have built the integration or the partnership or they'll have brought the products together and go, this is a great solution and then you just need to work backwards from there because you've actually proved it right.
• 28:54
  We believe a lot around fail fast, fail cheap.
• 28:57
  You don't even need to fail fast.
• 28:58
  If you go and ask the right end-users and they've built the meeting room bundle or the security software integration into Microsoft or whatever it is, they'll have deployed it and you go, oh, that really solves a key problem.
• 29:09
  Imagine if more end-users knew about this fix and that's the entire game is find the fix and then tell as many end-users as possible.
• 29:18
  You do that in two ways channel marketing, automation.
• 29:22
  Awesome.
• 29:22
  I think it was a great episode again.
• 29:25
  And to our listeners, I hope you're a bit inspired to really start with alliance partnerships or start focusing more on it.
• 29:33
  And if you want to ever spar brainstorm about it, you can always send Alex or me a DM on LinkedIn.
• 29:38
  We hope you enjoyed this episode and see you next week.