Ultimate Partner®

Effective co-selling, its where the rubber meets the road on the path to successful partnering. In this episode of Ultimate Partner, we delve into the intricate world of co-selling strategies alongside Chelsea Berlucchi, Head of Google Subregional Co-Sell, North America, a trailblazing leader spearheading revenue acceleration and partner expansion throughout North America.

In this episode, you will embark on a journey as Chelsea drives priceless insights into harmonizing company growth initiatives with customer objectives, ensuring flawless integration and delivery. You will gain unparalleled expertise from Chelsea Berlucchi as she imparts actionable tips and recounts real-world experiences aimed at optimizing co-selling opportunities.

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Summary Keywords

partner, google cloud, customer, organisation, marketplace, cosell, partner ecosystem, team, year, working, cisco, google, led, talk, solution, called, isv, product, build, chelsea

Vince Menzione 0:02  

Microsoft’s purpose is in service of your purpose. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear. And on finding this buyer intent you show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant every day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning that flywheel success is where you will build momentum. And that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. Chelsea burr Lucci leads the CO selling function for Google Cloud North America region. And I’m so excited to have her join us as she describes the role of CO selling the importance of the CO selling function, and how organisations like yours can more effectively co sell with Google Cloud. Chelsea, welcome to the podcast. absolutely happy to be here. So we’ve been talking a little bit about your role and how it’s evolved. And I was hoping you could spend some time with our listeners, you’re in a space that I just truly love and work with these partners on, which is on CO selling, and I was hoping you could deep dive for our listeners and viewers about your role and the mission of your organisation at Google. Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, my team does cosell. So right now I’m leading a team. But we call that I’m the head of the our sub regional cosell team for North America. And you and I did get to meet last year, we get to meet at the ISP forum in New York. So hopefully, we get to see you again this summer. Last year, I was really working closely with our ISVs. And I still work very closely with them. A lot of folks in in the ISP organisation do what’s called an ISV specialists role, or they’re what we would name also a partner development manager where they cover a specific ISV. In terms of my team, and my role we do it’s called co sell. So we’re really this team that’s at the front edge. We are working with customers, we’re working with sellers to set a strategy around adopting the partner ecosystem to drive forward. Now I did that last year was hired into that role in April 2022, we had this small but mighty team, which was fabulous. And we really aligned to each of our sub regions in our industries to say, hey, look, we have this opportunity to grow your business and grow your customers business by using our independent software vendors or ISPs and their third party products that run in Google Cloud. Now, this this year, at the beginning of the year, I was asked to take on more of an Extended Scope in my role, which has been very interesting and challenging. All the things at this point. Yeah. And that means that beyond ISC, my team also covers services now. So I’ve taken on a new team of individuals that had been at Google, but really, instead of covering just ice, we are covering that entire partner ecosystem. So again, when a customer comes to us, or when we’re working with our sales organisation, we can say, Hey, what is your strategy to execute this year? And what is that strategy inclusive of the partner ecosystem, we get really good to be the advocates for for our partners and coach our sellers on how to grow sell with with partners along the way. So that’s really the evolution of my role. Since you you saw me last. So things have certainly changed. I would say we’re doing some of the similar motions, just driving more rigour around that whole crew self process here. It’s part of our mission in general. So the partner ecosystem has is really standardise on what that looks like. And as you can imagine, you know, it’s really to work with our partner ecosystem, to make sure our customers are adopting Google Cloud technologies. And although that can be interpreted up and down and how you go after that mission in a couple of different ways, it really helps all different parts and pieces of our partner ecosystem within North America and Google Cloud to drive towards that one thing is really supporting our customers the right way, as they’re trying to adopt more Google Cloud as they’re trying to join a straight with us. Yeah, such an important function. In fact, and I wanted to spotlight on this because a lot of organisations at the hyperscale level, there’s this division of labour, right? So if I’m an ISV, I might have a partner development person or whether whatever the role is called, and they’re really focused in on the business development of that organisation, technological development, maybe the overall arching business strategy. But often what’s missed is this effective co selling piece and I was hoping you just described it, actually. But people don’t always understand what co selling means. Right? So I was hoping we can kind of double click on what is effective co selling and what isn’t it from your perspective? Now this is a great question because I think

Chelsea Berlucchi 5:00  

selling ads is a new word to your term, right? We’re hearing it a lot in technology companies, we’re hearing a lot in sales organisations. And we’re starting to see more and more individuals adopt this as even in title and what their their jobs are really entailed to. And so it being that more modern term and its baseline, the simple answer here is CO selling is really when two or more organisations come together to sell a complementary solution to a customer that they’ve identify. And we see this where, for an example, again, we’ve talked about ISVs, which is part of the organisation that I support. And that’s our independent software vendors. These are organisations that have said, Hey, we want to go to market with Google Cloud, so much so that we’re going to invest in their technology, we’re going to run applications in Google Cloud. And we’re going to list our product in the Google Cloud Marketplace. And now on the other side of that Google Cloud has also made this neutral investment by way of adding resources and tools and things that these companies can leverage people really to support that motion, and a cosell team. And so we’re invested in saying, hey, look, ISV thinks we’re going to market with us. And here’s how we’re going to jointly do that. Let’s take a look at the customer with that customer needs, and what solution we can provide to them. It when it comes to things like ISV and CO selling, we’re talking a lot about solution and completeness or out of box solutions that you may have, again, that are running on Google Cloud. On the other side of that, as I said, you know, my team also covers services partners. And that can be our systems integrators that have these fabulous solutions or services that are driving Google Cloud, maybe we have customers that are looking to adopt our technologies and set up a landing zone, they haven’t really started with Google Cloud, or they’ve identified a larger workload I did, it’s in a migration. And they want to provide those services too. So along those ways, it’s working together with these organisations and figuring out how we can provide that end solution or end service to the customer. By co selling together. That’s a you know, again, the highlight of of what co selling is and how we interpret it here at Google Cloud and how we actually go to market with a motion like that. What it isn’t, is, you know, what we’re probably more familiar with, if you’ve grown up in technology, or any sort of organisation where maybe you’re an OEM, or even a hyper scalar, or an independent software vendor, and you typically have what’s called a reseller. And this would be an organisation that is decided to say, hey, we want to take your product or your service, and we want to resell it to an end customer, a lot of times, that’s a, you know, a mutually agreed upon commercial contract, they get a certain amount of money for each of the sales, and then they can go directly to the customer and resell your product with CO selling, it really comes to that baseline word that we love here. And that’s partnership, right, we get to both be invested in the process, and support each other through it. And really, the customer comes out on top here, which is great, because we really stopped to pause to learn and understand what a customer needs through this journey to

Vince Menzione 8:16  

Yeah, I think what you had to say here is really relevant to the conversation we’ve been having about how it used to be a push right to the customer. Now the customer is dictating the route, right? They’re saying, I want to buy from Google, I want to buy, I might want to stitch together two solutions, I might want to take an SI solution and an ISV solution. And I want to I want to burn down against my agreement with Google to do so. And their help. And you’re working with them to effectively coordinate between the multiple parties, multiple partners involved? Absolutely, we are. And I think you know, we’ve talked about this in the past, but we see an organisation really evolve what they want to offer to a customer and they take a step back, and they say, Okay, I have this great partnership with Google Cloud, which is, you know, formidable. hyperscale are in the industry right now. And that’s, that’s great. But oftentimes, you need to think more about that. Because as you have these conversations with a customer, they’re going to want more than one thing. They’re looking at big picture. And that means more products, more solutions, more services. So we even say to our partners, whether it be a service partner, a sell partner, or build partner, what we call our ISVs is take a look at also our Google Cloud ecosystem, where can you make further relationships and partnerships, to then advance your opportunities in what you’re providing to a customer to? So we don’t we’re certainly at that, at the centre of that in that partnership. But we also have again, this fast partner ecosystem of 1000s of partners where everyone can start to work together to piece together what a customer is really looking for.

Chelsea Berlucchi 9:53  

Yeah, I think this area is so misunderstood by many organisations right where they they miss they missed the whole point. hero’s journey in the process, how you’re getting there. And I think you’re covering that specifically and maximising your relationship working with Google, and then working within their own ecosystem to maximise the results they’re trying to solve for. I’d like to double click on you, though, on your career journey, right? Because, you know, this is you’ve had an amazing career journey, Google, an amazing career journey in general. And I was hoping maybe you can spend a moment with our listeners and viewers here on how you got to this spot in your career. Chelsea? Yeah, of course. So a little history on Chelsea. I. So I’ve been at Google now for six years, but I’ll back it up. So prior to Google, I was at Cisco for 10 years. And that’s where I started my career. I started right out of college, I actually got my offer letter in my email on my drive home from Thanksgiving break for Thanksgiving break senior year in college, which is pretty exciting. So it makes for a really great rest of the senior year, of course, to be able to sign on the dotted line and know that, you know, you’re pretty much taken care of once you graduate at that point. But so I started just a couple of months again, after I graduated from college at Cisco, in what was called their Cisco sales associates programme. And you’ve probably heard of it a lot of other organisations have these programmes where they take in new grads from college or maybe graduate school. And they teach them the ins and outs of the organisation that technology soft skills that they need to be launched into the field as a seller. So I did that in North Carolina for nine months. And then I moved straight out to Boston, I packed my car with most of my belongings, some still, I probably left at my parents house at that point, and got a place in Boston and town that I actually never been to and took an outside sales role with Cisco, in that, I would say provided so much of foundation of one my career for for my entire journey, but also this role that I’m in today, I really gained my sales chops, I would say bear and a lot of bumps and bruises. But also, because I’m a very competitive person, it was something that I was excited to do. So I was at Cisco for 10 years. And you really learn when not only to you know how to truly qualify a customer how to work with customers. But Cisco does, you know, you can check me on this 95 plus percent of their business through a value added reseller to partners. And so they also have this really strong partner ecosystem that is really seen as a gold standard in a lot of industries. And one of the first lessons you also learn at Cisco is how do you actually partner, and those that do it successfully are going to learn how to scale their business the right way, but also, again, at the root of all of this is meet with their customer needs. So I built that, as I said, that foundation for 10 years, and it was going to meetings with partners, it’s leaving a meeting, calling a partner, and updating them on the status of the meeting. It’s putting together strategy with partners, and they become some of your best friends. One of them. I’m excited to see at Google Cloud Next soon, he and I have started our careers really together and kind of grown up in the business. So it’s been interesting to see a lot of the things that he’s done. He’s still at a partner, which you know, I value a lot. And I remember one one time, we’re going out to meetings in Vermont, we are carpooling together, and we planned how he was going to propose to his wife. So you really get closer to your partners if you’re doing it the right way. Yeah, they have, you know, beautiful family now. And it’s been incredibly successful. But it that built that foundation. And then after 10 years at Gu at Cisco Sorry, I was really thinking, this is the point in which I need to look at, hey, do I want to stay at Cisco? Or do I want to explore other opportunities, and at that point, it was everything you heard about was cloud cloud, cloud cloud. And I thought, Okay, I have this backdrop of really, technology sales, and even what’s in the data centre. But let’s see what this evolutionist is about, right. And so I got a role at Google. That was also indirect sales. I wanted to go into people leadership, but I’m also a firm believer of working for someone that has done your job before is a lot better of experience than someone that hasn’t. And whether that means you’re a manager and you have maybe an open wreck on your team and you are backfilling yourself. So you learn what it’s like to sit in your team shoes, or, you know, if you’re actually going for a position you’ve, you’ve at least done it for a little while. So I learned the Google way of selling what the technology was like what the customers were really worried about how to make them comfortable and confident with what we had. But then also my first week on the job was meeting what we then called our partner sales managers, which is A team that I lead now. And the PSM at the time, was incredibly helpful. He had the same kind of background that I did were knows how to partner and why partners are there to scale your business, but also make you and the customer successful. So it was great to build out a different strategy. As I progressed at, at Google, I really got in deeper with our ISP organisation. And I started to do a lot more business with our ISPs, this was actually a new function. For me to learn. We didn’t we didn’t do this at Cisco. So knowing that another organisation was running on top of Google Cloud, and by the way it could sell it and we incentivize our sellers to do so was pretty cool. So I got close with several of our partners, and I got to learn a lot more about my customers business, because I wasn’t just talking to them about what Google Cloud could provide. I was asking them broader questions. And instead of thinking, Oh, I can’t do that at Google. I was I was starting to think, let me see who of our partners can can do is to provide it. So it got me in a lot more conversations. And it made me understand that this really made you one of these invaluable assets to your customer to so I became more passionate about it. And luckily for me, they decided to invest in the IOC organisation that grew it. And I received the role that I got in April 2022, leading the cosell team fries team. So that’s really that’s my journey of, you know, being both at at Cisco and Google. I’m what I would think as an elder millennial, so I should probably have more hops in my career at this point. But I don’t because I’ve really been happy with the organization’s I’ve been with, and I hope I get to stay at Google longer to

Vince Menzione 16:51  

see, if you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I build growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change, and part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders ISV, sellers, S size MSPs, and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is, it’s noisy, I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There is a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard, we’re getting ready to open the doors early in a pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder, and innovator or leader, visit our website. As well, what I hear loud and clear is you’ve gone deep, right? You worked in an organisation it was very partner centric, a little bit more channel centric, that’s called the old school way of doing things. And then co selling Google like you were doing your field salary. So you got you got street cred, in my opinion. And then you’ve now you’ve integrated into this partner organisation, which by the way, we’ve had Jim Anderson, as you know, we’ve had his leadership team talking about precision partnering, where exactly does your function sit in that partner organisation? And what does it look like today?

Chelsea Berlucchi 18:32

That’s a great question. So this is something that, you know, moving the mystery around, how do I work with Google? Where do people sit is something that we get asked a lot to? It’s a one, it’s a great question, and, and people need to understand what that looks like. We actually had a pretty cool event at the beginning of the year called partner kickstart, where we invited our partners to several different locations around North America. And they got to sit with our sales teams, and then learn about the initiatives for this fiscal year, which was, which was great to get everyone on the same page, but also just build momentum for the year and get started on the right foot. And through the sessions each of us shared with this partner ecosystem looks like and so typically, when I have this question, I share a slide. So if people see me you can always ask me for it, but I’ll try to paint a picture here for you. Imagine please do Yeah. So imagine two pieces of the organisation that Jim Ron’s which is the North America partner ecosystem. On one side, we have this partner segment focused and you’ve had plenty of these leaders on we have our cell and service portion which is led by Shelby Johnston. We have our solution Si, which is led by Rebecca Potts, our GSI team that’s led by Gina Frederick Angelina who’s new you should have on and then of course, our ISV team, which is led by Scott Barson. Now within each of their teams they have we’ve you know that term we’ve said before as the partner development managers are eyes The specialists. And these are folks that are specifically chartered with covering in one to few partners to make sure that they’re building out a go to market strategy that can be launched at the north north american level. And they’re really looking to execute alongside these partners too, which is great. So intense precision partnering, as you said, with these particular partners to make sure we’re being very intentional in our go to market motions. Now, that’s one side that’s partner segment. On the other side, we have our customer segment focus, and this is where I sit. So this is where we have the enterprise cosell team, which is my team. We have our strategic accounts and industries cosell team, which is led by James Hardy, who is new to Jim’s team to James and I really work closely because our teams do the same thing, just covering different sets of accounts. And so we get to collaborate and share a lot of notes, which is great. Now, we have another new portion to the customer segment focus, and that is mid market enterprise. This is led by Lainey marks, who is you know, just absolutely tough. She is competitive. And she’s going after this business of mid market enterprise. And this is new, because we have taken a set of customers that sit what we call this mid market enterprise. And we have decided we want to be completely partner facing with them, which is great. So she has a team of sellers that are their go to market is always with and through a partner, which is great. And then finally

Vince Menzione 21:31

makes a lot of sense, by the way, because the mid market has been underserved in general from a partner perspective, right? Yes,

Chelsea Berlucchi 21:37  

yeah, agreed. And it and there’s so much opportunity there, I think. And we see a lot of these, these customers too, that have either it’s a niche product, or the solution they’re offering, or the way they’re built, the organisation should be reliant on working with a partner or building out their own ecosystem, too. So I’m glad that she’s chartered that this year, she’s doing a phenomenal job. The last piece of our customer focused teams is the candidate ecosystem, which is led by Meghan Tanner, whom again, is there another force that you should have on the call to so all of these folks are working together, either we’re out there with the customers and the sellers making sure we know how to co sell, we are working directly with customers, we’re building up these partners and what the business they’re doing with Google Cloud, but also the business that they’re representing out there in the field. And our underlying teams here, of course, partner engineering. And then we also have a Gen AI Centre of Excellence where we are keenly focused on driving innovation through generative AI and cloud AI.

Vince Menzione 22:38  

Okay, so that’s a pretty massive organisation. It’s a long as a lot of ground to cover. I’m a partner, I’m trying to figure out, like, where do I start? Like, who do I work with? Can you help us there?

Chelsea Berlucchi 22:48  

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s it? That’s a great question, I will make this very simple. If you are a partner in meaning you have gone to our partner advantage portal, you’ve registered, you’ve gotten the right certifications, pass the test, urine, you know, you should always still be working first with your account team. And that sounds a little weird, but I will say is that this could be your initial go to, and really, that Launchpad into further into the partner ecosystem, you would have an accounting that has this investment, initial interest in how successful you are in the Google Cloud ecosystem. And they can also talk to their peers to make sure you’re getting the right love to start with. Beyond that, as we see partners really develop what they have and their relationship with Google Cloud, we do ask that they then digging deeper to this partner advantage portal, which is going to provide them with a lot of training and access to information on how to build out a good market, but also gives them a platform to then log opportunity share that information. So we can see, oh, this is a very relevant partner that making an impact. Let’s support them more in that sense, too. So I would say start with those two. But then, as you as you progress within the Google Cloud ecosystem, we have folks like partner advisors that help you and partner and development managers or ISP specialists. And then of course, you know, that large team that I shared with you as well, that it’s standing there with with North America. And by the way, that’s just one part of our ecosystem. We have a global team too.

Vince Menzione 24:20  

So I know you present to partners quite a bit on these topics and how to help them be more successful. And I got a peek at some of your presentation materials before we have this conversation. Can you talk about this? And I believe very much in how you show up. Right? How do you stand out? How do you differentiate yourself as a partner, right, because now I’m a partner and there’s all these other partners that are trying to you know, they’re tugging on the teams to cosell together. And I like to talk about being a shiny quarter and a bucket full of shiny terms I use, like, how do you show up differently uniquely? How do I build an effective co selling strategy that will resonate with your sellers? and your customers, Chelsea?

Chelsea Berlucchi 25:01  

Yeah. So another great question that we do get frequently, we see people that come into the ecosystem they want to launch, they want to launch the right way. And so I do think it’s good to level set, right? It’s good to understand what you’re offering, how do we position it with the field so that you do get the right amount of scale resources, as well as intention that you may need to be successful with us too. So I think you hit on one key point that I’m just going to underscore right now is around a differentiated value proposition. And so in some cases, if we’re talking about an ISV, or an independent software vendor, offering up that technical, technically differentiated solution is a, you know, key importance. And I think any company out there that has built a product, they probably did it because they saw a gap in the market, or a new market that they wanted to build out. So that can be a little bit easier for these partners. One thing we also like to say is take that solution and how you’re differentiated, but then tie it back to Google Cloud, too. So how does it actually work well, with Google Cloud first party, and that will one help our sellers understand, Oh, these two work together, this is why they make sense. This is why it makes sense to our customers, and really helps them resonate with that actual solution. Now, on the other side of that, if your services or sell partner, maybe a little little more difficult, so you do want to then have a bit of a story. And I would actually tell everyone this and in that if you have that 30 minutes with the seller, we’re really pushing our customers to say yes, you may have your five minute pitch, which is great, I love a five minute pitch, you’ve boiled down to a shark tank type of thing. And we know really what we’re gonna get out of that conversation. But what I’m shifting folks to do this year is to share a win story, because I do think those can win a win story, tell me how you worked with a customer to win an opportunity and win over that customer to hopefully be a referenceable customer for you, because that’s really gold standard, right? Not only do they enjoy the process of working with you, they enjoyed it so much that they’re willing to be a reference for other customers, and even maybe talk to your sales team or other sellers to to understand why. And so I’m pushing goats to do that five minute pitch, but also a five minute win story of how and why a customer would adopt your solution, your service, your technology, I do think that those things will go a long way. And we do internal win stories, or we call win wires as well really sharing, hey, we’ve just started to work with this customer. They decided to move forward with Google Cloud and this technology or this partner. And here’s really what that cosell process looked like. So I would say get you know, get organised with those kind of the the basics and the foundation there. But beyond that, there’s always loads of content that people want to share with us. It’s, you know, could be an extensive pitch deck. It could be a list of qualifying questions, it could be architectures to review. It could be a Rolodex of people at the organisation to cosell with ourselves and all that’s fine. But I also do say, Hey, what is what is it good kind of walk away to pager. So you’re gonna have your, your, you know, five minute pitch, you may have your wind story, and then give us that battle card of information to get us to launch within the field teams. I think all those things, you know, we’ll get started. And then of course, you evolve from there. But you know, it can look look different for everyone as well. I just got a note from a manager yesterday morning saying hey, I just want to give props to an ISV that showed up so well with my team. And what his eyes we did was they they reached out to the manager, they asked for an account list, they went back and did their homework, they did account mapping, they said here’s where we are, here’s where we’re working with these customers, here’s maybe where we need help. And then they recorded themselves giving a 10 minute or less overview of how they were going to address this particular managers team. And really a little bit about their solution to in that sort of preparation and for thought that took probably you know 30 minutes to an hour on the partner side. Set them up for success with this manager and then their team and so that one interaction would lead to really a door opening at a probably 100 customers which is pretty cool. So I think Little things like that go a long way.

Vince Menzione 29:33 

I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago. Athletic Greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all Have my nutritional basis supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase, go to drink 80 one.com forward slash Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out. I think what you said to like getting, you know, you called about the five the elevator pitch the brand story, and then the customer account story, right? Like, what what did you do differently better in that account, I think, taking a seller through that process, so they could personalise it and say, Okay, this is how this partner can work with me more effectively. And then getting to the what’s in it for me, resonating with like, this is how you can win, we can win together by again, exposing the account list saying, Hey, these are the accounts will rehab relevance. This is the whitespace opportunities we can go after together and coming to the table prepared like that. Just it’s so important. I think doing that is the best way to differentiate yourself in the market, would you say? I

Chelsea Berlucchi 31:13

absolutely think Sony can get it goes back to basics, which I think people forget about a lot. And I will say from my jump from Cisco to Google, I had to go back to basics, right? It was coming from a company that was number one in a lot of markets to a company that was not. And you as I said, you get I got more bumps and bruises along the way, but really taught me to go back and say, you’ve got to prove yourself. And that means you start at layer one there. And really going back to basics will help. And I think doing that little bit of work again, goes a long way for sure.

Vince Menzione 31:50  

So let’s talk about marketplaces. I mean, we could probably spend the entire conversation here on marketplaces. It’s I’ve been calling this the marketplace moment. I mean, it’s it’s astounding to see the uptake just in a very short period of time over the last couple of years now. The durable cloud budgets, right customers are making buying decisions at the executive level with Google. They’re making large commitments. And this opportunity to show up differently and transact differently. We talked about millennial generation, Gen Z, also not wanting, like doing things digitally, our lives have changed since COVID. Right? How do in marketplaces are being a bigger thing that GCP? Right, I think that this is becoming a better vehicle, a way to bring multiple partners together? How do I initiate a conversation about GCP marketplace with a customer? Yeah,

Chelsea Berlucchi 32:42  

so I think this is another one that that we do get frequently, right. So we have ISVs, that, again, have built products that run on Google Cloud. And they’re available to purchase in our Google Cloud Marketplace, which is in our billing console. It’s in our Google Cloud Console, which is really where our customers go to build out projects with Google Cloud products. But it’s very easy for them to then click over to the marketplace and say, hey, look, I need solution completeness, or I want something that’s out of the box. And I’ve got a tonne of solutions to pull from there. And we do have an extensive marketplace. It’s been building and growing. And you did have Scott Arneson on last year, who’s who’s my boss. And he’s now you know, over his year at Google send an incredible job with really applying a lot of rigour in organisation to how we go to market, how we show up with our partners, but also with our customers. And in that he has an individual that’s also on his team named Pete Henderson, who is if you’re talking about marketplace, you got to get him on P is our marketplace go to market lead. So what Pete does is really straddles that line between go into market where he’s meeting with customers on a daily basis around the marketplace. And sometimes these are very strategic, sometimes they’re difficult conversations. And he takes back any feedback around features and functionality and make sure it gets to our marketplace global team to say, hey, can we start to make enhancements here. And, you know, I love working with Pete. He’s really one of my partners in crime here. And one thing we talk about often is this conversation of how to initiate the talk with with your customer around Google Cloud Marketplace, or marketplace in general. And we really tried to break it out in a couple of different ways. You’re going to have a first time user of the marketplace. And in that case, I always coach our sellers to say, if you’re having one a first time call or reset call with your customer, or just a general weekly update, you know, open up the Google Cloud Console, give them a quick tour and bring them over to the marketplace and share the show with them. Hey, where it is why our teams, our customers use it right and why it’s beneficial to them, and have them ask them questions, but then bring in bring in the Google Cloud team or your are, you know the Google app marketplace team to again help you have those conversations as well. Also the cosell team there. But that’s one is getting getting a feel for where they are. Had they used a marketplace in the past. If it wasn’t Google Cloud, great, that tells me they’re open to the process that tells him that procurement understands how to work with they understand it, yes, they understand it. So I don’t mind that I actually, I really like it because then we’re not really trying to convince them to use the marketplace, we’re just, you know, really giving the information on hey, we have a marketplace, here’s why you should be using it. If you’re also working with Google Cloud. Or even if you’re not, if you have partners that are listed in the marketplace, here’s why it’s also valuable to you and to them. And then that’s one place, it’s a very simple, straightforward conversation on the other side of that, if you have a customer that has used the marketplace before, but maybe they haven’t done what’s called a private offer, where they’re negotiating directly with an ISV. And that offer then comes through the marketplace for them to click to accept. And it’s maybe a more bespoke offer really tailored to their needs. They’ve done something maybe more like a click to subscribe, which is also totally okay. Or maybe they’ve done a trial they tested around, but nothing really substantial yet, with Google Cloud Marketplace, and you want to get them more comfortable and confident. This is maybe a little more of a sit down. It’s one, hey, we’ve noticed you’ve been using the Google Cloud Marketplace. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you’ve been testing? How’s that going? Do you know? How do you like the billing integration? And what else could you be using it for? And then the larger conversation is maybe with procurement to to help them understand, hey, look, here’s why it’s valuable to our procurement teams. Here’s why it’s helpful for you on the financial side of things, if you have a Google Cloud commit to in show remove, as we said, that mystery of the what and the why of the marketplace to get them comfortable. And then I always say handhold handhold through that first purchase. So if you’re a partner, having this conversation around that Google Cloud Marketplace, bring the cosell team in, bring that your sales counterpart at Google Cloud, to have the conversation to and be there and be ready when the customer does make that first purchase, we want to make sure it goes smoothly, and that they come back and then they reroute all purchases through the marketplace. So that’s what I mean by hand holding them and making sure they have a really, really good experience the first first time or second time or third time or 20th time.

Vince Menzione 37:33 

Do you ever have partners asked for propensity data? So do they ever come to you and say, who are customers who are either underspend on their cloud commitments, or might have a higher propensity to buy through marketplace?

Chelsea Berlucchi 37:46 

You know, we do pretty confidential. Obviously, we can’t, we can’t share out, you know, hey, look, here’s a list of our committed customers, these are customers that have really trusted us and put together a financial agreement. But what we like to do is it’s really give them the tools and resources to say, hey, look, you know, we do have some, some mutual conversations going on, or customers that are, you know, we’re also working on projects together, can you tell us how you may be working with them to so this, this goes back to that CO selling one on one of the give and take, right? If you’re gonna come and say, Hey, can you tell us where all of your businesses we’re gonna, you know, probably not do that. But we’d like to understand, hey, look, what kind of conversations are you also having, and I love that I love when two sellers get together, right, and they start talking about a mutual customer. And that way, they can really, one, become more confident working with each other. And as you probably know, if you’ve been in sales in the past, when you have someone that’s also in the trenches, maybe another company, then you build trust. And then you also really, the conversation evolved so much better to so we definitely, you know, have a give and take and make sure that we’re both doing neutral sharing, but again, of course, within within the realm of what we’re allowed to do there. Yeah,

Vince Menzione 39:05  

no, I understood. So let’s take us through. So we built our brand story. We’ve talked about when wires or successes that we’ve had together, help help illustrate the solution. We’ve gotten some success together working with the teams, we might have introduced marketplaces, we’ve gotten that flywheel going, now that we’ve gotten our flywheel going for a period of time, what else can we do to drive more effective co selling as a more mature partner now working with you and your organisation? Yeah, so

Chelsea Berlucchi 39:34  

I love this question. When I get this from partners, because it really tells me they’re looking to continue to invest and grow their relationship with Google Cloud, right? And they’re looking for coaching. They’re looking for feedback, whatever it may be. So we always get to one go to an idea board to and say, Hey, let’s figure out where you are and where do you want to be get to be a little creative, but I give folks a bit of a roadmap In where I see, you know, hey, here’s some of our really what we may call gold standard, or these partners that are have been really successful. And we also look at those that maybe are just starting out. And so what we first see is okay, the customers or partners decided to invest in Google Cloud, they’re building out a go to market with us and become a partner. Ideally, we’d like that partner to then assign someone the Google Cloud relationship, meaning do you as a partner have someone that owns who will cloud in terms of alliances in terms of a channel there, and that means they’re, they’re dedicated enough, they’re invested enough to know it’s a core part of their business to even hire someone or a team of someone’s to manage that relationship? And so we say that’s, that’s first checkmark, okay, Alliance is great, because we also have that too. The second one is okay, we see alliances and may start to immediately engage with maybe their counterpart at Google Cloud or sales directly. And I think those engagements are good, but they can only go so far, as you know, we just talked about this, where we really see things start to develop and grow, is when an organisation can get their sales team to talk to our sales team as well. And that means maybe they didn’t aligned on incentives, they’ve really said, Hey, sellers, at our partner, this is how you know, we’re going to pay you if you’re, you know, you work and you sell Google Cloud or with our through the the marketplace, right, or whatever else it may be, but if they have some sort of interest in working with Google Cloud sellers, and we get both of those grip groups working together, that creates a lot of this, this good gossip, a lot of champions internally, and we see more scale there, those two can be pretty easy to check off. And the third one we really anchor on is, again, another point we’ve talked about is expanding a partnership within Google clouds partner ecosystem. So say, if you’re an ISV, I find that a lot of them have said, Okay, we’re just going to work with the hyper scalar, right, and we’re going to launch in the marketplace. And that’s it. But they haven’t really adopted a resale strategy. They haven’t adopted a services strategy. And so at some point along the sales cycle, they may be a little stuck, maybe that’s in the prospecting stage, maybe it’s in the final stage of implementation, but there’s maybe a backlog or an area where they could really adopt business faster. And that means, hey, look, you’re already part of this ecosystem, why not lean in further, and find more partners that can really help you along the way? Again, maybe it’s implementing services, or reselling. And this can go into different ways, right? You’re a sell partner of ours, and your customer keeps asking for a particular solution that you don’t have in your book of business. Maybe Google Cloud does, or our marketplace does, go strike up these relationships with those partners too. And then you know, that third one is really services partners, which can say, hey, they may want to offer a solution completeness, or they know I’m going to implement x, and then my customer is automatically going to go search for y product, and to really add on or see, Hey, how is this other product actually running or working. And so you can really think about your business like that from the customer’s perspective is always really helpful, and then build out what that cosell strategy looks like. So I say, these are three buckets that are pretty distinct, and get a little more strategic as you go along. And then underlying that is really just this innovation, right? We talked about Jim AI, but that can be inclusive of other products. And that is taking that customer feedback to say, what are they really challenging you to do to maybe add to your product? Or what is the market really saying in terms of, hey, we like what you have to offer. But this is where things are headed. And using Google Cloud in the force of our engineering to really help you evolve your products and maybe even revolutionise them at some point to can can help you further along in that cosell process. Yeah,

Vince Menzione 44:06  

I love it. I love it. And Google Next is next week, like, I’m excited to be coming out to Vegas. Although I’m not always excited to come to Vegas. I am excited to come to Google next next week. I know you’ll be there. What’s in store for those listening and viewing today? Like what can they expect? And where should they go? What are the best sessions that they should attend?

Chelsea Berlucchi 44:26  

Yeah, that’s another good one. So I think I’m excited to you know, likewise, not so excited about Vegas. But I think well, you’re I’m excited about is Google Cloud Next. And it feels like we just had it because you did. But that’s part of why I’m excited because we get to take all the momentum that we had last year and we get to have it at the beginning of the year this year. And now even though the time in which we just had it out in San Francisco is much shorter. Now. There have been so many advancements and announcements, certainly around cloud AI in general. of AI that I think people are going to be excited to hear and see more about. So you know, obviously tune in to that keynote, get your seat there to make sure you hear what is the latest and greatest. Also, this is a partner podcast. So we have a specific area Partner Summit area for our partners to come and join us. My favourite thing from last year was the expo hall. So we have our partners that have set up booths. And we’ve these are sponsoring partners, they have assigned seating all around to really demo their products where you can meet with these partners, you can understand their value pitch, and you can really see what’s going on. They have a lot of swag, of course. So if you’ve got, you know, friends or kids at home, and you want to bring them a little souvenir, you can load up on the water bottles and stickers and all the things you really want. Like yeah, yes, yeah. Bring an extra suitcase just for that if you can. No, but yeah,

Vince Menzione 45:58  

so and also the parties. I know, I heard there’s like 100 partner parties, they’re going to be going

Chelsea Berlucchi 46:03  

on there too many, I think, yeah, we’ll have to hire a driver for the night to just carry around from from one part party to another. But yeah, so all of that is going on? I think certainly the partner keynote will be interesting. We do partner awards, but we really get to hear from our leaders at Google Cloud that share one the important importance of partnership, and what are we driving together? And of course, you know, that is something that will bring us through the remainder of the year, that sort of momentum and direction is something that we can all really anchor on and build our businesses

Vince Menzione  46:37  

around. Yeah. So Google Next April 9 10th. And 11th. Yeah, next week, excited to have and to see you in person again, IRL. Likewise, I have one more. Yeah, I have one more question. And it’s a favourite question. I asked all my guests this question. You are hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests from the present? Or the past this amazing dinner party? You could we could even talk about where you’re going to host that dinner party? Whom would you invite Chelsea? And why?

Chelsea Berlucchi 47:08  

Yes. So I have listened to your podcast in the past, I knew this one was coming to. And so I thought about it a bit. You know, I think what I would like to do so in 2020, tough year for all of us. But unfortunately, I lost both of my grandfather’s within months of each other. So it was tough, obviously, it you know, was a huge, huge gap in our families and, and tough on my parents, of course, and so I would certainly have them there, just to have that, that last meal, because in 2020, you really couldn’t go and visit people right or locked down. And so I think I’m just learning so much, even, you know, after they both passed away about them, and also really the marriages that they had with my grandmother’s too, who are both are bound, thankfully. And so I’m gonna break your rules a little bit. I’m going to give up my seat. And I’m gonna give both of those last two seats to my grandmother so they can have maybe a double date a romantic dinner. I don’t think they’ll be lurking around. But I do think that they would appreciate

Vince Menzione 48:11  

you joining. You could be she could be the chaperone as well. Okay, I

Chelsea Berlucchi 48:16  

can I can bring them their meals. I’d probably like that. To them. Yeah, no. So I think I would do that. Yeah, I think you know, it’s funny, I remember seeing you in, in New York. And after we had that big date the forum, we ran into each other, I ran into you and your wife, and you guys were getting to just get out around town and going to see your favourite French bakery and enjoy a bluebird, New York City day. And so I do think, of course, that marriage and partnerships are great, and they both had some some really strong ones. So I’m sure they’d appreciate that one last nail together.

Vince Menzione 48:47  

Thank you. Thank you. You’ve been an amazing guest. Chelsea, I so enjoyed spending time with you today. I’m so excited to see you next week. And if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, try to get out to Vegas for this event, or I know it’s gonna also be live streamed as well. So listen, watch. Google Cloud is on a tear, exciting time for our partner community. Chelsea, my favourite subject, co selling, having you on board leading this very important function. Excited to see what’s next for you. And for Google Cloud. Thank

Chelsea Berlucchi 49:20  

you so much, Vince. It’s been great to be here. And I look forward to seeing you next week. And to all the listeners as well. Hopefully I get to see you at Google Cloud Next.

Vince Menzione 49:28  

All right. Well, looking forward to seeing all of you at Google Cloud Next. Thank you so much for watching, and listening to The Ultimate Guide to bartering. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner online and Ultimate Partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe add to our new YouTube channel ultimate partner we’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner

In this episode, Greg Sarafin, Global Managing Partner—Alliance Ecosystem at EY, joins us to explore the pivotal role of the Chief Partner Officers, his career progression, and the dynamics of successful partnership and organizational leadership.

Discover how Greg oversees EY’s Alliance Partner Ecosystem, driving substantial growth and impact. He has contributed 40% to EY’s growth over the past six years, creating billions in revenue. With insights from his extensive experience, including leadership roles at IBM and BearingPoint, Greg shares invaluable perspectives on strategic partnerships, technology implementation, and leadership skills essential for C-suite roles.

Learn firsthand about the intersection of technology, business, and partnerships as Greg discusses the tech industry’s influence on GDP growth, AI value creation, and business process reengineering. Gain actionable insights into partner operations, cost management, and the profound impact of partnering functions on organizational success.

Tune in to uncover the secrets of effective partnering, leadership, and capital allocation in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. Don’t miss this enlightening conversation with Greg Sarafin, a seasoned leader with a wealth of experience driving impactful partnerships and organizational growth.

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partner, partnering, function, ecosystem, clients, ey, companies, creating, people, years, sap, organisation, big, sales, market, microsoft, tech, partnerships, outcome, gsi

Vince Menzione  00:02

Microsoft’s purpose is in service of your purpose. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear. And on finding this buyer intent you show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant every day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning that flywheel success is where you will build momentum. And that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide department, where our mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. I’m Vince menzi on your host, and today we have a really special guest here in our Boca facility. Greg Serafin is the global Managing Partner of alliances and ecosystems at EY, Ernst and Young, a multinational professional services partnership, and a thought leader on the topic of ecosystem and the role of the chief partner officer. Greg, I’m so excited to have you here today. Thanks, Vince. It’s good to be here. I am so excited to welcome you to Ultimate Partner you and I got to spend some time in Dallas, Texas, at our live event. And I so enjoyed your session with and it’s been such an incredible session on the chief partner Officer role. And I wanted to have you in the room because not just that topic, but we have several other topics, we want to talk to your leader at EY, you have been a leader in this movement around ecosystems. And so I’m so excited for this conversation today. But first, for our listeners that don’t know you, I was hoping you could spend a little bit of time on EY. Sure. Your role and the organisation that you lead. Yeah, absolutely. So

Greg Sarafin  01:49

I am part of the extended leadership team at EY. And I’ve had the great honour of being on that team for the last seven years. But I was just telling you before the podcast, I actually had my retirement, I’m retiring in June, and I don’t know how they could let you go. I don’t think it’s it’s actually a very hard rule. Right? We, you know, we want to continue the UN I agree with that. Actually, I’m like, you know, you gotta keep letting people advance. Right, exactly what we’re talking about politics before this. Right? Right. I’m still young for politics, I guess, already a time. Exactly, currently. So anyway, you know, ey for those that don’t know, is one of the big four. And all of us have both an audit business, a tax business, and then some set of consulting businesses as well. So we’re very broad in the services that we can bring to clients. And we’re very global, we have a particular place in society in terms of creating transparency of financial results, to give confidence to the public markets, which is a pretty tall task and important thing to do. Absolutely. It gives us a certain brand permission and trust, it gives us the ability to attract a certain level of talent, both out of university, as well as then later in life experienced hires. And so what you find when you get there, and I came there late in life that was 51 years old, when I joined the UI, I was an IBM executive before that, is just you are stung by not just the depth of talent, you know, people that are just world class, you know, in some sort of expertise, but then also world class as you know, relationship handlers or delivery people. And then there’s 380,000 of us around the world 380,000. And it’s huge. I was in attendance. I mean, seriously, it’s like, they’re all top people like, you know, you get goose bumps, you go to an EY meeting anywhere in the world. And there’s a consistent feel of consistent culture, commitment to client commitment to success. It’s unbelievable. Anyway, I want our people in the room I won’t I won’t dwell on about a why too much. But it’s been it’s been great to be part of you why I didn’t go to EY actually to, to be part of the ecosystem movement. Start there. I was at IBM where I also had a really good time and was also very fortunate have had a couple of good roles there. I was running a big part of the financial services business for them in North America. And so and then BearingPoint before that, before their implementation. Yeah, apparently for if we go through my career, we’re gonna be here we won’t No, no, we won’t do that. We will not do that. I sold my first deal. 41 years ago. I love it. I was in college. You are young money. Yeah, young buck away, you’ll you’ll you’ll appreciate this. So I needed to make money to pay tuition and room and board and so like, Well, I’m not gonna do that working at a bar or, you know, minimum wage jobs. It was it was I was at expensive college. Right. So

Vince Menzione  04:46

I love this. I sold a Novell NetWare implementation for law firm. Oh my goodness. Right. Isn’t that crazy? That’s when he PCs network them with token ring. I mean, I remember For those days, I remember that was my early days spent two days trying to figure out how to generate the operating system off of three and a half inch floppies. Are those Lucas? Yeah, yeah, remember those things? I do remember those? Oh my lord. Anyway, enough to remember that now I’m just aged myself.

Greg Sarafin  05:15

I’ve aged myself as well here.

Vince Menzione  05:18

So let’s fast forward again. So yeah, bearing points, IBM and n e n EY. And up until

Greg Sarafin  05:29

seven years ago, I was primarily financial services from hiring point forward. And so when two years into my EY tenure, they said, hey, you know, that plan for you to like, maybe run a big piece of financial services for us? We think we have something better for you to do I love every time you hear it’s gonna be better for you. You’re like, is it really better for me? Is it right? For us that it was because I never would have done it on my own. And I didn’t grow up in it. So I but I had always worked with partners. You know, I was at IBM, we did a lot with SAP and a lot with Oracle. Right. And financial services, and a lot of systems integration work with them. And I knew our three are Yeah, exactly. And I knew how to do ecc. I knew how to do sales motions with partners. I knew all that stuff. But from the running the business side, not from the partnering side, yes. Running the partner function side. So and if I’m honest, I’ve said this before publicly. I was like, Oh, my God, my career is over. I’m going to the indirect hell.

Vince Menzione  06:40

chemo, how was it was, you know, 10 years ago? Oh, something must have gone wrong with your career. You’re over and alliances now? Yeah, indirect revenue. That’s where we send people who can’t sell Exactly, that’s exactly was

Greg Sarafin  06:51

like, oh, everybody’s gonna think I’ve lost my ability to do deals and stuff, right. But in all seriousness, the reason I was asked, it wasn’t honoured actually, to be asked. Because EY had done a lot of work at the board level, and had determined that this was a huge gap for the company. And not just for the company, but for our clients, right, our clients expect, particularly those of us that are in the Big Four, to help them navigate their most difficult journeys, and to orchestrate a set of partners to help them do that. Not to say, well go Good luck working with Microsoft, your old job, or SAP or have ever been like working with them. No, we’re going to bring all that together for you. And we’re going to translate, we’re gonna take you on a business outcome journey. And of course, you can’t get any business outcome of any merit today without what tack?

Vince Menzione  07:40

That’s right. And this, and you’re in the transformation business. Right. And then we are, we are celebrated transformation. So you got right at the right time?

Greg Sarafin  07:48

We Yes, I did. I did get there at the right time. So we were at the time, you know, this is all public information. We were $33 billion network of firms at the time. And we were doing less than a billion dollars, raise the partner that all the dogs are looking at, you’re looking at it really gonna be like, what was going on there? Exactly. But you know, remember, ey had spun off its consulting business back in the early aughts. And they’ll they built it back. Because we audit a lot of technology companies at EY. A lot of people thought, well, it doesn’t make sense to try to do alliances, because we audit, you know, many, the hyper scalars, Amazon and Google and by the way, I’m glad we do. Yeah. It’s an important role to play. Absolutely. You know, I’m not one of those people that says, Well, you know, audits, something we shouldn’t do, which is absolutely, it’s a privilege to be able to do audits, for sure. We’re very fortunate that we’ve been given that licence. And so what did though is gave me a very short

Vince Menzione  08:46

palette to work with. Who was left at hyperscalers. That boy, I just so I,

Greg Sarafin  08:51

we have we have Microsoft? Yeah. And the hyperscalers and we have sap in the Europese. We have Dell for the you know, the mega tech OEM platforms. And we have ServiceNow for so if you if you think about it, right. The ones we don’t happen to audit historically turned out to be the category leaders and each of their sandwich the unicorns in many ways, right? Right. Right. So we so it turned out that we had the best of both worlds, we were providing assurance services to some of the most important companies on the planet. But we also still got to work with some of the other most important companies in planning, they happen to be number one in their position. So it actually kind of really worked out well.

Vince Menzione  09:33

So tell me about your organisation that we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording the size of the organisation, how are you organised for success? Because you’ve got this massive organisation global organisation, how do you aggregate the function and the team?

Greg Sarafin  09:49

Yeah, so first of all, you’re you came from a company that was pretty massive and complicated, too. So I

Vince Menzione  09:55

talked about McKenzie with you, McKinsey.

Greg Sarafin  09:59

So Yeah, I mean, for those that don’t know, Big Four, because of of regulation are their partnerships. They can’t be corporations, and they

Vince Menzione  10:11

is a by country?

Greg Sarafin  10:12

Is that how it works? Essentially by country? That’s right. Each country has its own franchise. So you can think of it that way. And then there’s a central entity in our case, ey global that owns EY brand, facilitates the UI network does the shared services for the member firms, but each member firm is still an independent operating entity. Yeah. So when you think about that, from the perspective of you just got a global roll, and you’re supposed to make things happen across 160 member firms? It’s like, how’s that gonna work? It was one of the early things I started to think about, like, how am I going to do that a huge influence strategy. And there’s, there’s a lot of influence, of course, I mean, even in regular top down corporation, you still have got to get people to care enough to allocate their resource to do something for the greater good isn’t necessarily what they’re doing today. Right? There’s always a change management element to any thing that disrupts what people do, in terms of their muscle memories. So there was certainly a lot of change management. But also we thought about it in a very structured way. So I’m, uh, those people that know me and work with me, I’m, I’m very, I’m like an operating partner. Okay. I’m very operational in how I think and engineering background. Exactly. I’m an engineering background. You know, I was telling you before the cast, you know, my, my degree, I had to build a PC from scratch on a wire wrap on a motherboard, you know, the chips and everything right. I had to programme the operating system, the monitor the operating system. I did a Pascal compiler there. I dated myself again. Wow, how it was less than anybody working past? Yeah. Oh, my Lord. So it was one of the top languages when I went to school. It was it was a great it was an education language, right? Yes. And so anyway, so I’m a hardcore engineer. And also, I’m just a connector right i, to me, I see the world about how things connect. Nice. And so that’s, that’s sort of the that’s sort of the way I structure and go after things. And so I joke with people, I went from engineering because, you know, first 20 years of my career, I was doing actual implementations, right? Where there was building Novell networks and infrastructure clients, where they’re doing custom software for them. Right. I had management. Yeah, I did project delivery, certainly. So but always tech related. And then I just said, you know, I can do the same thing and go to market. Very interesting. So I have thought about go to market for 20 years, because that’s I flipped to the go to market side. And I’ve used my engineering thinking, say, how would I engineer the outcome? That would, would be the ideal outcome, working from the client back. So many organisations they worked with, they work, they work their go to market from the inside out, we’ve got all these products and services we need to sell, huh? All right, we got all these clients out here will segment will like, what? Like, okay, that that works. But what if you flipped it? What if you said, Okay, what am I clients need, not necessarily what I have in my toolbox, but what do they need? That is what is in my toolbox actually helps them get to. Okay, now that I’m not, I understand what they actually need. Okay, maybe my toolbox doesn’t have everything they need. But if I think about how I can bring my tools plus the tools of others and orchestrate that outcome for the client, maybe that will get me a higher share of wallet as any given market. And it turns out, that’s been true for 20 years and different roles that I’ve had. And so the end was that mindset, actually, plus a very operational that that’s what we brought to how we thought about partnering. It was It wasn’t sell what you got, or hey, I’ll sell your stuff. You sell my stuff. It was like what a client’s need, what are they trying to get to? And how can what we have and maybe some other people have helped orchestrate that. To create that that value that doesn’t exist anywhere

Vince Menzione  14:10

like this is like a symbol I can’t wait to dive in more on this conversation because connector and orchestrator to two verbs that come to mind for me as well. And so I love your back. We’re gonna peel back here on how you how you did this across the Absolutely, yeah. And in fact you’ve been talking about, we had Jay McBain here just download Jay like two weeks ago. And you know, he’s he’s coined this term decade of the ecosystem. Yes, I’m aware. But you’ve been talking about ecosystem I think even longer than Jay is I think someone told me that they saw you speak about ecosystem maybe maybe four or five years ago. In fact, actually

Greg Sarafin  14:44

I started posting with the hashtag ecosystem value realised in 2018. Wow. And, and part of that was because I was trying to reposition in a way from Alliance Right, because the lines first of all is well as worse. It has a lot of baggage. Yeah, I don’t like alliances. I don’t like it either. Second of all, it’s not an alliance. It’s a it’s a multi party value creating, creating enterprise. It’s partnership, right. It’s partnerships to create value. Right? You can have an alliance agreement, which is a type of a contract, it’s not, you know, so I rebranded to partner EPA system, six years ago, and then I even wrote an article back in 20, about seven business models, right? Because Because partnering is not just one business model, right? There’s a lot of different ways to partner marketplaces are huge way to partner. And you’re very familiar with that. But then, you know, you also have what we call the symbiotic model, which is the joint go to market cosell motions that the tech companies tend to do with the big S eyes. And you know, I will take you through all seven. But you get the point, right? I do. I do. And so I tried to get away from alliances and more to what it was about, which was, we have this ecosystem of partners that we can orchestrate to create value for our clients. That was what I was trying to reposition it to the outcomes to the outcome, because everybody why when I first came in the role when I would talk to them, it’s like, we don’t sell software. I’m like, Yeah, we’re not asking you to sell software. That’s, that’s not our business model. There are plenty companies that sell software, right, their channel partners to Microsoft, we’re not a channel partner to Microsoft. We are a strategic partner to Microsoft, we create strategic value for our clients that we can’t create alone, nor can Microsoft read alone. But together we can. And so it was that constant repositioning of it and reminding people that look, at the end of the day, what I say doesn’t matter. Ask Your Client, what they want. Look at where your clients are spending money today. They’re spending money predominantly with partners that orchestrate outcomes for them. Yes. That’s what they’re spending the money, right? That’s right. So forget me, I don’t matter. Pay attention to your client over there. That’s that’s who matters. So it’s

Vince Menzione  17:01

become a movement, right? I talked to Jay about the decade of the ecosystem and this ecosystem movement. There’s a lot of debate around it. Is it a ecosystem is a multiple ecosystems? How do you think through that?

Greg Sarafin  17:12

So I realised about three years and I realised, oh, darn. ecosystem is one of those words where first of all, a lot of people think about the ecosystem of the ocean, right? Or the ecosystem of the desert, because most people when they first heard that word, it was a middle school. Yeah, in science class. It’s just kind of icky biology. Remember, exactly. It’s like a biology where it’s so right away. It’s got some baggage. And then, like you said, you know, some people use the word to mean like an industry ecosystem, like all the participants in the value chain of health care. Yes. Right. Yes. Others use it more like, here’s the set of partners who we work with, specifically. Right? Right. And then there are other variations of us, too. So we call it a partner ecosystem, to say these are our partners, and there’s a bunch of them. And that is a tremendous resource for us to draw upon to figure out new ways of creating value for clients. And

Vince Menzione  18:10

I would argue that your ecosystem is a subset of the total ecosystem in tech.

Greg Sarafin  18:16

Oh, a very small subset of the ecosystem and tech, its massive. Yeah,

Vince Menzione  18:21

I think about I always refer to the Bill Gates moment. And the fact that when he came down here to Boca Raton in 1981, and signed the agreement with IBM, he licenced the software didn’t sell it, right? Remember the old days. So hardware and software were intertwined, it was still sold directly? Yep, sometimes through an agent. But that created this massive movement. And with the work you did with Novell was in a great example, all these other all this other value, got it add to the chain, and we took PCs, and we took everything out, and then ultimately to the cloud. But if you look, to me, it’s like it’s the same ecosystem of all these companies Ultra. This $5 trillion industry that we have

Greg Sarafin  18:57

maybe like the technology ecosystem around the world is creating is unlocking GDP growth. I mean, how much of our GDP growth is really because of these tech companies?

Vince Menzione  19:06

What would you say this? We have a rough number on it.

Greg Sarafin  19:09

I don’t know, I’m not an economist. I don’t have data. But I mean, just, you know, just looking at it, looking at the value our customers are creating for their customers, and thus the their contribution to GDP. Tac is probably more than 50% of the engine of GDP now and most at least, certainly in many markets. And I think it’s growing, especially with the new AI, new ai ai stack and, and we’re just at the beginning of that journey. It’s crazy where that’s going Satya

Vince Menzione  19:40

says $4 trillion in value creation through AI.

Greg Sarafin  19:45

Yeah, and that’s probably on the low as early definitely.

Vince Menzione  19:48

I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. You It has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out. So let’s let’s shift back into UI for a second because I have this maybe it’s a false notion about the big S eyes, the big global s eyes, that they they’re, they’re hired because of that one throat to choke right there, the organisation that comes in, in the I call it almost the old model, but you think about it differently. Yeah, I was hoping you could kinda absolutely share your point of view on it, you

Greg Sarafin  21:06

know, so first of all, there is value in what I’ll call a, you know, a base CIT GSI. Right? So maybe you’re not hiring them to help you drive a transformation, the finance function, you just want them to put it in the plumbing and the engine of SAP, right? You want to do your SAP upgrade, because that’s one point on that big project. Like, yeah, exactly. And you know, that they have both the, you know, the talent arbitrage and the expertise to do these projects better than you will, or you’re gonna go out and hire a bunch of people are experts in implementing SAP, and then we’re gonna fire them all now. Exactly. So these, these, these organisations exist for a reason. And the ones that are good at it also realised something a long time ago, which is, most most large technical implementation projects don’t fail because of the people turning the wrenches. They, they fail because the business people, the client don’t do what they said they right do, right? That’s the truth. And so they got very good at, you know, muscling clients to do the right thing. Right, they use change orders and other mechanisms to do it. But so and there’s always been this sort of dance, right. And we certainly participate in that. But we’re unlikely as a big four, to compete against a pure GSI on array per hour. That’s, that’s not a, that’s not a smart thing for us to do. And we plan on going away many, and it’s not a business model, our business model is to start with the finance function and the CFO to say, what is the future of finance in the insurance industry or in the telco industry, or whatever the industry is, so bring that perspective to the CFO to say this is, here’s what here’s the regulatory agenda you may be faced with, here’s what AI is now going to do, like we bring them sort of this is this is where your function needs to go next, right in order to help be stewards of the business to help the business navigate all this change. And for you to do that your current technology platform is not going to get you there, nor your current business processes, or maybe even your functional alignment. So

Vince Menzione  23:12

this is the business process reengineering. This is the business.

Greg Sarafin  23:15

Yeah, in even the business function reengineering. In some cases, it’s even above process, but processes, certainly part of it. And then there’s the change management to get from your current state your future state. And then part of it to me part of the change management is swapping out the tech. Yeah, yeah, right. And a lot of go, it’s not always, it’s not the last piece, and in many respects, it’s the enabling piece. But if they don’t do the work to change the, if they put in this great new S for HANA implementation, and then they just keep using it the same way they’re using ECC, or three, what did they what did they crave as return on shareholder equity? They didn’t, they didn’t know anything up there. So that’s why we always, like I said, we focus on what’s the outcome you’re trying to get even helping you define what that outcome is? What’s the change journey you need to take help you take that change journey, and part of that is also swapping out the tech. Yeah. So

Vince Menzione  24:09

this is where ecosystem comes in for you, right? Because I think ecosystem is a clump of a bunch of companies surrounding a customer, and then pulling through. But in your case, you’re coming in doing business processes, function reengineering. And then you’re saying, Okay, this is the cadre of tools or solutions that you need to in order to drive what we needed the outcome,

Greg Sarafin  24:32

and it’s never one thing, it’s never just SAP. You still need the host that SAP somewhere and hyper scalar. And if you’re hosting in a hyper scalar, how can you get some leverage from the tools in their stack, right to bring leverage to the enablement of the functions, right? And then no platform has 100% of the functionality needed for any one function. So do you you bring a black line and for some reason ions in the financial clothes processes? Or do you bring in UiPath for for automating some of the more mundane tasks that are performed by accounting personnel or, or right, so, you you now we still have sales motions, we still partner with SAP, we still ultimately when we, when we take a client on this journey, we’re best served if we’re bringing SAP with us on that journey with the client and any other participants. And it’s where I go to the orchestrator, right? So if we were just a regular GSI, we would be okay, we’ve you know, we’re gonna partner with SCP, we’re gonna attack all these different clients and go through a sales motion to try to win some percentage of them. And then we’re gonna just wrench turn SAP and all these jobs, right? And that’s a bilateral sales motion. And it’s about how you need to implement it, where the best implement it. And here we are. And again, there’s clients that want to consume that way. Sure. But for us, it’s different we what’s the journey? And then who are the partners that we’re bringing, that we work with, to get you there faster, safer, better. But

Vince Menzione  26:11

I think I hear in what you’re describing on your approach is more of a mindset change. You talk about orchestrator, you talk about collaboration, as opposed to prime sub roles that you see often in the AI world. Yeah, we

Greg Sarafin  26:29

don’t we prime sub is a commercial construct that occasionally a client will insist upon. But our preference is like you have a relationship with your technology vendor way longer than you have a relationship with your SI will page in and out over the course of time, you’re gonna use SAP consistently, every year, year over year, right. So those are, that’s a different type of relationship. So you should have a commercial relationship with SAP and a commercial relationship with EY. But don’t put them on one paper unless you really have to, or need to got it. So we don’t, but we will prime sub if a client insists that we do. And then we also don’t use the word channel. Yeah, you know, channel, tell me why you don’t use it. Because channel is just an alternative cost of sales. Yeah. Transactional as well? Well, it’s more, it’s yes, it is transactional. But at the end of the day, to me, you use channel two to have a more efficient cost of sales, either because it’s a geography you don’t want to build a field sales office in, or it’s a particular segment of the market, that’s too expensive for your field sales to go after, to reach. So to me, it’s generally a surface area play. And instead of in your cost of sales, instead of it being a commission that you pay to your sellers, its margin that you’re sharing with the channel partner. So to me, that is a completely different thing that is that is sale selling through an alternate sales model. We’re creating value right through the orchestration, or the orchestration and the CO investment, because we also will often invest with our partners to create unique assets and tools that accelerate that client’s journey that they can’t get from another combination of partners. So Greg, you’ve been a thought leader in this ecosystem movement, as we refer to it now, like, why is it a strategic imperative? And

Vince Menzione  28:27

what would you say to other s eyes or other organisations similar to EY analogous to EY, what they need to go do better differently?

Greg Sarafin  28:35

So I’m gonna take it up from the world of tech and SI, because I believe this movement is much bigger than that. I know that because there’s a natural affinity for tech and and consultancies, you partner for four decades now, if you think about it, and that Bill Gates moment, right, exactly. And so and the reason for that is that clients, if they just adopt technology, and they don’t get business value, or value realisation, I think is the word we typically use, right? What was the point of spending the money on technology, so you, you you hire consultants to aid make sure you don’t screw up the implementation, because that’s easy enough to do and never happened? It’s never happens. And then, but more importantly, hopefully, you then adopt it and use it for a business purpose that return shareholder value, client value, employee value, stakeholder value, right, right. You want value creation from having deployed capital on op X to put in this deck. And so there’s been a natural synergy, but there are partnering models all over like every industry has its version of partnering models, they’re just very different by industry. Right? If you look at consumer products, they do a lot of partnerships. They do a lot of cross licencing. They do co branding, right? They do supply chain sharing, or they do a lot of things that are partnering models that are value creative to their end customer But don’t look like the way that we partner between si and tech companies automotive, automotive was massive partner at massive partner yellers tech dealer. Exactly. Now you’re getting to play in my in my, that’s another partnership with Bose stereo Yeah, Brembo brakes, you ever Carosi of BorgWarner transmission? Right? Those are all those were all supply relationships that turned into value relationships, and even co brand relationships in some cases, right? So let’s take it up a level. The reason it’s the decade of ecosystem is because partnering is more capital efficient, in many value vectors, the path to getting to a particular outcome for a client, if you try to do it within the four walls of your company, you probably don’t have enough capital or time to get there, you are speaking my language. So you need to combine your capital. And when I say capital, I mean it broadly. I don’t just mean money, resources, resources, IP, access to customers access to supply, how big is that today, that’s your route to supply is one of the most highly valued data is another highly valuable one, especially with AI, right? So to me, the reason it is the decade of echo system isn’t because what we’re doing in our little world of SI and tech, it is because Tech has taken down the barrier to interoperability between companies. I love that. And AI takes it down even further. You can in cloud and you again, you come from a very famous cloud company, right? How much value did Microsoft cloud on lock, not because people move their workload from a data centre to the cloud, it turns out that might actually be more expensive. The value unlock, is when multiple companies can form these really valuable value propositions, for no cost of interrupting the marketplace is driving it even further, the marketplace creates an accelerant seamless. So to me, the biggest thing that Microsoft is doing economically and its peers is it’s unlocking the ability for companies to pull capital together and new value creation models. And that is why it is the decade of echo system. Because and you’re gonna see this in every industry, we already are seeing it in every industry. And here’s the good news. And I dropped the mic now, if you are listening to this, and you are and you’re like me and events and others who have been banging our heads against the wall, a lot right here. Right, write it, you know, you’re into direct sales, etc. All of a sudden, you’re entering a decade, where your worth, to pharma companies and energy companies and automobiles, you’re there, they need you. Yes, because they need to try to figure out how to do this, because they don’t have what we have, which is experienced doing partner operations, partner governance, partner relationship handling, and go to market motions. So they don’t have any that experience or know, they don’t know. And the people listening to this do. And I’m telling you, more than half of you in 10 years will not be in tech or GSI.

Vince Menzione  33:21

Right? We’re gonna help the transformation of the rest of the world. Right. Yeah, I see that as well. I talked to and that is why yesterday about this very same topic. So let’s dive in here. The the talk that you gave in my event was around the CPO which were the chief partner officer new term, by the way, although I think you you’ve been exposing the benefits and the value of this. I think about your organisation, I love the talk you gave. And I also think having been on both sides, having been at the Microsoft and then in the billion dollar ISV where these things don’t necessarily happen as easily. What do you think about when you think about the chief partner Officer role, its value and where it needs to sit in an organisation?

Greg Sarafin  34:06

Yeah, so I actually flip it on its side. So I believe that for companies to pull, allocate capital, create new value vectors, and then drive go to market at scale. They need to have a partnering function. Yes, you’re speaking my language. You don’t have a partnering function, you’re not doing that function, not just a bolt on. Thank you a function, not just a bolt on. And in many companies, it’s a bolt on many. And it’s actually a go to market bolt on. That’s just not a value creation bolt on

Vince Menzione  34:42

based on where it sits in the organisation right.

Greg Sarafin  34:44

So you need a function and that function just like the finance function, or the tax function or the HR function, the supply chain function is an L zero function of the company and and it is a stored of a set of business processes. Yes.

Vince Menzione  35:04

It’s a steward of the processes say that, uh processes from hell yes. Take us through them. So,

Greg Sarafin  35:11

first of all, as you know, partnering touches every internal every other internal function in the company. That’s right. It can alter rev Rec. It can alter your tax position. It can alter your capital position. For the for the better, hopefully. It changes how you think about marketing and branding. Right now you’re co branding, multi branding. What does that Yeah, right. So

Vince Menzione  35:40

so far, you’ve touched the CFOs. Office and the CMOS office. Oh, by

Greg Sarafin 35:44

the way, if you’re partnering, you’re creating interoperability. Now you’ve created a nightmare for the CIO. Because the CIO now has got to worry about cybersecurity. Yeah, through all these other threat vectors. That’s right. Right. You’re no longer it’s no longer the it within your organisation is the it across your organisation and the partners that you’re working with? Like and I could go on every day, trust me, we’ve done this every arrow function, we didn’t get Avenue. Oh, my God, you have any avenue? Your go to market? Complete? Your product function?

Vince Menzione  36:11

Yes.

Greg Sarafin  36:12

Are you engineering a product to be complete? Or you engineering a product to be the digital core? Non back to tech? Right? Yes. Are you? Are you? Are you engineering your product to be the digital core? And then your your partner ecosystem does the last mile around it? Because as that core gets bigger, you know that it goes by the square of the radius, right? So your cost of making that too big? You can’t you don’t have the capital, right? So you can only take that core as far as you want the minimum viable core. And then you want your partner ecosystem to fill in the last mile around it. That is your ideal scenario. So your product strategy has got to be informed by your partner and go to market strategy. Right. So

Vince Menzione  36:51

is this the conversation you had at the C suite? at EY?

Greg Sarafin  36:55

Not a one. No. It doesn’t work that way. How did it work? On I haven’t even gotten to the intercompany process yet. All right. Let me let me come back to me eager. So, so So yeah, so you, you know, we won’t use this podcast to describe what all these processes are. I’m actually, I’m actually probably going to work. I’ll probably publish some of my thoughts about what these processes are in my dotage, but the point is, there are places you can go today. And you know what it was? You’re an expert in these processes, right? So you’ve got these processes that are intra company processes that affect every other function in the company. Yes, but then you have the inter company processes from hell. We talked about this before the cash, right, your old company and my company are to the largest, most complicated beasts in the world. And you know, let’s say Johnson and AMD go, Hey, guys, we want to do this thing and energy and you know, a lot of like, and it takes them 30 seconds, you know, stroke of the pan, we’re gonna go do this, and then it gets it then who’s to get handed to you, it gets handed the partner organisations, for us to then try to figure out oh, my God, there’s, there’s 12 corporate functions, or, you know, there’s 12 entities within Microsoft and 32 within EY. And then like, Oh, my Lord, you need a calculator to figure it out sometimes. Yeah. Right. So I joke a little bit, but you know, just how hard that is to

Vince Menzione  38:23

do. And I call it maniacal focus, right, you get from the kumbaya you get from the vision. Oh, yeah. Like that trickle down to the OKRs. And then you got to get into execution. Yeah.

Greg Sarafin  38:32

And the execution this, too. That’s a lot. Right, which is why you only do big motions. Yes, you do that, right. Because, right, because the cost of sales is is too high otherwise, right? And that’s one thing I’ll spend the organisation and multi have directions such right and easily you get, you know, my rule is you with any partner, what are the five motions that matter that are gonna get you to 80% of your value creation revenue, and just focus on those because each motion has a hurdle cost is a very large hurdle cost. And so you can’t spin up 20 of them.

Vince Menzione  39:04

So what is your guidance? Other organisations this is a this by the way, this is considered a new role, right? There are it’s you’re saying it’s the at the top level, the L zero level?

Greg Sarafin  39:14

Yeah. And it’s considered a it’s like you say every company has some form of partnering today. But it lives in it’s a bolt onto a difference. There’s a channel chief, there’s an alliances leader, there’s multiple alliances strategic supply chain lead. In the case of automotive, there might be a marketing function, that is business development and energy. Yeah, a lot of its jayvees Yes, yes. So and then there’s some there’s some businesses that are I call, you know, partner, partner native like Airbnb and Uber and all those folks, right, that just are there orchestrators, their value orchestrators. And they bring together a bunch of participants to trade and receive value for which they take their piece. Yes. So And do they have partnering functions? I don’t? I don’t know. Are they just partnering entities?

Vince Menzione  40:04

Yeah, I think they’re just partnering, partnering, they’re almost like Mark, they’re marketplaces in many respects. So yeah, those those models I would agree with, those are markup, I look at Microsoft, or Amazon’s marketplace, or Google’s marketplace right now, I’d say it’s more analogous to that,

Greg Sarafin 40:16

I would agree. So. So partnering is, is that every company, it’s a small p partnering, it’s not big P partnering, right, it’s not an L zero function. And you’re not allowing all the different types of partnering mechanisms, if you just keep small p partnering, and you’re never gonna be able to scale it, if you’re small p partnering, if you really want to scale, you’re gonna have to, you’re gonna have to raise it to an L zero function. And then L zero functions have an officer that are accountable to the board and the CEO for the efficacious execution of that function and contribution to key KPIs of the company.

Vince Menzione  40:56

And how do you get there? Like, what is that function? What does that function look like? And what are the attributes of that function?

Greg Sarafin 41:02

So that function has a number of layers to it. So there is a governance layer. And the governance is in part a governance into the capital allocation process. So how are we allocating our capital? And let’s not think about capital allocation as just deploying our resources? I call it I had this saying I use I say, you know, companies need to make a pivot from the, the economics of scarcity. The Economics of abundance. Mindset, it is a mindset. It’s very much a mindset. And that mindset can have it can be night and day. Yes. The the impact of which side of that mindset you fall on, because if you’re in the economics of scarcity, it’s like, me, me, me, my, here’s my capital, my people, my resources, I’m going to deploy them as effectively as I can to outmuscle my competition. That’s right. That’s the old mindset is the old mindset. Yeah. Right. Whereas the new mindset is, I have asset value and asset classes. I have all these other entities out there who I can work with who also has asset value in asset classes. And I’ve got customers out here who I’ve permission to help on a particular to a particular outcome. That’s right. Jeff Bezos understood that better than anybody he didn’t. He did. He did. Right. And Satya Nadella and Satya Nadella to the to the great towers of CEOs in history, right. So they understood that. And so both of those companies are masters at delivering the outcomes that we want, either in our personal lives or professional lives, we’re both and not just saying, what are what of my assets am I going to deploy? How am I going to orchestrate a lot of different assets to get you to that outcome? Yes. So right away, you have to govern decisions about capital allocation, about who you partner with and don’t partner with because here’s another one for you. More is not more know. In channel even in channel ation, right? More is dilution. Yeah, less is more. That’s right. Who are you strategics should be very few of those. And then who are your specifics? The ones that your partner is because they have a very specific thing. It’s not strategic as relationship overall, but you still need that asset class. And they’re the most logical provider that asset class.

Vince Menzione  43:35

You’re taking us through a masterclass. By the way, just say, if you didn’t know this already, I’m partnering. You’re, you’re touching so many faces. I love this. It’s,

Greg Sarafin  43:44

we all live it. But we haven’t elevated it to the relevance to the C suite. Yes. And

the decisions get made. And it has to be at the C suite level,

Greg Sarafin  43:55

it does basic. ever go back to what I said at the beginning. Don’t listen to what I say. Listen to what clients say. And look at what people buy, again, people in their personal lives, people in their roles as corporate buyers of some service or product. They want the outcome, but

Vince Menzione  44:14

it doesn’t sit there now. So how do we overcome it?

Greg Sarafin  44:20

So it does sit there in some instances, but I but I agree it’s fewer than fewer than it should be by a longshot. So

Vince Menzione  44:27

how do we do that?

Greg Sarafin 44:30

Well, I think it starts with First of all, I think it will happen. And this one I think will happen. It was the discussion we just had a few minutes ago, as companies realised, oh my God, I need to have an abundance, economics mindset. And I need to be able to think about capital allocation and value creation broader than just what I have within my four walls. They will realise maybe some faster than others that this is no longer a bolt on as you said earlier right there. is a core competency of the enterprise from decision making, all the way down to execution? And I think you’re seeing the secular trend now. There are there are more chief partner officers named every day

Vince Menzione  45:18

through, I just want to make sure that that is where it needs to sit, or is it just in title only, that’s the other

Greg Sarafin  45:23

piece I’d like so many chief partner officers are actually chief channel officers, or they are Chief Business Development Officers, or they are whatever they are, right, they are not actually running an L zero function of the company. They’re not in the C suite discussions. And again, I think it will get there. And I think economics will drive it there. Yeah. It’s just can we help ourselves by elevating this conversation? Right. And, and in, frankly, also elevating the understanding of what a partner function does? Because it is the of all the like, now if you ask the average person, they actually understand the difference between FPN A, and you know, basic accounting? No, they probably don’t know. Right? Or indirect tax from direct? No, they don’t. Yeah, for some reason, partnering doesn’t get that break. It’s like, we don’t know what you do. We don’t trust you. Why are you spending all that money? Where’s it going? Right, the least understood function is terrible. It’s just, I feel sorry for everybody listening right now. I feel sorry for myself. That actually, I don’t feel sorry for myself, because, well, how

Vince Menzione  46:37

did you get? How did you get from point A to point B, maybe that helps in you know, form, it starts

Greg Sarafin  46:42

with measurement. I realised very early on that. Yep. We all know people are belief driven. And so if I’m, if I’m in a system of belief that says, We shouldn’t be partnering, we can’t partner. Partnering doesn’t matter. And if we do partner is too expensive, we’re not getting the value, right? All those negative things. And we’re all familiar with those sorts of attitudes that are companies. So the first thing you need to do is say, Okay, this is why we partner, we owe partner because we’re trying to make money from Microsoft, right? Wanting to partner because we’re trying to make more money for ourselves necessarily. We’re partnering so we’re relevant to our clients. So you start there, right? You keep going guys, look at the market. Look at the secular trends in the market. This is happening. Look at the most valuable companies on the planet, and then go down a layer and say, Why are they most valuable? Why is Microsoft most valuable company on the planet? Because it unlocks capital value creation,

Vince Menzione  47:49

growth mindset,

Greg Sarafin  47:53

growth mindset.

Vince Menzione  47:54

I go back to this there were the bomber days. Scarcity Mindset. Satie comes in the first thing we do is we all get the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. First thing he did really changed the mindset of the organisation. Last year, a masterclass, right, you talked, we talked about valuation, right. We don’t have all the assets, we’re not going to compete in all markets. That’s how we change the mindset. We’re going to partner where we don’t have the right assets, abundance, abundance. And Sam Altman, right, open AI, what did he do? partnered with them? And then last year, he helped. I mean, he, he shepherded the he shepherded through some pretty whether it was a rocky road or turbulent water. It was there was a crazy time there for for a brief moment.

Greg Sarafin  48:43

Yes, but look how he calm those waters very quickly on them down.

Vince Menzione  48:47

It’s amazing.

Greg Sarafin  48:49

I think he liked Elon shine a storm up a little bit again. These these giants of industry, you know how they are sometimes

Vince Menzione  48:56

very, very different, characteristically,

Greg Sarafin  48:59

although both both tremendous value creators credible,

Vince Menzione  49:02

incredible growth. What about the characteristics or attributes? What would you say is the ideal attributes if you could pick them? I mean, we could point to you, potentially. But what do you think for a leader in this role? If I’m the CEO? Who should I lean on? What’s the characteristics and the type of individual that I need to bring on to my C suite? Yeah, in order to be successful in this role? So

Greg Sarafin  49:27

I think it has to be someone who has a rather a unicorn ish set of skills, not because they’re inherently that way. They’re just by dumb luck. They ended up that way, frankly. And I just it was dumb luck that I ended up that way, right? What we’re going to need to do going forward is is purposely create people where people have to curate their careers to develop this sort of unicorn or set of skills. It is a university curriculum, you could actually and certainly, you know what to call a career path that ignition, if you want to be a chief partner officer, if you want to be a CFO, you go big four, right. And then at some point, you make partner young, you come over your BS, you know, a controller or FP and a and then you work your way to CFO and like, so you know what that path and you know, the different parts of the finance function that you need to master are pretty well defined. It is and you know what it was, and you know, what all the things you have to master are within the finance function as well, you have all the different things that you need to be to be a CFO, you need to understand all of the underlying components of running finance, right, right.

Vince Menzione  50:37

Cmo the same way, right, you have to have all the disciplines of marketing,

Greg Sarafin  50:42

any any, any CXO, that has a mature function that’s repeated over and over again, in industry is going to have a very defined path, right? Instead of skills they know they need to develop in order to have the licence to hold the role. The problem is, our roles have lived as the bolt ons. So the skills we’ve developed have been within the box. That’s right, mostly sales or marketing, go to market and sales, a lot of relationship handling and no model. And then it’s a lot of complexity, navigation. Right. So you’re going to need somebody that has that, but then also is good with the capital agenda. Financial chops has financial chops has go to market shops. Yeah. Right. You have to understand how marketing function works exactly. Has product chops. Yes. So it’s a weird technical acumen, you have to understand your product, whether it’s a tech product, or it’s a farmer product, or it’s an automobile, it doesn’t matter. You have to know your product. You have to know how to make good capital decisions. You have to you have to be immensely commercial. If you if you want to do really cool orchestrated deals, you don’t just use a typical bilateral agreements that are, you know, papered over every day, right? You’re creating unique contracting mechanisms, in some cases in order to bring five partners together to do something that’s never been done before.

Vince Menzione  52:04

So creativity, orchestration skills, martial skills, are you mentioned being a connector, right part of our conversation,

Greg Sarafin 52:11

and you need to be a leader without without crossing your swim lane?

Vince Menzione  52:19

Influence strategy?

Greg Sarafin  52:20

Yeah, exactly. You need to be an influence leader. Because you don’t run the business units. That’s right. You aren’t a strategy officer of the company. You’re not CEO. You’re not, you’re not the head of sales. You’re not data product, but you need to influence all of them to bring them together to make the right capital allocation strategies, the right product fit strategies, the right go to market strategies, all those so that’s the skill set you need. And then you also need to be good operator, because these functions can be ruinously expensive, because they’re so these processes again, we’re not gonna get into the detail the processes, but when you look at the intercompany, intercompany processes, it’s brutal, absolutely brutal. So what we did in my phone, you

Vince Menzione  53:10

have to have the accountability for the financial account, and you need

Greg Sarafin  53:13

to report, here’s the cost. Here’s the cost that is related directly to selling cost the sales, the s&s GNA. And then here’s all the other costs, that’s not really s, it’s GA. But if you don’t, if you don’t do it, you don’t get the motion. That’s right. Right. And that is, you know, what we call that partner ops. Now, partner Ops is can be really expensive. So what we did is we said, look, we’re going to change partner ops to a shared service, we’re gonna move it offshore, we’re gonna put a tech stack on it, Microsoft, ServiceNow and UiPath. In our case, we’re going to automate it. And you’re not going to you’re not gonna have people doing these roles you’re gonna have you’re gonna buy services. And then we’ll have teams that serve, you know, in our case, now, about 150 relationships are being served by this, this partner ops centre, that Kelly strap in my partner obsoleted runs for us brilliantly. She’s built this thing over seven years. It’s incredible.

Vince Menzione  54:08

And they’re going across all the business partnerships within every partnership

Greg Sarafin  54:13

we have from the largest, down to the tiny, longtail ones that are important to somebody for some specific reason, are all supported. And last year, the cost of partner operations was less than 10 basis points. It’s down although revenue that we generated from the partnerships wild as well. And if I guarantee you 11 billion, was it, no, no, no, no, last year eight, and this year, closing in on 10. So like, so, first thing I say is look, I’ve separated cost of sales from indirect cost, indirect costs, were driving it to zero 10 basis points. Any questions? No. Okay, good partner ups. We’re done. Now let’s talk about the cost of sales. Okay, so, and this is the really interesting kind of So in this what I really do want to share with your audience, right,

Vince Menzione  55:01

so this is the piece that I want to dive in I know specifically for our community ultimate partner experience community on it’s like, how did you what were the steps you took? Yeah. Okay,

Greg Sarafin  55:11

so first thing I did is I said, Look,

Vince Menzione  55:16

if you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I build growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change. I’m part of the community’s special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders ISV, sellers, s eyes MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is, it’s noisy, I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard, we’re getting ready to open the doors early in a pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder, and innovator or leader, visit our website. Alright, we’re we’re getting close to time. Although we can go on all day here. I have a favourite question. I love to ask, okay, to my guests. You are hosting a dinner party. And you can cook this dinner party could be anywhere in the world, we were talking about some great locations just before. And you can invite any three guests from the present? Or the past. It’s got this amazing dinner party. We’ve talked about where you’re going to have it next to as well. Okay. Whom would you invite Greg? And why?

Greg Sarafin  56:59

That’s a great question. I’ll actually answer it with. I could go back in history, but I’ll pretend it’s not magic, right? If I was going to spend time with three people who, who I think would be fun to be with and also do challenge my thinking and just create a really engaging evening. I would probably I would probably do Bezos. I would do gamebird on the Emperor down. He’s the leader of the IAQ movement. He’s also named Beth Jeff Bezos. And he’s, I heard Lex Friedman interview him recently. And I’m like, Wow, that guy just changed how I think about things. I need to listen to that. And then there was another there was another one that now I gotta go on my phone and look it up because I’m terrible with names. But there’s another one who I also heard on elects. I guess I’m advertising extra now. Sorry.

Vince Menzione  58:06

That’s okay. As long as you listen to The Ultimate Partner and Lex Friedman, I do.

Greg Sarafin  58:13

The other one, the other guest wrote this unbelievable article in the it was nature. Last year that connects right down to quantum and particle physics, all the way through chemistry to biology to evolution and explains at the quantum physics level. How it is all connected, which no one is like it just is absolutely no one’s ever. I never understood how those things they were always so siloed to me. And here we go. Lee Cronin, Lee Cronin, Lee Cronin Cronin never heard of the person before. It was a three hour three and a half hour podcast. Wow, I listened to it twice. I never do that. Do it twice. And you know what I like? I like people that rewire my, my thinking. And those those two in particular rewire my thinking and Bezos just because his thing I mean, think about thinking, his clarity of thought, when you see him, you know, do a podcast or whatever his clarity of thought his way of seeing through complexity. And then to get people around him to like, it’s absolutely stunning. It’s absolutely so yeah, it would be those three now if he asked me a year from now, it might be different three. I mean, I could name some of these AI experts out there like the like the NYU guy who’s met with goon he’s another one I don’t know about him. Like, there’s so many awesome people out there that can really impact you, and how you think and expand your world and That’s to me. That’s what’s into me. We’re kind of doing this today, right? We’re love this. You and I are riffing off each other. We’re sharing experiences and so forth like this is this is the great thing about humanity to me. Exactly. And this is why we’re people, you know, so I told you I’m retiring from me why? Because I’ve hit the age barrier there. But I’m like, I’m the best version of me I’ve ever been. I’m not done. No.

Vince Menzione  1:00:23

I feel like more years, by the way, and I’ve got a similar age. So you know, I’m still I’m still going, I

Greg Sarafin  1:00:29

gotta love it. Because you know what? When you when you work, and you are you are gifted, the gift that we have of working with great companies, great people. Like you’re just constantly being fed oxygen. It’s great. I love it. I love it.

Vince Menzione  1:00:45

So you’ve just been an awesome guest. I love this deep dive we did today that we will deep dive in with Yeah, we’re gonna we’re gonna have a lot of fun with this. Okay, so any, let’s just because we’re in, we’re at the end of q1 of 2024. Ready, like Xander is blonde, just blowing by any last tips, advice, words of wisdom, you’d be shared so much here today, for our listeners and viewers out there that you would like to share?

Greg Sarafin  1:01:14

Yeah, I mean, like, It’s my biggest struggle. And the thing that I always work on is you’ve got to, you do need to take care of yourself professionally, you’ve got to, you got to be at least somewhat politically astute and thoughtful. But to me, if you’re creating value, and you’re not just creating value, but you’re creating new types of value in whatever function you’re in, you’re innovating to new types of value. That to me is I don’t care what you do, you’re going to be successful. And you’re going to enjoy it. Yeah. Joe so important. So so that that, to me, is what I always try to focus on is, it’s not about me, it’s about me, because it’s me, I live in me, but it’s, it’s about the value. And then it’s about bringing your teams and your stakeholders into that value creation. And then, I mean, my best moments are when I’m with my team members, and we’re discussing some idiotic thing that, you know, one of our partners is suggesting we do or as you know, I mean, but then to have that interaction, like we’re having right and just to create new and be innovative and create new ways of dealing with a different type of insanity is to me My favourite thing to do. And I, I have a great team that I do that with every day, and we just have a lot. We have a lot of fun. I love

Vince Menzione  1:02:40

hearing that. Bringing him along on the value creation journey.

Greg Sarafin  1:02:45

We’re all in. We’re all doing it. We’re all we’re all leading in.

Vince Menzione  1:02:48

Greg, I want to thank you again. You’ve been awesome. Just been great to spend time with you. And fun. Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. And I’ll come back anytime right here. Look at this scenery back here for dip later. Awesome. Thank you for watching and listening The Ultimate Partner with our amazing guest, Greg Serafin. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner online and Ultimate Partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feature amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partners

Welcome to an exciting new episode of the Ultimate Partner. Today, we dive deep into a topic we have not covered, Modern Selling and the Buyer’s Journey, with special guest Brandon Lee, the Founder of Fist Bump and the Co-Host of Mastering Modern Marketing.

In this engaging discussion, Brandon shares his experience navigating through the oversaturated world of marketing and sales, shedding light on the importance of creating demand rather than simply capturing existing demand.

These insights are complemented by Vince’s perspective on the need for a more cohesive and effective ecosystem for builders, innovators, and leaders in various industries. Join us as we explore the evolving landscape of digital content creation, the changing buying behavior of millennials, and the crucial role of trust in the selling process. Get ready to uncover valuable strategies for leveraging platforms like LinkedIn and revolutionizing marketing and sales approaches in the digital age. 

I am thrilled to welcome you into a world that delivers unparalleled insights, best practices, and essential information to unlock your potential as a partner and propel you towards your most ambitious goals. This is a world crafted for partners like you.

Our journey began seven years ago with a podcast. Our vision is to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS.

Today, Ultimate Partner’s mission is clear and bold, “empower every individual, organization, and partner to achieve more through successful partnering.

As an Ultimate Partner Experience Member, you will unlock a growing treasure trove of resources. Dive into recordings of our events, exclusive podcast episodes, and a wealth of unique content, all designed to enhance your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and ecosystem growth. We are in our early days and expect much more to come.

As an innovator, being part of this experience is more than joining a community; it’s about integrating into an ecosystem brimming with innovation and collaboration. Here, shared experiences and insights are your gateway to progress, offering connections with peers and resources to elevate your Cloud GTM strategy. This is your platform to engage, seek support, and contribute to our collective growth.

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linkedin, companies, organisations, people, talk, partner, sellers, podcast, call, email, selling, marketing, conference, customers, sales, mindset, boca raton, work, content, team

Brandon Lee [00:00:02]

What are you doing to help your customers think about what’s coming in 6 months?

Vince Menzione [00:00:05]:

Right.

Brandon Lee [00:00:06]:

How are you helping them think about what the shifts that they should be working on? How are you bringing to them something of value that they really care about? And now it’s even worse that you got sales on one side going, where’s our MQLs? And you got marketing on the other side going, all the MQLs we send you, you guys don’t close. Pull yourself back and really think about why should your customers or your prospects, why would they want

Vince Menzione [00:00:32]:

to talk to you? Welcome back to the Ultimate Partner. I’m Vince Menzione, your host, and my mission is to empower each leader and organization to achieve their greatest results through successful partnering. We’re coming to you live from our new studios in Boca Raton, Florida in collaboration with MediaZone, And I’m so excited to bring to you not a partner leader necessarily, although he works with partner leaders, but a sales leader on a quest to empower each of us as we are all sellers and his tools and capabilities around modern selling. Brandon Lee is the CEO of FistBump and the co host of Mastering Modern Selling along with my friend and Microsoft super seller, Carson Hetty and Tom Burton. I’m so excited for this conversation as we dive in to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through modern selling. Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Brandon Lee [00:01:26]:

Thanks, Vince. I’m excited to be here. I mean, look at this. Who wouldn’t wanna be here?

Vince Menzione [00:01:29]:

Welcome to South Florida. It’s so good to have you in our new studios here in Boca Raton, Florida. God’s country.

Brandon Lee [00:01:38]:

You know, I gotta tell you, I was it never dawned on me before. Boca Raton, I know, you know, famous in Florida, but it realized I speak Spanish. And so I went, why would you call something the rat’s mouth? Yeah. So I looked it up. That was very interesting.

Vince Menzione [00:01:52]:

Yeah. It would literally I I guess a lot of ships. I like the, the pirate ships and the coral ship. The coral would eat it up. Rat’s mouth. Rat’s mouth. And then I it’s also known for something else. Right? So I’ll share with you.

Vince Menzione [00:02:04]:

Do you know what happened on August 12,

Brandon Lee [00:02:08]:

1981? Partnerships were born. Yeah. Yeah. IBM and, Microsoft. Very good. Very good.

Vince Menzione [00:02:16]:

You’ve been following along. I love it. Yeah. So that was listen to your podcast. So for people who haven’t heard this before. Right? So Bill Gates comes to Boca Raton, Florida. This is the home of the PC, or at least it was back then. Right? They’ve they’ve sold the campus.

Vince Menzione [00:02:30]:

It’s now part of FAU and literally signs an agreement with IBM to license, not sell software, which was the first which was a first at the time. It’s a big deal. It was a big deal and sparked the ecosystem, changed the model. ISVs, right, software licensed software became a thing. PCs were born. Michael Dell starts making PCs in his dorm room. Compaq is the fastest company to a $1,000,000,000. A whole ecosystem of partnerships grows from there.

Vince Menzione [00:03:01]:

So lots of companies came out out of that decision that Bill Gates had.

Vince Menzione [00:03:05]:

Yeah. Incredible. Yeah. $5,000,000,000,000 industry. So, well, this is a unique discussion today, and I’m really excited to have you. Right? We know each other through Carson Hetty. Yep. And Carson’s been a guest on the podcast.

Vince Menzione [00:03:19]:

He was been part of both my digital event and my live event. He is what I refer to as the top social seller at Microsoft. Like, he sets the bar high for sellers to understand. And you 2 are been collaborating for a while now on an incredible podcast that you do, a a LinkedIn live show and podcast. Mastering Modern Selling. Mhmm. And you also have a third partner there, Tom Burton.

Brandon Lee [00:03:46]:

Yes.

Vince Menzione [00:03:46]:

So I was hoping maybe we spend a few moments here about maybe a little bit about your background and the genesis and how we got here.

Brandon Lee [00:03:53]:

Yeah. I mean, we we were talking about it earlier. I mean, my my background it took me a while to realize what my background because, you know, we just had this big, grand word, marketing. And so, because, you know, we just had this big grand word, marketing. And so, yeah. I’ve been doing that. I, in the 90 98, I started my first company. We sold that in 2000.

Brandon Lee [00:04:15]:

I had no idea what I was doing. But built a company at a couple million in revenue. Nice. Someone wanted to buy it. I’m like, okay. And built and sold a few other companies and then played fractional CRO for a while. And in, you know, 18, 19, I started looking at LinkedIn. What’s going on? I was looking at buyer journeys changing.

Brandon Lee [00:04:35]:

I was looking at call out you know, cold outreach declining a little bit. And, like, there’s something going on here. And, that’s when I started looking at, like, what what’s what’s new? What’s modern? What’s going on in the buyer journey? You know, for me, in in 2012 was the first time I looked and said the data was that buyers are doing about 30% of their research before talking to sales. Yeah. And today, it’s almost 80% with a with I think I heard on your show too, 75 percent of millennials want digital only.

Vince Menzione [00:05:08]:

Digital only. They don’t even wanna talk to a human. So our b to b companies

Brandon Lee [00:05:14]:

Yeah. We gotta figure some stuff out quick, and there’s a lot of pain with pipeline. I was spoke to a enterprise sales leader who said, our MQLs are 0. Our pipe our SDRs had a 97% closed loss rate.

Vince Menzione [00:05:32]:

Yeah. So Nobody wants to talk to SDRs either.

Brandon Lee [00:05:35]:

And their account executives, or full cycle account executives, still had about a 36% close rate. The problem is they had no pipeline because the only way they knew how to create pipeline was the same motions the SDRs were doing.

Vince Menzione [00:05:47]:

Right.

Brandon Lee [00:05:48]:

Make calls and send emails. So companies are there there’s a lot going on.

Vince Menzione [00:05:53]:

Yeah. And one of the main reasons why we wanna have this discussion today is I find that all of the tech companies, all the partners out there that I work with, and then you’ve been working with some of these as well, they really don’t do a great job on social selling. Right? They don’t get it. They don’t even do a good job on marketing, in fact, their own products and offerings. And so with this modern marketing, this modern selling approach, I thought we would dive in a little bit here today.

Brandon Lee [00:06:20]:

Let’s do it.

Vince Menzione [00:06:21]:

I wanna talk a little bit more about LinkedIn. You and I were having a discussion earlier about LinkedIn and this evolution that we’ve all seen. Originally, it was just a place to put your resume. And I started to notice we were talking about this earlier. I started to notice the change that was happening. I’d I’d say it was around 18 that sellers were reaching out to me. I was the chief partner officer of a $1,000,000,000 ISV, and they were either reaching out to me because they were looking for their next job, or they were maybe trying to sell me their product, and they wanted to get exclusive access to me that they couldn’t get through an email. And that was the beginning of the genesis.

Vince Menzione [00:06:56]:

And then fast forward to COVID, and when I came back brought the podcast back during COVID, I noticed a shift was happening. And people were paying more attention because we were all locked down and it became a town hall at that point. Right? Would you agree? And then, I think I think we’ve seen the tectonic shifts even more so since then. This evolution is happening even more rapidly. Satya Nadella says 7 years of transformation in 7 months. And so that acceleration just happened through COVID, and our lives have never really quite been the same since then. Would you agree?

Brandon Lee [00:07:33]:

Yeah. And you and I were talking. There a lot of things I’d love to respond to there. So let me see if we can do this one at a time. But, you know, we were talking before we recorded in in 2020. And I think it was about May of 2020. I had a CMO come on my show. This was pre before Carson and Tom and I had Master of Modern Selling.

Brandon Lee [00:07:52]:

I had a show called Digital Influence. And I was just trying to figure out, like, how are we building our influence, our relationships, our network through these digital channels? And I had a a CMO of a company come on, and I can’t remember the exact topic, but it was like, LinkedIn’s getting personal. And she came on, and I said, so you wrote a post the other day that LinkedIn is becoming personal. What do you mean by that? And she goes, personal content is, like, kicking butt on LinkedIn right now.

Vince Menzione [00:08:21]:

Yeah. And I

Brandon Lee [00:08:22]:

said, well, let’s talk about it. And and what we’ve seen is this transformation. And, you know, COVID accelerated for sure. The our culture, our environment now, the work from home, and people don’t wanna go back to the office. And, you know, budgets got tight. We’ve we’ve we’ve had a little bit of headwinds on the financial markets. So budgets are down. People aren’t on as many planes.

Brandon Lee [00:08:44]:

They’re not going as many hotels. They’re not taking clients out to dinner as much. All that stuff’s being pulled back. So what do we do? Right. And we just said the SDR model’s not working. Nobody wants to talk to an

Vince Menzione [00:08:55]:

SDR.

Brandon Lee [00:08:56]:

Nope. And I like to ask this question, especially with C Suite out there. Because C Suite, you know, you said 2 words that I don’t like to use very often. Social selling well, 2 phrases. Social selling or LinkedIn. I don’t like saying them because as soon as people hear social selling, they get these preconceived notions of what it is, and they go, oh, have you ever seen my social selling suck shirt?

Vince Menzione [00:09:17]:

No. Yeah. But tell me what people think it is from your perspective.

Brandon Lee [00:09:20]:

I don’t know. It’s they think it is what they think it is.

Vince Menzione [00:09:24]:

Interesting. So they have preconceived notions about

Brandon Lee [00:09:27]:

what that is. And because it could be Yeah. It’s well, I’m not looking for a job. I mean, I’ve a friend, Mick, who’s a he’s a sales trainer, LinkedIn guy. I see I hate saying the word, but LinkedIn guy in Belgium. And he was a guest on our show a few weeks ago or a month or so ago, and he said he went in this room. He was asked to speak in a CEO roundtable for the day, and he got 30 minutes. And he starts talking, and guy raises his hand.

Brandon Lee [00:09:52]:

He says, None of us are looking for jobs. Why are you talking to us about LinkedIn?

Vince Menzione [00:09:57]:

Wow.

Brandon Lee [00:09:57]:

Wow. Right? So if you say LinkedIn and that’s their mindset, why in the world would they wanna talk to me?

Vince Menzione [00:10:03]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:10:04]:

And we talk about creating qualified pipeline and growing your revenues, but there’s total disconnect. So social selling, LinkedIn, but, LinkedIn is evolving. LinkedIn became a it’s it’s a professional network.

Vince Menzione [00:10:23]:

Yes.

Brandon Lee [00:10:23]:

The problem is we held on to professional, and we forgot about networking. Yeah. And, you know, we had Facebook at the time. When LinkedIn, Facebook all started to come on, it was like Facebook was for personal and LinkedIn was for professional. But the problem with that mindset was, and it blows me away, is that when was business ever purely professional?

Vince Menzione [00:10:45]:

Never.

Brandon Lee [00:10:46]:

Never.

Vince Menzione [00:10:46]:

Never.

Brandon Lee [00:10:47]:

I mean, we take people out to dinner. We take them out to lunch.

Vince Menzione [00:10:50]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:10:50]:

We we get tickets to the ball game. We go golfing. Right? Corporations have these massive budgets for entertainment. Right? You you sponsor professional golf. Why? To bring your clients to these amazing events.

Vince Menzione [00:11:06]:

Build relationships.

Brandon Lee [00:11:07]:

Build relationships. And for some reason, we looked at LinkedIn and we’re like, I’m gonna hide behind my resume.

Vince Menzione [00:11:14]:

Or I’m gonna put my my sell sheet out there. I’m gonna Or or a link to my website.

Brandon Lee [00:11:18]:

I’m gonna publish my brochures.

Vince Menzione [00:11:20]:

My brochures.

Brandon Lee [00:11:21]:

Because, you know, when you meet somebody, you’re at a you’re at a trade you’re at a conference, trade show, an event, and you look over and somebody’s got their lanyard, they got their name. I look at, oh, Vince Benzion. Oh, I was like, oh, I wanna meet him. I what I do, oh, he’s standing in line at star I’m gonna go get behind him in Starbucks line. I’m gonna get up to him. I’m gonna pull out my brochure, and I’m gonna stick it in your face and go, Vince, do you have time

Vince Menzione [00:11:42]:

for a demo? Never. Never. Never.

Brandon Lee [00:11:46]:

But yet in this digital world of LinkedIn, that’s totally okay. That’s acceptable. And it’s stupid. It’s ridiculous Yeah. Because there there’s actually real human beings on the

Vince Menzione [00:11:56]:

other side. That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:11:57]:

And get this. They act like human beings. Yep. Which means when you throw your brochure in their face, unless they’re currently in market, which in any industry, the average is 1 to 3%, they might be in market. You might get lucky because you’re at the right place at the right time. And there’s there’s a little bit of fruit and that’s what keeps a lot of sales leaders going. But it worked. They hold onto a story.

Brandon Lee [00:12:21]:

3 years ago, it worked and we closed that. Yeah. But how many failures did you have in the meantime? And even worse, how bad have you screwed up your brand’s reputation because you’re just pissing people off

Vince Menzione [00:12:34]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:12:34]:

With spamming them in LinkedIn?

Vince Menzione [00:12:36]:

So I wanna go back to COVID for a moment. Okay.

Brandon Lee [00:12:39]:

Sorry. So I no.

Vince Menzione [00:12:40]:

No. No. Because no. It’s a great conversation and discourse. I wanna continue here. But I do think, I believe, I started, you know, I started back up the podcast during that time, and I was interviewing a lot of executives from the tech industry. And this change that was happening was how organizations were dealing with their people. They were dealing with their customers.

Vince Menzione [00:13:02]:

They were dealing with their partners differently because of COVID. Right. And because we were using tools like Zoom and Teams and other technologies, we were showing up in our pajamas. We were showing up with our kids in the back of the room screaming, Mommy, mommy, daddy, daddy, with our dogs and cats maybe jumping on our desk. Right? We’ve seen all of that. And so we needed we shifted, and our mindsets all shifted around. It was now okay to bring your authentic self to work, right, things you would leave behind about yourself. Yeah.

Vince Menzione [00:13:38]:

Right? How many people did you ever have work for you that you didn’t even know they had kids or didn’t know much about their family situation? We all were now in each other’s living rooms Right. Through COVID. And I think when you talk about, like the personal aspect of LinkedIn, I think that’s when the acceptability happened. Yeah. That you could bring your authentic self now to the platform, to the discussion, to the discourse. Right? What would you say about that?

Brandon Lee [00:14:03]:

Yeah. I mean, I think you’re spot on. I think that, you know, we you make me think of the times, remember, when you the rare opportunities that you had to work from home or you had to had to take a call from vacation or something and you pretended like you were in the office. Right? All of that went away. And I do believe that that one of the accelerators with COVID was so many people were isolated, and they didn’t wanna go throw all their social stuff on Facebook or Instagram.

Vince Menzione [00:14:33]:

Right.

Brandon Lee [00:14:34]:

And, and they missed their friends from the office, their colleagues, their relationships from the office. I think that was a bit of an accelerator to it. But I think the other thing was, you mentioned in in 2020, in COVID, companies were just trying to help their employees have a work from home environment. I mean, this is the first thing.

Vince Menzione [00:14:52]:

How do

Brandon Lee [00:14:52]:

we help them work from home? Let’s get them set up on Teams or Zoom or something so they could actually we could see people when we talk. They can see their customers when they talk. You know, does everybody have good internet access at home? Do they have a good chair? Like, we don’t want them sitting at the

Vince Menzione [00:15:07]:

kids’ hotel. Computer with a great camera, audio, all of those things, right? All of

Brandon Lee [00:15:11]:

that was the first 12 months of COVID, I believe. And let’s just use either easy numbers, 12 months. And then we started looking at what else. But in my opinion, the sales portion of it, the virtual selling portion of it, got kicked to the back because all these other things were important. And the belief was, when we go back to normal

Vince Menzione [00:15:34]:

Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:15:35]:

Just wait till we get back on the plane. It’s like, okay. Everything’s down. So 2020, we didn’t see revenue numbers drop too bad because we were living off pipeline from 2019. It was in the end of 21 that people started going, wait a minute. What’s going on? Yeah. What’s going on here? And then you get into 22, and there was still some some bit of hope. When we go back to normal, it’s gonna all be okay.

Brandon Lee [00:15:57]:

But a lot of people, they didn’t wanna go to shows. And their their companies were dealing with some financial challenges from COVID.

Vince Menzione [00:16:05]:

That’s right. The economic headwinds that we all saw.

Brandon Lee [00:16:08]:

And so they weren’t their budgets Yep. Weren’t there. And, I mean, I had a client of ours, and this was probably 18 months ago, he was saying, I can’t get clients to meet with me in person because they’re not working at the office and they don’t wanna get up in the morning and get ready and go to the office to have a meeting with me there. So where it used to be, I’d fly in town and be like, I got an entertainment account. Let’s go have dinner. We wanna go to a game. You wanna do this? And people would come. They’re like, no, thanks.

Vince Menzione [00:16:36]:

You know, what struck me about what you just said is pre COVID, I had relationships I had built up as a seller. And if if I was fortunate enough to still be in the same organization, I had relationships with my colleagues, my partners and my customers. And to your point, like, that sales cycle, maybe we got to a certain point where, okay, we’re not going back in the office. Now what do I do? Right. And you talk about something. I wanna tie in here. Right? You talk about LinkedIn as this always on super conference. Right? This 24 by 7 by 360 5 day a year Except

Brandon Lee [00:17:15]:

this year. 360.

Vince Menzione [00:17:17]:

66 with leap year, this super conference. So, how how what would you say about that and how how people are utilizing this super conference?

Brandon Lee [00:17:27]:

Yeah. Well, the challenge is most people aren’t using it in that way. Yeah. Right? And that’s why I like to say it because, so sort of like my t shirt that I had that said social selling sucks, I wanted to jolt people into thinking, Wait a minute. What do you mean? Aren’t you a LinkedIn type guy? I’m like, It depends on what you mean. I mean, that was a whole thing with social selling sucks. But I just want to pause people to say, What does this mean? So, the 20 fourseven, 365 is how do you act? What do you do? What is your goal when you go to a conference? And if you look at it from the corporate strategy side, we do a lot. Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:18:07]:

We we we bring a lot of people. Are you bringing your team to LinkedIn? Are you bringing them to this conference? Most most companies aren’t. No. Right? If you, you’re going to they go, this is your biggest trade show of the year, your biggest conference of the year. Do you do a sponsorship? How big is your booth? What type of footprint? I get budget, but you so you go to sponsor. Why? Well, we get to then do a breakout session. Right? We get to put our CEO on stage during a breakout session and talk about this topic that we’re experts in. Why do you do that? You want people to come and listen.

Vince Menzione [00:18:45]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:18:45]:

You want to share your expertise.

Vince Menzione [00:18:47]:

You want to build authority.

Brandon Lee [00:18:49]:

Build authority, build influence. And then people that Your team members that are at the event, what do they do? Well, they walk around to go meet the people who they want to meet. They want to go meet their customers. What do they want to do? They want to network. They want to build relationships. And just like I was saying with that silly story about you and the Starbucks line and I throw my brochure in your face

Vince Menzione [00:19:13]:

It’s so true though.

Brandon Lee [00:19:14]:

We don’t do that. We don’t even do that in our booths. Right? Somebody walks in our booth, we don’t shove our brochure right in their face. We go, how can I help you? What are you looking for? Thank you for coming to our booth. We do something other than shove the brochure in their face. But yet, in LinkedIn, so many companies bought this crap. Automation in order to do what? I I think even the words tell you it’s wrong. I’m gonna blast my audience.

Vince Menzione [00:19:40]:

Blast them. You know, we can go on. So I wanna talk let’s talk about this. Right? So many people are not getting it right. This is what you’re alluding to. Let’s talk about that.

Brandon Lee [00:19:53]:

Yeah. So when when if I can, you know, start thinking about your biggest conference, right, and how you act corporately, how you act individually. What is your goal? You go to work a room. You go to network. Okay. Let’s take that, and now let’s look through that lens at LinkedIn. If you wanna sponsor something in order to have a breakout session, Well, you can go live on LinkedIn. You can create a live weekly show, and you can bring on your customers as guests.

Brandon Lee [00:20:26]:

You could bring on your prospects as guests. You can bring in your team members that are experts in certain areas and talk about the things that you’re doing, talk about case study. You can talk about anything you want. But you create it as a live weekly show and a podcast because don’t waste your effort. If you’re going to record something, then reuse it, reuse it in other areas. So you can go live on LinkedIn and you can take the video with tools like Restream, which is one that we use. You also we’re going live on YouTube, and we go live on Facebook just because we throw it, and we go live on X.

Vince Menzione [00:20:58]:

Nice.

Brandon Lee [00:20:58]:

But LinkedIn and and YouTube are our primary categories. And then we take the audio file, and we edit it, and we publish it to our podcast. So when you’re thinking about wanna go to this conference and a lot of companies right now are talking about their big conferences, and we’ve got a partner of ours that they’re booth manufacturing, And they’re saying, our customers are coming to us, and they’re shrinking their booth size because they’re shrinking the square footage of their booth because they’ve got shrunken budgets.

Vince Menzione [00:21:28]:

Interesting. Right?

Brandon Lee [00:21:29]:

So we know and they’re and a lot of them are saying, we have to go because we can’t no show. We’ve been going for 20 years. We have to go, but we don’t have confidence in the ROI, so we’re gonna shrink our budgets for it. We’re gonna be there, but we don’t. K. So how are we looking at LinkedIn in the same way? Right? So many companies have looked at LinkedIn kinda like that show. Well, we gotta be there. So alright, everybody.

Brandon Lee [00:21:57]:

Here’s a half day seminar on how to update your profile. And maybe somebody comes in and updates your profile, and then we pat ourselves on the back, and we go, we have great profiles. And it’s the Field of Dreams mindset. Right? If we build it, they will come.

Vince Menzione [00:22:10]:

Right.

Brandon Lee [00:22:11]:

But your profile and just posting brochure type of content doesn’t make POs magically fly out of the sky and fall in your pocket. So if we just keep extending this analogy of looking at LinkedIn through that lens, we we bring our whole team there. We train our team how to have talk tracks and conversations with customers. We have strategies at the about conferences that And we invest in it. And it’s for a lot of companies, it’s their biggest pipeline builder of the year.

Vince Menzione [00:22:56]:

If you’re part of the movement, you know I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I’ve built growth through partnerships in PC, Internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organizations that are resistant to change. I’m part of the communities, special interest groups, and associations, and I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders, ISV sellers, SIs, MSPs, and other partners come together to spark the ecosystem’s growth. I’ve talked to many of you and what I continually hear is it’s noisy. I don’t know whom to listen to and where to go.

Vince Menzione [00:23:44]:

There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard. We’re getting ready to open the doors early on March 1st to pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder, an innovator, or a leader, visit our website. Your ultimate partner experience is less than a and this is why I think this is so valuable conversation, right? I am a company that has been a traditional sales and marketing organization, right? I might have a partner channel, I might have a direct sales organization. I might do co selling in the Microsoft world. Mhmm.

Vince Menzione [00:24:31]:

And I’ve been using marketing in the way that most organizations have used marketing. Right? Maybe some digital, maybe some click funnels, maybe some of that, but also, but not using LinkedIn in the right ways. Yeah. How do you talked about helping them and coaching them through that. Can you give us, like, an example of how that works?

Brandon Lee [00:24:50]:

Yeah. So first of all, like your principles, number 1 is mindset. We we gotta look at there’s a mindset shift here of of how we look at LinkedIn, or any of those modern selling. Because if you know, when I say a LinkedIn live with podcasts that goes to YouTube, that’s digital, not LinkedIn. And I’m a digital first, but not digital only guy. So if we look at some of the traditional outreach, and I’m gonna say traditional in quotes because there was, like, traditional outreach sales pre, call it, 2010. Right. And then you got this new modern traditional outreach from 2010 to, call it, 2020, which

Vince Menzione [00:25:31]:

was This is when Marketo and Eloqua and some of the technologies where marketing caught up a little bit to selling.

Brandon Lee [00:25:37]:

This is when Predictable Revenues, a book, was published in 2011 and everybody, you know, lost their and and everything moved.

Vince Menzione [00:25:45]:

That’s when we started

Brandon Lee [00:25:46]:

hiring SDRs and marketing automation. And I think that’s where blast came in and all this stuff and

Vince Menzione [00:25:53]:

And division of labor too. Right? Yep. Like, the whole division of, like, I don’t have consistency as a customer across who I’m talking to in your organization.

Brandon Lee [00:26:00]:

Right. Right. So when when that happened, a lot of the lead gen moved into marketing. And sales, quite honestly, just got pushed to the side when it came to digital and was just keep doing what you’re doing.

Vince Menzione [00:26:17]:

Yeah. Close the deals.

Brandon Lee [00:26:18]:

Yeah. Close the deals. Yeah. Go do your own outreach. Get on planes. Go do just go do your own thing. But marketing got all the focus.

Vince Menzione [00:26:25]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:26:25]:

And we created, quite honestly, culturally, we created some really crappy stuff. It worked for a while and that’s why it was good. But we saturated inboxes with email. We we saturated the voicemail. And so that you know this happened because then technology started creating to support people, us, all of us. Like, we all have spam folders now.

Vince Menzione [00:26:50]:

Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:26:51]:

I mean, when asking anybody out there, when was the last time you checked your spam folder? Because there might be something important in there.

Vince Menzione [00:26:57]:

I never check my junk folder. Right. Right. Unless somebody calls me up or sends me a note or a DM and says, check check your folder because that’s where I think it wound up. Right.

Brandon Lee [00:27:08]:

So when all of that started happening, marketing got more of this power and control, but we really hurt our buyer seller relationship. And this is why, like, Larry Levine, a good friend of mine, was selling from the heart. Yep. He comes out and just says, selling has no trust in it. Yeah. Sales has an all time low of trust. Well, it’s because we we created email automation. We’ve created phone calling automation.

Brandon Lee [00:27:38]:

Right? I I remember I I’m not gonna say the company name. It’s a big one. Everybody knows. But I love their research. But whenever I go and I download now it’s all ungated now. I don’t have to put in my name or e or any. I don’t have to I don’t have to put in my name and email. No.

Brandon Lee [00:27:54]:

I do. I have to put in my email. But it’s just my email. No phone numbers. No anything else. I download their research, and then I look at my phone. And within a minute, my phone rings. Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:28:05]:

And I always tell them, look. I am not gonna be a client. I’m never I am not a buyer for what you do. I love your research. You wanna just notate that in there so you guys don’t call me every 6 weeks Do

Vince Menzione [00:28:15]:

not call.

Brandon Lee [00:28:15]:

When I when I download your research.

Vince Menzione [00:28:17]:

Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:28:19]:

But that’s what we did. And it made buyers even more hesitant when the poor sellers were making calls or sending their own emails because the brand saturated their emails. And and and then we had, at the same time, the startup world. Right? Martech 500 or Martech 750 in 2012 is now the Martech. They they capped it at 5,000.

Vince Menzione [00:28:44]:

I think it’s over. I think it’s 8,000 or 10,000.

Brandon Lee [00:28:47]:

11,06 3

Vince Menzione [00:28:48]:

at the end of 23.

Brandon Lee [00:28:50]:

But they just stopped. At 5,000, they said, man, screw it. We’re not gonna change the name anymore.

Vince Menzione [00:28:54]:

Scott Brinker.

Brandon Lee [00:28:56]:

Yes. HubSpot. But over 11,000 companies, and what you know what they’re all doing? Landing pages, mass email, going out and buying cold databases, and emailing people, calling people, putting the SDRs on the phone, calling, calling, calling. What did we do? Buyers just said, Enough. Yeah. I’m done. And this is where the mindset around a conference. This is where we gotta take a look at creating demand versus capturing demand.

Brandon Lee [00:29:24]:

So you have those 11 1,000 companies out there and all the other ones, and they’re calling in, they’re sending in emails, they’re hammering away. They’re all fighting in this red ocean of trying to capture existing demand. And in any market, the data will say in a TAM, at any given time, 1 to 3% are currently in market.

Vince Menzione [00:29:45]:

Interesting.

Brandon Lee [00:29:46]:

All that is going into 1 to 3%. Yeah. You’re beating the crap out of your each other, your competitor. Everybody’s fighting. And then we got buyer intent software out there. Well, now we know, like, Vince may have done a Google search for this, and now you got 50 companies that are all calling you and sending your emails because your buyer intent score somewhere kicked up. And now what are you gonna do? You’re not gonna respond?

Vince Menzione [00:30:09]:

Not at all. And you talked about something that doesn’t exist in the room anymore, and that’s trust. Exactly. And I talk about the principles of partnership and saying that you have to have mutual trust in a partnership in order to have a that’s the oxygen in the room. Right. It’s also the same oxygen involved in the selling process. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a sale.

Brandon Lee [00:30:28]:

Here’s exactly. Now here’s here’s the question I love. So c suite sales leaders that are out there, here’s the question. When was the last time that you answered a call from an unknown number?

Vince Menzione [00:30:42]:

I blocked them all. When was

Brandon Lee [00:30:45]:

the last time you opened an email from somebody you didn’t know who it was from?

Vince Menzione [00:30:49]:

I’ll sometime if if it gets in through my spam filter, I might look at it, and then it’s it’s file junk, right, or block.

Brandon Lee [00:31:00]:

So the follow-up question is, if you’re answering I don’t and I don’t or a version of I don’t, maybe, kinda, sort of. Yeah. And all the companies are doing these motions. Would you actually buy from your own company based on the way your company sells? No. Would your company get your attention?

Vince Menzione [00:31:21]:

Not at all.

Brandon Lee [00:31:22]:

We wouldn’t. And yet this is our go to market. And our strategy has been post COVID, oh, let we’ll wait till it goes back to normal, and we ain’t going back to normal. No. Right? We didn’t, and we’re not. The make more phone calls. Send more emails. And now it’s even worse that you got sales on one side going, where’s our MQLs? And you got marketing on the other side going, All the MQLs we send you, you guys don’t close.

Brandon Lee [00:31:49]:

And so there’s this great division there. And all the companies are fighting for the 1 to 3 percent. And we’re sitting back going, you know, if we create demand, we stand out, and we’re in a blue ocean. And you and I were talking before and without names, but, you know, last fall, we had a customer, 400% of their qualified pipeline goal. And within 4 months, they were at a 120 percent of their annual revenue goal. We just had to change the mind shift, the mindset. We had to shift. Like, this is this is my job right here.

Brandon Lee [00:32:24]:

My job is to get people that are looking like this and go, just just look at this a little bit differently. And that’s why I come back to look at it is what do you do at a conference? How do you strategize a conference? And guess what? LinkedIn is a lot like your conference. Yeah. These digital platforms Like, they’re they’re listening to podcasts. That’s right. They’re Like, they’re they’re listening to podcasts.

Vince Menzione [00:32:52]:

That’s right. They’re there. They’re consuming from various forms. Right? Right. Like, 12% of people are listening to podcasts. 30% are on link. And so they’re on they’re on various platforms, but it all aggregates together to build your authority.

Brandon Lee [00:33:04]:

Right. They’re there. The question is, are you showing up there?

Vince Menzione [00:33:08]:

Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:33:09]:

Or is your competition showing up there? But we’re at a we’re at a time right now. All this has been coming to a head. 2024, big year. This is the year that millennials a millennial person becomes the buyer at 70 some percent of the positions. Yep. Right? They’re and millennials buy differently.

Vince Menzione [00:33:31]:

They do. They they behave differently. They’re on social.

Brandon Lee [00:33:34]:

They’re on social.

Vince Menzione [00:33:34]:

They’re scrolling. They’re real they’re looking at TikTok reels and Instagram reels. They’re watching all that content. I wanna you talked about mindset, and that brings me back to this set of principles. I talk about both the set of principles around partnering, and I talk about the dysfunctions of partnering. And I think you had mentioned that you have a set of false beliefs.

Brandon Lee [00:33:55]:

The fallacies.

Vince Menzione [00:33:56]:

The fallacies.

Brandon Lee [00:33:57]:

The CEO fallacies.

Vince Menzione [00:33:57]:

Well, and I talk about mindset really being a c suite conversation. Right? You gotta get the mindset right at the c suite and then up and down the organization. So can you talk about those fallacies?

Brandon Lee [00:34:06]:

So number 1, we we touched on it earlier, is they think of LinkedIn as a resume, a place for your resume. It’s it’s where I go when I when I look for a job. So that’s one of the biggest fallacies we need to get it out. The other piece is that anything social media is self promotion, and it’s not. It’s brand promotion.

Vince Menzione [00:34:28]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:34:29]:

We go back we go back to the conference. When your company sponsors so that you can be on stage for something, are you up there to promote you? No. You you use your CEO status to share the brand message to the industry.

Vince Menzione [00:34:47]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:34:48]:

It’s brand promotion, but it comes through your person

Vince Menzione [00:34:52]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:34:53]:

Because of the role the leadership role that you play in your company. So that big

Vince Menzione [00:34:57]:

fallacy position of authority. Position of authority. Right.

Brandon Lee [00:35:00]:

Right? So that fallacy is, you know, oh, LinkedIn, social media, anything. You’re like there’s there’s this pushback. And I get it because early social media was very self promoting. I mean, we didn’t know the word influencer until social media came about. And and a lot of influencers are very self promoting, but that’s their job structure. That’s their business structure.

Vince Menzione [00:35:25]:

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Vince Menzione [00:36:18]:

Check them out. I think it’s acceptable to be self promoting in the context of it helping the organization as well as long as it’s aligned to the brand and to the strategy.

Brandon Lee [00:36:29]:

And and that’s that’s brand promotion that comes through you. It’s it’s a slightly different mindset.

Vince Menzione [00:36:34]:

Right.

Brandon Lee [00:36:35]:

But but I believe there’s the fallacy of social media gets all gets thrown into the bucket of the the person that’s a talking head on their phone doing 10 videos a day, and they’re they’re making their money through affiliate deal, you know, opportunities. Yep.

Vince Menzione [00:36:51]:

Agree.

Brandon Lee [00:36:51]:

Right? Or the the bikini clad women on Instagram and where they’re making their money or you know, all that stuff, it’s very self promote self promote. Look at me. Look at me.

Vince Menzione [00:37:01]:

That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:37:02]:

And a lot of c suites are like, that’s not the way I got here. I didn’t get to my position by being self promoting. I’m I’m a team player. I’m a team builder. I’m about my team. So that’s one of the fallacies we just we’ve gotta address.

Vince Menzione [00:37:16]:

I see it so often too. And, you know, we talked about this earlier. Like, I do these podcasts with a lot of big corporate brands, a lot of leaders in those organizations. Some do a good job of it, like they do a good job of promoting that episode and promoting their brand and their self their personal authority and brand as well as the company’s brand. But there are others that they don’t know how to do it right. And it’s almost and it’s really, it’s challenging to me because I look to them candidly Mhmm. To take the podcast that we just did and help promote it because it helps promote my brand and reach. Right? And when they don’t do a good job of it, and it happens less time than more often, I guess, is what I would say.

Vince Menzione [00:38:00]:

But why do you think that happens? And how do you coach those organizations, the C suite leaders? What do you say to them now to help them be successful? Well,

Brandon Lee [00:38:13]:

that says a lot about the organization and the way that they’re structured, and it says the mindset that they have around all things digital. And we do that with our show too is, we gotta have you as a guest on our show. We put together this package, and there’s there’s shorts. There’s, you know, pre written social media content to help you. We’re like, you know, change anything you want. But there’s all these different shorts, here’s graphics. Here’s all of our tags and everything. And you have some guests.

Brandon Lee [00:38:39]:

They’re like, hello? Hello? Did you get did you get the email? Did you get the memo? Well, what does that say? They’re not equipped. They don’t have systems in place to take advantage of these because if they did, they would know, hey, this is great content that we could use to go tag our CEO or tag this person and do that. And, hey, let’s go tag the show and tag Brandon and Carson and Tom and take advantage of all their networks as well. And some of them just don’t do anything. So first thing for me, you know, what do I do is well, first of all, it tells me where they’re at. Tells me the structure of their business. That they’re probably one of those that are saying make more phone calls and send more emails because they don’t have any other actions that are actually helping them anyway.

Vince Menzione [00:39:27]:

So we reached the 400,000. I call it the Microsoft ecosystem, but it’s the same ecosystem that both Google and AWS care about. Right? In that ecosystem of partners, they range in size from companies that are 20 or $30,000,000,000 in revenue, like the large distributors, large reseller, transactional reseller organizations, some of the largest ISVs down to the smallest MSPs, small 1 or 2 person organizations. What would you say to them now to help them be more successful? What what are the 3 to 5 things that our listeners and viewers should be thinking about and doing differently, Brandon?

Brandon Lee [00:40:07]:

3 to 5 things. So the the first thing I wanna set it up with, companies should be looking at, are they blocking out? Are they breaking in? Like, where where are these companies at?

Vince Menzione [00:40:19]:

And what do you mean by that?

Brandon Lee [00:40:20]:

Yeah. It’s, you know, blocking out is you’re an established company. You’re one of the OGs. You’re there. And if you get a little bit arrogant and lazy, the young, aggressive, digital first organizations, they’ll be on your backside before you know it.

Vince Menzione [00:40:43]:

Right. Right? There’s They might even be copying your content.

Brandon Lee [00:40:47]:

They might even be copying your content. Yeah. Couldn’t imagine that happening.

Vince Menzione [00:40:50]:

Never happened.

Brandon Lee [00:40:51]:

Could you?

Vince Menzione [00:40:51]:

Never happened.

Brandon Lee [00:40:52]:

But, yeah, it’s in in that’s the challenge we have right now. Right? I mean, gosh, don’t even get me started on the whole expert space like anybody because you can go out there and watch some videos. Go watch YouTube. Go read the OGs content and learn it, and then start parroting it. And if you know how to engage with people on social media, you know how to be consistent, which being consistent is just showing up and doing it. Put in a system. Go go post every day and parrot someone else’s content, and you will start to get a following. Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:41:24]:

And so you ask, what are those? Number 1 is looking at your own structure and say, are we trying to capture demand or are we creating demand? And that’s gonna be a huge shift. And for most companies that have the very strong marketing and sales silos, can almost guarantee they are trying to capture demand. And there are some more companies on the marketing side that they’re trying to be more proactive around demand generation. But, honestly, it’s weak. Most of it’s weak. And there’s some people out there doing a phenomenal job, but most part, it’s pretty weak. It’s, you know, case studies. Yeah.

Brandon Lee [00:42:02]:

But, you know, case studies are still very sales y. What are you doing to help your customers think about what’s coming in 6 months?

Vince Menzione [00:42:11]:

Right. Right.

Brandon Lee [00:42:12]:

How are you helping them think about what the shifts that they should be working on? How are you bringing to them something of value that they really care about? And the biggest challenge is we use words like, you know, be a trusted advisor and add value. And if you don’t take the word serious, you start creating crap.

Vince Menzione [00:42:30]:

Yep.

Brandon Lee [00:42:30]:

You create a bunch of stuff and it doesn’t really do the job. And you go, well, we’re doing that. But but you’re not. Like, pull yourself back and really think about why should your customers or your prospects Why would they want to talk to you? Do that. And it’s not about you. It’s not about, oh, you got a new product or you got new pricing or whatever. What do they what would really, really make them go? Vince, I need to talk to you. I mean, we were talking about it.

Brandon Lee [00:43:01]:

Three messages today. Yep. I need to talk to you.

Vince Menzione [00:43:05]:

So I would layer in to these organizations. Specifically, we talk about brand and story. I would layer in those same organizations if they’re selling with and through a Microsoft and Amazon or Google. They need to be known

Brandon Lee [00:43:18]:

Mhmm.

Vince Menzione [00:43:18]:

With they need to be a shiny quarter in a bucket full of shiny quarters, again, that red ocean we talk about. And how do I stand out? Why should I, as a Microsoft seller, like a Carson Hetty

Brandon Lee [00:43:31]:

Right.

Vince Menzione [00:43:31]:

Wanna work with pay attention to me.

Brandon Lee [00:43:33]:

Yep. Right? But and that’s so if your your customer is a Microsoft seller, well, let’s focus everything on them.

Vince Menzione [00:43:40]:

Yep.

Brandon Lee [00:43:40]:

Why would they which we know the Microsoft sellers, what do they get all the time? They get partners going You got any leads? Yeah. You got any leads?

Vince Menzione [00:43:49]:

And thousands of emails and calls a week. Like, can I work with you? Can we do a deal together? Can you can you bring me into your accounts? It’s

Brandon Lee [00:43:56]:

and how’s that messaging working out for you? It’s not working out. Right. So do something different. What does that Microsoft seller need? What can you bring to them to make them want to talk with you? Exactly. So maybe let’s make this practical. Your CEO is very prolific with content. Your organization has a show and you get to invite those Microsoft sellers to come on your show as a guest and talk about the cool stuff that they’re doing. Now would they wanna come on your show? Like, you sit back and look at this company and go, okay.

Brandon Lee [00:44:32]:

Their CEO’s pretty they they create a lot of content. This is interesting. The team, all across different, departments, they’re active on LinkedIn. They’re commenting. They’re posting content. Overall, we built this brand of an organization that they’re active and they’re there.

Vince Menzione [00:44:49]:

You know, maybe they’re doing something very innovative and unique on, let’s say, AI as an example. Right?

Brandon Lee [00:44:55]:

What what’s your innovation?

Vince Menzione [00:44:56]:

What do

Brandon Lee [00:44:56]:

you guys talk about? And, you know, one of the fallacies we didn’t we didn’t get to all of them, but one of the fallacies with CEOs is I don’t have anything unique to bring to the market.

Vince Menzione [00:45:05]:

Yeah. Such a bet.

Brandon Lee [00:45:06]:

Which is totally wrong. Your your perspective is unique to the market. That’s right. And here’s the other the other thing with that is, for c suite, you wanna help all areas of your business Get active with content. It doesn’t have to be LinkedIn, but digital first because your employees are watching you. Do they see you? Are you there? Yeah. In an internal memo, it doesn’t matter. No one cares.

Brandon Lee [00:45:31]:

Nope. But are they seeing you out in public? Go back to the trade show. Go back to the conference. Sales is always going, okay. I got these important meetings, mister and miss CEO. Can you join me? Why do they do that? Because your person, your title, your presence matters.

Vince Menzione [00:45:51]:

Yep. So at the leadership level, I need to up level my game. Yes. I need to have I need to have my brand and story right. Yes. I need to tell my unique point of view is the way I would say it, maybe. Mhmm. Perspective, point of view, authority.

Vince Menzione [00:46:06]:

Yes. And then my team needs to come alongside me. Yes. And this is where, the amplification happens. Right? Yeah. And so many times, all I see is a marketing person repost a link to an event or whatever it might be with no point of view, no authority, maybe no following, by the way. They were just they’re just hired hands to go do that job, but they haven’t built their own authority, their own networks within LinkedIn.

Brandon Lee [00:46:33]:

Right. Yeah. So you get you know, I’ll get, oh, yeah. CEO. So, oh, yeah, our marketing team, they they take care of it. They’re crushing it. Yeah. They’re crushing it.

Vince Menzione [00:46:42]:

The marketing team does a great job.

Brandon Lee [00:46:44]:

And so we’ll go look and and go, okay. Well, here’s your here’s your post, and you had pick a number. You had 30 likes and one comment. So we go look at the likes, and 22 of them were your team members.

Vince Menzione [00:46:58]:

Yeah. They’re just amplifying it themselves. Right?

Brandon Lee [00:47:01]:

There’s no value in it. It’s it’s like you threw an event and no one showed up except your team members. And you’re like, we got all these people here.

Vince Menzione [00:47:08]:

We got a lot of leads.

Brandon Lee [00:47:09]:

We got a lot of people here. Right? So, yeah, as you were saying, leader led

Vince Menzione [00:47:15]:

Yep.

Brandon Lee [00:47:16]:

For sure. And then get your story right, get your systems right. When the leader starts taking something like LinkedIn serious, it actually demonstrates to the rest of the company that this is important. And then you equip them. There’s some coaching. There’s some training. There’s some guardrails that need to be put in place, but it’s gotta be part of that culture. It comes back to that mindset.

Brandon Lee [00:47:42]:

And we gotta get out of how much time does this take? Because it’s not about how much time does this take. It’s about how valuable can we make this.

Vince Menzione [00:47:52]:

How much time does it take?

Brandon Lee [00:47:54]:

Depends on what you want to accomplish. Yeah. May I ask this question? How much time does it take to make cold calls?

Vince Menzione [00:48:03]:

A lot of time. Right. A lot of time.

Brandon Lee [00:48:06]:

Is it is it is the the juice worth the squeeze?

Vince Menzione [00:48:09]:

Not not at all. Not at all.

Brandon Lee [00:48:11]:

So let’s stop looking at LinkedIn. Like, how much time does it gonna take? And let’s go, is there fruit from the activities that we’re doing? Because if I could have somebody that used LinkedIn for 8 hours a day and there was fruit and lots of it, I’d be okay with them not making cold calls anymore.

Vince Menzione [00:48:29]:

Yep. So for our viewers and listeners that wanna figure this out, what do they do next?

Brandon Lee [00:48:38]:

I think learn, observe, and this is the best way I think to do it. Who influences you? Where are you learning?

Vince Menzione [00:48:51]:

Who do you respect? Who do you Who do you respect?

Brandon Lee [00:48:54]:

And and what is it that they do? Whether it’s the company or the individual or the combination of them, what do they do that is getting your attention? Do you have podcasts that you follow? Okay. How influential is that pod? Oh, I love it. Great. Does your company have a podcast? No. Okay. So podcasts you love podcasts. Oh, yeah. I listen to them when I’m on a treadmill.

Brandon Lee [00:49:20]:

I go for a while. Love them. Great. Does your company have 1? No. Why not? You just demonstrated that

Vince Menzione [00:49:27]:

That’s right. It’s valuable.

Brandon Lee [00:49:30]:

Right? Oh, I got there’s people you know, I don’t do a whole lot on LinkedIn, but there’s a few people that I follow. Okay. Why do you follow them? I love their research. I love what their point of view. I learn a lot from them. Great. Are there people out there that want would want to learn from you? We are a customer. Great.

Brandon Lee [00:49:46]:

Are you out there on LinkedIn so they can learn from you? No. No. No. But but we have an email newsletter. Great. And our open rates are good. Are you sure? Because open rates and and, you know, don’t even we won’t talk about the cookie dying later, but, you know, your open rates don’t necessarily mean a human actually looked at it. That’s right.

Brandon Lee [00:50:07]:

It means their software looked at what your software sent them. So what are the click rates? Yeah. What are those trends? So I would say, first of all, is take that step back and say, who’s influencing you? Ask your team. Where are you learning?

Vince Menzione [00:50:23]:

And if I need some coaching, who do I call?

Brandon Lee [00:50:26]:

Well, we would love to talk to anybody. Okay. I would I didn’t I you know what? I’m not that self promoting, although I should be. But what should they do? Yeah. Look. We’re it’s get fist bumps .com and, Brandon Lee on LinkedIn. I’d love to help you, but and it’s if we can help you, I’d love to. Here’s the key thing.

Brandon Lee [00:50:45]:

Are you spending time, money, and effort, and frustration with your team trying to fight the red ocean of the 1 to 3 percent? Were you able to actually create demand? And I and I don’t say this very often. Yeah. And forgive me for being a little braggy right now. But it I had 3 messages today from people that said I needed one of them was from I think it was from my post today. She said, I need to know more about what you can what you do. When can we talk? Nice. Senior VP of a company. Another one was, so and so talked very highly of you, has tagged you in a couple of posts that they’ve read share.

Brandon Lee [00:51:25]:

Can we talk? And the other one was, okay. I think I’m ready. We need to talk.

Vince Menzione [00:51:30]:

Yep. You’re moving in down the funnel. In the funnel and down the funnel.

Brandon Lee [00:51:34]:

Well, I like to say we’re moving. We haven’t even talked about the matrix. Let’s move him in the matrix. Brandon, you have

Vince Menzione [00:51:40]:

been an amazing guest. I so enjoyed having you here in our beautiful studio. Look at this view here we have. This is incredible. Beautiful South Florida, Boca Raton, the Boca Raton moment as I refer to it. I had somebody at Microsoft say, I I don’t wanna hear Boca Raton moment anymore because I’ve heard it so many times. No. They got it again.

Vince Menzione [00:51:58]:

You were very generous to fly down today from Atlanta to be with our viewers and listeners here on The Ultimate Partner. This is such a great set of nuggets to help organizations, partner organizations that really need help here. A lot of organizations I work with, a lot of organizations that I know and admire still don’t get this right. So this has been such a great and valuable conversation for us.

Brandon Lee [00:52:25]:

I hope it helps.

Vince Menzione [00:52:26]:

Thank you, sir.

Brandon Lee [00:52:26]:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And thanks for letting me come down to Florida for the day. Yeah. Yeah. Be a part of that

Vince Menzione [00:52:31]:

to get you down here

Brandon Lee [00:52:32]:

more often. And have my my fist bump mug over there and everything.

Vince Menzione [00:52:36]:

I need a sip, actually. It’s been

Brandon Lee [00:52:38]:

a while. We’ve been talking for a while. Yeah. For for everybody, we we had about a 2 hour delay. So we’ve been talking for 2

Vince Menzione [00:52:43]:

hours before we recorded. We’ve been we’ve been for a while here. So I wanna thank you. I wanna thank each of you, our valuable friends, listeners, for joining the Ultimate Partner. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Ultimate Partner. Online at theultimatepartner.com. If you like this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a 5 star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feature amazing guests.

Vince Menzione [00:53:17]:

Also, please check out and subscribe to our new YouTube channel, Ultimate Partner. We’ll catch you next time on the Ultimate Partner.

Join Vince Menzione as he sits down with Yvonne Muench, a seasoned leader in business strategy, product management, and partner programs. Together, Vince and Yvonne delve into the transformative power of marketplaces, emphasizing the growing importance of AI adoption within the Microsoft ecosystem. Gain insights into the rewards awaiting Microsoft partners, the tangible benefits of Microsoft’s marketplace, and key strategies for success in the commercial marketplace. Discover how strategic alignment, deep audience understanding, and effective partner planning can drive marketplace growth and foster fruitful collaborations with Microsoft. Don’t miss out on this invaluable discussion on navigating the evolving landscape of partner ecosystems.

I am thrilled to welcome you into a world that delivers unparalleled insights, best practices, and essential information to unlock your potential as a partner and propel you towards your most ambitious goals. This is a world crafted for partners like you.

Our journey began seven years ago with a podcast. Our vision is to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS.

Today, Ultimate Partner’s mission is clear and bold, “empower every individual, organization, and partner to achieve more through successful partnering.

As an Ultimate Partner Experience Member, you will unlock a growing treasure trove of resources. Dive into recordings of our events, exclusive podcast episodes, and a wealth of unique content, all designed to enhance your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and ecosystem growth. We are in our early days and expect much more to come.

As an innovator, being part of this experience is more than joining a community; it’s about integrating into an ecosystem brimming with innovation and collaboration. Here, shared experiences and insights are your gateway to progress, offering connections with peers and resources to elevate your Cloud GTM strategy. This is your platform to engage, seek support, and contribute to our collective growth.

I’m thrilled to welcome you to this journey. Let’s navigate, thrive, and redefine success in the tech partnership landscape together. Come Sign Up

marketplace, isvs, partners, customers, isps, microsoft, azure, programme, microsoft cloud, isv, ai, build, benefits, apps, organisation, publish, sales, selling, offers, platform

Vince Menzione 0:00

Hi. I’m Vince Menzione. I’m the host of Ultimate Partner and the CEO of ultimate partner. And I’m on a 10 year mission to empower every individual, organisation and partner to do more through successful partnering. We’re back at Microsoft Studios again today. And this has been an incredible year as Microsoft not only took the world by storm with Gen AI and co pilot, but also doubled down on the commitment to marketplaces. What we’ve been calling this marketplace moment. I’m excited to be joined by someone at Microsoft who has been at the centre of this marketplace transformation and leads the initiative designed to empower ISVs on their marketplace journey. Welcome you Yvonne mench.

Yvonne Muench 0:44

Thank you, Vance. It’s great to be here.

Vince Menzione 0:46

So glad to be here with you. Thanks. So excited about our conversation today. This, I have been also calling this the marketplace moment. As you know, you’ve worked directly for Anthony Joseph who joined us in Dallas for this incredibly engaging conversation and dialogue on marketplace. And a lot of our conversations here on the podcast have been centred on this. So I’m so excited for what we hope to accomplish today to help partners understand this important topic. So you’ve on can you share with our listeners your role and the mission of your organisation? Absolutely.

Yvonne Muench 1:17

So I work in corporate cloud marketing, and on a team that’s focused on marketplace growth. Our mission is to make b2b commerce easier and have a thriving marketplace for all audiences, that’s publishers, selling partners or channel partners and customers. My team specifically focuses on scale global programmes to help ISVs in particular, but increasingly, those channel partners and transacting partners as well help them take advantage both of the Microsoft Cloud to build their applications and the marketplace to grow their sales.

Vince Menzione 1:48

I love what your your organization’s mission is. And you report in through Anthony Joseph, as we mentioned earlier, and you sit outside the partner organisation we work very closely with the partners in that in that organisation as well, correct?

Yvonne Muench 2:01

That’s correct. So I’m in the global demand centre part of Microsoft and that team focuses on onboarding customers at scale to the Microsoft Cloud. And ISVs are definitely a very important partner type. They’re also a very important customer segment as well. And we want to increase the quantity of ISVs that consider and adopt the Microsoft Cloud. And so that’s why the global demand centre is also a partner with our partner team to engage eyespace.

Vince Menzione 2:32

So you’ve on Microsoft has been around marketplace for quite some time, what’s different now? Well, we’ve

Yvonne Muench 2:38

really reached an exciting tipping point of sorts. And there’s a compounding set of factors that all influence that. It’s how the customers want to buy increasingly, in a digital online self serve fashion, the capabilities of the marketplace platform itself with increasing range of types of apps that can be transacted and private offers and flexible billing offers and how to sell them. And then internally, the focus and commitment to marketplace across Microsoft is really come to fruition, from engineering, to marketing, to partner, and sales teams all working together to make sure it’s a thriving platform for ISVs, with apps to find customers and to solve their business problems. So that’s been really exciting, exciting. And you’ll see that in the fact that we now pay our sellers based on marketplace, build sales, for ISVs that are considering but haven’t yet adopted marketplace, we have incentives to help encourage them cash incentives based on early ranges of marketplace, build sales, and all that works together to fuel that momentum we’re seeing, in addition to the platform itself, you know, the era of AI is also a factor that has really increased the number of ISVs that are excited about building apps on the Microsoft Cloud. So whether it’s using GitHub to speed their time to market in writing the code with generative AI, helping them finish the code more rapidly, or embedding the AI into their apps with Azure open AI and cognitive services, or even building ISV, or apps and API’s and extensible plugins into the copilot suite of products, there’s a whole range of new opportunities out there marketplace is going to be the place where they put those opportunities and get them in front of customers. And that’s another fueling factor.

Vince Menzione 4:23

You know, you mentioned AI, and I can’t We can’t have a conversation today without discussing AI, at least at the at the tipping point here that it is caused. In fact, I heard someone say last week that the CEO is now the new CIO, because they’re getting ahead of the transformation at the C suite level. Right. What are your thoughts there?

Yvonne Muench 4:42

Well, I mean, it’s changing everything. It’s exciting. It’s disruptive, and and it’s a new world and I am excited to be here in this moment, and I won’t pretend to know exactly where it’ll lead us. I just know that it what the Microsoft Cloud isn’t Everything to offer and with our partnerships in the best of breed players in the AI space, we want to be a platform for ISVs to build amazing products that we can’t even anticipate or describe right now and the sky’s the limit. And that’s going to unlock new capabilities and innovation with customers.

Vince Menzione 5:17

And tie in the marketplace to this, the momentum is accelerating, in fact that you can sense it right. Canalis is, in fact, had originally said that we would see $45 billion flow through the marketplaces by the end of 2025. Next year, they’ve now since recanted and said it’s going to be the end of this year. And then tackle IO, an organisation that works around marketplace, they have a platform around marketplaces are now predicting $100 billion flowing through marketplaces by the end of 2026. And that might even be sooner.

Yvonne Muench 5:51

Right? Well, I’m pretty bullish on marketplace. So I think those forecasts are really well within range. I see the marketplace as the future of b2b commerce. So that’s been driven in large part, as I mentioned, by those customer preferences that are changing, and today’s fast paced environment and the impact of AI. As we mentioned, organisations need more cloud solutions than ever before. They’re at pressure to remain relevant to accelerate innovation and to balance cost and marketplaces really help with that. So those customers want to maximise the cloud investments that they have the cloud commitments that they can use for app purchases, they want to simplify procurement and have it be really fast and easy click to deploy a SaaS solutions that are already validated for compatibility with the technology they use. So that’s what the commercial marketplace does. And we’ve recently done a study with Forrester a total economic impact study. And we found that customers have really compelling returns on marketplace. So it was actually 580%, three year ROI, with a payback and six months. So that was factors like reduced employee time for onboarding new vendors by 75%, reduced employee effort for each procurement engagement by 50%. And improved time savings with the finance and the payments teams by 30%. So that kind of benefit is creating the momentum of customers moving and embracing this new model of how to buy software applications,

Vince Menzione 7:19

everything you say points to what we’ve been seeing in terms of the changes in buying behaviour, in fact, right? I mean, we’ve, we’re seeing, you know, whether it’s the millennial buying behaviour, or it’s just that we’ve all become accustomed since COVID, to doing things differently. The decisions are being made at the C suite level in terms of cloud commitments, but the line of business owners are making these buying decisions, and they want to make those decisions very similarly to the way they buy things in a consumer fashion as well.

Yvonne Muench 7:46

That’s right. You know, I often think that like the consumer marketplace is, as it many times does, the consumer models lead the commercial models. And we think about the involved purchases that we do in the consumer world that we’re now comfortable with online, people buying houses buying cars buying Wedding Rings Online. So there is no purchase that is too involved or too high priced or too complex that can’t be considered and possibly, or already being done in a commercial marketplace. Absolutely.

Vince Menzione 8:16

So want to double click right you lead a programme called the ISP success programme. And I was hoping you could share with our listeners more about this programme, and its purpose to the partner community.

Yvonne Muench 8:27

Absolutely, I’d be happy to. So it went GA at last inspire in July. And simply put, it’s to help ISPs that want to take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud and take advantage of the marketplace platform. So we support it every step of the journey as they’re building the applications, publishing the applications and selling them through marketplace. And another key concept is that it’s a wide open door available to any b2b ISVs that could publish commercial applications. So that could be a brand new startup or an ISV, building their first app on the Microsoft Cloud or their 10th, or their 50th could be managed or unmanaged. And across the Microsoft Cloud, Azure applications dynamics power platform and 365 or teams. So we actually see really exciting data that over half of the ISPs we work with are building across the Microsoft stack. So the concept of Azure ISV, your team’s ISP is sort of a fallacy. Azure in teams being one of those hero combinations that we see most commonly. Absolutely. So to help build a publish we offer primarily technical benefits in the form of Cloud Credits are cloud sandbox across the Microsoft Cloud, best in class developer tools like Visual Studio and GitHub, as well as one on one technical consults to help both with app building and app publishing. Those are the benefits to help them get that app built and help get it published. And that in a sense, is what the ISP success programme is doing

Vince Menzione 9:54

as partners want to take advantage of that programme. Where do we point them? Well,

Yvonne Muench 9:58

ISP has Above is a website that they can find all the information about the programme, and it has the link to join. A couple other things the ISP has to do if they’re not already a member of our partner network, they will need to join before we can give the benefits. Additionally, they do have to be intending to publish to the commercial marketplace. Very

Vince Menzione 10:20

good. You also lead and you’re very busy. You also lead another probe. The Marketplace rewards programme, correct, right? What’s the difference between these two programmes?

Yvonne Muench 10:30

Well, actually, they’re all part of the same programme. So when we went GA, we incorporated marketplace rewards into ISP success. It still has two separate names, but that was a preexisting programme that focuses on the growth, what I call the growth stage of the process for ISPs that already have published applications. We help them instead of technical benefits now with sales and marketing benefits, to help them grow their sales. So it also doesn’t matter if again, a wide open door if an ISP started at the front door, so to speak with ISP success and build and publish benefits and then they publish great or if they publish on their own and show up in the store friends. That’s also great. Any publisher is invited to join and receive those benefits for free. They increase based on the ISPs performance in terms of application sales. The benefits include things like social promotion success stories, Microsoft seller spotlights, one on one consultations to optimise their listing with keywords and dynamic content, as well as most importantly, perhaps, Azure credits or free Azure grants to accelerate their sales. That is the most activated benefit and the most powerful in closing sales, especially large, even six figure and above deals. So the ISPs can use that free Azure to defray their costs of test drives and trials and proofs of concepts. Or they can use it to act as a deal sweetener with a customer, that can be really powerful. If a customer is first time considering a purchase on marketplace to help get them over the hump. It can also be really powerful. To help them choose the Microsoft commercial marketplace, and the Azure version of the application as opposed to versions that might be built on a alternative public cloud. I’m

Vince Menzione 12:18

so glad we’re having this conversation today. Because I don’t know that every partner knows this and all of these amazing benefits that are available to them.

Yvonne Muench 12:26

I can assure you they don’t I talked to partners all the time. And some of them are very surprised, even though it’s the most activated benefit. Some of them don’t know that marketplace rewards and we’re working hard to change that and do a better job of making it more discoverable. But also, some of them aren’t aware of how they can use the Azure benefits or some of the other benefits. So that’s an ongoing endeavour, we’re

Vince Menzione 12:48

gonna put a shout out here for our partner listeners here to make sure they’re taking advantage of this, please, thank you. There’s gonna be a quiz later. So you Vaughn, I get messages and calls from partners all the time saying, I really would like to be a managed partner, I want to have a PDM partner development manager. What would you say to these partners?

Yvonne Muench 13:10

Well, I hear that question a lot as well. And honestly, PDFs are fantastic. They help an ISP or any partner navigate Microsoft. And we’re a large, complex organisation. But honestly, our goal in in our team and the programmes that we build are designed to drive success across ISVs regardless of managed status. And honestly, we’re seeing that bear fruit. When we look at the ISVs that are progressing up the ranks have generated more and more marketplace build sales, the vast majority of them are unmanaged. And that’s, that’s really exciting. So you know what advice for those without a PDM first, engage in marketplace, and second, use the self serve resources. They’re not perfect, but you might be surprised at how useful they can be. So on engaging in marketplace, I always call that the single most powerful thing that an ISV can do to get the most out of their Microsoft relationship and effectively go to market with and through Microsoft, whether that’s selling through our field since Microsoft marketplace is now the foundational platform for cosell or selling through our channel or your own channels since marketplace provides access to and a way to extend margin to partners, whether that’s CSPs LSPs, MSPs s eyes, any acronym you want to use, and for selling direct to customers through the storefronts and the in product opportunities of Azure portal and team store where 95% of the Fortune 500 are using Azure and an Azure portal and 320 million teams customers are using teams and we’ll see things in team store. So that’s why both ISV success and marketplace rewards work to help ISVs take better advantage of marketplace. On the self serve resources. I want to take a moment and just share a couple of those alongside those programmes which are wide open. So go ahead and join and they all start free There are some really valuable resources and tools to be aware of, perhaps especially valuable to ISVs, new to Microsoft or without a PDF, a rich set of curated self serve content, sometimes referred to as mastering the marketplace. This is code samples and architecture diagrams and sash publishing tools, technical How to videos, marketing best practices, so take advantage of those, and you’ll find them on the SP Hub website. We also have a newly launched app advisor, which is a self serve guided experience that surfaces focused resources tailored to where an ISV is in the development stage, no matter where they’re starting from. So you can also check that out on ISP hub under the resources tab. And then of course, there’s an online marketplace community, and always on forum, peers, other ISVs that have encountered similar things, but also Microsoft experts to quickly and easily get questions answered. So you can find that link to join on ice we have as well, you can post a question to that community is probably been asked and answered before, if not, my team is involved in finding this means internally to answer the questions across engineering partners and sales. The answers provided draw from internal one on one engagements we’ve had from internal forums we have and that’s one of those places where PDFs go to get their questions answered. Yeah,

Vince Menzione 16:16

yeah, it seems like there’s a lot of rich content to support the partners out there today. I did see a lot of resistance this year, to marketplaces, at least the early part of the year, when the announcements came out there was there was some reluctance, and particularly in some of the large ISVs that had well developed channels, right? What do you see from this?

Yvonne Muench 16:38

Well, change is hard. And I definitely understand that and the larger the organisation, the harder changes. So agility kind of skews towards towards young and small. But I would start, you know, when we talk about when we talk with partners that are saying, Why Why should I bother? Why should I embrace marketplace, I often start with that customer angle of customers are moving to marketplace, and you don’t want to be behind on that trend. So you know, pre committed cloud budgets are one of the biggest factors driving that. And almost all of those customers are already using marketplace, 85 plus percent of them are and that body of customers with committed cloud spend, or what we call Mac Microsoft Azure consumption commitments, that is growing steadily 40% per year. So that kind of opportunity is only going to grow. And we often hear from ISPs, hey, you know, my customers ready to buy but only if through marketplace, they want to use their committed budgets, I’m gonna lose this deal. How do I get published quickly. And of course, there’s also benefits on the ISP side. Some additional reasons to embrace marketplace, you can expand your reach basically list once and sell globally, you can let Microsoft be your transactional platform outsourcing invoicing and taxes and currency conversions for almost any country that you might be selling in. You can let Microsoft be your deal making platform using those private offers to sell even highly negotiated price and terms types of deals that are well into the six figure categories. You can also engage your channel and extend margin and sell through partners via CSP private offers or multi party private offers. And finally, of course, you can get rewarded for your performance as I’ve been talking about with marketplace rewards I already mentioned increasing free Azure grants that unlock based on your marketplace build sales. But some publishers are also unaware that there’s also cash incentives for ISVs that kick in at 25k. In marketplace, build sales, and cosell benefits that kick in in 100k of marketplace, build sales. So many partners don’t realise that marketplace is actually the fastest and easiest way to unlock cosell benefits. Yeah, you can unlock them at 100k in Azure consumed revenue 100k a marketplace build sales, which is the full price of your application, not just the Azure component for a deal selling into the enterprise, that might be just one deal or a handful of them. And even top to your coastal benefits. There’s paths to earn them through marketplace that are accelerated. And that’s something really important to check out. If you are an ISV selling into large enterprise

Vince Menzione 19:15

IT marketplaces streamline so much of the CO selling process, I remember back in the day when we would like compare quotes and we would try to reconcile what we were doing. And this has just been totally eliminated through the marketplace. Marketplace is taking and really automating that CO selling process.

Yvonne Muench 19:34

Well deal registration was a burden, not only for ISVs, but also internally for us. And so it’s fantastic that you know, with the commerce platform and marketplace being where the cosell deals are done, then we can just eliminate that step entirely.

Vince Menzione 19:50

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Yvonne Muench 20:52

Well, it’s important to understand that the most successful ISVs are basically the ones that are deeply engaged. So they engage in programmes and use benefits. And in fact, we find ISVs engaged in marketplace rewards outperform their peers by five to one in terms of marketplace, build sales. And also their ISPs are the successful ISVs are still deeply engaged in the marketing and selling of their own applications. Marketplace is a transactional platform with a lot of great capabilities, but ISVs still need to invest and execute effective marketing and sales and or engage partners as their channel so it’s not publish and walk away. For the really leading ISVs in terms of marketplace, sales, we find they have a marketplace first sales strategy. I any deal that can go through marketplace does go through marketplace, depending on the size of the organisation, this can be quite a shift internally in processes of marketing and sales and even operations, compensation and more,

Vince Menzione 21:50

especially the larger organisations, right, the ones that we’ve talked about it or resisting the change is because they basically have to build new processes to drive this. That’s exactly right. So your organisation announced a new programme this year designed to help and was this applies to some of these partners we talked about that have these rich channel organisations. It was designed to help drive channel or seller adoption. This is you mentioned multi party offer. Can you share more about why this programme is so important? Absolutely.

Yvonne Muench 22:19

I would call it more a capability on marketplace rather than a programme. But it is hands down the most exciting one delivered this year. I’m super excited about it. Today, it’s only available in the US but it is coming to additional geographies very soon. In a nutshell, this allows ISPs to engage channel partners in selling their applications through the marketplace. And we know that most ISPs sell through a channel, this is not a surprise, sometimes the majority or all of their revenue goes through a channel. So enabling this marketplace is incredibly important. And it’s sure to be a strategic lever in unlocking this explosive growth that we’re seeing. So established ISPs can bring their channel to marketplace, younger startup or other ISVs can tap into our channel through marketplace. And we’re just over a half a year in this launched in July at Inspire as well. And we’re already seeing that the average deal size in MPO deals are about 3x the size of private offers without up channel partners engaged. So it just makes great financial sense to bring partners into a deal. Basically, the ISV creates a private offer to a selected reseller, which then allows them to extend that margin, the reseller then engages the customer, the deal is still transacted on our commerce platform on Microsoft paper. So that means we still handle all the invoicing for all parties paying out the margin and the remainder to the ISV. And since we’re transacting the deal, importantly, this also means that the committed cloud budgets can be used for that purchase by the end customer. One thing to note to be a transacting channel, partner on marketplace, any interested partner will need to enrol in MPO and get a seller ID. It can sometimes take a few weeks to complete. And we’re seeing channel partners come to us with deals in hand ready to go, which is so exciting. So we’re advising any interested partners to get the enrollment setup and out of the way in advance. So the first marketplace transaction goes really smoothly without any delay. Yeah,

Vince Menzione 24:16

it makes sense. So, again, we talked about this being the year of the marketplace. How do you think the shift in marketplace is going what’s next? And how should partners plan for it?

Yvonne Muench 24:28

Yeah, well, the shift is on we are experiencing a lot of growth. And that is one of the challenges that we’re managing through. But it’s a good problem to have. We’re seeing that growth in all measures such as the number of publishers and apps, the new customers, the deal volume, the deal sizes, especially the deal sizes, and of course the total sales. So what’s next from us, you’ll see a lot of great continued enhancements, additional types of apps are good and offers as well becoming transact Bull, the continued geographic rollout of the multi party private offer capability, continued improvements in customer experience and searchability. And continued investments in marketing the marketplace and driving demand. The latter part I’m really excited about as well, you’re gonna see a lot more from us in terms of driving demand. So for example, this is things like driving increased customer awareness and traffic to the storefronts, merchandising of the leading apps within those storefronts, AI powered discovery experiences within Azure Portal to improve search and surfacing of solutions, proactive recommendation engines to customers, propensity scoring, for of customers for the marketplace, publishers, and marketing campaigns, to the end, through the field sellers to and through the channel and of course, direct to customers, a lot of exciting stuff coming in that space.

Vince Menzione 25:52

So many exciting things coming down the road here. What would partners need to do now?

Yvonne Muench 26:00

Well, you know, a lot of these investments I talked about will focus primarily on the apps that already have some marketplace traction. So my advice would be to jump in. For ISPs. If you have existing publish apps that are just contact me, upgrade them to transactable. If you haven’t already joined ISV success, we can help you whether you’re upgrading an existing app, or building and publishing an entirely new one. If you’re already published, join marketplace rewards and start using those benefits to accelerate and close deals and bring your channel to marketplace and get them enrolled in MPO. And if you are a channel partner out there in the US get enrolled now and for others do so as soon as it’s available when it comes to your area. So

Vince Menzione 26:41

much to be done with these partners, bringing them together, getting them to execute together. I say ISPs channel partners transaction partners, again, to the end customers so much opportunity out there in these durable cloud budgets. It really is. So I have a favourite question. It’s not about marketplaces, though. But every podcast interview I do, I love to ask my guests this. So you’re hosting a dinner party. And you could have this dinner party anywhere in the world. We were talking about Rome a little bit earlier, that might be an interesting place, dad. And you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past to this amazing dinner party. Who would you invite? And why? And

Yvonne Muench 27:22

it’s a fun question. So, you know, for any dinner party, you need to have a great conversation. And I think I’d start with inviting Trevor Noah. I loved his book. He’s fantastic live, and I’m seeing him again here in Seattle in next month. Obviously, he’s a comedian and a great storyteller. I especially admire though, how he can talk about even really difficult issues and topics. Many don’t know he’s Microsoft’s chief questions officer. In that role, he runs a podcast himself, yes, called the prompt, little AI flavour there. With the tagline you can’t find answers without asking the right questions. So you should check that out. I’d also invite the poet Mary Oliver, setting aside that she’s no longer living the line from her poem, wild geese, whoever you are, no matter how lonely The world offers itself to your imagination, speaks to me. And she’s such a keen observer of life and nature, an incredibly beautiful writer. I’d love to see the world through her eyes and ask her about that. But I imagine she’s pretty quiet and introverted. So my friend Trevor would help bring her out or love it. And then for the delicious food, I’d invite Yotam Ottolenghi, he’s my absolute favourite cookbook author. I don’t know if I pronounced his name correctly. But I think I have almost every one of his books, and I adore his recipes and the intense Mediterranean flavours that he brings to them. When I was on sabbatical, I cooked my entire way through one of his books. So I’d love to sit down at a table with him. But honestly, for dinner party, I invited him over early, and he would be in my kitchen helping me cook the food. And I’ve asked him to sign every single one of my cookbooks, Mediterranean

Vince Menzione 29:03

cooking. So maybe we have this dinner somewhere in the Mediterranean is a coastal location that would suit me just it sounds fabulous. I might have to stop by at least for a beverage. Maybe I might see. I’d love that you’re buying you would have been just that amazing guests. I have so enjoyed our conversation. This topic is just so important right now for partners. And I can’t emphasise enough with, you know, $100 billion dollars, projected to be done through marketplaces by the end of 2026. And the amazing opportunity that this is creating around what Microsoft has been doing with AI and the durable cloud budgets, the ability to co sell such an amazing time for us. I want to thank you for joining Ultimate Guide to partner.

Yvonne Muench 29:47

Well, thank you for having me. It’s been my pleasure. It is exciting times and it’s great to talk with you about it. Thank you. Thanks

Vince Menzione 29:54

and thank you for listening and watching the Ultimate Partner Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner

We are thrilled to welcome special guest Jay McBain, industry analyst, as he joins our host Vince Menzione for an enlightening discussion. Together, they navigate the ever-evolving landscape of the technology industry, covering diverse topics such as changing market dynamics, the transformative influence of generative AI, and the digital-first mindset adopted by millennial buyers. Join us as we uncover invaluable insights into business strategies, partnership dynamics, and marketplace trends. Whether you’re a CEO, industry professional, or tech enthusiast, this discussion promises to be intellectually stimulating and enlightening. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of why every CEO needs to be a Partnership Ecosystem Leader.

1. Why CEOs should prioritize channel leadership with industry analyst Jay McBain. (0:00)

2. The changing nature of buying and decision-making in the digital age. (0:53)

3. Market trends and the role of partnerships in 2024. (5:52)

4. Platform companies and their success factors. (9:49)

5. Tech industry growth and marketplace fees. (13:31)

6. AI and its impact on the tech industry. (17:43)

7. Partner opportunities in the mid-market. (22:36)

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Our journey began seven years ago with a vision to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. It started with a podcast.

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Vince Menzione 0:00

I just finished an amazing episode with Jay McBain in our new South Florida studio. Jay is Principal Analyst at Canalis, a global technology analyst firm with a distinct channel focus. We had such an incredible discussion on why every CEO needs to be a channel leader. We’re here in South Florida at our new Boca Raton facility. When did you hit the big toe? It’s time to uplevel the game apart is the this is Ultimate. This is the ultimate partnering Ultimate Partner and ultimate ultimate partner. So live from Florida. Yep. And you are our very first guest in our new facility here. They’re nice courtesy of media zones, our partner and just excited to be here in person with you. Absolutely. Sort of that we talked about this Florida, this connection. We’re all the channel chiefs are coming to Florida. What do you think about that?

Jay McBain 0:53

Yeah, all the celebrities are coming here. And we’ve got a good group of channel chiefs. It’s the southern southern Florida mafia for for the channel.

Vince Menzione 1:00

I love it. I love it. Of course, with my Italian heritage, you had to say mafia. So Well, I’m excited to spend more time with you. You know, we it’s just two weeks ago that we were in person in Miami. We both had keynote presentations at the partner conference. And it was a really terrific event. And I really loved your session. So I was hoping today we could spend a little bit of time recounting some of that session. The five reasons why the next generation of CEOs will be partnership leaders warms my heart to know that as a partner, leader and former chief revenue officer as well. So I thought maybe we’d start here. I wanted to deep dive. But you had some very insightful comments, I thought maybe you can maybe summarise the five steps, and then we can deep dive into them.

Jay McBain 1:48

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So you know, for years now, we’ve been making these future predictions. You know, this is what’s going to happen to marketplaces. This is what’s happening to the new buyer. This is what’s happening to the economics of partnering and they were all a David Letterman top 10 list of you know, trends, yes, somewhat interconnected. But at some point coming to an inflection point. And 2024 happens to be the year of that inflection point, where number one, the new buyer is actually here. By the end of the year, a millennial will lead the majority of tech and telco purchasing over $5 trillion. And that’s both by number of millennials, as well as by budget. Number two, this platform economy, not just in the hyperscalers, not just in SAS companies, but taking hold and security. But outside of tech. You know, we always got confused that the biggest automotive companies and pharmaceuticals and banks wanted to become tech companies, every company was going to become a tech company, where we were confused as they actually want to become platform companies. And what that means yes, and that drives a whole different set of economics with the way partnering has worked for over 40 years down here in Boca Raton with August 12 1981. And that first IBM PC with the first IBM programme with Microsoft and others. But now we’re looking at a very different thing. And this is the year that it all changes. And then generative AI and other things that come into it. So again, inflection point all into one time.

Vince Menzione 3:14

Yeah, I thought we would deep dive on these it was really great and insightful conversation. Let’s talk about the millennials first, right? Because we’ve been talking about the tectonic shifts. And this new generation of buyers, right, the different buying persona used to clicking three times on my my phone and a box shows up right and, and maybe they don’t want to speak to as many salespeople they want to make their own decision. They go through their own process. You’ve talked about this, and how the decision making process has changed. Can you spend a minute there on that specifically? Yeah,

Jay McBain 3:47

so in a different psychology, different behaviours, different journey that they’re on. But suffice it to say they’re either Digital First, or digital only. Right. And when you said, you know, maybe I don’t want to talk to a human, the latest research says it’s 75% of them would actually like to get to end of job and this is to buy a million dollars worth of software. This is to buy a car, I’d like to get to end of job at a very important big decision. Digital only. Yeah, and so that’s 75%. So this is a different way to treat those first 28 moments before they make that decision. So that’s one thing. Second is their subscription and consumption friendly. You know, growing up on Netflix growing up on Spotify, yes, they’re okay to pay $1 a month for the rest of their life for a toothbrush that just gets replenished and they understand that they’re in it for life. And this goes again across technology, but it goes into every industry. Absolutely. And the way they bank the way they buy insurance the way they you know buy manufactured goods or you know pharmaceuticals it’s okay to buy be in these subscription or consumption models. And that leads to marketplace. Yes, there okay buy in seven layers to solve a problem. No one wants to buy this all you can eat you know best in class. To end to end platform, I’m okay building layers to my outcome. And I’m okay, building it as a team sport. So in the older generations, you and I generation, you know, we kind of looked for a single throat to choke somebody that was our trusted adviser, somebody that could really orchestrate it for us, right? The new generation, it’s okay to build a team. And it’s not going to be a team of the seven, seven, same seven people. It’s going to be a team of different types of people that have expertise in my industry that have expertise in my geography, expertise in the sector segment that I’m in the compliance and governance that I’m under all of the different angles, I want to build a team and I go back to sports, I don’t need seven quarterbacks that are 11 quarterbacks on the field. I need, you know, 11 different players, but I need them to each do their job of No, Bella Chuck. Well, you know, we

Vince Menzione 5:52

talked about partner to partner for years now Microsoft parlance was around partner party, we’ve been talking about the decade of the ecosystem. I don’t know who coined that phrase, maybe someone we know, personally. But this is this is really about ecosystem. This is really, when I think about the, I call it the marketplace moment, in fact, we’re taking we’re digitally buying, right? There’s a lot of things that come with along with that, right the ability to consume against these large cloud commitments, but also the opportunities you say, to stitch together the solution that best supports your requirements. And this is where we get into multi party offers, in fact, where you can, in fact, layer several solutions together, bring it serve it up to a customer already, he’s made $100 million commitment to a Microsoft, Amazon or Google and say this is exactly what we need. Right. So it’s exactly what you’re talking

Jay McBain 6:41

about. Yeah. And that’s the final piece of research on this new buyer is integration. First integration. First of all the things you’d write into an RFP, that’s important to you, you know, the price is important your service, your support, things like your brand reputation, you know, all these things would have criteria around how I’m going to make my decision. Number one criteria now is how you work in my environment. This is both as a personal story as well as a professional one, where Apple got on stage last year and said 79% of people won’t buy a car. Unless it is Apple CarPlay. Yeah, they neglected to mention Android Auto. But the fact of the matter is, you know, here’s an industry that’s $4 trillion in size, you may be, you know, taking over a dealership from your great grandparents. And all of a sudden, you’re going to lose four fifths of your buyers, because there’s not a technology integration in place. It’s amazing. And so watching this, and then, you know, feeding that into all the other parts of life, I’ll buy a product that’s 80% as good as the competitor, if it works better in my environment. So how do we feed in integration first buyer, a digital first or only buy or a subscription consumption marketplace friendly buyer. This is a complete reconstruction of how we do marketing, how we do selling, and how we do long term customer success.

Vince Menzione 7:54

It’s fantastic. So the next thing you talked about was the death of the cookie, you brought this up before as a big factor, right? And really why partnering is so important right now. And again, with my experience in partnering and as a CRO for formally, what would you say about the old acquisition models and new models?

Jay McBain 8:14

Yeah, so we talk about 2024 as an inflection point. And this end of the cookie, if you happen to be in marketing has been coming for years. It’s actually three years ago that on the iPhone, you could say I don’t want to be followed, I no longer want to be the product on the internet. And back then, you know, Facebook was publicly saying this could put us out of business. We rely on this, you think of Google whose half their company relies on this business model of selling our personal data in those first 28 moments. And obviously, there’s active buyers. So this is the third party data system. Were a couple of weeks ago to start off 2024 Google updates Chrome and Android to actually stop limiting cookies. They also made a declaration by the end of 2024. The cookie will be dead. Yeah. So in a world that moves from third party data, you remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And remember, you know, the billions of dollars which is created trillion dollar valuations for these companies and third party data selling our private data is now moving to second party, the channel partners ecosystem alliances are who owned these first 28 moments, the ebooks, the podcasts like this one, all the things that happen in these 28 moments, now becomes a second party data problem. And CMOS need to shift from third party to second party. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear and on finding this buyer intent. And this is just a remarkable thing happening along with everything else.

Vince Menzione 9:47

But it’s what we’ve been saying for so many years now. Right. I mean, many years ago, I went through a course by Miller Heiman strategic selling, and the whole idea was to find out as much situational analysis or awareness of your client. And the best way to do that is other people that are talking to your client who wants talks to your client than you, the seven or eight seats at the table, they might be competitors, they might be potential partners, they might just be friendlies. And be able to have those conversations. And now what you’re saying around this is, that’s why it’s so important that we have this new data intelligence. And we find new ways to approach the customer because we don’t have cookies.

Jay McBain 10:23

And so you know, a story around Microsoft, for example, you know, they did a better job of surrounding the buyer. Yes, they didn’t have a better price than than AWS, they didn’t have better product. They didn’t have better Superbowl ads. What they did is had better coverage of the seven people that surrounded every buyer. They had more Microsoft endorsements sitting at the table. And that sat in the ebooks, at the events, it sat in the podcast, it sat in all the different moments that the customer was friendlier to that solution versus that one. And that’s one example. But that’s the future of selling is a surround strategy of these seven trusted people, and how you get them to influence that buyer. In those first 28 moments.

Vince Menzione 11:11

It feels like the rest of the world is going to start speaking our language. This

Jay McBain 11:15

was part of the why the next CEO should you know have partnerships in their resume or be a partnership leader. Yeah.

Vince Menzione 11:23

So you this this year of the platform, but I wanted to dive in here a little bit, right, because this is this is somewhat new, you know, he talked about every company wanting to be a tech company. And now this year, the platform is a little bit of a different twist on this. Spend a little time with us on this one. Yeah,

Jay McBain 11:40

so it started the year with we did a paper with HubSpot, one of these leading platforms, along with partnership leaders and others that put together a study of the top 50 platforms in the world. Let’s look at companies like Salesforce. Let’s look at companies like ServiceNow and workday and Marketo and NetSuite, HubSpot, but the top 50 platforms in the world and ask questions, you know, how did they? Did they do this at scale? How do they create these integrations at the scale? How do they surround the buyer? How do they deploy the resources, the people, the the processes, the programmes, the underlying technology? How does this all work? And what makes these companies obviously the the highest valued companies in the world, right? They make up the highest valuations. And if you start at the fortune 500, at the top moving downwards, they’re the most valuable companies in the world. So this is where I said every company is looking in to become a platform company. Yes. And the the riches that come with that. You’ve got to learn though the basic underpinnings the foundation of what it means to be a platform, and how you run a platform. It just doesn’t come by accident. No, you have to put things in place. And it takes many, many years to make sure that you can build it’s like a universe. It’s like a sun that has planets and gravity and everybody getting pulled in. Because you’re not going to go out and sign up everybody to be part of your platform. Your platform has to be its own flywheel that kicks out a lot of multiplier of opportunity, and want people to come in. And we’re breaking down now, which is a little bit of the magic, the decoder ring, of what makes that happen. What kind of people do we need? What kind of programmes do we need? What kind of technology should we be running? How do we go to market? Again, another reason why maybe the CEO should be a partnership leader, if you’re looking to be a platform in any industry. Yeah. And

Vince Menzione 13:32

this ties into the whole marketplace conversation in such a great way as well. I mean, we’ve discussed the 45 billion that you had predicted by the end of 2026. I think it was originally 2025 2520 25. And now you said that that’s under call, then, potentially this year, what are we saying?

Jay McBain 13:51

So I mean, at Wall Street, now we’ve got not only the Big Three hyperscalers. But we’ve got now with the bigger marketplace, SAS companies and others, starting to show what their future commits are. And it’s one of these again, to get these high valuations. You know, investors love to know how much money you’ve got committed to you. And just the top three have over $340 billion committed rounding. And then somebody at some point has to figure out how to put that into product skews and put that together into seven layer stacks. But that 45 billion which was a hockey stick, it’s an 86% compounded annual growth. We think it might be doubling every single year, and we don’t see it stopping after 2025. This is just a trend that continues feeding this new buyer.

Vince Menzione 14:35

In fact, the number went from 300 billion to 340 billion in one quarter correct. So we’ll see what the what it’s expanding.

Jay McBain 14:41

We’ve also got in the last 30 or 60 days, we’ve got four press releases now. I’ll use AWS Marketplace as an example. CrowdStrike snowflake Palo Alto and Splunk have all issued press releases that they’re running a billion dollar business on one marketplace. And one of the predictions we made Alongside the 45 billion, which we also under called, is that AWS, as a leading marketplace, would join the likes of TD cynics and Ingram as a top 10 distributor by 2025. Again, under called it, they’re already there, they’re there. Now you have to get to about 5 billion to overtake dnh. An exclusive networks. And they’re already there. Yeah. So this is an area where they may have achieved, you know, $5 billion as one marketplace. But their sites are on the 60 billion at TD cynics and 50 billion at Ingram. The numbers are astounding. And when you’re doubling every single year, it doesn’t take you long to get there.

Vince Menzione 15:38

So what does this do to the channel and to distribution?

Jay McBain 15:41

Well, the blow up with this is the channel from decades ago, was at the point of sale, all the economics worked at the point of sale. And partners were only measured at that point of sale. Yeah, how much do you sell? Well, the fact of the matter is money is changing hands in a very different way. And one thing that happened and Microsoft led this, and everybody soon followed is Microsoft declared that a marketplace fee shouldn’t be 20%, or shouldn’t be 35%, which has apple in court with epic and 45% of what they’re trying to chose the New York Times. But Microsoft, like we’re not going to make money off our ecosystem. It costs us about 3% of the fee to run a marketplace. So much like a MasterCard or Visa swipe and consumer, it’s about 3% of the deal. Architect The movement of money, which is complicated, it’s, you know, we’ve got to move the money, we’ve got to take on the risk that the customer doesn’t pay, we’ve got to wait for the time value of money, net, 30, net, 60. Net 90. And in the end of all that we have to hire Biff to break knees when that customer doesn’t pay. But for forever, we thought in the 1980s, that that was worth 40% margin, then it was 30, then it was 20. And, you know, we’re all kind of deciding what that’s worth. But it’s now been declared and Google followed Microsoft, and just a few months ago, AWS is finally on board. Yes, but everybody’s at the point now and all the end users know that the whole value add of taking my money on behalf of a vendor is worth three. So let’s talk about where the other 17% of the gross two nets are. And a partner would tell you Well, I guess I do free consulting, I do free design and architecture. I do free implementations. And it’s great. I’ve always always got paid at one point. And a lot of the other stuff that maybe other partners like a system integrator would charge for, I’ve ended up giving for free. And and now in marketplace model, I could still go get the other 17% on a private offer or some sort of multi partner offer. And I might be willing to give up the 3% because that’s a part of the business. I’m not all that interested in.

Vince Menzione 17:43

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it’s changing the entire value chain equation is what I would say there. If you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I built growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers builders ISV sellers, s eyes MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is it’s noisy. I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard. We’re getting ready to open the doors early to pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder and innovator or a leader, visit our website. So we can’t have a talk in 2024 or even 2023 For that matter without bringing up AI generative AI. I did an interview with Microsoft’s leading reseller and Google’s leading reseller that earlier this week and we had this discussion about what’s happened this past year. I mean, Satya Nadella recognise the CEO of the Year gave us all a masterclass this past year, right about partnerships. In fact, he had been working on the Gen AI partnership for five years or so. And it came to fruition and everyone was caught on their back heels. I mean, Google was caught in the backfield. So they responded accordingly. But it’s changing the game now, right? It’s changing the valuation of those organisations quite a bit from 2023 to this year. What would you say about Gen AI? Yeah,

Jay McBain 19:50

and I think you know, Microsoft’s a good story where, you know, he will be crowned you know, with a Jack Welch award as the leader of the decade if not leader the century so far because, you know, overachieving Apple a couple of weeks ago in valuation, yeah, was a big testament to all the moves that have been made, not just the channel and partner moves, but the moves into generative AI. But there’s also he’s also confused the market, he’s come out and said it’s a $4 trillion opportunity. And in a world economy, that’s 105 trillion in GDP. That’s material. And so partners, you know, kind of look at that and go, I think I believe him. But Can somebody break it down? For me what that really means to me? Where in the cycle is this? What can I charge for? What’s my opportunity? How fastest growing? What kind of skills and competencies do I need to build? Now listen, I run a small business over here. And can somebody break down that 4 trillion for me, and, you know, at an analyst firm it Canalis. I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing. You know, here’s the $15 billion connected to that bigger number that happened last year, here’s the 150 8 billion, that’s going to happen within the next four years, a 59% growth rate. But very specifically, here’s the type of business model, here’s the kind of skills, here’s the kind of products you need to sell services you need to sell, to go take advantage of this. And it’s somewhat time delayed, you know, if you’re a VAR MSP, you know, there’s not a laundry list of things that you’re going to go and double or triple your business in 2024 around, unless you’re doing deep consulting on language models, and tuning and training, and, you know, connecting the dots between the 85% of the world’s business data in these large language models sitting out at open AI and sitting with Google. Unless you’re in these deep business conversations with the board and C suite at the biggest of companies. There’s not a lot to do this year. And, you know, our recommendation is perhaps go back and look at the cybersecurity industry growing by double digits. Yeah, look at managed services growing by double digits, look at the things you can control today. And perhaps don’t get too excited about changing everything shutting down your current business, and going all in.

Vince Menzione 22:00

Yeah, no, I would add to that. I do think I don’t know where the $4 trillion number comes from how you break out, it sounds like we’re obviously not there now. But I do think that there is an immediate opportunity, Microsoft put some layered in some significant investments in incentives on their co pilot products. And I do think for some of the MSPs. What I’m hearing now is that every CEO, wants is having a conversation about Gen AI, right? How do I how do I take advantage? How do I execute against it? In fact, I heard a quote this week from somebody from Microsoft, that the CEO is now the new CIO. I love that quote, I’m going to reuse that. But I think I think they’re making transform transformation decisions that were normally made further down in the organisation, what would you say? Yeah,

Jay McBain 22:45

so we went and asked, you know, Microsoft’s current 400,000 partners, what they think, and a third of them are very sceptical. And they’re happy to take a laggard or late majority play. The next third, are on the fence. And they’re not going to play early majority, or even early adopter. And then 1/3, and this was a comparison to when we asked them 2018 about AI, one thirds, a little bit more excited on the front end. So a highly sceptical, balanced audience, because guess what, they’ve lived through emerging tech hype cycles before, yes, 10 years ago, when IoT was going to take over the world. Last year when Metaverse is going to change everything. So you know, whether it’s quantum computing or Northern robotics, or self driving cars, or 3d printers, I mean, this is a sceptical audience to say that, you know, we’ll take a little bit of a wait and see. And certain partner types that are connected to certain customer segments are going to see a huge opportunity up front. And, you know, it’s wise that, you know, somebody breaks down that number. And make sure that over the course of five years, you know, ahead of time when to start to engage and, and get into these conversations, that technology lifecycle adoption curve, right. And I know the $4 trillion. I mean, when you break it against the world’s economy and 27 industries across 193 countries, and you start to, you know, augment resources and replace resources. And when you rethink your marketing and sales and customer success, your invoicing, your billing your finance, and operations and HR, every part of your company changes that adds up to 4 trillion pretty fast. Yes, it does. The fact of the matter, though, is that’s world economy talk. What services can I sell next Tuesday? And how do I skew them up? And what kind of people do I need to train to go and delight the customer? Is the conversations we should be having in partnerships. Again, another reason why, you know, senior in your company, you should have, you know, people that can understand how this is all going to work.

Vince Menzione 24:51

So you and I have talked about the mid market quite a bit, and I spent quite a bit of time analysing this market. I did an event where we feel Richard, some of the leaders from Microsoft and talked about the big market opportunity. In fact, one of those leaders is doubling down on partner attach because it’s I think it’s an under penetrated, I believe you will agree with me here under penetrated market, I wanted to get your viewpoint on this as well. Because I do think it’s a huge opportunity for partners in general, that are both kind of clustered to the top to the enterprise. I’ll call it 11,000 enterprise organisations.

Jay McBain 25:26

Yeah, so I happen to run mid market for years and years at IBM and Lenovo. So I know, it’s kind of the mushy middle, companies can quite easily have a top down strategy, the top 11,000, you know how to put out your resources, how to, you know, cover, have the capacity have the capabilities to cover that market. And then you know, the SMB is a little bit less known. It’s a bottoms up, it’s a community led, grassroots led, you’ve got to influence the influencers, which is a big part of the channel, this is where your channel strategies really form in SMB? Yeah, because you need an army to help you to surround those customers. And mid market is probably the least understood, because that’s where the two things meet. And there’s not a lot of expertise, there’s not a list of partners, you can just download that, you know, have mid market as their only target. There’s not a, you know, just an easy go to market routes to market that you can check the box, oh, I need to sign up these distributors, I need to sign up these partners, I need to go do this. And then we’re gonna go get our fair share mid market. So the leaders, you know, are under invested in their own companies. You know, there’s not an understanding either below or above them in their companies of what this is. So, you know, I’m glad that you’re taking this on, to figure out what this mushy middle is, and how to take action. I

Vince Menzione 26:44

think it’s a digital, I think it’s it’s marketplace driven. And it’s combining all of the partners, all the seats at the table to accomplish what we need to do. To your point, it is the mushy middle. And the organisations that the top aren’t paying attention. The ones at the bottom are paying attention the way they need to, right. So

Jay McBain 27:01

some need to scale up some need to scale downs, right. And it’s a massive market. Huge, it’s a huge market. And, you know, for for companies, there’s billions of dollars of opportunity, that doesn’t take that level of investment.

Vince Menzione 27:12

I mean, I’ll quote out of school here, Microsoft alone has somewhere between 75 plus billion dollars of business in that market. So that’s a pretty significant market for partners. So I’d love to having you here today. And next time, we’re going to have a longer session we’re going to have we’re going to host you here and maybe even have some partners in the room. But we’re on a tight timeline today. So for our viewers, listeners, what are they need to be thinking about and doing differently now that we’re in 2024 in a big way.

Jay McBain 27:43

I mean, the first thing in this is not a surprise to anyone is continued to be obsessed about your customer. get obsessed about the people they trust, get obsessed about what they read, where they go, who they follow, get obsessed about a journey that isn’t about the point of sale. It’s about the 28th moments before that, yeah, it’s at the point of sale, regardless of how money changes hands. So getting the customer to the dance, getting them on the dance floor. And now with every company, keeping them dancing all night long, every 30 days forever. You know, one company a couple of weeks ago became the most valuable company in the world. By telling Wall Street we’d be the most sticky, predictable, reliable, repeatable and scalable revenue. not reliant on a September launch of a product every year. Yes. And the market responded. And so, you know, we can talk about a $3 trillion company or we can talk about a startup. The same thing is, if you get obsessed about your customer, when you move outwards from your customer, you’re gonna find that there’s partnerships everywhere, in the integrations, in the go to market, in the routes to market in all the influence. All the things you need to do around your customer, are really partner driven at this point. And that’s why I think your leadership should have much better skills and partnerships.

Vince Menzione 29:00

I love what you have to say. Jay, I want to thank you. This is your sixth appearance. The robe is coming. It’s the Saturday Night Live Saturday. I live Rob is coming, except it’s gonna have the five timer and then we’re gonna have the stripes at time you come. Yeah, a lot of them both. I want to thank you for joining us today live from South Florida. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feature amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partners

In this episode, I’m joined by two remarkable leaders and friends. Dee Burger is the President of Insight North America, and Tony Safoian is the CEO of SADA Systems, a Google Partner of the Year for many years.

Both Dee and Tony have been guests before on Ultimate Partner. Tony was one of our first guests seven years ago and was an inspiration to start the podcast. He is also one of only two six-timers on this podcast.

Listen as Dee and Tony share the story of their first encounter and why they came together.

We also discuss this incredible transformation: AI, Marketplace, Security, and the power of Microsoft and Google’s services. Plus, gain exclusive insights into partnering with the tech giants and other partners.

1. Tech industry transformation and partnership strategies. (0:02)

2. Business growth and culture alignment. (2:03)

3. The merger of Insight and SADA. (4:06)

4. Transforming the reseller industry with a new business model. (11:56)

5. AI-driven commerce and marketplaces. (21:15)

6. AI, security, and Google’s services. (25:35)7. Partnering with Google Cloud and Insight. (29:53)

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Vince Menzione 0:02 

Welcome to The Ultimate Partner. I’m Vince menzi own and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through a successful partner. I have the great privilege of being here on site in Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re inside enterprises is hosting amplify 2020 for its annual sales and partner conference for an incredible interview with two amazing leaders and friends. D Berger is North American president of insight and a previous guest on Ultimate Partner and Tony Savoy in the CEO of sada and insight company, and a five timer on this podcast, inside acquired sought on December 1 of 2023. A move de and Tony say turn their combined capabilities into a multi cloud powerhouse, as Insight has long been a top provider of Microsoft Solutions, while sada is the global Google Cloud Partner of the Year, multiple years. Gentlemen, I’m so excited about our discussion today.

Dee Burger 1:02

Thanks for having us. Thanks

Vince Menzione 1:03

for having us. Excited to spend time with both of you. I have a long history working with both of your organization’s going back to my days at Microsoft, in fact, a lot of time here in Scottsdale, and Tempe within sight, and of course many years working with SATA back in my earliest days. So I’m so excited to exclusively feature you here for this conversation today. Appreciate that. So first, we’ve seen this incredible transformation in our $5 trillion tech industry for more than a decade. First, the transformation to the cloud. And then the acceleration we’ve seen these last few years. I call it the tectonic shifts, both of your firm’s were on the forefront inside has been the most transformative of the large partners working with Microsoft. And SATA has been referred to as both a born in the cloud partner back in the days when I worked with you, Tony, and has pivoted the business to become the most successful partner in the Google ecosystem. I was wondering if you could share your perspectives on what we’ve been seeing in these last few years.

Tony Safoian 2:02

First of all, I want to say being a five timer. Kinda like on Saturday Night Live. I expect the jacket it’s in the mail with a firearm or jacket on it, because I know it’s quite a privilege. Vince, thank you. This is the sixth time Tony it is so like we’re just gonna get racking up the numbers until we’re gonna put all the jacket bars on. Yeah, I mean, it’s an incredible next chapter for us. Obviously, everything I’ve done for the last 23 and a half years has been creating best in class best in breed, I’ve been very focused on uneven in the playing field that every opportunity that you can grab, because like who wants to compete on an even playing field, like you know, who wants to be generic? I think speciality niches, scale, customer incumbency, being on the forefront is just so much more fun. And coming together in a way that was almost serendipitous is an incredible thing for our customers, and an incredible thing for our partners. And I have to say these my new boss. And he’s he’s awesome. I don’t have to say that I say that because it’s true. And the culture is what really matters as Joyce reminds us all the time d reminds us all the time. And you know, that is going to be the foundation of what allows us to make the most of this opportunity. And, you know, everything that I was hoping for, you know, prior to coming together is even more true now that being on the inside, but not just the DEA and the Joyce level. The executive team but everyone we’ve met hear the hundreds of people we’ve met at at amplify our first amplify it’s the same at every level. So this is a great launchpad for 2024 and beyond. And

Tony Safoian 4:05

our vantage point you watching the market change, you know tech 2023 was a tough year for the industry. There was there’s a lot of absorption from overbuying, and 21 and 2022. And a lot of different segments. But technology keeps firing away. Right technology is marching forward. Gen AI is changing a lot of things. But all the things we were talking about just a year ago, cloud cybersecurity data, they’re all there. And our job is to help customers take all that and take advantage of it. Like so their businesses are better, as we kind of thought through what what led us here today. You have to be multicloud to succeed in that world. You know, we’d love the partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft is right there on the leading edge taking the world forward to so as Google and if we start with the idea, we’ve got to be great for our customers. We felt we had to be multicloud Absolutely

Vince Menzione 5:00

brilliant move strategically. So I’ve been chronicling this rising dominance of the hyper scalars. And I think a lot of people don’t recognise the level of dominance, right? If you look at the data centres, the chips and the data centres, and the infrastructure and the go to market strategies, right, and securing large commitments from organisations at the C suite level, right, buyers are making decisions in the lines of business. But the C suite is where these large commitments are happening. And they’re estimating now that they’re about $340 billion in durable cloud budgets amongst the top three, was this a consideration for the move going forward?

Tony Safoian 5:41

I like how he says it, and I don’t want to steal his thunder. So I’ll let him describe the strategy because I think it’s he says it really well. Well,

Dee Burger 5:47

I think, no doubt, right, no doubt. So if you look at the investment, people are making the hyper scalars. Now, who would have thought, you know, 10 years ago that three companies were going to own a such a significant part of the infrastructure of the whole world. Everything happens in the cloud. Everything happens in the cloud. And again, back to our job is to be great for our customers, and whatever they need to do. We have to be relevant in those areas. Yeah.

Vince Menzione 6:14

So let’s talk about the merger. How did this all come together?

Dee Burger 6:19

We had to separate we had two separate pathways, don’t you start with your pathway, I’ll add mine will tell you how they came together. A couple of years ago, it became apparent to us that we need we needed to do something seismic, to continue to be able to grow at the level of trajectory and capacity and evolution that our customers and the market was demanding of us. Every one of our peers had done things way, way, way earlier in their journey than we had. And we were getting to a point where, you know, being broad and deep in this ecosystem, in itself was not, you know, sufficient to serve the needs of our customers and a evolving strategy of more customer centricity customers are asking us to be in more markets, that was very hard to do organically, they were asking us to be more comprehensive, which is hard for us to do organically, like, oh, we wish you could do the Microsoft stuff or wish you could do the, you know, the 50,000 store location work that we want, like, what we just couldn’t do that. So we looked at tonnes of options, kiss a lot of frogs looked at, you know, private equity and all this, you know, just essentially every option, including every strategic option. And it wasn’t really up until I started seeing Insite kind of show up at the big Google Events. And I was like, insights here that it even came sort of to the forefront of my mindset that this could be a potential destination. But as we started looking at it closer and closer, I was like, Oh, my God, they’re, they’re just like us. You know, they believe in the magic of products and services and solutions coming together. They are on their own transformational journey. They have the best incumbency of any potential strategic partner that we could ever dream of. And they are amazing people.

Tony Safoian 8:18

Tell him the restaurant where the name of the restaurant where you got the whole thing started. verse, verse,

Dee Burger 8:24

yeah, so So this is an interesting story. I know. It’ll be where the thing culminates. So different for me, you know? So I came to Insight summer of 2022. And we talked a lot about m&a. Joyce’s new into the CEO role, we talked about the different things we needed to build over the course of time. The fundamental idea is we touch a lot of customers. And we need to do more and more for those customers. Our mission is to do more and more, be more and more valuable doing more and more things. And started down the path of what are the most we historically have been close to infrastructure? So what are the infrastructure adjacent sorts of things, businesses to get in, we came up with a list. Being multicloud was the first thing we really wanted to do. And so I called a good friend of mine at Google, who will remain nameless, but senior guy at Google and said, We gotta get into Google. We’ve got to figure out a way to do a job there who is out there to buy and it took three seconds SATA. And so we started down this path. We then were contacted through Tony’s banker on Project verse happens to be the same name of the restaurant that they they got started in. We’ve met a bunch we had Tony out to Arizona with with his full team, we sell very much same thing like a fit. It doesn’t help to buy a company that is strategically aligned. That just won’t work. It just doesn’t work in your culture and insights gotta very culture really comes first. It had to fit. We saw the fit together. Tony and I talk because actually at one of these events, Tony, I had a call with Tony, I went out to the lobby, it was at our event called mastery that we do for our technology, or most technical professionals. And we talked and said, let’s figure out how to do this. And we spent three months we worked it out. And then the closing dinner, going back to verse was at the very restaurant that Tony got started November 30, the night before December 1 with Tony and his family and his team. It was really a great event.

Vince Menzione 10:26

That is fantastic. What a great story. You know, this reminds me of this conversation, I think about both of your organization’s is really being categories of one. Alright. And Tony, and I’ve had a lot of conversations about his strategy. I know it very well. I feel like insights been the other company as well, that has thought about this holistically. And you know, it’s interesting, because I spent almost 10 years in the Microsoft world, right? And I know that Microsoft and the others as well. Like to fit you into buckets, right? You’re either an ISP, or you’re an SI, or you’re a large scale partner. But it seems that you are redefining your category. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Dee Burger 11:10

Yeah, I’ll start. It was great. We just had Danica Patrick out. And she actually gave the answer. I’m going to quote for this, which was good. You know, they asked her if she had idols when she was going up. And she said, No, she wanted, she wanted to be the best her very much the way we think about it, you know, we are trying to build a business that we don’t believe currently exists. You know, when you think about a client and how hard it is, with a vast array of technology out there, how do you choose? How do you purchase? How do you implement? How do you manage? How do you transform that that whole cycle, we think we’re better positioned to help our customers do that, against the fastest evolving technology industry we’ve ever seen. And it’s only going to get faster.

Tony Safoian 11:56

No, it’s completely right. I mean, we’ve been talking to anybody who would listen and you’re an expert in this area, but it’s like you’ve covered channels, partnerships, ecosystems, you’ve worked in it, you’ve covered it for years, you know, like the traditional tendency to put us in like little buckets, right? Like, oh, like, they’re a reseller. And though they’re an SI and they’re no, they’re an RSI, no, they’re NSP? No, they’re an LSP. It’s like just make up random acronyms and pigeonhole. Listen to, you know, traditionally, the one thing we’ve done well, well, you know, I think cloud has changed what customers need us to do, and has forced us to change our own business models, because like, you can’t just like buy a bunch of software from you know, vendor A, and then hire vendor bcde and hope that they implemented well, it just doesn’t work for customers, and it doesn’t work for us in our business model. So and we were both built that way. And we’re on these independent journeys, bring it together just supercharged charges at all we can think of a good name inside had had. So we’re just using there’s like we are the leading solutions integrator, and creating new categories is hard. So you know, Noreen, and Hillary are gonna have a hell of a time making it roll off of everyone’s tongue over the next two years. But that’s what we expect a new category, our own quadrant, we are one of one of solutions integrator,

Vince Menzione 13:20

I love solutions integrator, I think it speaks volumes for what’s been missing, right. And we’ve, I’ve had these conversations, you have independent software vendors that do one thing, you have transactional partners that do another thing you have SI is that come and build on top of it. And if you’re lucky, they’re not si ‘s that are going to basically want to be there forever, right? You want to you want to get to the end result. And I think that’s exactly clearly what you’re saying, stating, you’re doing here for customer with the customer in mind and customer focus.

Dee Burger 13:47

Absolutely. So I think about it, you know, from the standpoint that the the reseller industry was ultimately set up as a way to sell salespeople to partners. Right, the history was set up that way, he had all kinds of OEMs somebody figured out, Hey, we should consolidate the supply chain. Somebody else said, All right, it’s really hard for all these people to get to all these customers. So the reseller industry came about, and economics worked that way. The emphasis ultimately worked that way. We’re starting in an entirely different place. So there are a whole position in the way we’re going to transform is you start with the customer. And you become very valuable to your partners by virtue of the value that you have for customers. So it’s a it’s a big flip. Okay,

Tony Safoian 14:36

it’s all about business model, incentive alignment, right? If you’re just selling, you care about selling as much as the customer will buy. If you’re just servicing. You want to be as slow as possible to implement the salvages before you get fired. You basically are aiming for a c plus, that’s right, right. But if you own the whole value chain, you want to you want them to buy X exactly what’s gonna solve their problem. And you want to implement it as efficiently as possible. So you can point to that value. And then when the next project and the next workload and the next, you know, strategic implementation, we want to be there forever, for different reasons, right? Not because we want, we’re going as slow as possible, we want to be there by earning the right to be there over and over again. And that’s kind of how we built our business from day one. I remember like managed services, which is a great endpoint for where we want all of our solutions to end up for the right reasons. But the reason we won in like 2000 to 2003 is like, we had an agreement you can get out of in 30 days. And I think that just creates a different culture. It does. And again, the customer knowing with comfort, at the end of the day, that they’re, you’re gonna wrap your arms around them. And this way, I see

Dee Burger 15:46

Yeah, and we’re not successful unless we can point to business outcomes. So this level of incentive alignment, as a business model just really has not existed. So we’re going to just maximise that and lean on that. And the market will realise, you know, the trades will realise, but most importantly, our customers will just understand that, like, just working with insight is is a different experience.

Vince Menzione 16:11

So what an incredible event you’re hosting here, right? You’ve had some of the leaders in the industry here. I mean, we could talk about some of the names. We we had Kevin Pisgah, on stage, who was co hosting my event been a podcast guest as well, Michael Clark

Tony Safoian 16:25

got some good dance moves.

Vince Menzione 16:26

He is He is a low energy. He’s incredible. And Michael Clark as well. Yeah, from Google, to people that I admire and have worked with over the years. How should each of these tech giants think differently? And what unique value are you ultimately delivering as a solutions integrator to the market, but more importantly, to the customer?

Tony Safoian 16:46

Michael Clark said it best I think Google strategy is clearly a partner attached to every opportunity, every customer, every pursuit, every workload, 100% partner attach, it is paramount in our strategy, because, again, consumption economics, this stuff doesn’t just like light up itself. And I think that’s an important realisation and an important benefit to the channel. An enterprise is different, and I think it took Google maybe a few years to figure it out. But, you know, I don’t care if you have the best technology in the world. Unless you have a channel, you have partners, you have a strategy that includes them. The last mile is where the value is. So I think that multi year transformation, Google’s realise, going from a consumer mindset to an enterprise mindset, again, plays completely to our strengths. And no partner in the world can provide more parts of the value chain of how the best Google technology lands and produces outcomes for customers than this combination. And so I think, again, we’ve created an uneven playing field, it looks really good on paper. Now we get to go execute it post amplify, which is the big Launchpad of, of really sada and Google landing and insight and sort of a TEDx sort of way. So we got to go execute now and and prove it out.

Dee Burger 18:13

And I think that’s very much the case, you know, back to the question of how they should be thinking about us. It is about execution. So the, of course, Microsoft and Google are phenomenal partners. But we got many more partners, and amplify attendees we had, I had a slide on this represent roughly a third of the value of all the businesses in the United States. That’s our that’s our partner crew. They’re making unbelievable technology. Our job is to make it work for customers to be in there to drive value with customers and then to work backwards to what how do you assemble the right the right set of things, that that’s what we’ve got to do.

Vince Menzione 18:50

I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out. No, you had Kevin on stage and I’ve been talking to him about this SMC business that he manages at Microsoft. I mean, the numbers are astounding. People don’t realise that mid market is really, you know, everybody clusters towards the top to the enterprise, but this mid market is really untapped. Up to under Services underserved. And being able to again, I think your model is really effective in that mid market, which, by the way, it’s it’s $100 billion opportunity for even a Microsoft. So I just think that what you’re doing there specifically, it really hits home in terms of the market penetration.

Dee Burger 20:18

No question. So so if you think about the numbers we are, in our calculation, we do work with about 70% of all the businesses in United States that have $100 million in revenue or more, we do at least $1. Right. So it’s kind of a I’ve been in the system integrator world for a very long time before coming here. Those models are heavy. And you can you can land that model and about 500 customers. We can we can land our model at a much broader we have 29 That actually was sought, I haven’t done a recount. First of all, the 70% held Prasad his base, which was interesting about 70% of thought his base, and so it was already working with, but another 1000. So let’s just say we’re at 30,000 customers now, there’s a lot of things you can

Vince Menzione 21:00

do. Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s 11,000, I’m going to use my what I know, I think around 11,000 enterprise, and maybe it’s 38 or 35,000, mid market customers, and just sort of that you see the market pet potential is enormous. I mean, look,

Tony Safoian 21:15

we have a total of what 230 field people Yeah, like, we’d love to use our two to 3000, to be able to get to these customers. And by the way, the E commerce platform, we’ve never been able to be transactional how customers start, especially at scale. So we’re going to work with Rob and everybody else on the Google side with the API integration. We want customers to be able to buy and start however they want. And, you know, I love the ambition of creating also the best commerce experience on the website. And Google has never been able to deliver their products like that through through any channel, right on their own website, you can kind of try and buy in that kind of stuff. But that opportunity to reach 1000s of more customers globally through the commerce platform is something we’re going to definitely worked to integrate starting this year. But again, their reach is phenomenal. And we could never get that URL.

Vince Menzione 22:12

Glad you talked about law call ecommerce, we’ll call that transaction marketplaces, in fact, is the terminology we’ve been using to talk about what’s going on again, the three hyperscalers. Leaning in here, Microsoft just leaned in a big way this year, AWS was sort of in lead role before that Google’s also doing some significant moves into marketplace, huge opportunity. Canalis says, we’ll do $45 billion by the end of this year 80% through the hyperscalers through marketplaces, that the experience the buying experience is happening now the millennial generation not wanting to talk to salespeople, they want to go online, they want to click three times and have a box show up. Right. That’s the way we’ve gotten we’ve gotten indoctrinated this way. What do you think now about marketplaces in their role? And how are you addressing that?

Tony Safoian 23:00

I think all 80% of all enterprise software will be bought this way in about three years. So and it’s not only a you know, millennial procurement, I don’t want to talk to people construct as is even more drivers in that there’s there’s legal, there’s commercial, there’s contracting, there’s the economic benefits that are just too powerful, you know, everybody’s biggest contract is their main hyper scalar, contract, one or two or three, of course, I’m gonna push as much as I can, right and to get those benefits. So we play a critical role to add value to those transactions to package those things a little differently. And, you know, Adobe, Cisco, you know, Teradata, like with like, all these companies, right, like, we are going to be that last mile for them to, and I think onus is on us to create, you know, a value beyond just a transaction there. But Google realises, you know, this the work that dyes is doing to resell enable every part of this value chain. We’re gonna play a bigger role than ever before, in a weird way, but it’s true.

Vince Menzione 24:06

Any anything else you’d like to add?

Dee Burger 24:07

Totally, totally agree. I mean, we are looking at it as sort of a fact of life the way it’s gonna go. And we’re building our business around around that outcome. I

Vince Menzione 24:14

think it’s brilliant. I think it’s a brilliant strategy. You talked about AI a little bit you touched on AI, and we can’t have a conversation today in 2024. Without really diving in here, right? Last year was was in credibly insightful say, right, Microsoft comes in with their partnership. Google responds, right, both organisations, you look at market valuations, pretty significant growth for both companies this year. I think a lot of it was attributed to AI, I would say, What are your thoughts on delivering on the AI promise? I

Dee Burger 24:46

mean, I think the first part is the tools blow you away every time you see him. And even if you look once a week, they’ve moved so far, so we’re so so early. Everybody’s experimenting with it. Not that many people are finding direct value other than in the wild, that stunning sort of thing. You can get great pictures and things. Our job is to ultimately drive that value. Our job is to create the connection between. It’s almost, you know, I started my career, long time ago when I wrote a dinosaur to work and we focused on reengineering. Right? It was a big reengineering as don’t automate, obliterate and whoever the guy is that did reengineering. We’re going to enter a new era of AI driven, reengineering. And it comes down to how do you orient the business differently to use these tools?

Vince Menzione 25:35

You have me thinking the Flintstones there for a second?

Tony Safoian 25:39

pedal power? Battle power? Yeah. I mean, look, we saw Jensen on stage, we saw Pat on stage, Google with Gemini, Microsoft with copilot and, you know, the opening I partnership, etc. I mean, is there is there a more comprehensive destination for your AI execution strategy, whether you’re, you know, building models, you need a bunch of computing power or processing power the chips, or, you know, you’re deploying them through the, you know, the best prebuilt multimodal models on the planet like inside, literally has, has all of it, which is incredible. And that optionality for the base of customers is great. The bet the biggest gift to Google was the launch of Chad GPT. It unleashed the giant that has invented literally invented transformers and a lot of this technology that’s running, you know, the foundational technology for everything that’s going on. So Gemini, you know, one, Gemini 1.5. Microsoft’s not stopping, they’re not stopping. So, you know, I’m actually very, very optimistic that I think that this is going to create way more jobs and it changes. And I believe in humans plus AI, and, you know, listened to, you know, a lot of various podcasts, I think we’re going to enter a decade of the biggest economic growth in history. And I think there’s certain markets that are at an advantage to this, North America is certainly one of them, and there are others. But I think it’s our decade, and thank God for, you know, this huge leap in evolution at a time where we feel like we needed the most, right, like, so. Thank you. Thanks, open AI. Thanks, everybody. And we’re in a tremendous position to help our customers do exactly that.

Vince Menzione 27:35

And as we talked about the importance of the hyper scalars, layering in this AI component makes it even more critical, right? Yeah, it’s incredible. So another topic that’s on everyone’s minds these days is security. Right? We have we’ve all experienced in one form or another, I’m sure you’ve had many clients. It’s a real issue. And it continues to be an issue. And I know insight is focused incredibly well in the security space. Wanted to spend a moment here with you d to explain your position. And what insight is doing uniquely here? Well,

Dee Burger 28:09

we’re doing a few things. Again, American keep it in the same thing. We are really driving it through incident response. How do you help customers prevent it? But then how do you how do you respond to it, one of the very unique things about insight is our technical depth. We’ve been able to help multiple clients, in case studies you can never use when they’re in a very bad position. By being able to bring the level of expertise and programme management to get them out of it. We’ve got all the normal security businesses and sell security software. And we do you know, some of the pentesting there’s different types of things. But our real focus on that is to get really good at helping clients when they’re in hot water. Back to the start with client value. Go help a client be valuable forever. No transact

Dee Burger 28:58

security is one of the fastest growing parts of what we do in services, both professional and soon to be managed services. Google with chronicle with beyond Corp with reCAPTCHA with their general security posture across GCP. Google workspace identity, I think Google has one of the strongest security stories on the planet. Mandiant acquisition obviously put an exclamation point on that. In 2020, for many, it essentially is being rolled into Google proper. So again, by being an insight customer, you have access to all of that. And we’re going to leverage your scale your sock operations to bring that Google layer Google services Google capabilities to to all of our joint customers as well. And it is not it’s one of the areas that has, you know, experienced zero budget cuts in terms of customer investment.

Vince Menzione 29:53

So this is the Ultimate Partner. We talk about partnering and obviously you are a pinnacle partner and both of you are Pinnacle partners in Europe. On right, and now together just this massive power, power force for our industry, but you also work with other organisations, right? We talk about customers, and we talk about other partners. So is hoping for our listeners and viewers, what is your perspective? And what would you say to them now to optimise for success working with your organisation,

Dee Burger 30:21

you know, we are, again, we’re gonna be customer first, right? And we’re gonna be really, really valuable to our customers, sorry, to our partners, because we understand our customers context. And we can help position their solutions and their technologies and wages going to be valuable. Going way past the idea of let’s just tell them everything we can make it useful, make it valuable, make it long term. And so the partnerships that are going to work best for us are people that can work with us to ultimately contextualise their technology to make it useful to make it valuable. And that’ll be our continued focus.

Vince Menzione 30:59

Tony, from your perspective, working with other partners? 

Tony Safoian 31:02

Look, I think, again, you know, two years ago, we were you know, we only sold what Google sold. And now we have 4050 plus marketplace enabled ISVs that really round out the ceiling of the solution set inside has 6000 others that we are figuring out and merging in some strategies and you know, going sort of focused in other strategies to this point, and you know, Sandy coming in as our CRO year and a half ago, really reoriented, again, exactly the way that he talks about a Joyce talks about it. We got to lead in our customers. Sandy has a slide she showed this week to our own team said when I first came in, I was interviewing customers are like, their response was like, What do you think it’s not, you know, how they’re like SAT is extremely accessible and responsive. But not top of mind. You know, and I think that’s a problem, right? So we got to all orient ourselves such that we become indispensable to our customers that they think of insight, insight, SATA, SATA all the time, because we’re in there, and we’re adding value, we’re part of their strategic planning, we’re part of their budget planning, we’re part of their security strategy planning, were part of their, you know, helping them prep for board meetings, like we just got to be in there. And, and the PullThru will come and the customer relationship will grow. We were both challenged with and again, varying degrees of success and different customers. But the likes to say like, you know, we do $1 with, you know, X percent of customers, but many of them is just $1. And for us to it’s like we have some of the biggest customers biggest companies in the world for which we do one thing. And that’s terrible, right? Because that’s how they think of us and the only way they think of us. So we’ve got a lot of work to do jointly to change that. Obviously, this coming together helps. We want we want a significant amount of their love attention, mindshare, wallet share, but in a way that earns it every day. I

Vince Menzione 33:12

know you both work with ISPs, independent software vendors, I think about you both as being superhighways to the customer for those organisations in many respects. For partners that want to lean in with you, what should they do next?

Tony Safoian 33:26

I think new partnerships, to that degree are are hard. Insight has a great platform for onboarding those, I think we’re going to adapt that platform. But I think it’s about solving a unique problem that fits into a solution pillar. And is hopefully if not marketplace enabled today, let us help you do that we do great. We have great services around marketplace enablement for new ISPs that are not on those marketplaces. And then you have to, you know, make the economics work, which isn’t, which isn’t that hard, and then bring customers with you. I mean, that always helps. You know,

Tony Safoian 34:04

it’s simple. You want to do it. Let’s talk about a customer.

Vince Menzione 34:09

Well, I want to thank you both. This has been a real privilege to be in the room with both of you and hear the story about how you came together two amazing individuals and friends. And I want to thank you for spending time with our viewers and listeners. Any closing thoughts going into 2024? Through 2024, that you’d like to share with this group of listeners and viewers?

Tony Safoian 34:29

Well, first and foremost, thank you. So great to be back on talking about, you know, completely different trajectory. I think last time we spoke this is not on the table at all. And and you know, I don’t want to, you know, overstate this at all, but I don’t think I can like, honestly think this combination is it’s the biggest thing to have happened to Google Cloud, probably in the history of Google Cloud as far as partnerships go. Inside. It just made the biggest investment anyone’s ever made in entering the Google Cloud ecosystem that’s a compliment to Google a compliment to sada but also, of course, you know, insights vision, and it’s one of the biggest things have happened in the ecosystem period when you know, when a when a 40 year old company says, you know, I want to start a new practice they don’t say like that I’m typically say, I want to be number one tomorrow. And, you know, that’s what insights done. But thank you for this platform vents, keep doing what you’re doing a really an important part of our community.

Vince Menzione 35:28

You know, I think about executive commitment and closing, and this was extreme executive commitment. On behalf of both organisations coming together. I want to thank our viewers and listeners for joining Ultimate Partner to amazing leaders, D Berger, Tony Sivan, and the insight team. So great to have you both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Vince. Thank you.

Vince Menzione 35:53

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner

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Vince Menzione 0:00

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Partner. I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And in November of 2023 30, leaders congregated to a packed house of partners to help spark the ecosystem in this time of rapid change and transformation. If you were there in person, you felt the electricity and excitement in the room. But if you couldn’t join us in person, I still wanted to share this incredible rich content with you here. So I hope you enjoy this amazing session, as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you.

Vince Menzione 0:44

I am, I feel so grateful and so blessed? For this moment. And I just want to thank all of you for being here for supporting us. I wanted to take a few minutes this morning, before we kick into an amazing conversation just to ground us. And I don’t know how many of you follow along with me on my podcast and my journey. But, you know, I’ve talked about my transformation several years, several years in the business, running partner organisations, both on the partner side, and then almost a decade at Microsoft, and then 200 podcast episodes where I ask every single guest, what do the best do? And when you see failure, what do you wish you had said to those partners that failed partnering with you. And so from that body of knowledge that laboratory, I’ve boiled down a set of operating principles that I believe, make success. And they’re also the ones that lead to failure. And so I just wanted to ground us because I think it’ll, today is about the how, and to get to the how the tactics, we have to start with principles, we have to lead with principles. And so I’m just going to spend a few minutes here talking about a set of operating principles of successful partnering. And I believe there’s seven, you could say, there’s more, there’s less, but I’ve grounded in on what I call the internal victory, and then the partnership victory. And I’m going to discuss each one of these in a few mil. This could be an hour long presentation, and I’m going to do it in about five minutes. How’s that? All right, because I, I’m not gonna and by the way, this was a whole deck and it’s one slide. So I’m kind of proud that we got it down to that. But we talked a little bit about mindset when we started out the day yesterday. And this amazing leader, Satya Nadella who’s probably one of the greatest CEOs, legendary CEOs, at least of my of last decade, maybe even my career history. When Satya, I was I was at Microsoft during the bomber days and then the early Satya days. And the first three things that this gentleman did. He just got a copy of the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, if you haven’t read that book, I think it’s a great read on mindfulness mindset, growth, mindset versus scarcity, limited mindset. And that was a great opportunity for us to get grounded in the principle of growth mindset as an organisation. The second thing he did, and I mentioned this yesterday, the video of Michael Gervais, Michael Gervais, he was instrumental in helping set up the leadership team at Microsoft to move to a growth mindset. You see, these were Alpha leaders who were competing for resources, rewards, and, and recognition. And so those people were fighting and competing, in fact, built by firms competing against each other. And he he’s knocked down all those barriers. Mindset became a principle within Microsoft. And you go, wow, that’s like kind of a woowoo thing like we as leaders in our organisations, and to be successful partnering need to have a growth mindset, your CEO, your C suite, need to get there. And one of the principles we work through with the podcast. And the work that I do is around this and expect to see some more work even with Michael hopefully in the future. But mindfulness and mindset are critical to success while partnering and I believe that’s foundational, it’s a foundational element. And if it’s not there,

Vince Menzione 4:15

it’s not going to be you’re not going to reach your pinnacle of success.

Vince Menzione 4:20

I’m so excited to continue to partner with ag one. Many of you know I made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens, and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one

Vince Menzione 5:00

Get a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five free travel packs with your first purchase, go to drink ag one.com, forward slash Vince M, that’s drink ag one.com forward slash, then m, check them out. The second operating principles are on commitment. I talked about this yesterday, like, we all work in this partnership world. And sometimes we’re siloed. Because our executive teams aren’t necessarily committed. Commitment means a lot of things, it means from the C suite on down to the selling floor, everybody speaks partner, it means that the CFO is committing resources, it means the CMO is in lockstep with you on messaging and go to market. And it means that the selling organisation is selling with, through and CO selling in the partner journey. And so getting there is extremely important to success. The third principle I like to talk about is having a shared vision, and your partnership with Microsoft. I believe that this is fundamental Microsoft works off of this vision concept. And I believe that getting there is critical. It’s not just about the tactics, it’s not just about a situational relationship, it’s about having a long term vision for success and outlining what that looks like. And using that in within your own organisation, to rally people around what you’re trying to do, and how you’re trying to drive the growth of your organisation, and to get your partner on the other side on board. And we do visioning as part of the work that we do. But that’s an important principle, you need to get that down, you need to have a true vision for success. Well, both in terms of your partner strategy internally, as well as with your your key partners. So that’s when you get internal victory, you get it right, internally, you have growth mindset, you have extreme commitment, and you put vision and your values upfront.

Vince Menzione 6:55

When you lock arms across the other side, if you notice in the middle of that diagram, mutual trust, if you don’t have trust, you don’t have a partnership.

Vince Menzione 7:03

When trust is out of the room, there’s no there’s no oxygen in the room, there’s no partnership. And if you feel it sometimes don’t I mean, you’re in these meetings, and it’s not quite the way it should be. And you know, you’re just doing it, you’re just going through the motions, you have to have true mutual trust, before you lock arms with another organisation. So that’s a principle. It’s actually the oxygen in the room. And then when we move over to the other side, we need to do some things. We need to apply maniacal focus to the execution. You see, when I was a GM at Microsoft, I’d have all these meetings, we’d all get in the room. And we talk about like, yeah, we’re going to do this, we’d have all the slides, we’d say this is what our journey is gonna look like. These are the actions that we’re going to drive, this is our mutual go to market strategy. This is how much sales we’re going to drive. And then we leave Inspire. And I go to my PDM, three months later. So whatever happened to that partner,

Vince Menzione 7:56

crickets, we didn’t execute. We didn’t apply maniacal focus, the execution where the best partners, and their former CEO is actually here. Today, I don’t know if I can’t, I can’t see everybody in the room. But they used to come to Microsoft with their book, every year it inspire. And they would have, they basically come to the table and say, This is what we did with you this year. And they’d show us the results. And they did that every day. But at the end of the year, it was palpable that they actually came and they demonstrated, this was your blueprint, this is what you were trying to achieve. This is how we achieved it together, applying maniacal focus to your success. Brand. You know this gentleman, if you were here yesterday, dux Raymond size, a great friend, he’s been on my podcast three or four times now, he does this better than anybody I talked about building your brand. And your brand story. You see, you’ve got to get your marketing really good both with internally and with your you know, to your customers, but your go to market message with the partner. And then the third piece is you need to brand back to Microsoft, you see, you’re trying to be a shiny quarter in a bucket full of shiny quarters, even if you’re a significant partner. And you know, you’re going to do more for Microsoft than anybody else. And you’ve got all these competencies and great solutions, you need to brand yourself. So branding is a critical component. And we’re gonna have a session on that today. So I just want to make sure that we’re all grounded on modern marketing principles and showing up and especially how it aligns to the new world that we live in today. The sixth principle is about delivering results, you say it’s okay to say you’re going to do it, but then you have to go delivered against it. And that’s if you’ve applied maniacal focus, if you’ve done everything you need to do on the go to market side and branding both internally and to your customers and to your partners. You get that flywheel going. That flywheel of success is where you will build momentum and that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. And then you’re applying maniacal focus on it because you’re meeting

Vince Menzione 10:00

regularly and discussing it. And every meeting you have with a seller and Microsoft, you’re discussing those success stories. You’re saying this is the slide that says what I liked that partner that showed up with the book, you show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant. Need to do that. And then we’ve done all these things were wildly successful as a Microsoft partner, right?

Vince Menzione 10:24

We’ve done everything right. We’re at the pinnacle. We’re a top cosell Partner of the Year. And guess what Microsoft just did? They pivoted. They just changed everything right. They changed their priorities. They changed how they’re compensated in their people. They might have introduced a few things this year, like AI, like marketplace, and this whole new thing around SMC and what do you have to do now? You have to apply agility to your business. You need to be relevant, you need to stay relevant you need to thrive to survive, or you will be marginalised. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to bartering.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate bark. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner

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Join Vince Menzione in this special episode of The Ultimate Partner, where he shares insights from an exclusive interview conducted on the Partnerships Unraveled podcast hosted by Rick van den Bosch. Explore the intricate realm of tech partnerships and ecosystems, delving into Microsoft’s dynamic partner ecosystem, mid-market focus, and AI investments. Discover invaluable perspectives on Microsoft’s channel strategy and growth opportunities alongside expert advice on leveraging marketplace opportunities when partnering with Microsoft. Uncover the crucial role of partners in Microsoft’s AI strategy and explore potential opportunities in this burgeoning field. Don’t miss out on this enriching episode packed with actionable insights and expert guidance.

I am thrilled to welcome you into a world that delivers unparalleled insights, best practices, and essential information to unlock your potential as a partner and propel you towards your most ambitious goals. This is a world crafted for partners like you.

Our journey began seven years ago with a vision to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. It started with a podcast.

Today, Ultimate Partner’s mission is clear and bold, “empower every individual, organization, and partner to achieve more through successful partnering.

As an Ultimate Partner Experience Member, you will unlock a growing treasure trove of resources. Dive into recordings of our events, exclusive podcast episodes, and a wealth of unique content, all designed to enhance your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and ecosystem growth. We are in our early days and expect much more to come.

As an innovator, being part of this experience is more than joining a community; it’s about integrating into an ecosystem brimming with innovation and collaboration. Here, shared experiences and insights are your gateway to progress, offering connections with peers and resources to elevate your Cloud GTM strategy. This is your platform to engage, seek support, and contribute to our collective growth.

I’m thrilled to welcome you to this journey. Let’s navigate, thrive, and redefine success in the tech partnership landscape together.

Welcome to the future,

Vince Menzione

CEO, Ultimate Partner

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Rick van den Bosch 0:02

Vince, how are you doing today?

Vince Menzione 0:03

Rick, it is so such a pleasure and an honour to be here with you today. Thank you so much for hosting me. Likewise,

Rick van den Bosch 0:10

we actually recorded the podcast earlier together, but then it was on Ultimate Partner. So I’m very excited to continue the conversation today and the dive even further in the world of ecosystems on the channel today.

Vince Menzione 0:25

You know, I love I love unravelled because I think it’s a great way to decode and talk about what we’re experiencing in our world in our lives today. So excited for this conversation.

Rick van den Bosch 0:34

Likewise, I’m super curious. Also, for our listeners, Finns, who might not know you yet, could you elaborate a bit more on how you got acquainted with partnerships, and you’ve had an impressive career there. So I think it’s definitely interesting to learn a bit more there. So

Vince Menzione 0:51

Rick, as you mentioned, I’m the CEO of ultimate partner and the host of The Ultimate Partner podcast over 200 episodes. Now we’re in the 200 range now, which is kind of crazy. I started my career in the early days of wireless computing describe this careers for successful business transformations. I’m on number five now. And I started off carrying a bag as a salesperson company that was in the early days of wireless computing before Wi Fi. We were pioneers in that technology. We I use partners to build an influence strategy to help us grow our market share. We went public on the Toronto exchange, we had a successful exit that companies now Zebra Technologies, I followed one of the leaders to go to a turnaround company that was at the brink of bankruptcy. And Golden Gate capital had spun us out. And I built a new business. And that’s where I started into the partnership role to really fully I was asked to build the government business. We were Panasonic’s largest competitor, Panasonic was the market leader in selling into public safety and military. And we had a product that was equally as good. I built the channel strategy, I went down to Washington, DC, I aligned with several the largest technology partnership organisations and I build that business incrementally X. Just we had, we had tremendous success. I was the growth engine, we sold the company to another company, General Dynamics large defence contractor, it was at that point that Microsoft recruited me. And for almost a decade I ran Microsoft’s we didn’t call it ecosystem at the time yet we call the partner strategy. But I ran the ecosystem for $4.6 billion business within Microsoft for almost 10 years. And I learned quite a bit about partnering and ecosystems and all the different types of partnerships and, and what that meant to building a successful strategy for a large tech giant like Microsoft. I left at the end of 2016. And I was convicted more than ever. That organisation struggled, I saw the partners that got it right. I realise a lot of organisations still struggle to the 400,000 Microsoft partners in that ecosystem, which is the same ecosystem that all the big tech giants really care about. It’s really one ecosystem. And I started this podcast Ultimate Partner, I started doing consulting work for those organisations. I went back inside for two years to the largest software company nonprofit. And I recognise that the C suite level, there was still a lack of understanding and alignment of our partnerships. And so when I left during COVID, I was convicted more than ever, that we needed to solve for this. And so I’ve made it my mission now, to help organisations achieve their greatest results through successful partnering individuals and organisations, I want to empower the world of partnering. And it’s I’m on a 10 year journey, a 10 year mission to help solve for that with ultimate partner. And we’ve expanded now from just being a podcast, to doing digital and live events. We’re going to be building a collective of organisations we want, we want to invite everybody that is that cares about the hyper scalar ecosystem to be part of that collective, because we feel that they need to have a stronger voice, working with the big hyper scalars. So that’s where I’m a mission to help solve. I won’t stop until the chief partner officer is that equal footing with the CRO, the CFO and the CMO and the organisation at the C suite. And that’s that’s where we hope to get to.

Rick van den Bosch 4:23

I love that. And that’s super impressive Korean partnerships. And I’m very curious what you think I can totally imagine in the back in the days already at Microsoft probably it wasn’t called ecosystem yet. But I can imagine Microsoft is always the front runner and everything partner related. Really were a lot of things that were actually already ecosystem, even though we were mentioning it like that yet. Like, could you maybe give some examples what you see right now what are very hot topics. I mean, the market which actually maybe Microsoft was already starting to work or really laid the foundations for at that time.

Vince Menzione 4:58

In fact, we can Hold the network back then. But I’m going to back I’m going to back up, because I feel like Microsoft created it at the very beginning. We might you and I talked about this once before. But when Bill Gates came down here to Florida to Boca Raton, to meet with IBM when they created the PC, and they were going to buy his operating system, he said, I’m not going to sell it to you. I’m going to licence it to you. And they also agreed to licence the hardware components that sparked an ecosystem that created trillions and trillions of dollars of new incremental revenue in our industry. And it created Michael Dell started building PCs in his dorm room, and Compaq computer got started. An organisation large reseller organisations in the United States CD W and some of these others started marketing started delivering magazines and doing direct marketing to sell you PCs and networking bars were created. The whole ecosystem was really spawned from that moment in time back in like 1981. Microsoft recognise that and they nurtured that they realised they couldn’t sell direct, they realise their where their strengths were. And they didn’t want to have 100,000 salespeople out there, they realised the leverage and the value of the partner network that they call it back in the day. And they also started to divide and conquer, like, okay, these parts they, they bucket ties partners into specialisations, they recognise that there were MSPs, and si guys, and ISVs, and GSI, guys, and so on, and learning partners and all like, and they started nurturing and building a whole partner, organisation around it. And they’ve done a better job than anybody at aligning that and aligning salespeople to the success of the partner ecosystem rather than dividing it up and siloing it. And Microsoft is probably the most, I think it’s either Gartner or McKinsey that says Microsoft’s the most complex hybrid organisation in the world. But they’ve figured out a way to make this all work and integrate it so that people a salesperson cares about selling a partner, there’s partner people supporting it, there’s partner development managers, and they have a division of labour. And then the organisation I think, is very unique in supporting that ecosystem. And then the Microsoft inspire Conference, which used to be the worldwide partner conference was the the seminal event that everybody went to every year. You know, I know that I know that you have some family members that participated in that I know they came, they came over to the US to go to that conference every year. It was it was the happening. And then COVID changed all this right. Now we went virtual, we went digital. And it’s a shame in some respects, that that ecosystem hasn’t gotten the nurturing and love that it needed before, which is where we came in, we came in and helped support that we just hosted a live event in person. We called it ultimate partner live spark the ecosystem because we felt like that nurturing needed to happen. And it was an overwhelming success. I mean, I’m still getting people reaching out to me, telling me how amazing they thought the event was. Yeah,

Rick van den Bosch 8:06

absolutely. Like, I can only tell from my perspective, but everyone who is interested in Microsoft in my network knew about the event. And I also saw it everywhere throughout LinkedIn. And I’m actually super curious. And I think that’s actually so interesting to share with our listeners as well. I just said it already. But Microsoft is always the front runner, when you’re in general, when you’re embarking ecosystem, we are always looking at how is Microsoft doing it? Because we know that they have already tried and tested so many things. And if they launch it to the big public, then that’s also where they are all in and moving forward there. And I was super curious about that. Since would you like to share a bit more about the event, both in terms of how it was but also definitely what are the top priorities right now of Microsoft leadership? Because I think we can learn a lot from that in when we’re building a channel or partner ecosystem. Yeah, I’m

Vince Menzione 8:59

so happy to share. You know, I’ve described this time we’ve been living through is the tectonic shifts right. We’ve been seeing in our world or lives geopolitically, all the things have been going on COVID accelerated transformation. Organisations invest invested heavy, but then we had the economic headwinds, and they backed off. We’ve seen, you know, tremendous layoffs in the last 18 months or so in the tech sector, which also has precipitated doing more with less. So I now do the job of three people. Microsoft did that too. By the way. They said like, well, we need to do this. So we came in and we said, You know what, you’re not doing a live event. I had reached out one of the I’ve been blessed to have some several leaders from Microsoft participate in Ultimate Partner. We’ve been privileged to have some of Microsoft’s top partner executives come use our platform is the place to tell the story. announce the new programmes and things like that. So I was able to get some of those leaders in a room and it was it was two days. 30 speakers 16 sessions by both, you know, both keynotes, fireside chats and panel discussions, workshop type discussions, where we took an align to the three major priorities Microsoft announced at their inspire conference. Of course, AI was priority number one, right? I mean, Microsoft’s investments in open AI and what they’re doing with Chet, which at GBT and copilot. I mean, they’re, they’re leading the way. Sati has been visionary in this respect. And they really, it’s making a difference you just see in the stock price these days, the other big announcement they made, I mean, AI is going to infuse into every product and every technology, and they want everybody to build with them. The second one was around marketplaces. And we’ve been talking about this year as sort of the marketplace moment. AWS was out of the gate a little bit early investing in marketplace, selling, of course, coming from their retail background. And Microsoft is playing fast catch up. And this year, they made announcements and said, If you want to do co selling with us, by the way, Microsoft between Microsoft, Google and Amazon, they’re about $300 billion in durable cloud budgets. That means that those three hyperscalers have went to gone to the enterprise customers and mid market customers and said, Buy these agreements for our cloud. And so they own those budgets. And they allow those clients to burn down those agreements by buying software from their marketplaces. So they’ve created a new channel. This channel with marketplaces is a new way for ISVs. And SI is to sell their solutions to Microsoft, Google and Amazon customers. So we we focused in on that marketplace moment. We had the leader of the marketplace organisation Anthony jofa, Joseph Joseph in the room, and we did a fireside chat talking about the benefits of marketplace. So organisations are really it’s still new. For a lot of them. I feel like it was where we were 10 or 12 years ago with the cloud. People were kind of resisting the change. But the change is happening. And in fact, Canalis did a study. Jim, our friend Jay McBain was part of that organisation. They said $45 billion will flow through marketplaces by the end of 2025. They under call that Jay said they under call that it’s going to be more like 50. And then tackle IO, which is one of the big marketplace software companies is predicting. By the end of 2026, we will see $100 billion in sales and transactions flow through these marketplaces between the big three. So we need to get out you need to get on the bus or get on the train. Because it’s taking off and you have to we have to embrace that, right. That’s the agility component of great partnerships and organisations. And then the third area of focus is really around the mid market. And I was privileged that the president of Microsoft small, medium and corporate accounts, which is essentially its Midmark, its mid market and SMB business. He was he was my keynote, he came in in a big way and supported the event, and really sparked the conversations and that mid market opportunity is huge. I know our friend Jay was talking about Jay again. But our friend Jay and Canalis did some study and some studies on the mid market opportunity and it’s in the trillions of dollars. And Microsoft alone. They do about $75 billion dollars a year in that mid market. And it’s only 40% penetrated for partners. So there’s a huge I’m calling it the acre diamonds like partners that are a lot we know this right? A lot of organisations only want to focus on the very big organisations, those organisations get saturated at some point, right, everybody’s calling on this mid market opportunity is huge. So it’s the third it’s the third pillar for Microsoft this year. And we brought in the leadership to speak to partners about how to be more successful selling into that market. So we recovered all three all the sessions revolved around those three pillars with Microsoft. I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out.

Rick van den Bosch 14:46

I think that’s super interesting and also very similar to conversation. I hear from a lot of vendors that we speak to regularly in terms of what everyone is talking about and we know we need to do something with it and that’s why I would love to dive a bit deeper into the specific three key points. And I’m actually going backwards from the one you ended with. Like I think that’s so interesting right now maybe first question, some clarification on mid market. So is that do they call it mid market? But is it is it a combination of SMB and mid market and you should companies together? And secondly, why do you think that area of SMB is so important than why some a company like Microsoft is so heavily investing in that area? Well,

Vince Menzione 15:29

like I said, the top of the the top of the pyramid, the enterprise organisations, which represents about 11,000, top organisations, you know, the big tech, the big organisations, the Coca Cola is of the world, the General Motors, all those big organisations. Like I said, they’re dominated by big GSI is global systems integrators, big projects, long sales cycles, it’s hard to move through those hard to navigate, and it’s crowded, it’s crowded at the top, in this bid market segment. I’ll do Microsoft’s numbers here. They have about 38,000, I’ll round it up. 38,000 accounts. Right, that’s, that’s a bigger, that’s a bigger chunk. Yeah, they just and they haven’t been good before at being focused in this area. Microsoft, used Microsoft as the example. I think everybody’s the same. And in terms of tech giants, they they had a different operating model for each of the their, what they call operating units. So if you went to the lat tam region, or you went to AIPAC, or you came over to a mesa where you are, you find a different engagement model it there wasn’t any universal Tality it was hard to navigate. And it was hard to work with the teams and those teams were not as partner centric. They were just worried about selling licences and selling what they had in the in their bag. Were enterprise knew it, they had to work with partners. They have they’ve changed the model. Now they’ve centralised all the resources. So in the Microsoft world, they’ve taken the 6000 employees across every industry in every geography at Microsoft healthcare name, all the industries enable the geographies. And now they report directly into this one individual Kevin P skirt. And they have a regional model. They they have three regions, the Americas, EMEA and the APAC region. And those three models. They also have a corporate vice president structured, but they’re centralising. They’re creating a methodology across. And they’re also welcoming and partners more, and they recognise that they had a gap here. And so they’re investing heavily. In fact, Microsoft 75% Of all the channel incentives for Microsoft this year, are going into that into that business 75%. So it tells you, they’ve made a huge commitment here. And like I said, there’s 38,000. And then at the SMB level, there’s 150 million customers at the SMB level worldwide. So huge opportunity for growth, and Microsoft’s not going to touch those SMB customers at all directly. So the huge opportunity for the channel to go. Again, this acre of diamonds and great opportunities for growth. Think about taking an organisation, any organisation of any size, and implementing AI, or all these other rich technologies, helping other helping ISVs and other SAS software companies get to reach to those customers and stitching it all together. Like we like to talk about the fact that customer doesn’t just buy one, one vendor, they put together a solution, they’re solving a business problem. And it requires multiple organisations to come together to do that. So there’s this huge opportunity in the work that you and I do to help solve for that, I think I think I mean, it’s it’s such a great opportunity for growth for all of us, Rick. Yeah,

Rick van den Bosch 18:56

100%. And I think very impressive in terms of putting your money where your mouth is like aligning 75% of your incentives to that part of the market. I think that that’s a really big move. And something that we all in partnership should be aware of, because Microsoft like search, in my opinion, is the most brilliant strategic mind out there. So he won’t be doing that without some very thorough thought behind making such a move. Like I’m interested in the piece there like so we have mid market and SMB. And then I can imagine mid market is probably large enough that some of the direct sales of Mark, Microsoft’s can work on that but they’ll do a park assist play, but from what I understand SMB will be a pure channel play. So both the selling and the implementation and everything needs to be done by the channel.

Vince Menzione 19:42

What they’ve done in the mid market is they call it corporate accounts. So these corporate accounts, these 38,000 customers, they have they have a one to many, so they have a direct sales rep. They have a swarm basically they’ve created a pod around those customers. So there’s technical resources, they’re selling resources, and there’s partnering resources supporting a group of customers. And the ratio, we’re in enterprises, maybe like one to five, one to seven, you know, one, one rep for seven customers, it’s more like a one to 25, or one to 50 model, depending on the market, and the specificity of the customer. So they are directly supported. But again, if you’re, if you’re calling on 50 accounts, and in the course of a year, and you have a big book of business to drive, you’re not going to do that yourself. You need transactional partners that are going to help sell the software and the licences, you’re going to need systems integrators to help implement support, project management, do all those things. And you’re going to need ISVs that are going to bring bring now they’re going to bring their marketplace transactable offers. So think about all of the SAS software companies, you want to get into that marketplace, because you want the sellers over here to say, Oh, you have a backup and recovery solution. This is the one you should use. And they are by the way, they’re starting to use AI internally, to be able to track the vendors and who’s being the most successful and who has the best customer SAT scores and the like. So I as a seller now have at my disposal a whole toolkit and also, you know, pane of glass that tells me who I need to bring in and who can best support me on those sales. So again, this whole partnering strategy is just critical to success. Yeah,

Rick van den Bosch 21:28

it’s all super connected to each other. I think what also in the tying is a bit more to the marketplace point, which is also very interesting. One of the words that struck me was like a little bit of reluctance, see which I also really know this in the channel because we’re all a bit scared because what Amazon of course did in the retail sector was cut off the middlemen and go direct to customer. Yes, so I can imagine some of the reluctance is coming from that angle from specifically the channel. But what how do you see that the channel is being because from an ISV perspective, it makes a lot of sense immediately marketplace like you can bundle it, it’s easier to buy from a customer perspective with how do you see them tying in the channel? And also, what do you think like, for companies looking at that, and also trying to get their channel involved there as an ISP to skill operations? What like, what are a bit of the arguments why it’s also very relevant for the channel actually to to collaborate there?

Vince Menzione 22:24

Yeah. Well, you know, the channels. I mean, we talked about the, the Boca Raton moment, the channel has had to evolve, right? Because if you’re following the big tech giant, you know, your models have changed, right? He’s there used to be all of the incentives, I was very close to Microsoft’s channel incentives programme. So I know the numbers about what we spent every year. And it was in the trillions of dollars. It was it was it was the it was the I’m sorry, it was in the billions of dollars, not the trillions of dollars, it was it was the one of the largest line items, in fact, in terms of channel incentives. And that shifted, though, it’s still there. But it shifted, it shifted to driving the right behaviours. And Microsoft will continue to do that. Right as, as we talked about with these channel incentives. Marketplace, if you’re if you’re in the channel, and you’re used to a model that was different, and you were making more money doing something else, and all of a sudden Microsoft or someone else imposes this new thing. You’re a little bit reluctant, right? But there’s other opportunities for growth, right? So you have to look at and say, I might make a little bit less here, but I can make more here. And you’re starting to see this evolution of the channel. Some of them, one of them here in the United States insight is, you know, I would say they’re on their forward leaning in terms of what they’ve been doing. They’ve been evolving their business to compete, they’ll do the transaction work, they’ll provide all the other services and resale and everything. But they are leaning more into the Accenture’s and GSI world a little bit more. And in fact, they made a major purchase just recently, of Google’s largest reseller and system integrator partner SADA Systems. So you see that you see that world evolving to right, where they’re morphing their business models, and they’re embracing marketplace. Some of these organisations again, you mentioned, the reluctance, working with Amazon looking saying, hey, you know, we know how Amazon operates in the retail world, are they going to do the same thing here? And I would say proceed with caution. I would say Microsoft will continue to be the Microsoft of old in terms of embracing their partners. But they are creating this value chain that says we are creating we’re creating value here because we have signed up these customers already. We’re working at the C suite level, by the way, those Mac agreements and cloud agreements that they the three hold. Those are negotiated at the CFO level these organisations they’re not in the line of business, but it makes it easier now to take removes a lot Under the friction from the process, so you don’t have to go find budget to go buy your software, you just have to find a customer that likes your software, and has access to a Mac agreement. So it changes the whole model up. And hopefully it will drive, it’ll drive better behaviour. And the channel organisations are going to evolve accordingly the same way, the same way the world evolved 12 years ago with the cloud, right? Everybody was selling Dell computers and targets bags back in those days, they still do. But nobody was selling cloud, they were like, What is this cloud thing? And it looks like it’s a direct a direct model, and you’re gonna buy directly from the hyper scalar? Well, that’s changed as well, we we’ve all recognised that that’s created more value for these organisations to not only sell the cloud, but also wraparound services around that. And I think we’ll see the same thing with marketplace. Yeah, 100%,

Rick van den Bosch 25:49

I think we could do a full extra episode on the consumption based model. And indeed, how it works with actually the hyperscalers getting in at the sea level, having huge contracts where you can highly benefit as an ISV. Because it’s almost like Microsoft or Amazon is gonna pay you for the contract. But it’s with credits that the customer builds up, etc. It’s super, super interesting, right? And

Vince Menzione 26:11

it won’t Yeah, and I want to just note here too, because we talked about the channel, right? It’s not going to replace the channel, the model today, at least not in the near term, it becomes another channel, right? It becomes another channel to the customer and the customer by various ways. And you just have to be agile enough to recognise that. Yeah,

Rick van den Bosch 26:32

absolutely. I think one last question around the marketplaces like the examples and deeds of, of insight, for example, like joining the marketplace, and working more around that those are almost what I would call like the GSI, sort of really big Fars, or the DMR, almost direct market resellers. But for the SMB channel partner, do you also see a role there for that marketplace or less, so?

Vince Menzione 26:56

No, just as much. So I mean, maybe maybe at a smaller scale, but these organisations are going to provide professional services, and support customers, uniquely and more locally, right. And there’s still that need, like if I’m a company in a certain geography, I have local relationships. And you know, I’d like to go back to the five or seven seats at the table, to say, who is influencing my decision process. And it may not be one of the big DM ours that we talked about, it might be a local systems integrator that you’re comfortable working with, they now have the ability to bring to you everything you need. Right? So it’s enabling them more, in fact, to go do this through marketplaces, because now they have, they have the full access to that marketplace. And customers aren’t going to do this by themselves. We know that right? This is technology, especially smaller organisations are more challenged, they don’t have the IT staff to go do it themselves. So I’m going to rely on my local and trusted vendor to support me in doing that.

Rick van den Bosch 28:01

Yeah, absolutely. And I think any SMB channel partner, you might lose a little bit of margin when doing it in such a way, but you win it back as well, because everything is in one invoice. It’s very easy to manage, like everything you would use to do with a distributor in the past now is can be managed with a marketplace or hyper scalar as well. That’s right. That’s right. I love that then then we get to the final point of AI, of course. And first of all, I want to say like Microsoft, all in on AI, big investment. They had some tumultuous weeks, but I want to do a shout out to such because that is true partnership. Some album Back at the rings of open AI definitely not what I expected the author, it just happened. But then you can see like if you have a very strong partner, and they have your back, while in effect that’s going to happen. I think it’s the best decision for open AI and for the AI continuation of innovation and progress there in general. So big shout out there. I’m also super curious to learn in the like what the you see there in terms of the AI like, of course, we know why AI is so important. But I’m also super curious, what role does Microsoft see there for their partners in terms of bringing that AI to the market? They’ve done the big investments, they’ve worked insanely hard. I’m super impressed in integrating AI and all their products and in being in office in teams in every were in Azure like but what then now it’s I think up to the channel to bring it to market. Like what what’s their strategy there and what do you think that are some of the roadblocks they might see there?

Vince Menzione 29:40

Well, first of all the call out this idea there right? That was a masterclass and strategy like what he did with with Sam. First, first of all, he was blindsided, right that I mean the board didn’t even let him know until minutes before they announced it, which is crazy. And then he He took the he took the high road. And he said, Well, how do I best support this? I want to support Sam, I want to support open AI. He brings Sam on board on a Sunday. Right, Sam, Sam, he sets up a new business unit. By the way, almost all the employees said they were going to leave. So he knew that like, if open AI isn’t going to do it, they’re all going to be Microsoft employees. And then he positions it. So Sam can run back into the CEO, or get back into the CEO slot, which was just incredible. Now on the product side, what you’re seeing, I mean, Microsoft has been the Productivity Suite, right, and we go back, I mean, let’s let’s look at offices is just a crowning example, and M 365. Now, and all of your productivity offerings and sweet. Everything is infused now with AI is getting infused with AI, it’s, there were big announcements and releases in early November, we’re continuing to see things they had their big Ignite conference, the ability to infuse all this technology, they’re all the partner stays pretty much the same in that regard, right? Because these are saying these are organisations that need to embrace and deploy these technologies, they will do that. The role, there’ll be addition, there are additional roles for GSIs and s eyes of any size and shape, to take advantage of the toolkits that are available in Azure AI. And you can go on with the list of Microsoft acronyms and names. But being able to take that technology and deploy it locally, people will want secure GP TS they’ll want they want the ability to do their own and not be in the public domain. So the ability to implement those is going to be huge opportunity in the ISP and SAS world community. Well, I mean, I want it I want to infuse this technology into my my offerings, right? So there’s the opportunity for those partners to go do that. And then to implement that. So it’s creating more opportunity for partners of all types to take and infuse that, that stack into into organisations. Right. And it’s we’re just at the beginning. So I can’t even predict where it’s going to go. But we are people are talking about this. As even probably the biggest thing that’s happened in the last 40 years, right, since the maybe 50 years since the chip. Right? Yeah, we went through the PC era, we went to the client server, we went to the internet error. We got to mobile computing, we got to cloud and now we’re in AI and it’s man, it’s going to be it’s going to be a wild ride these next 10 years. Yeah,

Rick van den Bosch 32:25

it’s incredible. Really ended like the pace at which everything is progressing. I’m very curious to see where that’s where that’s going. And a question that comes to mind immediately we meet it’s such a new technology like we need to the left, but also it’s progressing so quickly. And that will keep the same pace priority or only grow exponentially from an innovation side. What strategy does Microsoft have in place to actually make sure that their partners, both the ISVs, and the channel can actually easily message that and take that message of AI but also the implementation etc. to the market? Do you see any potential blockers there are challenges for for Microsoft, Microsoft

Vince Menzione 33:08

is putting out a lot in fact, once once we have the content live, I’d love people to come see like the videos and some of the things that Microsoft showed at our event. But I mean, they they want the partner world to embrace it. What I would say in terms of blocker, I would say one thing I will say about Microsoft, even as a former employee, I’m still people like Brad Smith, who’s president of Microsoft, there’s an ethical level within Microsoft that you don’t see in most, if not any other technology company that they will do the right thing they will do. They’ve always professed the cloud for good. People like Brad Brad wrote a book called tools and weapons and he sits at the forefront of Microsoft’s aim to ensure that we do this in the right way. Right. And Microsoft again, being a partner led partner, they took the word AI if you know this, they changed the name of the partner programme in July. In fact, we had Julie Smith, Julie Sanford, come on to the podcasts and talk about this. They change the name of the programme from the Microsoft cloud partner programme to the Microsoft AI cloud partner programme. So they’ve infused AI into everything including the name of the partner programme for the 400,000 partners, which tells me and the channel incentives and everything that they’re doing, that they’re leaning in have more heavily. They are, I know for a fact that they are quintupling the size of the technology groups supporting AI. They had a team of black belts as an example, here in the United States. That was a fairly small ragtag team, maybe 20 people they have, they are going five times the size of that organisation just to support customers here. And they’re doing the same things around apart they Microsoft’s view is we bring we bring the technology in We bring the partner and the customer together, and we go solve for it together, which has been always been their approach.

Rick van den Bosch 35:06

I love this. Yeah, it just you can really see that Microsoft is always one step ahead of where they should, or multiple steps ahead, let’s say like that of where they want to go and where they are going. And that’s what you can clearly see with this as well. And again, also with things like that, I can also highly advise that to our listeners, like if you launch something, launch it back, like look at Microsoft, such an enormous company, but when they launch AI, they implement it everywhere. So everyone will know in their ecosystem, how important that’s gonna be for the upcoming five to 10 years or, and there are this case,

Vince Menzione 35:40

and even their executives. Kevin, Pisco, when he spoke at our event says I spent at least a half hour every morning studying what’s what we’re doing on AI practising it, implementing it getting to know the product better. This is the president of a $75 billion division of Microsoft, he’s spending time there, which tells you the whole company is focused on this. And to your point, too, I think they caught a lot of others were caught flat footed. I think that there was a there were a lot of people in other places in Silicon Valley in particular, that were going and getting into the rooms and going, what do we do now? What’s our strategy going to look like? What you know, they were just so caught off guard by Microsoft’s announcements. It’s an amazing

Rick van den Bosch 36:23

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome fans. I think this really was a pure masterclass early on where the partner ecosystem and channel is going, we spoken about how important SMB and mid market there’s going to be if you want to keep your growth rates that you had in the past as a tech company, because the enterprise market is getting saturated. So you need to really get that opportunity. We talked about how to really work together with hyper scalars and the opportunity with marketplaces and AI How can you best implement it? How can you leverage the AI that Microsoft is working with? I think it was super valuable. I definitely want to get you back later fence. And thank you so much for sharing this with our listeners. And to our listeners. See you next week.

Vince Menzione 37:10

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate bar. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to barter.

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Join Vince Menzione in a captivating conversation with Heather Deggans, VP of Microsoft Partner Go-to-Market for the Americas. Learn about Microsoft’s FY24 priorities, AI focus, SMB opportunities, and the importance of partnerships. Discover the co-pilot program’s benefits, insights on differentiation, and ecosystem growth strategies. Don’t miss this deep dive into the tech industry’s evolving landscape with a seasoned leader at the forefront of innovation. 

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Vince Menzione 0:02

Welcome to The Ultimate Partner. I’m Vince Manzi on your host, and I’m excited to be back here at Microsoft Studios in Redmond, Washington with Heather Dagens, the VP of go to market of Microsoft’s America’s partner, organisation, GPS. So excited to be back here with you today, Heather,

Heather Deggans 0:21

thank you so much, man. It’s it’s great to see you. And thank you for having me. Well,

Vince Menzione 0:24

it’s great to have this podcast in person, you were a podcast guest a couple of years ago. And then we got to spend some time recently in Dallas, Texas, at our live events. So so great to be in the studio here with you

Heather Deggans 0:36

what a great event that was, I made so many great connections with partners and customers there, and I’m keeping up the connections on LinkedIn and other avenues. So thank you for hosting the event. Well,

Vince Menzione 0:47

it was it was a pleasure and an honour to have you at the event. And we wanted to deep dive with you today here after that event, because we have so much exciting things to talk about today. But first, I wanted to spend a moment with about your career journey. I was just on LinkedIn. And I noticed you have an anniversary coming up at Microsoft. Tell us more about that.

Heather Deggans 1:07

Yes. So it’s a milestone anniversary, it will be 25 years in March, which is quite the accomplishment. You were 10 at the time, yes, exactly. I was about to say I literally grew up here before I even knew my husband or had kids. So I’ve been blessed to be here with all three CEOs and see the transformation that Microsoft has been through. And through that time, I’ve been in a variety of roles. So back in House chief of staff roles, product rolls around modern work and such marketing is my third tour and marketing partner has always been at the core of what I did, and across many of the customer segments. So it’s been great. I

Vince Menzione 1:45

love that because you have a 360 view, I’ve always said this about you and your experience, that you make it real because you’ve been on all sides of the business from Chief of Staff for the for the overall business, to marketing to the partner business now and back in the partner business again. So lots of excitement around partners, right, we talked about the excitement, the enthusiasm, the thirst from the partners coming from the event. And these fiscal year priorities. A big shift this last fiscal year, which started in July are still in we’re at the halfway point of 2024. I thought we would ground a little bit about the priorities. There’s three big ones, we could talk more about that and then all also the big changes that happen to the GPS organisation. In fact, this year,

Heather Deggans 2:30

yeah, that’s great. So in July, we announced that the company was creating three regions, so AMEA, Asia, and Americas. So that was the first big change that we encountered in July, bringing together the US Canada and Law Team, which I think has afforded us so much opportunity sharing best practices collaborating, most importantly, making it easier for partners, as they oftentimes go across borders and had to work with separate teams within the different regions. So we’re very excited. We’re still landing the Americas, but we’re seeing a tonne of benefit from the best practice sharing across the board. And

Vince Menzione 3:06

quite a big challenge, I think, bring everybody together too. Right? So you’re bringing lots of different culturals together different cultures together? Yes,

Heather Deggans 3:15

but it’s been great. A lot of learning. And, you know, although the US is this huge market, Canada looks a lot like the US last him as so many complexities to culture as you hit, but also in the way that our partners work in those different Latin American countries. So the consistency and the collaboration and the learning, sharing has been a core tenet that we’ve tried to drive. We’re lucky that the FY 24 priorities stayed largely the same year over year, which was great. The one main change we made in our focus area. And the way that we manage partners is we added in a channels division to basically look at routes to market, right. So if I start from ISPs and digital natives, which we’ve worked with for many, many years, that’s really around delivering the platform capability, and really leveraging marketplace as an area which we’ll talk a little bit more about. When we look at services partners that’s really around unlocking the cloud transformation, and helping our customers imagine what’s possible. And then as I mentioned, channels, it’s really around the routes to market and enabling SMC cloud expansion. It’s a tremendous tam or total addressable market for us in our SMB and SMCC. segments and wild channels focuses on all segments are so there’s a primary focus there as well. And then we can’t forget devices, devices are huge. Winning with Windows and creating experiences that can power AI and our productivity and security solutions is top of mind as well.

Vince Menzione 4:46

It feels like you’ve doubled down right the ISP businesses so critical, important Azure success. The selling partners, I’ll call them right, the transactional partners LSPs the channels to market and then also the sighs and building the competencies and practices, and of course, Windows and the devices business. Yes. You know, this year has been, we started off the year talking about marketplace moments. And then also AI has come to the forefront in such a big way. It’s been such an exciting time at Microsoft, I thought you could land with us those three priorities around the those three things that we talked about AI marketplaces, and this SMC opportunity.

Heather Deggans 5:27

Absolutely. So there’s just tremendous opportunity. When we think about marketplace, this is the future of how businesses are looking to transact. We’re working on creating new technology or giving access to that new technology. And then us is Microsoft creating demand gen for greater opportunity for cosell. That’s an area that we want to double down in, and we’re putting our money where our mouth is, this year in FY 24 marketplace, build sales is a part of the Microsoft sellers comp, which that as you know, compensation drives behaviour. And so that’s a very exciting piece. It’s not necessarily just a GPS or partner led motion, but our sellers care deeply about marketplace. The second one you hit on was AI, I’d almost put ai plus security, I think it’s a huge opportunity to connect with our customers. Ai conversation. I don’t know about you, but in every conversation I have with customers and partners is coming up. It opens the door to the boardroom. They’re wanting to know how that they can use AI. We’re looking at, you know, how do we engage our partners to help lead in this journey. We’ve had a lot of conversations around AI with our partners. And the feedback that we’re hearing from them is first, it’s exciting, but terrifying. The innovation is coming out so quick partners are struggling to keep up. And so we’re really doubling down on the enablement around AI. Second is responsible AI, US laws and frameworks are just now starting to come about our partners and customers are looking at how do I enable responsible AI? Another areas internal process. So each of our customers are wondering how can I use AI to streamline process data, all of that to better serve their customers? When we look at you know, another insight from partners, they’re asking their customers are asking them for skilling. So the partners have to be at the tip of the spear and how they are driving customer Skilling and guidance to to them as well. And then finally, because you know, I’m in marketing, as you mentioned, marketing, so AI and marketing, how do we know our customers? How do we anticipate their needs? How can we get in front of that, and really help you know, our customers capture the market opportunity that’s out there? There were some exciting announcements about co pilot, I heard Yeah, which I know we’ll go through a bit more. But when we start to talk about AI insecurity, you know, I think if you pull those together, you really deliver the best solution to the end customer for all solution areas. And then the third area, which you mentioned, is SMC so small and medium corporate business. As I mentioned before, Tam is huge with our mid market customers. SMCC, which is our corporate mid market and SMB Are we really view as partner led segments, their partner led very strongly supported by Microsoft. And there’s so much opportunity out there. And this is where we want the partners to take the lead. We obviously need partners in enterprise as well, that doesn’t mean that we don’t, but we think about the total addressable market and being able to tap into these hundreds of 1000s of customers in actually millions of customers. When we start to pull on SMB, we think about that CSP and the motion that we have there. There’s just a tonne of opportunity.

Vince Menzione 8:45

I agree. I call it the acre of diamonds in fact, and a lot of organisations don’t understand SMC feels like SMB only. And people missed that opportunity that the corporate account space is managed. And there’s huge opportunities. And these are fairly significant organisations. It’s just that Microsoft segments them a little bit differently than what other organisations do.

Heather Deggans 9:06

Absolutely. And we’re not going to ask our partners to segment exactly like we do. So we’re going to try to the we’re trying to put more focus on that mid market and SMB, we haven’t supported our partners as much holistically and trying to look at you know, how do we make it easier and break down barriers where you don’t have to talk to a separate group. For it’s something we qualify as mid market versus SMB

Vince Menzione 9:30

in a talked about AI and it has been the year of AI. It’s been the marketplace, but it’s really been the year of AI and obviously, Satya getting the recognition he’s gotten this past year for all the changes in the growth at Microsoft. But I also what I keep hearing from people is that we’re having different conversations now. We are in the C suite and their transformation conversations. I thought maybe we touch a bit a bit on that and the importance of partners leading with AI because those conversations are so relevant to partner growth. as well,

Heather Deggans 10:00

absolutely. And that’s a bigger we’re trying to focus is innovation is coming out so fast. And so how do we actually look at enabling our partners to go and have those conversations? How are we priming the market with the customers as well, to enable opportunities? We’re doing a lot of you imagining what AI can do for your business. We’re also looking at AI from an industry perspective, what are the top use case scenarios for financial services or healthcare, and making sure that, you know, we’re outlining that to give our partners a place to start the conversation? Because oftentimes, the customers are coming to us and say, you know, I hear AI, I hear there’s a lot of potential opportunities, but I don’t know how to use it. And we don’t want to expect our customers and partners to have to learn that on their own. Yeah,

Vince Menzione 10:47

there’s a lot of learning here, we talked about learning, and you’re providing a lot of learning for the partners there as well. But this is a time to transformation, right? We often brace it. Heather, I can’t believe we’re in 2024. Already. Of course, Microsoft’s been in 2024. Since July, exactly. And you’ve turned the corner and h2. But let’s talk about h1 and what you learned and what you’ve learned with partners here specifically?

Heather Deggans 11:09

Absolutely. So there is so much learning from the first half of the year, especially as we went through an immense amount of change back in July. You know, it really took us a quarter to land that change. But now we’ve got some, I think, strong learnings out of it. So I’ll rattle off a few. It’s obviously not completely comprehensive. But one of the pieces that we’re looking at is how do we focus on customers through the entire lifecycle. So we have an M CEM sales stage lifecycle, which is a Microsoft way that we’re looking at how we pull customers through from that interest piece all the way to deployment. And so we’re looking at how do we make sure that partners are tied in for that entire lifecycle, obviously, new innovation, there’s so much new innovation, it’s so exciting, but making sure that we’re providing simplicity and clarity attached to that. I mentioned it earlier, industry provides relevance. So that is a place in the Americas that we are doubling down, both from a go to market perspective, but also from a PDM, a partner development management perspective. That’s where we we speak our customers language, and it provides that relevance, opportunity and all segments, as I mentioned. So enterprise is very, very important to us, as well as mid market as well as SMB, with the opportunity. And the way that we engage is a bit different, but they’re all very important. So we’re learning about what’s the best way to engage in all those. If I pivot, and I look on solution areas, modern work and security together, partner so well. And that enables us to deliver that end to end solution for our customers. All customers are concerned about security. These days, all customers are concerned about productivity and collaboration. So again, that’s very relevant. When we think about business apps. You’re we’re looking at business apps, really accelerating the migration of our on prem customers, with the support of offerings that we can provide partners and customers alike aim, if you’ve heard of that. And it’s an a push to modernise their business applications to enhance their AI readiness. Azure is really the foundation of everything that we’re doing. Generative AI is driving a huge wave of intelligent applications and insights from a massive amount of data in the cloud. So one of the Go dues we’re asking customers is get their data state in order to be able to really leverage the power of AI. Your marketplace, as we mentioned before, AI based solutions through Azure Marketplace to millions of customers is our aspiration and making sure that we have that. We talked a lot about the SMC opportunity. That’s a big CSP motion. I hope there’s lots of CSP partners that are watching this today. Because we have some exciting announcements around AI and copilot that will be relevant.

Vince Menzione 13:54

We’ll be talking about that. Yeah. I’m so excited to continue to partner with ag one. Many of you know I made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago. Athletic Greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M That’s drink a G one.com. Forward slash Vince M check them out. You know you mentioned em Sam. I wanted to double click on this because we did a session at the big event on MCM. And I was sort of hesitant to do it. I was like, What is this emsam thing, but it’s being able to speak Microsoft’s language with a Microsoft seller. And it’s so critical for CO selling, that partners understand the process, the sales methodology that Microsoft follows with MSM. And so I thought, I think for people that haven’t listened or watched that interview, that segment, we should probably have them go back and do that. But anything else you want to say about MCM,

Heather Deggans 15:29

I will say we’re trying to put more structure around how we engage with partners and customers. So if you’ll see, hopefully, our partners are noticing, we’re aligning the incentives to M Sam sales stage cycle. So if we’re in listening consults at the very beginning of the sales stage, we have these offerings in these incentives to be able to really empower our partners and customers there. And then as we go along the emsam stages, we’re looking at which offerings and incentives should we deploy, it’s not black or white, there’s some fluidity in it, but at least some guidance in a win formula of what we should be doing, when that makes the most sense with our customers and partners.

Vince Menzione 16:12

So it’s an exciting announcements. AI has been exciting all along. But even more excitement now around, I was hoping you could cover off on some of the things that just happened.

Heather Deggans 16:21

Yes, so very recent announcement. So this is a very timely discussion that we’re having. We had some great announcements around co pilot, there, we see it as an amazing opportunity for our CSP partner ecosystem is massive opportunity. It’s unique to Microsoft. When we think about co pilot, there’s really three pillars and the way that we’re looking at it, cloud innovation, go to market scale, and differentiation. So I’ll kind of dive into each of those a little bit more. For cloud innovation, we believe Microsoft has the most comprehensive and trusted cloud. We’re the only cloud that supports everything an organisation needs in today’s hybrid world of work. When we think about Microsoft 365, and teams offerings, Microsoft invest literally billions of dollars every year in r&d in this area. The second is our go to market scale. So through commercial marketplace combined with our go to market offerings, we are aspiring to help our partners with both depth and breadth to serve their customers. In every segment, as I mentioned, through marketplace, we can reach 95% of the world’s businesses, and we can connect you our partners with over with other partners in over 200 countries. The third area that I discussed was differentiation. So helping our partners differentiate with one of the largest technology ecosystems in the world. From low code, no code business applications, we started to look at the most comprehensive way that we’re looking at the enterprise portfolio. Tech Tools, devices solutions provide limitless opportunities for you to help your customers on their transformation journey is we’re seeing customers at all different areas of the transformation journey. And what we’re trying to do is have offerings for every segment. There is immense growth, as I mentioned, across all the segments, and so we’re trying to create customised offerings to fit the needs of those customers so that you and the partners can leverage those. And the announcements that we’ve made is further evidence of all of this and it’s a further opportunity for our CSP partners.

Vince Menzione 18:29

You know, I hear parity, right? So small organisations, I’m an SMB, I run a small business, I didn’t have access to co pilot and some of the amazing technology that large enterprises like Microsoft have been utilising since since day one, and then also this democratisation. You know, Microsoft has always done such a great job of democratising technology and AI now for the masses, I guess, is what I would say the ability that every organisation and then every partner could use it internally, right. So the evangelism comes when we use the technology so partners as evangelists carrying forward to the millions of organisations What 150 million SMB organisations across the globe? Yes.

Heather Deggans 19:10

There’s just such immense opportunity. I’m so excited about the announcements that we made any opportunity. You know, I speak to customers and partners every single day and co pilot, you know, the resounding feedback as a co pilot is defining our future and transforming our businesses together. Partners have given us some very pointed feedback, and they’ve asked some tough questions. We know our partner community is not shy, and I love that. So the first thing that I always get asked is when will it launch and CSP? Well, we heard you, as of January 16, copilot is no longer just available in EA, but it’s available through EA CSP and our direct customer self serve channel, which is huge when you think about opening up the opportunity. The second question I get is when are we going to expand the skews so more customers can take advantage of copilot for Microsoft 365 Hello again, we heard you, customers who are on Business Standard, Business Premium and office 365, e three and a five now also meet the prerequisites to buy a co pilot for Microsoft 365. So we’ve really opened it up, copilot will now work with Office 365 e three e five is designed with Microsoft 360 in mind, so it will leverage security and management features which are important for a secure AI rollout. And it gives customers a choice, some customers are going to want to start with co pilot for the AI benefits and then move to more of the security and management offerings. Some customers want to do the exact opposite security management and then I’ll dabble in AI. Some want to do it simultaneously. So this really frees up all of those boundaries that we had before. And the third area, as you mentioned as an SMB is when we when will you reduce the seat minimum so SMB customers can purchase. So customers can trial with a smaller subset of users versus having to get it for their entire organisation. There’s a theme here, we heard you were excited to share that we removed the threshold and the minimum seat requirement that customers can end customers can now purchase a quantity one. So we know that that’s a possibility. But we also advise that they purchase for a department to test and learn. In our early adopter programmes. We found that we’re department is using copilot where they’re experimenting where they’re sharing their experiences, they get a tremendous amount of value out of co pilot in a shorter time. So in essence, we’re listening, we hope we hit the mark. We’re excited about these changes. But I would implore this partner community to keep the feedback coming as it’s helping us to deliver better products and services for you and your customers. Just

Vince Menzione 21:46

when we thought it couldn’t get more exciting. Yeah. So this is the Ultimate Partner. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, what do you see from the best partners that you work with?

Heather Deggans 21:57

There are so many great partners out there across all of those partner types that I talked to you about. But you know, if I were to sum it up to the top things is collaboration. So collaboration within their own organisation back to Microsoft and with other partners in the ecosystem learning and coming together in a partner to partner value prop. That leads me to second one differentiated value prop. So we in the go to market team work with partners quite a bit to help them you realise what their differentiated value proposition is, so that they can differentiate in the market and we can support them as we go to market. Great customer engagement goes without saying, you know, making sure that as the you the partners have customer engagement, we’re surfacing case studies that we can use, whether it’s by industry, or solutionary, or customer segment, running pilots and supporting our partners through that. And then as I mentioned before, really supporting our customers through the whole customer journey and making sure that, you know, we’re supporting them from beginning to end,

Vince Menzione 22:59

you talked about two things that struck me. One is the differentiation, I always talk about being the shiny quarter in the bucket full of shiny quarters, because partner has tried to be all things to all customers sometimes or to the Microsoft organisation and saying we could do it all versus focusing in on your superpowers and being very clear about what you bring to the table that’s different unique than anyone else. And then you talked about one of my favourite topics, which we’ve been calling partner to partner for so long, which I like to refer to now as ecosystem lead growth. Yes, and this is where I believe marketplace really sets the stage right with multi party offers. The ability for the customer is not just buying one solution, they’re they’re cobbling together multiple solutions, they might have security that they’re implementing, they might have different use cases, different solutions, ISV solutions, and they’re bringing that together with a licencing partner as an example. And bringing that all together with multi party offers. We can do that all now with one click.

Heather Deggans 23:55

Yes, it’s very exciting. And the piece that you hit on in the beginning, we don’t want partners to do be all to all customers. It’s It’s too hard. You know, we’re very blessed at Microsoft that we have such a breadth of offerings, but that’s a lot for even our sellers to know where there’s no expectations that partners have to do everything. Well we want to be able to do is help our partners figure out where they shine, whether that shiny quarter, and then really go to market with them, and help align them to the right customers. And then as you mentioned marketplace is just phenomenal opportunities and that partner to partner or what did you call it? A partner? Ecosystem lead growth. I like that even better.

Vince Menzione 24:33

Well, I love partner to partner but it’s not just two partners any long. Yeah, it feels like it’s a whole roomful of partners coming together exactly this ecosystem approach. So for the 1000s of listeners watching us or hearing us on the podcast today, what can they best do to align for success in h2?

Heather Deggans 24:54

So there’s so much opportunity out there as we talked about with the innovation and so there’s there’s a lot that we We want to bring you along on with the journey and enablement. So I would say take advantage of all of that, whether you’re an ISV channels or services partner, whichever solution you focus on or industry. But if I were to take it to more of a micro level, macro level, the ISPs, we want to get your transactable offers in marketplace, as we talked about, that is an area that we’re doubling and tripling down at Microsoft. And so we want to make sure that our ISVs have offers in there, and we will commit to do a better job of driving demand to marketplace with our customers. The second is, you know, for our services partners, as we talked about, they’re really focused on the opportunity on AI and all of our cloud offerings. And so really looking at how do we open up the door to those boardrooms, where you know, it’s not traditionally been a great, easy path for Microsoft to get into. But our services partners can help us. And that’s really going to be AI and all those downstream opportunities, and channels, with his unique focus that we’ve put on our channel partners starting this year, it’s really around scale, and activating CSP is one avenue, but really looking at that new customer and your new customer opportunity and delivering that value prop there. And then the other thing is, we know that there’s a lot of innovation offerings out there, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. So we would invite you all to join our partner LinkedIn group. On this LinkedIn group, we announce and provide monthly information for our partners in real time as it comes out. We have monthly insider calls that we would love for you to all participate in. We even have quarterly virtual partner summits. So making sure that we are we’re bringing the latest and greatest to our most treasured partners that we have. And then also looking at blogs and social updates, we’ve got a lot of ways to get you the information. What we’re trying to do is simplify the avenues in which we can connect with you all. So

Vince Menzione 26:56

many great go dues for our partners. I’ve been on those monthly calls. Yes, I’ve actually spoken to you. I was I think I’m coming up soon, I think maybe in a couple of months from now. But I want to thank you, Heather, for joining us today in the studio. Thank you for and I want to thank you for your commitment to partners. It is it is heartfelt. And it is known and recognised for the way that you have supported this community. So thank you so much. Thank

Heather Deggans 27:21

you. There’s a reason I keep coming back to partner through my career Microsoft. Thank you. So

Vince Menzione 27:26

great. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for watching and listening. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Partner online at Ultimate Partner.com or the ultimate partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. And please subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate partner. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Partner

Unlock the secrets of successful partnerships with Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Americas SMC, Sharon Schoenborn, on Ultimate Partner®. Join us as she shares strategic insights into SMC business segments, AI investments, growth strategies, and leadership tips. With over 20 years of global experience, Sharon empowers businesses to transform and thrive in the Microsoft ecosystem digitally.

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1. Partnering strategies with Microsoft corporate vice president. (0:04)

2. SMC business segments and partnership opportunities. (1:08)

3. AI investments and partner success in the Microsoft ecosystem. (6:27)

4. Partnering with Microsoft, growth strategies, and differentiation. (12:40)

5. Leadership, change management, and personal growth. (17:53)

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Vince Menzione 0:02

This is the Ultimate Partner the top partnership podcast. In this podcast Vince Minzy own a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione. 

Vince Menzione 0:28

Welcome to The Ultimate Partner for a special session shot here at reven at Microsoft Studios. I’m excited and delighted to be joined by Sharon Schoen born Microsoft’s corporate vice president for the Americas SMC small, medium and corporate business. Sharon, so excited to have you here today.

Sharon Schoenborn 0:46

It’s wonderful to be here. Good to see you.

Vince Menzione 0:48

So good to see you again. You know, it seems just like yesterday, but it’s been a couple of months since we were together in Dallas, Texas, for our live event, which we co hosted alongside your town hall. So much excitement in the room from partners. I was hoping we could sort of ground here for now and talk a little bit more about that excitement and what you’ve been seeing

Sharon Schoenborn 1:08

you bet. Well, first of all, Vince, thank you for your time in Dallas and also the standing room only event that you ran with us. Yes. You know, it’s SMC is really one of the main growth engines for Microsoft. And it’s such a diverse and dynamic segment. And I have the pleasure of leading our America’s business and partners are really at the core to our success in the way that we deliver growth and we help to realise the value of their investment with our customers.

Vince Menzione 1:32

You know, I’ve been talking about this acre of diamonds, my own quote, but Russell Conwell, who was a minister and founder at Temple University coined this phrase many, many years ago. But I believe the SMC businesses may be misunderstood, in many respects, or were helping to help partners better understand it right. A lot of these organisations tend to cluster towards the large enterprise and SMC sounds like SMB to a lot of folks. And then also the organisation of that was sort of it’s evolving, right, it was hoping you could help our viewers and listeners better understand how it’s

Sharon Schoenborn 2:11

evolved. Yeah, it’s a great question, because we have changed a lot over times. And I must admit, we can become complex as well. The best way to really think about SMC is the fact that it’s two distinct segments. Okay. So yes, as you say, the true kind of core SMB business, which very much is part of why we say about 80% of our revenue for the SMB business, typically customers, 300 employees or lower is really what we consider SMB. And then above that corporate is everything under the top enterprise, commercial and public sector customers. So within the Americas, we have roughly around 14,000 managed corporate customers in the millions, obviously within the SMB space, Sharon,

Vince Menzione 2:55

such a massive amount of business within the SMC sectors, the two sectors, I was hoping maybe we could double click on the two segments and how you go to market and each of them? Yes

Sharon Schoenborn 3:06

we’ll do well, I always start with the corporate business. And over the last number of years, we’ve really standardised the way that we engage with our corporate or manage customers across the globe. You might recall from your days back at Microsoft, it was probably sometimes a bit unique by country and some of the things that we’ve done in our corporate business is to structure our sales team in pods. So typically, a pod would have around 300 customers within it. And what we do is we we rally our account executives, and our specialist and technical sellers to align to that set a 300 customers per pod. And with that it gives us it gives us a centre of gravity to engage into team and especially to be able to make sure that we’re optimising the, the platform opportunity with each of our customers. And what we do now also is having standard marketing strategies and solution plays. So when we think about each of our clouds across Azure monomeric, and business applications, we have standard solution plays that we go to market on. And that really is the standard socket that we want our partners to snap into right in terms of their offerings and go to market strategy. So we have, we have go to marketplace for those across corporates, and the ability to then drive Account Based Marketing interests within those then catch by our field sellers. And obviously, together with our partners,

Vince Menzione 4:27

you know, strikes me as you’re talking here is thinking about the conversations we had at your town hall and our event. And just this massive opportunity and the opportunity for your teams to double click in fact, I believe I heard you say to your team, you can’t get to the customer alone. You need to work directly with a work very closely with the partners. I was hoping, you know, we talked about the opportunity and doubling down and double clicking with partners this year. Can you talk more about your commitment within the SMC business to partners?

Sharon Schoenborn 4:58

Yeah, boy. I could go on here for a little while, Vince, I think if I, if I go back to the corporate segment for just a moment, and then I’ll speak to SMB, because they’re their two unique operating models, I would say in the corporate business, you know, I really do see our channel as an extension of our sales force. Right? And so, but the art is, how do we best align to be able to optimise an engagement with each other? Because that can be a really hard thing? And you know, there’s far more sellers in the channel than I have within my team. And then how do we how do we get that interconnect at the right point in time, I think a couple things, one, going back to the solution plays, that becomes a really critical alignment point for how our sellers are going to market and when we’re looking for really highly specialised partners to be able to help drive that demand and ultimately realise value for customers. I would also say that the the opportunity for us to align on acquisition, and upsell within the within the the base boy, our upsell, opportunity is massive acquisition is huge. upsell is massive, especially in markets, like the US or even Canada, where we have a high penetration across the business. So we really need our partners, oftentimes, our CSP partners who are leading those engagements with customers to be thinking about, how are we operationalizing, the customer lifecycle management cycle within the existing base of customers to be able to help realise the value across the platform? Yeah,

Vince Menzione 6:27

and there’s a huge opportunity here for these partners to double down here, and we’ll talk a little bit more about some of the announcements that have been coming around AI and other areas. But as I think about it, it’s moving away from just the transaction, and you say, UPS upselling, into the organisation, but adding additional capabilities to drive that. And yes, and what I think your I hear you saying to the partners is, it’s time to double down yourselves, build your competencies aligned to our solution areas, specifically. And then also, when you’re working with your account teams better identify where you make a difference. Yes,

Sharon Schoenborn 7:04

you know, if I had a magic formula with our partners, and especially when we’re investing as businesses, in alignment with those solution plays, obviously, starting with deep skilling, and that’s an area that we’re investing in quite significantly, but really asking our partners to drive those certifications and the advanced certifications in differentiating themselves, then with a differentiated go to market offering, as it relates to that, ultimately, our channel incentives are probably one of the areas that we invest the most to be able to help recognise our partners and be able to invest in their businesses and be able to then help optimise what that transformation can look like, within our partner organisations, we realise that’s a big shift. It’s a big shift for us. You know, it really has been five years ago, Vince, we could have been sitting here and you know, would have been a very different conversation about the go to market solutions. And so our partners have done an amazing job to really lean in. But we need more partners to be able to think about how am I going to differentiate in the market with the specific certifications and specialisation and being great at that. And being great at that. And that’s what I think one of the most critical things of being able to partner really closely is differentiating the market around a, a solutionary that that partner is able to excel in. We’re 

Vince Menzione 8:23

at this moment, right? I mean, Satya was just recognised as the CEO of the Year, I mean, just an amazing job that he’s done in his nine or 10 years as CEO of Microsoft. But the investments, these massive investments in AI, right, I mean, this, this last year has been astounding, and what it says to me and to all of us, I remember Kevin being up on stage at our event talking about this, like take the time to learn every day, because it’s changing every day, right AI, is infusing is being infused into all of the Microsoft products and families. And the opportunity is massive for partners. And what I hear now that’s different when I talk to Microsoft sellers, is we’re having different conversations than we’ve ever had with those organisations. We’re now in the C suite. And we’re having transformation conversations. And what I think I hear you saying, in fact, is partners need to lean into this transformation in a big way. What else would you say about that? Yeah,

Sharon Schoenborn 9:20

at first, I would reinforce the point about learning. You know, Boy, I’ve been at Microsoft for a little while now. And I would say every day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning, because if I’m not that I’m falling behind, and I think that’s the same for our partners, right? And so, the opportunity we have is now you know, when you think about what our customers are aiming to achieve, typically it’s around some level of operational efficiency or being able to adapt their business models are really improving their customer engagement strategy. Our customers are leaning into this moment because they also know that if they aren’t thinking strategically about how AI is infused in the way that they operate, they can be left behind Now, one of the things that I’m most excited about is that when we have a platform opportunity at Microsoft, as you say, we’re really infusing AI across our solution set. And I’m especially excited about the fact that we now have co pilot for Microsoft 365, that is going to be available to our CSP partners and through our, to our customers to our CSP partners. But what that means is, it really opens up the ability for our smallest customers in the market, to have access to enterprise grade AI capabilities embedded in the solutions that they use every day. I mean, just think about that for a moment. That’s incredible. And the opportunity that we kind of have to, you know, really increase the productivity of our customers, and help them to innovate in ways they’ve never been able to. It’s incredibly exciting. I just can’t wait to see what our customers do with it.

Vince Menzione 10:47

I mean, this is exciting. This, the excitement around this announcement is just I think, well, first of all, I’m an SMB ultimate partner is a small and medium business. And so now I’m able, because I feel like the haves and the have nots, I’ve had all these conversations with Microsoft, people like yourself about all the tools that you’re able to utilise, right that are infused within Microsoft 365. And I’ve been on the outside of that, right I’ve had, I’ve had to use more of the pedestrian tools that haven’t been infused into the platform for me. So as an SMB, I’m excited about that. Also, as a partner partners are also smaller organisations that maybe haven’t been able to take advantage of these capabilities. I think first of all the they become evangelists because become users. And what Microsoft is doing, as well as this democratisation of the technology, right? It’s not only for the very large enterprise organisations no longer

Sharon Schoenborn 11:39

it is, I mean, let’s just talk about our small and medium business customers for a moment you’re spot on. And it gives us opportunity to really open up capabilities, that that I hope will will stimulate innovation in the market, over 90% of our customers are small and medium businesses, right. And, you know, our channel would understand this intimately. MSPs really are the IT department for so many of our SMBs, right? Oftentimes, our SMEs do not have internal IT, it’s their partner that are going to market with and looking for guidance. And so I’m really excited about what this opportunity means for our customers, and for our partners to be able to really activate this innovation and you know, but of course, as you say, you know, internalising it and being able to be best practice leaders in the use of AI. So you know, I would say this today, with co pilot for Microsoft 365, I challenge myself every day to try something different and see how I’m getting value out of it, because that’s the best way for us to demo to our customers, right? You

Vince Menzione 12:39

talked about partners quite a bit here. And I, I’d be remiss, this is the Ultimate Partner. What do you see from the best partners you work with?

Sharon Schoenborn 12:48

Well, I think back to the point of creating a differentiated capability and ultimately go to market offer. And being really, really great at that. Because I think that, especially when we talk about the the Manage space, being able to be really precise about how you’re differentiating in the market. Because we need our partners to really lead and drive growth there and not always have to be in hand to hand combat with our sellers, I’ve got a much, much smaller sales force then then the market demands. And so I think differentiating in the market off the back of that leveraging the skilling resources, and then really importantly, leveraging partner centre as a way to connect into Microsoft. And then of course, marketplace,

Vince Menzione 13:34

yes, we’d be remiss to if we didn’t bring up marketplace, right, this huge opportunity area. And I, you know, we at that event, we brought all the partners together. So we bought some of the ISVs had been the creators of platforms, as well as the selling partners into the room. And I’ll be candid here and say that some of those selling partners have been kicking and screaming away in a way and saying, you know, they’ve been they’ve been slow to adopt marketplace. But I’ve seen a change, and maybe it’s just in the last couple of months now. I believe a lot of them are now leaning in on marketplace. Would you agree there?

Sharon Schoenborn 14:10

I would I think it’s still early days. And I think the ability to have private offers in marketplace is going to be a really important opportunity for our partners to to accelerate growth for sure.

Vince Menzione 14:19

And I also think about it you know, Microsoft has always talked about partner to partner. And this accomplishes quite a bit on the partner to partner side because now you are able to take multiple solutions. And I’ll use the term stitching them together, right, because the customer is not buying one thing. In fact, they’re not talking to one organisation and not just talking to Microsoft. They’re not just talking to a partner. They’re looking at several different areas rather than be security or some line of business application or multiple line of business applications. And they have a transactional partner that they’re working with. Marketplace just offers that opportunity that private offer to pull it all together for the customer lead

Sharon Schoenborn 14:59

by the amazing capabilities within our channel, right in terms of in terms of making it real through projects, and also activation with each customer.

Vince Menzione 15:11

So we are kicking into 2024 in a big way. For Microsoft, it’s the second half, it’s h2, right? I was hoping maybe you could spend a moment here maybe any great advice for these organisations on what they should be doing differently now that we are in the throes of 2024 that we’re in the throes of Microsoft’s h2. What would you say to those partners to do better or differently than we’ve seen before?

Sharon Schoenborn 15:38

Well, a few a few areas, one, back to the point of learning, with all the innovation that’s coming to market, really leaning in role modelling that every single day and making sure that across our teams, we’re building the capability to have those differentiated offers, again, I come back to leveraging the partner centre to be able to be the surface area engagement to connect into Microsoft, I would also say, really pressure test, really pressure test your growth strategy. And ask yourself, are we really betting in areas where we can differentiate and be amazing and as we then think about more and more solutions, really make sure that that comes together? In the overall customer value proposition? I think sometimes we can get a little broad. And then then that runs the risk of not not differentiating as much in the market. It’s like those are those are really key areas. But at the same time get energised. Like, I don’t know that that takes much doing these days, because it’s such an incredible moment in our industry.

Vince Menzione 16:43

I’m energy. Are you energised, I’m energised. So, you know, you mentioned something to about getting very specific about what your superpower is, I like to talk about the being the shiny quarter in the bucket full of shiny quarters, there are so many Microsoft partners. Some struggle with the differentiation but lean in or niche down to where your real strengths are and focus there versus trying to go broad, right, the partner that tells me, I’ve got 250 competencies and capabilities, I lose focus, I lose, they lose my attention. Yeah,

Sharon Schoenborn 17:16

I think it’s I think it’s a an important thing to recalibrate and reinforce. And at the same time, we have some partners who can do it all right, in terms of like us. And so that’s really important thing in terms of looking at the unique partner communities across the market. Because depending on the profile, whether we have global system integrators, national system, integrator, services partners, CSPs, or our MSPs, really, again, it comes down to where we come together and drive the greatest. Good

Vince Menzione 17:53

point. Good point. You know, Sharon, I’d love to pivot. I have many listeners and viewers that are earlier in their career in their career journey. So I would love for you to spend a moment here. Was there a spark? Was there a pivot? Was there a mentor, in fact, that helped you get to this? I mean, CVP at Microsoft is a big deal, right, corporate vice president. Tell us a little bit more about that journey.

Sharon Schoenborn 18:16

Wow, um, do you know what I’ve been fortunate? I’ve been fortunate to have found myself in tech in the 90s and have am a person who enjoys change, I actually relish in and embrace change. I think if there was one thing that grounded me the most early in my career, I had an opportunity early in my career to work in mergers and acquisitions. But more on the people side, on the integration of acquisitions, and working with leadership teams right after an announcement was made to come together. And I studied and even got my grad degree in leadership development. And the the one skill that I feel has served me throughout my career, especially as I’ve moved on, and leadership is around change leadership. It’s about the EQ side of engaging and leading a business. And ultimately, all of us, as leaders, all of us together with our channel are leading change every single day, not just strategically, but certainly with our people. And so I think, having really gone deep into the principles of change leadership, at an early stage of my career that has been a pivotal asset for me. Ever since that point, and something that I greatly value, I’m still working on it, by the way, but at the end of the day, it’s my job to be a great leader for my people as we lead change and ultimately deliver business results. And I encourage anyone who’s earlier in their career to actually really get curious about the principles of leading change in some of the fundamentals, I think will serve you really well

Vince Menzione 19:59

fundamentals. To end principles right before my heart in terms of driving that, in fact, I would love to know if there was a book was it was there a book that has been a favourite of yours on transformation change or principles?

Sharon Schoenborn 20:13

Boy, there’s a lot like one that I think is really practical. And what I would definitely recommend to our channel leaders is adaptive leadership, adaptive leadership, it really speaks to the difference between solving technical challenges from adaptive leadership challenges and technical challenges are those that will probably deal with every single day as sales leaders, as business leaders, adapt to challenges are those that are really addressing longer term systemic changes that really require a level of deep and thoughtful stakeholder engagement to really get to an outcome that’s going to deliver meaningful change for the business. And again, so much of it does come back to the softer side around change leadership, but especially in organisations that might be a bit larger that have broader stakeholder groups, it really is more about how do you create that common shared vision, and really find a way to be able to enable that together and making some hard decisions as well.

Vince Menzione 21:16

I love everything you’ve said had to say here because we are driving a transformation like no other I believe, during this time. And what an amazing leader to believing that now at Microsoft within this very large segment of the business. I have a fun question, I love to ask every guest. So Sharon, you are hosting a dinner party, and you can host this dinner party in anywhere in the world. But you can only invite three guests to this dinner party from the present, or the past, to this amazing dinner party that you’re going to host. I’d also love to know where you want to host it. We’ll talk about that a little bit more. You’ve lived all around the world. Who would you invite to this party? And why?

Sharon Schoenborn 21:56

I love this question so much. Can I Can I take a little bit of liberty with answering how I would do this?

Vince Menzione 22:02

You know, it’s early in the day, I’d love? Absolutely, I’d have

Sharon Schoenborn 22:07

three dinner parties, three dinner parties. And I’d want to go to their space independently because I feel that each conversation is unique in its own. And I’m probably more of an introvert. So I like the one on one engagement versus so the first I would say is my team would know I’m biggest Peter Gabriel fan. So I love Peter Gabriel think he’s amazing human and I love what he stands for and his music back to the 80s Today, I’ve been known to fly from Sydney to Chicago just for a concert. Wow. Wow. So I think I would love to go to his farm where he has written many of his lyrics and just spend a very casual kind of picnic there having a good conversation with Peter Gabriel to understand a little bit more about what’s driven his mission. Because I think he’s a great human. Secondly, I would say my family came originally, like my great grandparents came from Germany and from Czechoslovakia years ago. And so and they, they landed in the Midwest, you know, ultimately in Minnesota, and had some pretty amazing experience, you know, finding their way and ultimately landing in their spot in northern Minnesota waggon trains, you know, bringing, you know, babies along in the below zero weather. So yeah, staying living in a tent in the middle of winter, while trying to build a very simple house. Like, I would just love to sit with my great grandparents. And listen and learn from what their experience was, I think it’s terribly humbling and inspiring and speaks to incredible level of resilience. And then a third, I would say, I’d love to go to Nepal. And I would love to spend some time with the Sherpas in there, you know, maybe two or three in someone’s home. And, and really I’m just understand a little bit more about what drives their spirit and energy and incredible capability. I think the Sherpas are the heroes of Everest. I think they’re the heroes of any major mountain climbing expedition. And I just think that having a conversation to understand where that spirit and energy and spectacular capability is driven from fascinating,

Vince Menzione 24:40

so fascinating. I might follow you around I might have fun. Where’s Peter live? Where’s this farm?

Sharon Schoenborn 24:46

Up in England? Yep.

Vince Menzione 24:48

All right. Well, the pile sounds fantastic. Yeah. Have you have you? Have you been a climber?

Sharon Schoenborn 24:55

Oh God, no, no.

Vince Menzione 24:56

We had a guest to climb Mount Everest. So that’s I have a special that is. It’s amazing, especially. Sharon, you have been incredible. Everything that I hope to have you having you here today. Really, I really enjoyed this conversation. Such an incredible leader, such an incredible time in your business for our partners listening and viewing today. Just an incredible time to be working with Microsoft and Sharon’s SMC, America’s business. Again, one last one last time here for our viewers, and for our listeners, any last words of advice? Or maybe not advice, but just go do’s in terms of how we need to think about this year? Great.

Sharon Schoenborn 25:34

Well, hey, first, Vince, thanks for having me. It really is a pleasure. And I want to say thank you for all the work that you’re doing with our partners, we really appreciate it again, standing room only event in Dallas a few months back, we really appreciate the the the the effort and the engagement. And for all of our partners, I just want to say huge, thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done. Thanks for all that you will do. Thanks for leaning into this opportunity that we have right now to help service our customers in incredible ways to innovate with this era of AI and look forward to really moving the dial together in the SMC business, not just in the next six months, but certainly in the years to come. So thank you very much, Sharon.

Vince Menzione 26:15

Thank you again. Thanks, Vince. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Partner online at Ultimate Partner.com or the ultimate partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five-star review on either Apple or Spotify. And please subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate partner. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Partner