Bold Journeys Podcast

It’s not your grandma’s channel marketing. That’s my take on my conversation with channel maven Heather Margolis. We explore the journey of channel marketing and the massive changes in demand generation from just 11 years ago when Heather launched Channel Maven Consulting. These changes prompted Heather to embark on an entrepreneurial mission to create a better channel marketing automation solution and launch her new venture, Spark Your Channel. Listen in and learn what you can stop doing and what you need to start doing to drive new leads with your partners. 

The shift to the cloud and everything-as-a-service has changed the game when it comes to driving demand and generating new leads with partners. If you’re looking to get a greater return on your channel marketing investments, here are five tips from Heather you need to consider: 

Co-branding does not exist when it comes to MSPs. They don't want to slap their logo on something that is 90% the vendors content. @HeatherMargolis
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Instead of speeds and feeds and pretty pictures of storage arrays, we're talking about content and talking about business outcome. @HeatherMargolis
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Instead of sending an email to 10,000 people, maybe you're sending an email to 1200 people, but they're the right 1200 people, and they have raised their hand to say, Yes, I'm interested. @HeatherMargolis
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Are you tired of the same old channel conversations that take place at channel conferences year after year? Channel veteran and entrepreneur Dave Sobel sure is! He’s the guest on this super fun podcast where he insists on asking challenging, stimulating, controversial questions. The type of questions that everyone is afraid to ask. Why? As he puts it, where there’s mystery, there’s margin. Dave is the founder of MSP Radio, host of the Business of Tech podcast, and co-host of the Killing IT podcast. We talk about these questions and explore the channel challenges and opportunities coming from three disruptive trends in 2020. 

Channel Disruptors in 2020. These are five hot topics that we in the channel should be talking about, but just aren’t. 

I want to start asking really hard questions. Like really difficult, intellectually stimulating, but challenging questions, partly because I've always said, in mystery, there's margin. @djdaveet
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I think there's something wrong when an Amazon employee with a CompTIA certification pays more in actual taxes than Amazon the company @djdaveet
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I really think that there is something here - helping customers be ethical, handling their customers data in a way that is core to their values and drives their business forward from that perspective. @djdaveet
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How do you drive Technology-as-a-Service through the channel? That’s the question Anne McClelland is tackling as the VP of Research of a new TSIA practice, XaaS Channel Optimization.  If you haven’t heard of TSIA, the Technology Services Industry Association, they are on a mission to help technology companies leverage services to drive profitable growth. In this episode I chat with Anne about how she’s building this new channel practice and the wide range of channel questions she will help XaaS (anything-as-a-service) vendors answer. Learn how you can optimize your XaaS channel based on the LAER sales model in this engaging conversation with a channel veteran. 

When it comes to selling and delivering anything-as-a-service, we’re all facing the same channel questions; What should our channel strategy look like? What partners do we need and what do we need them to do? How do we motivate them? Three common questions that Anne gets from vendors and will be answering through her research are:

As you’re thinking about these new as-a-service offerings, you can’t just take your old channel strategy and simply bolt on new chapters to make it fit the new offering set and the new go to market. Take a clean sheet of paper, retreat, and really think about what is it that you are trying to accomplish with these new offerings and what roles you as a technology vendor are going to play.

TSIA has a very effective sales model for this exercise called LAER, which stands for Land, Adopt, Expand and Renew. Optimizing your channel involves determining what role you play as the vendor and what role your partners will play in each of these four stages to capture the market and deliver an awesome customer experience. Decide what you are going to provide as differentiation and what you need partners to do to complement what you’re doing and help the customers really receive business value.

As you're thinking about these new offerings, you can't assume you can take the old channel strategy and do add-ons to make it fit the new offering set and the new go to market. @annmccle
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Vendors need to think across land, adopt, expand, and renew, and decide what they are going to provide and what they need partners to do to help the customers really receive their value.
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You've got to build systems that allow your partners to have secure access to customer utilization data. They need to know where it has and hasn't been adopted so they can continue to drive that adoption. @annmccle
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Seeing what’s coming in the channel in 2020 and beyond doesn’t require a crystal ball when you have Forrester’s Principal Channel Analyst Jay McBain in the room. In this episode, Jay and I talk about the top 10 things he sees coming in the channel based on his conversations with hundreds of companies and loads of data and rigorous research. His views helped confirm my channel strategy and gave me some new things to consider building into my plans for 2020. 

Jay lists all 10 trends in his blog What I See Coming For The Channel In 2020. Here are the five that really stood out for me:

Indirect Sales Will Shrink Every Year For The Next Decade

Channel Leaders Contemplate A Trifurcated Channel Model

Channel Professionals Become Ecosystem Professionals

Partner Experience (PX) Will Catch Up To Customer Experience (CX)

Channel Account Managers Turn Into Community Managers

If you look at the global technology spend, which sits around $3.5 trillion, 64% of that goes indirectly. @jmcbain
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For the first time in 38 years the amount of revenue, the percentage that goes indirect, has plateaued in 2019. And it's going to start to shrink.
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We're seeing the surge of influencer channels, they go by the names of affinity partners, referral agents, affiliates, advocates, ambassadors, alliances, all of those people. This is the Kim Kardashian of the channel @jmcbain
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We’re kicking off a new year in the channel with a look at what it takes to achieve channel success in 2020. Channel Chiefs have an almost endless list of things to do, from figuring out how to keep existing partners productive to launching new initiatives to attract new types of partners. I share my top five must-dos, above all else, that will provide the highest impact on your channel business. 

The 5 things technology vendors must do in 2020 are:

What does being bronze, silver, gold or platinum tell anyone about a partner? It doesn't tell you or your customers anything about their capabilities, their skill sets, or their value proposition. @ChannelJourneys
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Don't assume that your sales teams know how to work with partners. @ChannelJourneys
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As a channel manager, you've got to expect pushback from the sales teams. You're asking your sales reps to take a leap of faith and giving up some level of control. @ChannelJourneys
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Training your partners to deliver an excellent customer experience is even more important than training them how to sell. @ChannelJourneys
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