Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel leaders share success strategies, best practices, and emerging trends, brought to you by StructuredWeb. Here's your host, Steven Kellam. Welcome, everybody, to ChannelWaves, StructuredWeb's view into everything channel. I'm your host, Steven Kellam, and today I'm really excited, and I know I said this a lot. Jessica Baker joined us today. I know we just talked about this.
I actually am excited because things we're going to talk about today are very near and dear to my heart. We're going to talk about how to do more with less. And what I've seen is this conversation has been going on and on for quite some time, pandemic and then quote, recession, but it's always kind of in an ethereal level. And today we're going to dig into the strategies and tactics that can really help you run your programs and be successful.
And Jessica Baker is the CPO, which is Chief Program Officer at AchieveUnite, and I think is a perfect person to walk us through this. So welcome, Jessica. Thanks, Steven. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here, and I'm glad that you're excited about this topic. That makes me happy. Good. Thank you. Well, our listeners and viewers like a couple of things. They like lists because lists are really good and they like it when we're concise and get to the point. You've done a lot of podcasts.
I've done a lot of podcasts. The days of the early hour long podcast where we theorize, I think a lot of that stuff's gone. And we could do workshops on that, but we're going to dive right into it. So Jessica put together six key points, and I am going to ask her, why not five? Because six is an unusual number, but I'll let her talk about that as we get going. And it'd be great, Jessica, if you could introduce yourself for those who don't know you.
I think most people in the channel do, but those who don't, and maybe a little bit about what being a Chief Program Officer really is all about and why that really qualifies you to lead this discussion. And by the way, it does qualify, I think great to let everybody know. Thanks, Steven.
Yeah, Chief Program Officer at AchieveUnite, which means that I oversee and I run that side of our practice that works through the strategies and the programs and the development and the execution of partner programs for our clients. And people come to us all the time with either they don't have a program and we need to help them create that strategy and that framework from scratch, or more often, is that they've got something that maybe isn't as fine tuned as it could be.
Or there's a reason there's an M and A or there's a new product launch, or a new reason there's some compelling reason why the program needs to change. Refresh hasn't been touched in ten years, five years, whatever. So they come to us for guidance and a lot of times just practicality about how to make this happen. There's so much that has changed just in the last couple of years, I think since COVID people have really prioritized.
They don't have all that time in the world, to your point, like, they're not going to listen to us talk about this for an hour, but 20 minutes, they probably can grab that. And so, yeah, we tend to give a lot of practical advice to our clients to help them actually get that success with this go to market strategy using partners and channels. Yeah, I think that that qualifies me. I've seen a lot of programs, good and bad, over the years. So, yeah, I do have a list. It is six long.
I don't know why six? I just decided that's when those were the top things that were on my brain when I brought out this list for you. Well, let's go through these six. And by the way, one of the things I really liked about it, as I read through it, I truly felt if you take all six together, the sum of the whole is far greater than the individual parts. Yeah, I think as we go through this, listeners and viewers, as you listen to this, listen to all six.
Because in the end, I do think if you pull them all together, it works really well. Okay, so the first one is the power of three big ideas. Yeah, three big ideas. So three is a magic number. It's as adults, there have been lots of studies about how people remember things. And there's a power to three, like one, two, three. You can remember that beginning, middle, end.
So when you're thinking about your messaging to partners, the main goals of your program, what you want your partners to remember, things like that. There's something about three that people can wrap their head around. If you were to go and read anybody's annual report, any publicly traded company, the bigger are often the more offensive to this. They will lay out seven, eight, nine, ten corporate initiatives. And I think that's really hard to translate into a partner program.
Like, you want your program to support the corporate goals, right? But maybe you pick one that's really directly tied and the other two are more about how you need your ecosystem to work to indirectly support the rest of those things.
So I think if you pick three ideas, maybe it's a new product launch that corporate is doing and they want to capture some of that space or some of that wallet, but then the others could just be getting people certified to be able to offer services around your program or making sure that they're business planning with you and they're executing marketing events, something like that. The power of three is really good.
There are limitless combinations of those three different choices that you could have. But if you keep it to three, chances are that your partners will remember your key three ideas. So three is a magic number. Look, I couldn't agree more. I've been doing demos on platforms and technology from MDF to incentives to through channel marketing automation. And I've seen over and over again, if you have three key points on that first page, what does the partner need to see? Boom.
Are the administrator not just the partner, anybody working on it? And then when you take them to the next level, what are the three things? Over and over again? I've probably done 1000 demos. Absolutely. People can digest. They don't get freaked out. Let me show you three things. Let me show you three key ideas. Everybody goes, Well, I can get my head around that. I can do three. Yeah, but 17 is a little challenging, but three I can do.
Yeah, I think talking about portals, I think that goes right into my next tip, which is a two click test, right? So there's a whole practice, art, science around user experience and how websites are designed and where your eye goes on the page and things like that. But your partners, they're going to click to log in right there's, one click. So you get to that home page, they want to click one more time to get to where they need to go. So they're on there for a reason. Give them that reason.
You can see like you get the data of how people are using your portal, where they're going to let's make it easy for them, right? If 80% come on to register a deal, put a register a deal button right on that landing page when they log into your portal, so they don't have to click through multiple drop down menus and all that kind of stuff.
I've seen good and bad examples of partner portals, so I always challenge people to take that two click test to see if you can actually get to relevancy in that short of amount of time. I think people get confused sometimes about what the portal is there for. It's beautiful. Or spending time. You want partners to come in, engage, find what they need, and that's generally where's my money? Or where's something I do to get more money, or how can I figure out how to do something to make more money?
And then you want them to get out and go market and sell. Right? Isn't that the point? That's the point. I think the greatest gift I've done, we also do a lot of implementations of PRMs and things like that. And I think the greatest compliment that I could get from a partner that is looking at any portal that we've implemented is to say, wow, this is intuitive.
All right, if it's intuitive, that means it's easy to navigate, that you have come there and you're expecting something and it's there and you can easily get to what you need to get. And that happens over and over again. And that starts to build trust in the platform and in the relationship and things like that.
So it does have lots of things that it impacts, not just the usage of the portal, but that partner then comes to believe that you're going to meet their needs and that translates into all the other areas of engagement with them, for sure. And I think that goes into your third point. Clear the noise. Right? And we hear this all the time because we're just not through partner marketing. We're to partner marketing. And so when you get to that right, clearing the noise is a huge piece.
I remember this is probably 15, maybe even longer years ago. And I was running partner marketing for a big company, very billion plus dollar company. And I was having conversation with the CMO about the partners and the information and how they received the information that was put out to their mainstream clients. And I said, we have to be a filter to our partners. They can't just get everything that you put out. We can't just be a repeater.
We have to figure out how we package this up and how we make it relevant. Because partners, they can't hear everything or it gets noisy and then they hear nothing. And it was like a light bulb went off in her head and she was like, well, I never really thought about it like that. But if you think about a partner, they're getting this from every single vendor on their line card. So whatever you're sending to them, then multiply that times, what, 15, 20, 50?
Yeah, I think the average is 14, right? Yeah. It's crazy. So how do we make these things very easy for partners to consume and in a place where they know they can go and get it again? That's reliable, right? And that could be your portal. It could be an email digest that would go out to partners. I also did surveys with partners. You do feedback surveys with your partners. And I said, what are some of the biggest challenges that you have? Well, you send us too many emails. Okay.
So we'll try to scope that down. And one of my other questions on the survey was what is your preferred method of getting information from this? What did they say? Email. Right. So you need to do it. And they like it. But too much is not a good thing and not enough is also not a good thing. So making sure that you really don't be just that repeater, but make it digestible for partners. Clear the noise. Clear the noise.
And I think that goes very well into your fourth one too, is make the communications relevant. In today's world. The data is there. It's how hard the vendors are willing to work. Right? So our platform, we can say who the partner is, where the partner is, and what the partner is. You can personalize it and it takes a little bit more work, but boy, if you clear the noise and then you make it relevant I'm pitching your point here.
I completely agree with you. Yeah. And I think if you put this into the context of where we are today, I think AI is going to make a huge difference here, because AI is all about understanding who you are, who that audience is, making it extremely relevant. The questions that you're asking chatGPT, it knows who you are and it knows what you're talking about, and it's going to give you answers that are in that frame of what I ask.
It normally is having to do with things with partners and channels and trust and things like that, and it gives me those answers back. I think AI has the potential to really set this piece on fire so that it really is extremely relevant and it makes it easy for vendors to do that. Right now, if you don't have a really strong data strategy, the data is there, but sometimes it's hard for vendors to use. I think AI will come in and really save the day here and make it super relevant for people.
Well, I think there's a couple of things I agree with you. The data structure also, people are doing more with less. I think this is where the whole idea of AI being an assistant. Right. And how do I so much on LinkedIn now talking about that? By the way, we're about to release a slight little plug, something called ChannelGPT. And just you knew it was coming. I did. I can't wait to actually show that to you. We'll save that for another podcast.
But I think it's not only going to help people be more productive and more relevant, but they're going to be able to do more with less. Right? Absolutely. I think that's a huge part of it. All right. Number five, plan your communications. This is a huge one. And everybody not only plan it, but I think plan it and make sure it's organized. Right. So they're all getting it. You said from one place, one message. Yeah. Again, you have different segments of your partner ecosystem. Right.
You'll probably have a set of partners that are really close to you that are very strategic. Maybe they're on your partner advisory council or something like that, but they're the partners that you hold closest to you. And then you probably have another set of partners that are very close to that, but maybe not as completely strategic. And then you have everybody else. But the point is, these people, these segments of partnerships, all need to hear the information
so there are no surprises when things happen. Right. I used to work with a client, a channel chief, and in our first meeting I said, is there anything I need to know? And he said, I don't like surprises. I said, okay, good to know. He doesn't like surprises. He likes to be informed. And it's the same thing with your partners, right? Your partners don't like to know about the latest thing that you're coming out from one of their customers.
Oh, tell me about this latest thing that was just announced. And the partner is like, what? I have no idea what you're talking about. Right? That's the worst scenario. And they say trust is won in drops and lost in buckets. And that one little scenario, maybe it doesn't completely empty the trust bucket, but partners should not be surprised by some of these things.
Product releases, strategy events that happen if you have your communications set and they're relevant and they're timely, and you're hitting your partners where they want to receive that information, there should be no surprises plan out those communications for sure. Look, I think this is where AI can help as well, too. We could probably go through each one of these and talk about AI. That's another podcast I know we got.
One of the reasons is people are overwhelmed and their thought processes and they've got information, as you say, coming from product and coming from marketing, and what goes to the channel and what goes to direct and how do we message this? This is how you end up delivering. We're going to talk about MDF on the next one.
You end up delivering on a proposal based MDF budget three weeks before the end of the quarter and partner to execute and then wonder why you don't get adoption on your MDF, right? And the partner's head is spinning like, I can't believe you just did this. Right? Which actually goes into number six, make MDF open and easy to access. We could just do it in that podcast. We really could.
And I definitely pick on MDF a lot because it is an area where I find the most unnecessary over complication with partners. And we did a project for one client who had something like 100 different steps. Like, if you were to put out that flow between, here's who I am to here's my ROI to claim my money, 100 different steps.
And I remember talking to partners, and they used to employ people solely to manage the MDF process with this vendor because they had multiple millions of dollars in MDF that they were doing. But it shouldn't have to be like that. MDF should be the way where you get excited about the partnership. It's one of those ways to invest in that relationship. And you shouldn't have to jump through so many hoops and navigate so much red tape to be able to take advantage of its program.
I think it's a very powerful program. I love the concept, but so many people have just wrapped their head around this or staked their claim on. We have to get an ROI for every single dollar of MDF that we send out. I need to know exactly how many qualified leads I got from this one thing. I just don't think that it's possible. Right. So strip all that back and let's just make this an exciting way to engage and invest in the relationship, in the partnership.
So less is definitely more when it comes to using MDF as an instrument in your program. And yeah, see the five above and apply that to your MDF program, right? Yeah. I could be on a soapbox for hours talking about this. I'm sure you could as well. I ran an MDF company, right? Yeah. And learned an awful lot about it. And look, here's the thing. Partners will answer anything if they know what's in it for them.
The question is, these MDF programs start off pretty concise, like you talk about, but then you get finance needs, their pieces, and then it just gets odd and on and on. And pretty soon, as you said, you end up with 100 pieces and the partner can't even figure out what to do, and they just throw their hands up. And what you're talking about is supposed to be something really good. It's market development funds. That should be exciting. Business development funds.
Let's sell, let's develop a market. And it gets lost. And I think the problem that happens, right, the unfortunate result if you don't make it easy, is that you don't spend those funds and you end up with three weeks to go and you've got $20,000 to spend. And so you rush to get something out the door, and then nothing really happens because you haven't had the time to really make sure that this is exactly where you need to go.
And then the results aren't there, or you have $2 million left at the end of your MDF budget. And the next year finance is like, well, you don't need all this money because you didn't spend it last year, and it's just a bad cycle. So your partners should be not surprised, right. This is one area where your communications really need to be clear and concise, and it needs to be easy for them to be able to partner with you and execute.
Yeah, MDF is just one of those things, sort of the redheaded stepchild. Not to pick on redheaded stepchildren, but you know what I mean is the one place where partners really can get stuck in programs they can, and then you're backing them up against a corner if you do it late. And then everybody's moved from accrual to proposal based, so they've got to come up with plan, which, by the way, we spend a lot of time lately talking about how we integrate with MDF with
pre planned campaigns in a market. Right. For those mid group of partners, that's a great way to spend those MDF dollars. Pull it right into the demand generation free plan campaigns. This is why we integrate through there's this thing called an API, and you should expect your vendors between their MDF and their PRM and their through channel marketing automation to all be in sync on this stuff. Right. Super simple, easy button. Right?
Let's just make it super simple for partners to have relationships with vendors and transact and have that mutual success. Less is definitely more. Okay, well, that's a great place to wrap it up. Jessica, thank you for joining us. I think less is definitely more. A couple of things. How can people get in touch with you? And then is there anything going on that you'd like to promote? Any place you're going to be? Any place? Speaking engagements, maybe?
Yeah, So you can find our website, which is achieveunite.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. If you just search for Jessica and AchieveUnite, I will pop right up. If you'd like to reach out to me, jessica@achieveunite.com is my email address. I'm always open for a chat. This is one of my favorite topics, partners and channels. And so I'm always up for a good conversation.
I'd say the thing that I'd love to promote is that we are having an event at the end of June, June 21, in Burlington, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It's our Channel Ecosystem Bootcamp. So if you want some more information about that, we still have some space open, so just drop me a line and we'll get you signed up. Thank you. Once again, thank you Jessica. It's a great list.
And I would sum it up once again, as we said in the beginning, the sum of the whole far out ways that I think if you take all these ideas, push them together, it's pretty powerful. Yes. Thank you, Steven. I enjoyed the conversation. Me too. Thanks, listeners. Have a great day.