Bold Journeys Podcast

CJ11. This episode features Dina Moskowitz, founder and CEO of SaaSMAX, a multi-tier distribution channel for SaaS vendors. Dina tells how she is solving two key problems channel chiefs face. The first is finding partners who will provide the greatest return on investment. The second is enabling partners to market multiple vendors’ SaaS offerings effectively and efficiently through her SaaS marketplace.

Dina is also a strong advocate for women in the channel. That may come from an exciting adventure she had as a 19 year old study-abroad student in Taiwan.

[3:00] SaaSMAX is a multi-tier distribution channel for SaaS vendors. They identify the right partners for the vendors, curate introductions, and provide tools for partners and vendors to do business efficiently.

[5:30] Dina created the SaaSMAX marketplace with an entrepreneurial bug to innovate and create. She saw a clear market opportunity, validated it, and has been evolving and growing it over the past five or six years.

[7:30] The SaaSMAX Partner Optimizer solves two problems many channel chiefs face. One, recruiting the right partners and two, having thousands of partners but only a small portion are active and well known. She went on a quest to gather data on all the partners in the world. As a result, vendors can now use that data to better understand existing partners. In addition, they can find more partners who look like their most successful ones.

[9:30] Partner Optimizer Identifies partners by partner types, products they represent, services they offer, and many other parameters. Therefore, you can  leverage that channel data to rank your long-tail partners based on their profiles so you can allocate your channel resources more effectively.

[11:30] Leveraging partner data allows you to pinpoint quality partners based on their characteristics for a quality over quantity partner recruitment strategy.

[17:20] SaaSMAX Marketplace approach is to facilitate transparency between partner and vendor. At the same time, it positions the partner to retain the sales relationship and relevancy with the customer. This supports the small businesses who look to their partners to know what solutions are best of breed and be their trusted adviser.

[22:00] SaaSMAX simplifies the complexity of managing multiple vendors’ partner programs. As a result, partners can focus on selling and servicing their customers. And vendors can get stood up very quickly on the SaaSMAX platform.

[27:15] Dina grew up in Long Beach, Long Island. She earned a finance degree with a minor in Mandarin. A study-abroad program took her to Taiwan. Upon her return, she moved to La Jolla, California.

[29:00] While in Taiwan at the age of 19, Dina was invited to an international woman’s day event and found herself as the guest of honor singing Do-Re-Me in front of 1000 Taiwanese women.

[32:00] Dina advocates finding peer groups. She’s a strong advocate for women in tech and an active participant in Cloud Girls, Alliance of Channel Women, and CompTIAs Advancing Women in Technology.

CJ10. This episode features Laz Gonzalez, thought leader and Chief Strategy Officer for the channel tech company Zift Solutions. Laz has a unique channel journey that begins in Cuba and stretches across a wide variety of channel leadership roles. And he likes to spice things up with a little conga drum action along the way.

This episode is packed with valuable channel marketing tips. We talk about how lack of alignment within an organization and with partners hurts so many partner programs. Laz shares the 3 key ingredients for channel marketing success and how much you should budget for each. And he explains why too little of one ingredient can greatly reduce the return on your channel marketing investments.

[3:00] Think of Zift as an ERP solution for the channel. Zift merged with RelayWare and acquired some companies like Elastic Grid to create an end-to-end solution.

[6:30] As Chief Strategy Officer for Zift, Laz covers channel marketing and channel sales, and has done both in his channel career.

[8:40] Zaz was born in Cuba, came to USA in the 60s and moved to the Bronx. Learned to play the Conga drums at a young age for his parents’ house parties where everyone was a musician.

[10:15] Laz’ dream was to be an astronaut. He joined the Air Force during college, learned how to fly and how to program.  Decided to follow his new dream of a career in the computer industry.

[13:00] First channel role was working as a partner of Digital Equipment Corp. Laz was the network guy, relied on DEC’s partner program for training. Went on to Lotus Corp. when they rolled out a first-class partner program. Then had the opportunity to move into running international channel programs. Joined Sirius Decisions where he helped create channel marketing frameworks and the Demand Waterfall.

[18:00] Channel programs that succeed have close alignment between channel sales and channel marketing.

[19:30] Day-to-day channel challenges include getting alignment within the organization; is the channel organization funded and resourced to do the job? is it connected with the right parts of the organization to succeed? Zift serves applications to both sales and marketing, helping to build that alignment by providing data that breaks down the silos between the two.

[21:00] When running marketing programs for partners, having partners sales data helps you pick the right partners and the right marketing campaigns.  The data becomes the lifeblood of information on the partners that flows into the marketing.

[22:00] Partner engagement is an uber challenge. Lack of engagement hurts a lot of partner programs. Zift drives more productive partner engagement by getting the vendor’s sales and marketing teams together, rather than in silos that are counter-productive.

[26:00] There are three modes of partner marketing; to the partner, through the partner, and for the partner. To-partner marketing builds awareness of your products and your program to recruit and gain mind-share.  Most vendors start doing marketing for the partner, then try to get the partner do the marketing themselves.

[28:20] “What’s in it for you – the partner” is a message that many vendors miss.

[29:00] Many organizations have trouble pinning down their channel budget requirements. Generally, companies with under $1 Billion in revenue spend 5-7% of their channel revenue on their channel program. Compare that to sells budgets of 20% and marketing budgets of 7-8%. That percentage goes down as channel revenue grows. Companies over $5B spend 2-3% of their channel revenue on their channel program.

[31:00] You want to spend the majority of your channel budget for marketing activities through the partner. But if you’re spending less than 30% of your channel budget in to-partner marketing, you get less than 15% adoption for anything you do in through-partner marketing. For-partner marketing should be special types of program like financial incentives and should not make up more than 10% of your budget. So a good split would be 30% of budget to-partner, 60% through the partner, 10% for the partner.

[36:00] Zift has team of channel engagement folks to help improve partner marketing skills. Vendors are also implementing marketing academies for partners.

[37:30] Laz cautions that vendors can go overboard on marketing training. Need to be more prescriptive and teach partners on marketing skills specific to the vendor’s offering.

[39:00] Big takeaway for Laz, with all the change taking place, is that you can no longer implement a one-size-fits-all partner program. With all the different partner types…specialized, cloud, MSP, agents, referrals, OEM, alliance partners…suppliers need to develop programs that recognize the differences between these partner types.  And you need a partner management software solution like Zift that allows you to manage all these partners types on one platform.

CJ9. This episode of Channel Journeys features Gary Lowe.  Gary is an adventure seeker, a channel pro, and now he’s the CEO of his managed services company called Think IT Ai. He earned his channel chops at the value-add distributor Tech Data where he worked with leading vendors and hundreds of partners.

Gary tells why he decided to make the leap to becoming a channel partner and the lessons he’s learned along the way.  He shares some unique tips for handling the pressure of running the entire show and learning new skills faster.  And Gary provides newcomers to the channel some career tips for navigating their channel journey.

[3:00] Gary is an adventure seeker but has learned to go after the adventures that advance his goals in life.

[5:40] As a distributor, Gary got to help channel partners grow their businesses. Loved helping people, but realized he was helping other people reach their dreams, but not pursuing his own dream.

[8:00] Talking with a partner opened his eyes to the possibility of becoming a channel partner by launching his own IT managed services company. Named his company ThinkIT-AI because of the opportunity to build AI into their service offerings.

[10:00] As an MSP, ThinkIT-AI remotely monitors and manages clients end-points and acts as their clients virtual CIO. They charge by the person, not by end-point. Sweet spot is smaller companies with between 5 and 25 employees.

[13:00] Gary’s mentor is channel titan Pete Peterson who brought him into Tech Data.

[16:00] Gary recommends everyone get a chance to work with a distributor to learn channels from some of the largest and best in the industry.

[19:00] Channel speak is a universal language. Working at Tech Data taught Gary how to speak Channel with any company.

[21:30] Gary still follow’s his dad’s advice when trying to decide what career path to follow. His dad said to imagine the man you want to be at the end of your days. What do you want this man to say about your life and all the great things you’ve accomplished?

[22:00] Following Tech Data, Gary joined Syniverse, a communications company with the world largest private network, understand their business, their market, their customers. Working on introducing Syniverse to indirect channel sales by becoming their first channel partner.

[26:30] Biggest realization now that he’s sitting in partner owner’s seat is how much is on his plate having to think about every aspect of the business. Now sees why partners aren’t always as interested in distributor and partner program elements as you’d expect.

[29:00] When confidence shakes, he has no option but to push through. Sees failure as a learning apparatus.

[31:30] Advice to other startups, no matter what you’re going through it’s not that bad. You can push through. Follow your instincts. Use that grit. Stick with it.

[32:30] When knocked down, Gary re-energizes by learning something new. Now he’s learning to play the ukulele. He gains the benefit of moving forward in an area outside of where he’s getting beaten down.

[36:00] Gary applies the 80/20 rule to learning. By discovering the 20% that gives 80% of the results, he accelerates his learning by focusing on learning the 20%.

[39:00] The three things Gary wants to do in life is to be a good son, a good husband, and good father.

CJ8. This episode of Channel Journeys features Jacqui Rand, co-founder of Channeliser, a platform for finding and getting social with partners. Learn about Jacqui’s channel journey and how she met Peter Norton and Bill Gates. Find out how she’s helping vendors find the right partners and drive higher partner engagement through social channel marketing. And not just the largest and most strategic partners, but the long-tail partners as well. This episode is loaded with insights on leveraging social media effectively and efficiently in the channel.

[2:00] Favorite food is Bangers and Mash. Favorite sport is horse racing.

[3:45] After traveling the world, Jacqui’s favorite spot is Scotland and loves cycling there with Skedaddle.

[6:30] Worked for Ashton Tate, then Peter Norton of Norton Securities during acquisition by Symantec, and then got immersed in partnering at Microsoft.

[7:30] Formed a channel consulting business in 2011 with her business partner Ann Lampton helping vendors find new partners. This led to the development of Channeliser – a match.com for the channel.

[10:30] Met Ben Rosen, founder of Compaq, and met Bill Gates in Cannes.

[12:00] Millennials entering the channel grew up with social, and used to using social platforms, not email, to communicate.

[13:30] Need to be driving relationships in the channel, including the long-tail partners. Having technology than enables you to interact without increasing your workload is crucial.

[15:30] Channeliser provides a partner portal with all social features built-in. It becomes your private social channel marketing platform that can be integrated with your existing partner portal. And it helps you communicate more effectively with your largest and most strategic partners as well as your long-tail partners.

[17:30] Has an Industry Network of partners open to IT companies around the world to find partners by location and skill sets. Allows you to connect at company and individual level.

[20:40] The inspiration for Channeliser was initially the difficulty in finding and connecting with the right partners around the globe. Then market demand from vendors to have a private social channel marketing platform for communicating with partners led to the expansion of Channeliser.

[23:00] Now have about 3000 partners from around the globe in the Channeliser community. Still curating and growing to make sure it’s valuable.

[24:30] Challenges include looking for funding while running the company and finding the right developers – they found great team in Ukraine.

[27:30] Channeliser helps to drive more social behavior and best practices within the channel team.

[29:00] Looking for partners including channel technology vendors and consultants to help expand business outside of Europe.

[31:00] Great opportunities for women in the technology channel, both in channel management and channel marketing.

CJ7. This episode features Mike Kelly, founder of the Channel Institute. Inspired by entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Elon Musk, Mike loves Big Hairy Audacious Goals like scaling mountains and running marathons. But these adventures look easy compared to Mike’s most audacious goal yet. He is on a mission to turn channels, and roles like channel management and channel marketing, into a profession.

Websters defines a profession as a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation. For many of us, channel is our calling.  The goal of the Channel Institute, and the Channel Journeys podcast, is to share specialized knowledge, elevate the channel, and turn this calling into a profession.

[3:30] Mike grew up in Dublin, his favorite drink is black with a creamy white head! Favorite food is game pie.

[4:30] Of his many adventures, one of his most memorable is a joy ride flying with just the pilot over Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Africa. They’re in a small plane with wooden a propeller, that turned out to be rotten. As their flying over the jungle, the propeller blew off and they crash landed into the jungle!

[6:30] Mike is more than active. His outdoor sports include sea kayaking, mountaineering, running marathons, surfing, and skiing.

[7:45] Since he was 13, Mike wanted to be an entrepreneur. Studied marketing to learn how to create value and demand. Won a green card lottery to work in a marketing agency in Boston.  Met his business partner and launched a marketing agency, TSL.  After reaching over 300 employees, sold TSL to launch Ridge Consulting to help tech companies grow their channel and channel partners.

[10:30] Earned a Charter Director certificate, a gold standard for business strategy in the UK. He took the strenuous 2-year program to help him run his own business, be a better business consultant, and eventually join the board of directors for a charity.

[12:45] Launched the Channel Institute to fill the skills gap found among channel managers at the lower end. No one is teaching the fundamentals. His mission is to make channel management a channel profession.  Formed an industry council with tech leaders to validate the courses to ensure content is hitting the mark.

[16:30] Channel  Institute only one year old, but already gaining momentum, forming partnerships with Universities and vendor training academies. Focused on the fundamentals and look for ways to dovetail into other courses.

[18:00] His target audience includes:

[20:00] Even vendors with “gold-star” channel marketing teams are coming to the Channel Institute to gain digital co-marketing skills.

[22:00] Provides the channel management and channel sales certificates to meet the needs of channel managers who are more business consultant and the ones who are more sales focused.

[22:45] Sees a lot of people taking the course who pay out of their own pocket because they’ve been dropped into the role without any training.

[24:15] Biggest challenge in launching Channel Institute – being a small company trying to teach the religion of a channel profession.

[27:00] Sending a channel manager on a solution selling course designed for field sales people without first providing training on channel fundamentals is kind of pointless. Make sure they have the fundamentals first so they can combine the two skills.

[28:30] Mike’s inspiration comes from entrepreneurs with Big Hairy Audacious Goals like Richard Branson and Elon Musk. The have confidence, audacity, and vision.

[31:00] Channel Institute is a stepping stone for we as an industry to up our game and make channels a profession. Let’s treat our profession with more respect and give new people entering channels a lot more support.

[32:00] Channel technology is great. But don’t forget the soft skills.