Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 083 - Kameron Olsen - Pioneering Change in the Telecom Channel

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083 - Kameron Olsen - Pioneering Change in the Telecom Channel · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: My name is Alex Whitford and I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanix, and I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, cameron.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Cameron, how are you doing?
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: I'm great Thanks.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, alex.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: It's awesome to have you here.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: I'm excited to talk about all things channel with you.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: For the uninitiated, it'd be great if you could give us a little bit of rundown on who you are, where you've been and why our listeners should be listening so closely.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, fantastic.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: I have an interesting past when it comes to the channel.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: My first introduction to technology was with a little interconnect outside or in the state of Utah, where we just sold prem-based phone systems, and through that organization we morphed it into a UCAS supplier.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: And right over the freeway from us was a little company called Tolaris, and most of our sales were all direct.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: We were selling everything direct inside the state of Utah and these two gentlemen decided, or asked us, to come in and be part of their organization and sell through this channel.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: That we had no idea what it was, and over the next 10 years we grew that company and sold everything through the channel, went from being a direct company to a channel company, found success and built out a channel program.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: So we spent the 10 years skinning our knees figuring out what a channel program is, found success in that, sold that off in 2018.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: And then my friends over at the Tulare side asked me to come work for them.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: So so I was working for a TSD running their field sales team uh, part of their field sales team for a better part of three years when I realized that the uh, the supplier side is severely underserved.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: A lot of suppliers are out there struggling trying to figure out how to build out channel programs, how to find success in their channel programs.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: So March of last year I went out and started a consulting agency trying to help, or helping suppliers build out channel programs and find success in the channel.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: And I think for Tolaris has obviously grown from strength to strength and they've been passed to this sort of master agency and telco and everything unified communications as a service.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: That experience being part of that channel led growth.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: That must have taught you a lot in terms of, maybe, the differences between the traditional hardware channel and more that sort of telco UCAS channel.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: What are the sort of things that you've seen there?
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the great thing is is I started as a disty.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Right, we were a var, we were a value added reseller, we were selling prem based phone systems and then we started selling into this channel space and and I I compare the two to the upside down.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you're a stranger things fan, but like they look and feel a lot the same.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: One's's not evil, right, they both have their places, but like they're very similar.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: But they do have a few nuances that I don't think most people understand.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: Like, first of all, like invoicing the disty world wants to invoice, right, they want to take a product, put it on their paper and then sell it and receive the revenue.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: The telco channel doesn't want to do that.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: They want to come in, sell the product and completely step out.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Support disty channel wants to support everything.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: They want to be the frontline support.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: They want to add value in that space where the telco channel is like hey, the least amount of calls I get, I'm not getting paid anymore for this Like call, call the supplier.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: If you're struggling with the supplier, then call me.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: Installation like the disty world wants to install it.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: They want to go put boots on the ground.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: They want to put the equipment in, they want to do the training, they want to do everything and the telco channel doesn't.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: Which is really different in the fact that most of the disty world or the traditional distribution model can only handle a couple suppliers, right.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: You don't find them repping five, six, seven different hardware manufacturers.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: They got one and maybe two right, because it's such a heavy load to pull on a supplier of having to get their engineers trained and their support people trained and they have to usually have NFR products.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: They have to do all of this stuff to learn the product that they usually only have a couple.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Where the telco guys are much more about just sourcing, right, they're the beginning engine of the conversation that brings people and suppliers into the conversation and procure the technology versus managing and maintaining everything.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: And obviously you've highlighted there a few sort of differences in terms of invoicing models and go-to-mark motions and obviously it's a massive difference between banking margin or commissions versus banking revenue, right?
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: I think the other thing that we've've also seen is is that traditional channel has been there years right, we're talking 40, 50 year old business.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: They are ingrained in terms of their partner base and their processes.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: How do you see the sort of telco channel being a more immature businesses what?
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: What's the?
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Or a more immature channel still going through that maturity cycle?
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: What are the differences you see there in that motion and where do you think the channel still needs to evolve?
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what's interesting and what we're seeing.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, when I got into this space eight years ago or so maybe a little bit longer than that, I'm older than I think but when we got into the space there was 50 suppliers.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: These TSDs, or master agents back then, had 50 suppliers, that's it.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: So when you were a supplier in the ecosystem and the way that the TSDs brought you in is, hey look, sign with us and we're going to bring you opportunities, sign with us and we'll bring you opportunities.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: And that was true when they had 50, because a partner would go to the TSD and say, hey, I have this UCAS opportunity, who would you recommend?
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: And they're like great, here's our four UCAS suppliers and go talk to them.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: And so you got an at-bat.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Almost every single deal a TSD partner brought in partner brought in.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: The last time I checked, these TSDs have somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 suppliers, maybe over 100 suppliers that claim that they quote unquote have a UCAS platform, right.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: So you don't get those at bats anymore.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: And so you can't just sign an agreement with a TSD.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: You have to be much more prescriptive in the way that you provide value into the ecosystem, how you help partners in the ecosystem.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: I think what we are maturing out of is me as a supplier showing up into an event right, tsds hold lots of events showing up to the event and saying, hey, I sell UCAS, and then just sitting back and waiting for opportunities to come to you.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: This place is way too busy, there's too many suppliers in the space and if you sit around and waiting for deals, that's not gonna work.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: And I think where the traditional disty world does a great job is help partners find success, so they're not just sitting around and waiting for a deal.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: The supplier has figured out how to come in train, help out with marketing, help out with support like really ingrain their product within their organization and now there's this weird flux with the telco world that doesn't know how to engage in that way.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: Right, it's like, hey, I'll just bring you a deal, and now they're sitting around waiting for it.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: And and you're talking there in terms of that legacy channel being able to focus more in on opportunity creation, deal creation, marketing support, enablement support.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: And I think really fundamentally, the difference between the Great and everyone else and every other program is their ability to support partners in creating opportunities.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: Right, I often reference this on the podcast.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: When I was at zoom, zoom was still building out their channel program.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: However we were in, we were in covid times, right, and so the demand was so high partners were willing to put up with a little bit of friction.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: When it came to the program, it maybe wasn't as optimized as I know it is today.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Zoom have done a really good job maturing that motion and they get great partner feedback, but we were still ironing out the kinks and we were going through such rapid growth that, you know, I think it would be impossible even for the most mature channel to experience, you know, 600 growth in a quarter and then go oh yeah, don't worry, we nailed everything perfectly right.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: It's just not possible, however, the demand was there and so partners put up with it, and my view really is really simple if you can create demand at the end user base, as you put it, you get the app back intrinsically and the partner will put up with more and more friction, the more opportunities and the more money they're going to make right.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: And so my view really simply is part uh, brands need to be focused on.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: How do we create partners, how do we support partners in creating opportunity?
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: My view is marketing is critical.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: In your view in telco world, how do you see, who do you see doing that really well?
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: How do you see brands engaging with partners to help them support in creating opportunities?
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the place where the telco world misses out on is they don't look at a partner from the traditional onboarding method.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: Right, it's a.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: Hey, I'm going to show up.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: Here's my product.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: Let me know when you have an opportunity.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: We are in the process here in the next couple of days releasing a methodology called channel 2.0 methodology that basically backs up suppliers to start thinking on a broader scale of what a partnership is.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: Most suppliers in the telco world maybe.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: I'll give you an example my first year at Teleris I was at the Partner Advisory Council and we were sitting there in a break and I was with a dear friend of mine who was the supplier manager for Teleris and a channel chief at one of the suppliers and the channel chief was talking about his frustrations not being able to calculate an ROI on his MDF funds that he's giving into this TSD or TSDs in general.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: He just was frustrated that they've spent so much money they weren't getting the return they expected.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: And they were talking back and forth and I'm a very analytical guy, I love math, I love operations, I love statistics and I just simply asked him so, with that amount of money, it sounds like you were probably at almost every single event that Tlaire's through that year.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: And he was like, yeah, we showed up at every one of them.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: And I was like can you tell me how many new partners you met this last year?
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: How many did you not know, but you met them through these events.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: I was trying to understand, even from a Tlaire's standpoint are these suppliers coming to events and meeting more people?
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: And he said I can't answer that question.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: And I'm like are these suppliers coming to events and meeting more people?
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: And he said I can't answer that question.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, why not?
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: And he goes we don't track that.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, okay, can you tell me how many deals you sold with new partners this year that never sold before?
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: And he was like, nope, we don't track that either.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: And what we quickly realized from that standpoint is the TSDs most of the TSDs do a great job of bringing partners to a supplier and making some sort of interaction through the events that they hold, or the field sales team makes an introduction, but then the TSDs step back out and say, okay, I made the connection, now you guys go do your thing and I'm going to sit back.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: And the only two inflection points a TSD sees is when a partner meets a supplier and when revenue comes out at the back end.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: Besides that, they're completely blind.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: They don't have any statistics and so it's reliant on the supplier to have those statistics on what that onboarding process looks like and what those inflection points.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: And then the channel 2.0 methodology allows you to look at those different inflection points.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: Hey, how many partners did you add into your ecosystem, into your CRM?
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: How many of those did you actually talk to, like back and forth conversation From there?
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: How many of them did a discovery call?
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: Like a discovery call, and where I think a lot of suppliers go wrong in their marketing, isn't here's my product, right, it's hey, where are you at today, where do you want to be in the future, mr Partner?
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: And then the presentation isn't your product.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: Your presentation is how you as an organization can help them get there from A to B.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: And that is, hey, what does your sales process look like?
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: What do you do in marketing?
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: What are you doing in all these different facets?
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: Are you selling our product?
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: If you're not, what are you selling?
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: How do we have those cross-sell, up-sell conversations?
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: If you're selling?
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: I mean, I had the most amazing interaction between one of my suppliers that I consult with and a partner.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: I'll give you a little case study.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: This partner sells a lot in the cannabis industry.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Their whole company is built around helping cannabis industries get ready for all of the compliance requirements.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: And so we were asking them what do you sell?
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: And they're like well, we sell physical security, we sell network.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: And the supplier was a cyber company and he's like we don't sell any cyber, so we need to need help on selling cybersecurity.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: So the question was great, talk to us about security, your physical security.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: What are the requirements?
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Well, hey, if a camera goes down, they can't open the shop, and that happens all the time, and so we're really struggling.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: And the cybersecurity company goes great, we integrate with that security camera.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: We can watch uptime, downtime.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: So we got a 24-7 SOC that will watch the notifications and if they're down, we'll notify you and with our integrations into that camera system, we'll help wherever we can.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: And it was just a natural pull through conversation now with this partner hey, we sell physical security.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: Physical security goes down.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: You need this MDR solution to help augment the issues there, right?
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Those are the types of conversations.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: And then what they did is they built out all sorts of marketing slicks for them, so that they could take that product and go sell it already to the industries that they're in, and then it's easy to pick it up.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we've talked a lot on this channel around how you build a nascent channel right.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: What are the first moves that you need to make?
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: And I've worked in distributor land for a long, long time.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: I've spoken to hundreds, maybe thousands, of partners over the years and one of the things that I always think is wildly wrong with brands is they walk in and they go.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Here's why our product is brilliant.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Really sort of almost arrogant mindset of like.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Let me explain why our product is so good and I'm like partner cares about three things who do you sell to?
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: How much money am I going to make?
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: How easy is it to sell what's?
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: it and so I, you know I've sat down with brands and, and, and, time and time again just gone.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Get rid of all of that and just talk through those three points.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Because if they go, oh, we sell to banks or we sell to hospitals, you go, excellent, we also sell to hospitals, that's good news.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: And then you go, okay, you're going to make x amount of money and it's going to be quite hard, but it's a lot of money.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Are you up for that?
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: And for some, that's no.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: Actually we've got such a high velocity model we we'd rather take lower margins, but it's really low touch, low margin, yeah, exactly and some it's like, hey, no, we're av integrators and we'll spend two and a half years scoping a project.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: It's's like cool.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Then they want to make 40% and they are going to really it's really complicated and they provide all their value.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: And if you just dial it down into what does the partner actually care about and then we can start to hang off, okay, then we get further into that funnel and we'd start to talk and here's why our product is going to work in your sphere.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: But if you're out on one of those three things we've never sold to a hospital in our life and you're completely focused on med tech, well, this is just a waste of time.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't matter, we can just stop now.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter how good your security system is, and so I think that real understanding and putting that partner first strategy is critical.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a partner tell me the other day he goes I want to know your people and processes first before you ever talk about your product.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%, because I just think and maybe some products and engineering people are going to hate me your product's not that good, your product's not that good.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: There are almost no products in the world where I go oh my God, that's really unique and really powerful, right.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Broadly speaking, competing solutions will have 80 to 90% feature crossover, and so then the Delta is in.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: How are you going to market which that?
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: That wildly changes, right, and some it's.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: You know, we're going full direct motion low touch marketing generated through to.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: We're going full channel high touch and it's all integrated and it's all complicated.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: But the product features can be, broadly speaking, the same, right, and so those nuances.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: That's where I think both the telco channel and the legacy traditional channel where they really have to step up and ensure that we're focusing on the things that actually make an incremental difference.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean some of those questions that you asked the partner should be what verticals do you play in and what market size?
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: Right, if you're playing in the SMB or you're playing in enterprise, like you got to make sure that your products align with where they're at a hundred percent.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: What I also think is interesting is you mentioned most products are like 80 to 90% the same and it is true Like you look at them.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: I think over the next little bit, as AI comes in and the ability to program is so much easier and some of those types of things, that I think that will significantly it's not going to be 80 to 90.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: It's going to be 98 to 99% the same, I think, over the next little bit.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: So, really really being focused on your go-to-market strategies what verticals are you playing, what integrations are you looking at, what are you doing for specific spaces and what needs are you solving?
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: I think will become very hypercritical.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: And what needs are you solving?
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: I think will become very hypercritical.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: I'm working with a couple of different AI companies right now that really focus on the customer experience, right, and one of them is like hey, we're going to boil the ocean, we're something for everybody.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: And there's another one you talked about healthcare that is specific for healthcare.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: They integrate with the healthcare systems.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: They're really focused on doing go-to-market strategies for hospitals and healthcare systems and the products are vastly different.
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: So if you don't play in healthcare, you're not going to use the one, but if you play in some other sector, let's say manufacturing, then you're going to be great for the other one.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: So yeah, you got to focus on a lot of that type of stuff.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Now on this podcast, we speak to sort of experts all over the channel, such as yourself, and we're hearing one of the same things continuously from some of the biggest and strongest brands in the world, which is SMB is becoming more valuable, and we mean that both from an SMB partner perspective so sort of sub 50 FTE but also within the SMB end user space.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Now, what's interesting, based on a recent McKinsey report, that actually telecom is one of the tech segments where SMBs actually spend more than enterprise companies, which, for most of the traditional channel, it's the inverse.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: What have you seen?
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: What have you learned about how you tackle the SMB space?
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: you learn about how you tackle the SMB space.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: What I find interesting that is starting to happen is how the industry is starting to morph together.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: We talked a little bit before about the MSPs versus the telcos, and I think the first time we recognized that there was some synergies between the two industries is when Intellisys bought Scansource bought Intellisys in 2016.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: And the entire industry was thinking, oh my gosh, this is perfect.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: It's like a match made in heaven.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: It's like the milk to my cereal, right Like this is going to be perfect.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: And I think we can all fairly agree that that didn't happen as fast as we all thought it would.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: And we all thought it would, and we all thought that these MSPs would come in and they would start selling telco and they would be competition to the partners and all of this type of stuff, and it never happened.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: But what is starting to happen is that the MSPs are coming into the space as suppliers.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: We all thought they were going to come in as a partner, but they're not.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: They're coming in as suppliers.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: We all thought they were going to come in as a partner, but they're not.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: They're coming in as suppliers and I believe what is happening is that the big tech companies need somebody to wrap a service wrapper around their product set right, the Amazons and the Microsofts of the world need somebody to come wrap a service wrapper around it.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: And now the MSPs are starting to recognize they need to wrap a sales wrapper around it.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: And so they're coming down market to the telco world and saying, hey, we have the product, we have the service.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: Now we need a sales engine to go out there and do that.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: And because the telco channel doesn't want to support and do all of that type of stuff, that the MSPs and the telco agents of the world, partners of the world, now make a great match.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: And so we're starting to see a lot more of that MSP community come into the telco world to get into that SMB range.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: I think it's fascinating because I think it's one of the biggest shifts that the channel's experienced in a long, long time.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: We sort of understood how to hit the consumer market.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Right, hey, that's a marketing play.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: Then we need facilitators who just, you know, hardware transaction flow makes sense and we know how to hit the enterprise, which is you put your sharpest partners and your sharpest salespeople and you go and hit the enterprise, which is you put your sharpest partners and your sharpest salespeople and you go and hit the enterprise and make sure that the enterprise understands your value Incredibly high touch.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: And then you go and then there's this huge bucket and the bucket is unbelievably valuable.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: In fact it's the most valuable part of the entire market but it's operationally the most complicated to satisfy, because you can't go and hire 100 salespeople, because it won't wash its own face, you can't cover the cost effectively, you can't just market because you need salespeople to close the deals.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: It's not so light touch like it is like consumer.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: And so now you're at this weird middle ground where you need people to sell the service but not deliver the service.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: And I think that's why telcos landed in that sweet spot, because you can't have a high touch model of delivering a service.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: When you're talking about, hey, we sold seven seats, it's like, well, no, we can't send an engineer anywhere.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: 20 minutes of an engineer's time, we've already lost all the margin on the deal, right.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: And so I think telcos landed in this amazing model where they invoice directly and they're marketing to the customer directly, but then you've got a sales team actually making sure that they convert, and I think that is going to actually lead the way for the likes of a microsoft and a cisco for them, who we've we've we've spoken about previously on this podcast have announced that SMB is their fastest growing segment.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: It's the place they're putting the most resource, and it may even require a shift, or not, may?
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: I firmly believe it will require a shift in terms of do we need the same structure?
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: We're not going to report on the same data points, because the way I report on CDW is not the way I'm going to report on 500 SMB partners, and so I think Telco has a really interesting and valuable input into how you drive that forward.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah the great.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: The great news for the MSPs and the big tech of the world is this is a sales force you don't have to pay for until they sell something like the, the like.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't go hire those hundred people because they're an expensive line item on your balance sheet.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: But if you can bake in your costs into your products and then you're just paying this variable cost model to, to the, the partners of the world, on a monthly, evergreen commission, then everybody wins because that's what they want.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: Anyways, they don't want upfront costs, they don't want all this stuff.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: I think the biggest frustration right now that suppliers can't figure out is how to get an ROI to the TSDs with their marketing development funds.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I firmly agree because I think that the complexity and we've had this conversation on the podcast before in terms of is the channel the CFO's best friend or their worst enemy?
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Well, it sort of depends on how you cut it, because it's no risk, right there's.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: You know, to run a channel organization it's unbelievably cheap because you hire some channel people, you hire a few disty people, you hire a few support engineers, that's it right and you can transact millions and millions and millions of business at almost no internal cost.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: The flip side is, when it's working, you go oh my god, we're losing 30 percent of our revenue because partners are being successful.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: So it sort of depends on how you look at it, right.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: But I think for me, when we start to talk about the unit economics to get really financial, of running an smb channel, you can't afford to hire 100 salespeople.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: If you're a CRO you're getting sacked for that decision.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't work.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: But instead, building that channel-first strategy to satisfy that market.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: And I think it's why Microsoft I'm always paying really close attention, because I think Microsoft play the game so well.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: They understand how to do consumer, they clearly understand how to do enterprise and now they're bringing those two worlds together and I think they're trying to cherry pick how they saw each element together.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: But where they've heavily invested and where they continue to invest is, as you say, how do we attract partners and then how do we create opportunities and the analytics and reporting on those pieces.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: That's critical to be successful.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: Look, if you are a CFO and you hire 100 salespeople and they don't perform, you can fire the salespeople and it's their fault, right.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: But if you spend a bunch of money, like you would, on an indirect channel and that indirect channel doesn't perform, you can't fire them because you never hired them and the only person for that blame to come back is you and the way that you're spending money.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: And so I think there's right now a lot of CROs, cfos, looking at the channel and saying is it worth it?
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Is it, is it?
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: And really what I find, going back to that case study talking to the channel chief, and really what I find, going back to that case study talking to the channel chief, is these suppliers haven't figured out how to truly calculate an ROI on the money they're giving to the TSDs.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: Right, they're not calculating that because they don't have the metrics internally.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: They say, hey, I'm going to give the TSD a couple hundred thousand and then I'm going to watch the revenue come out at the back end.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: And is there enough money to justify that?
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: And if the answer is yes, everybody's hunky-dory.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: The channels work, the channel is great, but as the channel begins to morph, as the channel goes from 50 suppliers to four to 500 suppliers and look, in the next couple of years it's probably going to double and triple again.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: So how do you continue to compete in a very crowded space?
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: And the answer is is you need more analytics along the way.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: You need to know that when you go to an event, you meet 50 new partners.
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: Put those 50 new partners in your CRM.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: Those are your identified partners.
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: Watch the analytics of your team trying to reach out and connect and touch with them.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: Are they making enough outward outbound type activities to connect with these people, yes or no?
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: Right From there, how many went to a discovery call?
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: Discovery call to conversations around?
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: How do we sales enable you?
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: What can we use for your marketing pitch?
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: What can we help you with to find more opportunities?
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: We don't have any of that data in the telco world.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: That's, I think, the immaturity of our model right now.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: So we can't see where the fallout is.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: Hey, maybe you got and you spent all your money.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: You got hundreds of new identified partners in the space and maybe your elevator pitch is great and you're getting all these people.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: They're very excited in your product.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: But when you go to talk about your processes.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: When you go to talk about your sales enablement tools, right.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: When you go to talk about the marketing that's available to them, you don't have anything, and so they're thinking, god, it's going to be really hard to sell you because I got to spend all this time and money trying to figure out how to sell your product.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: You're out.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: But the suppliers these days don't understand that fallout because all their tracking is revenue in and revenue out, so they're missing out on being able to fix their channel program.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: I completely agree.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: I think we've always separated um here and I think it's a really important philosophy.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: You have a partner acquisition funnel and then you have a deal funnel.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: Those are separate flows.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: They're connected but they are separate, right.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: And so when we talk about how are you acquiring partners and we've, you know, we've we've spoken a lot about the recruitment to revenue gap, right, so often people are brilliant at signing partners.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: They never have any problem signing partners.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: Because who cares?
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: You sign a ticker box and, hey, I'm a partner, right?
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: The question is how do you take partners successfully from that to closing three deals?
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: Because the data is extremely clear Once they close three deals, they are your partner, they will stay your partner and it becomes much more a continuous engagement flow.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: It's a very different workflow to keep a partner engaged once they've closed revenue, and I think I firmly believe this Opportunity creation.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: We can struggle through enablement and we can struggle through MDF plans and we can struggle through everything.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: If there's a salesperson going, hang on my commission's on the line, there's a customer who wants to buy the thing, I'm shouting at everyone internally to get that deal done and suddenly you've got sales people on your side pushing to say we need to sign this vendor because I've got deals coming right.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: And so I think where I wanted to sort of finally land because you're absolutely right revenue attribution for MDF, especially, I think, within the TSD space poorly executed broadly speaking.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: What would be the key change you would make?
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: I think the key change that we're trying to help out here at the channel advisors to give all the suppliers the methodology right, the channel 2.0 methodology that we're releasing here in a couple days.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: We'll give them those key indicators, we'll give them those key points.
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: We'll identify the different touch points of where you're interacting with a partner so that you can really see where your channel's going wrong, where the fallout is.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: And it's by channel manager, by channel manager, it's by area, it's by what, and it's by channel manager by channel manager.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: It's by area, it's by what event, it's by what TSD, like the ability to see where you put the money in, how it goes through the channel and where your fallout is.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: I mean we need more data, we need more metrics to see where things are falling so we can go in and diagnose the problem.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: I think the other place where the industry goes wrong is there is no place to go to figure out where and how to do the channel.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: I surveyed 125 channel managers and asked them how many of them have had formal channel training, like like sales methodology.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: But hey, this is how you do channel.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: Three people three people said that they've gone through a program that actually walked them through step-by-step on how to do the channel.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: Only three, there's nowhere you can go out there right now to figure out how to do the channel.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: And so what's happening?
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: We're getting these channel managers coming in.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: They're like if they sink or swim they last and then they learn from their counterparts.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: They ask lots of questions.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: They're the ones that hustle, but the ones that don't build a few relationships, struggle, ramp up quota, leave to go to the next place and we're not bringing new blood into this industry.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: And if we go from 50 suppliers to four to 500 suppliers, to double that again we're going to need to figure out how to bring in good talent that knows how to do a process of walk through the system if this channel is ever going to survive.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: Cameron, I really appreciate you coming on.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: It's been an absolute pleasure.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.