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The CEO of Tackle Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
Bringing you some of the top episodes of the year for this end-of-year round-up.
Are you ready to learn to leverage the massive $200 billion cloud opportunity in Cloud GTM working with leading providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google? Are you interested in learning how to leverage the power of marketplaces to grow your business and reach new customers effectively? Are you dealing with the economic headwinds we’ve all seen this last year? And if you want to hear from an expert, the CEO of a leading company driving effective, go-to-market strategies with the leading cloud providers, you’re in the right place.
John Jahnke is the CEO of Tackle, a company specializing in helping SaaS (Software as a Service) companies accelerate their Cloud Go-to-market strategies. He joins to share how you and your organization need to take advantage of this massive opportunity we’re all seeing around marketplaces and hyper-scalar co-selling. If you’re ready to accelerate your success, you’ll enjoy listening to this insightful interview with this fantastic leader.
In Tackle’s words
John Jahnke was an early investor and advisor in Tackle and now serves as the CEO. John has spent the last 20 years in executive leadership roles with B2B technology companies like Pivotal, Greenplum, EMC, and Cognizant. John is passionate about remote work and helping software companies with their go-to-market strategy. He leads Tackle from Buffalo, NY where he lives with his wife and 3 children. John is an active member of the Forbes Technology Council.
What You’ll Learn
- Tackle’s Mission2:49
- How Tackle started in 2016 with the idea that the clouds would change how software was sold.
- Tackle is investing ahead of the curve.
- The economic headwinds since covid-19.
- Cloud go-to-market is becoming part of the sales tech stack.
- The Genesis of Cloud GTM8:40
- How the organization is aligned and how it needs to align today.
- $755 billion of B2B software
- The early days of cloud go-to-market.
- How much revenue cloud will grow by in 2025.
- The opportunity for acceleration in the cloud marketplaces.13:10
- Acceleration in the cloud go to market.
- Crossing the chasm between early and mainstream adoption.
- The proof is there.
- How to get people on board with driving cloud
- Why it starts with a strategy.18:15
- Advice to large organizations looking to go to market.
- The importance of having a partner-led mindset.
- How to get an alignment at the c-suite level.
- The two spots to start when launching cloud go-to-market.
- Steps to successful cloud go-to-market strategy.24:03
- Selling and maintaining customers is the most expensive part of every software company.
- Five Steps to successful cloud go-to-market
- The Five Steps to Consider?25:56
- The five steps to take to get to cloud go to market.
- Success patterns at scale.
- Success patterns start with the end in mind.
- Selling today is harder than it has been.
- What John is seeing from the “big three”?31:42
- Predictions for the coming months for the big three.
- The coming together marketplace.
- Innovation from a business model and marketplace standpoint.
- The evolution of enterprise agreements.
- His Career Journey to CEO of Tackle?35:59
- How Dylan got started in the startup world.
- How Dylan and his co-founders met.
- Timing is tricky.
- Two distinct answers to the go-to-market question.
- His Ultimate Dinner Party?41:10
- Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Robert Cialdini.
- The seven principles of influence.
- People want to work with people.
- Calls to action for the ISV community.
Other Tackle Leaders Featured on Ultimate Guide to Partnering
Why Ultimate Partner?
Over six years ago, I embarked on a mission to empower partners struggling to navigate the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ultimate Partner, an extraordinary media, events, and advisory company dedicated to transforming your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering Ecosystem Led Growth.
Having witnessed the industry from multiple perspectives – leading a $4.6 billion Ecosystem at Microsoft, spearheading partnerships for a billion-dollar company, and hosting 200 episodes of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® -, I’ve gained invaluable insights and crafted a manifesto of principles to guide your success.
In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead.
Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?”
If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace Ecosystem Led Growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise.
Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cloud, market, company, people, journey, marketplace, channel, isvs, organization, revenue, strategy, product, buyers, talk, cfo, cosell, part, customers, partner, years
SPEAKERS
Vince Menzione, Announcer, John Jahnke
Vince Menzione 00:00
Are you ready to tap into the $200 billion cloud opportunity? Working with the leading providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google? Are you interested in learning how to leverage the power of marketplaces to effectively grow your business and reach new customers? Are you dealing with the economic headwinds we’ve all been seeing this last year? And would you like to hear from an expert, the CEO of a leading company driving effective, go to market strategies with the leading cloud providers, then you’re in the right place.
Announcer 00:38
This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione.
Vince Menzione 00:57
Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to bartering.
01:01
I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And today I will John Young
Vince Menzione 01:06
geek, the CEO of tackle a company that specializes in helping software as a service companies accelerate their cloud go to market strategies. And he joins to share how you and your organization need to take advantage of this massive opportunity we’re all seeing around marketplaces, and hyper scalar. CO selling. If you’re ready to accelerate your success, then you’ll enjoy listening to this insightful interview with this amazing leader. Thank you for joining the ultimate guide to partnering. Today, I’m excited to announce ultimate partners first live digital event winning the ecosystem taking place on July 20. We’re all be joined by Microsoft and the leaders leading this movement to cloud go to market and ecosystem led growth. This will be a companion event to the Microsoft inspire conference where you will learn how to achieve your greatest results in 2024. Please follow the link in our show notes to sign up for this exciting event. Thank you for joining us. John, welcome to the podcast.
John Jahnke 02:17
Thanks for having me, Vince Great to be here.
Vince Menzione 02:19
I am so excited to finally welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering we’ve been trying to do this for quite some time. You’re the CEO of tackle a company that specializes in the SAS and ISV. Space, accelerating cloud go to market strategies. So welcome. Thanks. So I did Jack, you know, we had the opportunity to finally meet in real life. And you know, I know quite a few of your team. I’ve had your chief cloud officer Sonjay as one of my earlier guests. But for our listeners that may have missed that episode, can you tell us a little bit more about tackle.
John Jahnke 02:54
So tackle we actually got started in 2016, and co founder and CTO Dylan had the idea that the clouds would change the way that software was sold. And he was part of one of the cloud providers beta programs for marketplace. This is hard. And in general no one wants to build software to sell software. There’s there’s a repeatable product here. And you know, we raised a seed round with that hypothesis and started to invest and found pretty early success helping make it a business decision to launch cloud go to market instead of a product and engineering challenge. And we were able to work with some really interesting ISVs who who saw the future as well. And we’re investing ahead of the curve because back then it was not as clear what was happening with this movement as it may be it is today. New Relic was our very first customer. And I remember the conversation where they’re like at half of what you say is true we’re in because we’ve been struggling with this. And we really think there’s something great here for our business. And we were born on AWS, but our customers really, it was clear to them. They’re like, hey, we want to meet our buyers where they want to buy. And that’s across the hyper scalars. And this movement is happening across the hyper scalars. And we want a partner who can help us go on that journey. So that led to a phase of innovation to expand in cloud go to market across the hyperscalers. And then, you know, really marketplace was where we started. But that’s kind of the last mile. It’s like the execution of a transaction. And a lot of our customers would say, Well, I really want to better understand how to align cloud go to market with my pipeline. How could we accomplish that this cosell thing is really interesting to us. We think there’s magic to unlock and to sell. But the process is still very human centric, like how could we take that platform style thinking all the way through and that’s where we expanded our capabilities that allow an ISV to analyze their pipeline and make decisions about which of their customers whether their new customers or renewal customers could go on a cloud go to market journey we make that process of partnering with the clouds from a coastal standpoint really seamless, make executing a marketplace a business problem. And we allow you to do that at Super scale. And then the last thing we’ve seen happen, a lot of companies who maybe weren’t ready for it come to the table and say, okay, like the proof is there, how can we do this for all of our products? So it’s a really fascinating time in cloud go to market.
Vince Menzione 05:22
Yeah, it is fascinating. In fact, I had been working with an organization that’s just at that point, right now they’re finally jumping in the water, so to speak, and they’ve been holding back, they’ve been resisting. And it’s funny, I think back to 2016, like, marketplaces, were really not a thing yet. CO selling was at its early days, I was still at the Microsoft side of that equation, and then moved over as a channel cheap. And we were still struggling to get some organizations to understand the value of the whole co selling methodology, why that was important, and why you needed to invest resources in that. So it seems like you got to it early. And then we’ve been talking about these last, well, I’ll call it the economic headwinds we’ve seen since COVID. We’ve seen most recently layoffs and what’s happening in the SAS economy. And then marketplaces, this whole notion around marketplaces being more of a thing. So you’ve coined this term cloud go to market. But can you tell us what it is? And perhaps for our listeners, what it isn’t?
John Jahnke 06:21
Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s funny, we’re always trying to figure out how do we meet our customers where they are on their journey, because go to market in general, is really complicated, and is only getting more complicated. And I think cloud Gouda market is becoming part of that story. But if you rewind a few years, the way people thought about go to market 10 years ago, it was maybe direct and channel, they have their two options for sales. And then you saw, like marketing become a real integral part of go to market as people started to think about their top of funnel differently, and how do I better instrument sales and marketing system together? And then you layer in product lead growth, and everybody was thinking about, Well, how could I make it easier to land, or get people into our product sooner, so they could think about how to get value without ever actually having a formal relationship with us yet. And then you layer cloud into that as a way to complement all of those motions. So we’re on this journey where we think cloud go to market will become a default part of everyone’s sales tech stack. And they’ll be all of these different tools available to companies as they’re being born, to think about how they scale their go to market systems. And I think we’re seeing this shift where companies today are being born, more cloud go to market needed, where they’re saying, hey, as I’m building, as I’m building my go to market system, I want to be able to align where my buyers operate, which most likely is in the clouds. And I want to be able to capitalize on the budget that the cloud providers have in order to make it easier for someone to get started with us. And I think that’s an interesting part of cloud go to market for new companies. But for all these other companies who have all these different layers of glue, go to market clouds a complement to them. And it’s a way to either give your sellers more way to win, give your sellers access to a budget that didn’t exist before, which in this current economic time is a really powerful thing. Give your buyers access to solutions they need faster in order to solve problems.
Vince Menzione 08:40
Well, you bring up an interesting point as you went through that journey, this both the buyers journey and the SAS or ISP vendors journey. And one of the things that strikes me is you look at the hyperscalers, the three hyperscalers, primarily here, and then you look at some of the ISV companies that are moving to SAS, right, not the born in the cloud talked about the board and the cloud ones, we talked about those cloud natives. But those organizations through the model, where I’ve got a channel, I’ve established a business process around the channel, I talk about how the organization is aligned and how it needs to align differently today, because generally the channel is like bolted on to the sales organization. It’s not integrated. And what I think I hear you talking about too, is this integration component, like how do we get as an organization more effective at co selling, not only with our hyper scalar vendors, but with our channel, even within our own organization, driving the resources that are directly touching the customer, with the alliances and partner facing parts of those organizations? Do you agree there?
John Jahnke 09:40
Yeah, I think especially in companies of that vintage, who were maybe born in an era where the capabilities go to market work as significant or robust. Aligning cloud as an option for them to sell in new and modern ways is where we see the benefit happening. And it’s not just the go to market side, these companies are thinking like the nature of the way their buyers using products is changing. Now, these products may have been on prem at one point, they may not have been operating in a SAS or a SAS hybrid style. And so their products are going on a journey, how their customers run are going on a journey, which means go to market has to go on a journey with them. And I was thinking about this from what’s the macro level, who’s met, that’s underway. And you know, there’s this $755 billion of b2b software duckets. And some percentage of that is migrating to the clouds. And is that 1%? Is that 10%? Is that 50%? I think we’re still in the early days, you know, Canalis talks about how, by 2025, they think it’ll be $45 billion, go through it. You know, today, we estimate it right around 15 billion, those numbers are growing about 100% year over year. But if you said 15,000,000,755, it works out to roughly 2%. Today, yeah. And a lot of times when we talk to these more traditional organizations, they’re in the earliest days and the first transaction like changing the way you sell, it’s just like any new channel, when you when you turn the channel on getting your first win is the hardest one. But that helps you build the pattern for repeatability. And a lot of those companies have seen they’ve either done their first win, or they’ve had buyer demand in this new way. And they’re like, how do we capture that? And then how do we go on a journey to what percentage of revenue makes sense to us? And then we do this Data Cloud Marketplace research every year. And this is one of the questions we asked were like, first ISVs? What percentage of revenue Do you think cloud go to market will make up in your organization’s here? And the most common answer was 10%. This year. And when we first saw the data, we’re like, is that a lot? Like? How do I think about that, and when you boil it down here, like a $10 million error, or company having a million dollar channel, it’s probably their first meaningful channel, right? $100 million company having a $10 million channel, it’s likely their fastest growing channel, a billion dollar company having $100 million channel, it’s probably the largest channel in the world, globally scalable, powered by one of the fastest growing budget line items and enterprise technology. So that that story of where people are at in their journey, and even what they think that destination wants to be I love to have that conversation with more mature ISVs to be like, what does good look like to you? Is this the ability to capture a deal or a couple of deals? That’s one thing this is you want to get to 10% of revenue? I mean, this is literally a revenue transformation.
Vince Menzione 12:43
I want to hone in on that Canalis study the 2025 study, right? So for 15 million, I think is the number you use 15 billion
John Jahnke 12:53
to a 45. By 2025. Our data actually said 50 by 2025. But we’re in the ballpark today, like we’re both in both feels like
Vince Menzione 13:01
a pretty aggressive number to achieve in two years. Do you think those stats are accurate? I mean, you said 50, they said 45? Do you feel confident about those stats?
John Jahnke 13:10
I do. I actually think like this is where the current economic climate could we could see acceleration. And I think there’s the opportunity for acceleration for two distinct reasons. One, the durability of the cloud budget during this time of economic instability is really powerful, which I think will drive an acceleration for ISVs, to think about selling the other clouds. And the second is the movement that’s happening channel. And how there has been so much focus from all the cloud providers around this first wave of cloud go to market has proven the second wave is coming. And the second way really does think about how do you align an ISV and our channel partner together to be able to meet the buyer, the way they need to be met with appropriate combination of product and services in order to solve their business now, so I think channel is a turbocharger for this cloud, go to market movement. So those are the two things that cause me to believe, like this actually becomes a gravitational force around this. And the bigger it gets, the more it could excel. Yeah, yeah.
Vince Menzione 14:22
I think you’re right on with that, by the way. And I’ve been in the room with the channel partners and the ISPs having these conversations. And really, the blockers right now have been things like compensation for sales reps, compensation at the channel side, right? top line revenue or versus bottom line. And how do we make it whole for everybody? How do we make this achievable? And a win win win across the organizations? I come back to this a little bit here because it feels like a momentum around marketplaces. We could all feel it right now. Right? We were in the room a couple of weeks ago with a with a host of ISVs and one of the hyperscalers is Seeing it across what are some of the other hyperscalers? You doing? Microsoft has a big event coming up soon here. I’m certain there’s going to be some announcements where marketplace will take center stage. So where are we in the lifecycle? I think about Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, and like one of my favorites, and probably one of their classic books on technology adoption lifecycle. Have we crossed? Are we crossing? Like, are we mainstream yet? And where are we in terms of getting those later adopters? And laggards onboard? What do you think about that, John?
John Jahnke 15:30
Yeah, I think we’ve crossed the chasm. And I think we’re in like, using Geoffrey Moore’s actually, I think we’re in that early majority phase where you see the upslope of the curve, which ties to the growth rates that we’re talking about. And the thing that changes from the early adopters are the pioneers, the visionaries, they see things before, there’s real proof, and they’re willing to make a bet. And that was the people who embarked on this journey back in 2018 2019 2020. Today, the proof is there, there’s so much proof where the mainstream is saying, Okay, there’s clearly something here is this 50% of my revenue, like some of these Borg cloud, go to market needed companies, maybe not, but it’s definitely not zero. When you talk to some of those companies, and you have that percentage of revenue conversation, they’re not talking about $10 million, or $100 million, a percent of revenue is hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which I think is further fuel to those projections, because I had this conversation with someone recently, where they’re like, well, is the cloud, who owns the cloud budget? And how why would that work? Like why would that make sense? Isn’t this owned by like it, or the engineers are? Like, no, actually, Cloud has gone on this journey were in 2018, the cloud budget was probably a departmental budget line item, it was owned, either by like infrastructure, or application engineering, or development or product or whatever you would call it inside your company. And then as it got bigger, it started to move to be a CFO own budget line items where these oftentimes, especially as people are getting out of data centers and rebuilding platforms and products run in the cloud, the cloud becomes one of their top five budget line items. And that’s when the CFO and procurements engaged in thinking about how do I optimize, like, even that shifting of the ownership of budget inside the buyer, I think is another factor outside of that large company transformation.
Vince Menzione 17:32
I would agree there on the CFO side, it’s certainly a large line item, large budget line item. And I’ve seen firsthand the CFO negotiating directly with the hyper scalar leadership team, on those numbers, the whole notion of the durable cloud budgets, I feel like you’ve brought that really to light, I don’t think a couple of years ago, maybe it is because of your focus, and the research of your study. It really helped bring that crystallize that for a lot of these organizations that are there on that journey. What about the ones that aren’t there yet? Like what would you say to them now? Like how would you get them on board with driving this? Obviously, the ones that are resisting the most whether it be channel strategy, whether it just be laggard, mentality mindset within the organization? What do you say to those organizations? Yeah,
John Jahnke 18:18
I actually, this is an area where thinking about just tackle and the journey we’ve gone on as a company, we’re a SaaS company, we built a platform. And that’s the way we thought about the world. How could we help people use our platform in order to go on the street. But as we’ve shifted in the technology, Adoption Lifecycle curve to this more mature company approach, we’ve actually had to evolve our approach because companies like that, they don’t want to start with products, they actually want to start with strategy. And that strategy, oftentimes looks at the executive team, where there’s some education about what’s happening in the market. There’s some storytelling about customers who’ve had success and what powered that success. And then there’s execution, like, how can they get started? Because in in these larger organizations, oftentimes, it’s not a single product discussion. It’s a portfolio of products. And they often have a huge range of buying centers, then I think the best way to start is to focus like choose the spot that makes the most sense to initiate this journey. And you don’t have to go all in you don’t have to say day one, I’m going to get to 10% of revenue, you can say that’s, that’s part of the possible, but how do we go do a real experiment and see how this fits into the system? And I think one of the things we’ve seen over the last three years with large companies is oftentimes they get ground up in their own like, internal discussion, like how is if I launch a cloud, go to market strategy, how is my existing channel going to think exactly? Well, that’s an at scale problem, like, we can self contained that to a spot we’re This is an experiment, our buyers want us to meet them where they want to buy, this is a proven place, we have to experiment and understand how it fits in. And we’re not changing our whole business strategy, we’re doing a go to market experiment. And so back to how do we advise people who are stuck at that spot, we oftentimes will reverse the order and say, let’s start with the executive team. And let’s actually go through that education and enablement process to define what the right strategy is. Because you go too big, too fast, you’re probably going to spend too much money and too much time and not actually have success. And what you really want is the tailwind of revenue and deal acceleration to drive your transformation, not some big picture, press release, and launch that doesn’t actually turn into value for your buyers and sellers.
Vince Menzione 20:50
I’m glad you brought up the C suite or the executive team, because I always talk about this lack of a partner lead mindset and a lot of these organizations, right? Some of these companies that SAS in particular, just a few years ago, the CROs primarily came from a direct selling motion, you didn’t need a channel to sell SAP. And then you’ve got this, I called it the appendage of the channel that’s bolted on to the organization and might be under the CRO it might be in a different pocket. Generally, it’s buried someplace. And it’s owned by a channel chief. And some of these channel chiefs had been around for 30 years. They came from the old. I call it the Boca Raton model, right when IBM launched the PC and the channel got created that whole movement there. And then you got the CFO sitting in the middle saying why am I spending more money on an alliance strategy? I’m giving up revenue here on partners on channels. Oh, I’ve got to pay marketplace fees? How do you think through? Is there a pat answer you have on how you get the alignment at the C suite?
John Jahnke 21:47
Yeah, it’s a great, it’s such a great question. And we haven’t seen like the silver bullet answer here. It ends up being who inside the organization sees the vision, and how to help them go on a journey to bring alignment across the stakeholder gaps. And I’ve had a few conversations with ISVs lately that highlight this, I was talking to a how to channel medium size ISV earlier this week, and they’re like, hey, in this economic downturn, if we can’t tie our impact directly to top a funnel and revenue, people are going to ask questions about why we’re here, right? Like this is the era of productivity. And I think being able to think about it not just from US Strategic what’s our strategy from a partner standpoint, but it’s strategy and execution, which brings that partner leader in the Alliance building the revenue leader directly together? So I think those are traditionally the two spots we’ve started, if we’re talking about launching cloud, go to market, who in the revenue team is on your side, to bring this to life? But what does good look like? And if you don’t have that stakeholder day one, you need to figure out how to get that stakeholder to the table with you to launch and sell. Yeah, okay, we’re in the era of productivity, what value do I get out of the costs in our go to market Cisco? And where do we want to invest more? And where do we need to think about investing less, and there’s complexity here with channel like the cost of channel layered into the cost of selling, but we’re seeing CFOs emerge in those conversations in ways that they weren’t. I’ve seen this happen, where CEOs have a strong desire to evolve their company towards cloud. And they’re disconnected from an execution standpoint, and they actually really want to be able to bring the team together to get to like, how do we go do something together. And we’ve seen that in some of the largest ors in the world, so it’s mostly figuring out who has the vision and how to connect the dots to success, and then use that success to help them drive that broader engagement.
Vince Menzione 23:47
You know, you mentioned peeling back on that client acquisition costs, like if you could get into the numbers that an organization is spending all up on their go to market and their client acquisition costs. And you can say, this is what it’s like in the model today. And this is what it would look like in the future. I think you’ve got a brilliant
John Jahnke 24:04
analysis, there. Still, it’s selling and maintaining your customers is the most expensive part of every software company, and really has yet to be optimized. And we’re not simplifying the problem. We’re making the problem more complicated. So costs are going up in some ways. And I do believe deeply the order with which this happens, we’ll change company by company based upon their product strategy, but every company will have direct sales, every company will have channels, every company will have product lead, and every company will have cloud and those four things will enter their go to market system at different times based upon age of the company, the type of product that they have, and how they think about prioritizing.
Vince Menzione 24:45
good segue here. I got to listen in on your big event. You talked about five steps to successful cloud go to market during that session. Could you take our listeners through what those As five elements were sure,
John Jahnke 25:01
I think when we think about cloud go to market, it starts with strategy. And really your strategy ties to a lot of this executive alignment conversation we’ve been having. But it’s also about your product strategy with the clouds. It’s about your go to market strategy will pick clouds, and then how you’re aligning resources and resources or a combination of people and technology in order to set your destination. And I think about a product person A grew up a go to market person became a product person over time and inside a product you’re constantly iterating are constantly experimenting, you’re constantly seeking to learn from your users. And I think that’s a era we’re in and go to market. We’re in this rapid experimentation era, but you need a strategy. So the second part of that becomes how do you power your strategy with data. And we think very much in like, the outcome that matters to our customers is selling, they want to sell more, they want to sell faster, they want to sell more efficiently. In order to determine the opportunities to go on this journey, you have to start with data and be able to analyze your existing pipeline and your existing customers to make decision about who you can deliver more value to with Cloud gemondo. The third part is around your pipeline for cloud, which really centers around taking the intelligence you get from analyzing your existing customers and existing pipeline, distilling that down to where their focus and then leveraging this magic of cosell, in order to start to accelerate that pipeline. So the third phase is all about connecting with cosell in order to improve the quality of your cloud pipeline over time, the fourth phase is all around marketplace, and really being able to take that pipeline and turn it into revenue in a fast and efficient way. And this is where you get to tap into the cloud budgets, you get to tap into all of the benefits, clouds are investing in order to bring this movement to life. And then the last piece is all around scale. Because doing one deal looks very different than doing 10 looks very different than doing 100 looks very different than being 1000. And this is a multi year evolution, your first deal will be the hardest deal. And they will only get easier from there. But they will create different pain. As you go on that journey, we’ve helped customers go on that entire journey from single transaction to 1000s of transactions. And those who take a long term view are the ones who acknowledge that, okay, we know we’re going to wrap more resources around this in the early days to learn to build the patterns of the future. And then we’re going to take those patterns and teach our organization how to change with success. So those are the five steps that we think about when you go on
Vince Menzione 28:00
this journey. It’s a lot of organizational change in there creating the operational excellence as well to drive that new initiative. And that new model for the organization that use put a stake in the ground with the strategy.
John Jahnke 28:10
Yeah, and this is where, four years ago, there were a lot of unknowns today. Honestly, there are success patterns, at scale, across ISVs of all shapes and sizes, from seed stage, startups being board and cloud go to market needed to growth companies who are investing much more in their go to market and are trying to think about which investments to layer and when to add scale sellers who are selling 10, or 10s of percentage points of revenue to the largest software companies in the world, mostly, are doing this big revenue transformation. There are success patterns across an entire ecosystem.
Vince Menzione 28:50
So that brings up a good point. So what do you see from the best of the best here and the success patterns,
John Jahnke 28:55
starting with the end in mind, like this is a strategic layer to your go to market system. So I think people who win, think about this in a long term way, and then work their way back to what are the steps we take to get to the destination that we want to be. If you are thinking about cloud, go to market for one deal, that can be success, it’s not going to be durable success, it’s not going to become an integrated part of your go to market. So I think the other part, going back to that first point around the like building your strategy, the ISVs who go fastest, have executive alignment, have product strategy alignment, have go to market alignment, and know that they’re going to invest in both people and technology to bring this to life. You can’t make this a side project you can’t like and I say that because so many people have done this as a side project that became their next career. So if you’re starting today, you want someone who’s going to own it and focus on it you want to Tigard To clearly identified who’s going to go execute on transactions, I think like that strategy part is a really key formula. And don’t try to do too much too fast. Oftentimes, we encourage people to start with one hyperscalers, start with one product start with one deal. And people are like, no, no, no, we know this is going to work. We want to launch in all three at the exact same time with all of our products. And really, you can’t, we just do not see that as the success pattern. This is an evolution, I spent a lot of time in the application transformation world like moving applications from on prem to cloud, and it all started with one, what’s the one, we’re gonna go change? And I think this revenue transformation all starts with, what’s the one deal? You’re gonna start with? And then go, I’m not sure,
Vince Menzione 30:49
yeah, I love what you had to say, here, I was thinking about the ones that just do it as a side project, or do it that check the box with the hyperscale, or to say, yeah, we’ve got this marketplace, solution and market now, versus being all in and doing all the things you just discussed. I mean, as this is
John Jahnke 31:06
not the easy button, like there is no magic button for revenue in a software company, especially at this time, if you’re gonna do it, you need to invest in bringing it to life, that’s no different than any other channel partner relationship. And even if you think about you hire a direct seller, and you don’t invest in helping them be successful, odds are, they’re not going to be successful. We all have to acknowledge the fact that selling today is harder than it’s ever been. And we need to lean in to make it successful. If you’re going to take it from a we’ll just throw it we’ll just hang a shingle and hopefully some more calls us on Czar’s animal.
Vince Menzione 31:40
So let’s talk about the hyperscalers. For a moment here, we discuss them briefly earlier. But it seems to me that they’re at different stages in their maturity models as well, I suppose first out of the gate, the most advanced, Microsoft will probably this is just a hunch is going to put big investments when they do their 2020 for Microsoft Inspire. And we were both at the Google event a few weeks back, right where they laid out their plants. What are you seeing from the big three? What is your observation or predictions for the coming months,
John Jahnke 32:12
this is working for all three, sellers are selling buyers are buying. And they’re all at slightly different points in their evolution. And they’re focused on different things. And they’re all going to continue to innovate, which I think will continue to make the domain more complex. And I think with that, the coming together marketplace and cosell has been really fascinating to see over the last couple years because I do think like how those who nail cosell when and when that scale, because it’s one thing to enable someone to list and launch in your marketplace, it’s another thing to be able to let them use your budget, in order to make it easier for their buyer to get access to your technology. It’s a whole nother thing to help them actually sell revenue is strategic to every software company, fast, efficient, productive, global, which I think is another super interesting spot. Because you think about building a go to market team in Grow SAS company, one of the hardest things to do is go global. It’s expensive. When you talk to people, a lot of times they’re not successful, or they take repeated iterations. It’s very channel rich, a lot of channels history there, which increases complexity, like other clouds can help with global, I think is a really interesting spot. So I think we’ll just see more, we’re going to see a lot more innovation, both from a business model standpoint, as well as a cosell plus marketplace standpoint. And a lot of times going back again, 2018. I remember having a conversation with a buyer who was talking about their enterprise agreement. And this is like the earliest days of this idea of drawdown. They’re like, Could I actually sell more to my customer, if I could convince them to use marketplace as part of the overall agreement. And that was like the earliest indications of Yeah, people are starting to understand this ecosystem effect at a cloud seller level could help them increase their share of wallet, as well as deliver a lot of value to the buyers like, hey, we have all these first party services, but we have all these third party services, put them together in a way that gets you your business outcome as fast and efficiently. Since then, there’s been like waves of these enterprise agreements that have gone through. We’re now it’s much more common to see that CFO think about okay, I got my cloud agreement. How do I complement those two together? Like that’s becoming more real, but we’re still really in that evolution because we talked about the dura ability of the cloud, those agreements oftentimes are durable or multi year in nature, right. And now we see that across all the hyper scalars, it’s a much, much more common pattern, the clouds, investing more in helping the buyers understand how to do this, I think helps the whole seller ghost,
Vince Menzione 35:15
it talks to also the power of the hyper scalars to enter the C suite of those organizations and have those more relevant conversations than a startup SAS company would and having those budgets aligned.
John Jahnke 35:28
And yeah, as a cloud seller, you have a better reason than ever to talk to the CFO, not maybe not only the CIO, or the head of infrastructure that had a product that the the CFO, the CEO, and now even the CRO, I just bought, how many salespeople actually got the attention of a CRO and software company?
Vince Menzione 35:46
That’s right, not very many. So I’d like to pivot here. John, we talked a little bit about your career journey. But was there like a pivot or a spark that got you to become the CEO of this amazing organization?
John Jahnke 35:59
Yeah, it’s a fun story. So maybe going way back, because there’s first that when do you decide you want to do this point in your career. And I remember I worked for EMC, I started my career as an SC actually was a customer prior to being an SE. Joe Tucci was our CEO. And I’m an SC and Buffalo, New York, like, and Joe’s doing some big oil company meeting. And he talked about how he started his career as an SAE, and then went on this journey to your product leader, and then went on the study to be a revenue leader, and then ultimately a CEO. I was 23 at the time, and I’m like, you know, that sounds pretty awesome. Like, I think I could do that. So there’s this like, distinct point where you’re like, because people always ask me, When did you decide you want to do that? And I remember that point as a point in time where I’m like, that sounds like a really interesting journey. And then you get to the, how do you come together around an idea, and not really starts with people. So I was at EMC, we acquired this company, green plum, I joined Greenplum. To help them scale. I was in like, field ran pre sales and professional services. I’m always a field person, always in emerging tech. And a couple people from Greenplum ended up on my team, Brian Denker. Until woods, my co founders, and they were super smart, super curious, like fun to be us. We did a lot of work together. And they like many startup people didn’t want to go on this big company journey. And I ended up going off and doing a couple other things. And we always stayed in touch. And those relationships. We had this synergy were When Dylan had the original idea, he came back and we came back together. And we talked about it. So there was that, like, I love the line from Hamilton, where they’re like you never know who will tell your story. You never know who you meet, who will become part of your story. And that’s been so true on the startup journey. So many people have helped us along the way and reached out and introduced us to a customer reached out and introduced us to an investor. Sometimes people you don’t talk to for years, and you’re like, wow, let’s just never know. So be a good human. Always try to maintain and develop those relationships, because who knows where they go. So that was the second part like us coming together. And then I originally was an investor in tackle. And I said to Dylan O’Brien, I’m like, I love what you’re doing. I love the space, I want to stay involved. I’ve never done a day zero company, smallest company I’ve ever worked for was 140 people. I know again, and we’d love that that’d be great. And Brian tells a story about how a lot of people say that when you’re starting a company and how few people actually show up. And we just started doing the work together. And it became really natural and got to the point where I was going to start a different company. Brian’s like, we’ve gotten to product market fit. You’ve been here since day one, why don’t you just join us full time and help us scale. And again, we kind of just grew together it was startups are very much about timing. There’s a lot of great people out there. But getting the timing right, like getting alignment. And then the timing right is really tricky. And having grown up in SE, thinking about N v and se in the year 2000 like.com Mania, I wasn’t in sales, but I was just observing the crazy behaviors and like this, this really bananas and being able to play a part in changing the way that software is sold, which is ultimately what I think we’re doing. And that was the thing guard early customers. They weren’t saying that, but that was the signal you were seeing and feeling. That’s the thing that even we didn’t fully understand it in those early days. And it’s just come to light in different ways over the years. And I think there’s so much we’re in the earliest days of this revenue transformation. We’re earliest days at his club go to market movement. So it’s a bit of a longer like, there’s a lot of twists and turns along the way. But that’s maybe like an arc of what that journey looks like.
Vince Menzione 39:46
It strikes me as we think about beginning with the end in mind being that marketplace offer which I like to refer to as a non fungible token really becomes the objectification of bringing all those elements together and changing and Shifting this movement, if you will, shifting this go to market motion across internally within the organization and then across your ecosystem. Yep. So this is a fun question I like to ask just about every guest. John, I know you know about this question because we’ve had Sanjay on and Aaron on the podcast, but you are hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past, to this amazing party. You could even decide where you want to have this great party, whom would you invite? And why?
John Jahnke 40:33
It’s funny when you ask this question. I thought about it a lot. And I actually have two answers. And there’s two distinct answers. And one, I live in Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised my whole family’s around me and my wife’s whole families around us are like, and that’s like, what we live for. And so my first answer would be my mother, my grandmother and my father in law, we’ve all passed on and being able to come together one more time would mean the world to me. So that’s like answer number one, the more business relevant answer, I think, you know, probably, so two of these are very famous people. And one is probably less known. So the first ones, Warren Buffett, I just think, like, such a fat, like such a fascinating story in so many ways, so much wisdom, so humble. And then one of his best friends is Bill Gates, who I also think like the learning arc on Bill Dietz from the journey at Microsoft to being a philanthropist and everything he’s done. So that’s really part two. And part three is somebody Robert Cialdini, who’s a professor at Harvard. And he wrote a book about influence, which I read when I was in grad school. And it’s one of the things that I think most about, just on this career journey of just trying to understand people and understand how they think and why is research really connected with me when I was in grad school, and he’s someone that I’ve always wanted to meet. So those are very cool for two sets of three.
Vince Menzione 42:05
I think we could bring them all together, you know, just have them all the same. Where were you going to host this dinner party, John?
John Jahnke 42:11
Well, it’s funny because I actually talked to my wife about this. And I’m like, because originally I was like my mom, Warren Buffett. And I’m like, my mom wouldn’t want to go let dinner and she’d be like, No, I actually want to spend time with you. And like, maybe bring your sisters like that would that would be
Vince Menzione 42:25
good. Oh, so we’ve met.
John Jahnke 42:29
Yeah, she’d be like, I don’t care about those other guys. Like, it’s so where would we host I mean, honestly, at home, in our backyard, at a table like good people, good food, good. times. I’m a pretty simple, pretty simple, but I love fine things. But at the end of the day, I’d rather a barbecue on good money over fancy food.
Vince Menzione 42:50
And we’re talking about the weather getting nice now. So if you don’t mind, maybe I’ll bring a beverage and come along. I’ve only met one of those people, Bill Gates, and certainly only got to work with him for a short period of time. But Warren Buffett so irrelevant at his age, and do you know the book by Cellini? What is that title, and
John Jahnke 43:08
it’s been republished, it’s a principles of influence, but there’s a lot, there’s a lot of different versions around it. And there’s like seven principles of influence and understanding, like how it really comes down to just like the way people react, and you see these principles and use and especially like, all forms of marketing, like scarcity is a principle of influence. So Taylor Swift tickets right now are the greatest example of scarcity applied, and she’s not really benefiting from that, but the system is benefiting from it. People do unusual things for things they perceive to be scarce, right, like understanding that changes the way you think about them. So it’s that, that those are the liking principles. And other one, like, people want to work with people, they like Linux, in general. And it’s funny, you see it all the time, if someone shows up in a way where they’re like, I don’t know, if I want to be around that person. That person doesn’t give me energy, like so. It’s a fascinating read.
Vince Menzione 44:07
We’re gonna put a link to it in the show notes. I appreciate. Okay, so any last words, calls to action, if you will, for our listeners, many of which are in the ISV community, the independent software, vendor, community SAS community, about optimizing their success, and perhaps engaging with you and your organization.
John Jahnke 44:25
I think, like tackle, we’ve evolved a lot as a company, and we continue to evolve on behalf of our 600 ISVs we support with and that number is growing every day. And I love when Nicolas, like almost call it a boomerang like someone we worked with at one point in time on our journey comes back around because they’re like, Hey, we actually, yeah, we worked together for a little bit. But now, with everything you’re doing, we want to work together a gap. And I think we’ve invested a lot in this idea of services on strategy. and being able to meet customers wherever they are on their journey, and even just to be able to share some expert advice. So that’s a common thing. Like, everybody knows they want to do more. And people aren’t exactly sure how they what the best practices are. And that’s the thing that in this next era, the evolution of tackle our continued growth, we want to be able to share those stories more. And those we try to like club go to market XP, we try to bring the voice of our customers forward is it’s their success that matters, right? But how we help people build their strategy for success. And I’d say, we’re here we’re here to help, like we live, to help sell or sell like, it’s the most fun thing. I’ve got to pee. I feel like I’ve gotten a PhD in the software industry go to market over the last seven years. And that’s been the greatest part of this technology. So we’re here to help. And I’d say, even if that’s just engaging and sharing what’s happening in the industry.
Vince Menzione 46:00
Well, thank you so much, John, I was excited to have you as a guest today. I want to thank you for your time know how precious it is, as CEO of a fast moving organization, a rocket ship, if you will, in this space. So thank you for your time.