Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 096 - Sam Valme - Leveraging Channel Partners for SMB Growth

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096 - Sam Valme - Leveraging Channel Partners for SMB Growth · 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 and I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channext, and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, Sam.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: How are you?
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: doing.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: I woke up this morning, alex, I cannot complain.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: our special guest Sam.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: How are you doing?
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: I woke up this morning, alex, I cannot complain.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: There we go.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Ever the optimist Sam, awesome Sam for the uninitiated who are you?
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Why should we be listening to you this week?
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Well, as a famous poet once said, allow me to reintroduce myself if you haven't met me before.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: My name is Sam Valme.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: I'm the senior director of US Channel Sales over here at AppPoint.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: I've been with the company around 10 years.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: I started off in engineering, moved over to our services team that I was running our public sector engineering team for a number of years, where I got into training partners, because being in public sector here in the US it is very partner centric.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: And then I learned some of these partners can do demos and sell just as well as the rest of us.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: So that's how I moved into partnerships and I became the.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: I and I became the.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: I ran a global partner program and actually created it, as well as global certifications as well, and then now I've transitioned into running the US market for our channel sales focus on the MSP persona and from the preparation call, you gave me a little bit of history about how AvePoint grew and how channel has become a core part of your strategy, specifically once it went public.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: I'd love to understand why, from a strategic level, that decision was made.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're looking at organizations that are in the billion mark as far as revenue, it's few and far between, especially for an ISV, that you're going to find a company that's doing it all through a direct sales.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: The reality of it is you have to multiply and leverage the sales force, and the best way to do that is through the channel, and that's working with a number of different personas, with our distribution partners, is working with MSPs, vars, lars, sis, across the board.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: So when we went public, of course one of the big things Wall Street's interested in is consistency and growth, so we thought let's stay on the shoulders of those that came before us and really dive into the channel as a priority for our organization, along with a number of other key initiatives as well.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: But channel was really the core of it and I'm very thankful and honored to be to have been there not only during our IPO but also moving up to it, helping to design our partner program and certification, so that when we went public and actually launched our global partner program, really partners felt as though there was a space for them to learn about our technology and, more importantly, how our technology is going to be able to help push forward their businesses.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, sam, you've actually underplayed it.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: Maybe I can be slightly more direct in terms of the importance of channel, but I believe there are zero B2B.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: I think this was true two years ago.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: It may not be true anymore, but there are zero b2b.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: I think this was true.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: This was true two years ago.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: It may not be true anymore, but there were zero b2b.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Businesses that do a billion dollars revenue per quarter that aren't channel led or channel supported right either.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: It's impossible to service those businesses, ie someone like salesforce right, where they rely on their partnerships to help service the program, or they actually, you know, like microsoft right, who are actually delivering reselling, supporting msp style business.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: No one does a billion revenues, of course, because it's impossible to hire, train and manage that many people.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: Hence why people like yourself run channel programs absolutely awesome and so, as an isv that's new into the channel um building that program, entering that market building awareness within the channel, building awareness within the partner base.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: That sounds wonderfully complicated.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: How the hell did you do it?
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so Apple has been around since 2001, and we have definitely been working with partners pretty much since inception, obviously Microsoft being our biggest one, but really it's that formality around it, right, and we're on five different continents.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: We have an install base across in all seven.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: So we've actually have a number of partners across different regions, but everyone really was kind of operating on their own locale what made sense for them.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Very opportunistic.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: Some folks had the beginnings of a program, some folks were really just kind of doing it where it made sense for an individual opportunity.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: So step number one is we wanted to formalize that system.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So what we did is we actually took the time to develop a team, number one that was responsible for rolling the Global Partner Program out, and we really took the time to actually listen to all the different regions and how they work with partners today, listen to all the different reasons and how they work with partners today.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: So that way what we designed was not going to ostracize or push anybody out that really was maybe already working with that point in the partnership capacity.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: We wanted to make sure everyone was included Now in a parallel lane, which we have been doing for a number of years, probably over seven to eight years is actually building up our distribution partnerships.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: So, as our global partner program was coming into existence, when the conversation about procurement how do you actually buy we had a very strong base of distributors as well, already set up and ready to go to be able to help handle that procurement via their cloud marketplaces.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: So Ingram, micro, td, cynics, folks like Also DNH, just to name a few, and that really helped us accelerate Once that plug partner program was stood up, getting folks to actually begin working with us a little faster.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: The next thing, of course, becomes enablement and education.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: So we partnered with an organization I'm sure folks listening to this podcast have heard of called Impartner, and they helped us spin up our partner portal.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: We had one that was sort of built in-house, that kind of mirrored our customer-facing portal but really in part helped us take it to the next level by not only giving us things like an asset library, not only allowing us to do things now like deal registration at scale, but also transitioning us from doing one-off agreements to click-through agreements, which really saved a lot of time and energy for our legal teams, for our legal teams and then, of course, enablements right, so we were able to actually roll out our first certification program.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Similar idea when designing a global partner program you got to ask the different regions how they'd like to work with us.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: You also have to ask them how their partners like to learn too.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: So we took all that into account as we built that first version of our certifications and now that's been rolled out around the world.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: You know I'm proud to say we're going on.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: You know two, two and a half years now of this program being in existence and the majority of folks really still find it very fresh and useful to their organizations, and we're continuing to upgrade and iterate on it as well.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Awesome, Sam.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: I think we've spoken a lot on this podcast around the sort of pyramid of priorities when it comes to building your channel.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: You're absolutely right.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: You start with your base, which is how the hell can people buy at scale right, so that operational mechanism, whether that's done via API, whether that's done through billing portals, via distribution, led on top of that.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: You've got your engagement process right, your enablement engagement process.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: We need to train our partners to be successful and then we sort of see the crown jewel is how do you then go out and help partners generate demand, be successful, find new opportunities?
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: When you look at that sort of top of the pyramid, what's your view in terms of supporting partners to create and find opportunities?
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the first thing is actually executive buy-in at the ISV's organization.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: That's the first thing that has to happen, because there's so many layers down that you actually get to doing the transaction, doing business.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: It starts off with executive buy-in.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: From a strategy perspective, that channel is going to be number one.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: But then also, in our case as far as ISV, making sure that the technology that we create is actually built and designed for partners as well.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: So, as an example, we deal primarily around M365, migration, backup, data recovery and data resiliency right.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Well, that's great, you know, with our enterprise strengths, going directly to the customers was a fantastic story.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: But for partners it's different.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: You actually need to go ahead and have a platform.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: So, let's say, an MSP can load in all their different customers and kind of track things across the board.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: So that's a key way that we support our partners as well is by giving them a purpose-built platform.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: We call Elements to let them see all the different customers they have leveraging our technology.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, that wouldn't be possible without that executive buy-in and budget to the development team.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: From there it continues to roll down.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: It's like all right, once you have the platform, having that dedicated sales team, making sure that the partners aren't just working with an AE here or there.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: They have that consistency with that experience.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, pushing forward to the more niche things, like making sure that partners that don't have a strong marketing arm have capabilities with a campaign in the box that we offer via our partner portal, making sure they have assets and battle cards.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: And then also making sure we have a dedicated engineering team that can train that persona.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: So it's not just, you know, doing a demo for a sale, but it's really doing the demos and presentations and helping them build out a practice that incorporates our technology.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Once again, all that is flowed out from that executive buy-in up top and I'm extremely proud of our executive leadership team for making all this possible.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: And really I think our partners have grown to love that love that they're getting from Avecoin with all those additional investments and us trying to support them more.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: We see that the market is changing.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: We're seeing lots of people head down market focus on SMB.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: I think you've touched on Microsoft there.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: There's few businesses who are doing it as well, as I think Microsoft are both the breadth and depth of their channel, but also the operational infrastructure that they've built around their channel.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: That has sort of greased the wheels for businesses to start heading and focusing on SMB.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: How do you sort of see that changing?
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that SMB you know, last reports we were looking at right, and I think this is still true today is that 50% of Microsoft, you know, when it comes to license revenue, is from the SMB market and you can't do that unless you have that strong operational base at scale.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Frankly, I don't see that changing very much.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: I think that the SMB is still going to continue to be where we see a big push forward.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: I think that as people get better at working with that persona, because step number one is you have to be able to scale with them right.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: You have to be able to work with them at that pace, be able to do and I think you know if I looked at an evolution, maybe it's getting more specific and looking into healthcare, looking into the defense industrial base, the more niches that the S&B customers have, being able to service those.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: And we do have a number of partners that have gotten to that level of speciality in their partnerships, specifically with things with partners such as that are focused in the defense industrial base here in the United States, and then, of course, even things like healthcare and legal services, we can actually get to the point that, as we're supporting those S&P customers.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: And this is only possible with that strong infrastructure and tools like the Asset Library via mPartner, where we can not only have our core story as AppPoint, but then we can have our story for the defense industrial base, for the S&P customer, for a legal persona, you know, for the SMB customer.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: I think that's how we're going to be able to really drive things forward and give a more tailored story to that end customer.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: And what we see is that there's different businesses and they've got different sort of routes to market depending on the vertical in their segment, right?
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: So some businesses they'll be direct for SMB and they'll have their channel to go for mid-market and enterprise.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Other businesses it's vice versa.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: How do you see the channel playing a specific specialized role to go after that SMB?
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: What's the sort of differences that you're building when you build for SMB versus enterprise?
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: How do you see that change?
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Well, number one is simplicity, right?
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Typically, when you're dealing with the SMB persona, it's an individual who has to do a lot of different things in tandem, right, we've all heard the adage someone that wears many, many hats technology around, removing a lot of the intricacies and decision-making around, you know, and providing so many options, I guess, with our technology and really providing best practice.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: And going back to that, you know, speciality of your market segment is, hey, here's the best practices leveraging our technology for legal, for healthcare, for manufacturing, right, we do a lot with data.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: So the way that we've actually shown this is in our tools, like we call it, policies and insights Helps you actually take a look at the data inside things like M365 and make sure you have no high risk information.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Or what we actually have are pre-built templates for those different personas looking at things like PII, phi, credit card numbers, right, that way, somebody first using that tool and MSP, you know, using that tool for end customer can say, hey, applin already has pre-built templates for me that I can then use for this persona that I talk to every single day.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: And, better yet, you can customize those templates and copy them out for your customers, right?
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: So it's that level of having those stories pre-built into your product, so it's easier for the SMB servicing partner to quickly apply what's relevant to that customer and then also allowing them the capacity to do some customizations as well, so, as they bring on more customers of that persona, being able to copy those out and service them at scale too.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: And when you're building that infrastructure and you're heading down market we see that the sort of unit economics of how a channel works.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: When you head down market, the construction of your channel looks very different.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: That's all the way down to the sort of unit economics, right From how many people you have managing partners to the revenue split between your top end and your low end.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: Can you talk through some of the sort of financial differences you see in building and running that channel?
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, something that I've always been cognizant of looking at this team is that I never want to be in that 80-20.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: I forgot, I forgot.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: I'm going to butcher it.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: Great, I should have stuck the landing.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: I was about to say it, but I didn't want to go out.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: But right, is that Pareto principle, that 80-20 rule, right?
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: I think that is true in a lot of cases.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: But with the channel in general in business, I think that offers a lot of risk.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: So well, that definitely might've been true, you know, a couple of years ago.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: One of the things I actively strive for my team to do is bring on more and more of these top end partners to kind of help us lean that out.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: So, as opposed to it being more 80-20, I like to see it being more like 60-40, right, just to kind of, of course, having that fixation on those top end partners, we're really focusing on our long tail too.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: The way that we look at it is is that you know, we have several hundred partners here in the United States and roughly two thirds are what we would call long tail partners, right?
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Um, and the way that we manage that is, I have a team of nine.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: So if you look at two thirds of your partners and talking about, you know, several hundred, um, I don't want the majority of my team to actually be focused on folks that are doing, you know, the bottom call it 60% of the revenue, so it's once again, it's kind of layers of foundation right.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: So I have a very small team, one through nine years, so three people now that I have on my team.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: They actually serve as two thirds of that long tail.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: And the way that we do it is we actually score and grade partners based on whether or not they've done things like build out their partner profile and the partner portal.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: Do they have certifications completed in the partner portal?
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: Do they have any revenue with us?
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: How many different product segments do they actually sell?
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Right, and we can generally get an idea of how engaged the partner is looking at these different segments and then we band them into a red, yellow and green category and then what we do is we'd say, okay, cool, out of this, two-thirds of our long tail, we actually have nurture campaigns specific to the things they might be lacking, right, maybe they don't have any certification, so I can now band them together and have a nurture campaign to help push them to getting more certifications.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Maybe I have a subset of that long tail that's only selling our migration SKU, right, let me try a day two solution, right, and have a nurture campaign there so we're able to having this all really automated.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: I'm then able to have the rest of my team focused on the mid-tier, managing what we call our investor part and the top-end partners as well, giving them a lot more time and attention.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: So that's kind of how we have the team broken up and organized, but really it's about operationalizing it and making sure that things are templatized and you're really making things in repeatable and making things as repeatable as possible too.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I think that's that's what you have to do.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Especially as your partner base grows and expands, you have to provide just as much love and resources for the long tail, but do it in a way that's more automated and easier for them to consume, so you can focus on that mid to top of your top of your 10 year partners.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: And what are some of the advantages of growing that long tail?
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: Why don't you just focus on recruiting and driving more revenue at the top end?
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Because I'm a nice guy, I like everybody.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: I want to work with everybody, right?
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: No, it's one of the.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: I think that because it's easy to forget, it's hard.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: I think that a lot of my personal journey is doing the hard things that ultimately are for the benefit of more than just my immediate team or just myself.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: So I think that's why it's important for folks to invest and take the time and have the six, seven, eight hour whiteboarding sessions to figure out what additional resources do you need to be able to make this possible.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: I think it's worth taking the time to get the resources not only from sales, but also marketing, as well as our distribution partners, to be able to help service these different types of partners as well, because I think that partners appreciate that and really, if you take a step back, it goes back to what we were talking about before, which is the support from the executive leadership team Number one, giving us the resources we need because they see the value in the long tail.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: But really it all trickles down to what's the experience?
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Look like MSPs, partners.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Everybody has networks and subgroups that they're talking to and working with it.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: Does the organization no good to have just the top 30 partners speaking our praises but then having you know three, four hundred partners that can't get hold of us because we don't have an email set up for them, we don't have a portal set up for them, we don't have resources set up for them.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Somebody is going to come along and service that persona.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: So it's only to our benefit to make sure we're putting our best foot forward to make sure the long tail is served, and, once again, the better we do that, the more we're able to find out of those several hundred partners, folks that can move to the next tier, and that's a metric that my team's actually held to.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: We call it promotions, right, promoting up to the managed tier.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Um, you'd never find these partners if you just looked at, you know their website, zoom in forward and be linked in, and saw their statistics and just said they're not worth our time awesome, and one of the things that I've heard a lot is, as well as around diversification of risk, right.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: So one of the things that I think happens is we we sometimes internally call it our rising star program, right, how do we go and find silver partners that should be gold, or gold that should be platinum?
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: But also it's a case of well, if you've got a very top heavy channel, there is an element of risk involved that's going to affect your valuation, that's going to affect partner churn.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: The responsibilities come tighter, the profitability of those partners is less, and so, having a split channel, can you talk to me with your CFO hat on or some of the sort of executive leadership view?
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Why is building that long tail helpful to a business outside of just the opportunity?
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: You know, outside of the brand recognition awareness, it's if you look at leveraging and you know the multiplier effect right of channel.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: It's if you look at leveraging and you know the multiplier effect right of channel.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: That's really where you see it, because at the end of the day, my top team, that is, the top tier team, is not the top team.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: So the top tier team that I have working with our middle and top partners yes, from a revenue perspective, it's significant, but if I look at the fact that we have several hundred partners who are signing up to our portal, learning about our technology and selling our solutions and you know they're doing their procurement all via our distribution partners we have several hundred thousand dollars.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: That is transacting, right.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Getting zeroing in the millions where we don't actually speak to the partner at all, right.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: If you look at it from a sales perspective, you's good, you're a CRO, right.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: That's the dream.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: You just wake up one morning and there's checks in the mail, like there's checks in the bank, right.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: So that's really from a leadership perspective.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: That's why the investment makes sense.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Now, what's also critical when you're doing this is tracking that and making sure that that's true, because it's easy to get on here and talk about it.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: It's easy to say, yes, it's possible, right, it's easy to be like I've done this before.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: But it's a whole other thing to pull up Power BI and to look at that long tail and actually see that MRR grow month over month, to be able to look into your portal and see, like, all right, hey, what are the top assets that our partners are actually downloading, right?
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: What are the certifications that they're taking?
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: And another thing that we do is we actually look at all the different partners that are using our assets, taking our certifications, and then we look at the amount of revenue that they bring in, right, and then I see how many of them fall within our authorized tier.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: So, the long tail tier.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: And I can now clearly see, hey, in this long tail tier, on average, someone that downloads this campaign in a box makes $40,000.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: At that point, people that take this certification make over $100,000 with us, right?
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: These are key metrics for the CFO and the executive team to show that ROI right.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Why am I investing in certifications?
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: Well, because people that take this cert make X number of dollars.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Why do I have marketing dedicated to making all these campaigns in a box?
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Well, folks that download this on average are making $40,000, $50,000 of us, right?
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: That's where you kind of bookend the story.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: It's getting the investment up front but then also showing that ROI on the backend.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that because I think so many leaders and Forrester and Gartner and everyone is talking about the opportunity down market.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: The opportunity down market is twofold.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: There is a huge amount of demand there, which means there's a big bucket of money that everyone wants to get their hands in.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: But the low touch and no touch approach means that that money is more valuable because you're paying less people on it.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: You can run it efficiently.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: Now, the first deal is really hard, right, that's always the way it works.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: But the thousandth and first deal is really easy once you get it right, and so that operational scalable efficiency allows you to hit that hyperscale.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: And so we had Jason Beal on a few weeks ago on the podcast.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: He was excellent and he spoke about the importance within security, especially of winning the hearts and minds of the engineers within the partners, because they are gatekeeping success, and I think that's fundamentally true from my experience within the channel.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: You can do the world's greatest sales and marketing job, but if the engineer says nah, it's never happening, how do you focus on winning the hearts and minds within your channel?
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, we talked a bit before this and I do have to give a shout out to Jason, of course, being one of my mentors teaching me the ropes Not only the ropes, but teaching me the floor mat, teaching me the ceiling, teaching how the doors work everything to this.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: So I definitely am eternally grateful for that man and everything he's able to do, not only for my career, but also giving us a solid foundation at that point.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: The engineers I have an engineering background, like I mentioned.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: You know, at the end of the day, when it comes to decisions being made as far as what technology we're going to be using, what's most efficient, what's most secure, your CEO, the CIO, the CTO they have an army of people behind them that are helping them make decisions, and the decision I want them to make as an ISV is around technology.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: So the people that they look to to help them make that decision are the engineering team staff, the managed service providing team and the professional services team, and they're the ones that really guide them the CXOs to making these kind of decisions.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: So you can have the greatest pitch in the world.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: It can make perfect sense.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: You can work with every single competitor that that particular MSP might have and it might be very, very true and valid.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: But if there is a specific criteria or expectation or operational piece that the engineering team that's responsible for implementing and managing the software does not feel comfortable with the CXO, the CEO can't in good conscience force them to do it because they know they're shooting themselves in the foot and at the end of the day, the technical teams have earned that respect by having their seat.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: So it would be, I think, a misstep to push the engineering team to adopt any technology they don't feel comfortable with and that places, I think, the onus exactly where it should be on us as the ISV, to make that engineering team's life as easy as possible.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: Whether it is implementation, whether it is procurement, whether it is support, whether it is enablements, whether it's appreciation right, there's so many different facets that you can kind of touch on to make sure folks are getting the support that they need.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: And I think there needs to be a clear investment from ISVs to make sure that that engineering persona is top of mind when it comes to not only designing the software but you know you being successful as a sales organization 100%.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: I think there's been so many products which are unbelievable once deployed.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: But if they are awful to deploy, awful to manage, it doesn't matter how good your sales and marketing engine is right, because the engineering is trying to protect his team, he's trying to protect the customer and he's thinking how are we going to ensure continuity and efficacy?
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: And that just does not work if you've got a highly complicated motion or product.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: And that just does not work if you've got a highly complicated motion or product.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: And so if you can win those first, you know there's something very comforting from an end user perspective when you don't have, you know, a smile, me garlic, myself calling and instead you have a well-versed engineer who's going hey, trust me, we vetted this and this is really good quality.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: That just is the trusted advice that you're trying to win, right?
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: So if you can win them first, then worry about the sales and marketing people behind.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: It becomes a much smoother transition.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: Yep, that's what they say.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: They say relationships open doors and trust closes deals.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: So 100% agree with you there.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: Excellently slick line.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: That was good.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: So we are a channel podcast through and through, which means we love a referral.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: I would like to ask our current guest who they think we should have on next.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Sam, who did you have in mind?
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: I got to throw it up to my current boss.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: His name is Scott Sackett.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: He's the SVP of Global Channels here at AppPoint and I think that Scott can really provide a lot of deep knowledge and experience and just recommendations on how to really set up that distribution channel.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: He is the primary architect of getting that set up here at AvePoint.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: He was doing it way before channel was on top of mind for anybody, blaming the foundation doing the work and also helping to guide how the technology had to evolve in order for us to get to where we are today and also being a champion internally once again getting to that executive level and constantly showing results and moving the ball forward.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: I think that he is exactly who folks should hope they can have on their team If they're looking to make a channel transition.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: He would offer nothing but great insight if you had him on here.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: That's about as glowing a recommendation as we've ever had Excellent.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on, sam, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, alex, deeply appreciate it.