21 - How to Align Channel Sales with Your Direct Sales, Darren Bibby

21 - How to Align Channel Sales with Your Direct Sales, Darren Bibby This production is brought to you by magenta Eric's. A gen tricks is a Pioneer in platforms for partner, ecosystem management and partner relationship management. Speaker 2 This is partner relationship management. The ultimate Channel sales podcast. Welcome to another episode of the ultimate Channel sales podcast. I'm your host, Paul Byrd. The success of a company is often reliant on its sales team. So aligning, your channel Speaker 1 sales, team with your direct sales, team can be a great way to maximize your business has potential. This episode will provide an overview on how to align the two. In addition to tips and techniques to help you navigate, this tricky situation will cover topics such as the importance of communication and collaboration between the two teams, creating a unified sales strategy, and the benefits of Having a cohesive sales effort. Guest intro: Darren Bibby, Aligned Partner Our Guest today has an impressive background in building Channel partner programs. He's been helping high-tech companies succeed in their partner, programs for almost two decades together with his team as the vice president of partner strategy and programs. At DocuSign. He focused on creating programs to help resellers isvs and a size. Do more business with DocuSign and they built that program from the ground up in just Five years before that he was the vice president at IDC a leading Global channels and Alliance research firm. And he also ran the partner program at Microsoft Canada. Today, he's the principal at a line partner, a consultancy providing assessments, and advisory services around partner programs and channel Alliance strategy. He's with us now to talk about how to align Channel sales and your direct sales. Welcome Darren, BB welcome to the show. Darren, it's great to have you here. Speaker 3 Thanks for having me Speaker 1 Paul. So maybe you can give us a little bit of your background. Some highlights of your career in the channel space so far. Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. I think what's interesting about my background and others can say it too, but I've had kind of three very interesting perspectives on the Channel World. I've been a partner, so I get that perspective when you want to work with Microsoft, who was in my case or another vendor and what you're trying to get out of them. And not relationship. I've been a software vendor both of Microsoft Canada and then we, you know, more recently with DocuSign. So, I got a chance to actually build out the partner program there and get that perspective. And for 10 years at IDC, I studied, partner programs, and partner strategies. And really there, I got a sense of what are the best practices, what are the standard practices in the industry around programs strategy, and all those sorts of things. And now I'm trying to pull it all together. My own little company here aligned partner and I've been working with some software companies on improving their partner programs. I don't think anyone's really perfected. It, there's always work to do right now. Whenever kind of, have you ever talked to someone and say no, we got everything done. We don't need to work on it anymore. We're all happy. We love our portal or all done. Everybody's got something to work on in partner program. So I'm trying to add my value to some, some companies in this Consulting capacity. Speaker 1 So that's interesting. You went from Microsoft to IDC and then to DocuSign. So how was that transition from going, from an analyst perspective to actually boots-on-the-ground? Did it? Did it help you at DocuSign your time at IDC? Speaker 3 Oh certainly yeah I mean for anything that we were trying to do I had a dozen ideas or more of how other companies had done it. So that was the that was the great part. The thing that was harder, of course, is that IDC all we did. All day was talk to Partners, see how they were using. Being the partner programs and getting along with their vendors. We were talking to the vendors all the time and getting their insights, but is always a little bit higher level than what I would need at DocuSign at DocuSign, I needed to roll up the sleeves and build stuff that worked and I laughed that, you know, it often be sort of like, Elon Musk did during the model 3. A days when they couldn't get things going, I sleep on the floor beside the machine that wasn't working. That was sort of my analogy there. Is he just had to get that going. Which Alden Salesforce would make this process happen and so it was a lot more sleeves rolled up kind of work once I got Speaker 1 going. So let's get into today's discussion and really start with the kind of importance from a partner strategy and program perspective. So at a basic level, what role does a vendor's partner strategy and program. Role of alignment with the direct sales team in a vendor’s partner strategy and programs function Play in the bigger conversation of getting alignment within two sales teams? Speaker 3 Yeah, sure. So first of all, I think there's just such an Since to have a partner strategy and programs team, and there may be lots of different connotations of what that means to differ vendor. Sometimes it's a bit more operational. Sometimes a bit more on the strategy side. But I ended up kind of being the number two, to the channel, Chief and almost a chief of staff. In some ways, he was too busy trying to make the number. He was too busy trying to meet our biggest partners and solve those situations. My goal was to make it easier for everybody to do business that meant Here for the partners to do business easier for our partner account, managers to do business and in the field teams the sellers. That's what we're here to talk about today, right? How could we make edges more smooth for everyone to do business? And I kind of, think of, we had a very bumpy Dirt Road in the beginning. When I got there partner, I seller a Pam could get down that road, but ever crosses it was, but it wasn't nice. We need to make four lane Highway smooth signs on the road that said, here's how you do it. Here's how fast it should go and you just get a a lot more throughput when you think that way. So I was there, my team was there to make things smoother and for everyone to do their business that they needed to get done with DocuSign partner side easier. That was the point Speaker 1 you bring up an interesting topic. This idea of smooth operation. most important aspects to building out a program that paves the way for smooth partner operations and help achieve that alignment So, what are some of the most important aspects? If you're giving some thought to building a program, putting your strategy together that are really going to affect that kind of smooth partner operations, Really help to get you pointed in the right direction for alignment Within These direct and channel teams Speaker 3 here are. So first of all, I think if you got someone whose job it is to make it smoother that help. So I've said, the importance of this type of team and I think it's important that person in the beginning and then that team overtime is a part of the partner organization. It's a different thing to have a matrix structure and you're hoping someone over and sales office has your best interests in mind. But to have a driver right beside the channel Chief. I think that's really, really important and then the Mantra of I call it program at ization. I don't, even think it's a word, I don't care all patented, but it doesn't have that mindset of someone comes to you with a one-off situation. And you've got to thank, could we make that into some kind of program process policy? And that's kind of the start of it is just that mindset of, we're not going to accept one-offs, okay? Maybe if we're partnering with the Companies in the world will do something special but for the most part, the default has to be standard program. So you're always thinking about that program is ization, it would be quicker to just saw in the moment, it would be quicker to solve the one off and move on, but you've got to think this person's coming to me with this one off issue. Is this going to happen again? Yes, start thinking about how to make that into some kind of program process policy and the next big one too, then is to document it. It's not real until it's dark. Demented. That was a big one too. I have seen some funny stuff at companies. I mean the, the documentation sometimes is well, hey, I took a screenshot of a slack message. I got. It said, this was the way we were supposed to do something that's not quite good enough. Speaker 1 No, not at all. Processes or systems that allow for efficient communication between the vendor and partner sales teams Is there kind of any systems that you would put in place to have these kind of processes shared between the team? Something that maybe could improve or make communication between a direct team and a partner, team more efficient. Speaker 3 Yeah, sure. Jumping to that piece of like, how sellers work with a partner organization and systems. Certainly your CRM has to be well architected. It has to be clean enough. I mean, there's a lot of technical debt on some of these things. Kind of old little things that some 15 years ago, had a great idea for something. So then cleaner and simpler that CRM is and the partner record in the opportunity, record mapping to the partner in the customer and everything, the smoother, that is the better. So there's a system CRM. Just how you document that. So there's some really nice tools out there that are on top of the serum or within it to tell you how to do a process, right? Oh you've never done a resale deal before Step 1. Step 2. We didn't have all that figured out but even just having step-by-step instructions in a Google doc. That was very, very important. Obviously the portal and how a partner sees everything. So all of those systems are more important than ever. But what I would say is you, Yet automate, some of these things, if the process isn't there the program and you can't a lot of me one off thing. So there's almost a maturity there to make sure you really thought through the program at ization of these different different elements and document it and then get it automated. Misalignment or effect can a poor partner program on alignment So what's the effect if you've got lack of documentation, you have misalignment between direct and channel, sellers really a poorly architected partner program and dealing with these one-offs all the time. What kind of It does that potentially have on an organization. Speaker 3 It's maddening when you start watching it happen and it can be demoralizing when everything you do is hard and it's not documented anyone. It is documented when that's easy to find things work. Smoothly, people are more upbeat, they're spending way less time on figuring out how to do something. They just go do the thing they need to do. That's certainly a big one, is just the whole organization is walking more upright, they're proud of the job, they're doing, they're not spending all this time. Trying, Solve things and I think it's a nicer culture to work in when things work more smoothly. Getting partner teams and sales teams to work together So as we get kind of into more, the Tactical side of things on implementing, this getting teams to work together, never mind selling teams, like, partner teams and your direct team that can be a bit of a difficult task. So, generally speaking and kind of, in a nutshell, tell us why this conflict, what this conflict is all about and what it tends to Speaker 3 involve. Well, so we're talking about Out to different departments, + Partners on the other side. So you've got your sales or typically, somewhat separated even if it's under the same leader in a cro and your partner org and then you've got the partners on the outside and you've got the situation where leadership can say to anyone internally jump and they'll say how high you know I'm ready to go and if you say jump to a partner they'll say well let me think about it what's in it for me and they evaluated and they've got other vendors in the like so that starts to set up some of what Going on, you got these three different stakeholders. Obviously sellers are coin driven, you know, they do what they're trained to do, there may not be a bigger truth in the world to to that. And so even if they will make a tiny bit more money in a scenario, they will go for that even to the detriment of a partnership that has taken five or seven years to build. We've got that saying that I love that trust is built in drops has earned And drops and lost in buckets. So that's seller, can make an extra hundred dollars and they'll throw a partner under the bus and kill that relationship. So that's kind of what we're dealing with and from my programs a strategy team I thought like, what could I do, what could we do to make this better? And so that's why I've got some ideas and hopefully can help some of the listeners on how to fix some of those things. Speaker 1 So what are some of those top tips that you have to start getting alignment or maintain alignment and in You're kind of both teams are working collaboratively towards a common company goal. Top tips to get that alignment for partner sales and direct sales teams Yeah, absolutely. And and maybe this is the difference between my previous role which was higher level, and then now I've actually rolled up my sleeves and gone through it. Let me give you some of those tactical tips. I've got about six or seven here. First of all, nothing is more important than if you can get your CEO and your cro in alignment with the partner strategy, right? That's not always the case, but none of the rest of these tactical ideas. Will ever amount to the CEO in the cro. All being in alignment with our they go to market with Partners. Typically most companies, there's some amount of friction in there. The first thing that I would suggest anyone who wants to get their partner organization, more in alignment, with the sales organization, number one is just sort of a steady stream of consistent messaging to them about why it makes sense for them to work with Partners. So they need to keep hearing it for it to hit home otherwise they're not going to. Listen and the upset of partner in the process or throw them under the bus or something. So first thing I'd say to the partner organization and often to that strategy and programs group is come up with your talktrac. I'm working with partners and get everyone in that VD or partner or, to know it and start repeating it. And so how do you come up with that talk track? There's some really great statements you can make and you should make sure they work at your company but hey seller did you know the majority of the president's Club, a he's got Out there by working with Partners. Hey, there's a there's a comment that just models the behavior to say, hey look our best sellers if presence Club got there, because they work with Partners more than they didn't. For instance, right? You can talk about the fact that did, you know, that deals with partnership two and a half times the size of your average deal size. So there's some sound bites, you can go and collect. That's a bit of a gut feel number, or you could say, you know, the average deals closed in half the time, go find that analytics person that your company may be in sales officer, or And go have a look at the deals because you'll probably find some really interesting statistics and sound bites that you can use on. And on one of the places I did, this is when new employees came on board, every month in Seattle. We had, oh, God is 100 plus people every month. It was incredible. The amount of hiring we used to do when I was at, DocuSign not no longer there, of course, but I'd go up and I tell this story of the partner organization and how we work with Partners. So that was kind of the first time I would get them and a lot of them may have I've come from a place where they never work with Partners. Now is often the case I found so get them early. Get that message consistently out there and let them know that they can be, you know, the GM, the CEO of their territory, you pick the account. So you want to go to a loan, get the rest of your quota with these Partners. So there's some nice sound like they're so number one is get your messaging together and get everyone sort of on that same talk track. Speaker 1 So are there other things that they can do, you know, does the role of sales enablement and the Collateral everything that we're providing to these teams. Role of vendor training in sales enablement and achieving alignment That play a big role in achieving good alignment. I completely agree with the messaging. I'm wondering how much does the training in the enablement have an Speaker 3 effect? So that's an interesting one. I went into the the whole thing saying, hey, I'll just set up a webinar, internal the sales enablement team. Kind of had a process for doing that, you know, I'll get an hour and I'll tell them everything they need to know about working with our partner group. And it was, Okay, but it was just okay, what you realized was that they are so busy, they don't really think about working with Partners until they actually have a deal. So on that one hour call, maybe I had a handful of 10%, 20% of the group who is dealing with a partner deal at that time. Who didn't already know how to do that deal? Who needed the help? Everyone else is like oh gosh another webinar. And so what the real answer became was a little bit more of a Just in time and a in the right place kind of training and enablement. So we were able to take some advantage of the technology and have the battle cards in the information about the key Partners, right beside them in the CRM, right? So we would always refer to it, you can go and here's the top information, and we made each of the partner account managers, responsible for that information to make sure it was up-to-date. So having the information right in the place, they work every day. That was super helpful. The other enablement was just Quick guides on, you know, how to work with a reseller, how to do a referral deal, how to do an isv type of deal. So as quick as we could kind of wizards or step by step to make that easy and one of the other things was you just I think all companies need this sort of this one place. There's usually somewhere that the enabling team has set up to say go here for product training, go here for whatever to their two sellers. There's got to be a place on how to work with partners and the mistake people make from the partner organization is They fill it and they put all sorts of stuff in there. Keep it simple how to do a reseller deal, how to do a referral, how to do, whatever, and then how to get in touch with us. And that's the other one on enablement. Honestly, a really dumb and simple one, but we had the resources to do it with just a slack channel that if you had any question about how to do business with a partner, fire us a question and we had someone monitoring at all times and that get back to them right away half the time they could answer it half the time. They said God Your question, we're going to dig that up for you, will get right back to you. Thank you for maybe for them. The North Star has to be make it easy for partners. Make it easy for Pam's, make it easy for sellers to do business. So we thought that through Speaker 1 that's a mantra, I've always had, you know, make it easy for people to do business with you and they usually will. I've worked on both sides of the channel very much like you. And when I was building and managing channel, one of my partners with CDW and I was in Chicago, all the time. And doing a floor walks and one of the things that I saw as far as one of the strategies implemented was all about incentives. Do incentives play in motivating the channel team and the direct team? So what role and you think it works do incentives play in motivating the channel team and the direct team is it effective? Is there anything that you've seen in the past that helps bring that more into alignment when you got something incentivizing behaviors Speaker 3 here? So we didn't really We spend a lot of time on the sort of spiffs and incentives in that. Hey, go sell a partner deal and you'll get this or that kind of, you know, one time thing. The major thing that we worked on was a compensation neutrality plan that what's critical. So if you can imagine that a hundred dollar deal comes to a rep sales rep, and it's through a reseller and they realize, oh wait a second, I'm only getting the net of this deal because we have to pay a reseller but would, but if I did that deal on my own, I'd get the whole hundred dollars. Ready to throw the partner under the bus? Don't even ask me twice. I'm ready to throw. So we had to come up with and it took a long time, it took a lot of research of other companies. It took a lot of working with the finance group to implement the comp neutrality program. But what that eventually meant was that they were incentivized this, the direct traps were incentivized. Pretty much the same. Take it direct to you, get your dollar, they are hundred dollars. Take it through a reseller, we're going to make sure your quota is representing a hundred dollars. So we were able to All to put that in and I'm eating massive difference, it really did. Because otherwise, they were just always worried about this haircut, the way, things were going before, and a lot of with other companies work, is they have to give up that discount to the partner and they don't see it as their quota. So that was a big one. That was the major incentive we worked on. Speaker 1 That's a great idea. Like that idea of there's no more infighting between. Hey, if I take it direct then I get X number of dollars. Speaker 3 If I put it through a partner, Speaker 1 I'll take less. So if it's the same regardless of what channel you put it through, then I think you'll change Speaker 3 their whole mentality, really did, they were more open to working with partners, that was a massive deal for us. Speaker 1 So, I want to you had mentioned earlier, this concept of trust. Do vendors trust their partners and do partners trust the vendors? So do you think vendors sometimes have trouble trusting their partners and vice versa. What about the partners? Do you think Partners have trouble trusting their vendors Speaker 3 welfare all the time? I mean, we're All only human. I think there are times when a partner does enough of their business with a vendor that the trust is there and it's pretty Rock Solid. There are other times where a partner is doing a third of their business with the vendor that we're talking about a third with another vendor and a third with another and they're all competitors, all of a sudden the vendor has to start worrying. They have to say well hang on if I'm bringing them a deal or talking about a deal or they just going to their other vendor. And that's so certainly, there are lots of scenarios. Where you have to question the trust. But as we all know in relationships and Partnerships is never going to work if there's not a sufficient amount of trust. Speaker 1 Absolutely. So if we kind of dig in a little bit, you know, you talked about making it easy not only working between teams but then also having partner sales teams easier to work with. What vendors can do to make it easier for partners to work with them In general, do you think of anything that vendors can do to make it easier for partners to work with them? Yeah, so Speaker 3 what can you do to make it? It easier for your partners to work with the direct team that whole partner field linkage is important. And I think that is, it's sort of on my aligned partner, Journey map, my checklist of things that you need to think about is, how are you making it easy for ya? Those partner sellers to work with your direct sellers, there's a few things that we did, we talked about systems having some transparency. That if you are the partner record on a deal, we're sharing that with you on the portal. There was actually an ability to Back and forth with the sales rep on the portal and make that introduction. It typically comes down to those Human Relationships that we get the partner sales rep in touch. I keep saying back in the day, what we did was when I was at DocuSign, we got the sales rep of the partner with the sales rep very quickly. It was typically the partner account manager, who would make that work. But another thing that I was going to point out as we did have a partner service advisor, team that would handle any of those situations. Where if a partner didn't have a full-time partner manager, we had a one-to-many partner account manager team that could go and handle them. And that just solves so many problems because often, you know, you just talked about, trust you talked about working, well together, it's all about human relationships. So RPS, 18 would be able to connect them and getting that connection started off on a solid, footing made the world of difference to get that. So I don't know that we had any super special Magic on that one. Was getting the relationship in their early reminding everyone that you're on the same page, remaining the seller. They weren't going to get any less by working with partner, letting the relationship Foster from Speaker 1 there. Strategies for promoting communication and encourage collaboration So also on the topic communication you had mentioned earlier about the slack channel for being able to get questions answered right away. Are there any other strategies or did you kind of bake this into kind of your policies that you've put together to really promote communication, and really encourage Raishin. Speaker 3 Well, I think that if you've got a mantra of making it easier and we're all trying to get to the same goal as you start building in ways to make it easier for the seller. So another way that ticked off a bunch of boxes, as we had in the sales organization partner development reps. Something we didn't really have too many of when I got there but over time we were able to build out a role that was very similar to a sales development rap but they would focus on one or two or three bigger partners and they would kind of paying them for Heels and make relationships and find it on a one-to-many basis. Whereas an SDR was coming talking to 100 customers in a month that partner development rep with, talk to three Partners about 100 customers in the month, right? The nice thing about making things easier though was, we took that opportunity to say. Hey, you're handing this off to the AE, anyway. Do you think you could just give them a little bit of an extra guiding helping hand on doing that partner deal. Ask them if they've done one before. Ask them, if they need any help, and that made it. World of difference. So that was another technique to just make it easier for the seller to do partner deals. When again there's a queue songs becoming a big company especially over the pandemic and there was lots and lots of. I saw it every time I went to Seattle with the new cohort of new employees and they're mostly sales employees. A lot of them didn't have the background so that was another way to get those partner development reps. Yes, their main job was getting new leads but as they hand them off they can do a little bit of hand-holding and that went a long way. So I Speaker 1 The really good idea. So that makes me think I wonder how is there a way? And I'm not sure if this is something that you have done in the past, but is there a way to measure the success of collaboration between the direct team and the partner team? Measuring the success of collaboration between the direct team and the partner team You know, they say that you can't manage something, if you can't measure it, but is there a way to manage that to kind of measure that collaboration between those two teams? Speaker 3 I mean that's a really good question and I do agree want to measure as much as you can. I suppose the most obvious answer is, am I hearing about it? You know, am I hearing problems? Am I hearing issues as we are? We hearing more compliments and comments so I guess that's the really the ad hoc way of measuring. It is sort of what am I hearing out there and do you think that's another key element to all of this is if you're in the partner or and you're in the program's team, you're trying to help any of this, go track down, some sellers, get some time with them, go buy him, a coffee virtual coffee and just learn what their life is. Like because when you know more about them, you And create processes policies instruction guides that help them more. You should be able to measure the downloads of the instruction guides, you given to them. Are they getting used? Are they getting red? So, you could measure things like that. But I'm also a fan of just getting that anecdotal evidence to say, hey, a partner needed to sorry. Uh, sales rep need to know how to work with a partner. They download the guide. They went to the slack Channel, they went to the PDR and it solved their problem and that was great. So I love hearing those stories but I like where you're going. Going with that. I don't think we did it well enough. Speaker 1 It's a metric that doesn't have a box to check, but I think that those types of things looking at how much interaction with the enablement materials, how many times did they hit the slack channel? To answer questions? Probably gives you at least a trend analysis to see. Are you answering more Speaker 3 questions? There's a sort of Maslow's hierarchy of needs when you're building these things, right? Like if we don't have any kind of Partners you start there. If we don't have any kind of good way to enable sellers, we got to get to that. I say we didn't quite make it to the talk, which I would say was the measurement, the metrics, the, how are we doing on that? And so sometimes, there was just so much to get done. We had to get on to the next problem, and start again with the hierarchy of needs, but I think your bang on with your comments, call that you've got to measure all these things if you can and you're right, there's ways to do it for sure. Speaker 1 Perfect. So as we start to wrap up, What do you think the most important bit of advice that you can share with vendors that are trying to steer? Advice for vendors who want to steer clear of misalignment between partner sales and direct sales teams Clear of this, kind of misalignment between their direct sales and their partner sales team? Speaker 3 I think it's helpful to have a team on the partner side. Like I had, it's not quite operations, it's not pure strategy. It's someone thinking about how the operating system of the partner business Works, internally and externally. So having someone focused on and thinking about Number one is the, then you have the people to go and work on this and I'd say, number two is go and talk to everyone and just try to understand the situation. The number of times, I've heard of companies trying to implement something and I kind of dig into that. Well, why are you doing that? What? We think it's the right thing to do. Did you go and talk to the seller and sometimes it seems scary? No, go have a coffee with them. Find out what's going on in their world. And once, you know, a little bit more about three or four or five times, they tried working with Partners. It was too difficult, why? While we didn't know how to do it. Okay. You start to find all the points of friction and you just start knocking them off. One by one is sometimes, it's just a just do it thing. Just go. Listen, what are the points of friction and start knocking them off one by one. Some are going to give you a bigger wins and others like comp neutrality but the slack channel that was an easy one. We realized they had questions they didn't know who to go to. Okay, there you go, slack Channel solves, a lot of them. So start knocking them off one by one. You'll make it a lot more Speaker 1 aligned just do it. That is Sage advice. All right. Darren. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Speaker 2 All right guys, thank you for listening to the ultimate Channel sales, podcast. Please don't forget to join us. Next time for more information, please. Visit Channel sales, podcast.com if you haven't already, please like And subscribe to our podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode today, please leave us. A five-star rating from the Apple podcast app just select. Our show, scroll down to the rating and review section and click right review. And don't forget to share with your friends or Professional Network, anyone who to enjoy it, see you next time on the ultimate Channel sales podcast, Speaker 1 this production is brought to you by magenta Eric's. A gen tricks is a Pioneer in platforms for partner, ecosystem management and partner relationship management.