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For the 68th Episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering™, I’m excited to welcome back Brent Combest, Microsoft General Manager for National and Local Partners on the US One Commercial Organization. Brent was an early guest two years ago, Episode 58, “Focus on Launching Successful Partner Business Models.” Both his role and the world have changed since this 2018 interview.
I was excited to have Brent as a guest because his work impacts many of Microsoft’s largest partners in the United States. In this episode, we discuss the impactful work of his team during these uncertain times, how he coaches the team on best practices for what makes a great Partner Development Manager (PDM), what makes successful partnerships, his career journey, and the lessons he learned from mentors and role models, including his father.
It a far-reaching and broad discussion that I believe is impactful not only to Microsoft Partners, Customers or Employees but also anyone looking to grow their career.
I so enjoyed this discussion and the broad range of topics, including:
- The role of his National and Local Partner Organization
- The transformation is seeing now during these times.
- Microsoft’s increased emphasis on industries and partner-to-partner selling.
- The Three Roles of a Successful Partner Development Manager.
- Words he lives his life by and advice he would give to his 25-year-old self.
As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to Partnering™ and where they can find us. I’d love your feedback. Please like the podcast and provide comments or reach out to me at @vincemenzione on Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also like and follow Ultimate Guide to Partnering Facebook page or drop me a line at vincem@cloudwavepartners.com.
LINKS & RESOURCES
- Find Brent Combest on LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Email – bcombest@microsoft.com
- Link to Dr. Michael Grevais.
- The transcript of our interview is available below.
Ultimate Guide to Partnering™ is a rich compendium of what makes successful partnerships and is available on iTunes, Spotify, Google SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, almost anywhere you get your podcasts!
Transcript – Please excuse typos in this transcript as it is provided through an automated service – otter.ai
Vince Menzione 00:27
Brent, welcome back to the podcast.
Brent Combest 01:49
Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Vince Menzione 01:51
I am so excited to welcome you back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. You know it’s been a little over two years since we last met back in July. of 2018 to be exact in Episode 58 of the Ultimate Guide to partnering, we’re now at Episode 68. So it’s taken us two years to go 10 podcast episodes. But of course, we had a two year hiatus here. So great to welcome you back. And quite a bit has changed. So I’m eager to for this conversation today.
Brent Combest 02:17
Yeah, likewise, and I can’t believe it’s been two years time sure flies!
Vince Menzione 02:21
It sure does. And boy, has the world changed in two years, or even just six months? Right?
Brent Combest 02:26
Definitely. Definitely. So and it’s been interesting to track those changes and do what’s needed to keep up.
Vince Menzione 02:33
So that’s exactly what we want to speak about today. So let’s talk about your role because it’s changed quite a bit since we spoke two years ago. Can you spend a few moments explaining to our listeners, your team’s focus now at Microsoft?
Brent Combest 02:46
Sure. And we’ve taken that kernel that we had a couple of years ago and just continued to grow that. My team now is what we call the national and local services team here in the US subsidiary under one commercial partner. And the easiest way to break that down is my team is responsible for managing the very top systems integrators and msps. That are not our global systems integrators, our lsps, or our distributors, everything else is under my purview. That’s a services partner.
Vince Menzione 03:15
So that’s quite a bit of area to cover. How many partners exactly are in that portfolio? Or can you tell us?
Brent Combest 03:21
Sure, yeah, there’s about 450 partners that reside in the portfolio today that are rolling up and working with about 40, top partner development managers.
Vince Menzione 03:31
Wow, that’s a quite a bit of partners. And we can talk a little bit about the scaling are in a moment, but you know, we’re recording this in a time like no other. I mean, six months of COVID working remote, a rapid pace of change and transformation like we’ve like we’ve never seen before. And you know, Satya is now what we’ve seen more change in six months than we’ve seen in six years. Right? And it’s been driven out of necessity. What are you seeing customers and partners doing now those 450 partners of yours that you didn’t expect to see
Brent Combest 03:59
well? from a customer standpoint, it’s really revolved around being prepared to operate in a in a remote structure. So everything from ground up security to make sure that the infrastructure is stable and set up well to operate in that kind of a scenario, all the way through to thinking about what types of technologies that need to be introduced or improved upon so that we can be successful. And that’s why we’ve seen massive adoption of things like teams or Windows virtual desktop as remote work has just become so prevalent across the entire market today. On the partner side, we’ve seen kind of an evolution in some cases of the business model itself. We’ve seen a lot more predominance of work that’s being done remotely and not on site. So for example, for many years, the way partners went out and deliver their project services was to fly out or drive out and physically be on site with that customer, and that That’s really changed. And the interesting thing that’s going to come out of that as a benefit is it’s actually long term going to help boost the profitability for some of these partners because they’re getting better usage or utilization of those resources and not having to spend time traveling or in a lot of cases where customers won’t pay for travel time, the partners aren’t having to absorb that now. So that’s, that’s an area that’s really interesting to see take shape.
Vince Menzione 05:26
That’s really great. You know, it’s also the end of Microsoft summer, and you’re coming off of the big Microsoft inspire conference, which was tremendously successful this year, virtually. And I see Microsoft is making an even bigger push and focus on industry. How is that focus impacting the work of you and the team?
Brent Combest 05:43
Well, it’s having a big kind of change in the importance of it. We’ve always positioned, I’d even say bill beneath the industry, the vertical approach for a long time, my my big mantra or to me the kernel of any business strategy, and the joke I always make is Doesn’t matter if you’re making chocolate pies. Or if you’re selling Azure, the kernel of any successful strategy is differentiation. How are you going to stand out in a crowded marketplace and the channel here at Microsoft is vast, so it is a very crowded space. And industry is finally giving us more than just a mantra, it’s giving us an operational model that is driving our field sales teams in this direction. And our partners in pockets have really adapted their I’d say my business applications partners that we manage are very much in that space with a predominant business model to be vertically oriented. As I move over to Azure, or in the modern work, it’s taking hold but a little bit slower rate, I’ll say that those partners are probably 12 to 24 months behind where the dynamics partners are at in terms of that evolution. But what matters here is as you say, if you’re a partner and you’re thinking about, Okay, I’m going to build a solution and I want to co sell it with Microsoft. How do I construct that? How do I build my GTM and how do I get the attention that That one. And that’s where thinking about it differently now is super important because the way that we’re trying to bring this together is we have these things called sales plays. So across the clouds, the three clouds that we have, there are different sales plays like Windows, virtual desktop, or server migration as an example, all the dynamics ones are already wrapped around industry. So our sales plays or manufacturing, healthcare fsai, those very specific and narrow plays. But within the plays, what we’re trying to do now is, the first thing we do is we say, what are the pain points? And what are the solutions that we need to architect to do that, and how are they different from one industry to the next? It’s not good enough to go in and say, I have a team’s collaboration practice in a sales play around that. It’s how does that differ for frontline workers in manufacturing or retail compared to say healthcare and having a solution built around that? And if you want to get the attention of our field sales teams, you need to be able to answer those specific question. How do I solve the business outcomes or the pains of that industry with the solution that either I’ve built myself, or that I deliver in partnership with somebody like an ISV?
Vince Menzione 08:09
So how do you get those partners to invest in a particular industry? I know when I was running the US public sector business, it was often hard to get a partner that was safe in a commercial sector enterprise sector to come over to, let’s say, education as an example. What’s the work that you and the team do to get them to align to those solution plays?
Brent Combest 08:26
Well, there’s a why and there’s a how the Why is a combination of I want to close out with Microsoft, and I see the benefits of doing so. But the other half of that which I think is actually more important, is the profitability of the business, the more that you create that specialization, the greater efficient or greater. The increase in efficiency can help you in a number of different areas that can increase your return on marketing investment and the rates of response from your target accounts. It can drive an efficiency in your sales process so that your velocity and your close rates improve and it can also lessen And the cost that it takes to deploy things, when you do the same kind of deployments on a regular basis, you either can create code that can help accelerate deployment time, or you can find utilities that allow you to reduce the amount of human labor that has to be deployed to actually make something work. And so that helps you to create efficiencies there bolsters profitability and growth significantly, that’s the Y side of it, the House side, and what we go and really try to help them to understand is the connection points into our business and what that’s going to do for them. This is the story around the investments that we make available to partners. It’s the programs that are very specialized that go after these portions of the market. And those two things together, the why and the how are really what dictate what takes partners to that level.
Vince Menzione 09:50
So Brent, you said something here that I’d like to tease out a little bit about making the investments and incentives that follow that and I know from previous conversations, we’ve discussed how much Soft has investment engines, the partner investment engine pi, as it’s referred to, what are some of the best practices you’re seeing some of these partners do to utilize those investments? How would you coach existing managed partners to better take advantage of these unique offers? You know,
Brent Combest 10:16
it’s a great question. And it’s really an important one to be transparent. You I look back on historical performance, and we’re at the beginning of a new year. So we’re kind of in reflection mode, or we recently we’re now we’re into full execution again, but one of the things I look back on was the partners in my portfolio last year that consumed the most dollars, whether it be pi investments or end customer investment funds or very specific programmatic investment dollars. And I looked at their performance to kind of see if there was an overlap or a correlation between the two of them. And what was interesting was my top performers, the number 1238 and 11 in terms of overall performance, or my top Five consumers have investment dollars. So to me, that’s such a leading indicator that investing the time to really make that work for your business is so critical.
Vince Menzione 11:09
So number 1238 and 11. In terms of ranking, we’re the largest consumers of the incentives.
Brent Combest 11:17
Exactly. And to answer your question to around, how, what do they do and how do they do it? It’s nothing more than a disciplined approach to going out and understanding those investments, the processes for how to plug into those and then just relentless attention to taking advantage of them. I mean, I kind of liken it to a workout program, right? Everybody wants to have a great physique. But at the end of the day, if you don’t show up at the gym, and you don’t apply the effort to it, you’re not going to see the benefit. And I totally understand that our processes at times can be a little bit cumbersome. Some of the things the first times you go through it are learning experience. But as you build that muscle up and as you understand those processes, the payoff is Significant once you get really going with that flywheel, it’s an interesting
Vince Menzione 12:03
best practice for partners to take advantage of that. And you talk about it in terms of bit building up the muscle. And you recently posted a blog or an article on LinkedIn. And you talked about partner attribution, and partners, making sure that they’re telling Microsoft back like, this is the work I’m doing with your customers. And this is where I’m adding value for you. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Brent Combest 12:24
Yeah, you know, it’s funny we have, like I said before, a very large ecosystem of partners. And oftentimes, more than one partner will be working with a customer because of the vast nature of what they’re deploying, and you’ve got a partner in there that specialized around eirp, and another one that’s in there doing an IoT project. And it’s super important that the partners make sure that they take the time to get the credit for the work that they do. And there’s a number of reasons for that, you know, first and foremost, my portfolio. The PDM is in my team and the technical specialists and the marketing advisors that huddle around my portfolio to help them, we have to follow a set of criteria that determines which partners we actually manage. And if we don’t have optics into what you’re doing, and that doesn’t show up on our systems, because you haven’t taken the time to be attribute it to that work or to that customer, we’re blind to it. And we’re not able to then see how your performance should allow you to have access to these resources. But it’s bigger than just being in a managed portfolio. When I think about the Targeted Investment programs that we make available to certain partners out there based on a very strategic initiative that we’re going after something like SAP on Azure, an example. As an example, for compliance, we have to pick the very top performing partners and again, you know, so often I’ll get on a call in a business review with a partner, and they’ll talk about some marquee logos that they’re working on Delta Airlines or a big company like that. And then I go look at our systems and they’re nowhere to be found. And that’s a disconnect. That’s a break Because they’re not attributed to that customer, I really have no idea that they’re working in that case. And that then leads into future misses in terms of Cosell opportunities with our field, our field is looking for partners that have a proven track record and a proven history there. And the way that we validate that is through attribution. We use that to for incentives, we use that for MPN benefits, it’s across the board. And so if you’re not today, going through the effort to do partner admin link or cloud solution provider program or claiming partner of record or deal registration, you’ve got to take advantage of those. It’s a big, big deal.
Vince Menzione 14:34
Yeah, it’s about building your brand. And you know, it’s okay to brag, right? Because Because the the work that you do, like, I know that the field organization, they have so much limited limited bandwidth. And you know, they want to know the partner that gets it right doing this one thing and like if you were the one who did it for Delta Airlines as an example, and I have another customer that needs that, like I need to know that right? That’ll be the reason I bring you into that account. Exactly. That’s exactly right. So it’s part of Getting what getting it right working with Microsoft, as I call it. It was such a great piece, by the way, and I’ll put a link to that article in our show notes for our listeners. Another area I wanted to spend some time with you on today. And it’s been a topic and a few of the other podcasts interviews. I know it’s become really, really important to Microsoft and also to your team is around partner to partner sales motions. And Rodney Clark talked about it in our episode about IoT. I had Sharon Hildebrand, who’s the managing partner Petacci solutions in your portfolio. And we had a really informative discussion on the work that her team is doing around partner to partner emotions. So can you talk to our listeners a little bit about how your team is coaching partners in this area?
Brent Combest 15:39
Yeah, and it is becoming a very predominant focus for us right now. And it has been for a while, but even more so as we go forward. You know, a few years back there was some great research that was done by IDC, where they talked about the shift of who owns the technology budget inside of customers. It was at that time and this is now data that’s probably three or four years old six percent of the budget was now owned by a BDM. And they influenced another 21%. But the bdms have a totally different decision making process, they have a totally different way of reacting to technology decisions. Oftentimes, it’s almost emotional, right? They’re trying to solve a problem, a very specific pain point that they have. And there’s oftentimes in that case, to a time to value equation that has to be met, there’s not a lot of appetite for lettuce come in, and we’ll build something from the ground up and in six months, we’ll do a pilot or in six months, we’ll do minimum, you know, efficient value there and we’ll see we’ll go from there. Well, no, they want something to work and they wouldn’t work right away. And the faster time to value and something that’s also consumed as a recurring revenue expense for them or recurring expense for them is an ISV plus a services partner, the ISV solution in most cases, what I find is they can take and land probably 6070 80% of what that customer is looking for in the service. As Parker comes in, rounds it out, sets it up and trains and gets everybody on a path for success. So the marriage of those two roles together is incredibly important to meeting those demands up the new BDM decision maker.
Vince Menzione 17:12
And so important now with SAS solutions, right, as you said, the the bespoke days of doing a custom solution, or I won’t say long gone, but there seemed to be gone in many areas in focus, and ISVs are coming in with you know, pre packaged solutions that can do 70 or 80% with it within MSI come in and si coming in and providing the rest or finishing out or polishing up the application.
Brent Combest 17:36
It’s true. And it’s interesting how our consumer lives have influenced our business lives. You know, on the consumer side, we’ve gotten so used to the app modernization mindset where we just pick up our phone, grab the app that we want, and it takes care of what we need, and we kind of have that expectation bleed over into our work life now as well. And I think that’s driving a lot of the behaviors of some of these business decision makers.
Vince Menzione 17:57
So your team is managing 400 50 partners, I’m sorry, I’m going to bring up this number again, but it’s in my head, and that most of them are your team is mostly comprised of partner development managers, or PDMS, as they’re referred to within the Microsoft nomenclature, what do you believe to be the best attributes of a successful PDM? What what attributes do you look for? What attributes Do you coach your team on?
Brent Combest 18:20
Yeah, we’ve got two different types of PDFs. And in my organization, we have what we call optimized PDFs. And these folks look after partners that are very mature and they’ve been with us for quite some time. They do a lot of CO selling into the enterprise space and into our kind of corporate accounts space, what we call SMC see now let me have this accelerate portfolio, which is a combination of SMB partners and partners that are really on a high growth trajectory, but are still kind of in their incubation phase or almost like the adolescence of the business and the optimized portfolios are a ratio of one PDF to seven partners and excel rate is one to 25. And because of that, and the fact that we’re not working one to one or one to two, there’s some attributes that really kind of shine through. And this is where I think Microsoft is a little bit different. We have partner development managers, other vendors have partner account managers. What I mean by that is, when you start to think about what the other vendor providers doing for the partners, it’s more relational based, it’s more reactive, it’s more account management. We’re on the other side of that where we’re more development, challenging, growing, wanting to really go out and capture the market almost in an aggressive fashion in partnership with our channel. And so that that difference between a PDM and a Pam really matters to me. And so those three areas that kind of highlight are an adjunct board member. So if you’re going to be a PDM in my organization, I think you’ve got to play the role of a senior leader inside of that partner and kind of go in there with that C suite or board member kind of mindset where thinking strategically to be able to go in and coach them to drive for the next 12 to maybe as much as 48 to 60 months out. But in the meantime, thinking about the strategy across the business of what we have to do today to actually bring that to life. So that adjunct board members, C level executive is that first pillar of real importance. The next one is partners are going to go through different cycles and different phases of growth, you’re going to be with one that’s on a great trajectory right now that may level out for a little while, while the business normalizes they deal with customers that they’ve on boarded. There’s a multitude of reasons why that happens. So the reality is, you can’t treat every partner the same in the moment, you have to understand how these ebbs and flows work. And so I, I asked for them to be investment bankers. And what I mean by that is, they have limited access to time and the resources and that’s their currency. And they have to think about how they apply that in phases or ebbs and flows against that portfolio so that it really operates optimizes the total growth of that cluster of partners as opposed to just trying to apply it all equally and hope for the best. And then the last pillar that’s so important to me is I think of them as pioneers. You know, one thing that I say to them often is, the competitive advantage that we have and our partners have today likely won’t be a competitive advantage in 18 to 24 months, if you’re not constantly striving and fighting to learn and to grow and to find new opportunities, and to build on what you’re great at today, you’re really introducing and allowing the door to be open for risk to come in and potentially become obsolete. We’ve seen that happen with partners in the past where the business model that they had really became a problem for them as others kind of leapt into Cloud well ahead of them, for example, and understood recurring revenue models and really outpaced them in growth. And then they were in a position where they were fighting for the lives and trying to play catch up. And so I’m always, always trying to implement that healthy state of paranoia to keep everybody ahead of the curve. That’s really great. You know, I refer to that last one that pioneer as agility, right in terms of a partner attribute, what makes a great successful partner is that they have to always be iterating on their business model. They need to be talking to Microsoft to their partner development manager and to leaders like you, and then deciding like, what are the investment areas? Where should we be pivoting are turning the crank on the business to iterate the business and improve our performance or get into new markets or stay ahead of the curve, I guess, if you will. It’s so true. And I coach partners on that note to say, you need to spend about 10% of your time working on the business and not just in it and actually say the same thing to my PDFs. You need to spend between five and 10% of your time thinking about yourself and where you need to evolve and grow so that you can better help and support your partner so that we don’t become stagnant In either case, whether it’s our channel or ourselves.
Vince Menzione 22:51
So I really like that partner Development Manager three roles. adjunct board member, investment banker and pioneer. I really like I really like those through you. I think you simply tell a story about and for and visualize for your people as well. How do you help them from a readiness perspective? Like, is there anything you do in terms of coaching your your team members on how to play those three roles.
Brent Combest 23:16
I’m fortunate in the way that we have a very large backing of readiness across our company, a lot of smart people that create technical content, and then mastery of PDM content that is kind of a foundation for me, but I take that a couple of steps further with my team. The first thing that we do is everybody in the organization has a stretch project, and that serves really two prime benefits. The first is it gives those individuals a chance to stretch and to have to learn something that perhaps they didn’t know in the past. The other benefit to us is our business is large, and it’s complicated. There’s many products and platforms and licensing models, I would almost argue that, you know, being a PDM at Microsoft is kind of like being a PDM for four or five different companies at the same time. With how much you have to know, and because of the challenge that comes with that the stretch projects, basically create 40 additional subject matter experts inside of my organization that we can turn to and work together with. And one of the primary measures that we determine variable compensation on at the end of the year is this concept of the contribution to the success of others. So it plays very, very well into that. And then above the stretch projects, I love to always be coaching with my team. It’s my favorite part of my job. And so I really have two personal stretch projects myself that I’m driving this year one is one that I’ve had for quite some time and I just continue to evolve it but my background is around Parker profitability. And I’ve studied this deeply and work with partners the entirety of my career, and so I’m doing everything from taking a brand new PDM that’s new to the organization and teaching them how to read a p&l and a balance sheet, all the way through to connecting core metrics and what’s really going on in the business when something like gross margin is is under pressure. For me, and then my other stretch project, what I call PDM three Dotto, which is, you know, really about kind of taking the mindset of the CEO of this business, and how do I completely optimize all of the operational processes to try to make this business as efficient as I can around things like Cosell and data inspection and those kinds
Vince Menzione 25:18
of things. I love the fact that you’re covering the partner profitability piece. And it was a topic of our last conversation two plus years ago, but it is so important to these organizations. And it’s important to the Microsoft understand the profitability conversation, when it’s enlisting partners to do new and different things. Right. So I think it I think it creates a sense of empathy for your team as well. It does, it does
Brent Combest 25:39
and it also introduces a new skill set to a lot of people that I think are going to help them as they continue to progress in their career. You know, if you want to take on a VP level job at a company like Microsoft or a C level job at another company, you’ve got to understand the mechanical components of how the financial pieces work inside of a company and how decisions are made. around that, and that’s something that I tried to ingrain in the team and using their partner portfolios to kind of mutually not only learn, but help them as they go through that journey.
Vince Menzione 26:09
So Brian, we talked about how COVID is impacting the business and transformation. What about your team in particular? And how are they iterating staying engaged and staying healthy. And, you know, having a sense of well being during these times,
Brent Combest 26:23
it’s been interesting, we’ve had about half my team before was based out of their home in terms of work, but they travel a couple weeks out of every month. So the concept of working from home wasn’t foreign to them, and knew that and so we leaned on them for some best practices and some ideas to help one another. I think we’ve learned to use even some of the features and products like Microsoft Teams that we maybe hadn’t before. We’ve become absolute power users and those kinds of things have truly helped us to get better working in this kind of environment. But I think above and beyond that, we’ve really rallied together In a number of things, one is the COVID side has created an opportunity for us to work in a more empathetic way with our partners on creating solutions that are going to solve current world challenges that we have. And so there were hundreds of COVID specific solutions that were developed by our portfolio. And so we dug in there with them. And it helped us to understand how we can more rapidly leverage our resources across technical and marketing to take something like that to market and have an impact with it right away. So that was an actual benefit for us that came out of that. The other side of that, though, is, you know, kind of keeping the fun component in there. You know, we have, obviously, regular meetings that we have as a team. But now what we’ve introduced as well is we have more fun inside of those meetings. I’ve got one manager that reports to me that every Monday she her and her team come together and you know they are every Friday should say and the entire intent of that is just to kind of enjoy each other’s company. There’s no specific agenda, from time to time, they’ll enjoy Do a fun topic, like who has the highest Uber rating and then they’ll share best practices on how they accomplish that. But they’re really the intent theirs is to try to keep things light and make sure that we’re still having that camaraderie and that human connection between one another not letting it become too mechanical.
Vince Menzione 28:16
That’s great. You know, I’ve had these conversations with many of the other guests around you know, first of all the all the screentime that you’re doing now, as opposed to sitting across from each other in many cases, and being able to look at your computer and then look up and talk to somebody so it’s a lot more straining on the eyes, I guess is what I would say with the attention span. And then also, you know, this whole thing around working from home like it’s now Okay, if Johnny and Sally come in, are the dogs barking. It’s so we have a new acceptance to working from home and the environment that we’re working in.
Brent Combest 28:47
We really do and it’s it’s kind of funny, you’re right, we use video pervasively, and you inevitably see the cat walk across the desk or It happens all of us even in business reviews with our cvps And, you know, it’s it’s we all kind of chuckle at it now. And you know, it’s a reminder of just the human connection that we have, and that we’re all going through this together.
Vince Menzione 29:08
Yep, absolutely. And so, you know, you’ve been around Microsoft quite some time. And we’ve spoken in the past about, you know, working at a couple of Microsoft partners, and then coming to the tech giant. And, you know, I coach organizations and leaders on what makes great partnerships. And so, as you know, I’m fascinated by this topic. So given your fantastic set of experiences, working with partners and multiple roles, what do you believe makes what characteristics Do you believe makes a great partner?
Brent Combest 29:34
Well, I think there’s different elements to it. I think that first and foremost, kind of back to the statement I made earlier, it’s understanding the mission or the vision of the company, and what is the kernel that makes you different, right, the last thing you want to do is go out there and build a business that looks just like stuff that’s already there. So how do you stand out and is that a vertical is that very specific technology that you’re extremely good? have you built something that nobody else has out there? And and use that as kind of the basis for it? A lot of times when I talk about differentiation or a coach on it with with partners, I hear things like we’ve got great people, we’ve got all these certifications or gold status. And that’s amazing. I love it. But at the core of it, that doesn’t make you stand out. There are too many partners out there that have really smart people, a lot of certifications that are gold status. It’s how are you truly different? And how do you go out and solve customers problems? That’s the that’s the core of that piece. The next piece is what’s your culture? Like? How do you establish yourself across your leadership team and pervasively across your staff in such a way that makes people not only want to come to work for you, but once they start there, make them want to go all in, you know, I had a manager years ago that I truly would have walked through fire for and it didn’t matter what he did. From that point forward. I was always going to be interested in joining his organization and when you make sure that you take a disciplined diligent approach to thinking about culture, focusing on what that means to you, and really doing an effective job of planning that I think that’s incredibly important. But then kind of swinging back towards the business side, you know, where I see a lot of partners get hung up is, are they thinking longer term about how am I actually going to scale this thing? We’ve got a lot of cases where partners kind of get to a particular size, and they start to plateau. And the biggest challenge at that point is implementing the people, the process and the technology that’s going to allow the business to become almost factory like in as many ways as you can. I’m not trying to make it incredibly rigid. What I’m trying to say is, how can you find ways to make things repeatable and scalable to where even if you were the owner of the business and you were to leave, the business wouldn’t implode on itself, it would continue to grow, because ultimately, my advice to all equity stakeholders out there in our channel, at some point, you’re going to sell your business, you’re either going to Aesop it out To your employees, you’re going to sell it to a private equity firm, or it’s a wholesale m&a kind of an activity at the end of the day, something’s going to happen in that business. And you’re not going to be a part of it either immediately or through an urn out. And you want to have built a legacy or a business there that can survive without you. And to the degree that you’re involved in every sales, deal, delivery, HR decision, that business is never going to grow beyond what you have in terms of hours in a day to give it capacity to do so. So that’s that’s kind of the other big one.
Vince Menzione 32:29
Yeah, that you bring up a really good point. So you mentioned three specific areas. One is being highly differentiated, right? And so it’s being known for that one thing, what like, What’s that one thing that sets you apart? The second one I thought I heard was around culture. And to me culture is around having that growth mindset and making sure that your culture is compatible with your partner’s culture, in this case, Microsoft so that you are similar in culture and how you go to market and do business together. And then the third I heard you say was around scale. And I see it so many times to that. So These businesses are more lifestyle, they reach a certain point and they plateau. And then how do you get them over that plateau?
Brent Combest 33:06
Well, that’s a good point. And I think that’s where a lot of the challenge lies and, and the thing for us that we’re coming to drives 95%, a little more than 95% of our commercial revenue through a channel. And we love our partners, if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have the level of success that we have in the market. And as a matter of fact, there’s no way we’d ever meet our mission. You know, the number I always give is, we have about 17 million people that work in our channel today. And for us to really reach our mission of empowering every person and every organization on the channel to on the planet to achieve more. If we went it alone, we’d have to reach something like 46 47,000 people per Microsoft employee, but if we do that through our channel that takes that number all the way down to a couple hundred or a few hundred so it’s, it’s that scale that makes a difference but you know, breaking Through that lifestyle piece that for me, you know, I have the blessing of looking after the top 450 partners, I my duty back to the business is to make sure that I am growing those partners but investing our most significant resource our people, I guess the partners that have the highest propensity to grow. So I guess what I’m saying is if you want to have the investment for Microsoft, if you want to have access to resources, you’ve got to be on that same kind of growth playing that growth trajectory and that hunger to live out the mission, which is very audacious for Microsoft, to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And if you have a comfort zone, where you plateau, you’re going to kind of get to a point where we’re misaligned a little bit in that respect. Does that make sense? Yeah,
Vince Menzione 34:46
yeah, it really does. It really does. It comes down. You know, it’s investment but its commitment, its commitment to the success, the vision that we set together the joint, the joint vision, and to get to that vision, which I love, the fact that impacting every person and it reorganization to achieve more is just, you know, an amazing aspiration at Microsoft.
Brent Combest 35:05
Definitely. So yeah, that’s, that’s one of the things I love working love about working for this company is we have gigantic goals and aspirations. And we’re one of the few companies out there that that I think can chase it. And it’s because we have such a vibrant, powerful ecosystem that
Vince Menzione 35:22
doesn’t with us that we can actually make that real. Yeah. And believes in it. Microsoft believes in partnering intrinsically, and everything it does in the businesses is so demonstrative of that. Absolutely. So what about common myths partners have about working with Microsoft? Do you run across this? I know in my past life, I did. And are there any common this that you see with partners in terms of working with Microsoft in your team?
Brent Combest 35:46
I think as much as it’s not myth, I think it’s just gaining clarity on how to best partner with Microsoft and how to plug in I will readily admit at times, there’s just a lot to digest and it can be very complicated. I think. Though, you know, for me, if you invest the time to understand our programs, we’re very transparent on where we’re going. It’s an analogy that an old mentor gave me of, you know, follow the money, where you see our channel incentive budget go, or our variable marketing expense go in terms of programs, like we talked about earlier, the partner investment engine pie, as we call it, you’re going to be quickly able to recognize how to work with us and where to plug in. But in terms of overall myths, I don’t know that that any kind of stand out to me, I think, as much Vince as it does, just really understanding how to work with it. So the one specifically that you kind of run into a lot that maybe I can work through with you. I think
Vince Menzione 36:42
one of the things that I ran across in my day and I’ve seen this before, is organizations think because Microsoft has such deep pockets that they’re willing to invest, you know, unlimited amounts of dollars and resources to a particular solution strategy or go to market strategy.
Brent Combest 36:58
Yeah, I mean, we do definitely have the benefit of having financial capability to do a lot of different things. I think what a lot of partners may misinterpret or understand is how much of that capital is free. Now, this is a better conversation for our CFO or somebody that can really give a detailed answer on it. But what I would say that we don’t Telegraph and I don’t think we ever will, and or we should, is a lot of those dollars that we have access to, you know, on our balance sheet are already accounted for whether that’s building massive amounts of large scale heavy investment data centers around the world. That’s a massive plan that we go after. And our focus is so committed to building that out and a lot of our money is kind of tied up there. You know, and we certainly, if you look across where we invest our dollars and incentives and programs as well, there’s a lot of money that goes back into the channel. The thing that we’ve done over the last few years that I think has changed a little bit as we’ve moved away from kind of more One off type of investments to more programmatic investments. What we’ve noticed in that process of doing that is a couple of things. One is we just have better compliance and controls over what happens with that money. And whenever we also go more towards a programmatic approach, what we’ve known as the ROI, or what we’ve recognized is the ROI has gone up, because we’ve become more efficient, and how we execute that we have a playbook, or what we call sales plays, that our sellers and our partner folks and our marketing folks all kind of play to the same sheet of music now. And the impact that we have when we all rode the boat together is so much greater than when we’re kind of off placing bets in randomized places.
Vince Menzione 38:43
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And having a programmatic and predictable model, with accountability backing it up. It’s just so important to drive. You know, it’s really important to the business brand. I’m going to pivot here. As you might know, I have a group of early career professionals that listen to the podcast. I’ve done A lot of mentoring as I know you have. And I’m fascinated how leaders like yourself got to this particular spot in life. And I know you came from the channel before joining Microsoft, what was the best piece of advice you received when you got started?
Brent Combest 39:14
Well, there’s a couple different things that that come to mind. It’s almost as if I could go back and tell my younger self, this is, for me, it’s all about focusing on how you want to leave a legacy. And when you think long term or you think back, potentially, you need to get later in your career, you think back on what you’ve accomplished, nobody’s going to remember your titles. Nobody’s going to remember how much money you made. Matter of fact, nobody knows how much money you made. What they ultimately are going to remember is how you made them feel what you helped them to accomplish, the impact that you made on individuals or companies that exist out there. It’s all about chasing that legacy for me. You know, I’ve been at Microsoft for 15 years and like any person that’s been at a big company like this for a long time, I’ve had opportunities to leave, but there’s never been And anything that even compared in terms of what I could do myself that would have a lasting impact as what I can accomplish here at this company, as well as what I can be a part of which is something much bigger than myself here so that that legacy piece is really big Vince. But I also think that for the folks that are starting their journey, there’s a way that you can navigate your career in a strategic way. And somebody told me a long time ago, they said, Nobody will ever care about your career as much as you will. And so if you don’t put the time into building a plan and building a strategy around it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. And frankly, for me, what I’ve done along that path is I’ve always tried to think about what job do I want from now to rolls out? And what is the stepping stone approach that I need to take to get there, what’s the next role I need? And within those, what are the skills that I need to develop in order to not just be successful, but to tremendously flourish in those roles and From that, what areas are Where can I go plug in to get experiences right now that are going to build those skills to make sure I’m successful. And then around that kind of yellow brick road that I often call it is Who are the people that can help me along the journey. And one thing that I found invaluable long that way is having mentors in the right places. And I’ve always had two flavors of mentors. I’ve had a mentor that helps me to fill a gap in a skill that I have. And I can learn from that individual and ask them kind of safezone questions and try things with them and try to understand what makes them great at that particular skill. But then I also have always had mentors that were in a place where I wanted to go long term in terms of groups inside of Microsoft or businesses that I wanted to work in eventually, and what I was trying to accomplish there with that mentorship was really two things. I was trying to leverage them to help coach me on things and challenges that I face today, but I was also used Seeing that as a learning ground for what their business was like, so that if I were to make my way into that organization, I would have done really two things, I would have already asked all the questions and really taking the time to understand deeply what that organization is all about and where their pain points are, and what makes them great. But I also would have leveraged that opportunity through that mentorship, to take a chance to ask that individual before our next meeting, what are two or three things that you’re wrestling with? Let me go away and think about that potentially come in with an unbiased perspective on how an outsider thinks about that. And really, that provides value to that mentor for for what I’m giving to them in that case. But more importantly, it’s kind of a tryout, if you will, it’s a chance for them to see my skills and a chance for me to really get to understand how they react to things. And ultimately, at the end of the day, if you want to go into that group, now you have somebody that’s in a position of power, that can not only want to bring you over into that group that can help to make that happen, whether it’s working directly for them or somebody that’s in your organization as a leader,
Vince Menzione 43:01
that’s some really great advice, Brent. And so I think I when I heard and I would encourage people to go back and listen to this part again, because you cover two areas, how do I get the skill set? And how do I get to where I want to go on the yellow brick road? And having mentors in both of those areas? Is that the way I heard? That’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s really terrific advice. So can you point to a life experience was was there something that happened that compelled you to do what you do today? Like how did you get into it? What was your interest in it? Like, was there anything that sets you off on your journey?
Brent Combest 43:32
You know, my men are my internship in college was I was the director of sponsorships and player appearances intern for the Spokane chiefs Hockey Club. That is a major junior team kind of a step below the NHL in Spokane. owned by George Brett and his brothers wonderful organization. I owe them a debt of gratitude for teaching me so much about just how to operate inside of business. Great experience, I cannot overemphasize the value of internships. But I came out of that and went into interview for different companies. And I ultimately came down to two different job offers. One was with a major shipping company, and one was with a CRM company called pivotal corporation that was based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. And I was going to work at their us headquarters. And it really came down to what path do I want to take? And where was my passion at? Was it going to be in working in logistics, which is a great industry a great place? Or was it going to be in something that I felt was kind of a never ending challenge that was always going to keep me inspired, which is technology. And I went that’s kind of where I didn’t know what at the time but that kind of kernel of this concept of chasing a legacy really began there and I wanted to go after something that was going to keep me engaged and keep me interested for a long term and you know, the, this gets set all the time. If you find your passion, you’ll never work a day in your life or if you go after a passion The money will follow. It’s so true. Now, that’s really kind of helped me kind of on my journey. That was that was one inflection point for me, Vince, another one that kind of helped to shape me, my current skip level manager here at Microsoft, they will as I remember, a few years back, we were it was in the recession of 2008 2009. I was chartered with leading as a stretch project growth project for me leading our CRP strategy here in the US, and we’re having a bit of a difficult period, you know, people at the time of the recession, they were buying a whole lot of PRP. And I tried a bunch of different things. And Dave said to me, you know, hey, I applaud everything that you’ve tried, this is really good stuff, but it’s really not yielding the results that we need right now. If we can’t turn this around pretty soon, then we’re going to need to go another direction. And I knew that that another direction meant me kind of rolling off of this as kind of an opportunity to stretch project and the thing that I took away from that what really helped me was to understand the big moments, what really matters, and when Where to dig in. But even more importantly, it’s okay to take chances. And to think about how you’re going to accomplish that. And to me probably wasn’t as drastic or dramatic as I’m about to say. But that was kind of a moment of make or break for me where it could have been, and of my time with Microsoft or a whole other path. And so I took a big chance. And I partnered with another guy that I worked with at the time. And we built this offer where we gave away three users of dynamics, which were like $3,000 each, we gave them away for $1. And wow, the popen theory was it’ll create stimulus, a project services work for our channel, it’ll seed more customers and drive acquisition and get us going. And it wound up creating the biggest q4 in the 20 year history of Great Plains at the time, and it was just a pivotal moment for me. Wow, that’s
Vince Menzione 46:48
fantastic, or surmise that you stayed at Microsoft. So it was a happy ending. Yeah,
Brent Combest 46:53
it really wasn’t I, I admire I have an immense amount of respect for Dave Willis. And there’s a reason that I’m working for him again. And actually my current boss, David Smith for my third time working for him.
Vince Menzione 47:05
Yep. And I’m a big fan of Dave’s as well. Both Dave’s But Dave Willis in particular. And we get, we’re gonna have him on here at some point. So Dave, if you’re listening, get ready. We’re getting on as a guest. So Brent, you know, I’ve been interviewing other great leaders in Microsoft, like Lonnie Phillips and Rodney Clark on the topic of diversity and inclusion, and leading through this change. And Microsoft is playing such a pivotal role in the leader in terms of addressing diversity, inclusion and racial injustice. Lonnie, and I talked about se commitment. And so do you mind if I ask you as a white male leader, leading a diverse team? What are you doing now or doing differently to address the issue of diversity and inclusion?
Brent Combest 47:46
Sure. And you know, one of the things that I’m working on in the short term right now is I’m a member of that team that Lonnie is leading where we’re focused on how do we support bringing in more In American and black owned businesses, into the Microsoft ecosystem, but also into the managed portfolio as well. So we’re working through an approach to to make that real more broadly. You know, as a company, we’ve really focused on investing and helping people understand where their unconscious bias resides. And understanding that in a self reflective way and identifying that is very, very significant. And then from that more specifically, across my team, you know, we’ve got a dedicated DNI plan that we drive we have a regular discussion on the topic. We’ve even implemented a section or a chapter of our partner development plans that we have with every one of our of our members of our portfolio to actually take diversity and inclusion implemented in their business. So we go from being a something that we’re focused on as a company that reaches 170,000 people at Microsoft, to now that 17 billion that I talked about before, a much bigger footprint out there.
Vince Menzione 48:59
Yeah, it’s great to see Microsoft’s leadership during these times, and also having that mirroring of the culture like asking partners to also buy in and having the commitment as well. So it’s really great to see the work that you’re all doing. And you know, Lonnie, and I discussed the gaps as well today with with that ecosystem. So it’s really great to see all the work that’s going on there. So Brent, do you have a quote? Do you live your life by or think of often?
Brent Combest 49:23
I do? I do. And, you know, I’m a student of Michael Gervais, as well as Pete Carroll. I’m Look, I’m a huge Seahawks fan. You know, one of the things that Dr. Michael Gervais talks about is this concept of personal philosophy. And you know, one of the things I love about Pete Carroll’s his his short and sweet doctor today, he talks about it being 25 words or less well Pete Carroll’s is very simple. It’s always compete, which I love. And if you know Pete story that’s so fitting of him and just a quick anecdote. A while back, I had the opportunity to tour the V Mac complex for the Seahawks practice. And I was one of the first people to be able to do that. And what was so fascinating they have this giant building picture, almost like a warehouse. And I come walking around the corner, and I see five giant men, you know, offensive lineman playing basketball with Pete Carroll. And Pete Carroll is running around them like a B score left and right. Not only is he significantly smaller than them, he’s also in his 60s and these guys are in their 20s. But it’s his mentality of just, it doesn’t matter what he’s doing. If it’s a hot dog eating contest, or it’s a football game, he is going to find a way to win. I love that. For me, mine is very simple as well. Mine is better every day. And that’s really born out of history for me. You know, there’s two big influences there. One is, you know, I grew up playing sports, every sport that I could get my hands on, but I really gravitated towards baseball, and then was able to go on and play division one college And so just my nature is I’m extremely competitive, not just externally but also internally, I always want to find ways to get better and to learn and to really build my skills that as time goes along. And then the other influence of that was actually my my family growing up. My dad was an amazing man, coached, every sport that I played in, I was an only child. So we spent a ton of time with me. I was the best man at my wedding. I truly adored him. But during our journey, when I was growing up, he worked in oil and gas, and he had to extended periods where he was out of work when the economy just really took a fall. One time he was out of work for 14 months and other time for 17 months, but he was always hustling, going out and trying to find things to bring income to the family. And I remember when I was young, and the first appeared that he was out of work is probably seven or eight years old. He was cutting firewood to make money for a company and he had a chainsaw and the chainsaw back kicked off the tree, hit his leg and he almost lost his leg. He had a gnarly scar until the day he passed from where that had happened. And I just had this immense amount of respect for him to go out and do that. And it’s where this concept of the healthy state of paranoia comes from, I’ve always got to be really, you know, focused on creating growth, because you never know what tomorrow is going to bring. I work for two partners in the channel that basically went bankrupt. And at the end of the day, I only had so much control there, but I needed to be able to find ways to grow and that’s what really inspires me to make sure that I have as much say, on the outcomes that dictate my life as I can. And in order to control that as best I can. It’s all about getting better every single day and that then makes its way down into those three columns of what makes a great PDM in my mind,
Vince Menzione 52:48
wow. So a lot to unpack here. First of all, Dr. Michael Gervais, I’m a huge fan as well. I sat through some of the training or participated in some of the training within and you know, met and listened to Pete Carroll. So your dad was an amazing role model. I was getting kind of goosebumps, a little choked up here just listening to his personal story, and then better every day. So that’s a that’s a great, it’s so short, but like, what’s the mindset that you go into every day with a mindset that says today, I’m going to do something better than I did yesterday? How do you do that? I do.
Brent Combest 53:19
So there’s a couple things that that really helped me a lot in that regard. One is I devote an hour every morning to doing nothing but looking at data, how’s the business performing? Where do I need to apply attention or extra muscle to be able to help this become its very best that it can be? And that’s the mindset that I have. It’s not, it’s not to go in there and be negative about, oh, this is bad. We’ve got to find a way to fix it. It’s where can I do better? And how do I improve that and so that, that is really how I start my day, every single day is going through that. The other is, is I’m a tenacious kind of note taker and they’re scribbles either on one note or even on the pad of paper that I have in front of me and all the business reviews and I’m constantly looking for things that I can dive into to learn more about, and I love to go out and quickly consume information to get myself up to speed about it. And my goal with doing that is not to become an expert by trying to read something, it’s to inform myself enough where I can start the journey of asking the questions that leads me to the next one. And then I start to go through that process of asking constantly asking why, until I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on it.
Vince Menzione 54:25
That’s really great advice for our listeners better every day, and I love your best practices around that. Brent, this is really terrific. You know, Brian, I know you have a compressed amount of time. And I want to thank you so much for spending the time with our listeners today. And so you’ve been an amazing guest. Do you have any closing thoughts or remarks for our listeners?
Brent Combest 54:45
Yeah, I do. And Vince, thank you so much for bringing me on not just once, but twice. I greatly appreciate it. I would say you know, if you take one thing away from our chat today and the points that I made, find a way to understand what you’re passionate about what you’re doing. legacy is that you want to leave help to start to define that legacy. It may change over time, it may grow and swell as you learn more and aspire to accomplish more. But stay true to that and find experiences and people that can be a participant in it. And then don’t just make it about yourself. Part of the the entire point of leaving a legacy is how you made other people feel and how you help them along the way. So everything that you get in building up yourself to achieve that legacy, make sure that you flow back out and deliver even more to the people around you.
Vince Menzione 55:33
Just amazing advice. And thank you so much for being a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering Brent.