SUMMARY KEYWORDS
marketplace, partnering, cloud providers, organization, cloud, tackle, customer, isvs, big, sellers, channel, buyers, business, journey, sanjay, teams, solutions, podcast, strategy, vince
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Sanjay Mehta, Vince Menzione
Announcer 00:00
Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione. a proven industry sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.
Vince Menzione 00:23
Welcome to or Welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering where technology leaders come to optimize results through successful partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships, right, optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. marketplaces. They are becoming the driving force for the future of partnering. And each of the hyper scalars sees this as a fundamental principle and pillar to their strategy. If it’s not already a core component of your strategy, or even if it is, you won’t want to miss this episode. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Sanjay Mehta, the chief cloud Officer of tackle IO tackle i o is focused on removing friction for b2b selling of cloud solutions through marketplaces. And I was excited to welcome Sanjay to discuss how cloud marketplaces are becoming the channel, how his organization is enabling the transformation for SAS software organizations and other partner types. And why organizations should consider tackle I Oh, I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed my time with Sanjay Mehta. So before we dive into this interview, I want to take a moment and just say thank you, I am so blessed to have so many incredible listeners, like you come like, share, follow, and listen to Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I’m so grateful for your support as we bring the best in the business to share leadership principles, learnings, and help leaders like you achieve your greatest results. So stay tuned. As halfway through this interview, I’m going to share a couple of shout outs to some of you. And thank you for your amazing support. Sanjay, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Vince, it’s awesome to be here. hope you’re well, I am so excited to welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You’re the chief cloud officer at tackle IO, a company focused on removing friction for b2b selling of cloud solutions through marketplaces. And I can’t wait for our discussion today. Really excited for it as well. So for listeners who might not know tackle IO, can you explain the mission of the organization and your role? Absolutely.
Sanjay Mehta 02:53
So tackle helps ISVs accelerate the path to meaningful revenue with their cloud partners. When you think a cloud transformation, most folks just go to kind of technology transformation. But it really just starts there. The whole nature of how people are discovering, trying and ultimately purchasing their software in their SaaS solutions is changing as well. And ISVs are trying to respond to that. And like any change, it’s difficult. So tackle helps ISVs whether they’re early stage startups or very well established companies navigate that journey with a big cloud marketplaces like AWS and Google Cloud and Microsoft and his chief cloud officer to tackle. I lead up our partnership teams, I help drive some strategy. And I take that knowledge and worked closely with our customers to really help them get the most out of their cloud partnerships and their related go to market journeys.
Vince Menzione 03:42
So dive in a little bit more deeply with us, right, because we’ve been all talking about marketplaces. And we’re going to dive in specifically around the marketplace concept. But specifically, what do you do to enable these organizations around marketplaces?
Sanjay Mehta 03:57
Yes, sir, to think of it from an ISV perspective, I think there’s a misperception that if you list your product in the marketplace, all the buyers will come right Kevin customer and feel the dreams all the buyers just emerge out of the cornfields and buy your product. But that’s not actually the case. And the other reality is that listing your product, while the cloud providers try to make it as easy as possible, it does generally take your product teams to prioritize development cycles to make that happen. So if you’re an AI vendor, or an IoT vendor or security vendor and observability vendor to go to your product teams and say, Hey, I need two or three guys for three or four months to build out marketplace support maybe for one marketplace, maybe for multiple marketplaces, you’re having an internal discussion around where does that fit in the priority stack of things to do and we’d like to say, engineers don’t like to build software to sell software, they want to innovate in what they’re great at, right? Whatever the technology discipline that they’re great at. So to build software, just to sell it is is a hard internal sell. And then once you’re up and listed Things change, right? The cloud provider is innovative and amazingly fast paced. And as new services or extensions come out around those marketplaces, you have to keep your stuff up to speed. So tackle helps alleviate all of that by offering a platform, that’s a no code or very low code approach to getting your solutions up and listed in the marketplace. And that’s just the product side, when you think about, I want to go to market right now that I have my product listed, I want to help my buyers on a journey to maybe find my products and marketplace or maybe trial the marketplace and ultimately purchase them in marketplace. What does that mean for your own organization and, and if you’re well established, and you’ve been entrenched of direct sales and channel sales, there’s a lot of behavior change that happens. If you’re maybe a newer organization and your go to market is fundamentally around marketplace, maybe you’re doing 70% 80% 90% of your business in a marketplace without your desire, maybe it’s a little bit easier, but still still a lot to get your arms around.
Vince Menzione 05:56
So what are you doing specifically to enable organizations on their co selling?
Sanjay Mehta 05:59
So we do a few things. One is we understand the program’s really, really well. And well, at the high level, all marketplaces are the same, right? You put your products there, buyers discover them, there’s purchasing that happens. There’s subtle intricacies across all of the major cloud providers from the types of contracts you can do to the Cosell motions that happen to how the channel is or is not involved. So we have a team of folks that complement our platform that help understand what our customers are trying to do, what cloud partners they’re trying to do business with, how their alignments happening at a field level, what programs they may have access to, or maybe what they need to achieve to get access to higher level programs. And then we help them make those connections with the cloud providers themselves. Nice.
Vince Menzione 06:43
Nice. You know, we’ve had all seen this rapid rise in digital transformation. We’ve been discussing what’s happened in the last 18 months or so and time like no other and what seven years of transformation in one year. I think IDC said, and partnering is changing. In fact, we’ve had Jay McBain I know, you know, Jay, we’ve had him as a guest here multiple times on the podcast. Recently, we talked about the fact that you know, there’s 76% of CEOs today in every industry in every geography, believe their current business model will be unrecognizable in five years. What are you seeing today that’s indicating in that direction that’s leading in that direction?
Sanjay Mehta 07:22
Yeah, you’re right, I follow Jay pretty closely. And I think he’s right. And whether it’s five years or six years, who knows. But there’s, there’s no doubt that the way sellers sell and the way buyers buy is fundamentally changing. And the doomsday errs will say what’s going to happen to the current channel, and if you’re a partner of Microsoft, or a big established vendor, the odds are you have 1000s, and 1000s of partners all around the world, and they’re not going to go away tomorrow. And they’re not going to go away in four or five years. They offer great services, they have great connections to customers and all of those things. But there’s no doubt that change is happening. So I think it was Gartner who came out and said that the b2b software procurement market is about a $500 billion market every year. And if you look at the big cloud marketplaces, they’re starting to make a dent in that and they don’t publish those numbers specifically, but it’s probably a single digit percentage. So it’s, it’s in a way, early days. But if you look at the types of buyers that are showing up, some of the biggest, most recognizable brands on the planet, are purchasing through marketplaces. And the cloud providers are making it really, really attractive to do so with, with programs and incentives and orchestration with from a technology perspective. So the buyers are coming. And the sellers are pivoting that way as well and saying, All right, how do I get the most out of these marketplaces to reach these massive pools of buyers, because the reality is the big cloud vendors represent access to the biggest buyers on the planet, right, and 1000s and 1000s of them. So you’ve got this convergence of buyers and sellers saying something’s got to be different. And then the pandemic introduced something interesting, which was suddenly, the days of sending your salesperson and your sales engineer and maybe a sales manager and maybe a Solutions Architect to a customer site to run a proof of concept and fend off the competition and position against the customer requirements. Suddenly, all that happened remotely. And as you can see in the stock market, like companies are doing pretty well, right software companies are doing pretty well. So that dynamic change. And then the other thing that I think really changed in that is the journey that a customer takes to discover software is is constantly changing. And every year, they get a little bit further down the path of evaluating a solution before they ever want to talk to a vendor, right. And vendors are adapting to that with a product led growth strategy and saying how do we get our products out there in a way where buyers can experiment with those things in a very low touch or tech touch way and then at the right time will engage to talk about a bigger deployment, enterprise discount or anything like that. So you’ve got all these dynamics that are happening that think Jay is exactly right. There’s going to be sweeping changes and help people adjust the market in the coming years. And it’s happening right now.
Vince Menzione 09:51
Yeah, I refer to as the consumerization of it in some respects. And Jay talked about the five seats at the table the influence strategy and it’s also why part ships are still very important, but the role of the partner has changed, right? Because the customer is relying on their trusted advisors who may represent other technology vendors complimentary or support vendors that they’re working with in order to make that decision, as you say,
Sanjay Mehta 10:17
you know, when I look at buyers, I think, a really basic level, you know, what customers want is they want to know they’re getting a solution that is trusted by their peers, right? I want to be at least as good as my peers may be better. And I want to know that the price I paid is fair for the number of widgets that I bought, right? And if you start to think about big cloud reference architectures, the data is there, right? It’s maybe not there publicly at the privately folks know, what’s being deployed, what’s being purchased, what solutions pair up well with one another. So that dynamics really being established, I think that if you look at the traditional channel, the ones that are really leaning forward, are transforming their businesses from product resale with a little bit of services to being really heavy on cloud services, where product helps fulfill the journey. And I think those are going to be the winners in the channel, ultimately. And they’ll help you have maybe their own little version of private marketplaces that say, Hey, Mr. Customer, these are the trusted solutions we deploy. Much like we always had recommendations in the old world. But in the new world, there’s more automation, there’s more orchestration, there’s maybe centralized buying, there’s standardized contracting, all these things that ease the entirety of a procurement and deployment cycle, that may be a little bit harder kind of pre cloud.
Vince Menzione 11:33
You know, as somebody who’s sat on both sides, you know, it was a GM at Microsoft, and then I went to become a channel chief at a billion dollar ISV. You know, there was a lot of friction, working across the two organizations, because we didn’t use marketplaces, right, we had to go through the whole traditional process, you know, size, quote, procure, enable all those pieces. And, you know, the partner on the other side is kind of waiting on the other side, they’re not able to engage where I think when a marketplace concept, it’s a lot easier for your selling your co selling partner to kind of point the customer in the right direction, or kind of point them to a specific solution, or even if it’s a private offer in the marketplace, seems to be a lot easier, a lot less friction in that process.
Sanjay Mehta 12:19
So a tackle, we use the marketplaces ourselves. And the benefit of that is we get super close to those cloud partners. And we figure out those Cosell programs ourselves, we figure out if you want to work with AWS or Microsoft and their Cosell programs, and you want to work with a partner center, you want to work with ace, how do you do that inside of your organization? What does it mean for the partner organization? How do you create those links? What does it mean from a seller compensation perspective, and then we translate all of that knowledge into something that our ISV customers can use on the tackle platform. So I would say that the big mistake people make is they see these cloud providers is the path the lots of customers, and they go with their hands out and ask for help. And they forget that there are 1000s and 1000s of global ISVs doing the exact same thing in what you need to do is differentiate and figure out how do you help that cloud partner actually help their customer be more successful. And if you can figure out that motion, and get a couple of early design wins, and then be smart enough to take those design wins and market back to the cloud partners, right? Because there’s a lot of noise that they hear and their selling community and say, Hey, this is how we help this customer with this use case, on this part of their journey, and then start to replicate that you can really get that flywheel going. And suddenly the coastal motions can be can be really, really awesome.
Vince Menzione 13:32
I love what you have to say here. It resonates so much with what I teach organizations around, right. So this whole first of all, the shiny quarter and a bucket full of shiny quarters that a standout what what’s the what’s in it for me for the seller on the other side that a lot of organizations struggle with their value proposition? And the what’s in it for me, for the partner that they’re working with? And how do I align on your scorecard? How does our joint solution aligned to help both organizations be successful?
Sanjay Mehta 13:59
Yeah, and I love the last point you made around goals, right? And when you look at these cloud provider organizations with, you know, 10s of 1000s of employees, working with them is not some consistent recipe, depending on who you’re working with. Maybe you’re working with an enterprise sales team, maybe you’re working with a vertical sales team, maybe you’re working with a startup team, maybe you’re working with somebody who takes care of a VC portfolio, and all have different metrics based on where their customers are in their transformation journey, right? So maybe it’s we just need to get a lot of folks listed. We need a big catalog in our marketplace, maybe it’s our catalogs pretty good, but we need more people transacting and we want to see more private offers, or maybe they have a big public offer motion to to find some buyer lead kind of product lead growth, or maybe they’re really trying to drive top line. And if you don’t understand what the goals are for the particular person or group that you’re trying to work with, you’re not going to get very far. So I love that adjective there.
Vince Menzione 14:53
So this next question, you know, I’m going to take a quote directly from an announcement about your organization. was written by Martin casado, the general manager from the VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz. And what he said in the announcement was cloud marketplaces aren’t just one more channel for selling software, it’s becoming the channel. Can you comment on that?
Sanjay Mehta 15:17
Yeah. So we’re really lucky attackable to have Andreessen Horowitz is an investor, and Martine is a board member. He’s a brilliant product guy in a category creator. So we’re really lucky to have brought them into the family earlier this year. You know, I think that if you look at the journey to marketplace for particularly established ISVs, the mistake most people make is they treat marketplace as just another channel, right? Maybe I’ve got some really big national partners, the names we know and respect, maybe a CD W and s, h, II and optiver, whatever in this country or a computer center or softcat. And in, in Europe, and if you don’t get intentional about it, and you say, Alright, the Alliance’s team will do something with the alliances, partners, and the sales team will try to figure it out and wrestle with compensation things in the channel team will try to figure out, maybe we’ll have you take care of marketplaces 10% of your job, or 20% of your job. And don’t forget about the other partners, and everybody owns a piece of the puzzle than the reality is nobody owns anything. So one of the things we’re starting to see is the emergence of this title chief cloud officer. And it’s a very intentional reason that we established a tackle, which is, if you really want to move to a marketplace, 50% of the challenge, maybe more is going to be internal. And you need to empower somebody who has a break glass mentality, and the credibility in the organization, and the dedication to that organization to go out and break that glass because you’re going to need to look at how do I sell or sell today? And how is that going to change if you’re going to move towards embracing consumption buying where traditionally you’ve done enterprise software licensing, that’s going to be a massive shift for your business, a shift for your compensation plans, a shift for how you book deals, a shift for how you recognize revenue, a shift for maybe how your channels involved. So you really got to look at holistically and as the flywheel starts to turn and the business starts to get bigger than your business is going to expect the same things they did in a pre market late place world. So your chief revenue officer is going to say, where’s my pipeline? And where are my deals? Right? I put out private offers, where are they? How fast are they converting and the converting faster or slower is my margin better or worse, your CFO is gonna want to know about margin and dsos. And why your DSO is different across the different cloud providers and your legal team is going to want to know. So sometimes we sell the software, but sometimes I have a channel and their reseller record, but then in certain marketplaces, they’re actually the seller of record rates. So there are all these complexities that you need to consider when you’re shifting. And if somebody doesn’t own it, it’s just this forever going bowling spaghetti, where you’re just gonna get tangled up amongst your own your own staff, that the outside of the external marketplace piece is actually a lot easier, in my opinion, right? So the internal stuffs really hard the external side, you’ve got the biggest companies on the planet, convincing buyers to go down a different path, and an easier path and a more sustainable path and a more profitable path. So that part’s actually you got a lot of people working for you, the real thing is figuring out your internal house. So where do your channel partners play here now in the marketplace?
Vince Menzione 18:19
I think I know the answer. But I want our listeners to hear.
Sanjay Mehta 18:21
Yeah, so the channels really got an opportunity. I think if you go back five or six years ago, and it really early days and marketplaces, I think the channel was a bit scared might be a harsh word, but thinking, alright, are these marketplaces gonna cannibalize my business. And that was probably a fair assessment back then. But what you’ve seen is that the big cloud providers have figured out that the channel actually does a couple of things. One provides a lot of value around services, has amazing reach to customers in terms of stickiness, and already controls a lot of the software portfolio that the cloud marketplaces are getting involved in. So you saw the cloud marketplaces start to pivot to say, how do we embrace and scale through partnerships with the more traditional channel, as opposed to trying to create, you know, the future channel, if you will. So, I think if you’re a more boutique firm, and you’re not really paying attention to cloud, you could be in some trouble. But if you’re getting out ahead of this, and you’re transforming your business, just like the end customers, transforming theirs, and the software vendors are transforming, there’s, I think it’s actually a tremendous opportunity. And even today, I think there are handfuls of channel partners doing this well out of 1000s. So it’s definitely not too late to get in the game.
Vince Menzione 19:32
Yeah, I think you know, it reminded me the conversation way back in the early aughts around like the internet is going to basically eliminate sales, it was going to eliminate b2b sales. It was going to take all these things away and what what you’re really seeing is the role is just changing somewhat, right, these channel partners, they provide scale, they own the licenses, they have, you know, hundreds of 1000s millions of feet on the street, and they have relationships and they can bring these solutions. That are now being the vehicles the marketplace. But the transaction is happening buyer to seller.
Sanjay Mehta 20:05
Yeah. And if the channel wants to be in the middle of that they can be if they want to just be there to support from services they can be. So they actually have choice them in what they want the next version of their business to look like. I just think they need to be intentional about what they want it to look like,
Vince Menzione 20:20
yeah, and determining what their value is their highest, highest and greatest purpose and value. So thank you again for making this a great week for Ultimate Guide to partnering. This week, we ranked consistently in Apple technology, Business News, in the top 250. And in fact, we ranked as high as 88 this week, which is just incredible. And I’m so grateful for you. So let me read these incredible shout outs, and reviews and apple and we’re going to provide links in our show notes. If you’d like to leave a review. The first is from an industry friend and someone who’s been a guest here and Ultimate Guide to partnering Mark Monday, five star content, the most important podcast and the tech ecosystem today, the industry has changed dramatically in the last three to five years. And Vince Menzione is tracking the lightspeed shifts with this important podcast. Old naming conventions and taxonomies are being eviscerated by emerging models. That cloud is ubiquitous. Customers demand more and more. It’s no longer enough for tech companies to sell di t it’s all about meaningful customer business impacts. Vince brings great guests innovative ideas and compassion to the podcast each episode, I highly recommend this one. Mark, thank you so much. It is just I’m humbled by those amazing words. Thank you so much for your support. And the second one from Robert Hanson’s. Vince is amazing. Love this podcast so much. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much, Robert. And thank you to each of you for listening, following liking, sharing, and being part of this community. I so appreciate you. So what are you seeing specifically from the big three when it comes to marketplaces,
Sanjay Mehta 22:10
they’re all really serious about it. If you want a few years ago, you could you could debate like they’re all gonna lean in or not lean in and it’s beyond the big three, right? You. You see all the cloud doing it, you see IBM Red Hat, get more serious about their marketplace, VMware, Oracle, Atlassian, CrowdStrike, right. Like lots of folks looking at marketplaces in lots of different ways. But when you talk about the big three, the AWS, the Microsoft that Google you, I think it’s interesting if you think about those organizations, with hundreds of different services, right marketplaces themselves are competing for resource, but they’ve definitely arrived on the scenes and buyers have embraced. So you’re seeing a ton of innovation. There’s There’s no doubt about that in terms of how far the marketplace can extend into areas not just around procurement, but around deployment, around orchestration, around governance and things like that, you’re sort of starting to see more and more international flair. So marketplaces were kind of a US centric phenomenon for a long time. But certainly you’re seeing that extend you’ve seen features around geo fencing, for instance, come into play, so you can kind of lock pricing based on particular geographies, which a lot of ISVs do and that needed to be embraced in a marketplace world, you’re hearing more and more about support of local language and local currency. So I think the international flair is gonna change a lot and just the overall geopolitical climate that’s happening around data privacy and SAS solutions. I think the next few years is going to be super interesting that helped marketplaces, embrace that and how ISP support that you’re seeing tons of programs on making it more and more attractive for the buyers from have cloud services to buy through cloud marketplaces. So lots of incentives there. And you’re also seeing incentives for the sellers, the sales teams within the cloud providers to embrace marketplace. So, again, I think that that piece is getting so much attention that ISVs just need to figure out how to latch to it like how do you be a barnacle to that thing, because that is a whale that’s moving really, really fast, and then just get your internal house in order.
Vince Menzione 24:09
You know, we’ve been talking about marketplaces for quite some time. And it seems like it’s being embraced. It seems like everyone is now getting very serious Microsoft, the announcements that they made the one announcement to me that resonated, the greatest from inspire was around the marketplace changes. And the the reduction in fees. I’ve seen many organizations still struggling with the perception and execution of a marketplace strategy. What are you seeing on your site?
Sanjay Mehta 24:37
Yeah, Microsoft certainly made a big splash and they’re combining that a lot of different marketplaces right there, the Azure marketplace and App Store and something different for teams and this and that, I think, probably a dozen or more marketplaces and they combined them all under commercial marketplace, which to me is another sign that they’re really, really serious. And then they made some moves around fees. And to me, that’s another sign that they’re really really serious. And if you look at Most of the big marketplaces over time, they have made adjustments to make marketplace selling simpler. Five or six years ago, folks had pretty complicated tables of different types of solutions and different tiers and this and that, and everything over time is getting simpler. It’s not surprising that Microsoft would come out with a with a big statement like that. And I think every cloud provider has their own advantages. Microsoft’s got a really big ecosystem, right? for a lot of years that they’re, they’re trying to leverage and AWS had some first mover advantage, and Google has awesome compute advantage, and whatever it is, right? lots of lots of examples you could go into. So I think all of those steps that that happen. And when somebody like Satya is up on stage talking about marketplace. I think that’s an awesome thing for industry. And I think you see that across across all the cloud providers and all the big conferences.
Vince Menzione 25:45
What about the perception and execution of a marketplace strategy? Why do you think organizations still struggle here?
Sanjay Mehta 25:51
I think it’s baver change. Like, fundamentally, I guess, maybe I’ll back up and say two things. One is marketplace knowledge isn’t that prolific. If you want to go grab that marketplace person and bring them into your business to be the expert. It’s not like they’re a dime a dozen. So certainly, that’s why a lot of the big cloud providers send their ISP is to tackle to get help, because we’ve consolidated a lot of those brains that we’ve we’ve found along the journey, myself included, and then brought them into tackle. So I think that’s one big piece. And then, then the next one is the one I touched on, which is the organizations that I see struggle, haven’t put themselves in a position to win. And they didn’t make it somebody’s job to win in that. And they didn’t make it somebody’s job to actually cause the change. And to break the glass actually helped folks on the journey. Before tackle, I was in a big cybersecurity company with almost 1000 sellers globally. And if you want to change the sell the behavior of 1000 sellers, some days, it feels like you’re going one by one, right? When you get lucky, it feels a little better than that. But behavior change doesn’t happen quickly, particularly when you’re talking about compensation and playing with somebody’s wallet. And until somebody sees somebody else succeeding and winning customers and having good customer outcomes, and also getting paid and that success. And he’s a good advertising, he’s good proliferated. And once you see that, you can start to see the tide start to turn a little bit, but to turn it into a wave take some time. So you know, we ran a, we called the marketplace sellers experience a few weeks back, and we had CrowdStrike, and a cloud guru and f5, and Barracuda networks, some of the best names and marketplace selling on board. And if you just Google marketplace, seller experience tackle, you’ll you’ll find all the recordings. And you I think one common theme, you’ll find there is commitment. And if you want your marketplace journey to work, it’s not something that’s just going to produce fruit in two or three months, right, it’s a year to year real journey to really make a transformative effort inside of your organization. And, and that takes the C suite all agreements important and that that cloud provider relationships important. So I think that’s where most people trip up.
Vince Menzione 27:55
I love what you had to say about commitment. I talked about it as extreme commitment. It’s one of the principles of successful partnering from my lens. And you’re right, the executive suite, everyone up and down the organization, across the boardroom have to all agree and be aligned and committed and execute upon the strategy.
Sanjay Mehta 28:12
Yeah, and it’s lacking a lot. You see marketplace journeys, is changing a bit. But historically, marketplace journey started with Alliance teams or partner teams, that were looking for one more edge with a cloud provider. And I guess the other the other group that was involved early was generally a product team, right, and maybe a team you needed to convince. As the business grows and the marketplaces grow, we’re seeing more CEOs get involved, we’re seeing more CFOs get involved. And ultimately, I think we’ll see more CEOs get involved in George Kurtz put out a piece yesterday on CrowdStrike and talked a lot about competition, but then also talked about marketplaces. And he’s been pretty loud on that. And when you see a pretty faint CEO, talking about marketplaces, part of his growth strategy, I think that’s the type of thing that catches on.
Vince Menzione 28:55
Yeah, we’ll provide links to both of these links in our show notes that you’ve referenced here. Fantastic. So what companies are best candidates to work with you and your organization?
Sanjay Mehta 29:06
It ranges and we’ve we’ve structured our team accordingly. So from early stage companies, where they’re thinking about their overall go to market strategy, they haven’t developed a direct sales force, they haven’t developed a channel, maybe their, their venture arm is talking about marketplaces relationship with a cloud provider. So we see series A startups get involved with us. And we also see the biggest software companies in the world get involved with us, which is really exciting. And we see them come to tackle, sometimes to get listed, and sometimes when they’re actually pretty advanced in their journey, and they may already be doing 10s of millions of dollars and hundreds or 1000s of offers. And they figure out that it’s just not something they need to be expert at. They want to innovate in their category. They don’t want to spend a ton of time on product teams, operations, teams, sales teams, program teams, and everything else to figure out these marketplaces. So it was a bit surprising. To me, before I came to tackle that, that well established marketplace, sellers would, would do that. But we see it fairly regularly. So we can really help anybody. And we spend a lot of time making sure we advise V’s that come to us and say, listen, every cloud marketplace, we think that’s actually a big mistake. And you talked about it a bit as well, like the commitment that you have nothing, you’re only in your organization, but to the cloud provider matters. So if you just smear it like peanut butter, you’re not going to get very far. So who are you trying to align with? Why are you trying to align with why is that good for them and their customers and then list, right and get started and maybe add solutions. And then maybe over time, you should extend further. So we really walk through that with a customer regardless of where they are to make sure they’re, they just know why they’re doing what they’re doing. And not just trying to tick a box,
Vince Menzione 30:43
Sanjay, if our listeners want to reach out to you, they’re interested, how might they do so.
Sanjay Mehta 30:49
So at tackle we, we really appreciate the position we’ve established in marketplaces. So we put out a ton of resources, I would encourage listeners to hit tackle i O. If you go to just plain old tackle comm you’ll end up at Bass Pro Shop. So tackle.io important difference there. But we have lots of information for different types of personas on where they are in the marketplace journey in their company. So I would certainly encourage you to take those down, we’ve got lots of ways to contact tackle from the website, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn, I’m always curious to talk to folks who are curious about marketplace, whether they’re advanced, or whether they’re a novice, I can always learn something. And hopefully I can always give something as well. So lots of easy ways to get a hold of tackle
Vince Menzione 31:30
an exciting topic and exciting time and an exciting company. So really great to have you today. As you might know, I love sharing with our listeners, how people got to this particular spot in their career, and I’m fascinated by the career journey. Was there a spark or pivot that got Sanjay here?
Sanjay Mehta 31:51
Yeah, it really happened over the last decade. So before tech lab was at Trend Micro and after a few years of my decade long career there, I got really lucky. And my president said, Would you be willing to move to Australia and run the business down for Australia, New Zealand. So if anybody ever asked you that question, your answer should be yes. It’s amazing, both professionally, and personally. And on the professional side, that part of the world tends to lean into technology really, really early. So they virtualized really fast in Australia. And when I got down there in 2012, it didn’t take me very long to figure out that there was a lot of cloud movement. And it surprised me a bit because the big cloud providers didn’t have a point of presence in the land, right. So folks who were in financial institutions, were leveraging AWS, but they were actually hauling everything back to data centers in the US. So not not what you might have expected. But I remember sitting down with one of the top financial providers in Queensland, and we’re talking about security for their both their data center environment as well as their cloud environment. And they said, How do we pay for this? And my answer was, how do you how would you like to get all set back. And we literally crafted a consumption model, not on a napkin, but on a whiteboard. And from there, it turns into, you know what marketplaces today. So along the way, I got deeper and deeper and deeper with with the cloud providers and with AWS, in particular in the marketplace. And I learned a lot. And I came back to the US, I was running the US doing a lot of these deals, getting closer and closer to the cloud providers. And at some point, I got introduced to one of the co founders at tackle, Brian denker, or COO, and I met him early 2020, just before the pandemic, we got along, he invited me to the advisory board, which was an offer I didn’t want to pass up. So I got to know the executive team more get to know the customers more I get to know value proposition more. And then one day, I was talking to our CEO, john Yankee about some ideas. And he’s like, those are great ideas when you come to tackle and try him out. And to your point, like the thing that was the spark was like, man, marketplace knowledge is really pretty limited on the planet right now. And I could do a lot to help the current company I’m with or I could really try to shape the industry. And it’s not often you’re you’re presented with an opportunity like that. So after a great run with a truly fantastic company, I just kind of decided it was time to shift gears and, and shoot for the stars.
Vince Menzione 34:11
That’s fascinating. Was there one best piece of advice you received?
Sanjay Mehta 34:15
I might do, too. And what I touched on earlier, which is that make sure you know what’s in it for the cloud provider. I see that mistake all the time. So I would do that for sure. And the other one, I learned hard lessons early in my career. And then I’ve helped others understand it later, which is I say find the juice. And when you look at how folks go to market, that everybody gets trade on some sort of qualification criteria, and maybe it’s banter. Maybe it’s just budget to, you know, access to power, whatever it is. And I think a lot of times people forget to find the juice. And there are so many folks who can say no, inside your own organization inside the cloud provider inside the cloud providers, customer. Lots and lots of folks can say no very few people can say yes If you can find the people with the juice, and maybe they’re the budget owner, and maybe they’re not, but they’re not an influencer, they’re bigger than an influencer. If you’re driving marketplace transformation in your organization, you need the juice. If you don’t have it, you better go find it. And then you got to extend that same thing across the rest of the ecosystem,
Vince Menzione 35:16
find the juice. So I learned quite a bit in my early career about win results, which was a concept of like, find out what the personal win, what’s the win for that person? Is that a similar concept?
Sanjay Mehta 35:27
Yeah. So I mean, you know, big organizations have big priorities. And the folks who can impact and shift those priorities are few. And if you’re trying to align, you need to understand, we talked about the goal alignment, maybe at a more skip level, or organizational group. But if you truly want to make a transformative effort for your business and align with a cloud provider, you need massive sponsorship to make that happen. So I was I would say, find the juice,
Vince Menzione 35:55
find out where how you align to their scorecard, and make sure you’re hitting all the dots. So I’d like to have a little fun here. You know, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit. I’m listening to Spotify a little bit more. Although I still have my podcast on Apple. It’s also on Spotify. And I’ve been building Spotify playlists lately. And I’m wondering from you what enduring songs and we’re gonna limit it to five here, you would place on your playlist if you could only take five songs with you into the future? What would they be and why?
Sanjay Mehta 36:29
So luckily, events are listened to your podcast, thought this question might, might show up. And it’s an interesting one. What most people probably wouldn’t think is that, well, I think all of our musical choices change over time, right? as we as we grow up in a country guy a country fan for since high school. So for many, many years, really? Yeah, dude, every dial on like,
Vince Menzione 36:51
I had you pegged as rock I had you as a rock guy.
Sanjay Mehta 36:55
In high school, I was a Van Halen guy. But you know, we all grew out of Van Halen, or van Hagar. So I probably surprise you, but but I throw some rock ins for sure. So one is I’ve always been a Miranda Lambert fan. I think she’s just a fun person to follow. And she sings a song called the house that built me, which I think is just an amazing thing to listen to, to realize how lucky we all are, and where we came from. And that journey, so I like that song a lot. When I was in high school, I got to see Metallica a few times. And I think I might have had as much of a mullet as I could have had back then. But fade. Fade to Black is I think one of the better guitar riffs out there. So I’d probably a little throw, throw a little metallic in there. I have long been a fan of YouTube. And my wife’s a massive YouTube fan. And the years ago, I think we were in a blockbuster which kind of puts timing on it and the song one came on and maybe 15 seconds into the song you hear Mary J Blige pop in, and it’s really hard to mess with a YouTube song. But when it’s YouTube and Mary J. Blige at the same time, it’s it’s pretty tough to beat. So I would do that one Christmas, we did karaoke. And I sang shotgun writer by Tim McGraw with my daughter, which was pretty special. So she did a much better job than I did. But it was a great memory. And it’s just a song about connection. And you don’t change your shotgun writer, right, so you don’t give up on your partner, which is a great song, and then also the pink thing. And once the world freeze up, and concerts exist again, then certainly one on my list. And she does a recent song with Chris Stapleton who got a ton of respect for him and really admire his work. And they have a little duet with called Love me anyway. And I think I would do that and I would likely be wearing my, one of my pairs Lucchese, cowboy boots while I do it.
Vince Menzione 38:42
So very cool. Very cool. I love it. I love it. We’re gonna share this with our listeners. And look for that link in our show notes. We’re gonna share that I love your list. Totally threw me off because I did. Metallic. I did expect it. I expected a little bit more rock and roll but I love the country. It’s awesome.
Sanjay Mehta 39:00
That’s it comes from the heart. So if you haven’t discovered country music yet, I encourage you to do it.
Vince Menzione 39:06
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I want to thank you. You’ve been an amazing guest, Sanjay. I love what your organization is doing. I feel like this is the future or a lot of organizations are still struggling here. Or maybe have misperceptions is one of the reasons why we’re releasing this episode. So excited to have you as a guest today on Ultimate Guide to partner.
Sanjay Mehta 39:24
Yeah, thanks, Vince. I think you do a ton for the channel community and the guests you bring are amazing some happy to be on that list and wishing you all the continued success.
Vince Menzione 39:33
Thank you so much. Cheers. As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please subscribe on your favorite platform, like comment, tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to partnering and where they can find us and i’d love your feedback. Please like the podcast and provide comments or reach out to me at Vince Menzione on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You can also like and follow Ultimate Guide Partnering on our Facebook page, or drop me a line at Vince m at ultimate dash partnerships.com. This episode of the podcast is sponsored by ultimate partnerships. Ultimate partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships, get partnerships, right, optimize for success, deliver results. For more information, go to ultimate dash partnerships.com
Announcer 40:28
thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering calm and facebook.com slash Ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering