Bold Journeys Podcast

By Rob SpeeReligion & Spirituality Education Self-Improvement Religion

Bold Journeys Podcast episodes

June 01, 2021 Paul Bird: 3 Tips for Finding the Right Channel Partners – CJ71
Recruiting partners who are non-productive or a bad fit with your company is a costly waste of time. Paul Bird, Salesforce enthusiast and portal wizard at Magentrix, comes back for another Channel Journeys interview to show how you can find the right channel partners to grow your business.
40 min
May 19, 2021Rob Spee: It’s Time to Ditch Your Channel Program
When creating or transitioning your technology offering to the software subscription as-a-service model, the traditional tiered channel program is going to look as old and outdated as the lump sum perpetual license. In this episode, I share how and why we updated our channel program at OutSystems to benefit our partners, customers, and internal sales and services teams.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Why you may need to update your old Partner Program
You’ve transitioned your business model but still have your old channel program
You need a way to attract and motivate partners to participate in different ways in the LAER (Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew) model
Your customers (and your internal sales and service teams) want a better way to differentiate your partners capabilities than which metallic tier they sit in
Key features of our new Partner Program
Partner Types rather than Partner Tiers to differential how partners want engage with OutSystems
Authorizations for each Partner Type that define the benefits and core requirements that must be met each year
Funding for enablement and marketing based on joint business plans rather than programmatic rebates or MDF
Ways to measure the success of your program
Partner activation – how many partners you need to achieve each type of authorization
Partner alignment – what percentage of your revenue or deals should be partner influenced
Partner growth – set targets on the revenue growth of your partners sales and services tied to your offering
Partner success – for partner delivered services, measure the NPS or CSAT of their customers
LINKS & RESOURCES
Find Rob on LinkedIn and Twitter
Jeff Mattan: How to transition to a SaaS Partner Program
Sandra Glaser Cheek: Why it’s Time for a Modern Partner Program
Check out the special offer for 2 free months of Magentrix
The post Rob Spee: It’s Time to Ditch Your Channel Program first appeared on Channel Journeys.
19 min
May 19, 2021 Rob Spee: It's Time to Ditch Your Channel Program – CJ70
Rob Spee, RVP Channel Sales at OutSystems and host of the Channel Journeys podcast, explains why it's time to update your channel program for the XaaS world.
19 min
April 28, 2021Taylor Macdonald: Double Revenue with a Hybrid SaaS Channel
What exactly is a hybrid SaaS channel and what can it do for your company? That depends on who you ask. I spoke with channel pro Taylor Macdonald, SVP of Channel Sales at Sage Intacct, to get his view. Taylor built an indirect SaaS channel that now contributes 50% of the company’s overall revenue. Learn the benefits of his hybrid SaaS channel model and how to live in harmony with your direct sales force.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Here are the key lessons I learned from Taylor on Sage Intacct’s hybrid channel strategy and how they are getting the best of both worlds, direct and indirect.
Share all the resources that your direct team has with all of your channel partners. That includes marketing, sales, and training resources. Treat your partners as if they are employees or colleagues of your firm.
Let your partners do the bulk of the services work. Sage Intacct’s partners implement between 60 and 80% of the deals that direct sold and 100% of the deals they sell.
You have to enforce deal registration so you don’t have two partners in the same deal and you don’t have a partner and a direct salesperson in a deal. That way you have just one sales team, either direct or a partner, focused on one deal.
Let your partners take down the deal on their paper and let them build an annuity by giving your partners margin on the subscription for the life of the customer.
Partner enablement is paramount. Taylor has a large partner enablement group that enables and coaches partners in sales, pre-sales, marketing, technical services, and professional services. Get your best partners to share their best practices.
Help your partners generate leads by investing in channel marketing resources and co-marketing funds.
Be very selective in your recruiting and offboard partners who aren’t performing.
LINKS & RESOURCES
Hear how Taylor is Driving Growth Through Alternative Channels
Listen to Rich Blakeman share Why 1 + 1 = 8 With A Hybrid Sales Channel
Find Taylor on LinkedIn
Learn more about the Sage Intacct Partner Program
The post Taylor Macdonald: Double Revenue with a Hybrid SaaS Channel first appeared on Channel Journeys.
55 min
April 28, 2021 Taylor Macdonald: How to Double Revenue with a SaaS Channel – CJ69
Taylor Macdonald, SVP of Channel Sales at Sage Intacct, built an indirect SaaS channel that now contributes 50% of the company's overall revenue. Learn the benefits of a hybrid SaaS channel and how to build one that works.
55 min
April 01, 2021Jeff McCullough: How Customer Experience Drives Partner Success
Customer experience is the name of the game for technology vendors. And when you’re counting on partners to grow your business, partner experience and customer experience go hand in hand. Today’s guest is Jeff McCullough, Global Vice President of Channel Sales at Park Place Technologies, a leader in data center services. Jeff describes how to measure partner and customer experience on your journey to customer success.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Build a closed-loop feedback system to survey customer feedback after every customer event, and as quickly after the service is delivered as possible.
Keep your customer surveys super short to increase response rates.
For a closed-loop, Park Place puts all of their survey information into a weekly report reviewed by the executive team. And have someone assigned to go back to the customers to get more information on any negative scores.
Customer satisfaction can be a key piece of your value proposition to your partners who want to know that their customers are going to be happy with your service.
Partner experience includes ease of doing business topics as well as business issues like impact on partner growth and profitability.
Measure partner experience using your own system metrics as well as through partner surveys and partner advisory boards.
Know your attach rate for partners; what’s the product and services drag for every $ dollar of your product. That’s a key measurement of your value proposition.
LINKS & RESOURCES
Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn
Listen to Hope Galley: How To Leverage Partners To Drive Customer Success
The post Jeff McCullough: How Customer Experience Drives Partner Success first appeared on Channel Journeys.
43 min
April 01, 2021 Jeff McCullough: How Customer Experience Drives Partner Success - CJ68
When you're counting on partners to grow your business, partner experience and customer experience go hand in hand. Today's guest is Jeff McCullough, Global Vice President of Channel Sales at Park Place Technologies. Jeff describes how to measure partner and customer experience on your journey to customer success.
43 min
March 18, 2021Marc Monday: Channel Lessons from the First Wave
This episode takes us on a journey exploring the mental health aspects of our new work environment. Marc Monday, head of Citrix’s Global Partner Go-To-Market Strategies, talks about lessons learned from a study on the impact of the lockdowns in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Lockdowns brought us the benefit of working from anywhere. This likely will not change. But working from home with back to back zoom calls and no downtime is creating mental health risks we have to address.
Pre-Covid, our commutes to work, business flights, even walks from meeting to meeting gave our brains a chance to slow down. Now we have to create our own downtime.
Be more intentional about using vacation time and ensuring your team members are taking vacations to recharge. And don’t work when you’re on vacation.
Carve out sacred time on your calendar each day when you go out for a walk, enjoy a coffee, mediate, or whatever. Don’t accept meetings during your sacred time, otherwise your colleagues will quickly learn it’s not really sacred.
We no longer have the luxury of walking down the hall to get things fixed. Remove as much friction and red tape as you can internally.
LINKS & RESOURCES
Follow Marc on LinkedIn
Read Lessons from the first wave, the downside: Big burnout
The post Marc Monday: Channel Lessons from the First Wave first appeared on Channel Journeys.
47 min
March 17, 2021 Marc Monday: Channel Lessons from the First Wave – CJ67
Marc Monday, head of Citrix's Global Partner Go-To-Market Strategies, talks about lessons learned from a study on the impact of the lockdowns in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Learn about the silver linings and the things to watch out for to protect your team's and your own mental health and productivity.
47 min
March 03, 2021Larry Walsh: Channelnomics of the New Normal
According to Larry Wash, CEO and Chief Analyst at Channelnomics, the only thing that’s certain moving forward is more change. The Covid pandemic may have accelerated Digital Transformation, but we’re still more at a point of digitalization and haven’t even started the transformation yet. And that’s the next evolution that’s going to be coming over the next few years, driving even more changes in the channel. Changes in value propositions and changes in the actors. For some of us it’s scary. For others. it’s exhilarating.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Our default thinking is the channel exists to make us money. And while that is true, we really need to think about is what do we want the channel to do? Because it’s actually the customer that makes us money, not the channel.
If we’re trying to solve for the customer and if we’re going to work with partners to solve for the customer, then we have to ask, what is the role the partner plays? What role does the partner play to find the customer, to service the customer, to support the customer, and to engage with the customer?
Eisenhower was credited for winning the second world war on logistics; having the right materials in the right place at the right time to accomplish the mission. Think of partners as logistics. You need to have the right partners in the right place at the right time to achieve your mission.
Ease of doing business is more about reducing the friction in the system. Your partner program and operations can be as simple or complex as you want them to be. It doesn’t matter as long as the partner has a simple experience with whatever you’re putting in front of them.
When you’re engaging with GSIs, what you need is basically an influencer program, plain and simple.
LINKS & RESOURCES
Follow Larry on Twitter and LinkedIn
Listen to the Changing Channels Video Podcast
The post Larry Walsh: Channelnomics of the New Normal first appeared on Channel Journeys.
47 min