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056 - Growing Your Channel: Why the Long Tail Matters More Than You Think · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Parking Ships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of parking ships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: My name is Rick van der Bosch and I'm the CEO and founder at Chennext, and I'm here together with Alex Wittverth, vp Parking Set, chennext.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Alex, how are you doing today?
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Not gonna lie, rick, slightly nervous.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: It's been two months since we recorded our last podcast, so if the audience can suddenly pick up that we're absolutely terrible at this, apologies, but we might be slightly rusty.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Correct, but I think this time for very good reasons, because you just returned from your honeymoon.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, not quite a two month honeymoon, but yeah, we did a whole batch of recordings ahead of the summer because I think you were on holiday and I was on holiday.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: It was a long time between getting us both in the office at the same time.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: But yeah, me and the wife, we went to the US for three weeks, which was amazing.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: I came back about 10 kilos heavier, but it was amazing.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, lots of great food right.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: It was kind of like a food trip.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so me and my wife were big foodies and so we went to Texas and Nashville and we went to all these food spots that we've been researching In COVID.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: We did this big deep dive because we couldn't do anything else on great food to go and eat, until we found like a stupidly long list of food.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: And yeah, outside of something called Nashville Hot Chicken, which is like the spiciest chicken in the world, my wife literally had stomach cramps for like six weeks afterwards because it was so spicy and we literally only had one bite of this piece of chicken each.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: But yeah, outside of that, it was a perfect trip.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Excellent time?
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, great For me it's the same.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Actually, I think I'm also five kilos heavier.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: So if you're looking at on YouTube, you can currently see that.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: But had a great time in Italy, also lots of food, and now ready to get back at it again.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, italy, and all those carbs.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Right, that's definitely hopefully.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Over the next few weeks you'll see us all losing weight very quickly now that we're back to normal.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: Now I think on to today's topic, because we're going to talk about long tail, and especially long tail in the channel.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: If you work with your long tail partners, why is it so important to do so, how do you do it and how do you track success?
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: But maybe, before we dive into that, alex, could you define what is the long tail Like?
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: How would you tell someone what it is?
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, broadly speaking, there's an 80-20 rule to basically all channels, right, and so there's 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your partners.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: I think my rough definition for long tail is everyone outside of that 20% of partners.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: And so lots of people think that, hey, that bit of the channel is not valuable.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: We're going to put all our focus in at the top and this podcast we're going to explain why we think really that long tail is the backbone of the channel economy and how you can really really leverage and get outsized returns by heavily focusing and heavily investing in that space.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think long tail is also a bit synonymous with unmanaged right.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: So what we see there is that with the 80-20 rule those 20% of partners they do a large, significant amount of your revenue.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: So you have account managers on them who are visiting them weekly, monthly, like having a lot of discussions around how do we improve.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: But then we got this big long tail, which are a lot more partners but with a little less revenue.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: So therefore we can't manage them directly, right?
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and so then they leverage either distribution or automation technology to help enable those partners.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: But it's very, very high level and very, very light touch, and the idea is, if that partner is good enough, they'll rise to this top right, they'll become the next rising stars and then ultimately, hopefully, they become a managed partner or a gold partner, if that's your medal status.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I think that is an outdated view because that's a strategy that certainly worked in the 90s and the 2000s, but technology has advanced so far that I think we're really missing a trick by just spending all of our time and resources on those top few partners.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's a bit where sometimes the challenge could be right.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: Like if the majority of your revenue is done in that managed partners, like, why do you think that the long tail or a manager is still so important for the vendors?
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: So I think the first reason that I would pick out is competitiveness, right, so there are very few brands out there who are truly unique and don't have competitors.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: I think there's probably zero, right?
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: If you're a big, successful brand, someone is going to design a similar proposition to you and try and compete.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: All of your top partners are most likely all of that hot partners to, especially if you've reached a significant level of maturity and so you are competing for market share left and right.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: That puts a lot of the power In the partner right, because they can negotiate better rebates, better terms, they can play you off against each other and so you're looking for incremental wins Double edged sword, in some ways really good, because you're working with very successful partners, got the economies of scale, got the professionalism, got the customer base to really grow very effectively.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: So if you get it right, it's brilliant.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: However, you can also spend a lot of money and a lot of time and lose Really loose, because you can go right, we're gonna have 10% rebate and we're gonna put all this resource and the guy down the road.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Got better pricing, better rebate because they're a bigger brand, right, and they can just cut you out of the game and they will do right, because that's a really smart way of going about business.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: I'm certainly not saying don't focus on the top, but I'm saying be careful of only focusing on the top, because you are hedging, you put in all your eggs in one basket and you are just as likely to win as you are to lose.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think in almost all the discussions that we're having currently with vendors, we actually hear that from a global perspective, they are really looking into partner breath, like making sure that they Get a lot more partners on board, and actually getting more and more of that long tail.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: And I think a big reason for that actually is that it's a lot of the risking there as well, because if you only work with a small set of partners and indeed, all of a sudden there's a competitor that's going super aggressive on those Parkers and they all shift left while while you what you thought we were going right, then there's a very big risk and big revenue cuts that could be in front of you.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the other piece that you want to understand is those top partners.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: How are they creating business?
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: So, broadly speaking, it's two ways you create business channel push and end user pool.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: So channel push is an end user is agnostic Lee asking for a solution and they position your brand.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: That's great and really valuable.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: The other is end user pool, where a an end user saying I would like this brand.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: If an end user does that nine times out of 10.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: The partner will sell that brand because it's what they've been asked for, right.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: So end user pools incredibly valuable, also very challenging to do.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: The difficulty with partner push or channel push is that's where you can lose or win big, because if you get it right and nine times out of 10 when they get an agnostic request, they're positioning you that's where you win all the wallet share.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: That's where you win all the mind share.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: However, you've got to make sure you get it right, otherwise, based on the time of day, the rep who's there, the last time you're in the office, did you bring enough doughnuts for everyone?
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Whatever, the weird reason is why someone might be annoyed at you.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: They can just turn your business off so quickly, whereas if you put eggs in multiple baskets and broaden your channel, you de-risk a lot of that.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so on one hand, we've got to need that competitiveness within those top partners, but there's also, like a lot of those top top partners were once small as well, right, and I think that's also a big reason to work with the long tail.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, to me, if you can only pick one group right the 20% of partners who do 80% of your revenue, or the 80% of partners that do 20% obviously you pick the top partners right.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: That makes complete sense.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: The challenge is for you to keep growing.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: You either have to keep getting more and more for those partners which we've already discussed is difficult because you're having to compete against the other big players in that space and so you're living and dying by that competition, or you need to deepen that pool, and so what you want to be doing is finding the next partners that enter that top medal status right, the next rising stars.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: The only way you can do that is by proactively hunting for them in your long tail, and while it's great if you can monetize your long tail and I absolutely think it's a core component of what you should be doing due to it not being as competitive, one of the inherent benefits of doing that is you will be proactively finding partners who go wow, if we really drive resource into them, really drive resource support, we think they can grow 10x, 20x.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: I've seen it happen over a few years where someone we've never heard of just comes out of nowhere new business or new, go to market motion and they're just dominating that space.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: If you catch them early, you get their loyalty early and then they are embedded into your practice.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: You could be a core part of what they do.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so true.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: I think in the past we once made like a correlation to football where indeed, like it's like your football academy, where you get players in very young but and therefore you also make sure that they become more loyal to you as a club or as a vendor in such case, but also for, like you have to do to do less aggressive rebates etc than when you want to get in at the top partner.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: So it's better for your margin of your channel etc.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: There's so much advantage to actually getting in touch with the right partners very early there, but I think at the same time that's a bit the difficult part, right, because on one hand you want to get in touch and you want to give them attention as early as possible, but on the other hand, in the long tail, a lot of those partners are not doing that much revenue yet that we can give them that personal attention.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: So maybe we can dive a little bit into and really start at the start.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: Let's say, as a channel vendor, you work already with a big long tail or you want to grow that long tail a lot like where would you start in terms of approaching that long tail, first from a strategy perspective, and then let's later on dive a bit more into the tactics.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Sure, so what you want to understand is why there is a long tail, and I think, like hypothetically, I think there's two key reasons why there's a long tail.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: One the top performing partners are more effective businesses, right, that's just brutally speaking.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: They know how to go to market better.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: They're operationally better, but a sales process, but a marketing process, and then they capture demand very effectively.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: But it is a self fulfilling prophecy, because if you've only got 10 cams, I'm going to put them on the top partners and then you create that wider and wider separation, right?
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Because suddenly the top partners getting all the love and they've got improved processes and you just create this huge separation.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Bluntly speaking, I don't think that huge separation needs to be there, because now technology has improved to such a level where we've got a way of digitally driving performance.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: So I'm not trying to play the game by the same rules that we did in the 2000s.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to play them in the rules that we do in 2023.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: There's lots of technology and with AI coming and we're definitely going to do a podcast about AI coming down the line and what that means for the channel but there are things that we can do today that we've never been able to do before, and so that's one.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: How can technology strategically drive a different approach?
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: And the second is the reason long tail partners don't grow because they don't know how to create demand.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Marketing, in my mind, is the core challenge within the long tail.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Lms exists, so you can train them.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Onboarding exists, so you can onboard them.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: You've got distributional channel account managers or high touch managers.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: If there's a big deal that they need to escalate the chat, the challenges, they don't create enough opportunities.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: It's a marketing problem.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Great thing about marketing is it scalable?
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's something very interesting you're touching upon, because especially in that long till, that's where they have the biggest problem with marketing.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: Indeed, because they are usually between 10 to 50 FTE, loads of technical people, quite some sales people, but usually less than one FTE for marketing who's indeed to need to do their own marketing.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: They need to do marketing for all their vendors and they're usually just overloaded and therefore that leads to inaction.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: Well, indeed, we touched upon it in the beginning already a little bit.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: There's channel push and end user pool and you can't give that much attention to those smaller partners to really do that channel push motion, because you're not going to deals together or do co selling etc.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: So you need to facilitate them and create that end user pool to make that very successful.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I look and I'm speaking from from the know right, I use.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: I worked at zoom through the pandemic.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: There were partners there that we've never heard of closing huge deals.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Because they were the IT provider for a big company that wasn't in that space and they were asked for that brand and they went oh yeah, we'll facilitate that deal.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: And that's because opportunities drive revenue and revenue drives engagement.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: We've got it backwards.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: We talk about engagement driving revenue.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: To me, that's not true.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: If suddenly, I can see that I'm going to make a lot of money, I'm really engaged.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: If I've done all the onboarding and training in the world but I'm not creating any opportunities, I will turn off, I just will.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Partners want the easiest mechanism to grow and it's incumbent on the vendors and the distributors and the channel strategy to give them the tooling required to make that done.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: The reason why I think people don't focus on marketing Because we have not had the technology to do it right.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: It's much easier to go.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Here's our LMS platform, it's digital login, watch the videos, do the test, move on.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: But marketing support done digitally is hard, and so that's why I think we're really missing a trick and, I think, 2024 for the vendors that are paying attention Can be the year in which we suddenly go hang on.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: We don't need to treat this the same way we did 10 years ago, for 20 years ago which, by the way, broadly speaking, is still how we treat the channel today.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think what I always hear from people that we're talking to at the moment a lot is they are really looking for that high volume, low touch model.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: So how can we get a big amount of partners and facilitate them in the best way?
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: But not necessarily we can't give them that one to one attention every single week, every single month Solution, and what I saw a lot there was that they were looking at the partner portal.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: That's what I hear a lot like.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: We have the partner portal for the long tail, but I think if there's one group of partners that really does not have time to use your portal, it's the long tail.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: So that's where you really need to rethink how can we facilitate or partners in a different way To make sure that we enable them in the optimum way and create that demand.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: Indeed, and I think that's really what, what, what you should be thinking about around that long tail, but in a very digital way yeah, I'm sorry if I'm chuckling, but to me it's hilarious when people say partner portals.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Has anyone spoken to a partner and they said I love my partner portal?
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: I think it's literally happened zero times, right?
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: No one likes using them.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: I don't think even vendors like using them.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: I just think it's a thing that you go well, this is the technology available, so it's what we will do.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: And, by the way, that's why cams exist, because they still go and ignore the partner portal and go and have the one on one conversations.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: So we're limited by either the technology, all the resource, because you can't put a cam on every single long tail partner.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: That's where that separation comes from.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: We're just approaching it the wrong way round.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: We're going okay, let's pour all our time and money in the most competitive area, because that's where our physical resources, because partner portals don't actually work, and so we've got to throw people at the problem, and you can only throw people at a small subset of partners.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: You've got to flip that on its head.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: How do we activate, engage and, most importantly, create lots of opportunity and therefore digitally drive performance?
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: You've got to do that in a macro way Invest in technology, invest in automation and drive opportunities, because that will keep your partners engaged.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's the only way to do it.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: But at the same time, I'm thinking like distribution usually also plays a big role in the unmanaged or the long tail.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: Like what's the best way to approach that?
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: How can you best collaborate with your distributor towards the long tail?
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: So distributors should be fully bought into that strategy, because distribution and look, I've spent seven years in distribution.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: I fully understand the challenges of working through distribution.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Distribution has its own priorities and its own needs and they've got their own targets.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: So they're pushing what their priorities are and sometimes they're fully aligned with your priorities.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: They also don't have enough marketing resource right.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: They're managing multiple vendors and they don't have the contact and they are not going to invest in, you know, a million pound TCMA platform to manage 100,000 global partners.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: They're just not going to do that, whereas what we can do is collaborate and drive marketing automation to help drive those opportunities, and distribution will support that because they see the revenue right.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: If their partners grow by 20%, the distributor grows by 20%.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: That's what we need to do.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: How can we collaborate on the real challenge, which is creating more opportunities?
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah and I think that's also like to think about from a vendor perspective really teaching your partners how do you create that demand, not just facilitating that, because that's what you really want.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: You want to help them grow their business in general, because that's we always say where revenue goes, attention flows.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: That's so true in the channel, like if you can show your partners there's demand and they see that they can actually be successful with that, there's no better way to get them engaging with your brand and therefore indeed get to your ultimate end goal is that they are growing throughout your partner program, eventually to the highest tier, that they can become a managed partner there.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly All the partners and all the vendors want the same thing a consistent flow of partners going from zero to hero.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: I've never met a partner who said I was creating too many opportunities.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't happen.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: And so they have a very singular challenge, which is they are relying on salespeople to create opportunities, which is the same as relying on CAMs to manage all of your partners, your resource bound.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: There is a much smarter way to do this, and it has to come from the vendor supporting their partners to grow, which, by the way, buys loyalty.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: This is exactly like Marcus Rashford, I think, will play for man United for the whole of his career.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Because he's born and raised in Manchester, went through the academy.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: He has that loyalty.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: If you show that partner the support when they are Zero and you support them all the way to hero, they will be indoctrinated to.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: They're gonna be supporting you the whole way through, evangelizing your product.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: That's how you blend and how you go from end user pull To channel push, and the most effective channels in the world do both brilliantly, so that has to be the goal.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, then it becomes a parallel process which only strengthens each other every single time, like you do that, do such a thing.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, every single time I get, I get loads of requests to sell with you, zoom as an example.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: I've used loads of requests to sell zoom.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: Well, that means I'm selling it all the time, that means I'm really familiar with the product, I'm really familiar with the process.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: Then someone says, hey, agnostic, lee, I need a video product, you go.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Well, I sell zoom all the time.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: So I'll sell zoom like that's just how it works.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: But we're only spending our marketing resources at the top.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: But again, that's a technology issue.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Mdf works if you've got a marketing department, but if you don't have a marketing department, it doesn't work.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: And that's where you create this huge disparity in terms of opportunity creation.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Invest there, help your channel grow, get their loyalty.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when I'm thinking about the long tail, one of the things that we hear a lot in our conversations with vendors as well Is that it's sometimes difficult, like what leading indicators can we track?
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: We get the sales out lists on a monthly basis and then we see which partners are growing there, like what could be some other things that as a that our listeners could look at if they manage the long tail partners On to see, like are we actually getting traction within that long tail?
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: So the the leading indicators revenue is deal registrations right If your product and go-to-market motion supports that offering.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Sometimes they're capped based on Deal size and if you're selling lots of SMB stuff, you probably won't.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: And then you want to get a leading indicator to deal reges.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Now you can do that via activity metrics in terms of how many Calls are your partners making, if they will share that data, typically they won't, and so to me, the best leading metric is marketing, because you can see how much marketing someone's doing If you've got that bilateral flow right, if you've got the communication oh, this person's done 40 email campaigns this year from five email campaigns last year, and I can see their revenues going up.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: Okay, it turns out email campaigns are predictive of future revenue growth.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: They do 80 the year.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: After what my?
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: I'm expecting revenue to continue to grow.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: Oh, we've seen that again.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: And the great thing about doing it across thousands of partner partners, you get real data right.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: It's not a data point if you do it with two partners, but if you do it with two thousand partners, you can start to really have informed analysis.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: You don't just have to deal with email campaigns, social campaigns, landing pages, whatever it is.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: You can start to measure performance digitally ahead of revenue, and that's so important in the long tail is one of the challenges with the long tail is we have no visibility of what we think it's going to do.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: We just find out at the end of quarter.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: They were 20% down.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: What we were expecting my bad.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: Not sure why call distribution get annoyed at them.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: But they're also not sure why.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's not the economy could be a million reasons.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: If you got this predictive activity data based on marketing, you can predict how many opportunities they create and then you have a conversion percentage into close one revenue.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: I think I would really like to invite our listeners to think about it like a funnel All the way from the top how many partners registered then?
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: How many partners completed their onboarding, how many partners engaged in several types of activities like marketing, training etc.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: Do registration and sales?
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: And if you do that quarter over quarter, you'll get a lot more grip on what are our conversion percentages in every stage of that funnel.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: And then you can start Predicting it right.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: Then you can start collaborating with your Distributor, say, to achieve a revenue goal next quarter.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: We know that we need to actually register 500 new net new partners this, this quarter, and how are we going to do that and make plans around that?
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: And then you'll get a lot more grip and more that feeling that you're in the driver's seat towards that, that long tail.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and I think if you can, if you can land on marketing performance and realize that your long tail has an opportunity creation Challenge, and then it's just okay.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: How do we solve that problem?
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Because that's a small, digestible problem that we can solve.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: And then we know, hang on, if we 10x the amount of opportunities and our conversion stays the same, my, my channel, is gonna all my long tails gonna grow 10x or the partners participating in those activities are gonna convert 10x.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: And if you do it time and time again, you are going to be known as the channel that's really contributing, the vendor that's really growing and that's gonna buy their loyalty and you're just gonna see the return and return and return.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so two arts are listeners.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: Focus on the long tail, because it will bring you good things.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: I think we touch upon multiple aspects.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: Why is the long tail so important?
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: How can you best approach the long tail and how can you track the success of the long tail?
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: Thank you for sharing today, alex.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: I hope our listeners enjoyed as well and see you next week.