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Google’s Services Partner Leader Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
Google Cloud is approaching a $30B business, and its partners have witnessed remarkable success in driving bold digital transformation journeys for customers. In this episode, Chris Voss, Director of North American Services Partnerships for Google Cloud shares valuable insights on “Precision Partnering” and the ever-evolving digital transformation landscape. Chris emphasizes the significance of understanding partners’ unique capabilities, enabling them to develop tailor-made solutions aligned with customer needs. He highlights the importance of agility in responding to unforeseen challenges and the role of responsible innovation and generative AI in driving successful outcomes. This conversation reinforces the importance of strategic partnerships in unlocking remarkable transformations in the age of rapid digital advancement.
In Chris’ words
Chris Voss is the North American GSI / SI Partnerships Director for Google Cloud. In this role, Chris and his team of senior Partner Development Managers are responsible for bringing the power of Google’s top GSIs and SIs to help deliver successful digital transformations for our joint customers across the US and Canada. To accomplish this, the GSI / SI team is focused on differentiated go-to-market campaigns, technical enablement, and partner delivery excellence.
Chris joined Google in 2020 from Microsoft, where he spent 11 years in crucial Partner and Customer facing roles. He has a long track record of success and deep partner relationships from his time as Microsoft’s Sr. Director of Enterprise Alliances, where he led the strategy and execution of global go-to-market programs and alignment with Microsoft’s strategic technology and SI partners.
Before Microsoft, Chris enjoyed a 12-year sales career at SAP America, where his last position was Vice President of Global Accounts.
What You’ll Learn
- The Mission of Google Cloud Services Partner Business. 2:55
- How Google differentiates capabilities to ensure they are mapping the right partners to the right opportunity? 5:14
- How partners are evolving during this age of rapid transformation? 9:10
- Agility as an atribute of partner success. 11:10
- What characteristics make a great partner for Google Cloud? 14:42
- Advice for partners wishing to work with Google Cloud. 23:57
Exclusively Sponsored By Google Cloud
This episode of the podcast is exclusively sponsored by Google Cloud. Google Cloud’s mission is to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business. More than any other top cloud provider; Google Cloud as unique capabilities to meet customers’ needs across four areas. Data, Trust, Open Infrastructure, and Collaboration, all underpinned by Sustainable Technology. Learn more at cloud.google.com
On becoming, The Ultimate Partner™
At Ultimate Guide to Partnering, we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, who drive the greatest influence and impact to our world of ecosystems.
With this exciting new Masterclass Series, Ultimate Partnerships becomes The Ultimate Partner™ More than just a new look, The Ultimate Partner is doubling its commitment to helping YOU become the Ultimate Partner by getting it right. Do you want to be The Ultimate Partner? Visit our NEW website.
Other Noteworthy Episodes Featuring Google Cloud
Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
partners, google cloud, customers, technology, capabilities, organization, chris, partnerships, years, industry, ai, google, great, meriwether lewis, opportunity, cloud, ultimate guide, journey, impact, business
SPEAKERS
Chris Voss, Vince Menzione, Announcer
Vince Menzione 00:00
Ultimate Guide to partnering we bring you the leaders in this industry, the best in the business from the leading tech organizations and the hyperscalers, the ones that are driving the greatest influence and impact to our world of ecosystems. With their latest earnings results, Google Cloud is approaching a $30 billion business ranking at number three of the leading cloud providers, or hyperscalers. This creates a massive opportunity for you as partners to help Google’s customers take full advantage of their cloud environments by providing the ecosystem of additional services, platforms, and expertise only partners like you can provide. So if you’re a technology leader, looking to learn how to effectively grow your business, then you’re not going to want to miss this exclusive Ultimate Guide to partnering series precision partnering. In this series, I’m joined by the Google leaders driving the partnership business to help define what it takes to effectively partner with Google.
Announcer 01:08
This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, 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 01:27
Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and today I will Chris FOSS is the director of North American services partners at Google Cloud. And he joins us for this masterclass partnering with Google Cloud precision partnering. In this episode, you’ll learn from Chris, what attributes he looks for in partners, how his services team is organized for success, how he’s applying Google’s methodology, to create a win win win for partners like you, and how you and your organization can best engage to drive mutually successful outcomes. Partnering with Google, I hope you enjoy and learn from this discussion. As much as I enjoyed welcoming Chris boss. This episode of the podcast is exclusively sponsored by Google Cloud. Google clouds mission is to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business more than any other top cloud provider. Google Cloud has unique capabilities to meet the needs of customers across four areas. Data Trust, open infrastructure and collaboration, all underpinned by sustainable technology, learn more@cloud.google.com. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
Chris Voss 02:55
Hello, Vince. Thank you. You know, I’ve listened to your podcast for years and have a lot of people that I’ve worked with, and I admire who’ve been guests on your podcast. So it’s really exciting for me to be here.
Vince Menzione 03:05
I’m really excited to welcome you as a guest, you and I both had the opportunity to be working in the same organization years ago. But for our listeners, can you take us through the mission of your organization as the director, North American services partners, and its role in the larger partner organization at Google Cloud,
Chris Voss 03:27
our mission is to help accelerate the digital transformation journey for our customers. And we really do that, utilizing a number of key capabilities. We call our four clouds, which are really Data Cloud, because it starts with your data estate, ensuring you have a holistic view of your data that you can gather insights to drive your business and feed advanced AI and ML models, we have our open cloud, which is about creating an open, flexible infrastructure to efficiently run your own applications or technologies, or ISV applications or other technologies on it, security and trust is super important. So our trust cloud is based in zero trust principles and really provides a best in class security posture for our customers. And then of course, our collaboration cloud based on Google workspace offers the capability to seamlessly communicate, collaborate, work with people inside and outside of your organization, which obviously, in today’s day, and age is even more important than than ever before. And all of that runs on top of the most sustainable cloud in the industry. We are carbon neutral today in our operations. And we aim to be carbon free in all of our operations by 2030. So that’s an important element of our capabilities as well. So when you think about those capabilities, it’s really how do you drive an in business impact with your customer, and that’s what my team is 100% focused on working with si s and GSI is to take these capabilities and help our customers be be successful and maximize the impact of their Google Cloud investment.
Vince Menzione 05:05
So Chris, I love what you have to say here, first of all, four clouds, trust cloud, collaborate, cloud, open cloud and data cloud. Are we looking at four different models? Are we looking at four different distinctions within the overall Google Cloud,
Chris Voss 05:20
it’s really just different capabilities within one overall cloud platform. But sometimes it’s easier to think about those unique capabilities. Because depending on the workload, or the business case that they have, it really does rely on you drawing on those capability from those four different clouds.
Vince Menzione 05:39
And you mentioned really such a bold point around carbon free footprint. How does Google aspire to get there?
Chris Voss 05:47
Well, right now, it’s a combination of renewable energies and carbon offsets. But what we really want to have is, first the most efficient data centers in the industry. So it requires as little energy and water consumption as possible, and then creating responsible renewable energy generation sources to run those data centers wherever they may be around the world.
Vince Menzione 06:10
So we discussed the overall mission of your organization, how does the team organized for success,
Chris Voss 06:17
my team in particular is focused on the SI are the services partners. And what we really aspire to do every single day is map the capabilities of our partners with the requirements and the needs of our customers, we really started thinking about this as precision partnering to make sure that we can be very intentional about what capabilities we bring to our customers. And so there’s no wasted motion, we’re really driving the value every day, with our customer success being the Northstar of what we’re trying to achieve.
Vince Menzione 06:54
And how do you differentiate right, you got a vast ecosystem of partners, like how do you differentiate capabilities to ensure you’re mapping the right partner and to the right opportunity, this precision partnering motion?
Chris Voss 07:08
Yeah, that’s a good question. We really start with each partner, asking them what their unique core differentiated capability is, and how they can apply that to unique solutions that we can put a wrapper around and make sure that it’s easy to consume for our customers for our field, so that everybody’s on the same page about what that superpower is, for that particular partner. That’s step number one. Step number two is great. We have all of these customers that are on very ambitious digital transformation journeys. They have requirements, they have workloads or technologies that they need help with. And then it’s using the data and the propensity data and the knowledge that we have about the incumbency at the customer. And really mapping the right solution, the right partner to the right opportunities.
Vince Menzione 08:01
You know, what strikes me in this conversation is that organizations, these customers that choose Google tend to be the most transformative than not doing the traditional lift and shift that you and I saw in our former lives. It seems like they’re reinventing their businesses. Is that true?
Chris Voss 08:19
Well, it’s it’s a great point, I think, where Google Cloud has had a lot of success in the market is around these bold, ambitious digital transformation journeys that are often supported by board level and CEO level support at the customer. They look to Google Cloud and our partners to infuse some innovation to bring the right technologies to their digital transformation journey. And so it’s a lot of responsibility that we have with our partners. The future success of these companies really depends on our ability to realize the digital transformation that each of these companies is looking for. And Google Cloud has had some really good success with the customer opportunities where they’re looking for these bold, ambitious digital transformation journeys. And of course, our customers know that our partners are a key part of that.
Vince Menzione 09:14
Chris, you and I were talking about this just before we recorded today, and when ties into this rapid transformation conversation, right. But we had been experiencing headwinds since the lockdown a COVID. And then since with the financial, I’ll call it headwinds, for lack of better term, what are you seeing that you didn’t expect to see? And how is it impacting these organizations evolving during this age of rapid transformation?
Chris Voss 09:39
Well, I’ve been in this business for 25 years, and to be coming out of COVID, hopefully, but the world that we’re coming back to is different than the world we left certainly from a workspace environment. And now we have these looming headwinds of macro economic conditions. And so we’re in A space that nobody really can predict accurately where it’s going. To me this is exciting. But it’s also means that we with our partners have to be incredibly agile customers that are on a path one day, they might come back the next week and say, Hey, we’re shifting our focus on a new workload or a new area, we need to cut costs in this area, everything is happening so much faster than it happened before. I really started my career events in ERP implementations at SAP. And those implementations, as some of you might know, might take two or three years or longer sometimes. And there’s just absolutely no way in our current environment, that you can have projects that lasts anywhere near that long, we’re talking about transformation and changes that are evolving and happening in a matter of weeks instead of months and years.
Vince Menzione 10:56
Chris, you bring back the old days of SAP, I actually spoke at the Sapphire conference 20 plus years ago, and I remember those times, right? That was all y2k and people implementing these big solutions that took years to implement. And like to your point, agility is key. I talk about agility as being super important to partnership ships as well. What are you seeing from the partner side of that? Are the are your partners being agile as well, in terms of their engagement with you in the team?
Chris Voss 11:24
Yeah, I think partners are being as agile as they can be. I think one of the challenges they have is that technology is coming out so quickly, not just from us, but from other technology providers across the industry. And so they are keeping up to date and abreast of the technology and trying to determine which trends which technology are going to be most important to their customers. And then they have to rapidly enable their resources, they have to create solutions. And so I do think that they are responding to that technology innovation challenge. And they are becoming much more agile as well. But it’s clear that we have to help them. There’s so much information technology, and change happening every day that if we’re not there hand in hand, helping them decipher what’s coming down the pipeline, it can be very, very daunting for them. But I have seen to your point, a real desire from our top partners to not get too caught up in how they used to do it. They’re really focused on what’s going to drive the most value for our customers today,
Vince Menzione 12:31
you know, building on that the shifts we’ve been seeing, right, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk to you today about AI and generative AI. You know, in fact, open AI made a big splash. And now even my postman comes to me and asks me questions about things like Jad, GBT, because it’s it’s out there. How is Google Cloud approaching the AI? I’ll call it arms race?
Chris Voss 12:55
Sure. Well, to your first point, the speed of change. Vince is amazing. Having been through a number of significant technology shifts over my career, if you think about mobile, and the cloud change and shift that we’re in right now, a lot of these shifts happened over the years. And what we’re seeing now with Gen AI, these changes are happening over months and weeks. And it is it’s unbelievable, it’s actually very exciting, as well, as Sundar CEO said, Gen AI will impact every product from every company. Think about that sometimes when I try to identify a product or a company that won’t be impacted by the technology that we are seeing land in the marketplace right now. And it’s difficult, it’s really difficult to imagine any part of the world that we know in the business that we know today that won’t be impacted by this, Google is committed to innovating responsibly in this space. And so what you’re seeing from us to this arms race, as you said, is a set of controlled experiments really, in which we’re releasing technology out into the market to our partners to consumers, getting feedback iterating, ensuring the technology is understood that it’s being used responsibly, and that we’re making changes to that as we go along. The last part I’ll say about our response to this is that we understand from the very beginning that partners are a critical piece of this. If you think about Gen AI and its application in the enterprise space, we’re probably thinking about a tiny fraction of the eventual use cases that we’ll see out in the market. Our partners have the capability, the relationships, the experience, to really think about what all of these amazing use cases will be that will be lit up and enabled by Gen AI. I’ll make one more point I sat In a meeting with one of my partners in New York a couple of weeks ago, and we did a whiteboarding session for about an hour and a half with some of our AI leaders, just identifying which potential workloads either from the industry standpoint or horizontally will be impacted and changed by Gen AI. And we had three whiteboards filled in an hour using small print, because there were just so many it’s going to be everywhere, and partners are going to be the last mile execution, of really bringing that capability to life for our enterprise customers,
Vince Menzione 15:39
I would have loved to been in the room for that, Chris, it’s just an exciting time. And to your point, all of these amazing use cases, all the permutations of things that we are going to be able to do differently or better, because of this generative AI and the work that’s going on at Google and other leading organizations. But what an exciting time to work with partners, like the ones that you manage Chris, they’re the ones who will be the builders working with your customers to build these new solutions, these new use cases, and you have quite a bit of experience with partners. What do you believe makes? What characteristics do you believe make a great partner?
Chris Voss 16:14
That’s a good question. It’s so fundamental to anybody that’s in a partner enroll or works with partners. And over my years, I’ve thought about this with my team quite a bit. And I think number one has to be a culture of customer success with the partner. And what I mean is, when you’re working with a partner at a customer site, inevitably, there will be some escalations, there’ll be some challenges, it’s just the nature of the work that we’re in. And you have to know, at the end of the day, that the partner is going to do the right thing, just like the partner needs to know that you’re going to do the right thing. But you have to have that fundamental understanding and belief that your partner has this customer success as their Northstar, just like you do. The second part is I want my partners to be invested. Is the partnership, a hobby for the partner? Or is it a business for the partner. And what I mean is, a lot of partners want to have Google Cloud, or they want to have the logo on their website and be able to say that, yes, I’m the partner for Google Cloud, what I’m looking for is the dedication, the focus and the commitment from the partner, to really make it a business who are the people who wake up every day, thinking about driving a successful outcome for our joint customers, who are the people that have dedicated their careers to this practice. And if you can’t name those people, if there really aren’t any. Sometimes that can be a challenge, and a sign that that maybe it’s a hobby, instead of a real business. First of
Vince Menzione 17:49
all, customer success, like knowing that the partner is going to do the right thing, whether you’re in the room or not having that trust style, say between the two organizations, so fundamental to success. And you talked about invested, I also talk about commitment, and commitment. From the top of the organization up and down the organization, I have gotten to work with some Google partners that have that executive commitment, you don’t see from every single one of them, some of them are just in it for leads, but others really invest in the business of building out the capabilities and driving the right results for the customers.
Chris Voss 18:22
Absolutely, I do look for commitment at multiple levels across the organization, if you have some feet on the street that are really committed, that’s super helpful. But if they don’t have the backing and the support from the leadership of their organization, it’s going to be problematic. Or conversely, if you have the CEO or a very senior person at the company, saying the right things, but it’s not really embraced at different levels of the organization, it doesn’t deliver the impact to the customers that it often needs. So that support up and down the organization is absolutely critical.
Vince Menzione 18:58
And so Chris, for our listeners, for the 1000s of partners, or potential partners listening today, what advice would you have for them, for those organizations wishing to work with you and your organization? In fact, what I would say is, what don’t they teach working with Google Cloud?
Chris Voss 19:15
Well, I would go back to this concept of precision partnering. And what often happens, and Vince, I’m sure you’ve been in many, perhaps dozens or hundreds of these meetings over your career, you get teams together, executives together, and they say, let’s pick four or five accounts and get our account teams together and find out what the opportunity is. My guidance is to really be much more precise about what the key focused superpower is that you want to bring to the partnership and start there. Be very intentional, be very specific about what you want to be known for. And in a way it means less is more. So many partners want to come in He explained that they can do everything, which is great having a wide range of capabilities. But oftentimes, the way to make the name for yourself and have the biggest impact is actually zeroing in on that unique capability that you can do better than anybody else. The second thing I would say is, know that you’re not alone. And what I mean by that is, Google Cloud has a lot of capabilities and support services, to make sure that our partners have all the backing and support of Google to make our customers be successful. And at times, partners don’t want to raise their hand and say, Hey, this partner or this project is a little off track helped me they go on this hero journey, and they want to be able to deliver it all the way through my guidance would be bring Google Cloud in very early, have an ongoing relationship and know that we’re with you, and we’re there to help you every step of the journey with them. Chris, really great
Vince Menzione 20:56
points, organizations need to stand out. They can’t be all things to all people. And what is the one thing that makes you better different? And the one reason why you are the right partner for this opportunity. So Chris, I’d like to pivot here. And I wanted to focus a little bit here on your journey. Was there a pivot point? Was there an inflection point, or spark that set you on the path to this amazing role at Google Cloud,
Chris Voss 21:19
I was an English Lit major from a small liberal arts school, I was not a technology professional. Or I didn’t know what a technology professional even was events at the time, but my oldest brother was in the technology industry. And he was in sales. And I gotta tell you the truth, I thought sales equated to working in a store and sitting and ringing customers up at the cash register, I didn’t really have a great concept for what sales was. And my brother, Joe, who’s one of the smartest, most creative people I’ve met, was in sales. And he told me what he did on a day to day basis, the opportunities and the challenges and the level of collaboration, bringing together different technology solutions to the customers in the sales cycle, I was fascinated, I didn’t know that world necessarily existed. And so I was so fortunate to get into enterprise sales at SAP back in the day. And I couldn’t believe how challenging it was, but also how invigorating to get into the sales cycles that sometimes would span multiple quarters, or multiple years. And so that was really the start of my technology career. It also gave me an opportunity to learn every single day, so many new things because the technology was emerging all the time. And here we are talking about Gen AI, it’s still happening, but even faster today. So if you wanted to be in an industry where you are constantly going to be challenged, this was a good place, after doing the direct sales for about 12 or 15 years, I did make the big pivot to the partner side of the house when I got to Microsoft. Now that created a whole different set of opportunities for me, which I really, really loved. And the great thing about that was instead of being focused on one customer or one technology, working with partners, every single day meant I got to hit every part of the Microsoft business, whether it was the office or Windows or cloud or back then it was server and tools. So the variety of customers, the variety of technology, that being in a partner role provided was fantastic. And I still get excited every day, by that type of challenge and opportunity to work with partners here at Google Cloud, to make our customers be successful. No two days, Vince are ever like
Vince Menzione 23:50
an English Lit major. What a pivot that was right was their best piece of advice you received along this amazing journey.
Chris Voss 23:57
Yeah, I think about this quite a bit. And I actually tell people that I mentor, I share this piece of advice with them quite a bit. And it came from a leader I had early on at SAP, when we would get to the end of the year and accounts were being shuffled around, there was often a rush for the best accounts, people wanted to get that customer because they had heard that customer was a really good customer. He told me, Hey, don’t rush to the customer where everything is easy and already running great. Go fix the customer, that’s a problem or that’s a challenge. Go where nobody else has been successful. And if you can turn that customer around, that’s how you’re going to really advance your career. And that’s how you’re really going to have the biggest impact in the company. And so every step of my personal journey along the way, I’ve tried not to rush to the easy part or the opportunity that was going well but look across an organization of where I think I could have the biggest impact where I could To take that customer or that partner that was a challenge and and turn that around and really drive impact there.
Vince Menzione 25:06
Was there an example of that from your career you can cite for us.
Chris Voss 25:09
I go back, certainly from some of the partnerships that we’ve had that have traditionally not been friendly towards our company, maybe for one reason or another, that partner was not interested or they were so aligned with one of the other clouds. And so okay, they might be aligned with one of the other providers so far, but what can we do? What value can we bring to them? What opportunity can we mutually unlock with our customers, to get them to embrace our cloud? Right now in my portfolio, I have about 25 partners, and at least half of them were not partners or significant partners two years ago. So going out and building those new partnerships, where maybe they were only aligned with one of our competitors, and making sure they understand the opportunity that we mutually have here at Google Cloud, and then getting them to embrace the partnership turn it from a hobby into a real business, that has been a journey that I’ve been on every single day.
Vince Menzione 26:17
Well, it sounds like it’s paying off the business is growing. And it’s great to see the energy and work on precision partnering from you and the organization at Google Cloud. But Chris, I have a favorite question. I love to ask just about every guest this question, you are hosting a dinner party, and this dinner party could be in any part of the world, it might be in the Seattle area, it might be someplace else. But at this dinner party, you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past. I’ve had a couple of guests actually pick someone in the future to invite to their amazing dinner party. Whom would you invite to this amazing dinner party?
Chris Voss 26:55
And why events I have to say, having listened to your podcast in the past? I knew this question might be up. So I did some thinking last night on this and I came up with three people very different, but I think they’re great. The first is Meriwether Lewis from the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. I spend a lot of time out in the mountains up here in the Pacific Northwest. And I gotta tell you, even with maps and trails, sometimes it’s intimidating, and I’m out there thinking about what it must have been like, with Lewis and Clark having no map having no trail and the exploration they did up in those mountains. I would love to hear all the stories. Unfortunately, Meriwether Lewis died before he could finish his journals. And so I’d love to hear the stories from him. The second would be Abe Lincoln, Abe Lincoln had a different type of courage, more of a moral courage, and would love to spend some time with with Abe Lincoln. The third one to keep things maybe a little more lively would be Bill Murray. I’ve heard so many stories about what Bill Murray is like in person that I think he must be one of the funniest humans ever to live. And so I think getting Merriweather a bill together for dinner would be insightful and incredibly funny at the same time.
Vince Menzione 28:13
That’s a fascinating group. Chris, I might want to come along at least maybe for appetizer for a beverage. I don’t know, I did have the opportunity to meet Bill Murray very briefly like brushed shoulders with him at a restaurant in Charleston. And I know other people in Charleston who got to know him a little bit better than I did. But that’s a fascinating one. Meriwether Lewis. Wow, that’s one I’ve never heard before. That’s a new one for this podcast,
Chris Voss 28:37
if anybody hasn’t read or if anybody wants to read, undaunted courage, by Stephen Ambrose, if you’re into historical novels like that, or biographies, it’s an unbelievable read. I put that book down every night. For the couple of weeks. I was reading it, just amazed at the courage of that expedition. So really amazing things.
Vince Menzione 28:59
Yeah, amazing what they did, right. And then of course, Abe Lincoln, right, when an amazing leader led us through a very difficult time. And yeah, there’s just three amazing guests. I love. I love your choices, Chris.
Chris Voss 29:11
Well, thank you. And if I ever can arrange that, Vince, you’ll be invited.
Vince Menzione 29:15
So Chris, you have been an amazing guest. I feel so privileged and honored to have you here as a guest today. Do you have any closing comments or advice for our listeners?
Chris Voss 29:25
Well, the last thing I would say is we’re all part of a partnering community, a partnering industry. One of the things I got from my dad was to always hold your head high and be proud. Partnering is not often the most glamorous role in a company. Let’s face it, but there are so many important critical things that partnering professionals do every day for the success of our customers for the success of our business, that I would just say be proud of what we do. I’m proud to lead a team of amazing partner professionals every single day. A and I hope everybody else is equally proud to work in this industry and in this ecosystem.
Vince Menzione 30:06
Such an honorable profession, the world that we work in and technology and partnerships. So thank you again, Chris.
Chris Voss 30:14
Of course, it was great to be here with you, Vince,