Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 095 - Oren Yehudai - SMB Channel Mastery

Transcript

095 - Oren Yehudai - SMB Channel Mastery · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channext and this week I'm extra specially excited to welcome Oren.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Oren, how are you doing?
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: I'm doing great, alex, thanks.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Excited for a chat to welcome Oren.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Oren, how are you doing?
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: I'm doing great, Alex.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Thanks, Excited for our chat.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah well, we always have a briefing call ahead of this and me and you were nerding out about channel for about 45 minutes, so I'm incredibly optimistic about the quality.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Maybe the quality or maybe we're just going to have a really good time, but maybe, for the uninitiated Oren, could you give us a bit of an introduction?
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Who are you?
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: What do you do?
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Where have you come from?
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: So I'm Oren, israeli, living in the Netherlands, now been in channel for around 20 years, always worked at vendors, spent the first three years actually at professional services, so working with partners on implementation of big projects and then most of my career was in pure channel management big projects and then most of my career was in pure channel management.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: And at the moment I'm spending my time on the dark side, actually on the sales organization, running the SMB sales organization for EMEA, for Sophos.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: But I think I was very fortunate to work with all different types of partners throughout my channel career.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: You know, from traditional two-tier distribution reseller model, oem, gsi, managed service providers, agents, referrals, really any type of partnership you can think of.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: And for me that's, you know, what I take great joy in is seeing the different angles of partnerships.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Well, I like the dark side reference, I think, as VP of revenue, that makes me Darth Vader.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: You are Darth.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Excellent, so for most of our listeners.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: They'll know we spend a lot of time at Channex.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: We're both on this podcast talking about the power of SMB channels, and it's both a huge upside, in our opinion, but also wildly complicated.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: As a channel leader who's worked with partners of all sizes, how does managing SMB partners differ from managing larger partners?
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Well, the easiest way to say it is there's no difference.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Partner is a partner.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: You're driving revenue together and I think the differences are more on the nuances.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So you work with a partner, you're driving business.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: You need to have alignment.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: They need to like your product, you need to like them.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: There needs to be some money that can be made together.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: There are certain things that might not make sense to dwell on with an SMB partner, like spending too much time on individual deals.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: It's a complete waste of time, in my view.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: What you want to do, which is different from when you work with the GSI, is to talk about the whole segment, because you're essentially dealing with volume.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: So you want to look at the volume growth, you want to look at the volume predictability, you want to look at the profitability.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: But you want to look at the profitability, but you really don't want to go and say, yeah, what's your forecast on this specific deal?
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: So I think that's a really interesting model, right, because there's sort of categories of focus.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: I suppose that's the sort of antithesis of when you're working with large GSIs.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: You can appoint someone to manage and develop that partnership, or even manage and develop an area of that partnership.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: A marketing account manager is focusing on FinTech, as an example.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: However, you can't do that with every channel manager for every SMB.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: So what should vendors who want to be successful in the SMB segment be focusing on?
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Well, I think the first thing is a lot of people like simplicity, but there's a tendency for oversimplicity, so I've been in places where they try to push this narrative that big partner, big deals, medium partner, medium deals, small partner, small deals and that's complete bogus.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: I've worked with partners that had 19 employees that only sold to like seven major enterprises, and at the same time, I think we both know a few very famous partners in the UK that cater to SMB or mid-market, depending on how you do that.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: So the first thing if you really want an SMB strategy, then forget about that.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: It is true, though, that a big chunk of your SMB revenue will come from the long tail of partners, and for that you need a different strategy, because, like we said before, if it's a managed partner, then you have a partner manager, an account manager, on it, and they manage it in the same way that they will manage a GSI or sort of a major national player.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: But where you really need sort of the brains and programmatic approach is in the long tail, and there I think there are a few things.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Is one, like you said, you can't have dedication there, right?
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: You can't have a vendor partner manager on all of these small partners.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: So you need to automate, you need to make things go through, and it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a system, it just goes seamlessly through.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: We saw one transaction for I think it was $742 that required seven communications back and forth with the disti and the reseller, and just these seven questions make that whole deal invaluable.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: So how do you make things just go fast?
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: You're talking about volume here, so it needs also pace.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: I think the second thing is to have the distribution focused on it.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: When I was working at Palo Alto Networks, which is a great channel organization and very heavily intertwined with the disties, we almost had a sort of reverse pyramid of focus with them.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: So if you can think of on the large, big partners, we told them hey, we have our partner managers and, like you said, even sometimes multiple partner managers, so you guys don't need to spend much time on them.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: You get the transactions coming through, you get your margins.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Where we do need you to spend time is on the long tail.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: So this is where you put a BDM taking care of 50, 60, 70 partners, whereas we as the vendor only have a distribution manager.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: So that creates that sort of optimal touch on the long tail of partners.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, there are some other tactics that we can touch, if you're interested in.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: No, that that's awesome.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: Because I think one of the huge misconceptions is that those smaller partners only deal with smaller customers and the problem is, if you build an smb strategy that's focused that way, you're going to miss enormous opportunities.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: I think for me it's always been fairly obvious that that's a misnomer.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: I come from the video and unified communication space and I knew an AV partner of maybe 40 FTE that was servicing thousands of rooms for a large search engine I'm not talking about Bing, they're very, very focused on that and that's because they have a very niche engineering framework.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: And then there are lots of partners who service thousands of SMBs and they're a massive, massive partner.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: But you're absolutely right, you've got to leverage distribution and resellers in the right way to sort of deliver that value.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: So when we're talking about that SMB channel orchestration, what value do you provide as a vendor to support those distributors and those resellers to being successful in that SMB space?
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the first thing and I always say it very upfront.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: The first thing that I don't offer is leads, that sort of lead discussion between vendor and partners.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: I remember when I joined Equinix to run the channel organization there we were new to channel as a company, so there was a lot of internal growing and learning and stuff like that.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: And almost every office that I went to, first thing that the local sales manager would ask me is where are my leads from your partners?
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: And I would ask where are my leads from your salesmen?
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Just to be tongue in cheek, but when it comes to SMB partners, there should never be an expectation that the vendor can provide any significant number of leads.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, you can.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: You can have a program that you know.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: People come on the website, a BDR screens them and then you pass them to a partner.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: But even those, most of the times these guys will have a partner that they're purchasing from.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: They're not going to come and look at your product and say, oh, I don't know who I buy IT from.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Please give me a recommendation.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: So the value we don't provide is leads.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: The value we do provide is ease of doing business, pace, clarity and simplicity, and then you can get as sophisticated or as least sophisticated as you want or as you're able to.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: So, for example, one thing is about pricing.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: A lot of SaaS companies have the ability to really have fixed pricing, none of that sort of discount negotiation things like that.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: I think that's a godsend.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: I think that you do have places where you might need a discount and a lot of sales organizations are still very tied to their ability to discount.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: So you can also work around that.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: And you can also give the distributor that you say, okay, work around that.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: And you can also give the distributor that you say, okay, this is the margin that I want from this segment.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Um, so you know, this is the pricing level and here's a pot of money.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: You deal with that.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: When you run out of that money, you run out of that money.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: But I, as a vendor, know what I'm getting.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: The disty feels that they can add pricing value down the chain when they want to, so they have more control.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: Um, but for the reseller, more of these things work at a pace.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: The other thing, of course and that's not really in the hands of Channel, but if a vendor wants to go into SMB, you need to have the right product.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: It's one thing to sell the product but the other thing is to run it and manage it and administer it.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: And you want things that are not overly complicated because someone's going to have to pay for it, right?
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: So we know that a lot of the customers in this segment they don't have huge IT teams.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: That's fine.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: That gives the reseller an opportunity to do a service, but even then that service can be overly complicated.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: That you need, you know, half an FTE working on that, because the math doesn't work.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: So you need things that are simple, that are dedicated pricing, product features, and then you get the value.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Then you get the volume and the pace and the predictability in your business.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: I 100% agree and for our audio listeners, when Aaron was talking about don't give leads, I was fist pumping in the air because I think to me, leads have always been a really funny thing, because I think leads passing leads down to channel partners is incredibly valuable, right.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: But you want to that leads should help do something.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: It should help drive enablement because they've got deals to practice on or whatever.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: The problem is, providing leads won't actually make your SMB channel successful, because the reason an SMB channel isn't successful isn't because of a lack of leads.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: They don't know how to sell effectively.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: They don't know how to generate demand consistently.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: It's too operationally complex to purchase or to price.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: I love your pricing structure conversation there.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: I think that's an amazing tool, but those are all prohibitors to being successful.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: Leads don't solve any of that problem and our sort of mantra at Chanix is don't provide leads, provide a lead engine.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: right, that's what you need right Exactly, and that's you know.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: You also talked about the distributor, because the distributor has a lot of opportunity to add value in this chain and some of it is sort of again the basic stuff of enablement and so on.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: But that's where, as a vendor, I really need the distributor to do the one-to-many enablement.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: That again, I don't have a dedicated SE that goes into that partner and does that.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: So as a vendor SE that goes into that partner and does that, so as a vendor, I can support the disti.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: But the disti needs to be able to provide for the long tail of partners, regular enablement, share of mind, share of wallet.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: So that's something that I, as a vendor, want the disti to do and I think it's good for the disti because that keeps the reseller sticky with.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: You know, campaigns.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: So a lot of our business is going on.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: Okay, you sell a product, you renew it, but after a year, after two years, you have an upsell, you have an upgrade, you have these things.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: That's stuff that the DST can run themselves to help the resellers generate more revenue and again, demonstrate what does the DST want besides revenue?
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: They want stickiness to these partners, because these partners can also go elsewhere, go elsewhere.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: So there's there's a lot of space for the distributor to make significant impact on on this segment, and especially through the long tail of partners.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: So you're touching on the value of distribution.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: Now you are preaching to the choir.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: I spent six years working in distribution as an ex-discie man yeah yeah, yeah and then then also I ran zoom's distribution master agency strategy across amia, so I've really bought into the power and value of distributors.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: However, like anything, it's all in the detail and in the execution.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Now, one of the things I was comped on was the amount of rebate I generated, which was excellent, but I think rebate is the absolute carrot or stick to drive distributors, or certainly that was my experience.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: How do you see rebate and distributors coming together?
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I think it's always an iterative process, right, it's a bit like um sale reps comp plan you, you build it one year and then you see what the results and then you're like, okay, this uplift made a lot of sense and this one just created bad behavior and people just cashed in, which is fine, fine, that's their job.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: It's the same with with this decent rebate.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: So you know, we, we tried different things.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: We there was a period that we tried to put a rebate on the segment, which I was very happy about because you know it was all my segment, but it I'm not sure it was the optimal thing, because as a distributor, you talk to partners.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: You're not going to ask them, wait, how big is that customer?
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: And you know, next year we're going to change, as a vendor, our definition of SMB from 100 seats to 200 seats.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: You know what the disti can control is who they're talking to.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: So I think if you in general push the distis to focus more on the long tail, you're already getting bang for the buck.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: I think, if you add, regardless if it's paid KPIs or non paid KPIs, if you track activities so I don't know, how many enablement activities did you do to the long tail?
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Howment activities did you do to the long tail?
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: How many webinars did you do to the long tail?
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: How many people do you have technical and non-technical who are supporting and enabling the long tails on specific deals?
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Because for these resellers, they have big deals.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: For them, it might not be the biggest deal for the vendor or the biggest deal for the disti, but since this is where we want the disti to focus, we want to make sure that they're there to lend a hand.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: So I think these are some of the things where you can push that strategy and this re-emphasizes everything.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: If the conversation with the disti is I want to drive the long tail and you're the best way for me to do it, then you align everything with that.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: I think the other thing that we sometimes tend to ignore is if a vendor is really clear about their segmentation, then they should also have that as part of their regular reviews.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've seen multiple situations where we talk to especially distribution, about all our strategy and stuff like that, and then when we go to the review time, we just look at the total number.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: So I don't know if we did well on this segment and poorly on that segment.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: I just see a number and that's fine, but it takes away the ability for both vendor and disty to inspect and understand what happened.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: And when you go down to the segment then you can say, okay, we did really well in mid-market, great, what did we do there?
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: We did this, we did that.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: We underachieved with GSI.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: So why is that?
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: And especially for the SMB, where my view is this is a heavily distributor-driven segment then you drill down or okay, do we need?
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: I think you and I talked about partner recruitment.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Right, this could be, in a certain situation, what you need as a vendor and then you put a KPI on that, say, okay, you need to, I don't have enough partners who are selling in this segment, so you need to recruit them.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: And it could be that after a few years I mean, I had that when I joined Equinix Again, the program was three years old, so prior to me joining it was.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: You know, everyone has to recruit partners and the channel team got paid on it.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: So I had guys who were making buck on recruitment.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: But I had like 600 partners in France.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: I can't tell you the number that we're transacting.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: So you know, as long as you review and revise, but the disti has the power and you know, you've worked in one, you know the capability to do things in a programmatic, repeatable way.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Get me partners on board Great Now.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: Enable them, now, you know, make them ready to sell, make it easy for them, and then you can really drive that segment.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: Oren, you're so correct.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: As you say, as someone who sat on both sides of the table, you need to decide on a sort of quarterly or annual basis.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: What is the next improvement and the real mistake that I see brands making as they go?
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: And here's the seven things that we want to change this quarter.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: We want to recruit more partners, but we also want to do more enablement.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: We actually want more activity, we want to do more quotes, we want more deal registers, and I sit there and go.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: A distributor is not a speedboat, it is not agile, it's an oil tanker, unbelievably powerful when set in a singular direction.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: So what is the improvement that you want to make now and the next quarter?
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: Iterate on it, and if you get that right, distribution could be so, so, so powerful.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: And if you get that wrong, you can and I've seen it happen you're rewarding bad behavior.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: The distributors confused.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: They don't know how to disseminate the information into their teams, let alone their channels, and so what we've got to be is laser focused on the next step and if you get that right, then over quarters and years you can make massive improvements.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: But you have to do step by step by step, yeah and, and you can refine tactics, but you know one one things that you know talking to partners and in multiple companies that work for one thing that really pisses off partners is flip-flopping strategy.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Yesterday you told us to sell cloud.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: Today you're telling us to sell this.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, if the strategy with distributors is SMB, then that's it.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: What you can revise is the tactic under it.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: But they're also an organization that's for profit.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: They need to make their buck.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: But you know they're also an organization that's for profit.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: They need to make their buck.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: You know, if every day you change things, they will also think about.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Is this a vendor that I can have a long-lasting partnership with, or is this something that I'm just going to look how to exploit the current program in the way I can?
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: But my strategy would be I need to diversify.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Correct.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: So I love that because the direction might be SMB.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: But the process is recruitment now, then enablement, then demand generation then, close one revenue, then retention, then expansion, and you've got a motion.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: But everyone is coherent that we're going down the SMB pathway, because otherwise what happens is you go well, I didn't do anything for the first eight weeks of the quarter, so I'm not going to do anything for the next four weeks, because I'll get a new goal and I don't want to waste my time right, whereas if it feels like it's building momentum, then it's all headed the right way.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and, quite frankly, one other thing is I think vendors sometimes tend to forget how the relationships between distributors and many of their partners can be and how tight it can be.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: So I always find, you know, forming the tactics should be a joint thing.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Or also there are certain things that I would ask my disties to come up with.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: So, if you know, we talked earlier on about how much of the SMB channel is the unmanaged.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: But as a strategy, as a channel leader, I also want, let's say, at least 30% of my SMB business to come from managed partners.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: And if I don't have that, then I will go to the Disney and say I need you to pick from the long tail, where are the big bets?
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: And I can tell you that if you nurture them and grow them, then in X quarters I'm going to hire another channel manager to focus on that.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: And again, that's me helping you make your margins.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: But I wouldn't presume to be able to guess who out of the long tail is good, because all I see is a spreadsheet with deals.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: I don't know about their strategy, I don't know if they're going to acquire someone, I don't know how many customers they have that are not my customers.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: That's the disty that can bring me that.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: This has become a disney celebration here.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: I'm feeling hey, hey, they're, they're, they're the lifeblood, and I think the best place to learn about the channel is in distributor and nice segue here or potentially on partnerships unraveled.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: I don't think I've ever.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: I don't think I've ever explained why I wanted to do this podcast and certainly why I wanted to bring guests on.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: I've always I coach a lot of young budding salespeople and I walk them through my mantra for how to be successful, and the mantra is development, progression and money.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: I find very often salespeople chase money, and the problem with chasing money is you've got to get good to be worth money, and if you start chasing money, you never get good, and so instead what you've got to do is develop.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: Then progression comes and the money will just happen as an art of thought.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: So the idea behind partnerships unraveled and bringing guests on is here's the podcast I wish I could have listened to five years ago as I was growing.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: That's the idea and what I like about.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: The next question is here is a question I'm sure our listeners really care about, because they are trying to progress through vendors and become wildly successful.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: So why should a high growth executive aim towards SMB partners maybe, rather than GSIs?
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: That's a good question.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm a bit biased because in my career, what I value the most is having the ability to work with different types of partnerships, and the reason is that I think it showed me different models and it also forced me to innovate, because the way you drive a partnership with Accenture doesn't work.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: If you're trying to drive it with a master agent, it's a completely different story.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: The fundamentals are there, you know trust and all these things, but so for me, one of the keys to especially in today's world where channel is changing, so the linear channel reseller customer or vendor disty reseller customer, that's gone.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: I've sat on transactions that had a referral partner, an implementation partner, a reselling partner, and at some point you don't even know who brought the lead in.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: You know, but this is the way and this is before talking about you know, alliances and cloud and tech partners.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: So I think that to be a successful channel leader or ecosystem leader in the future, those different experiences help.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: So that's one reason to go into SMB, because most people will not have had this experience.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: I think the second is you sort of need to go through more things to run this segment and sometimes you just have less arrows in the quiver.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: So to run the segment successfully, you cannot do standard things like executive alignment on everything.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: You know your partners, as opposed to if you're running a GSI segment.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: You know you have four or five partners.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: You do executive aligned with all of them, boom segment covered.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: So you have to be successful with less things that you can actually use and therefore, when you go into another segment or when you go to a higher level and you're looking at everything, all of a sudden certain things seem clearer, they they're easier because you just have more options.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: And the last thing I think is, especially when it comes to people development it's not a rule of thumb, but it tends to be that when you look at SMB sales, you'll have people that are younger in their career, similar to people who are working with distribution or SMB partners, and that, as a, gives you an opportunity to teach, to coach.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: Personally, for me that's one of the biggest elements of satisfaction is to see people grow and develop, people who are like a barrel of energy that just needs to be pointed in the right direction and that's just regardless of your career progression.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: That's just great job satisfaction.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: Excellent.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: I particularly like that last point.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: I'll let the listeners into what I sort of how I sort of view the way that you can increase the probability that you are going to be successful long term.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: And the answer is to have a little black book of really, really talented people who are probably going to follow you to the next job.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: That's really hard to do when someone's 25 years into their career, they're fully fledged, they understand they're not going to see you as the visionary leader who helped cultivate them, because they're cultivated right, they're lested, they're landed, they've built a career, whereas what has been very useful and rewarding, right, both monetarily and also spiritually, has been being able to cultivate talent.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: And then when I land somewhere new, go hey, by the way, I'm at this new place.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: I think it's really interesting, I think you'd be really good fit here and as you sort of collect that network.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: Ironically, the same thing is true, and why I think working in channel is just excellent is because you collect partners, you collect colleagues and and suddenly, when you land at a new place, yeah, and I think that's a really valid and valuable point in the long term is if you're cultivating and developing young, hungry people when they're five or ten years more experienced and they're absolute rock stars and you suddenly get that big job and you need to flesh out your team, having a whole bunch of people that you've really nurtured and developed.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: I can't tell you how valuable that asset is and when I've been on interview panels, I was one of the questions I asked, which is who are the first five people you want to hire?
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: And when people are, then I'm always nervous because I'm like why don't you know?
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: Because you've either either they're not going to follow you, which is concerning, or you don't know them, which is doubly concerning yeah, no, that's a great point and you know, the other thing is it.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: It also helps you in your own organization, because one of the things that I saw in, uh, when I was at palo alto networks I was running inside these were, you know, we took care of the sort of mid-sized partners, the smallest partners, that were managed.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Everything below us was in distribution and half of the team were sort of early in their channel career, but we did an incredible job and I think I did a half decent job as a manager and some of them moved on in the company and in other company.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: But that sort of coaching and development and helping people become successful.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: It also created basically a queue internal queue every time I had a job opening because people knew that, hey, if they join this team, there's someone who's going to help them be successful, someone's going to help them learn new skills and the people who left my team in the company.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: Then all of a sudden, you have an ally in the sales force.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: That is.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: You know, you don't need to discuss why should you work with my partners?
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Okay, I know you're going to take care of me, so it works both inside and out.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: Indeed, yeah, no, I absolutely love that and I, you know, I love getting LinkedIn messages of hey, alex, can I just run this past you?
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: Or I just wanted to say because to me, you know, outside of everything else, I just you know I'm infatuated with coaching people and I think the channel is amazing for it, because there is an internal element and an external element because you spend time educating partners on why they should be looking at a business model.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: You know, there's something that I've often referenced in this podcast is the best thing for me about working with the channel was that, at 24 years old, business leaders were asking me questions and I had no right to be speaking to them.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: I had no right to be advising them.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: If they saw what was up to at the weekend, they definitely wouldn't be listening to me.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: But it was just that opportunity to understand from business people about the business and be able to pass that knowledge on is just awesome.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: And that last shout out to distribution.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: That's something that you can only get in distribution If you go to a vendor at 24, you will not sit across of the CEO of XX.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: No, and I think that sometimes people ask me how did you get some level of business understanding?
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: And the honest answer is I have a fairly good memory and other people who are much smarter than me just told me the information.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: So you know, and now I'm taking credit for you know so.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: And so av, partner, who walked me through the unit economics of closing a massive customer, fantastic, awesome.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: So we are a channel podcast through and through.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: Um, and we wouldn't be a channel podcast without asking, ironically, for a lead.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: We like to ask our current guest who they think our next guest should be.
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: Oren, who do you have in mind?
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: So a lady called Gemma Telford.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: She's a channel marketeer First of all, overall fantastic human being, so always a good thing about someone that it's just nice to chat with them, but really, really amazing background in channel marketing, worked for vendors, now spun off to her own business already for a few years and I think has a pretty unique view on we talked about leads but basically how an organization needs to drive channel through the marketing lenses.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: So I think she'd be a good guest and I think you guys will get along.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: Well, me and Gemma have been circling each other on LinkedIn.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: She's one of those people that somehow I know but have never spoken to, so I'm looking forward to having Gemma on soon.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: And, oren, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Likewise Thanks for having me, Alex.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: See you soon.