Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel leaders share success strategies, best practices, emerging trends, brought to you by StructuredWeb. Here's your host, Steven Kellam. Welcome everyone to ChannelWaves. StructuredWeb's view into everything channel. I'm your host, Steven Kellam, and today we're going to dig into partnerships and how you can get the most out of your partners in demand generation and revenue generation. Everything that's important to you in H2.
And I'm joined by Diane Krakora, who's the CEO and founder of PartnerPath. Welcome, Diane. Hey, Steven, thanks for having me. One of the reasons that I'm excited to have Diane one is, gosh, we've known each other quite some time, and I have a lot of respect for what Diane has done and the knowledge that she has in the channel, particularly about partnerships. And one of the reasons I asked Diane to join was actually there were two reasons to be totally transparent.
One is she talks to people in the Marketing circle, she talks to people in Channel Sales Circle, and she talks to people in the Channel Chie . f circle last time I checked. That's a pretty broad and comprehensive perspective, right? Yeah. So it's really fun to be able to talk across all the different discourses within the partner ecosystem, to be able to see how they all come together to support and grow ecosystems, particularly in 2023, which takes a village, that's for sure. It does.
And the second reason is because I live in a lot of the tech stack. I've done the MDF, I've done the incentives, I've done all that. Now we're in the market automation tech stack. And Diane, I think this is absolutely true, no matter how good your technology and how good your stack is. And we're going to talk about that and talk about integrations.
If your programs aren't done well and if isn't lined up and you don't have your go to market strategy for all that together, then you sort of automate for automates sake. And I don't think that really makes things successful. And you kind of end up with, I think, selling everything short that way. Yeah. And I think that'll certainly be one of our five key partner program challenges or one of the outcomes or the answers to one of the five key program challenges that we're seeing this year.
It's certainly the new world order in 2023. So I think there's some aspect of automation that is definitely growing as well as refining and really getting specific around what are you trying to do with the partner program? Sure. So why don't we start with Demand Generation? It's something near and dear to my heart oh, by the way, listeners, we're going to talk about the challenges. But Diane and I were talking about this before. There's a lot of opportunities around that.
Every time there's a challenge, somebody is going to figure out how to make it work, and they're basically going to have a competitive advantage. Absolutely. I think in one of the five is demand generation which right now we are seeing so many people kind of freaking out about pipeline and running to partners and saying we need more pipeline, we need our partners to generate more pipeline.
The whole world is in a pipeline crunch right now and we're kind of seeing this entire student body left into we need our partners to do more marketing or do more demand generation or get more partners that can do demand generation and really drive that pipeline. So certainly I think those are the realities of mid year 2023. And the question is can some partners do demand generation for you as a vendor and will they? Well, what's the answer? Look, I have my opinion.
I think people want to hear your opinion. I think certain partners can do demand generation. I think certain partners are going to be challenged. Which is why there's to, through and for partner marketing. Right. And I think the problem I'm seeing is I think there's some confusion on where to use to, where do you use through and where to use for? And even more importantly, in which individual segments to go after that, right. The small, the medium and the large.
I think that's really the challenge. I see people flip flopping around a lot and it's certainly not a one size fits all. In terms of can partners do demand generation or will they? I mean, certainly they can else they wouldn't be in business, right. If they weren't able to generate the demand for at least themselves, they wouldn't be in business. But will they do it for or with a vendor partner? And it's really a mixed bag. Some will and a lot will do more of an ABM. Right.
In terms of trying to reach new accounts and sell more, drive more? I think the biggest answer here is you can't paint, use one brush to paint your entire partner ecosystem and say they will or they won't. Some will, some won't. And how do you find the 8% to 10% that will and can? Yeah, what's a good way to do that? Have you run across someone who's doing a very good job of segmenting their partners and how they segment their partners and how they build those segmentations?
One way that we see is successful here is just allowing partners to opt in, right. And saying, hey, we have marketing campaigns for you. We have marketing automation tools to help you guys be successful through those communications, allow them to sign up and opt in. And instead of expecting 100% of participation, we just need to start expecting 10% participation and thinking that's great.
Instead of it has to be every partner in our ecosystem adopting and leveraging our marketing so it might align to some of their business models, then it might not align to other business models. So again, we can't think everything. We can't think everything is a nail right there's. Definitely a whole bunch of different types of partners in your ecosystem with different business models and different priorities, quite frankly,
even in this quarter. Sure. Okay. Number two on your list was partner contributions. Are partners influencing deals? So what's going on there? Yeah, the other thing, along with partners generating demand, the second thing we're seeing is a lot of requests and centering around measuring partner contribution. This might be our vendors justifying their existence, our vendor partner aims justifying their existence.
We're seeing some organizations like Workday swing heavily towards partnering and say, oh my God, we haven't partnered in years, we've got to start doing this. And we've seen other organizations like New Relic kind of lay off most of their partnering came and say, oh, we're not getting enough contribution from our partners and we're going to kind of swing the pendulum the other way.
So in that kind of divergence, it's understanding what the partner contribution is and is it influenced, is it assisted, is it resold, is it developed? And trying to put measurements to that, I think, is one of the big challenges that we're seeing for partner programs this year. How does the vendor go about that? Right. Is there a process that you bring to that? How do they create best practices around that? Right? Well, the hardest part of measuring partner contribution is data. Right.
Everybody knows I love data, but what are your systems, what are your tools to be able to collect data in terms of are partners doing marketing? Right. That could be an indication of contribution that the partners are actually adopting your partner marketing and doing marketing and generating leads and registering those leads. And like, regardless of those close or not that still are closed with that, partner can be considered contribution.
So the hardest part is getting the data, the data entry, the leads in, the deals registered, the deals closed, even assigning actions, really being able to define are there seven steps or 27 steps in your sales cycle and who's doing what within those, there might be multiple partners. Right.
So how do you kind of have those capabilities and systems to see what actions, what activities partners are doing along the sales and customer success lifecycle, to be able to then say kind of measure partner contribution. Well, so that leads I was going to say that leads into your next number three on that, which is customer success and renewals. And how are partners managing and working to that and adding contribution there? Yeah. And how are vendors allowing or
not allowing partners to contribute there? Right. And is the expectation that partners are driving customer success? Most of you guys all have subscription models out there. And are you expecting your partners to help the customers adopt and use the solution so that they are renewing it and growing? And are those customer success motions part of your expectations?
And I think that's one of the big challenges that we see in partner programs for this year is that we all know that customer success is important. But kind of the rigor and even the expectations are not kind of written into your partner programs and your partner program guides that we're expecting the partners to play here and even rewarding them for that in terms of additional deal registration or discount around renewal. That renewal motion. But 2023, we need to keep our customers.
Not only do we need to find them with new leads, but we need to keep the ones who pass. Making sure that they're using is important. I was going to ask you about rewarding them for do that. It makes total sense to me. It also makes sense to me that that is a place I think partners could play really well. Historically, everything I've heard having been a partner a long time ago, getting new business or new logos was a hard thing. It was always wanting to sell to the existing.
So if that's part of the DNA of a lot of partners, why not just go that extra effort onto the renewal side and that partner success. But it is a behavior modification. Right. That changes the program, changes what you ask of them and changes most importantly how you reward them. Absolutely. And that's why we kind of calling them challenges for this year because we all see that renewal and that adoption is important.
We're getting pressures from executives around and boards and the street around renewals. But that hasn't really made its way into a lot of partner programs around those expectations. So certainly kind of redesigning and looking at your overall expectations for your partners and the benefits or rewards for them and those activities. It's really partner programs just come down to what activities do you want partners to do and what are you paying them to do? Right.
Or where are they getting that MDF or additional discounts or discount off training or something like that. So how are you setting up that value exchange? Yeah.
One of the coolest reward programs I ever had when I was a partner is if I hit 95% customer satisfaction on all the implementations because such a huge part of setting up what the renewal is going to look like asking for the renewal and trying to be a good partner to a client eleven months down the road when you're trying to do a renewal versus doing the beginning big thing. It changed our whole organization how we did onboarding.
Because let me tell you, the project manager, everyone in that organization knew they wanted to hit that 95% because it had a drastic effect on our profit margins. Right, right. And it's all about the metrics that matter these days is adoption and usage and renewal in a subscription model. Especially as we start running out our first two and three years. If you sold them for a two year subscription model, which really isn't a subscription model, but I don't want to go into that now.
But when that two or three years start, which now, then we start saying this is now not the time to start making sure that the customer is actually happy with the product and using it because we're 60 days out of renewal. That should have happened a year ago. Oh, no, I totally agree. I mean, someone told me there's three things that happen on a launch and there's positive, neutral and negative. And you don't want the other two. Right. You only want the positive.
It makes a huge difference to cross-sell, upsell even way before you get to renewal, right. Just really change things. So the fourth thing on your list kind of ties into that. If partners aren't making it, which partners do you cut from that program? I saw someone, I think this is really hard to do, that had the Premier League way of doing it, right. Literally cut the bottom 10% every year. Right. When I first heard that, I was like, well, that sounds really cool.
I kind of like the Premier League way they do that, right. For those who don't follow soccer, bottom three teams and then Premier League gets sent down to another league. and you'll get it. Yeah. Kind of, either way at least you enjoy yourself, right? But yeah, look, when do you do that? Why do you do that? Well, this is, again, a challenge that not necessarily people have or have a firm pat answer to. The question is, do we cut? And if we cut, how do we cut?
And we see very two different camps on this. One is like absolutely. Just like we're cutting the bottom 10%, right? If you haven't done a transaction in x long we're cutting you off. Which then brings me back to the conversation of are they contributing other than transactions? Right? Are they doing marketing? Are they generating leads? Are they an advisor out there in the world? Are they influencing even though they're not transacting?
Do you know if those partners are whispering into your prospects executive ears? And that was the thing that closed the deal, even though they didn't show up in your POS reports, quick throwback to the 1980s, those POS reports. So I think that the question becomes, if you don't have good data on what are partners doing and how are they contributing to your sales and success cycles, then we end up cutting partners that actually could be influencing and actually driving contribution.
So to cut or not to cut this long tail, we used to say, yeah, 90-10, rule and lop off everybody else, because if they're not doing, we get 90% of our revenues from 10% of our partners, and the rest of them are just out. But I think that's changing in 2023 because we're seeing so many more touch points to the customer's buying journey and it's more difficult to really measure who is being successful.
If we can automate some of those relationships and have less of a cost to them, then there's no harm, no foul, having partners out there that don't look like they're transacting, right? So while it's more difficult, I would say it's never been more critical to have that data so that you don't inadvertently cut off someone who is an influencer and maybe you just didn't know it. So here's the scenario, I'm going to paint the picture for you because this is how you're going to wrap it up, right?
So you need to know more about your partners and how they interact with all the customers. The buying has gotten more diverse and challenging because there are more partners involved, because the buyer's journey has changed and how they want to buy. And you have to have all of this data so you can really accurately do things. But we're doing more with less people, with less resources.
So you got in one hand I need to do all these great things and in the other hand you're like, oh, I don't have as many resources, or maybe it's not that I don't have as many resources, maybe I'm not getting more resources yet I'm expected to do more. Certainly doing more with lots is a topic yet again. It was also a very hot topic in 2008.
And we're seeing either reduced budget so we don't have as much money for MDF to be able to do more of that partner demand generation that we talked about is point number one. So how do I drive more demand with less MDF budget? Or how do I do program changes or do I have to cut partners because we don't have as many people to help address or manage those kind of longer tail partners that may not look like they're contributing? Definitely.
I can't imagine there's anybody out there who's not feeling the pressure to do more, to grow more pipeline, to grow more partner sales, to contribute more from the partner ecosystem with not the same resources, less resources we've seen across the board for the last year. Many, many cuts, right? Many human resources are kind of removed or changed. Still only 3% unemployment out there. So I don't understand.
People are finding jobs pretty quickly, but we have definitely seen in the technology industry, there isn't a client we've had in the last year who has not had some version of a reduction in force. So for me, I would say there's two places actually I want your answer on this, but my first place, or first thought is there's two places they have the program side and like how to review it.
Every time you say things like the MDF, sorry, I go back to my roots, I'm like, well you should review your guidelines and you should view what you're operating. MDF is not, somebody was saying they had 95% use of MDF and then they looked at it, went oh, all my partners coming to my partner event, they're not actually doing demand generation, actually driving demand. They're not doing any stuff, but they're not actually driving demand. Two different things. That's a very different thing.
I was like, maybe you should review that and then you should look at your to partner marketing, by the way, and if your guidelines read like you hate your partner, maybe you should change your font. I mean, I'm serious. Stuff matters. The other side is the technology piece to It. And I know you live in the programs world. I live in the technology world. My technology world can't do well without your programs.
And I think your programs need technology like never before, but not like hodgepodged together, right? I'm still seeing a lot of hodgepodge on stuff, which makes it really hard to get good data in a more with less world. You have to go to automation. You have to go and leverage technologies. The investments that you all make in technology systems pay three, four, five fold from the human resources aspect, right?
So instead of a body, if you spend that same amount on systems, which is a lot of money, if you're talking about what kind of bodies we've got here, then we really see that help grow and scale. It doesn't all have to be AI. We don't have to be on the kind of the cutting edge of some of these technologies that having systems that talk to each other or unifying systems really help the data, which helps you show contribution and value, which helps you actually get more budget.
Because if we can show that we are as a partnering team and through the partner programs contributing to the corporate goals, generate revenue, generate revenue, generate revenue, generate pipeline, then we're certainly showing that value and usually getting more money to go after those and continuing to get that leverage, which is quite literally the definition of partnering is leverage.
Well, can I think this is a great place to wrap it up because if they can't do that, I think, Diane, this is where you can come along and help if they can't justify it. I can't tell you how many situations where I've been in where automation would have been really good and they could help, but they couldn't get the IT resources. It wasn't even the budget for, say, someone's software platform, whether it's mine or somebody else's, it was the internal resources and even the IT.
To get it implemented. People got to figure out how to sell that so that they can get that in there. And certainly outsourcing even implementations and being able to work around IT or being able to work with IT and have consultants that help, implement and install and even run your types of systems can show a pretty big ROI fairly quickly, which then gets IT on board. And it's not that they will not want to play, they just have other priorities. On their list.
And our partnering tools aren't always the number one priority on their list. But that doesn't mean that we should sit there and say, oh, okay, go implement that great big ERP system or that big, huge CRM system, and we'll wait for three years. We, as a partnering teams, need to fight a lot faster because we have to do more with less. So, Diane, thank you for joining us.
And what's the best way for people to reach you so that you can share some of that wisdom and help people figure out how do they make this happen, how do they get the budgets, how do they get it through internally? So how can people reach you? Certainly easiest way to reach us is partner-path.com, is the website. So there is a little hyphen in there, and it's dkrakora@partner-path.com as well and LinkedIn and kind of all the standard social media aspects.
If you can Google, you can probably find us. Fantastic. Once again, Diane, thanks for spending a few minutes with us. Listeners and viewers, thank you for taking some time. Hey, everybody. Have a great day.