Channel Edge

This week Ryan Schopp, Vice President of Marketing at AppDynamics joins Channel Edge to share his thoughts on investing in the right channel partners.  Listen in as Ryan shares his company’s approach to determining the group of channel partners to focus upon and how they go about categorizing partners at AppDynamics.

At the heart of AppDynamics’ channel program is a modified version of the MEDDIC enterprise sales process they’ve coined as BEPIC (pronounced “Be Epic”). Ryan uses this acronym to guide and focus his team. The acronym stands for:

Belief – The foundation of the program is to get both sides to believe strongly in AppDynamics and the value it will provide customers. This happens over time starting with a structured sales deck that everyone is trained to present.

Executive Sponsorship – Finding and building a belief with the right executive sponsor is critical to success. An executive is identified and targeted during the Belief part of the process and their commitment to the program is secured as a second step.

Propensity to Buy – Ryan’s team and the channel partner work together to identify the twenty accounts with the highest likelihood to buy. They then narrow the list to the top 5 and work together to secure the business.  

Interlock –AppDynamics’ uses what Ryan describes as a value pyramid to present the offering to customers.

Cadence – is all about holding each other accountable to how often they get together and work on these accounts and track their progress.

Ryan also shares how investing in the right channel partners helps AppDynamics amplify what they achieve in the market. He describes the approach as being like Account Based Marketing but focused on investing in the right channel partners.

Ryan’s team sounds truly committed as they are spending 80% of their time and budget on their top 50 partners; a list that is revisited every six months.

Our partners, agents, dealers, etc. are people and to effectively engage, communicate, and market to them we need to understand and empathize with their journey and lives. In the channel, this is creating a pivot towards hyper-personalization.

This week Kristine Stewart joins Channel Edge to share her observations and findings and five key hyper-personalization themes she sees emerging:

1. Hyper personal experiences
2. Simplify and virtualize everything
3. Better together
4. Alignment with sales
5. Channel automation and analytics

The world has gone virtual out of necessity and there is a need for vendors to reduce friction and move the customer and partner experience needle. Vendors are innovating their approaches to personalization, lifecycle engagement, customer journeys, and much more at an incredible rate.  Listen in as Kristine shares her findings and how this is impacting CX & PX.

As we settle into a new normal created by this pandemic, it’s time to get back to focusing on customer and partner experience. This week Theresa Caragol, Founder and CEO of AchieveUnite, joins Channel Edge to discuss the good/bad/ugly of the current state of the channel and where partner experience is headed.

On the good side, Theresa shares that we seem to have settled into this normal and we’re getting back to focusing on things that matter. On the bad, she still sees some companies and individuals paralyzed, and Steven adds the ugly are those companies not executing plans they announced.

Theresa shares key partnership experience themes AchieveUnite developed from research conducted in partnership with CompTIA which include:

1. Partner lifetime value is key
2. Partner communities and ecosystems are the new channels
3. The power equation has shifted towards customers and partners
4. Enablement is the new currency

These themes and the underlying research were shared and discussed in more detail at CompTIA’s ChannelCon event. Listen in as Theresa and host Steven Kellam, VP Marketing at 360insights discuss these themes and current channel trends.

What is compassion marketing? This week’s guest, Nabeel Ullah product manager at 360insights, shares his thoughts and his company’s latest activities related to how brands can leverage consumer rebates to align with customers in supporting social causes.

Many corporate value statements include taking some form of social responsibility. The activities companies engage in to fulfill these commitments are known as compassion marketing. Often companies engage their suppliers and distributors in compassion marketing. This podcast shares an innovative approach to also engage a brand's consumers.

“Incentives are about influence, giving back to individuals who act in alignment with brand strategy,” said Nabeel. “360insights has made it easy for customers to align with brands in a giving strategy." Listen in as Nabeel shares his company's latest efforts to align the objectives of brands with consumers to create social value through consumer rebates.   

Jason Atkins, Founder of 360insights, embraced corporate giving as a strategic initiative from the company's first days. It is woven into the company's core DNA and now it has manifested itself on the product side of the business. With the global pandemic, more companies are embracing compassion marketing and 360insights latest product innovation creates a new avenue to engage consumers. 

The insurance industry is about as established as an industry gets, but it isn’t immune to digital transformation. When it comes to insurance marketing, old school tactics are no longer working, and agents are aging out. The industry also isn’t known as a destination for Millennials or digital natives.

What’s insurance digital transformation look like today? Listen in as our latest guest, Pat Moore a Farmers Insurance Agency Owner discusses trials and tribulations of successfully adopting new technology. Pat shares his experiences and his view of the future of insurance marketing.

Covid, Covid, Coronavirus,i  t seems like this pandemic is all anyone can talk about. Isn't there a lighter side of the channel? We hear you, and for this episode of Channel Edge we're going to take a break from the news of the moment and take a look back.  Join us as Janet Schijns, founder of the JS Group, and Jason Eberhardt, Global Vice President Cloud & MSP at Bitdefender, talk about some of the odd and crazy things they've seen on the lighter side of the channel.

Take a break, sit back and relax and hear Janet and Jason share real channel experiences from dealing with people who don’t know what a channel is to those making changes because someone thinks it’s their job.

Larry Walsh joins us for an update on the Current State of the Channel as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to progress. In this episode, Larry shares how businesses are evolving and adapting their Go-to-Market (GTM) models, and how generational differences are influencing those changes.

Most importantly, in this episode, you can hear LARRY WALSH ADMIT HE WAS WRONG (just having a little fun with him)!

Listen in as Larry Walsh and your host Steven Kellam discuss how CFO’s are influencing how/where channel management funds are allocated and utilized. How companies have adapted communications with customers and where data fits in the new world.

What changes are temporary and which will last? Our guest and host have a hearty discussion about this and why some companies are thriving while others struggle.

Digital transformation has never been more relevant than it is today with the COVID-19 pandemic occurring alongside most IT channels transitioning to some form of a subscription model. This week Kristine Stewart, Vice President, Client Success & Marketing at Channel Impact, joins ChannelEdge to discuss a nine-step process she co-developed with Robert Saxe of nVision for achieving channel success in an X as a Service (XaaS) economy.

Kristine shares her nine-step business model framework for transitioning to XaaS and discusses with ChannelEdge host, Steven Kellam, the nuances of each step. Listen in as Kristine and Steven discuss getting the right mechanisms, incentives, and analytics in place to successfully transform a channel organization to XaaS. Learn about vendor and partner roles and responsibilities in achieving channel success through the transformation.

Theresa Caragol, Founder and CEO of AchieveUnite, joins ChannelEdge to share what she’s hearing in recent round-tables her organization is facilitating related to the Covid-19 crisis.

Listen in as Theresa talks about superpowers a topic that came up in her most recent round-table on collaboration and innovation. What makes a business or person extraordinary or special (superpower) and how to capitalize on it?  When the going gets tough we tend to fall back on these superpowers, so understanding them and knowing how to draw strength from them is important.

This dovetails into a conversation prompted by our host Steven Kellam on trust as a superpower. Is trust a superpower? Is trust innate or can it be built? Hear Theresa reveal AchieveUnite’s eight ingredients to building trust.

Lisa Penn rejoins ChannelEdge to discuss driving channel success and improving customer experience post Covid-19. Lisa drops key wisdom bombs like:

“Vendors need to acknowledge your partners are going through some critical issues and they need help”

She also shares her three key steps to driving channel success now and post the pandemic:

1. Get your own house in order - look inward first – get it right internally – know your strengths and weaknesses
2. Put the Customer first – from partners to the install base, don’t just offer assistance, be genuine, be empathetic, build long term relationships
3. Drive consistency – be there for your channel, stay consistent and flexible – emphasis communications, leverage field people to social

We’re living in a new world paradigm and to survive and thrive we need to adapt our channel strategies to drive customer and channel success. Shift from hard selling, show some empathy, share thought leadership to help them survive. This will create loyalty amongst existing customers and help you uncover net new ones.