Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 024 - Partners Are NOT Coming To Your Portal Pt.2

Transcript

024 - Partners Are NOT Coming To Your Portal Pt.2 · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:16
  My name is Rick van den Bosch and I'm the CEO and founder at Channext.
• 0:19
  And I'm here together with Alex Whitford VP Partners at Channext.
• 0:22
  Alex, how are you doing today?
• 0:22
  I'm doing great, thanks.
• 0:25
  Rick, how are you?
• 0:25
  Doing great as well.
• 0:27
  Especially with the topic we're going to discuss after last week.
• 0:31
  Of course, we're in the middle of our two part series around everything regarding partner portals, why they are not working, and of course, very important, what is the solution to make it work?
• 0:42
  And I think that's where we're going to dive into today.
• 0:45
  Last week was really about why it's not working.
• 0:47
  And today we're going to discuss what shifts do we need to make in partners management to make the partner journey as smooth and easy as possible.
• 0:55
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 0:57
  In terms of what we discussed last week, there were a couple of highlights.
• 1:01
  In terms of partner portals don't work typically because we see really low usage rates, low engagement sub 15%, I've even heard as low as sort of five 6%.
• 1:13
  And what happens when partners aren't leveraging a partner portal?
• 1:17
  They're not getting the latest information, they're not participating marketing content, they're not generating demand deal regs are impacted.
• 1:24
  And if you've got a low engagement channel, up to 80% of your partners are inactive.
• 1:29
  That reduces agility, raises costs and all those amazing benefits about really building a partnership program start to disappear.
• 1:38
  Something we talk a lot about internally is obviously SaaS businesses are valued incredibly highly based on how they're able to retain their end-users.
• 1:46
  Right.
• 1:47
  Their NRR is such a critical thing for their valuation.
• 1:50
  Why?
• 1:50
  Because it shows the operational efficiency of growth within SaaS businesses.
• 1:55
  So retention is such a critical stat.
• 1:57
  The irony is when you look at partnerships and channel businesses, 80% of partners are inactive.
• 2:03
  If you saw 80% of churn within a SaaS business, you know it's doomed to fail.
• 2:08
  So CROs and CFOs are going to look at that partnership organisation the same way.
• 2:14
  So we need to analyse and drive partner success at an individual partner metric as a critical statistic.
• 2:21
  So we minimise that churn and really drive that profitability.
• 2:25
  Yes, because indeed, otherwise you are wasting so many resources.
• 2:28
  Because so many resources in a lot of partner organisations are geared towards partner recruitment.
• 2:35
  But then if you don't have the means, just as in regular customer journeys, indeed, to get them on board properly, to make sure they are well enabled, that they can do co-marketing, co-selling, then you will never get them towards self sustainable revenue.
• 2:47
  And like we discussed last time, the number one goal of a partner program is to get your partners in and make sure you guide them towards self sustainable revenue.
• 2:57
  Yeah, exactly.
• 2:57
  The reason that business is so profitable and that has to be the goal is just like SaaS, the idea is to bring in net new customers and those customers stay using your products for a long, long time so that you can pivot the resource to continue to bring new customers in.
• 3:13
  The same is true of your partnerships people, which is you want to get partners on board and self sustainable as quickly as possible so that your internal resources can pivot to bringing new partnerships on board.
• 3:23
  If you get that funnel process and that circular process done really well, you're going to have that constant flywheel which is going to drive exponential growth, which is the thing we're always after.
• 3:33
  Yeah, and I think indeed what we always tried, of course was okay, we put every type of enablement and engagement like that in the partner portal.
• 3:40
  But like we saw last week as well, with what we see in the market in general, partners are not getting there.
• 3:46
  So it's not about building a better partner portal, but a complete new philosophy towards partner management that we need to really get into a mode where we don't have 80% inactive partners, but 80% active partners because that's what we should aim for as a channel and as a partner business.
• 4:04
  Yeah, exactly.
• 4:04
  I think one, we've got a lot of customer success people internally at our business and that helps drive our philosophy.
• 4:11
  But I'm seeing ever more increases in sort of that comparison between customer success and really partner success.
• 4:19
  So today we're going to look at three major pain points and the solutions to fix those pain points that are going to drive you towards that 80% active partners and that exponential growth.
• 4:29
  Yes.
• 4:30
  Let's start with the first pain point there.
• 4:32
  Indeed, because last time we discussed of course, that the channel market has changed a lot.
• 4:36
  Could you maybe briefly summarise that again and then afterwards we dive into the solution?
• 4:41
  Yeah.
• 4:41
  Channel sales is getting more complex both for vendors, for end-users, and for partners.
• 4:47
  Mainly because end-user expectation has gone up.
• 4:50
  End-users want a more holistic solution, typically tied together of lots of different brands knitted together into a really, really smooth, well functioning solution that's put a lot of pressure on partners in terms of having to widen their speciality so they're no longer selling one, two or three vendors.
• 5:09
  Data suggests typical partners are selling between 20 and 30, but it's even more complicated than that.
• 5:16
  Those 20 to 30 vendors all have to work well together and whether that's tech partnerships or alliance partnerships, the partners want to be able to weave that together into a really slick solution.
• 5:26
  Well, we know that if the expectation is there for the end-users, partners have to deliver.
• 5:31
  The problem is the partner portal can't handle that level of complexity.
• 5:35
  Now, there are so many types of stakeholders, right?
• 5:38
  Like in the beginning you had a large vendor who was working with many partners and there was just one to one communication between the two of them.
• 5:45
  But now all vendors are working together because of all the integrations and the co innovation there.
• 5:51
  But also distribution is involved and you have the unmanaged partners, you have the regular partners and therefore it's a wildly different ecosystem than what it used to be when partners where the original partners comes from, from like 30 years ago.
• 6:04
  Yeah, you might even have referral partners, implementation partners, consultants.
• 6:08
  All of those people provide a really valuable ad into that process.
• 6:13
  But the partner portal's got to be able to handle all of those complexities and it just can't.
• 6:18
  Which brings us on to our first shift stepping away from a partner portal to the partner success platform.
• 6:24
  Yeah, what you really need is shift from a siloed portal to an open platform and there are three reasons why you need to do this.
• 6:32
  The first one is that you can then combine alliance partnerships with channel partnerships and in that way really create the double network effect where you both work with alliance partners into the same channel partners but also in combined channel partners to accelerate.
• 6:48
  The second one is to also include distribution.
• 6:51
  I think one of the things within the portals of all the vendors is that their unmanaged partners are often not in there and therefore there's a wild black box out there where you don't know what's happening behind the distributor.
• 7:03
  And thirdly, it's an excellent opportunity to recruit, to find and recruit new partners because you're all part of a total platform together where you can also create new connections, get warm, referrals into new partners and really expand your base in such a way.
• 7:18
  Yeah, I mean, the opportunity is clear for everyone to see.
• 7:21
  That's why if I look at big brands they're going to have an alliance division, they're having a tech partnership division.
• 7:27
  They've got channel managers to drive the partners forward and to sell.
• 7:31
  And you want to find like minded brands who also have that same architecture and knit into each other because then you've got the scaling ambition of both companies working together two or more.
• 7:43
  The problem is the portal just can't handle that.
• 7:45
  That one to one relationship becomes prohibitive for success.
• 7:49
  And that's why you have alliance managers having to work with third party tools that potentially don't integrate properly into people's CRMs.
• 7:56
  The partners aren't used to using it.
• 7:58
  All of that complexity means you have to throw people at the problem.
• 8:02
  And the problem with people is expensive, hard to train, you've got to keep them reengaged.
• 8:07
  Whereas if you can invest in the right automation and the right scaling tools you can let people manage relationships, which is what they're best at and let the technology handle everything else.
• 8:18
  Yeah.
• 8:18
  And that's where you find true skill.
• 8:19
  And I think if you look into a platform based model then all of a sudden there are so many new opportunities.
• 8:26
  Like if we would take the example of combining your alliance partnerships with the channel.
• 8:31
  All of a sudden you can do combined training.
• 8:34
  Like how do you integrate the products together?
• 8:36
  How do you make sure that the end-user gets the best implementation?
• 8:39
  You can do alliance campaigns together where you can build a joint value proposition that's more valuable for the end-user but also more valuable for your partner.
• 8:48
  You can do co selling which actually enables you to work with multiple alliance vendors and your channel partners in the same deal so everyone has access to the latest information there.
• 8:59
  And I think there's a massive upscale there if you combine it like that to really bring more value for all stakeholders in the channel.
• 9:06
  Yeah, the way I really feel what we're talking about now around this solution, it gets me really excited is it feels like the early days of like a HubSpot or a Salesforce where you're embedding that existing architecture and then there comes all this opportunity to customise and use your own unique angle to really generate those opportunities.
• 9:25
  But the first thing that has to happen is the Channext needs to start working into a platform so that then we can start doing hand raises.
• 9:33
  If there's three of the four brands are working on a particular deal, well, let's bring in the fourth one to complete and really make that a holistic solution.
• 9:42
  You start to see how this becomes a win win for vendors, partners and the end-user.
• 9:48
  And if you've got that architecture right, that's where the channel is always going to win.
• 9:52
  Yes, I fully agree there and then I think that the other stakeholder, of course, that still plays a massive role is distribution as well.
• 9:59
  And maybe interesting from your perspective from running that at Zoom, like, how important is it to not just have that communication with your distributors, but also to have the communication with the partners of your distributors and having that combined go to market?
• 10:13
  You're absolutely right.
• 10:15
  What's really interesting around distribution is distribution.
• 10:18
  Typically there is as a macro strategy, how do we recruit and enable lots of partners and then some of those partners will become the next rising stars and then they will fly into the top and they'll typically become cam managed.
• 10:31
  That almost is the role of distribution.
• 10:34
  Mass facilitation and this funnelling exercise.
• 10:37
  Well, what you'd love to understand is well, hang on a second.
• 10:41
  If I've just recruited 500 partners, what other vendors are they working with?
• 10:45
  Are they key players for other vendors?
• 10:47
  Does that mean they've got a really high ceiling in terms of growth opportunity and a platform allows you to have that multi-tenanted approach and then I can start to run alliance campaigns via distribution.
• 10:57
  Maybe we're talking about two or three vendors that that distributor sells.
• 11:01
  Now we can take a proactive strategy down to the market.
• 11:05
  Distribution is a fantastic scaling lever, but again, if you don't have the automation and tools in place to really turn that on.
• 11:12
  Distribution is always going to struggle and this platform approach can really help scale distribution strategy out there.
• 11:19
  And to any of the distribution managers listening who think, oh, hang on, this is interesting.
• 11:23
  Absolutely chuck myself or Rick a DM and we'd love to have a conversation with you around how we can really help grow your distribution plan.
• 11:30
  Yeah, I think in such a way you create your ultimate scouting vehicle.
• 11:34
  Like you and I are massive football fans and you don't want to wait until everyone is at their top and you need to buy them for full price.
• 11:41
  But you want to find them very early, know exactly which players are out there and also know get as much data as possible.
• 11:49
  Like who is going to be that top talent eventually.
• 11:51
  Because the earlier you find them and you can build that relationship with them, the better it is for your long term relationship.
• 11:57
  And distribution is the ultimate way to handle those type of partners in a scalable way.
• 12:02
  But you do want to get to know them and understand what their needs are so you can facilitate the unmanaged partners in the best way as possible.
• 12:10
  I've never thought about it like that, but yeah, distribution is your academy, right?
• 12:13
  That's where you're looking for all your young talent that you want to really take up through the ranks and that scouting vehicle to really assess everyone.
• 12:21
  And what's great about having that platform approach, you can understand what other vendors are people working with, but also what sort of activities are these partners doing.
• 12:29
  And then from that activity measurement, which we'll come on to later through the podcast, you're really able to get a predictive view on where you think that they will grow to, which is obviously the critical bit when you're using it as a funneling exercise.
• 12:40
  And indeed it brings a lot of opportunity as well in getting the new partners towards you.
• 12:45
  I think if I think about the platform approach, their partner recruitment has always been very outbound driven.
• 12:51
  So we start to contact new partners, we try to build a relationship, et cetera.
• 12:55
  But if you're part of a larger platform and you can showcase your brand there and show the partners why it's interesting to work with you but also get promoted by your alliance, vendors, et cetera, to watch those partners, then this platform approach is also the ultimate way to find and recruit new partners that fit your ideal partner profile.
• 13:15
  Yeah, and you can even have things like predictive suggestion, right, which is, oh, you're selling three of these four vendors.
• 13:20
  We know they pull together into a really slick solution.
• 13:23
  Should we go and target all of the partners that sell these three vendors and suggest a fourth?
• 13:29
  Because we know together we closed an HSBC or a Rabobank or one of these big enterprise end-users.
• 13:35
  Let's show them that case study so that now they've got the understanding of how these products work together and improve the partner's go-to-market offering which really makes that partner win.
• 13:45
  And then the second pain point we discussed last week as well is as a result of partners that are not coming to the portal we also see that the content utilisation for enablement training marketing is hardly utilised by partners even worse, it's utilised by less than 15% of the partners actually.
• 14:04
  Why is that a problem Alex?
• 14:06
  And what do you think we need to change about that?
• 14:08
  Well, it's almost hard to think of a scenario that's worse right?
• 14:11
  You're spending a lot of time and resource creating very effective content but the vast majority of your partners aren't using it.
• 14:19
  I can't think of a worse situation than either having partners who aren't using your content.
• 14:24
  That means you're spending a lot of time and money creating that content, and it's just being wasted.
• 14:29
  Or some partners are using it and they're getting involved in sales cycles, and they're mishandling those sales cycles because they don't understand how to market and sell your product effectively.
• 14:40
  That creates a bad experience at the end-user and a bad experience at the partner level which ultimately is going to guarantee churn.
• 14:48
  Yeah because I think.
• 14:49
  Especially the latter part as well that is costing a lot of revenue, right?
• 14:52
  A lot of opportunity costs there Yeah, for sure.
• 14:54
  What we see in the partners landscape is that conversion is actually very very high so partners who get into sales cycles typically close them.
• 15:02
  However, if you're not generating good marketing content or more importantly it's not being used, they're not getting into enough conversations that you need to drive inbound which ultimately drives engagement, which ultimately drives revenue.
• 15:16
  So creating marketing assets that get used is one of the critical things you need to be targeting.
• 15:22
  And today we're going to discuss how you can do that far more effectively by driving automation.
• 15:27
  And that's what we keep emphasising, of course, that the number one way to get the attention, but more importantly, keep the attention of your partners is by driving revenue.
• 15:37
  And the ultimate way to help them get there is helping them to create end-user awareness, to create end-user demand and really facilitating them in the optimum way.
• 15:46
  And what I liked what you were saying was that it's actually very important that they not just put the message out, but put the right message out.
• 15:53
  And indeed, that's really a thing where you can support your partners very proactively.
• 15:57
  Right.
• 15:57
  Yeah, 100%.
• 15:58
  I know brands who have, like, silver bullets that they've got a really clever integration or they solve a really unique problem.
• 16:06
  And partners don't talk about that problem because they're unaware that that is the silver bullet and it's because they're not using the right enablement tools.
• 16:13
  They've not been trained effectively enough or the marketing content is not scoped enough because the partner is just not logging into the partners portal.
• 16:21
  So the way to fix that problem is to drive engagement and drive usage, which, as you say, ultimately triggers inbound demand.
• 16:28
  Inbound demand drives revenue opportunities, revenue opportunities, drive engagement and then it becomes a circle, right?
• 16:34
  And the partner portal is failing there.
• 16:37
  So how do you tackle that lack of usage?
• 16:40
  Which is the key question I think.
• 16:42
  Start with the key problem really is partners want their life to be easy and the way it is right now, it's not easy for them.
• 16:50
  They need to go into that portal, they need to crawl through every kind of thing and like we said before, they have all those portals to go to get it themselves and then get it out there while having very few resources for marketing.
• 17:03
  So the shift we really need to make is we need to stop waiting for partners to come and get the content, but we need to proactively distribute the content.
• 17:12
  Or like I always say, we need to stop reactive providing, because that's what it is in a portal.
• 17:17
  And we need to start proactively and automatically enabling our partners and distributing the content to their marketing channels and therefore to their endusers.
• 17:28
  And the way you do this is integrate with the systems of your partners.
• 17:32
  I think that's really the big shift of going from portal to platform as well as that you really integrate your systems both on your end as a vendor but also on the channel partner side.
• 17:42
  Secondly, you offer them the content in a very segmented way so you ask your partners what type of verticals are you focused on, what type of product categories do you sell, in what regions are you selling, et cetera.
• 17:55
  So you are only providing the content that's relevant for the partners and then thirdly automated with what we call an always on principle.
• 18:03
  So they told you what type of content they want and what type of end-users they're focused on.
• 18:07
  You only provide that content and the end you are integrated with their systems.
• 18:12
  So therefore the campaigns are always on unless a partner turns it off.
• 18:17
  And always on means if they don't do anything, it automatically starts publishing on their end-user channels.
• 18:23
  And in such a way you can drive the partner marketing engagement from less than 15% to 93% on average.
• 18:30
  And that's the big shift you want to make if you really want to enable your partners with marketing at scale.
• 18:35
  For sure.
• 18:36
  I think partner marketing managers will be so aware of that.
• 18:39
  In my mind, there's three key partners that stops partners actually utilizing a lot of marketing content.
• 18:45
  The first is lack of internal resource.
• 18:47
  Most partners don't have large marketing teams and they sell lots of vendors so there's lots to market.
• 18:53
  Second, they've got to log into multiple portals to download those pieces of information and that becomes prohibitive forget a password, there's zero chance they're logging in.
• 19:02
  Third, those portals typically are not well designed in terms of having that segmentation, ie.
• 19:09
  Oh, how do I market to finance SMB versus enterprise healthcare?
• 19:14
  Having that correct segmentation allows that to become a far easier process and then like you say, if you can pivot the entire process on its head to drive an automated approach that does all of that on the partner's behalf, that's how you go from 15% marketing engagement to 93%, which is an awesome improvement.
• 19:33
  What's the outcome of that?
• 19:34
  Massive amounts of inbound demand we see from our data once we do this marketing automation process, partners grow up to 40% faster.
• 19:43
  Who do you think are the highly engaged partners?
• 19:45
  There the ones that are growing the fastest.
• 19:47
  Right.
• 19:47
  If you've constantly got inbound demand that's going to keep your salespeople engaged, it's going to keep your marketing team happy and ultimately it's going to keep them wanting to sell your product, which is the outcome we all want.
• 19:57
  Yeah, I think we spoke about it a lot in previous episodes.
• 20:00
  The partners are always following the market and where they think they can do the most business.
• 20:05
  And the ultimate way for them to see that that's the case is by showing them that there is end-user demand and in this way you are really helping them in such a proactive way with that.
• 20:15
  So it's not like here is everything we have to offer you and good luck with it.
• 20:19
  But it's really no.
• 20:19
  As soon as you join our partner program, immediately we're going to give you marketing support from the get go, you can connect your systems and we start activating the end-user base immediately.
• 20:31
  And in such a way that's the ultimate way to get engagement right.
• 20:35
  Show partners that there's revenue opportunity for sure.
• 20:38
  I was always told by partners that the most effective way to recruit them is they need to know three pieces of information who am I going to sell to as an end-user, how much money am I going to make and how easy is it to sell.
• 20:49
  The irony is the third one how easy is it to sell?
• 20:52
  Is almost the most important and is the one that's tackled the least.
• 20:56
  Partners will be happy making less money and not having to do a lot of work because if it's really easy to sell, well obviously I'm going to do that and so you've got to solve that way, that problem very effectively.
• 21:09
  The first is generate significant inbound demand, then it becomes very easy to sell.
• 21:13
  And the other part of that is do I know how to sell it?
• 21:16
  And with the correct platform to enable them from sales enablement tools, that becomes a foregone conclusion.
• 21:22
  Drives high engagement, drives high sales.
• 21:22
  Yes.
• 21:25
  And partners love it because for them it's less time, more opportunities and eventually more chance to grow their revenue.
• 21:33
  Yeah, I've still not met a salesperson whose favorite brand is the one that gets them closest to Target.
• 21:38
  It's always the way, right?
• 21:39
  It doesn't matter how difficult it is or how complicated the sales cycle, if they are hitting Target continuously due to your brand, they will love you.
• 21:47
  And the best way to do that is maximally drive inbound demand marketing automation is critical to making that happen.
• 21:55
  Yeah, great point.
• 21:56
  And then I think it's already time for the third and final shift and before we dive into what the shift is, I think the third biggest pain point in the channel is that actually there's such a huge lack of data and that the data is very reactive.
• 22:10
  So oftentimes we only know what's happening once it's already too late.
• 22:15
  What is the impact of that?
• 22:16
  Well, data informed decisions drive success, right?
• 22:20
  Especially when you start looking at a channel cross EMEA or even a global channel with thousands of partners.
• 22:27
  That's incredibly complicated to manage and what you need is data to drive great decisions.
• 22:32
  So if you've got really good data, you can decide where to allocate resource.
• 22:36
  So one of the things that we're really strong on is predictive data.
• 22:40
  So how can I know if a partners is likely to sell a lot next quarter or if they're churning away and then I can allocate resource based on what my priorities are.
• 22:49
  The problem is if you're only capturing deal reg three days before they actually sell the deal because they've only put the deal reg in at the point they've closed the deal, it's too late.
• 22:58
  You can't do anything with that level of data.
• 23:00
  And so one of the things that's really, really critical is investing in a platform that's going to get you the data so that you can allocate that resource effectively.
• 23:08
  Yeah, I think the underlying problem there is that I think the underlying problem there is that to capture data we are completely reliant on partners.
• 23:19
  Because if a partner is not going to the portal and telling us what happened, whether it's a deal registration or fill in a budget request form or whatever type of data you want to capture and see there, then we simply don't know it.
• 23:32
  And we just analysed of course, that partners are hardly ever using those portals.
• 23:37
  So we need to rethink that that we don't have to wait anymore for partners to record the data we need.
• 23:44
  One of the data points that we capture that I absolutely love is we can see marketing performance, not just the amount of campaign participation, but the actual outcome of a lot of that in terms of engagement rates and views.
• 23:56
  And that's an awesome predictive measure that lets you know that inbound demand is going to spike and therefore sales is going to spike.
• 24:03
  And what's really great about that is you can start to align a cam ahead of even deal registers coming in.
• 24:10
  That's the level of data that you want because it allows you to allocate resource before a problem starts or before an opportunity starts so that you can start to really impact the sales process.
• 24:21
  And if you think about that logically, inbound demand is about to go up.
• 24:24
  Well, maybe I need to go into sales enablement so the sales guys know how to sell the product, not just what to sell and see suddenly you're able to impact conversion rates in a really provable and measurable way.
• 24:37
  That's what you really want from your channel?
• 24:40
  Yes.
• 24:41
  Then I think that we can go to what is the third shift?
• 24:43
  It's the shift from partners relationship management to partner success management.
• 24:48
  And what we mean with this is that we can learn a lot from customer success here because what did they start doing to predict future upsells, future churn, et cetera?
• 24:58
  They started creating leading measures where they could actually predict what future outcomes would be.
• 25:04
  And that's what we need to embrace in the Channext as well, where we are not just using a portal to record things and only see things backwards, but really to make sure that we collect a lot of leading.
• 25:16
  Metrics and data that can actually predict those future outcomes and can really guide cams, indeed.
• 25:21
  But also the full channel team on where to focus our attention, where to allocate our resources, and where can we have the most success.
• 25:29
  And most importantly, which partners can we make most successful.
• 25:34
  For sure.
• 25:35
  I know it's one of the challenges that channel leaders really have where there's this debate whether we should go direct or indirect.
• 25:42
  The thing with direct is you have much better data now.
• 25:45
  The thing with indirect is the scaling volume, the conversion rates, partners are so valuable.
• 25:50
  But if you could blend those two worlds to have that same level of data, everyone's taking that deal.
• 25:56
  No channel leader thinks that they've got good enough data because typically what they have is number of partners, average partner spend and deal reg and then ultimately revenue.
• 26:05
  That's nowhere near enough leading indicators and what you need is those predictive measures that allow you to make very.
• 26:12
  Data informed decisions, those are going to drive the success metrics that you need.
• 26:17
  Yes.
• 26:17
  And to really make that shift, you need three things.
• 26:19
  And again, I'm going to make the comparison with Customer Success.
• 26:22
  Just like in Customer Success, we started tracking all the product usage data.
• 26:26
  So literally, every interaction a customer has with your product, we need to do the same with partners.
• 26:32
  We need full partner engagement tracking.
• 26:34
  So every engagement between a partner and you, you want to track it.
• 26:38
  What announcements did they read?
• 26:39
  What content did they view?
• 26:41
  What marketing did they participate in?
• 26:42
  How many deals did they register?
• 26:44
  How often are they following up?
• 26:46
  So we really measure everything.
• 26:48
  Secondly, we tie all this data into one single partners health score.
• 26:53
  So just as we did in Customer Success with a Customer Health score, we're going to do the same with partners.
• 26:59
  And with that Partner Health score, we can see besides the outcome.
• 27:02
  So the lack measure of revenue, what other activities are the partners undertaking and how well do we score that to predict future revenue outcome?
• 27:11
  And then based on those customer health scores, or sorry, based on those partner Health scores, we need playbooks that are automatically triggered together with our channel account managers, together with our Channext team.
• 27:22
  So we are focusing on the right partners and doing the right actions at the right time.
• 27:27
  That's so unbelievably powerful to be able to have a partner Health score that you could even embed in salesforce.
• 27:34
  I mean, having run distribution for a large vendor of Zoom and having 1200 partners, I would have killed to have that level of data to understand how long does onboarding take, what is my average level of engagement in Germany versus the UK?
• 27:49
  Having clarity around that information allows me to make very, very strategic and precise decisions that are ultimately going to impact the number.
• 27:58
  It stops becoming macro performance and starts becoming micro analysis, which is that level of depth that you need.
• 28:04
  And if I can start to turn individual partners, or it may be even individual members in my team to go and do strategic actions based on those indicators, you can just see organically, you're going to drive huge, huge growth.
• 28:18
  And the best thing, you're going to be making better decisions than your competitor down the road with these tooling.
• 28:23
  And that means you can take a lot of their market share.
• 28:26
  Yeah.
• 28:26
  And the integrations with the systems of your partners makes it possible that it's not data input anymore, but it's data extraction.
• 28:34
  So all the data is automatically tracked in such a way.
• 28:38
  And that's where you can completely shift the name of the game.
• 28:42
  Because usually we were only seeing what happened in the past, but now we're tracking everything real time, which enables you to actually predict those future outcomes.
• 28:50
  Yeah.
• 28:50
  And better data means better decision making, right at the end of the day.
• 28:54
  And us, as channel leaders.
• 28:55
  We want to understand who are the key partners that aren't just going to get me to number this quarter, but next quarter, next year, so that I can start to pack resource around them.
• 29:05
  Because we're all very aware of the 80 20 rule, but a big part of that 80 20 rule is the black box of data of the 80% of partners who aren't really delivering much value today.
• 29:14
  But I want to find the next rising stars.
• 29:16
  This real time and predictive data allows me to do that before revenue has come in that allows me to pack resource around them to guarantee success over the long term.
• 29:27
  Yes.
• 29:27
  And I think maybe to finalize this point by tracking everything, you can measure your full partner journey and see where your partners are dropping out and therefore continuously improve your partner program to lead as many partners as possible to self sustainable revenue.
• 29:43
  So today we've discussed why partner portals are failing you today and how we can shift to a much more platform orientated structure to really help drive engagement.
• 29:54
  What's really important to understand, low engagement partners equals lots of churn, and that makes an expensive, slow moving and ultimately failing partner program.
• 30:04
  We need to flip it from 80% inactive to 80% active.
• 30:08
  And that's going to lead to a far more successful Channext with lots of tech partnerships that delivers maximal value to the end-users but ultimately delivers that exponential growth.
• 30:18
  Yes.
• 30:19
  And that's when everyone in the channel wins, right?
• 30:21
  Absolutely.
• 30:22
  We've got to make sure that we build a program and a platform that allows vendors, distributors, tech partners, alliance partners, but also the partners in the channel, but most importantly, the end-users.
• 30:35
  For those interested in learning how to implement such a thing for your organization, you can go to partnersuccess.channext.com or send Alex or me a DM on Linked in.
• 30:45
  We always love to chat about it and I really want to thank you for listening this week again and see you next week.