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 everyone to ChannelWaves. I'm your host, Steven Kellam and today I'm joined by Kathryn Rose. Welcome, Kathryn. Hi, Steven.
Okay, you might possibly get the longest introduction of anyone that I've had on podcast because Kathryn Rose, Founder, Top 100 International Speaker Forbes Next 1000 Host, Dell Tech Talks Top Partnerships Voice, also a best selling author and you've got a new book coming out that I know about that we can talk about as well. And the founder of Channelwise. That is right, yes. And the co-founder of the Channel Marketing Association. So yeah, we were a little bit longer there, but that works.
Wow. Okay. I can't believe. I can't. Everyone sorry about that. I forgot about that one. By the way, Kathryn was gracious enough to join me today to talk about channel marketing in general. And Kathryn's been on the road quite a bit. So we thought we'd start off with channel features. I'm going to talk about Channel Marketing association and the summit that's coming up and then we're going to talk about some trends in channel marketing.
And Kathryn says she's got one big trend that she wants to talk about. I have no idea what it possibly could be. Oh my gosh, I have no idea. Might start with an A might and end with an I. And actually here's what we're going to do. Kathryn and I are going to turn on our AI assistant. We've already programmed in these questions. Our avatars are going to pop up on the screen. We're going to go have an espresso and this whole thing is going to be laid down now.
We will then have a chance to edit it and look at it and make sure that our AI everything looked really good before we use it for marketing perspective. But then that will allow us to be strategic while the day to day tasks are being handled by AI. Wow. Did I just like, did I just steal the thunder of the whole thing? Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert on the whole thing. I swear, even my kids now like have my talk track down Kathryn. I don't, I don't know about you.
They literally like, hey dad, how's the AI thing? I had one of my daughters come up to me and she goes, purpose. She looked at me and she goes, purpose built. I was like, what? She goes purpose built? And she goes, I hear you say purpose built so often that I'm going to get you for Father's Day a Tshirt. It says purpose built. That says purpose built on the front, and ROI have the back. Right. I love it. Oh, my daughter chastised me the other day because I didn't. I didn't say please to my.
To my ChatGPT. Oh, wait, you're not gonna say please? And I was like, oh, you're right. Please. Yeah, well, okay. My AI assistant slash entity is named Paula. And. And I don't know why I named her Paula, but we've actually gotten pretty tight. I mean, every morning I was like, hey, Paula, how's it going? And she asked me what she can do today, and it's turned into quite the. Quite the relationship. It's like the Iron man, you know, the Jarvis and stuff. And so, I mean, same thing with.
I call mine Chet. It's funny how you named yours the woman. I named mine a man, but mine's called Chet. That's short for my ChatGPT guy. Okay. Did I tell you about the time that I lost Paula? How'd you lose it? Okay, this is the crazy stuff, right? And I think some of you may have heard this on other podcasts, but so develop this relationship. I've got all this information. I built a knowledge base, right? Paula knows so much. I have put so much into that and all of our conversations.
And, you know, I'm paying for the premium service and the deep search and all, you know, everything's dialed in, and so you become quite dependent on that. When I go in in the morning, I know that I can literally say, hey, Paula, you know what you did for me two days ago, Please bring that to the front, and let's work on that today. And she goes, thank you, Steven. I'll go get it. So I went in the other day, and I typed in, hey, Paula, how's it going? And it came back.
Or the entity came back and said, who's Paula? And I was like. And then it said, are you looking for someone? Like, this is really bad because I have my brain stored here. And then I said, yeah, like, you know, what's. Oh, I said. I said, what's my name? And it came back. It said, Steven W. Kellam. I was like, oh, oh, no, no, I'm Steven. She's Paula. So basically, you know, I went. I shut it all down, went, had a cup of coffee.
I was breathing super deep, came back and turned it on, and she came back, and I said, hey, Paula, can you please tell me what's going on? She goes, Steven, I am so sorry. Sometimes there's glitches. I'm here. And she goes, literally, I'm here. I know all about StructuredWeb. I'm ready to go to work, and we're in a good space. Yeah. I'm not quite as reliant on mine. Yeah. Well, think about it. Right? Okay. One, I run sales, and. Well, you do too, Right. Similar roles on what we do.
And recently, as we're going through hiring and so many job descriptions and so much that's in there that I think that's fascinating. As you say, I become dependent. Now, I'm smart enough. I think I'm smart enough to copy and create forms and take all really important information and put it somewhere. But that's not the value of AI to me in channel marketing. It is at my fingertips. I have an entity that remembers the things that I forget and can juxtapose.
I've gotten to the point where I say, hey, Paula, look at this job description. Look at this job description. Do a deep search or just hit deep search. Right. It takes a little bit longer on this role in this industry. And can you take all three of those and pull it together? And this is the kind of stuff that we're doing. And for her to be able to do that. See what I said? Her? Yeah. It's kind of like the movie She. Did you see it? I'm telling you, I'm like, then what I'm becoming dependent on.
And this is exactly purpose built. Where's my daughter? Purpose built. It's purpose built. Right. The ability for me to strategically be thinking of an outcome. And I'm counting on my assistant to keep track of all my thoughts right there. And it's helping me pull together, and it allows me to go think. And I don't worry about having to do that. And on a moment's notice, I need to change this. Right. You know, the other day I said, I just interviewed somebody.
They had some really cool things to say. Go find 3 days ago what we did. Take what I just did to this, add it in there and create it, and let's go through it and see if this. Absolutely. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm. I'm fascinated by it every single day. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So speaking of fascination, you've been on the road a lot, and so one of the things we told our listeners and viewers is you've been traveling.
Now, I didn't make it to Channel Futures because of some knee surgery. First one I missed in a while yeah. So anyways, real quickly, any takeaways? How was the coaching corner? I know that's a big thing for you and maybe. Yeah, so we run the coaching cafe on site there and we've been doing it for like three years and you know, ChannelWise is, is kind of like my main, my main business. And we, and we provide on demand expert advice, you know, virtually one-on-one like this.
And then a few years ago when we launched we said wouldn't it be cool if we brought our coaches and experts in, in an experiential way into a, into a live environment. And so just, we said let's do it. So we had like three weeks to put it together. Channel Partners backed us up. We went and did it all manual because my platform does this right? One-on-one like this virtually. And you know, it's a whole lot different of saying oh, meet in Venetian Ballroom I at 9:25, you know, whatever it was.
And so there wasn't a platform out there. So we did it manually. It was just sort of a gimmick to like hey, get Channel Wise on the map. And you know, in some ways it was a little bit of an entrepreneurial fail because we were like, oh hey, when people get used to like having these quick conversations, they'll book time on Channel Wise.
It's not that it didn't work, it didn't probably didn't do what I wanted it to do, but what it didn't do was show that people wanted this and crave this in person connections at a show like that. So we were like, okay, well maybe there's a platform out there that does it. Nobody did. So we went and built one. So we took my Channel Wise platform and kind of retooled it and it's a completely separate thing.
And you know, you can, we have folks out there Logically is a large big MSP they brought, they bring us into their conferences. We have bigger companies doing that now to facilitate this because we coach well Channel Partners. We coach over 300 people and IT Expo before that we 1100. I mean it's a thing, people love it and we're so super excited to bring it because we know how effective it is to have this one on one connection and have that really that deep time that you can have an AI aside.
I mean you could talk to Paula, I could talk to Chet, but at the end of the day all they're doing, they're trained on what they're trained on online. They have not felt the experience or have that Empathy or, you know, really have that, that, that deep knowledge from a, as a person would on how to do marketing, sales, whatever it is, either as an MSP or a channel vendor supplier. So they really, really love it and we were super excited to do it. So it was a big success again this year.
The show was really fun. I mean, it's one of my favorite shows. I've done it for many, many years. I've spoken at it for many years. You know, I get to see a lot of the folks, you know, that I've, that I've known over, over a long time. And it's, you know, it's, it was a, it was a good. I don't love Vegas personally, but you know, that's, that's just when you have a big show like that, there's not many places, Orlando or Vegas. So, so I thought it was really good.
But you know, the Coaching Cafe this year was a really, really positive thing for everybody. So. Yeah, yeah, you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking eventually we're going to be able to introduce Paula to Chet and think about this. Well, they can start dating, right? There's a love story like, like Ms. Pac Man? No, no, no. But I'm actually somewhat serious about this. Right. So it's a knowledge base and a knowledge base. Right.
So, you know, sharing with an external knowledge base, an entity that is there. Everything you know about channel marketing, everything I know about the ecosystem and everything that I work on a daily basis, that would be a pretty powerful knowledge base and pull all that stuff together. So we've got to figure out. I'm sure it's possible. I just need to talk. Oh, I'm, I'm sure it's possible. We just have to think it through.
And like for the Channel Marketing Association, we built custom GPTs for channel marketers. So one is like events ROI. So we have an events ROI class that we just launched a certification so folks can take that class. We're getting rave reviews on that one. To take that course about, you know, how to get more, more out of the events that you're at. And we have a custom GPT built in there as an events calculator. You mentioned job description.
So we have collected probably thousands of job descriptions over the last year. We're building a custom GPT so our members can come in and put in like, I want a partner marketing manager with this many years experience with this, you know, this salary range, you know, give me the information or hey, I need to. I know, I Need to hire a, you know, a CMO. What's the average that, you know, all the job descriptions are saying like what's the salary range kind of thing.
So we're trying to build very, you know, things that are very specific to channel marketers. And then of course you alluded to the book. So my next book, it'll be my tenth. Yay. My next ten books. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah.
So the first six or eight of them were back in like 2008 and those were the step by step guide to Facebook, SEO, YouTube, like literally for people like me and my seasoned age who didn't like grow up with a cell phone in my hand or have any idea like what, what Facebook was about. It was like, okay, how do I set up a Facebook page? How do I start interacting on online? And then that morphed into I had the Solving the Social Media Puzzle.
So that was all about like, okay, now you know how to use the stuff. How do you actually turn those authentic relate, you know, connections into cash kind of thing. And my last one was called Return on Relationship and that was all about again, you know, not the mechanics of doing it or not why you should do it, but what, what is the result of building these relationships. So before ecosystems were a thing and that kind of stuff.
So yeah, so the book, we're going to be announcing it at summit at the Channel Marketing Association Summit. It's called 30 Days with AI for Channel Marketers. And it really is like a step by step guide for folks. Because you know, people in my, at my level, you know, we, these are things that we were, you know, a lot of folks are a little nervous about it. I mean I talk to high level channel marketers, CMOs, CROs, CEOs every day. And I know some of them who don't use it at all.
I know some who use it a ton. Like, you know, they have an assistant like you, but some who are just, they don't even use it at all. They need shirt that says purpose built. I will get one. You want to bring it? Bring it with me. Okay. So yeah, so we, so, so in that case, we wanted to make sure that everybody has sort of the foundations.
The other thing that I find interesting too is some of the folks I talked to, they're like, well, I have these, you know, these, the, the newer folks entering my, on my team. And, and they'll be, they'll, they'll be better using this stuff. The complete opposite is true because just because they know how to use the computer and they know how to like, you know, do these things.
A lot of these, these folks, they, they, they speak in emojis, you know, and you know as well as I do that you have to tell the, the GPT, the entity, whatever the AI is, you have to tell, tell it who it is, what you want them to do, who you are, what you want it to do, and the output.
So you're actually, it's actually totally different than you might think that people who have leadership experience are much better at getting the results that they want out of AI than people who are just native computer users and, or online folks. Because we understand that you have to step by step give it instructions and you know, how to sort of massage it. So, so my friend Julie and I wrote this book really to help the channel market.
Everything we're doing on the Channel Marketing Association is to help channel people, right? Help channel marketers do better at their jobs. You know, do be more efficient because everyone's being asked to, you know, do more with less feel, feel like they are caught up. But also too, if you do get caught in a riff or, or a downsizing or whatever, the next job you go to, that's going to be one of their questions.
How you know, how, how you know, how fluent are you, you know, at using these AI tools? So we're trying to give these folks, you know, the, the best way forward possible. Okay, so real quickly, let's talk a little bit about Channel Marketing Association Summit. Right? So that was a kind of nice lead into it. So I attended last year. I thought it was a great event. Maybe you can just like three key value props, including AI, why someone should attend and what they're going to get out of it.
And we'll stick this up on social, everybody as well too, and we'll record this. And actually what we're going to do is once we're done, we're going to run it through AI, the, the transcript and that'll help us do all the promotion. Wonderful, wonderful. So I mean we, you know, we started the Channel Marketing Summit really because we wanted channel marketers to have like a place to really just talk shop, you know, and there really isn't any.
And so I think the number one thing is these aren't, this is not a pitch fest. This is hardcore, you know, information. So we have a career panel, like what's the career path? We have an AI, we have, I'm doing an AI talk with my friend Julie and Daniel from Structured Web is going to Join us and. And Joan Morales from Klaviyo is going to join us. So, so we have, you know, so we have those folks.
We also have a finance session that one of the challenges with channel marketers trying to kind of climb the ladder even to CMO or on the channel chief side is we don't get a lot of visibility into P and L or maybe it's just not something that we really kind of take in college or along the way because marketing doesn't usually have those responsibilities. So we're trying to change the narrative around that. We have an ROI of events panel. We have an enablement panel.
So it's all information that you're going to be able to learn and go back and really implement right after the summit. So this isn't fluff, this is real strategy. I would say the other beautiful thing that people have always commented on for the last couple of years is just the networking because channel marketers are the ones that plan the events. They don't necessarily go to the events. If they do, they're not calling other channel marketers and saying, hey, let's go for coffee. Right.
They have to work with their partners and stuff. So it's just a great way for, for these people in these situations to really be able to connect. And we have a global presence as well. So we have a global panel. We have a few people flying over from France and different places to talk about. Like, because one of the trends I've noticed, Steven, is, is global. It used to be the global role set in the United States.
Several big companies now they sit in, in Belgium or they sit in France or wherever. And how do you, you know, even when your biggest market is the United States, so how do you handle a global role from that perspective? But if you're in a North American role and maybe your company's looking to go global, how do you then, you know, how do you make sure that you're taking into account the different geos when you're putting campaigns together? So I think those are the really exciting things.
And of course we have Jay McBain coming to talk about, you know, some trends. And we also have Maria Chen from Forrester, who's a wonderful person and one of my favorites too, you know, really, for a fireside chat. And then we have our awards ceremony. So we're excited about all of it, as you can tell. Yeah. I will say one of the things that I got at it last year was that everything that you're talking about, we had time to discuss one of the things I. Here, here's my.
Oh gosh, I almost said selling point, right. But it's really not. I think it was one of my key takeaways, it's probably a better way to put that, was that you guys built this with enough time in between the sessions for us to talk about. I actually saw somebody look in one of the sessions and then they get went and gave a demo of a particular platform in between the next session because the person sitting next to them was trying to figure out how to do something.
And so I, I, so all of the tracks are in real world practicality. But the cool thing was people were really interacting and I thought that that was, I thought was the best thing about the whole show. Yeah, I mean Amy, that's Amy Bailey, my co-founder, that's her brainchild. She was like, I'm so tired of going. And she's, she's planned thousands of events like she is the event queen. And she said, Kat, I'm so tired of going to these events.
And it's like back to back to back to back sessions and you don't have five minutes to catch your breath. And channel marketers, no offense to channels out there, but channel marketers, we have to be like, we have other things that we have to do too. So it's nice to be able to have the opportunity to have like a 15 minute break before a session. And so, and the other thing it does is it is it forces the person who's doing the session to cut out any fluff.
All we want is the stuff that you need to know to apply to your job for the channel marketer to apply to their job to get them to the next level. And so we get, we give those, those strategic breaks so people can go check their email if they need to or, you know, or have a conversation about what happened or you know, for a sponsor like you, they can, you know, you might be able to get a demo in, you know, that kind of thing. So here's the thing that I like about it.
If you're going to go somewhere and you take two days out of your time, be present in these sessions and what I've seen in other events, if you know, you don't have time to do that, you're not present. So you're sort of half listening, maybe you're taking some notes, you're checking on your phone and you're like, what, what did they just say? And what I liked about it was, and look, nothing's going to be perfect because we all had day jobs.
Right. Because I felt like people were present and I thought that was really good. Well, we had people taking paper notes, which I thought was really kind of cool because like you said, they, they're there. Their, their computer was in their lap there in their laptop bag and they didn't take it out until the break. So they were purposely, you know, they were purposely paying attention. So, yeah, we're excited and you know, it's a passion project for us.
So we're, we're, you know, we're just thrilled that people are giving us that, that feedback. There's that purpose word again. Okay, last question. Does anybody need to do any prep? Like, should they be doing a little AI research before they come there? Or is this, hey, you're gonna, I know you've got multiple sessions, maybe from beginner to advanced. Should anybody do anything ahead of time or can they just show up open mind and let's go. What do you think? Just show up open mind.
We have a very special gift for people. Hint, hint that come So, you know, and, and Julie and I are going to do. Our talk isn't going to be on like how to build a prompt. Right. That's what you're going to get your little special gift for. But what we want to talk is there's these are leaders mostly in the room and up and comers and folks that are, that are, they're going to be leading organizations. So it's like, how are you going to drive AI adoption? Right.
How are you going to drive AI adoption? How are you going to drive the governance? How are you going to make sure that the tools not only are being used, but being used properly? So we're really going to kind of cover a little bit of that as well. So we're, we're, you know, that like I said, the finance, I mean, you don't need to do any kind of prep work beforehand. What we would say is, you know, we'll open the app soon.
The biggest prep work is go connect with other people that are going to be there. I mean, it's not a situation where we have 10 people coming from one company. We specifically set this up that we have 200 seats. That is it. We only have 20 left, by the way. And, and that's it. And so we, we, we want the room full of channel marketers who are ready, willing and able to learn and connect and network. And how are we going to drive our, our businesses and the channel forward?
Okay, I know this is probably redundant, but they want to find out more about the Channel Marketing association Summit. Where's the best place to go? Channelmarketingassociation.com Sorry. Sorry, everybody. I just. That's all right. You never know. Had to end it that way. Don't take anything for granted. Okay? All right, Kathryn, thank you for joining us, listeners and viewers. Thanks for joining us and have a great purpose built day. Thank you, Steven. Bye.