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Elise Carbone - Building Partnerships That Last · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to 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, I'm the VP of Revenue here at ChanEx and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest Elise.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: How are you doing?
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Very well, thank you and you.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm extremely excited to be here and excited to hear a little bit about your journey and what you're responsible for.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Maybe, to start us off, you can give us a little bit of a rundown about who you are and where you've come from.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Sure, absolutely so.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: I'm Elise and I'm based in Paris.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: I'm French.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: I'm sure you can hear that from my accent.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: I've been in the software industry since over 15 years and most of my career in channel.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: I love working with partners.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: As a background, I initially started as a consultant consulting on talent management and HR solution, and I got into partner sales very randomly, taking up a solution engineer role and supporting a large OEM network within that.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Interesting because I think lots of people want to finish their career in consultancy.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I'd love to hear a little bit about how being a consultant maybe has influenced some of your sort of channel strategy.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Absolutely so in my current role.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: So I'm at Dell Tech and I'm leading the partner sales team for ME and APAC and I'm using a lot of what I used to do as a consultant, so I could share that.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: I think what I see maybe is around three things.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: The first one is active listening.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: You know, people don't necessarily say what they think or what they want to say, and also because I'm working with a lot of countries, sometimes what I understand is not necessarily what they say.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, active listening is a very important part of my job.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Awesome, and you mentioned there were a couple of other things that really, from a consultancy perspective, has influenced you.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Understanding the needs of each partner.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: Each partner is different, so when you are a consultant, you ask a lot of questions to understand the real need.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: So that's something also I'm using for my consulting background.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: And, lastly, leveraging the right resources.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: As a channel professional, you are a Swiss knife a lot of time, so you need to be able to pull the resources you need when a partner asks for help.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think in the channel especially, and I think you touch on active listening, which I think is important.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: I think every salesperson in the world is taught how important it is to listen.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: But exactly your point about you know we wear many hats in the channel.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: We have to be finance people and distribution people and sales people and marketing people and everything in between.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: That importance of active listening means so much because if you stop building a strategy on an assumption that's incorrect, you can cause such damage to the relationship or a huge amount of operational lag.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Maybe you can share an example of where you've seen this work particularly well or some of the tactics that you sort of drive into your team to help improve active listening.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: It could be in two things.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: So the first one will be when you ask to your partners an update on an opportunity, it's usually very, very important to listen to what they are saying and dig deeper if you want to have the realistic view of what's happening with that opportunity.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Because most of the time a channel manager or partner sales they don't have access to the end customer, so they they are not accessing to the direct information.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: So that would be one of them where active listening is important.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: And then you know in business planning, usually as a vendor, you come to the table and say this is what we want and you are not asking to the partner okay, what are we doing together?
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: So that's another area where I see that as great skills.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Amazing.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: So really I know from sort of previous discussions that you're really helping drive channel roles for first time channel people right, They've come from other backgrounds, backgrounds.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Talk to me about how you help drive sort of coaching and onboarding to help them pivot into the channel, which I think can be quite a big jump for a lot of people who've not experienced a role with such complexity.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I've got a few people in my team that are new to channel so, and I was speaking with one just now and she's been now four years with me, so we were speaking about how she grew within the role, which was quite interesting, and so you know her strength and weaknesses.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: So my first advice to any of my team members is you need to build a good network within the organization.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: That's critical to your role.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: As I said, we are wearing many, many hats, so it's going to be important to be able to have like who is who within your organization and who can help you for each topic enablement, sales, legal product, et cetera, et cetera.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: So that would be the first thing I'm giving them as an advice, and then same thing on their partner side.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: So, when they get a partner account, it's very important for them to build the right connection and relationships, so they need to find out who is influential within the partner organization and spend a lot of time building this relationship.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: When you are in partnership.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: It's a relationship and network job, so you need to be able to build that skill up.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: And then the second thing is also focusing on the data.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: I feel that sometimes in partner sales, we don't have the right KPIs.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: So my second advice will be going and digging into the right KPIs for your partners and it could be sales KPIs or something else.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: But that would be a second part.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: That is very important.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: And then I'm all about trying Try things, make mistakes and you will learn for them.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Awesome.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: I'm really curious in terms of sort of that KPI misalignment.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: What's some of the sort of typical mistakes?
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: What do you see?
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Channel teams focusing on KPIs that you're like this doesn't make sense.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: Multiple.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: The first one is that, okay, I've got a target in my mind for my partners, but they don't know about it.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: That could be a good one, which is a catastrophic misalignment, I would say, because then if they don't agree with the number you have in mind, you are in big trouble.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: So that will be one.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: And then also around lead generation and pipeline build is sometimes you've got some experience and your company is going to tell you we are the software bundle.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: We know that our direct team needs 5x a pipeline.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: That's maybe not the same for your partners.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: Your partners have developed connections.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: So really getting to learn about your partners and build your own KPI together, together, like having a joint plan, is very important yeah, I I have seen time and time again that sort of misalignment between what our expectations of the partners are and the partner's expectation is sort of what success looks like, which can always lead to a very complicated conversation.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Come and a call to, when the partner's over the moon and we're sort of sat there going.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: We're not particularly particularly happy, right, that's an awful position to end up in.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: So one of the things that I know Dell Tech and yourself are extremely proud of is how partners are really sticking to your program right, that they're with you for a long time.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: We talk a lot on this podcast about partner lifetime value, which is you know we talk a lot about lifetime value of an end user and how long they continue to purchase from us, and I think actually partner lifetime value is a much more interesting statistic, typically a lot bigger.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: How are you managing to drive such excellent partner lifetime value, who you know?
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Those partners keep coming back and keep working with you.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: What do you do to sort of drive that long term relationship?
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: So the basis is really transparency and honest communication with them, and when something is doing well, we acknowledge it.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: When something is not going well, we also speak about it.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: That's very important.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: I don't like to compare, but we can compare partnership in marriage, and that's the same.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: You need to have a very good line of communication with your partners.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: That's the first thing.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: And then alignment.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: So you need to make sure that on a yearly basis, on a quarterly basis, on a monthly basis, you are aligned on what you want to achieve together, and together is very, very important.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: As a software provider, we usually come to the table by telling what we want, but this is not how long-term partnerships are built.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: We build long-term partnership by saying how, together, we are going to help you grow your business as a partner.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: And that's what I'm interesting on when I'm speak to my team is how can we help this partner community to grow their business?
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: And ultimately, if they grow their business, they are going to grow our business.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: That would be the second thing and so maybe, speaking as a leader, I'd love to understand how you're fostering that sort of open communication and transparency, because I know lots of salespeople and partner people who are almost scared to approach that conversation with pure honesty, with some fear that actually that conversation is not going to go as well as they're hoping and maybe that sort of jeopardizes the relationship.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: How do you empower your team to really step up and take that transparent approach?
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: so I always tell them partnership also goes, goes in wave.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: So you've got very good time with your partners and then maybe something happened like a channel conflict with a direct seller, to take an example and then the relationship goes a little bit down, but then you manage to go up.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: So don't be afraid to see it going up and down.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: What's important is you being consistent and reliable to your partners and that's how they're going to trust you in good time and bad times.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I had a mentor of mine and I remember when one of my accounts went really really south very, very quickly and he gave me a piece of advice I think maybe six months into my career which has always stuck with me, which is your reputation is built in the bad times.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: I think we've all been there as as especially channel people, when the, when the partner's working well, you almost need to do nothing and it is going successfully.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: Right, to use your marriage analogy, we turn up for a few dates, we have a few laughs, everything is great, but your marriage is tested and your partnership is tested through the bad times and sort of how you show up and how you drive success and how you communicate, then that is actually what builds success for the long-term and, from my personal experience, partners really resonate and understand how you've navigated the tough times and your ability to sort of drive and get through that.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: That's actually, I can imagine from your perspective, elise, is what's so important to driving that long-term success.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and also don't take it personally.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: You know, sometimes you are in a fight, which is not necessarily a fight, but you are fighting a little bit.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: It's not about you.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: It's, you know, it's tough, because you want to be successful together.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, they're criticizing what's happened, not who.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: You are Right.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: And it can very much and trust me, I have felt it as well can very much feel like, hey, this is my.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: You know they are attacking me, who I am as a person, right.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: But very often it's a misalignment, especially in the corporate world.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: I remember when I ran distribution strategy for Zoom, there was lots of conflict and lots of pains and lots of growing pains.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: We were growing, I think, 300% quarter over quarter through COVID.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: So it was absolute lunacy and very often it felt like I was being attacked.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: But when I sort of zoom out now and I think, well, we were all overworked, we were all overtired, we were all under too much pressure and actually we were doing a great job in the context.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: But what I'm very pleased to say is some of those partners who were furious with me at the time now come back and they're good friends and good mentors to me today because they understand that sort of nuance of the moment.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you just have to get a bit of space and distance from it.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: Great yeah.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: So maybe switching slightly, how can companies navigate the challenges of transitioning from a sort of direct sales model into a channel and partnership focus approach?
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: I'm coming back to communication.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: It's very important, you know, and I think it's the basis of everything.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: It's very important if, as a business, you decide to make this transition, it's very clear to every level of your organization and every business unit on the why.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: So why you are doing this transition and how it's going to help to grow your business.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: And you need to do it at the exec level because you need to get on board all the executive and then you need to drill that down to every single layer of your organization.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: And if you really make a plan and make sure that the vision is understood by your team, that's going to help.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: That will be the first one.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: And then you need to think about to have a very good view of your partners and your partner ecosystem when you make the transition.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: So, know, what are your weaknesses as a partner team?
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: Do you have everything in place and ready to support your partner ecosystem, such as enablement, partner marketing, just to name two?
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: And after that, also, what's the mechanism you have for your direct sellers to really see the value of working with partners?
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: What are they going to get out of this relationship?
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that sort of senior media and junior conversation in terms of why we are building channel is so important.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: I remember my time at Zoom.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Zoom had a huge direct organization and in certain regions channel was growing unbelievably fast and in others it was growing slower and every single time I saw that I had an amia role.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: So I you know I was dialed into the numbers and every single time I saw that a region was slow it was because there was some direct sales leader who maybe wasn't bought into why we were building the channel.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: Every time we saw that fixed, either with some top-down pressure or some bottom-up pressure.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Then suddenly we saw the channel really grow and really grow from strength to strength.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: But having that sort of 360 buy-in is absolutely critical.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Do you have any sort of strategy.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I do, I was thinking about that.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: So obviously we are in a virtual world.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: So in the past you would have done a roadshow going to offices, but I strongly recommend that to do it online.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: So what I've done, for example, is jumping into team meeting for the customer success team and direct sellers of particular business units and just introducing them.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: Who is my team?
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: What do we do?
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: What is a partner ecosystem?
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: How a partner can help them to do better or to go faster.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: So that would be the thing really spending time with the people.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: That would be one.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: And then another strategy would be finding a champion.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: So I've got somebody in mind.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: I cannot name her, but, for example, she was great in working with partners.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: She saw the value from day one.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: So, leveraging this success story and seeing the other sellers see she's successful, she's reaching her quota faster because she's working with partners she's successful, she's reaching a quota faster because she's working with partners, yeah, 100.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: I think the thing that is so often misaligned is there's the company drive and then there's the individual drive, and you must deliver on both right.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: And so sometimes I see, uh, channel leaders over index on one, so hey, this is how you can help reach quota faster, which is obviously really important.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Or they over index on the other and they're like, hey, this is the company vision and the honest answer for you.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: To win the hearts and minds of all the AEs, you have to nail both, and I love your idea of a roadshow right, whether digitally or in person, really getting that buy-in.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Do you see yourself doing that sort of cyclically?
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: I'm assuming it's not a sort of one and done program no, exactly that's something you need to do all the time, obviously also with turnover and changes, um and I really invite my team to do it too like they could go and you know, jump in a team meeting of another sales sales business unit or thing like this.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: But that's really something you need to do.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: And on my day-to-day job is working with my peers, the other leaders in the organization, to if we've got some conflicts, we deal with it and then we probably sit down and speak about it.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: So what happened on these particular deals while we're in this situation?
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: So that's a day-to-day job, I would say and are you doing things?
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: because I I often hear about doing sort of a stand-ups where a direct sellers are sort of evangelizing how partners helped them close and you sort of getting them to do the messaging on your behalf.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely so.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: On a quarterly basis we are working with a sales leader to make sure they are using some cases and how they run with partners.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: So that's something we share.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Excellent.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: I think one of the things that makes that sort of doubly complicated is looking after big regions, and you said EMEA and APAC, which from my perspective I would argue are the two most complicated sort of macro territories in the world.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: How do you adapt and sort of pivot your strategy to have that nuance of localization whilst maintaining that global alliance?
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: So I'm very lucky because the partners I've been working with are here with us since 10, 15 years.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: So the first thing I've done when I took the role two years ago was really listening to them and what do they have to say?
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: So gathering feedbacks of what we are doing well, what we are doing wrong and how we could improve this kind of local approach, because every country within MEA works differently, every country within APACA works differently, every country within APAC works differently.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: So focusing of okay, what are your basic needs to make sure you can sell the software, and then, once I've gathered that, it's, really looking at our product portfolio and having a very realistic view of which product we could sell in which region, to which industry, to which customer size, et cetera, et cetera.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: So working on local strategy.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Obviously, I've got to deal with what is the global strategy of Dell Tech, which is important, but I feel that we've been very agile in adapting and allowing our partners to really operate in the market they are in.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Awesome.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: I think one of the things that I find very interesting about your model and about other models in the channel is partner to partner alliances right More and more, whether it's from GSIs to deployment partners or sort of nuanced like AV partners working with IT partners.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: We're seeing more and more sort of partner to partner collaboration, and I know that's really important sort of for your go to market.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: How do you foster that environment and I know that's really important sort of for your go-to-market?
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: How?
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: do you foster that environment?
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: We are trying, and it's hard because we are online, but we are trying to create a community.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: So it's very important and that's something I always say to my team is make sure that your partners know who is within the ecosystem, and you are facilitating this introduction between our partners.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: I don't want to work in silo and think like each partner is bringing revenue, but I like to see them as one unit and what can they bring to each other in terms of skills, geographic reach, et cetera.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: And that sounds like a lot of work, right.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Fostering a community.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: What's the sort of cynical revenue reason behind that?
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: What are you expecting to happen as a result of building that community?
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: um in, in my case, uh, managing capacity.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: Some of our partners don't have capacity and when they don't, they don't sell anymore.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: So if I want them to sell, I need them to know who they can leverage in terms of services within the region and then winning more deals also, um, in some deals enterprise deal especially we really need to have partner combining forces and experiences.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: So, um, being having them working together is really helping us win more maybe to turn that sort of tactical for the audience.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Then it sounds like what you're looking at is the constraints of your partner, go to market and then trying to tie partners together to understand okay in I I've seen this happen with softcat in the uk, very large partner.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: They often in the in the background of the the world I came from.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: They had very few installation engineers available and so we would often tie them together with installation engineers from another partner because they were unbelievable sales machines but they just didn't have enough engineering resource and so there we were able to sort of raise their ceiling by sort of removing that capacity blocker.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: It sounds like you're deploying something very similar.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Maybe looking ahead into 2025, what's your sort of key focuses, Liz?
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: So I've got three focuses.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: The first one is scaling and using all the wonderful, you know, automation.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: We see around not to name ais and see how we could implement them, uh, within our partner ecosystem.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: The second one would be continuous enablement for partners.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: It's very critical for us to make sure they've got the right skills to sell the product and our product is evolving a lot and that's creating the community, because enablement, you could really have some training groups and peer sharing and things like this.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: And lastly, I would say data drive and decision.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: It's very important that we have the right API in place for next year to be successful.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Awesome.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: You're reminding me I had Christian who runs the Americas organization for Nutanix and he has deployed I think to great success he was evangelizing on the podcast an AI partner enablement tool.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: So it was effectively their learning management system and they were able to do sort of dynamic tests specialized per role, and then their AI model learn and learn and learn, so it was able to feed the information to the right partner and the right persona at the right time to get their certification level up, which I think.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: I'm really excited to see how AI optimizes for the channel, because I think the channel is so complicated relative to other go-to markets, and so I think we have the biggest upside, because I think if you can smooth out some of the complexities that happen within the channel, we have the most scale and therefore you're going to see the most return.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: So I think how those two come together is going to be really exciting absolutely awesome, elise.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Look, we are lazy here at partnerships unraveled, and so we like to get our guests to book our next guests for us at Elise I know you have someone in mind.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Who do you think we should have on next?
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so when you asked me the question, I was thinking about Stephanie Key.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: I know Stephanie since two years I think now, and she's a wonderful channel professional, and I know her because she's been co-founding Women in Alliances, so I would love for her to come into the podcast.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Amazing, stephanie, we're coming from you.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Elise, thank you so much for coming on.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: It's been a real pleasure.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: Thank you, bye next.