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In this critical conversation, Vince Menzione sits down with Shannon Sigmon, Marc Harpster, and Jeff Mesnik to uncover how the rapid pace of change in the Google Cloud Marketplace and AI agent integration is forcing organizations to completely rethink their go-to-market strategies. They break down why traditional three-year business plans are dead, replacing them with agile 100-day sprints to keep up with the shifting ecosystem. The panel reveals that leveraging your Adaptability Quotient (AQ) and turning data patterns into actionable co-sell motions are the only ways to survive the upcoming “agent age” and maintain a competitive edge.
Key Takeaways
- Consistent messaging is required to gather actionable data and build trust with channel partners.
- Three-to-five-year business plans are obsolete, and leaders must now operate in 100-day sprints to keep pace with hyperscaler changes.
- Google Cloud Marketplace uniquely supports channel partners by allowing them to own the customer relationship and recognize top-line revenue.
- The rise of AI agents is shifting discovery away from traditional SEO, requiring ISVs to adapt how they provide access to their tools.
- Creating interactive content variations from a single asset helps train AI agents to discover and prioritize your solutions.
- Despite rapid digital transformation, human connection remains the ultimate deciding factor in enterprise software purchases.
If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community.
At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.
Key Tags
Adaptability Quotient, Google Cloud Marketplace, agentic age, co-sell motion, digital sales hub, private offers, propensity to buy, AI pattern analysis, hyperscaler CRM, interactive trivia content, product-led discovery.
Transcript
Shannon – Marc – Jeff AUDIO Podcast
[00:00:00] Vince Menzione: That becomes the core of your data analysis because if you’re not submitting consistent content and submit, you know, consistent information, then you’re not gonna get information back.
[00:00:13] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us. The way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026.
[00:00:25] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner
[00:00:26] Vince Menzione: Podcast. I’m Vince Menzione your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the
[00:00:46] Vince Menzione: strategy.
[00:00:47] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start.
[00:00:57] ——-: We have another incredible group of leaders coming up here and, uh, and friends of ultimate partner and, uh, Susan, do you need me for, okay, good. Come on up. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna invite you up and then have you each. Introduce yourself, uh, to this conversation. Shannon, it has been a great to see you. Yeah, great friend.
[00:01:18] ——-: Been in, it was in Boca. Mark. Great to have you. Good to see you, sir. Jeff, great to have you. Uh, this is incredible. I’m, I’m excited for this conversation. So, uh, yeah, we talked about aq. We talked a little bit about AQ in this last session. Don’t, didn’t we? Yeah.
[00:01:34] Shannon Sigmon: A little.
[00:01:34] Vince Menzione: Why don’t we go, why don’t we have you, I wanna have you each introduce yourself, your role, your company mission, and, and, and everything here.
[00:01:40] Vince Menzione: So why don’t we start with Shannon.
[00:01:41] Shannon Sigmon: Um, hey, thank you Vince for having us again, um, here in Bellevue. It’s been great to meet with everybody and see some old friends. Uh, I’m at Software One, so Shannon Sigman, um, based on the East Coast, but I work at Software One I’m responsible for. Um, in my sales role, I’m responsible for our channel and digital sales organization in North America.
[00:02:00] Shannon Sigmon: And then I also have, um, responsibility supporting Regina Ma and Freddie and our leadership team as the chief of staff. Um, and we’re focused software one, if you haven’t worked with us before, we’re focused on helping, um, helping our customers and partners deliver real financial impact in their business so they can afford some of the, the cool to do some of the cool stuff you were talking about in the earlier session.
[00:02:20] Shannon Sigmon: And it’s, for us, it’s really about coming in on the front end and helping, um, our customers and our partners understand what they’re doing in their software stack, their cloud stack, and then how to, um, optimize that, rationalize the strategy and, and the implementation of of solutions.
[00:02:36] Vince Menzione: And a global leader in the marketplace in
[00:02:38] Shannon Sigmon: That’s right.
[00:02:39] Shannon Sigmon: The, the number one Microsofts, um, we
[00:02:41] Vince Menzione: used to say re reseller or ls. We used to all these different,
[00:02:44] Shannon Sigmon: yeah. We, um, it’s funny, I was speaking last night. We fall into the scale solution provider. We’re d with Google and AWS. But, um, we operate very differently on the, on the North America market as a more of a boutique, uh, personalized experience than what a traditional dity is.
[00:02:59] Shannon Sigmon: I’m less about the transaction and more about the impact and the, the outcomes and, and helping partners with their go-to-market strategy.
[00:03:07] ——-: Awesome. Yeah. And sitting next to you, Marc I’ll let you introduce yourself ’cause this kind of ties in very nicely in
[00:03:13] Marc Harpster: Yeah.
[00:03:13] ——-: In terms of the work you do.
[00:03:14] Marc Harpster: Uh, thanks Vince.
[00:03:15] Marc Harpster: Uh, hi everyone. I’m Mark Harpster. I am part of the Google Cloud Marketplace organization. So, uh, guy who you just heard from on the last panel is my boss. Uh, I run strategic initiatives within the marketplace team. So this includes our channel program. Uh, so everyone who is. Uh, the partners who like to resell, uh, ISV software out our marketplace.
[00:03:38] Marc Harpster: Uh, I have a team who works with, uh, all of you, and that includes distribution. Uh, and uh, then I also, we run, um, the, some of our, like the go to market strategic initiatives. So we have a. Uh, customer credit program that ISVs can take advantage of to help incentivize deals going through marketplace, uh, propensity to buy, uh, data that we can share.
[00:04:02] Marc Harpster: Mm-hmm. Uh, a number of different programs along those lines. Uh, basically, uh, we’re we’re helping. You know, customers find the solutions that they want to buy and helping them buy from the who they wanna buy from.
[00:04:14] ——-: Yeah. And you were out early. I mean, you’ve been in the, the, I I feel like Google was leaned in very early on the channel.
[00:04:20] Marc Harpster: Yeah.
[00:04:20] ——-: And it was a couple years now, right?
[00:04:22] Marc Harpster: Yeah. I joined Google about two and a half years ago. Uh, I was, you know, at, at another, worked for another cloud marketplace before that. So I’ve, I’ve been in the marketplace space for, uh, over a decade now. Uh, I’m really passionate about it. And with the, to touch on your point, Vince, I think the one key advantage of Google is, you know, within the, our channel partners, uh, we have a huge, uh, partner network, uh, of, of, you know, channel resellers and, uh, system integrators.
[00:04:52] Marc Harpster: Uh, and we actively want those channel partners to, you know, own the customer relationship, including all of the billing. Uh, channel partners tend to love this because we’re the only cloud marketplace that really supports sort of the ability to recognize top line revenue for the channel partners. Uh, and so that’s been a real, uh, you know, distinguishing factor.
[00:05:11] Marc Harpster: And one thing I’m really excited about within our marketplace.
[00:05:14] Vince Menzione: You got it right. Awesome, Jeff. Good to see you, sir.
[00:05:17] Vince Menzione: Good to see you. Thank you. Thank you for having
[00:05:19] Jeff Mesnik: me. Good to have you.
[00:05:20] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:05:21] Vince Menzione: Tell us a little bit about your organization, about content amx.
[00:05:24] Jeff Mesnik: Well, I’m honored to be here with, uh, these two. Yeah.
[00:05:27] Jeff Mesnik: You know, and, and Vince obviously
[00:05:29] Vince Menzione: Thank you.
[00:05:29] Jeff Mesnik: But you know, our organization is really about coming back, and I’m not trying to plug tackle by you saying this, but we’re doing the blocking and tackling for organizations another.
[00:05:40] Vince Menzione: That’s why I named the tackle.
[00:05:41] Jeff Mesnik: Yeah, I know. It’s, it’s, it’s part of my every conversation now and I have to think about it, but we basically believe in the idea that trust is starting by consistency and expectation.
[00:05:55] Jeff Mesnik: So a few years ago I was listening to, um, an event where Tim Couch and, um, Michelle Ragusa, McBain were talking and they said, partners respond to. You meeting and greet, you know, exceeding expectations. So one of those expectations should be consistent messaging to them and consistent messaging for them to send out to their customers.
[00:06:15] Jeff Mesnik: And then the next step is that becomes the core of your data analysis, because if you’re not submitting consistent content and submit, you know, consistent information, then you’re not gonna get information back. So that information back then turns into sales opportunities because you’re not looking at.
[00:06:34] Jeff Mesnik: Clicks or having a marketing person say, Hey, you know, this person just stopped by my booth. Or Hey, they downloaded a white paper. It’s patterns using AI to analyze and address and look at patterns and turn those patterns into actions. So, you know, we’ve been talking Shannon and Mark and I about those patterns and how to.
[00:06:55] Jeff Mesnik: Respond to them to maybe do a co-sell motion if that’s what’s necessary, or to make sure that the partner is ready for the next step. We’re doing a program for Microsoft. Whoops. So we’re doing a program for Microsoft. Do I still have it?
[00:07:11] Marc Harpster: Yeah, you’re
[00:07:11] Marc Harpster: good. Um, that en enables the partners to learn about AI and then we can understand where they are in their AI path.
[00:07:22] Vince Menzione: Awesome. So Shannon, uh, Regina, man. Freddy. Yeah. Also a great friend of, ultimate Partner. Been on stage, was on stage here a couple years ago. We talked about adaptability quotient. Uh, we, we took that, we took that back. Now we use it all the time. And I, you know, I want, I wanna cover with you what that means to your organization.
[00:07:40] Vince Menzione: A lot has changed.
[00:07:41] Shannon Sigmon: Yes. Still. Yeah.
[00:07:42] Vince Menzione: Still changed. Yeah. And you work with multiple hyperscalers, so take us through like, how, how, how does. What is now Software One used to be crayon, now it’s software one Crayon, or it’s just software one. Now let’s talk about all the change and how you’re absorbing it, and then how are you taking it to market and being successful.
[00:08:00] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah, it’s interesting. We spent time, gosh, two, three years ago now, um, talking about adaptability being the next superpower
[00:08:07] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:08:07] Shannon Sigmon: Uh, of workforce, right? That it wasn’t just about having the experience, but with the rate at which. The pace at which change was happening, having, uh, uh, employees foundationally focused on curiosity and learning and con constant development.
[00:08:23] Shannon Sigmon: Um, and my goodness, uh, this year alone, right? We we’re. We, it’s hard to keep up. Right? So this idea of creating a full three to five year plan, we’re, we’re creating sprints plans. Yes. Right. And sprint strategies. And so I do think when we look at our integration of the two companies as Crayon and Software one come together globally, um, that has been a critical mass.
[00:08:47] Shannon Sigmon: Uh, issue for us to overcome, but also to get our employee base one feeling comfortable with the pace of change because it can, for those people who are, are not change agents, it can be really uncomfortable and, and stress inducing. Um, but also giving them space to, to try things, fail fast and learn from it.
[00:09:07] Shannon Sigmon: And. Um, it, it, it infuses that adaptability quotient, infuses entrepreneurial spirit within the organization a bit. Um, but it has become, it is the superpower of the next generation is how, how quickly can you adapt to change, but not just adapt to it as it’s coming, but stay ahead of it, um, and stay ahead of what’s happening in the industry through communities like this so that you’re skating towards the puck, not waiting for the puck to hit you in between the eyeballs.
[00:09:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah. How long are these sprint. I can’t even imagine doing a three-year plan any, any longer. Right.
[00:09:39] Shannon Sigmon: I mean, we, there’s some intentionality behind it for us. So my, um, partner in crime, Sean, uh, er, who leads our rev ops, uh, function in North America, we, we sprint pretty fast. So we do leadership offsite every three months.
[00:09:52] Shannon Sigmon: Um, and it’s not like it does, we don’t sit in a meeting conference room like this quite often. There’s. We’re running an Airbnb and we’re living and breathing and talking and tumbling rocks together in a real productive way. Um, and it forces our leadership team to not just work at an operational level, but like really down in the trenches at a personal level together to solve problems for our people.
[00:10:15] Shannon Sigmon: For our culture, for our business future. And I think that has helped us stay ahead of what’s coming at us from both the hyperscaler community, from the economy, uh, and global, some of the global trends that we’re seeing. It helps us stay ahead of that. And I mean, as leaders, we can, we can conflict and, and, uh, debate in a closed, safe space to get to work through some of that.
[00:10:38] Vince Menzione: Mark, what are you seeing? I mean, we were just talking to D about all the significant advances Yeah. In your organization and you work with all these amazing top resellers in the industry. Mm-hmm. Uh, Tony Voya is an old friend of mine’s. Been on the podcast a hundred times. Yeah. Ran another organization’s one of
[00:10:54] Marc Harpster: Yeah.
[00:10:54] Vince Menzione: Also one of the large, yeah.
[00:10:57] Marc Harpster: Yeah. Tony’s great. Um, it’s interesting you mentioned working in sprints. We, we ourselves are even adapting into sort of the notion of like. What are you doing in the next a hundred days?
[00:11:07] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:07] Marc Harpster: Right? You can’t, that six months, a year is too long. It’s too long. So, you know, that’s just internally, uh, within Google Cloud.
[00:11:14] Marc Harpster: But, uh, our, you know, I see this across, if, if we go back a decade ago, uh, you know, ISVs had to learn how to change to, to just to, to list a PayGo product in a marketplace.
[00:11:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:28] Marc Harpster: Right. A whole new business model. Uh, and then, then we. Introduced the notion of like, Hey, it doesn’t have to just be pay, right?
[00:11:36] Marc Harpster: It’s, yeah. Now we’re going to introduce the concept of a private offer, right? And how does that work? Right? And so you heard a lot of, uh, insights in the last panel about some of the changes you need to make to your sales organization and how do you adapt to that, right? And then there’s the change of like, well, what about the channel partners?
[00:11:52] Marc Harpster: Right? Yeah. So every channel partner. Uh, in that I’ve been working with for the last eight, nine years, make the pivot to like, oh, we still have a place here. We have all these customer relationships and connections and hey, we can sell these things too. Right? But they have to figure out how the channel private offers feature works, right?
[00:12:10] Marc Harpster: Um, distribution. Right. Then suddenly we’re, we’re, we’re bringing distributors back into the cloud marketplace world, you know, and they’re actually pushing us for like brand new things, like, Hey, we wanna, we want more APIs, right? And so I, I’ve seen. The entire community of partners. Be, be able to adapt to meet the customer where they are.
[00:12:30] Marc Harpster: Right. And, and take advantage of the customer benefits of buying through marketplaces. And so now we’ve got another, another moment of great change, right? As we head kind of into the agent age. And every one of us is gonna have to, to be adaptable again. Yeah. And I think the notion of like. Whatcha gonna do in the next a hundred days?
[00:12:47] Marc Harpster: Or like, what, what, what is the first thing that we, what are our priorities? How do we focus on, this is going to be key, right? ISVs need to, to understand, hey, how do, how do agents change the way we, uh, allow customers to access our tools and our software? Right? Uh, the channel needs to then understand like, well, what are we reselling agents?
[00:13:07] Marc Harpster: Are we creating our own agents? Yes. Like, how does this change us? Right? And so it’s across the board, uh, and it’s gonna be a really. Fun, you know, rest next few months.
[00:13:16] Vince Menzione: What are you seeing with regards to that? I was thinking about that as well. Like does the ISV create the agent or does the, the, the, the channel partner, the reseller, the Gs, I mean the GSIs
[00:13:25] Marc Harpster: are involved here as well.
[00:13:26] Marc Harpster: Certainly are, are, are, you know, I think DI mentioned this in the last panel. They, they’re, they’re creating agents, uh, you know, all over the place right now. But a lot of ISVs are as well. They recognize that they need to adapt. Right. And so I think we’re getting. Um, we’re getting really good participation, uh, from.
[00:13:46] Marc Harpster: All sorts of partners and even, you know, the, the kind of traditional, uh, like what I call a reseller, they’re starting to figure it out as well. Right? Like, do I need to list my own agent? How do I do that? Right. And they’re coming to us seeking some guidance right now. Yeah. Are
[00:14:01] Vince Menzione: you?
[00:14:01] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah, I mean, I think we look at ourselves as customers.
[00:14:03] Shannon Sigmon: You already heard that yesterday. Yeah. A lot on, from some of the Microsoft community. Um, we we’re starting to see pockets and um, we’re, we’re actually running our own company-wide hackathon in June. Um, specifically to intersect with copilot, Gemini, Claude, how do we get our teams on the ground level? Um, I loved what was said earlier, but it’s gotta be a, a bottoms up, tops down approach.
[00:14:28] Shannon Sigmon: And the good thing for us is we have leadership support at the top down on, on the tinkering, on the learning, on the implementation. And now we’re working to build the skillset from the bottom up so that we can take some of those use cases to our customers and our partners and, and start to learn and adopt along the way.
[00:14:45] Vince Menzione: So Jeff, you’ve been working with channel partners on the marketing side for many years on their go to market strategies. What are you seeing on your side of this aq? Or how are, how is AQ being absorbed and how are you thinking about this new world that we’re living in today?
[00:14:58] Jeff Mesnik: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we work with 10,000 different types of channel partners and whether it’s through education or passing through and driving demand for them, and what we’re finding is there’s a little bit sometimes also a whiplash.
[00:15:12] Jeff Mesnik: I mean, it’s like first it’s like, okay, we gotta go to the marketplace. Now we have ai, and now, oh wait, there’s these ISVs that can add value on top, and how do I do it together? So. Well, we’re, when we’re talking to these partners, we are trying to learn from the customers also who are bringing, because they’re adjusting their, you know, notions like, right?
[00:15:34] Jeff Mesnik: You know, Shannon, you’re doing it every three months,
[00:15:36] Shannon Sigmon: right?
[00:15:36] Jeff Mesnik: So these poor partners, right? They’re trying to communicate and engage and work with the customer, and then all of a sudden it changes on a dime. So you need to have that instantaneous access to the. Information about what a customer is researching, what they’re doing, what they’re most interested in, and that’s really the important part to help with the, you know, adaptability quotient for these partners.
[00:16:00] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:16:00] Jeff Mesnik: And for them to learn, they have to be pushed into it through a customer. Not just pushed into it from the vendor’s perspective. Also on the distributors are saying, Hey, let’s you know, go to my marketplace. Don’t go to Google’s marketplace. We are, we are Google’s marketplace. And it’s very, it can be very confusing.
[00:16:18] Jeff Mesnik: So using AI you can understand what the customer’s needs are. You can enrich it by pulling in data from the different sources of information, whether it’s a CRM system or third party piece, and then use AI to actually define the next step that each partner can take so that they’re adapting faster and their sales team understands what to do next, and then go through some micro learnings or whatever it might be.
[00:16:44] Jeff Mesnik: Mm-hmm. I love that.
[00:16:45] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah. Yeah, and I was gonna say, Jeff and I are actually working together on a pilot. One of the things, and Vince, we talked about it, um, our teams internally are so consumed with the integration.
[00:16:56] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:16:56] Shannon Sigmon: I was scared. There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes. We pulled the plug really early on, at least getting our frontline sales force integrated last year.
[00:17:04] Shannon Sigmon: So, at least to the market and to our customer and partner community, we were one company, but there’s a lot of system integration that’s still to come. And so, um, we, we’ve been partnered with Jeff and, and the content MX team because, um, a part of our cycles of getting our message out to market to our partners and helping them with their customer messaging is just the nurturing, the insights and leading the customer, leading the sellers through that sales Next.
[00:17:27] Shannon Sigmon: Best step conversation. And so we’re, um, we’ll leverage some of the, the tools and the resources that that Jeff’s team is bringing to bear for us, because our marketing team has got integration work to go do. We’ve got rebranding and new websites to build and new processes to implement. And so for us that adaptability means realizing we can’t do it all ourselves.
[00:17:48] Shannon Sigmon: And so we leveraged this community to connect with partners in the ecosystem who can help us. With our own solutioning of, of how we go to market and making sure we’re not missing the beat in those a hundred day sprints.
[00:18:00] Vince Menzione: And you’re truly global. That’s right. As an organization. Right. So Switzerland is now the new headquarters that is right.
[00:18:05] Vince Menzione: Nor was it Norway before and
[00:18:06] Shannon Sigmon: yeah.
[00:18:07] Vince Menzione: And then of course you’ve got the Americas
[00:18:09] Vince Menzione: and
[00:18:09] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah, we have our headquarter office here in Milwaukee and they’ve got a digital sales hub in Nashville, Tennessee.
[00:18:13] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So. Bringing all those resources and then having all these people that have to adapt to change and then drive and go to market.
[00:18:20] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah.
[00:18:20] Vince Menzione: On top of that,
[00:18:21] Shannon Sigmon: look, it just allows us to focus on what matters most, which is our customers, our partners, and our people. Um, and so leveraging our partner community, leveraging this network of folks that you’ve built helps us. We’ll continue to focus our team on the things that matter most for driving the business our results.
[00:18:38] Shannon Sigmon: Um, we just announced earlier this week we had a bang up, um, Q1 and looking forward to that momentum carrying through the rest of the year. And, and it’s because of the partnerships and, and helping us to, to manage that adapt adaption of our business, um, going forward.
[00:18:54] Vince Menzione: Mark, anything else from your side?
[00:18:56] Marc Harpster: Uh, I just, I, I think, you know, platforms like yours are, are super exciting to me, and there’s a number of them that we’ve heard from over the last couple days.
[00:19:06] Marc Harpster: You, you help all of us, every partner in the room, including the hyperscalers, you know, meet the customer where they are. And I think that’s increasingly important because as complicated as it’s for all of us to figure this out, it still has to be the customers at the center of it all. Right? And so we need to meet ’em where they are.
[00:19:22] Vince Menzione: So what does real AI credibility look like for those partners?
[00:19:27] Marc Harpster: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. Um, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, I’m fortunate to, to get to be at Google right now and we have, uh, uh, you know, we’re obviously working on a lot of things. Um, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about agents and, and, uh, you know.
[00:19:45] Marc Harpster: What does it mean to, to listen agent and what’s that gonna do for the customer? Um, you know, I think it, it’s, it’s gonna have a big impact on how we co-sell. Right. I think we touched a little bit on this in the last panel. Uh, I think that, um, you know, customers, uh, are going to find their way to agents and it’s a different type of customer who’s gonna find it.
[00:20:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:20:08] Marc Harpster: Uh, and I think that, you know, this opens up a real opportunity. Uh, for us to, you know, us as hyperscalers in the marketplace, to, um, kind of flip how things have been. Where traditionally it’s like, oh, you know, the ISV or, or the channel reseller sources the deal, and then we’re gonna register a deal in the, in the CRM, it’s gonna go over to, uh, you know, the, the, the hyperscaler CRM and then the sales rep’s gonna get involved.
[00:20:34] Marc Harpster: I mean, that stuff is still gonna happen, still gonna be important, but now customers are gonna find their way to agents and now it’s, oh. The marketplace.
[00:20:43] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:20:43] Marc Harpster: To get that information back out. Right. Or maybe they’re finding the content through a platform like Jeff’s, uh, and they go try something out and suddenly that’s the signal.
[00:20:53] Marc Harpster: Right? And so we need to find a way to communicate that, I think a little more nimbly than we have in the past. Um, you know, so that’s a really big one. Um, and I think that like, uh, you know. The next, the next decade is really gonna be like, a little bit like the last decade was, uh, just as you know, in the last decade, really all these, all of the businesses that, you know, all of you guys in this room found a way to grow these astounding businesses, you know, in cloud.
[00:21:21] Marc Harpster: And now I get to do the whole thing again in, you know, in the age of AI and agents. So I’m super excited for it.
[00:21:27] Vince Menzione: Well, it, I think about SEO and product-led growth, almost like, oh, the agent’s gonna discover mm-hmm. Yeah. The solution in the marketplace, right?
[00:21:35] Marc Harpster: Yeah.
[00:21:35] Vince Menzione: So how do you think about go-to market strategies around that, right?
[00:21:39] Vince Menzione: Yeah. ’cause, ’cause marketing changes dramatically,
[00:21:41] Marc Harpster: right?
[00:21:42] Vince Menzione: We were talking about that yesterday.
[00:21:43] Marc Harpster: Yeah. Like when the agent is the one, finding
[00:21:45] Vince Menzione: the agent is the one finding it, and it, it better be able to find it. ’cause then it’s gonna go search other places if it doesn’t. Yep. As if it’s not discoverable.
[00:21:52] Vince Menzione: I think we all get to figure that out together.
[00:21:54] Vince Menzione: Right.
[00:21:54] Vince Menzione: Jeff, you’re, you’re the go-to-market expert,
[00:21:57] Jeff Mesnik: I mean,
[00:21:57] Vince Menzione: in the panel here. So how do you think about that?
[00:22:00] Jeff Mesnik: We think about it the same way, kind of in your video, right? Yeah. Where it’s basically there’s a few ways that you need to be, um, reaching out so that you’re discovered by the AI agent.
[00:22:10] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:22:10] Jeff Mesnik: So exactly the, you know, for example, you, you know, people here we are all writing white papers and case studies and, you know, doing all that work.
[00:22:18] Jeff Mesnik: But what really triggers it is when you create more content from that one piece. So that’s more interactive. So for example, like, you know, you guys were talking about the short, the video shorts.
[00:22:29] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah.
[00:22:29] Jeff Mesnik: You can instantaneously, like we have a system that’s connected that instantaneously creates these video shorts from the PDF.
[00:22:36] Jeff Mesnik: Or some of you may have seen I created a trivia night, which is an interactive element, so it enables people to then share and engage, and that starts to have, you know, some effect with the SEO, which is now. AI agents who are looking out to see, okay, what are the responses? What are the other people saying?
[00:22:57] Jeff Mesnik: You’re spearheading that motion.
[00:23:00] Jeff Mesnik: Yeah.
[00:23:00] Jeff Mesnik: And then as you said, kind of the, kind of the triggers or the, you know, the, for the data insights that come back mm-hmm. From that are the ones that can trigger a co-sell motion where you’re working together with. Other partners you can be, you know, if you’re a vendor and you use us and you see that information, then maybe partner tap comes in and you can basically find which partner is the right one, and the systems can then target and have a co-sell motion together.
[00:23:27] Jeff Mesnik: Yeah.
[00:23:27] Jeff Mesnik: Right. So that’s the power that’s available now.
[00:23:30] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Shannon, you mentioned about skating where the puck is going. Yeah. Famous. What, by the way, Wayne Gretzky lives in Jupiter, Florida. For those who dunno, uh, all the famous athletes, but of course that’s his, his quote.
[00:23:42] Vince Menzione: And Joe Namath. Right.
[00:23:43] Vince Menzione: And Joe NamUs.
[00:23:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah, he’s in the, he’s in that one picture though slide. I have. Let’s talk about that a little bit. ’cause you, you’re navigating quite a bit of change. One of the most trusted resellers in the market working with the hyperscalers. Tell us how you’re adapting to that puck, where that puck is going.
[00:24:01] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah, I, I think one of the things that we encourage and we talk about it, we, um, have a regular standing, uh, meeting where we talk about going out in the wild.
[00:24:09] Shannon Sigmon: And so I think the, the most important thing that I would leave you all with and something that we are, um, fostering and learning along the way too, is your people in this whole A-E-O-G-E-O world. Your people have to have an opinion. It’s not just enough for them to share the content, click on the content, read the content, but they have to show up with a perspective or an opinion.
[00:24:30] Shannon Sigmon: I don’t, I don’t need to be Jay McBain, but my goodness, I’m gonna follow him. I’m gonna learn from him, and I’m gonna share some of the learnings that I read from him because. He’s doing the work and, and getting the research together for us. But it is important that they do that and the, and the learning and adapting to where the puck is going, doesn’t happen behind a pane of glass.
[00:24:47] Shannon Sigmon: They have to be out in front of it, in front of their customers, in front of partners, having a cup of coffee down the street with the neighbors. Because everybody is now consuming information in a much more personal way. It’s not, uh, just a corporate feed, uh, trough of AI slop that, um, somebody I was at an event last week they talked about, but to, to really understand it, to know it to be customer zero.
[00:25:13] Shannon Sigmon: You have to be in it. And that doesn’t happen behind the pane of glass. So I would say that was probably the first one. And I think, um, one of the things that, uh, sparked, you know, a fire yesterday for me, Vince, was just really this conversation around the marketplace. Um, and especially in our, our, our community and what we do is how do we, this convergence of SaaS.
[00:25:34] Shannon Sigmon: This convergence of consumption in the marketplace. Um, how do we as resellers help our customers optimize how they procure, um, their software in a much more modern way, um, and manage that along, along this journey so that they can take advantage of things coming up in ai. But I think those are like the two.
[00:25:53] Shannon Sigmon: The one thing is just being curious, getting out in front of it and building your perspective. And you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, but you do need an opinion. Um. And then showing up at events like this so that you can learn.
[00:26:06] Vince Menzione: So Mark, uh, largest go to market shifts happening. I mean, the, the, the, the growth is astounding.
[00:26:12] Vince Menzione: What about from your perspective?
[00:26:14] Marc Harpster: Yeah, I think, um, you know, how you go to market, uh, in, in this new age is gonna change based on the type of partner that you are, right? Uh, if you’re an AI native startup, then you know that is your go to market. Like, like the AI is who you are, right? It’s part of your identity.
[00:26:35] Marc Harpster: Versus if you’re a a, you know, a, a, an incumbent, a, a large ISV, you need to figure out how to wrap AI around your existing solutions, right? Mm-hmm. But if you may have a SaaS solution, and now do you have agents that are talking to that SaaS solution? You know, and are you building that? Where are you building that?
[00:26:50] Marc Harpster: How are you running it? And how are you partnering with, you know, the hyperscalers? Uh, how are you partnering? You know, it could be, uh, philanthropic or open ai, right? Mm-hmm. Like we all have to, you know, you have to think about. How each of these different types of partners can help you go to market, right?
[00:27:08] Marc Harpster: And really come up with that strategy.
[00:27:13] Vince Menzione: Former. Any comments on that?
[00:27:14] Jeff Mesnik: Yeah, well, I mean, I’ll just add, I, I just was thinking about this, uh, I’m gonna butcher this Bueller quote, but things are changing really fast, and you gotta take a moment to listen and understand what’s going on out there. So the data coming in is always going to drive everything else that you do.
[00:27:30] Jeff Mesnik: So I butchered that quote, but imagine I said it right?
[00:27:33] Vince Menzione: Yeah. I, I love Shannon, what you said it, and I’ll. Paraphrase it. The analog is the new digital.
[00:27:42] Shannon Sigmon: It is, yeah.
[00:27:43] Vince Menzione: Because we need rooms like this. We need to be in the room with other listen experts like
[00:27:48] Shannon Sigmon: yourselves. Yeah. I mean, I say quite often human connection still matters, and at the end of the day, people are gonna use AI tools to do the research, to find the information, to surface the video training, but they’re not gonna make the decision until they know the person they’re buying from.
[00:28:03] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah. And so that whole adage of people buy from people they like and trust. Is even more important in this, in this day and age. Yeah.
[00:28:12] Vince Menzione: Any last comments or go tos for the, for this community? In front of us today.
[00:28:17] Jeff Mesnik: I’ll just say that because of this community, you know, Shannon and I met, so we have yeah.
[00:28:21] Jeff Mesnik: Great business that we’re gonna be doing together and I met the team at ISSI and we’ve got a great partnership that’s brewing. And, you know, I’m looking forward to other, you know, people that I’ve met here, um, Andrew who’s out there. Um, we’re gonna do some work together. So thank you, Vince. Thank you. I mean, this community has really been fabulous for me personally and for my business.
[00:28:39] Jeff Mesnik: It’s been great meeting
[00:28:40] Vince Menzione: and I didn’t pay you to say that, by the way.
[00:28:42] Jeff Mesnik: No, I paid you.
[00:28:44] Vince Menzione: That’s right. You did. You. Okay. Well, alright, mark, anything, any last comments from
[00:28:52] Marc Harpster: Yeah. You know, um, don’t be afraid of the change, right? Like, if you have that hour a week, just go play around with play, play with all of the different, uh, AI.
[00:29:02] Marc Harpster: Technologies that are out there, right. And just, uh, get to know them, right? The more comfortable you are with them, the easier this whole thing’s gonna be. So dedicate an hour a week, just go, you know, and that’s your time to, to learn how these things work, right? So
[00:29:15] Vince Menzione: yeah,
[00:29:15] Marc Harpster: I say don’t be afraid of it.
[00:29:16] Vince Menzione: Awesome.
[00:29:17] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Thank you so much. What a great panel. Great conversation. What do you think? Everyone? Thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:29:25] Vince Menzione: Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated. Share it with a
[00:29:31] Vince Menzione: partner leader in your network. Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the Ultimate partner.com for show notes related content and the resources for this episode.
[00:29:42] Vince Menzione: And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.
