Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Sanjay Mehta & Erin Figer of Tackle.io join Ultimate Guide to Partnering
I so enjoyed bringing two friends and experts into the studio for an insightful conversation. In this episode, we explore the world of cloud go-to-market strategies and co-selling with two of the industry’s top leaders: Erin Figer (VP of Co-Sell) and Sanjay Mehta (Chief Cloud Officer) of Tackle.io.
With extensive experience in B2B technology marketing and the hyperscalers ecosystems, Erin specializes in amplifying your reputation to boost pipeline and optimize program alignment. Her proven method has resulted in 200% pipeline growth, higher close rates, ISV Partner of the Year, and achieving Co-sell Ready status in just 60 days. Erin’s mission is to help you achieve the best results through a structured framework.
A seasoned business leader and sales strategist, Sanjay brings a wealth of experience in cloud technology. At Tackle.io, he focuses on enabling software companies to sell through the cloud marketplaces of AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, driving significant revenue growth and market expansion.
Whether you’re looking to strengthen your partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, and Google, or optimize your sales strategies, this discussion is packed with valuable insights. Get ready to learn how to maximize your co-selling efforts, boost your pipeline, and accelerate your wins with actionable strategies from industry experts.
What You’ll Learn From This Episode
0:02 – Cloud go-to-market strategies and co-selling with Microsoft and partners.
4:37 – Coselling strategies for ISVs with cloud providers and partners.
10:12 – Partnerships and ecosystems in the tech industry.
13:57 – Marketplace growth, validation, and potential for universal buying mechanism.
18:03 – Leveraging data to power sales strategies and improve customer engagement.
22:39 – Leveraging Salesforce marketplace for ISVs, with insights on data-driven approach, ecosystem power, and partner acceleration.
26:41 – Optimizing partner strategy for success.
LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP
For more insights and detailed discussions, tune in to the full episode of The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Subscribe to stay updated with the latest trends and strategies in the world of technology partnerships.
Transcript
Jay McBain 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 on finding this buyer intent you
Vince Menzione 0:13
show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant every
Sharon Schoenborn 0:18
day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning
Vince Menzione 0:23
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. 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.
Vince Menzione 0:36
Welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Manziel, your host, and I’m on a mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. We’ve been talking about these tectonic shifts we’ve been seeing in our world and in our lives, and the role and dominance of the hyperscalers. And this cloud, go to market moment. And now I have two leaders in the room from a valued partner tackle IO for discussion on this amazing transformation we’ve been seeing and how cloud go to market is evolving today. I want to welcome Erin Figer, the VP of cosell.
Erin Figer 1:10
Hi Vince, thanks for having me.
Vince Menzione 1:11
See you and Sanjay Mehta, Chief Operating Officer at tackle
Sanjay Mehta 1:15
he just promoted me. Thank you very much. I love that. I’ll take the promotion.
Vince Menzione 1:20
Office. Sorry. So great to have you. You know, we just finished a live event here yesterday. And it was so great to have you both here in Boca Raton. We covered several areas of cloud go to market marketplaces, conversations around co selling. Both of you are experts in this space. And you’ve been around this, this journey for us with us for so long. And I was hoping for a deep dive today really spending some time here on this amazing topic. We we’ve seen a third of a trillion dollars in durable cloud budgets by three hyperscalers just an amazing growth. Five ISPs reached a billion dollars total transactable last year, right just that’s a volume we might see one get to a billion dollars in one year.
Vince Menzione 2:11
John Yankee, your CEO said yesterday, Microsoft saw a 80% increase in 100 million dollar cloud commitments quarter over quarter, just this past quarter. And the role of the moment of Mark marketplaces, we had Microsoft in the room Microsoft is finally leaning in on marketplaces. So tackle was built in 2016. Like evolved in 2016, really at the forefront of marketplaces from the very beginning, even leading the charge just finished your own event last month in May. Really interested in this deep dive conversation with you around this topic. Sanjay over to you first, I think you know, we have we’ve had a rich conversation with John Yankee or CEO about marketplaces. What are you seeing now that you didn’t see before?
Sanjay Mehta 2:45
Yeah, if you roll back to like 2015 2016, when this started, getting up and listed in a marketplace was just part of your cloud provider strategy. I don’t want to go to market with AWS or Microsoft login to tile up in the marketplace. And honestly, I just we just didn’t have a lot of plans. They just wanted to get their shingle up and act cool until they’re bored. Hey, we’re a cloud company. We’re a SaaS company.
Vince Menzione 3:04
brochure. We’re
Sanjay Mehta 3:05
brochure work, right? And, like a lot of partnerships, unfortunately, back then. But now it’s a boardroom conversation around how can I make this the most sales efficient channel and particularly as the market has become a little bit tougher economically. And his cloud transaction fees have come down from all of the major cloud providers. Now CEOs and CFOs are looking at this and saying, I can make my deals go faster. I can tap into budgets that already exist. I can tap into legal agreements that already exists. Yeah. Streamline vendor onboarding. So the conversation has totally changed from
Vince Menzione 3:39
lowering the days. Quicker payments. Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s amazing to see how this has evolved. And I believe if Microsoft was on the sidelines up until this past year, right, and they’ve leaned in a big way. We had Jason rook leading the conversation with you and another one of the Microsoft leaders yesterday around the topic, and what partners need to do differently than that they haven’t done before. And CO selling plate pays an even more important role here. And Aaron, you and I have a long history working together.
Vince Menzione 4:02
I mean, we share to those who’ve been following along our journey together. You’ve been on the podcast, early guests on the podcast. We did a lot of CO selling workshops back in the day when I first came back out and ultimate partner was was reignited you lead a session on effective co selling and operationalizing. CO selling. And now that we’ve got Marketplace offers in market, that’s the next step, right, we need to get to that we need to get to the buyer. And the best way to get to the buyer is through co selling with the organizations to get there. Right. Tell us how you think about that.
Erin Figer 4:37
Yeah, it’s really great to see now that we’ve been at co selling for a while. Initially people took co sellers like, I’m going to connect a seller with a cloud cellar and it’s this like seller to seller coaster motion. So now we’re at this point where people are like know where they’re thinking bigger about cosell and really that when you just aside to co build and bring that solution to market, how are you going to cosell? In your partnership? How are you going to co sow with the people through the marketplace and with the ecosystem that you’re now a part of that you could also be co selling and supporting this solution holistically and bringing that to market. So cosell is getting people are now looking at it much bigger than just this cosell thing I do with two sellers,
Vince Menzione 5:32
your CEO, John Yankee talks about like meeting the customer where they buy. And we had Jason rook with you. And then also on the podcast recently talking about this as well that there was an influence strategy, there’s the seven seats at the table, like it’s not just an ISV and a hyper scalar together going to the customer, there are all these other influencers, there might be a channel partner is actually transacting maybe has a relationship with the customer, there might be other ISVs involved security solutions. Yeah, to your point,
Erin Figer 6:02
right. And so now you can flip it and say instead of like an ISV, thinking about one customer and CO selling with the cloud provider, they can now say, we meet the buyer, where they’re at? And how does that buyer want to buy through the marketplace, but who are the other players. And now it’s really, I’ve got to make sure I’m co selling with all of those seven people who are influencing that buyer, that I’m also co selling with them. And we’re all collectively working on driving this solution that we know is going to help our customer with their problem.
Erin Figer 6:39
And it’s going to drive the clouds metrics that they care about the channel partner that you’re working with metrics, you might have an SI Partner doing your services work for you that ultimately makes your product get used and implemented, which is what the ISP wants. Right? So cosell, you have to think about all those seven players? And when you put that opportunity, and how are you going to connect with all of those different players now that are supporting that opportunity? Or supporting that customer?
Vince Menzione 7:10
So you lead the cosell practice? Right? And you work with a lot of these leading organizations leading ISVs on this strategy? How do you do this more effectively? What do you how do you coach them on this?
Erin Figer 7:21
Well, we we launched a maturity model, which really helps because we have to figure out where you’re at in your journey, like, are you in the starting off? And like just getting started and establishing the foundation? Are you in building adoption? Are you driving adoption? Or are you scaling adoption? So once we can understand where the partner is in their maturity, then we can look at what is the solution? And how are you trying to go to market with with skilling up your people with your processes, with implementing technology to support you operationally, your partnership, so there’s many different points that we look at inside of your overall maturity. And then we come in with consultative support and best practices to say, Okay, we’re going to help you go from here to here. Now, based off of where you’re at your solution and how you’re trying to bring that to market
Vince Menzione 8:20
have you look across the ecosystem approach.
Erin Figer 8:24
So when you are looking at your solution, you’re trying to say, in there in not just your club partnerships, but what are the other partnerships that you are trying to create in your channel, in your channel strategy? And then how are you engaging with them. And yesterday, partner tap was here and one of your sponsors, and we really love partner taps technology, because it enables you as we start to cosell and we identify, say, a use case scenario or specific area that we want to start to share opportunities. Then using a tool like partner tap to say, okay, these are where I have opportunities. But where do we have continued customer alignment around this use case or around the sales region or territory or industry we’re trying to go to market in and they help fill in the that visibility to like, here’s the other accounts that you guys have in common, or could support and bring in inbounds to fill out. Your, your cosell audience, your cosell customer base around that particular solution or use case scenario?
Vince Menzione 9:37
Yeah. And Cass was on our panel from CO partner tap was on our panel yesterday for that conversation. So that’s replacing all the spreadsheets that we normally operated on before right. Starting
Erin Figer 9:47
to like you, you can actually activate a coastal strategy in your channel. Now. So like we have this coastal strategy with our cloud providers, but now using that At an partner tab, we can actually build a more holistic cosell strategy that enables us to bring in all of our partners around one opportunity love that. We’re
Sanjay Mehta 10:12
starting to drink our own champagne a bit at tackle around this. So we just launched our own ecosystem a couple of weeks ago. And the effort behind that stemmed from as an ISV matured through the model Aaron’s talking about their needs became a little bit different when all you needed was a title and a marketplace, you could do it yourself, we could do that for you is pretty simple, right? But as you start to move along, we have ISVs, that might be in one cloud, but they want to be in another cloud. So maybe they’re an Amazon, they want to go to Google. So we’ll bring in a partner like do it to help them specify that application in a different place. Maybe they need reseller services to get to market and the beginning marketplace was going to kill the channel. Now we figured out the channel is actually a huge benefit for going into markets that matter to reach out to a Presidio or WWE and in the AWS world and the Microsoft world, maybe they need go to market resources. So they’ll tap somebody like a transcends. So we’re starting to look at the journey and say, What kind of partners do we need? Because we can’t do it all to slot in the right experts at the right time to really help somebody to accelerate their revenue curve.
Vince Menzione 11:06
Yeah, you’re spot on. You mentioned a couple of things. Firstly, you can’t do it alone. We all know that right? Partnerships are important to everybody, even those of us in the technology side of partnerships. And then and then the fact that this journey is evolving, and the role of channel we thought it was going to this is gonna kill the channel. No, it’s invigorating. It’s sparking the ecosystem is sparking the channel. In fact, we’ve had we had people in the room here yesterday from some of the big channel companies that are leaning in on marketplaces and CO selling in a bigger way. And
Erin Figer 11:34
now we have to include them in that cosell conversation. So how are you going to connect with them? And get everybody collectively working around that same use case or that same customer in that code in the spirit of CO selling?
Vince Menzione 11:48
And I, you know, I like to use the term like we’re passing each other in the hallway, right? We’re all calling on that same client, but maybe we’re not showing up at the same time. Yeah. So this brings it all together. So we know oh, by the way, I’m also working on that account, but I’m trying to sell this into that account. And that’s where that’s where you’re effectively helping them get to, yeah, their whole influence strategy around that client.
Sanjay Mehta 12:09
We’re trying to be we have hundreds of customers. So we’re thankful that so we try to be the voice of the ISV. Back to the cloud. So we’ve got awesome, not just go to market relationships with the clouds, but more importantly, probably product and service relationships. So you can see in marketplaces, we’re going from single software vendors selling a single software title on a single deal to a single customer. And that’s great, but it’s not where we need to be like, ideally, a customer wants to buy a solution that has multiple things from multiple ISVs, probably wrapped with some services that potentially come from a channel and might need to buy it with credit terms.
Sanjay Mehta 12:46
Or maybe it needs to be metered. So you’re starting to see the clouds think about that phenomenon. And it might be 24 months out before it becomes a reality around marketplace. And we think cosell should do the exact same way like you need true multiparty cosell like who’s gonna register that opportunity, who’s gonna get credit who’s gonna get incentivized. So there’s really a ton of evolution that needs to happen over the next 12 to 24 months to make this, like really tuned for what a buyer wants to buy, how they want to buy and getting more prescriptive around how to package solutions versus kind of this ala carte sushi menu of like, pick whatever you want and deploy it one by one.
Vince Menzione 13:15
Yeah, you know, we had Jay McBain in the room yesterday as well talking about the channel tech stack, and you’re part of that channel tech stack. But it’s there they are on islands for a reason. Because they’re not interconnected today, right? We need to get better, that better connection point those better connection points around all these technology offerings to your point, maybe 24 months from now we’ll be where we need to be nirvana. Maybe it’ll be you’ve been working with some of the largest ISPs. I want to I want to go back on this moment. And this kind of this. Really the evolution of where we are moving from the brochure brochure where to where we are today $100 billion potential by 2026 is tackles call. Yeah. Whether it’s whether whether we get there exactly or not probably doesn’t matter. It’s just that this is a huge opportunity. What are you seeing you work with some of the biggest and the best ISVs that are out there doing this?
Sanjay Mehta 14:02
Yeah, it’s interesting, like the the first pick a number 3000 ISVs. The Marketplace were mostly infrastructure vendors. What we’re seeing now is more and more business application providers, Salesforce announced late last year, that they’re teamed up with AWS to go through the marketplace. We do a lot of work with zoominfo. So another great business application going through the marketplace. So we’re seeing that the next horizon we think is very likely vertical industry applications interesting. Little more traditional, those industries move a little slower. Sometimes they sell 10 year deals to utility companies. So just the evolution of that’s going to take a little bit of time. You hear about data marketplaces and ml marketplaces, I think we’re really going to see a proliferation of the types of things you can buy through these marketplaces, which is going to be a big change.
Sanjay Mehta 14:58
We’ve seen deal sizes go up so there a lot of myths around these things like it’s only really startups selling to small customers. Not true, right? It’s so the biggest companies, also the biggest companies in the world, and also the biggest buyers in the world and all around the planet, right marketplace is not a US phenomenon anymore. It’s a globe Well phenomenon the, the best ISVs in terms of performance are going 50% In the US, maybe 25% or so in Europe, another 25% in a and Zed and in a pack. So we’re seeing that we’re seeing bigger deals, like in the early days, it was 20,000 or transactions $40,000 transactions. Now we’re seeing 100 million our transactions. So he’s the type of business that’s going through is changing. So I think just the validation, even though it’s early, we think only about 2% of global b2b commerce went through these channels last year, we think $100 billion, might be under called in 2026, because we’ve seen massive acceleration and marketplace throughput. But the validation of this is a channel that’s here to stay and to grow, I think is really firmly validated. And now you’re seeing more and more vendors jump on.
Vince Menzione 15:42
Yeah. It’s astounding to see the growth and how quickly it’s Yeah.
Erin Figer 15:46
And I think, I think also like, yesterday, I think it was in the Transcend event session where Ashley was talking about, you have to also look at your customers. And again, going back to like, where are the customers buying? And sometimes those customers aren’t buying yet in the marketplace, like regulatory industries might have challenges. The educational institutions, nonprofits, like are they really buying in the marketplaces yet, but I think that, as we as the marketplace evolves, and addresses some of these challenges that has caused these industries to have such specific buying mechanisms, that the marketplace could become a more universal buying mechanism to then bring, like, if we want to get to the all of that b2b software sales to the marketplace, we’ve got to unlock these other traditional buying mechanisms, contracts and well. That’s impossible and, and universal in the marketplace. I think that’s really the opportunity is when we can evolve our marketplace to be able to do that for us and take care of that. Then the rest of this, this customer base will start to come there. And we’ll start to see more of b2b sales go through the marketplace.
Vince Menzione 17:07
We’re thrilled to announce our partnership within partner software, the world’s leading provider of partner management technologies, serving over 4 million partners globally, in partner excels in delivering cutting edge solutions for partner relationship management, and partner marketing automation. Their robust platform offers essential tools like program compliance tracking, customizable partner journeys, and comprehensive business planning. These features Empower partner teams to swiftly transition from program design to achieving maximum value in partner is dedicated to supporting partner ecosystems everywhere and continues to innovate with new modules like analytic studio designed to help track and maximize the ROI of your partner program for more information visit in partner.com.
Vince Menzione 17:59
So at your event, last month, you talked about the data and the underlying data that you’ve been aggregating. Now, I want to dive in here a little bit on that point, because between the CO selling platform, Aaron’s company that was acquired core was acquired by tackle almost two years now 18 months ago. Wow, that went by fast. And tack ball tackles work over the last 898 years. Tell us about the insights that are coming out of this coming from that data.
Sanjay Mehta 18:31
Yeah, so we announced in December that from the founding of the company until December last year, we saw $5 billion go through our platform. And the vast majority of that was really in the last two or three years. From December last year to today we’ve seen almost another $5 billion. So crazy, the rate of growth is really astronomical just
Erin Figer 18:49
six months. And just as
Sanjay Mehta 18:52
we take that data as well as third party data, we source demographic data infographic, data, technographic data, and we compile that together, use some ml on top of it to indicate where a customer is most likely to buy. The most likely they’re buying Amazon or Google or Microsoft, is it high as a medium is low? The reality is most big enterprise companies bind multiple places because they, they might do that just to diversify their suppliers. They might do that because they grew through acquisition. But for a bunch of
Vince Menzione 19:19
reasons. The biggest part is my collaboration platforms absolutely lying. And our stitching solution runs better here than there. That’s right.
Sanjay Mehta 19:27
So we’re seeing a lot of that, but we take that data to start to help our customers get a little more educated on where they’re most likely to succeed. And it’s hugely important as you enable your Salesforce right? If you just go to a Salesforce and say, there’s this new way to sell, it’s called Cloud or go to market. And you’re talking to a sales team that’s done the same thing for 20 years and beat their number. They’re not that likely to change unless you give him a good reason. So we’re trying to use data to really power the story. And then our customers and our customers do they push the hell out of our customers like what else can you do with the data so today, it’s almost a little bit more reactive.
Sanjay Mehta 20:02
Like I’ve built my pipeline. I want to analyze my pipeline and make some decisions in the red zone, if you will, for NFL analogy, like I’m inside the 20. Now how do I navigate to the endzone and the best way, we want to actually figure out, like, on the other end of the field where they got the ball in their own two yard line? Like how do you start to look at your ICP at your ideal customer profile? Use tackle data and say, Where should I actually? Like, how should I execute my place? Right? I love it. Where’s my pipeline? So we think that the data store is one that’s hugely powerful today, and we’re seeing awesome use cases, we think it’s going to evolve a lot. For the sales persona. We saw the marketing persona jump in. So we have all this great data, we saw marketers say
Sanjay Mehta 20:40
Oh, I have six sense data, that showing me some buyer behavior on my website, and the intent and what they plan on doing. And we can say, You know what, we can pair that up with cloud data. So now when you do an Account Based Marketing Campaign, to that buyer, you can actually speak the language of the cloud that they’re in. We saw Reb ops leaders team up with sales leaders to say when I do territory design, I can now look at the density of my buyers by cloud, and start to think like, do I go Northwest southwest, or I say like, this is my Google region, this is my Amazon region. This is, you know, my particular use case region. So our customers are trying to do really amazing things with the data, it’s going to, it’s going to push us really hard to continue to drive that innovation edge. But how
Vince Menzione 21:15
are they consuming the data? I mean, I know you do a lot of work with individually with clients on the CO selling methodology, the operationalizing. How are other clients that taking advantage of the data?
Sanjay Mehta 21:25
Yeah, what we started our journey with the alliances persona, because they own the cloud relationship. But what we found is as revenue goes from like, zero to 2%, to 5%, so around 5%, and certainly by 10%, the CRL in the CFR like, what is that thing? And it’s arguable that will be your single biggest channel on the planet that operates consistently, right? You no longer need all these distributors, and all these channels and operate in different ways. Like, it’s one way to do business, which is hugely powerful. So during that transition that was here, I was like, I don’t need my people logging into tackle, right. And I don’t want to just continue to expand my deal desk.
Sanjay Mehta 22:01
Like directly for every additional deal, or 10 deals I do I need to add another one hour of, of human capital. So they said, Can you pump this stuff into my CRM system. And for the vast majority of our customers that Salesforce sometimes it’s dynamics or HubSpot, or something, but the vast majority of the ISV business runs in Salesforce. So we’re now taking all of this data, and we’re pumping it in an account level. So in the tool the seller is living in, they can say this is the profile of my buyer. So you’re integrating into Salesforce directly to Salesforce, and then you can initiate your coastal activity and initiate your private rock private offer activity, all within Salesforce. So you don’t need to leave the digital tech stack that you already know love
Vince Menzione 22:33
propensity to buy, you can look at under underspend commitments, all of those user
Erin Figer 22:39
scenarios you just walked through, like your marketing team can now engage in this content and start to pull it into their campaigns as they start to build out the audiences that they want to reach for their campaigns using Salesforce, they’ll have that as a data point to help them. The great thing too about the data, and how you can engage with it is it if you think about our maturity model, in every phase of that maturity model, you can be engaging in our data to help you it just shows up a little differently in like establishing the foundation, it’s giving you that compass, like how do I get started, which customers and where and, and it gives you more of a validation of like these customers with this cloud provider around this solution. And as you move into establishing the foundation, it becomes a tool to really support all of the enablement effort you’re doing. I’m trying to get your sellers educated on this solution and how we’re trying to co sell and go to market with our cloud partnership. So that data now supports my enablement effort. It really helps the seller enablement get sticky and get engagement out of my sellers. So that when I go to driving adoption, and scaling adoption, I now start to just use this data in building my automation to say when things look like this, and has this data set there, and the data looks like this, automatically do these things.
Vince Menzione 24:03
Nice. That’s fantastic. What a fantastic value you’re providing. Yeah.
Erin Figer 24:06
And that’s data driven. Yeah. Right.
Vince Menzione 24:09
So we covered a lot of ground yesterday at our event. And I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.
Erin Figer 24:17
It was a busy day. It was
Vince Menzione 24:18
a busy day. Maybe it’s just some highlights from each of you on your sessions. Maybe just a couple of points for those who are weren’t maybe didn’t watch the whole seven and a half hours and are just listening to the podcast driving their cars today to wheeling around or watching us on YouTube. And I find that people like want to why they want that they want the salient points quick, right, the Tick Tock moment. Sanjay over to you like what was the essence of your session? What would you what would you ask our partners to go learn and go do differently?
Sanjay Mehta 24:46
I’d say jump on board. Like the road is now paved, which is nice. It’s not Oban people had a drive on it and a lot of people were leaning in the community to help lift everybody else up. So if you’re not in it’s not too late. Like they’re really is 98% of the market still ahead of us? The power of the ecosystem, hugely important, a data driven approach, hugely important. You don’t have to leave your channel behind. In fact, embrace it, bring him along for the ride. Absolutely. So those are probably the top three or four things that we touched on.
Vince Menzione 25:16
And like you said, it’s a massive opportunity, because it’s really only what the top two 5% of ISVs that are really consuming at scale. Yeah,
Sanjay Mehta 25:23
maybe 10% of the ISVs are driving 80% of the business pretty typical stuff, right. And if you think about the overall b2b software market until the really big players show up, and gravity is hard, right, like you said it earlier, like Mac was the year of the marketplace for Microsoft. They’ve got the most sellers, tons of ISPs a global channel, but 90,000 strong or something. But all that gravity also makes the barge a little slower to turn, but when it turns, it’s gonna be really, really powerful. It’s a big battleship and a narrow river. Yeah, absolutely. So I think you’re gonna see as those as those things open up for more ISVs. And as the big ISVs join, you’ll see that acceleration from 2% of b2b to 10 to 20, pretty fast so and your customers more and more are going to drag you that way. So you can either get out ahead of it, and be strategic, and make it part of your rhythm. Or you can respond when your customer is late. And we see it all the time. Like an ISV selling to a buyer, the buyer is like I need to buy through that through the marketplace, then we get the call to say can we be listed in three days? Because, you know, June 27, and my quarter is almost over. So we help as much as we can. It’d be nicer to help with a little bit more time.
Vince Menzione 26:28
Yeah. Well, that’s always the Yeah, hurry up. How about on the cosell side? You had an incredible panel yesterday. I mean, like, Wow, what a lot of power in the room if you haven’t, if you want if you haven’t watched that session on our on our YouTube channel.
Erin Figer 26:41
Yeah. Operationalizing cosell, I mean, the session was spent a lot around partner center and kind of demystifying partner center. But if you if you take that topic operationalizing cosell to really operationalize QSL, effectively, you have to take a step back and say, what is what is my product? How does that impact consumption or utilization of the cloud provider? How do I engage my channel? And how does it help drive the things that my channel partners care about? to then say, Okay, now, how do I align this partnership to my overall company strategy. And then once you understand the strategy part of that, then you can say, Okay, here’s how we’re going to go operationalize that. But just to go in and operationalize and say I’m going to connect, I’m going to build this API, or I’m gonna connect this widget, and I’m going to start passing all this data, it just creates a lot of noise with not a lot of value and outcomes from that, or it takes you a lot longer to get to that value and outcome.
Erin Figer 27:39
If you go slow to go fast, and take a minute to say, Okay, what’s our strategy? How does this solution really drive the thing? The metrics that matter for all the players involved in how do I start to cosell with them, then operationalizing, your cosell strategy will happen quicker. And the data that you’re using will be more meaningful, and you’ll get those outcomes and you’ll reach that revenue faster.
Vince Menzione 28:18
I was thinking about the flywheel. Yeah, right? Totally. It’s all about the flywheel start out small, meaningful, go slow to go fast, go slow to go fast. And then that flywheel goes faster and faster. Before
Sanjay Mehta 28:29
cannon balls. That’s my favorite Jim Collins.
Vince Menzione 28:33
Well, I can’t believe we’re at the halfway point of this calendar year. Right. Microsoft’s 2024. I flail. Like I was just wishing you a happy new year, the other day, it seemed like on text, any last words of guidance for all of those watching, listening today on how to optimize for their success moving forward for the second half of the calendar year, first half of Microsoft, Cisco, and we care about the other two as well. But what would you say to them now?
Erin Figer 28:58
I think in our theme yesterday, we talked about how do you get ready, be ready? And then how do you stay ready, and it’s that like, stay ready, stay ready. It’s not a one and done this entire go to market strategy is not like I’m going to create this go to market strategy. It’s beautiful. And then I’m going to put it on a shelf and never touch it. Again, it is always evolving. And you have to be ready and be ready to constantly evolve and change and stay current and adapt right with where the market is going with how buyers are buying and who is surrounding your customer and how you’re reaching them and CO selling with them to support the overall solution that’s going to solve that customers
Vince Menzione 29:47
combined to me once you know once you build the plan, you have to apply maniacal focus to it you do maniacal focus and then you pivot. You pivot because things are gonna continue to change. Right.
Erin Figer 29:58
Always maniacal focus always on There’s always now called Focus. You’re constantly pivoting and just keep learning growth mindset. keep learning, keep testing out possible theories. And just keep evolving.
Vince Menzione 30:11
I love it. I love it. Yeah. So good.
Sanjay Mehta 30:14
Yeah. So I’d say when, before coming to tackle, I was in a cybersecurity company and actually hired Aaron’s company to help me figure out cosell. And one of the things I liked was this concept they introduced called vocalizing your wins, which was all about advertising your six event success back in your own organization, your partner, your partner organization, I changed that this year events inside of the company, and I call it be a Kardashian be a Kardashian, I encourage all ISVs to be a Kardashian. And behind that it is all about ruthless self promotion. The market is crowded, right, and it’s noisy, and it’s hard. And it’s tough. And it’s a terrible time to be in software in the history of software, I still think it’s an awesome time to be in software, it’s an awesome time in tech.
Sanjay Mehta 30:52
And so you gotta get your word out there. And you have to do it often. And you need to use it to retain wide and your relationships so people know what you’re doing and what you’re driving. And people automatically think, like, only about a customer success story. But the other thing to think about is how did that help the cloud provider? What did they not have to do? Because you did it better or faster? Or to compliment them? So I’m telling everybody be a Kardashian, it might be my new year’s resolution in 2025. If this goes well, those are my words. Add to that
Erin Figer 31:19
for a minute. I mean, you can’t top a Kardashian. Yeah, but I think it’s it’s twofold, right. So we spent a lot of time yesterday talking about how to show up correctly in the tools, your you need to make sure that you are showing up correctly in the systems that your partners are in and your cloud providers are using. So there’s the data side of it and making sure you show up correctly and those tools, plus the Kardashian philosophy that you have of like making sure you vocalize your wins and vocalize your success, because that’s then going to drive them to go look inside their tools. If you’re doing the tooling correctly, and you’re showing up correctly in their systems, the two of those things is really what will boost your brand and make you rise above all the other partners in the ecosystem that are fighting for that attention. And you
Vince Menzione 32:11
might need some help along the way. We had Ashley Vox that lead that session on pet with the pinnacle partners, some three very strong award winning partners. And she talked about that too. Like you need to build an awesome story that you have to deliver around why you’re better and different. And why you deserve the success. And in her case, the award winning partnership, yeah.
Erin Figer 32:29
And then make sure you’re showing up in the system. And then make sure that you take that awesome story. And you continue to show like how that awesome story came to life in these customers, your success that you’re having. So we had this differentiator and powerful story we showed up correctly and the tools and now we’re vocalizing all those wins to validate that this thing was really awesome.
Sanjay Mehta 32:49
Just brought it together. You’re gonna you’re gonna say get on the scoreboard right get on their cloud provider scoreboard. I’m gonna get you to dance on the Jumbotron.
Erin Figer 32:58
Oh yes
Vince Menzione 33:01
this has been so much fun. So great to see you both. So great to see you my friend. Great to see you, buddy. So much. Great to have you on Ultimate Guide to partnering. Yeah, it’d be bad for your sponsorship for your friendship. And just so great to have you both here. Thanks so much. Thank you got some slick you. Thank you for following along. And I’m gonna get some sleep tonight because it’s been a long couple of days here in Boca Raton. Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering.
Vince Menzione 33:24
I’m Vince Manziel. And thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us. And if you haven’t subscribed, please hit the subscribe button on either Apple, Spotify or our new YouTube channel. Thank you so much for joining the ultimate guide to partner. Thanks for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partnering. Hopefully, this episode and all the episodes we’ve recorded are helping you better align your partner strategy to achieve your greatest results. So I want to ask you something. Have you implemented everything you’ve been learning? And are you now achieving the growth and revenue objectives that you hope to achieve? If not, it’s time to take action now. Join ultimate partner experience. We’re building the community I’ve always dreamed about. With up x you get access to exclusive Industry Insights, unparalleled networking opportunities, tons of educational resources and support from a community that shares your goals. Join us now visit our website, the ultimate partner.com and sign up today.