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Vince Menzione, Host of Ultimate Guide to Partnering® being interviewed by Adam Michalski, Host of the Partnered Podcast.
Join this special episode where we turn the tables. Adam Michalski, the host of the Partnered Podcast, interviews me. In this episode, we discuss the Ecosystem Movement, Partnership Principles, and how Ultimate Partnerships helps clients achieve their greatest success through a partner mindset.
In my words
I help leaders transform their organizations to achieve their greatest results! Transformation is at my core, personal transformation drove business transformations:, including:
1. I was a top performer at a startup, I helped it grow from $6 to $125M. We went public and had a successful exit.
2. At a Golden Gate Capital turnaround. I started a new segment and partner strategy that became the key accelerant to growth and transformation, resulting in a successful 5X valuation and exit within 26 months.
3. As a Microsoft Executive leading Partner and Ecosystem growth for nine years, I grew the business from $2.5B to $4.6B with channel transformation to the cloud.
4. As Channel Chief / Chief Ecosystem Officer for a billion-dollar global ISV. My team’s partner strategy resulted in the “Partner of the Year Award” top partner co-sell status and a channel turnaround.
Why Ultimate Partnerships?
I started Ultimate Partnerships to help leaders achieve their greatest results and ultimate survival in the Decade of the Ecosystem. I am on a mission to help organizations transform, achieve their greatest results, and change the world through successful partnering.
What You’ll Learn in this Episode
- My Journey to Partnerships
- Changes in the Partnerships Space
- Measuring Success & Reciprocity of Partnerships
- Guiding Organizations to Success
- Mastermind at Summit Event
- The Complexity of Partnering with Microsoft and the other Tech Giants
Join our first Masterclass
Join us, LIVE, October 9th & 10th – learn how the best achieve their greatest results HERE.
Quote From This Episode
“And what I love the most about this is organizations are finally getting it. For many years the partnership was this appendage that was stuck on the side of a sales organization and maybe not fluid and not integrated. And now today, with organizations like Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer ventures saying, we’re leaning in here, that we’re starting to see this become a reality that partnership is integrated and go to a partnership or go to ecosystem strategy can really happen.”
- Vince’s LinkedIn
- Vince’s Twitter
- Vince’s Email
- Ultimate Partnerships
- Ultimate Partnerships Podcast
- Ultimate Partnerships Contact
- Mastermind at Summit
Episodes featuring Partner Ecosystem Leaders and Experts.
153 – Janet Schijins – Ecosystems & Megacosm
150- Celebrating 150 Amazing Episodes with a Five-Timer Guest, Jay McBain
149 – WTF is an Ecosystem? And How Partner Hacker helps tech companies PartnerUp with Jared Fuller
139 – How Can Technology Partners Organize for Success around Go to Ecosystems? with Allan Adler.
132 – How to Achieve Your Greatest Results in 2022 – Part Two – Ecosystems with Jay McBain.
116 – Helping ISVs Accelerate Meaningful Revenue with the Cloud Providers through Marketplaces with Sanjay Mehta of Tackle.io 115 – Creating Value to Innovative Routes-to-Market with Precise Industry and Customer Solutions – with Oguo Atuanya, Microsoft GM for Scale Partners.
114 – Cloud Wars Ranks the Most Influential Cloud Vendors During This Rapid Transformation – with Bob Evans, creator of Cloud Wars
Links from this Episode
We are so excited to welcome Athletic Greens as our latest sponsor. My daily ritual has included a “green drink” supplement for over 20 years ago. AG1 is packed with 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens. If you’d like to join me, give AG1 a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one-year supply of Vitamin D and Five Travel Packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athleticgreens.com/vincem
PartnerTap is the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine.
Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
organizations, partner, partnerships, microsoft, selling, strategy, podcast, happening, cosell, vince, started, independent software vendors, microsoft ecosystem, link, aligned, event, market, dynamics, sales, years
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Adam Michalski, Vince Menzione
Vince Menzione 00:00
And what I love the most about this is organizations are finally getting it. For many years partnership was this appendage that was stuck on the side of a sales organization and maybe not fluid and not integrated. And now today, with organizations like Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer ventures saying, we’re leaning in here, that we’re starting to see this become reality that partnership is integrated and go to partnership or go to ecosystem strategy can really happen.
Announcer 00:30
Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione, a proven sales and partner executive brings together leaders to discuss transformational trends and deconstruct successful strategies to help technology leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione.
Vince Menzione 00:53
Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right, optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with fellow partnership podcast host Adam mill kowski. In this episode, Adam is interviewing me about my background, my passion for partnering, and how I see organizations achieve their greatest results. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed being interviewed by Adam mill kowski hosts of the partner podcast. Before we dive into the interview, I am so excited to announce the ultimate partnerships mastermind. Our first event is taking place October 9 and 10th at the gaylord hotel in Orlando, Florida. This first of its kind live event will feature some of the best leaders in the partnership business and leaders from Microsoft in person to help you achieve your greatest results. For more details, follow the link in the show notes. attendance for this event is strictly limited to support and intimate executive dialogue. So please register today before it’s sold out.
Adam Michalski 02:20
Welcome back to the partner podcast super excited to have my friend Vince Menzione on today founder and CEO of ultimate partnerships and the host of ultimate guide to partnering, which I’m proud to say it was inspiration for this podcast if you go all the way back. So Vince has been doing this for longer than I have. I am super excited to have you on and Vince the question that I always love to ask first is tell us a little bit about you and your path into partnerships.
Vince Menzione 02:47
Adam, first of all, thank you so much. I’m honored to be on your podcast and we had you on Ultimate Guide Department not that long ago and so really excited to be here today and participate with you in this discussion. Vince Menzione. I am the founder and CEO of ultimate partnerships hosted the ultimate guide to partnering podcast describe my career as consisting of four maybe more successful business transformations. I started off carrying a bag in the early days of wireless computing before Wi Fi helped grow a company exponentially. I was employee number six in the United States. We grew that business from 6 million to 125 million we went public on the Toronto exchange. This company was like a fledgling company, Canadian based company trying to sell in the US markets. I recognize then the opportunity and the potential and leveraging other organizations to develop trusted relationships with customers. And I started partnering back in those early days I followed the leader of that company after I got acquired to do a turnaround. I was asked to start up a government business and my background was on the Enterprise selling space. And I was like I don’t want to go sell the government. But I knew that my largest competitor had built a formidable channel. And so I went down to Washington DC I got us a GSA Schedule. And I found the right partners to help go sell and influence government customers. And that consisted of channel partners and resellers that are also consisted of trusted organizations that had the relationships with the organizations that we were trying to sell to the company had been spun out by Golden Gate capital. And my business unit became the growth engine for the successful sale of Golden Gate capital selling the organization to General Dynamics. So I stayed at General Dynamics just long enough to get my urn out. And then I was recruited by Microsoft. And for almost a decade, I was Microsoft’s general manager for US public sector partner strategy, I was responsible for the partner ecosystem for all of federal government, state and local government education and health care. And so I had a pretty significant sized organization. And we looked at ISVs I had the independent software vendors. I had all of the resellers selling into those four markets, and I had the systems integrators and any of the other partners have different types inside As is, as you might imagine Microsoft being the juggernaut that it is in the ecosystem world with 450,000 partners, that I had a pretty significant purview. And within that purview, I really got to understand what worked and what didn’t work and why organizations were successful. And a lot of organizations weren’t, and had the wrong expectations, my business unit got blown up. And rather than take a job moving to Seattle, because I just moved to Jupiter, Florida, I decided to take a package. And I started up consulting as ultimate partnerships. After I had two successful years of consulting work, I went inside one of my clients for almost two years, and help them become partner the year with Microsoft helped rebuild their ecosystem strategy. And then I left during COVID, I really missed two things, I missed having the podcast, I put it on hold for two years. And I really missed working with a lot of organizations internally, as an employee, it’s not as easy to go to the organization, the leadership, and say, We gotta go fix this. Sometimes you have to deal with internal politics. And I miss being able to have those candid conversations and help drive the strategy for an organization. And when I left, I wrote a manifesto around what needs successful partnering. I’ve landed on what I call the Seven Principles of successful partnering, and also the four dysfunctions of a partnership. And so that’s how I go to market working with organizations. I primarily work with independent software vendors. And my focus sweetspot has been working within the Microsoft ecosystem, helping these organizations become more successful co selling with Microsoft. And we’re also working outside that ecosystem with the other hyperscalers a little bit more fluidly today.
Adam Michalski 06:37
Very cool. Very cool. And what I would love to get your opinion on, because obviously, you’ve been around for a bit, you’ve seen a lot of the different transformations that have happened, like in the partnerships industries, I think that you bring a unique perspective to this question of what’s been changing over the past couple of years. I think that it is it’s pretty fair to say that there’s obviously been a lot happening, but I’d be curious to get your take in terms of you’ve seen multiple different evolutions and what’s different, if anything you know about what’s happening. Now,
Vince Menzione 07:03
there’s a lot that’s different. And there’s a lot that’s the same, right, the fundamentals and the principles are the same, but what’s really changed and it really got accelerated. We were talking about this digital transformation, this rapid transformation as early as five or six years ago, and we were trying to move organizations to the cloud, and some were moving faster than others. It’s like crossing the chasm, the Geoffrey Moore analogy of early adopter versus late adopter COVID really was a seminal point in accelerating organizations need to needed to work remotely hybrid. And that acceleration really began to happen, as well as the digitization of everything and the buying patterns changing. And we both have had Jay McBain on the podcast, talking about the five seats at the table, and that we’re making technology purchases now versus years ago, we’re making those technology purchases, much like we make a decision to buy a car, right, we talked to the people that we trust. And we asked their opinion, we make those decisions independently of the CIO. And those decisions are made in the line of business more fluidly today than they were in the past. So that has changed buying behaviors is changed marketplaces are becoming adopted more readily. You’re seeing the three large hyper scalars really investing heavily. The trend now is to get all of the independent software vendors to do marketplace solutions. And each of the three vendors is working through cosell strategies and scaling strategies with their organization. So that whole ecosystem movement is happening more fluidly. And I think it’s taking some of the friction, it will take a lot of the friction out of the way organizations partnered in the past because the marketplace solution becomes almost like an NFT, a non fungible token. And that it’s easy to get to it’s easy to access, it’s easier to buy. And organizations can then wrap services around that. So I think the whole the dynamics are getting better, the technologies are getting better. Certainly technologies like yours, and crossbeams where we now know how to drive attribution the right way were years ago, we didn’t know how to do it again, back to our good friend Jay, calling this the decade of the ecosystem and so many of us have been gravitating around this conversation yourself, Alan Adler, Jared Fuller, and others all guests on both of our podcasts. But we’re seeing this really this rapid change happening. And what I love the most about this is organizations are finally getting it for many years partnership was this appendage that was stuck on the side of a sales organization and maybe not fluid and not integrated. And now today, with organizations like Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer ventures saying we’re leaning in here, that we’re starting to see this become reality that partnership is integrated and go to partnership or go to ecosystem strategy can really happen. So that’s an exciting time. I’ve been around this a long time. So I’ve seen the pain but now I’m starting to see the potential of what is really the most exciting time in my career. Yeah, I
Adam Michalski 09:59
tend to agree really obviously, I don’t think either one of us would be investing so much of our time into this, if we didn’t see eye to eye, I think it’s a really exciting time from both bottoms up, but even top down like macro time to be in partnerships where there’s just a lot of folks looking at it as a potential new growth lever, even though obviously, it’s been around for a while. But I think that things that are happening in marketing and sales are forcing even more scrutiny on partnerships, which is exciting. The one piece that you touched on that I wanted to double click on a little bit further was co selling, you know, so I feel like it’s one of those things that when done, right, I seen it be one of the most impactful things for an organization because it can fast track their sales cycles lead to higher ACV. Like fundamentally like connecting with a partner who’s already closed, the deal that you want to close just makes sense. But there’s so many different ways that it can fall apart. So particularly when you work with your clients, I’d be curious, like, how do you guide them towards co selling best practices? What are those best practices? And what are the pitfalls that you try to get them to avoid when they’re trying to deploy co selling like across the organization?
Vince Menzione 11:03
Yeah, that’s a really great question. And there’s a lot of different directions we can go here and the whole topic of CO selling. So there’s fundamentals that come to mind with regards to co selling, is you really have to get it right from the beginning, like your brand and story to your partner is critical. Let’s use an example of an independent software vendor. And you’re trying to go at a big with our Microsoft or an Amazon or a Google Well, you may not be as well known as some of the other organizations, maybe you’re early stage and or you’re you’re fighting for market share with those other organizations. It’s really critical. You build your brand, you build your story, you key in on some early wins, like work on some early wins, and then take that and use that as your flywheel and then build your messaging out. You have to enunciate, I find that organizations, sometimes they’re not deliberate enough in their communication strategy with their partner going out early. This is our value back to you locking arms, and coming up with what’s our shared story for success, what you want to create that compelling why are we partnering together? What’s in it for you? What’s in it for me lock in on that vision? What do we want to go accomplish together? And then being deliberate about the execution? I call them the Barney meetings or the kumbaya meetings where we come together, we’re high fiving each other at the end of the meeting, yeah, we’re gonna go do this together. And then crickets, nothing happens. So you gotta be deliberate in terms of the execution. And I use OKRs objective key results, which John Doerr, institutionalize the Google, he wrote a book about it. And OKRs are a great way to say what are the key things we’re gonna go do? How are we going to get there? How are we going to measure success? And let’s scorecard, let’s go green, yellow, red, are you executing against it, and deliberately meeting week after week, month after month, to ensure both organizations because really, you’re aligning two ships to big organizations, maybe your smaller organizations, they have product teams and marketing teams, they have selling teams, and get them aligned together. And making sure you’ve got all the components on both sides operating together to get to green, which is let’s be, let’s get to the objective that we want to go solve and drive together, which at the end of the day is sales. But you got to align the organization, is that the right way to do it?
Adam Michalski 13:15
Yeah, exactly. As anybody who’s worked at any company can attest to it’s very difficult to even get your organization to do the right things. Forget about involving other organizations. Curiously, it sounds like with your consulting practice, that’s obviously how you help out companies and make sure that you can set them up with the right infrastructure on that front. So I’d love to spend a couple of minutes here talking about like, how you engage with clients, who are the type of clients that you’d like to work with? And yeah, how do you guide them to what is success? But pun intended there with the ultimate guide?
Vince Menzione 13:44
Yeah, it is being a guide to those organizations, right. Yeah, like I said, there were like, seven operating principles, and I won’t drain those for you right now. But it really does start with mindset, the organization’s I have found that a lot of we’re talking about the what’s happening, that’s really great. But there’s still some organizations that don’t have that partner mindset, that growth mindset. They have a fixed mindset internally, they think they have that I used to call it the heroic sales culture, which says we ring the bell, we reward the individual contributor and selling is a team sport. So getting the mindset right in the organization is critical, ensuring that the leadership is fully committed, I work across organizations on all these aspects, especially at the leadership levels, commitment looks like the CEO or the C suite, all up and down that you just said getting the organization aligned to doing it. All the departments means that everybody’s vested are buying in and they’re investing in department strategy. And then this vision thing where we lock arms, we decide what we’re going to go do together. And maniacal focus is really that execution of the strategy. There’s a brand and story element. A lot of technology organizations don’t do as great a job as they should on their branding, both to the market and even to their partners. And then that marketing story, like getting that engine running. And then at the end of the day, it’s delivering results, right. It’s an I call, it’s all about the Benjamins. It’s about utilizing the right tools. We know some really good tools out there, both of us collectively, that can help organizations come together identify opportunities, decide which ones are the right ones to go after and what the strategy will be to go. cosell together into those deals and what co selling looks like. Some organizations have different expectations of what co selling really is. So again, having an agreed set of outcomes around that cosell strategy. And then what I say is agility is certainly like the seventh motion, things change, markets change, product needs change, we need to be agile, we need to pivot when we need to. And we need to recognize the new opportunities and new areas that go after a growth minded world that we live in today. So I go across those organizations, I have found that doing it by myself is sometimes arduous, it’s hard. And so I have identified some of the best players in the industry. And we’ve created this ultimate partnership stream team, we are actually launching a partner mastermind, and we’re launching our first mastermind event, October 9 and 10th. In Orlando, Florida at the gaylord hotel get I’ll provide a link to it. We’re co locating it at this big dynamics, which is a Microsoft ecosystem of organizations that are tied into the business applications here with Microsoft, we’re co locating it their event, we’ll be doing a day and a half event live. We’re inviting executives only to this event ISVs primarily independent software vendors primarily. And really, it’s going to be a day and a half chock full of great sessions and work around what makes success what the best of the best do. And the people that I’m bringing in the room, I cover from a leadership perspective, I have the top person who’s been doing co selling in the Microsoft ecosystem for about 10 years. Now, on the operational side, I have one of the best former CMOS of a partner organization that I’ve ever met in my career. And she’s recovering off on all the marketing and go to market aspects. And then I have one of the top sellers in the business, who took a business, she took the business to top cosell Partner of the Year for Microsoft worldwide this past year. So we are coming together, we also have a gentleman who is super steeped in the dynamics community because this event is around the dynamics world. But we’re doing this event and we’re also creating community around it because we find that these organizations don’t have a watering hole necessarily, that they can go to, to learn from each other. And to be constantly given information and learnings and principles on a regular basis. So we’re creating a whole community around this, which we’re really excited about.
Adam Michalski 17:43
Very cool. And what we’ll do is for our listeners, you can check out the show notes, we’ll go ahead and you can link out to it over there, be sure to check it out over there. It’s just recapping on October 9 and 10th. Down in Orlando. And obviously the community as well. I love it huge proponent of anybody who’s trying to share best practices. I feel like part of the reason I think over the past couple years that partnerships have seen a boon is it’s no longer as siloed as it used to be a lot of folks are going they’re sharing their learnings and across podcasts, but also communities and things that are starting to really grow up and mature at the space, which is awesome. One One other point that I wanted to make sure that we touched on is particularly it’d be touched on CO selling but co selling with Microsoft, I would argue that there are very few people that know that Microsoft ecosystem is good as humans. So we’d love to hear a little bit about some best practices that you have for folks who might be listening and might be a smaller organization. They’re looking to really cut their teeth, if you will of starting to break into the Microsoft ecosystem. And cosell How should they do? Yeah,
Vince Menzione 18:38
co selling across my across Microsoft is I think, again, we talked about expectations, right? I think that organizations don’t always understand the breadth and complexity of Microsoft. And there’s 35,000, Microsoft field people all aligned the scorecards and specific sets of goals worldwide. There are 450,000 partners 17 million sellers in that equation. And there’s millions of customers that utilize the Microsoft stack in one form or another. And so there’s huge enterprise customers down to the smallest organizations. And getting that right is hard. It’s hard to cover it in, in an episode that’s of our length today, and that’s why we’re doing the mastermind. But what I say is organizations often don’t understand how to navigate the four walls. We help them do that understanding the complexity of how Microsoft it’s really one of the best matrix organizations I would say McKenzie came in many years ago. And we have so many different products. So the complexity of all the huge portfolio that Microsoft has, plus all of the independent software vendors that Microsoft Works with and trying to land that requires a lot of work and they do a really they do an excellent job and one of the things they do is that they really have made selling with partners institutionalized in the organization. Microsoft has always been partner led organization from the early days of the PC. Because of those days, we were like you build PCs, like Michael Dell was in his dorm room building PCs and selling them, he was a partner. And then organizations would take those devices and they cobbled networking and printers and things and software. And that’s how a partnering really started, like 40 plus years ago, and that’s how I said, it’s institutionalize. And so the value, they incentivize their field sellers to work with partners. Getting on the radar is one of the things we help organizations do. Smaller organizations often struggle because you have to show up with a compelling offer, you have to show up and demonstrate why you’re adding value. And you both Microsoft will give you attention, but it takes time it takes work, you got to be deliberate, you have to invest in it as well, he can’t just do it. It’s not a once and done you have to invest in it. And organizations hire Alliance managers, or Microsoft lions managers. And we’ll do the same thing with Google and Amazon as well. To really get it right. So invest in the strategy drop me a line, I’m happy to talk to anybody about the topic come listen to my podcast, I’ve had almost every executive on from Microsoft on. We just did a masterclass. In fact, we visited all the seats at the table and Microsoft’s global partner organization, and interviewed the marketing team, the CO selling team, the ISV team, the scale team actually interviewed one of their top sellers. So you get a different perspective. If you go to the I’ll give you the link to that masterclass, I think it’s a great way. If you’re trying to understand Microsoft, just understand how it operates internally. And that’s out on our podcast. So happy to share that with everyone.
Adam Michalski 21:35
Amazing. Yeah, I think for our listeners, we’ll link out to that in the show notes as well. So you can check that out right there. Just go down and click. But yeah, I also want to go back to go to bat for events, I think there’s no better person out there who understands the Microsoft ecosystem. With that said, My final question here is if somebody wants to actually work with you from get engagement standpoint, how should they get in touch events?
Vince Menzione 21:55
Easiest way is reach out to me on email or LinkedIn, my email address is Vince M at ultimate dash partnerships.com. And then LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn pretty often, I reach out to me on LinkedIn and link with me there DM with me there and happy to have a conversation and share my knowledge and hopefully lead you in the right direction. If I can’t help you, or if I can, we can have a longer conversation about what that looks like. But excited to work with any organization that is looking to drive greatest success working with the tech giants
Adam Michalski 22:26
antastic. And we’ll link out to those in the show notes as well. But don’t be shy reach out to Vince, I know he’s extremely active in the community. And Vince, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I know that it is we’re shooting this in mid August, where it’s a great time to be down in Florida. So you can be doing any other thing. But you joined us today. So thank you so much for being here.
Vince Menzione 22:46
And I just want to say thank you. That was an awfully nice compliment you made earlier. I love what you’ve been doing. You had been we were talking about this before we started every week. Podcasting isn’t easy. It’s not for the faint of heart. And you have to put in the hours and the commitment to go do it. And you have done an amazing job. You’re up in the 100 plus range, right 150 120 episodes wherever we land in this episode. But I appreciate all you do for the community and how active and supportive you are as well. So thank you slowly
Adam Michalski 23:15
but surely, brick by brick, and we’re all doing this together. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today admins. I really appreciate it.
Vince Menzione 23:21
Same here. Glad to be on the journey with you, Adam. Thank you. Likewise, I am so excited to announce the ultimate partnerships mastermind. Our first event is taking place October ninth and 10th at the gaylord hotel in Orlando, Florida. This first of its kind live event will feature some of the best leaders in the partnership business. The group I call the ultimate partnerships Dream Team, and leaders from Microsoft in person to help you achieve your greatest results in 2023. For more details, follow the link in the show notes. attendance for this event is strictly limited to support and intimate executive dialogue. So please register today. Before it’s sold out. I hope you join us my friend at the beautiful Gaylord hotel, October 9 and 10.
Announcer 24:19
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering