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105 - Greg Finnigan - Customer Obsession: How AWS is Redefining the Channel · 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 very excited to welcome our special guest, greg.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: How are you doing?
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: I'm well, alex, good to speak to you today.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited for this one.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: We've recently had a couple of guests on from AWS and I think AWS is building the channel in a very different way, a very non-typical way, but maybe for the uninitiated Greg, you can walk us through who you are, where have you been and why they should be listening to you today.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: So I'm a channel man.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: I've spent about 25 years in various roles in channel and partnerships.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: I started my career in the wonderful world of distribution.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: I then spent a decade or so in cybersecurity and more recently have been sort of in charge of strategy of scaling businesses in small businesses and in large businesses, of scaling businesses in small businesses and in large businesses.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I was recently head of partner strategy into the SMB segment at AWS and that was a global role.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I had a lot of fun.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: So yeah, that's me yeah, we had a call eight weeks ago, nine weeks ago, where we're sort of getting to know each other and getting to know your job, and I do remember turning around saying Greg, you have an awesome job because you're working at a place that builds channels but is doing it differently.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: We certainly at Chanix, think the SMB is the most interesting part of the market because I think it's growing in opportunity and value.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: But it's highly complicated to get right and for problem solvers that to me is a really compelling challenge to sort of get your teeth into.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is Absolutely, and I remember that conversation.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: You're right that my role at AWS was a lot of fun and you know, now I'm sort of out there on my own and thinking about how I can help companies establish an AWS practice more as a consultant.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: I'm very excited about doing that and, yeah, and I think the conversation that we had about the different aspects of what's going on in the channel, especially when it comes to the cloud, it's a really interesting time.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Well in your role as a consultant, but also in your role within AWS, I'm sure one of the things that you're going to be evangelizing or continue to evangelize is customer obsession.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: It's a cool part of how amazon as a, as a total practice, but also how aws, has built a tremendous amount of growth and value within the market.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Now, what I find really interesting about building a customer centric channel is it's actually counterintuitive, right?
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Most channel leaders spend all their time thinking about the partner or themselves.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: How do we build a great program and AWS has flipped that on its head?
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Talk to me about why customer centricity or customer obsession is so, so critical when we're talking about building a channel or customer obsession is so critical when we're talking about building a channel yeah, it's a great question.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: And so Amazon's leadership principle of customer obsession.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: It emphasizes starting with the customer and working backwards to meet their needs.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: So I think this is probably optimal today for a few reasons.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: I think if you focus on the customer, then you get this sort of profound understanding of their needs, of their preferences, of their pain points, and this really allows that creation of products and services that really resonate with customers.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: And I think it can be really helpful building sort of trust and loyalty with a customer.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: When a customer feels that a company is genuinely invested in their success, it obviously is a real driver for trust and loyalty.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: And we're all after sort of long-term relationships with customers and repeat business.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So I think you know it's especially important, um when, when driving with that sort of repeat business.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Um, the other thing that I think about is how customer-centric businesses are really the high innovators in the market.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: So a customer-centric approach, the advantage that comes with that, these are the ones that are winning, are getting sustainable growth and they're sort of evolving with the needs of customers and they're retaining customers.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: They're winning new ones, perhaps even through sort of positive word of mouth.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: So I had a really interesting conversation with Harold who's at Trend Micro the podcast was released a couple of months ago.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: He's ex-AWS and he was talking about how, for example, deal protection for the renewal they've scrapped from their program because it actually protects the partner and not the customer and actually the customer may want to make a different decision.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: And building around the customer centric and he's trying to drive customer centricity into their program and into their design, which I fully understand.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: From a sort of macro business perspective, if you win the customers, ultimately everything will pull back and flow from there, right.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: So if we provide maximal value, you're ultimately going to win.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: But that's not what the partner wants.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: And and suddenly you've got to balance customer centricity with partner centricity and I imagine there are certainly instances where those two sort of butt heads.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: How do you sort of think about balancing that when you're trying to scale a channel?
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: I love what Trend is doing.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I think you have to follow some steps here.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: That's certainly what AWS is doing and it starts with probably aligning goals between yourself, the vendor and the partner.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: You've got to ensure that both customer and partner goals you have that alignment, you have that shared vision.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Partners really understand the importance of CSAT, of customer satisfaction, and they're incentivized to prioritize that.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Another thing that I think is super important is maintaining a sort of open and transparent communication with both customers and partners.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: So regular updates, those sort of feedback loops you know that co-sell motions and even sort of collaborative planning sessions.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: You know you want to ensure that everybody's on the same page, right.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: And then, when it comes to those joint customer engagements, you know involve the partner in that customer engagement as early as you can in those joint marketing campaigns, those events, co-host those events and build sort of collaborative relationships.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: You know customer support initiatives that makes partners feel valued and integral to the customer experience and to what you know the vendors do.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: The last thing I'd say is just a couple of words on training and support.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: You know it's a top three of what most partners ask for when it comes to dealing with vendors.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: But if you can include, you know, that customer focus, that customer obsession in the product training you know, schedule things like customer workshops and give access to the customer feedback, both good and bad, through to the partner, then that's going to be so much more effective when they're out there talking to customers and you know actually circling back on you know making sure that you're aligned.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: It's so important, I think, to have shared metrics and shared KPIs so that both the CSAT and the partner performance they're aligned towards each other and recognize and reward those partners with incentives that are sort of running in that direction.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Aws has a lot of competencies and strong programs around recognizing and rewarding partners that put the effort into scaling up their skill sets and focusing on certain areas and that can sort of maintain really high standards that obviously we're all looking to drive.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: I think that's fundamental right.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: So maybe framing it as customer centricity versus partner centricity isn't isn't the right uh methodology.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: The overarching principle is let's build the most value for the customer and in doing that we need to drive that philosophy into the partners.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: And I love your point about common language.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: I'm aware that, for example, aws works through a medic or a med pic infrastructure with both isvs and partners so that everyone's speaking in common language.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: Because then we know that we're not misaligned on how information flows and I think that's such a.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: It feels like such a small detail, but you can understand at scale, especially in the SMB, having everyone talk the same economic buyer infosec procedure, it's like oh, we understand what we're doing.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: What metrics are we going to drive into this deal?
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: How are we measuring for success?
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: Having that common process, that common drive, that's how you get partner centricity falling in line with customer centricity and both things playing well together.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Right, right, I mean, I can remember it was a while back now, probably 18 months, two years ago one of my senior leaders at AWS was asking questions about how the partner community as a whole can be as customer-obsessed as AWS is, and he was asking real questions about how can we build mechanisms to ensure that is the case today and is the case going forward.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: And that really changed a lot about how partnerships and the APO, the partner ecosystem at ODOS was used in co-sale motions, Because once those senior execs started driving that customer-centric through partner ecosystem then you know, obviously customers benefited a lot ecosystem, then you know, obviously customers benefit a lot.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: There is a a phrase that we we use a lot internally at channex within our leadership team, and we say there's a difference between thought leadership and thought doing right and what you've just called out.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: There is like we can be a thought leader about customer centricity or we can actually drive the change in the market that the market requires right and and I always think evangelizing things sort of utterly pointless unless you're actually going to do the thing and actually really enforce and make the change.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: Which sort of segues me onto my next question.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Aws, as most large enterprise organizations, is quite complicated from an organizational structure.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: You're campaigning in your role about SMB and strategy and partnerships, but you're then working into the regions who then have autonomous decision-making.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: So how are you going about winning the sort of hearts and minds of the direct organization or the people who aren't so channel-orientated or maybe don't know much about the channel?
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: How do you go about winning the hearts and minds in all those different regions?
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: yeah, I think for anyone in a role where you're working inside an organization that that doesn't get it yet.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: You know, just get the value of partners.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Um, it can be quite a challenge and and especially at multinational companies like AWS, but who run their business as close to the customer as possible.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: So a lot of decision-making at Amazon is done at a local level.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: There's no sort of central or top-down push.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I had to go and convince dozens of people that the partner strategies that we were offering were right for the customer in their local territory.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: So it really sort of emphasized probably one of the most important leadership principles at Amazon, which was own trust.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: So, and owning trust is based upon things like honesty and transparent communication, of course, but what made Amazon probably a little bit different is how all the leaders were driving a culture of active listening.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: So this is where they're really encouraged to listen attentively to folks.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: You know this is all folks you know hear.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: You know concerns, but ideas and feedback.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Obviously, the most important voice is the customer here and where a customer is sort of saying you know, we've enjoyed, you know, working with X, y and Z, you know their local partner, be it msp or sorry, whatever, then leaders are sort of encouraged to listen to that and sort of say, okay, well, we can help make that work.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Um, and and the other thing that I think I really saw in my time at aws is that the culture Culture is very vocally self-critical.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Again, folks are encouraged to sort of acknowledge their own mistakes, look for areas of improvement.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: It's a real sort of humility that can be very inspiring and offer that sort of culture of continuous improvement and collaboration.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: That's where I was emphasizing.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: You know, I didn't really have it wasn't really a time where I thought, okay, I can't point out an area that wasn't working so well.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: I was encouraged to do so, you know.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: And leaders saying to me, what, what can we do better?
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: And I'd say, well, here, you know, here's some data.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: That sort of points in the fact that this customer experience wasn't optimal.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: But partners can help, and and here's how.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: So I think those sort of three things really helped drive um a lot of new things that we did over the last couple of years.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Um, and and build more and more traction and more and more sort of emphasis on this partner-centric approach married to and with the customer-centric approach.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: And to me, people in the office are going to start laughing.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: Right, there's a few businesses that I call out that just you can see.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: They play the game a different way and it's enterprising when you start to see the results.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: Right, but that self-analysis, I think is so important.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: We really try here at Chanix to talk about development as a proactive procedure, and that only comes from a fundamental understanding of what are we doing well and, really more importantly, what are we doing poorly and how can we start to build plans and start to execute so that we can improve.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: And that improvement starts with yourself and then, you know, comes out into the business.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: One of the things that I found so interesting, um, being a leader is putting people in the right position so that they can be successful.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: Right Cause you can only change people so much.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: Now, one of the things that can happen I'll hold my hand up here is as a salesperson, intrinsically or by profile, most salespeople find operations and the requirement to do an operational heavy lift a burden.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: Hygiene in a CRM is famously worse done by salespeople than almost any other part of the organization.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: We spoke previously that actually there is quite a significant operational burden on some of the partner managers which, by profile partner managers, typically sales people, networking people, relationship people.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Right, they want to be focused here, but they're also having a burden.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: How do you see that impacting their ability to be successful?
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: um, I see it having a big impact, um, and you, it's one that perhaps isn't acknowledged as widely as it should be.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: You know, I've, as I said earlier, 25 years, you know, either being a partner manager or managing partner management teams, and it's always been a struggle stripping out as much of the operational burden from the partner managers as I could.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: But today I see that it's a fairly wide range.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: But even at the lowest point, I see about 30% being best case for a partner manager spending a third of their time on operational duties, and I've seen it as far as 70 percent, right, so more than two-thirds of their time on operational duties.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: And and you've got to think about the fact that obviously these people are business people, right?
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Um, they're, they're usually very seasoned, senior people who know how to drive business and relationships, and so to have them doing that sort of percentage of the time on operations and administration is a waste.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: And I imagine if you could increase that by at least 30 percent, if not 70 percent, what sort of numbers would they be pulling in?
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: So I think it's a really significant impact, um, but there is solutions, I think, around the corner.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: I think the impact of gen ai and ai here, um will be prolific and profound and and and so much of what that operational burden is doing for partners can be taken away and they can be much more sort of in the trenches with the partners and closing customer deals than they've ever been before.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: So I expect in the next 12 to 18 months we'll see a plethora of both, I guess, startup companies, but also established companies offering these tools to reduce, you know, friction in the channel and perhaps you know folks like OWS will develop their own.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: But I can really see that sort of being reduced in the very, very short term, the next 12, 18, maximum 24 months, and that's exciting because I think then these partner managers will be much more um, you know, true partners to the, to the accounts that they look after, and really you know, like I said, um driving strong co-sales shoulder to shoulder in it together with the partner, and talking to customers about solutions I think think that's really exciting because my belief on AI is that people struggle as humans do.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: If I ask you to think of a million people, you can't put that in your brain.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: Our brains just don't work that way.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: I think people struggle to understand how significant the change of AI is going to be.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: But I did read an amazing article about what the shift of AI is going to be.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: But I did read an amazing article about what the shift of AI is going to be over the next 24 months.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: Right now, people look at AI as a creative tool, but hopefully for humanity.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: The idea behind AI isn't that AI does all the creative work and we do all the operational work.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: We want to see that flip on its head.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: So we want to spend all our life writing films and writing lovely books and writing poetry so that AI can do all of the grunt work Right.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: So it's great to hear that that that operational burden is going to to flip and AI is going to be able to help do some of these swivel chair processes, these manual processes, because my view on where the channel is going to go is we can hire super specialists in the exact area that I can't do, and that's person to person relationships, right.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: That's really where we need to focus and if we can remove that 30 to 70% burden, that's going to help drive one huge success.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: But I think it's also going to drive real happiness and adoption of those roles, because people are doing the bit that they are born to do Right right?
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, we'll get this huge boost in in morale, um in retention, I guess, probably in acquisition, because you know partner managers will suddenly.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: It will suddenly feel like a a really strong career path, even for direct sales people today you know, so I see a lot of like like starting partner management.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: They want to move into into direct sales.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: I don't, you know, I don't see that being the case going forward.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: I think there will be even some movement in direct sales into the partner world, and that's just.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: That's very exciting because we're all up leveling here and we're becoming more talented business people I'm hoping you're not going to disagree with my next point because I'm going to quote you to you, but at the recent AWS Summit you mentioned that SMBs contact their IT providers about 70% of the way through their buying journey.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: Smbs do a lot of research on their own and usually develop a preference towards a particular brand or technology, whether that decision's a good one, a bad one or a terrible one.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: Um, why is it so important that smb's focus on trying to be involved earlier in in the buying process?
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: Or why should partners want to get ahead of that 70 of the research journey?
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: yeah, yeah, this is so important.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: It was really enlightening for me.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: It was a, it was a survey that aws ran and that we shared with partners across all of the summits.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: And, yeah, 70% of the buying process, it's actually step 11 of 12.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: So, you know, those first 11 steps are what we all know.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: A customer does, do it, does its own research, you know, and it does it across a lot of different mediums through, obviously, through referrals and word of mouth, but also through papers and vendor websites and reviews and things like that.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, why is it important?
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: Well, I think you know partners should have the the greatest possible role in the customer decision at process.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: You know, and we're all looking for that sort of trust of advisor status with the customer.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: And you know, the reason why I talked about this in my role with SMB is because the trust advisor status is particularly important to SMB customers.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: They lack that sort of technical depth that an enterprise has.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: We know that only about one in 10 SMB customers have dedicated IT resource.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: I think 7% have developers, 2% have security expertise.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: So they need help is the point.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: And so trusted advisor status is where you're really going to sort of drive that long-term relationship that I referred to earlier and so earlier on in the process is so much more important because it's going to help that customer be more informed.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: There's going to be a closer relationship between partner and customer and ultimately, you know you're going to be in it together and I see some really interesting especially in the world of managed services, some really interesting business models coming out about, you know, shared impact, shared values, value creation from technology, and I think if you're involved in that decision-making process right at the start, then you've got a much better chance of designing the right solution for the customer that joins to the maximum value.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: We just released earlier, I think last week, depending on when this was released late august we released.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: The president of acronis came on and he spoke a lot about how you capture and inform the smb um and because he works in security um, it is a lot of information and so we need msps to be able to inform so that they can provide not just the right product but the right service wraparound.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: And to me, that's why it's so critical, because if you're not dealing with it, teams in the enterprise who can, you know, have their own accreditations and opinions on on what, on how they're going to weave everything together in the smb.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: Where it's so critical is because when something goes wrong, I need to be able to talk to someone, right.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: I need to be able to, and the vendor typically isn't going to answer your call right.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: There needs to be a partner in the way that's going to help knit everything together.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: And why I, for me, partners, need to get involved much earlier is because two brands might broadly do the same thing, but one of those brands might integrate into the other four or five services that you provide that you've got a managed service wraparound so that if one leg of the table falls down, you know how to fix it.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: And to me that sort of business continuity motion, especially in that sort of cybersec world that's so, so critical and where I see MSPs focusing a lot right now, is having that layer of protection wrapped around those SMBs so businesses can drive forward.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: But that integration story, I think, that ecosystem story that's why 70% or step 11 of 12 is far too late, because we need to know that that integration is going to work, not just it's technically it works, but that we've got the service wrap, that we've got the engineers, that we've got the supporting wrap, that we've got the engineers, that we've got the supporting infrastructure to really make that a success.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: One of the things that I think is going to be really critical for customers going forward is bringing together what's often referred to as the power of three, which is typically the hyperscaler and the infrastructure, and then it is an ISV solution of some description, and then, of course, finally, that third party is the partner.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: The partner who's managing the deployment into the customer's environment and bringing together the power of these three in the most efficient way possible through things like marketplaces.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: You know, which is particularly efficient when you come to the point, the end point of that buying cycle, when it's all about procuring it and managing it.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: That is very effective and that's why we're seeing so much growth in all the hyperscale marketplaces.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: But I think there's still some work to do in bringing together these solutions.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: You know making sure to your point, alex, that things are optimal working together and you know we're sort of maximizing the value behind each service or product and that you know each party is really effective in working together and presenting something simple, particularly for an S&P, for folks to understand.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: In my role, I try to speak to as many S&P customers as I possibly can and what was pretty consistent across the world, really from S&P across the world, really from SMB was the concern about overstretching themselves, of, you know, of leaving a set of EC2 instances on and getting a huge bill at the end of the month, and things like that.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: You know, because they just couldn't afford to do things like that.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: So you know, having guardrails I call guardrails so that customers understand exactly what they're buying, what it's going to cost them.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: You know, providing some sort of ceiling so that they know that they're not going to overspend.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: You know, understand clearly what value this is driving for their organisation, be it, you know, improvements to the top line or operational cost-saving improvements.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: You know it will be one or the other and and that way that we're going to be so much more effective in in explaining technology to to folks, as I said, 90 of which don't have dedicated it resources yeah, that I.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: I think that's.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: That's perfect, that sort of understanding, because I'd never thought about it from the smb perspective.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: But you're right, you'd hate to suddenly get a 30 grand bill at the end of the month because you forgot to turn a feature off and suddenly consumption's gone through the roof right.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: So putting that protection in again reinforces that trusted advisor.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: There's a difference between sort of handling objections and handling objectives, right and so if a partner can come in before the end customer has even thought about that problem and say, hey, by the way, we see this, this and this, so we'd like to put these guardrails around to protect you.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: Think of the level of confidence and trust that builds, and focusing back on customer obsession.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: That's ultimately what's going to provide maximal value.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: But we are not talking about all the hyperscalers.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: We are focusing on one hyperscaler in particular.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: You're now focusing on companies that need help understanding how to partner more effectively with AWS.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: How's that been going?
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: It's a little overwhelming actually.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: I mean maybe.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: I shouldn't say that, but what I mean by that is there seems to be a plethora of companies out there that want to understand how to work with AWS, how to drive co-sell, how to build relationships, how to understand marketplace, things like that.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I'm getting a lot of folks sort of reaching out, which is great, and you know I'm happy to help and I'm really, you know, happy to share and have conversations.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: But I think there does need to be a more scalable way of doing this, and so what I'm trying to look at with my company is how do I get what's up here and what's you know the best practices that I see and that AWS sees and put it into some sort of scalable mechanism so that everybody can benefit for it?
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: So I referred to earlier about you know things that I think are going to happen over the next 12 to 18 months with Gen AI and AI, and so I think this will also apply here and I'm excited about you know, being involved in that in some way.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: But for now, yeah, I it's, it's going great, um, and I'm loving seeing the impact that it's having and sharing you know some of these best practices.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: So, um, yeah, I couldn't be happier good.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: So gregai coming soon as well?
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: Um, so it sounds like you're filling up, um, uh, you're filling up your pipeline of potential customers, uh, through a word of mouth and referrals, which I think is a a fitting place to end, because that's really what powers the channel, but it also is what powers our podcast.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: Um, greg, we'd like to ask our current guest who they think we should have on next.
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: Who did you have in mind?
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: I had in mind my good friend, jason ellis, who is uh as hopefully many of you know the vp of channel soft force.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: Um, jason and I met many, many years ago embarrassing number of years ago.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: Uh, he's a great guy but one of the most uh passionate, uh partnerships and general people.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: So I nominate you, jason.
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: Excellent.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: Well, Jason, I'm hunting you down very shortly with Greg's help.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: And, Greg, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: Thank you for coming on and sharing your knowledge.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: It's been great, alex, great to talk to you, really enjoyable, and thanks very much for the invitation Awesome.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: We'll see our listeners next week.