Co-Sell That Sellers Crave

[Music] Channel Voices is sponsored by METER. METER helps partners deliver a complete networking stack, wired, wireless, and cellular, with no upfront costs and ongoing recurring revenue, offer your customers the best in connectivity while building a more profitable services business. Thanks to METER for sponsoring. Go to METER.com/channelvoices to apply now. That's M-E-T-E-O-R. com/channelvoices to find out how to partner with METER and accelerate your business. Hello. Welcome and thank you for tuning into Channel Voices. The podcast for future channel leaders where we learn the ins and outs of partner ecosystems through casual conversations with channel professionals from a variety of industries, partner types, and geographies. My name is Magic and I'm your host. [Music] Alex Buckles, welcome to Channel Voices. Thanks for having me, Magic. Lovely to have you. Alex, would you mind just quickly introducing yourself, telling us a little bit about your channel background please? Sure. So my name is Alex Buckles. I'm the CEO of a company called Forecast of Olen, where professional services organization, a tech enabled service that helps me to be company, stand up and execute really tightly aligned co-sell motions. In terms of background, I'm a 20 year enterprise sales veteran. I've actually never held a partnership role in my entire career. I just figured out early on in my career when I was selling in the SAP ecosystem and subsequently twice in the Adobe ecosystem how to get pipeline for my partners. And they usually didn't involve working through the partner managers. I just figured out how do you get to the sales teams and how do you show a strong what's in it for them, make sure that there's incentive for them on their side. And I just got really good at that. And over time, we ended up forming a very, very niche focus business and helping others do that. But more from a sales perspective, and less from traditional channel. Fantastic. Thank you so much. The co-sell motion is super popular right now. And obviously a lot of partnerships, professionals recognized that it's one of the best motions to go to market with. In terms of partnerships, many of those teams struggle to activate sales, right? From your experience, what are the top reasons sellers after ignore partner source opportunities and how would you fix that? I feel like the channel, well, there's a number of different things there. But the challenge that most partnership professionals face is they don't really know how to go about putting, you know, partner-centric motions in the hands of sales and the way that they want to be enabled. And I found that what we do every single day is we build co-sell playbooks. We have a playbook for everything. And a playbook is not a battle card. When I get on to go create a playbook for a customer, I usually get into, especially a new customer. I want to learn like, what are the executive priorities for the year? Are we trying to win net new, maybe in a specific vertical? Are we trying to drive expansion plays? Do we have retention or churn issues that need to be addressed? Maybe we can create playbooks for. And once we get that list of priorities, then it's about figuring out, okay, which partner or partners are best suited or the subject matter experts in that particular area? And it's usually like a services partner or an SI or a GSI of some type. And what I do then is I do an hour-long interview with the partner and the customer and kind of go deep on, you know, what pains are we solving together for the buyer? What personas are involved? Who do we need to win in terms of, you know, hearts and minds by persona? And the output of that is we have a co-sell play. And that co-sell play has all, you know, a bunch of boring details about ICP and how do you identify the right accounts that would be a perfect fit for this motion, could involve intent data, things like that. But the most important part of that is what we call the co-sell door opener. And the door opener is essentially a message or, you know, it's the outbound communication that either a sales rep or a CSM is going to go put in front of an account that says, hey, you know, we know you're a, you know, a large insurance company and we've created this experience that'll help, you know, you uncover, you know, a revenue leakage or, you know, whatever it may be, I'd like to invite you to an experience that, that'll help you kind of uncover, you know, that revenue leakage and normally our partner, you know, insert SI company A charges, you know, $5,000 for this. But we're going to cover it for you. And I only have a few of these to give away this quarter. I thought about you. Would you like to take advantage of that? I'll pause there for a second. See if you have any questions about it. But in general, that level of messaging that creates scarcity and exclusivity and you assign a monetary value to it, sales reps and customer success managers almost salivate over they're like, oh my gosh, yeah, I definitely want to put that in front of my accounts. And that's usually the beginning of a wonderful co-sell motion. That is pretty cool. I like the door opener. I like the scarcity that this type of messaging creates. And obviously from the get co you are not saying that I'm going to sell to you. You're saying we have a partner who's just going to sit down with you and do an analysis, right? Whichever direction you want to take it, they'll, they will be there for you. And they'll tell you what their, what their findings are out of this. And then if, if you're so inclined, we can talk about, you know, what their recommendations would be in terms of how we could solve this for you. That's how it typically plays out. Absolutely. That's correct. You don't want to show up and be like, this is not a sale situation. This is a, you're not doing a demo. You're not like just doing pure discovery. You're simply adding as much value as humanly possible to attempt to fix some type of pain or uncover some type of insight that the buyer has. And the output is something that we review together. It's like, hey, we're going to, we're going to give you this high value thing that's worth paying for. And so that they should value it. And if you've done the interview correctly, you really honed in on what that value is. And it leads to a very organic type of sales cycle versus the, let me just show you a demo, do some discovery because I know I want to sell you something. It's a very different experience. When you come in and start sitting down, obviously vendors typically bring you in to do this coastal playbook. How do partners typically respond? Do you have to drag them or are they typically quite open to this? Sometimes you have to drag them. But most of the time, especially if we're working with a large platform company who has a large ecosystem of service providers or size, when that large platform company invites you in to go do this coastal, you know, this coastal activation workshop, they normally feel very special. They understand that it's an opportunity for them. You know, because a lot of times you're trying to, you know, get and maintain the attention of the platform sellers. And it's very difficult to do if you don't know how to do it properly. And this is a really great way to get your foot in the door, meet new sales teams or customer success teams. You're going to get some pipeline along the way. And when we have that first early success, even if a platform company only buys one playbook from us, you know, and they just want to try it out, which is how most of them dip their toe on the water. Once they see success, they're like, okay, let's like pick 10 more. And let's go. We want to go pick competitive, ripener places. Let's go do that new expansion retention. And and everybody gets excited. Do you see those coastal motions typically being more on the exclusive side when it comes to, you know, the partner ecosystem? It isn't kind of rolled out flat to everybody, typically partner tiers, some sort of some sort of status plays a role whether the partner is invited into a coastal motion or not. How do you, how do you see this? And how have you seen vendors prioritizing the ones to invite into a program like this? Sure. Great question. So one on the exclusivity side, yes, there can be exclusivity in some of these motions. And it happens kind of organically. Case in point, I've got a customer now who's a small professional services organization that's co-selling in the HubSpot ecosystem, you know, and so you're not, you know, you're not used to seeing, you know, seven figure ARDL sizes and that ecosystem. But, you know, what they did was they created a, they specialize in banks and credit unions. So specialization is really key when it comes to tightly aligned coastal motions. Generalist need not apply. They usually don't co-sell very well. And in their case, they have the, the AES or what they call grow specialists at HubSpot, you know, give them account names that are on their target account list and the partner does all the research and puts together some proprietary data they have and gives this read out. So they approach the account with something very, very personalized and relevant. And in that case, because the, the partner is using some of their unique IP and their in-house resources, it can't be replicated across other partners. And so that's a really cool way to go to market. And if you have, if anyone who's listening to this has a specialization like that, that's where you win over and above your competitors. And that's how you gain access to teams. And that's how you also keep other, you know, other competitors outside of working with the AES and the CSMs that you're working with at the large platform company. Now, you know, there are plays that can be created that are more horizontal in nature that can be applied to multiple partners as an example. Expansion is a really common one. So let's say we've got, you know, 50 generalist, you know, services partners, you know, in an ecosystem that are really good at, you know, at, with your product. And you roll out a new feature set or a new cross-sell opportunity. You can create a motion that allows them to go into their customer bases with, you know, a motion that helps them cross sell a new product while also creating services revenue for them plus referral fees. And so that's a more horizontal motion that isn't, it doesn't, is not exclusive. I specifically like the point and I took a note of this that it actually creates a better level of loyalty with your partners because they buy into this coastal motion and takes them away from working with competitors, right? That mind share actually gets directed towards that coastal motion with this particular vendor. In the mind share is the most important piece. It's like, you can develop that initial coastal playbook and get some early success. But oftentimes, even when there's early success, communications fall off the radar, the partner has other priorities. They forget to stay in touch with the AES or the CSMs. And at the end of the day, almost all of your referrals are going to come from individual contributors. I don't care who you are or what company belong to, like who you partner with. It's the frontline people that are interacting with prospects or customers every single day that are in the position to make a referral. And so in order to make sure that they're, you know, enabled to identify when you're relevant and to articulate why you're relevant in that moment, you've got to stay top of mind. And so, you know, engaging them on a regular basis for every customer we create engagement plans. How are we going to add value to their lives on an ongoing basis and not just say, hey, at the end of every month, like, you've got any deals for me? Like that, you'll get, that becomes annoying really quickly. Yeah, absolutely. That's the, that's the old world of typical resale, right? Then the pipeline dries out. Typically, the cams are tasked with, okay, go after your partners, ask what they're working on. Can we get any deal edges in, right? Yeah, it's all about me. Go, go in there. You can't make it all about you. It's that, that, that chip has sailed. It's gone. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned this, right? You work across ISVs, you know, large system integrators. There's, on its service providers. What's different about how each of these partner types should approach co-setting to maximize results? So let's chat about your standard ISV. So when we're dealing with a customer who's just, you know, they're not, they're not a big platform company. They're just an ISV that usually has integrations with, you know, many platforms, but they usually have a couple of focus ecosystems that they want to break into. They often believe, amidst that they're going to, that they're going to be able to, all the sales reps that, you know, at Salesforce or HubSpot are going to feed me business because my technology is so awesome. That is not the case. Very rarely, in fact, will an AE bring you into a deal from a large platform company unless they cannot win that deal without you, then and only then will they bring in an ISV partner. Sometimes you can backdoor your way into the pre-sales organization, and, and if your technology should be in an architect's mind as they're scoping out, you know, a deployment, then that's a cool way to backdoor your way in. That's, so that's a more common motion in that regard for ISVs. But the most common is about getting the mind share of all the SI's or service providers around the big platforms. So as an example, if you're, you know, if you're an ISV and you're specializing in financial services of some sort, I would go find all the professional services organizations who are also serving that same ICP around, let's say Salesforce or HubSpot, and you start building the Coastal Playbooks for them. So they have your story and your value propositions baked into their core process. You can't just hope they're going to bring you into deals. It's like, no, get into their slide decks and make sure that your story is a part of their story. And that's how you win as an ISV. On the professional services side of switching gears there, they tend to revolve around big platform ecosystems too or large SaaS companies. And those are the folks that can get great results from going directly to the AES at the big platforms. And usually I start there with it's very, you know, it's not impossible to break in from nothing, obviously. But I usually, you know, I like finding folks who already have some wins under their belts, like, oh, I've won a couple of deals with the AES. Am I great? That's all we need or a couple of wins. And that's how we get to a team. And how do we make this repeatable? It's built a playbook around that so you can replicate that same success with other folks. And then we have an engagement plan for every team that they've got, you know, they're connected to at the large platform. And we keep track of all that activity to make sure that they're creating that moat around the team. So other competitors don't get in for what they do. The third one are the large platforms themselves. Anybody with a very large ecosystem, we work with them all the time. And it always starts with building one playbook and proving success. But some companies like we just had a very large CRM company engage us. And you know, we worked with 25 different services companies in one fell swoop. And that is really strategic because why you can like if I were the CEO or CRO of one of these big platform companies, I would go to find where we want to win again, net new expansion, retention, competitive rip and replaces like whatever the strategic reason is, go find partners in every single category, build playbooks at the same exact time altogether and deploy them to the field. And what we do in that case is we actually create a co-sell playbook menu for the platform reps. And so they let it go to a Google sheet and they see all the plays and they see, you know, row by row each row is one of the plays and they can click a link and kind of see which accounts of theirs, you know, might be able to might qualify for that play. And then they have the ghost written messaging, okay, how do you activate the play? Well, send this message to this persona and go ahead and get started. And when you start selling like that and turning it into like handing those reps these plays on a silver platter with very clear instructions, the front lines, they salivate over it, they love it, they want to go use it. It's an easy way for them to break into accounts with unique offerings. Just earlier you mentioned, you know, vendors used to go to partners to ask them, you know, you have to deal with this, deal with that. We need to see your pipeline, what are you working on? What's coming in this quarter, etc. But even with the co-sell play, this could still be partner source revenue, right? In terms of your version of that definition for, you know, partner source revenue, like, how would you define it? And what would be kind of a more accurate or action bow metric? That's a fun topic because, you know, I feel like everybody's always talking about partner influence versus partner source. And at the end of the day too, you've got these huge companies, the big platforms that, you know, they're setting this metric of partner source revenue. When in fact, you know, they're the ones that have the big marketing machine, like they're the ones that have all the power and the brand recognition. And it's like, I think it's silly. I mean, yes, you can still get partner source. And, you know, your, some of your partners are going to run events and do some independent things that might trickle in some deals, but they're never, ever going to be at the level that you are. And so, you know, it's, I think it's a silly metric in many cases. I feel like this style of co-selling, I'd rather take those partners, go find their unique, again, specialized, right? Forget all the generalists right now, unless it's a horizontal motion, go find all the specialized partners they want to invest in you. They want to go create these deal flow, create the co-sauve playbooks with them, and then leverage your big machine to get the playbook distribution. Now, to your point, is that really partner source? It could be. I've had some customers that have said, you know, we're actually going to change our definition of partner source to include these co-sauve motions because the partner is investing so much from a pre-sales expense perspective that that it justifies them getting partner source credit. I had another customer the other day. We had this topic like last week. I was chatting with a customer who pays out 20% for partner source, and then the partner influence I just counts towards tiering, and there's really nothing in between. And so I suggested I was like, well, why don't we create a new category, and you can name it whatever you want. And say, you know what, if you're investing in the co-sauve, and if you don't want to pay out the 20% and call a partner source, why don't we create a 10% tier? And if you're in one of these motions, you still get some cash plus you get the tiering credit and everybody wins. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with that. And I, there are different ways in terms of how you want to compensate partners on this, but especially with the one play that you described earlier on in this conversation, when kicking this off, that door opener that you talked about, you say, you know, we're going to take on the cost of that. Really, the cost is carried by the partner, right? Because they do in all that upfront pre-sale work and whatnot. So they have to be compensated at the minimum just for this, right? Never mind the actual sale, if it gets to that point. So that's a very interesting discussion. I'd say we could spend hours just talking about this, how to structure it the right way. And there's probably many different schools of how to do it. Partner recruitment often comes up as one of the kind of most labor-intensive parts of partner management as a whole. Do you have any views on how technology or structured playbooks make that process easier or at least smarter? Yes, and candidly, partner recruitment is the hardest as a business owner, you know, running a services company. Partner, and we deliver a partner recruiting services. Some people come to us and they don't have a partner ecosystem at all. And they have some hypotheses around where they could partner. And so it's often when you're doing that, it's like doing the upfront work, come up with your hypotheses, like who's already serving your IECP and things like that, like your ideal partner profile, figure all that stuff out. And then it's standard list building. Well, how many of these companies are actually out there and what personas do we need to get in touch with and it's easy to get in touch with a partner manager, but they may not have one. And so who do you send that messaging out to? And then when you start getting that messaging out the door, you're now subject to the same cold outbound results that, you know, as everyone else, and it is hard. There's no way the fans are buts about, I don't care how much good work we've put into the messaging and the positioning. If they don't open the email, like you you end up, you know, getting left with, it's very difficult to go recruit. So I find that LinkedIn tends to be a better source of recruiting there. And so what we'll do is on our side, we'll craft individual messages from, you know, the the CRO or the CEO or whomever from the customer side. And we'll either do the sending for them on LinkedIn and like log into the LinkedIn profiles and the connection requests or do that. And there are ways to do that smarter. We just started doing something with a technology called BDR.AI, which is a technology that can automate like it's a thing about like sequences, but for LinkedIn. And so I started testing it out late last year where I was like for my own network. I was like, let me see how many partner pros I can connect with and let's get messages out the door. And I found that to be a far more effective way of getting things out using automation like that, but in a very structured way, it can also do AI commenting, which I don't like. I think that's silly, you know, like I don't use it for anything else other than partner recruiting. And I found that that had a lot of value. Interesting. I think, you know, when it comes to the whole concept of co-selling, a lot of times, if if the vendor has that in mind is being, you know, the main go-to-market strategy when it comes to their partnerships, that should open a lot of doors because it shows the commitment and the investment that the vendor is willing to put in for this particular partnership, right? For the partnership leaders listening to this, what would be the one simple but maybe powerful change that they could make this quarter still to improve their course alignment and start generating pipeline faster? We teach this stuff and we have free courses on it too. It's really about that COSO Playbook development and you haven't done it before. If you think you build a COSO Playbook, you probably haven't. It's in the way that we're doing it. It's very, very unique and we have lots of efficiencies. We had over 300 companies come through a program last week where we teach everything that we do every single day. We teach how to build the Playbooks. We've built custom GPs that take the remember earlier we talked about. It's important to get, you know, figure out the executive priorities, then it's partner selection and then it's the one hour interview where you go deep, deep, deep, don't merge one page, don't do silly things like that, don't just let marketing do it in a silo. You've got to do the one hour live interviews and then we've built some custom GPs that we hand to customers and others in our courses that can help them take those transcripts in any other cloud world they have and turn them into real true COSO motions. Once you have kind of that, the COSO Playbook develop with all the IECP and all that criteria and you've got your door open or like the ghost written messaging that invites that buyer into some type of lightweight experience that produces an output, then it's about testing it with the front line. So as an example, if I was shouting with somebody this morning that wants to COSO in the Adobe ecosystem and they want to start getting distribution there, they're a huge tech company too. So two big tech companies trying to COSO with one another and I told them that like why don't we go find an SI that is an SI that's that's perfect for you. They're already a great partner, high tier, and let's, but they're also a high tier Adobe partner and let's go build a motion for the customer success organization at Adobe where the ghost written copy is actually be sent out by customer success to invite customers into an experience to, you know, for whatever, you know, whatever that experience is. And once we prove in value and customers like, oh, yeah, I love combining the data from company A with the data from from into the, you know, AEP, you know, Adobe's Adobe's technology, then you've got the not only do you get distribution for, you know, company A, the other big tech company, not only to get distribution through Adobe, which is what they want, but you then start opening up the doors to net new COSO motions because once it's successful, you then take that SI, the same SI you just did it with and you turn it into a net new motion and now you've got use cases and proof points and things like that and you get more distribution there. So it's wonderful. Thank you. That's a very good takeaway for for everybody listening to this. And so I do appreciate you sharing this. And there's two more questions that I need to ask you. Both of them I have to ask. Let's start with the one which is absolutely standard for every single guest. What's the one thing you wish you knew before you started your career in channel? One thing I wish I knew, it's how hard it is. It candidly, like I, I am for me personally, you know, it's like when we started for Castable eight years ago, we started out life as a SaaS company and I'm a career enterprise seller. So I built all this SaaS that that I thought I was solving all the world's COSO problems. I'm like, this is exactly how I would COSO and this is all the tools that I would need to go do it, but nobody knew what the heck to do with it. And when I started getting introduced to partner orgs and things like that, I remember it was like a Q4 of 2022. So we're going back a few years. I had done this big event, you know, and at a partnerships event, we did big sponsorships and things like that. And I opened like 70-some-odd opportunities. I closed absolutely zero of them because I was in the partnerships board and dealing with partnership personas. And yes, they can be our buyers many times, but I didn't realize how big the disconnect was between partnerships and sales. Such a silo. And this side didn't know how to talk to this side. And you really need to create some type of mechanism that brought them together. And the COSO playbook does that because it finally gives them something they can put in front of sales that sales understands and they appreciate and it just creates this wonderful relationship. And I didn't know how hard it was going to be to figure that out, but it took me around three years to figure it out. Appreciate you sharing that with us. And the other question that I need to ask you was left for you, unknowingly that it is going to be you, but it was left for you by a previous guest. And that was Margaret Adam on the episode around AI and partnerships. And her question is twofold. And goes like this with all the noise and activity and how fast things are moving. How do you individually avoid the AI overload? And then the second part of it is, how do you make sure that you are staying on top of it and being able to apply it, but are staying focused on purposeful? That's a great question. Our two questions really. So one is I actually don't, I don't let myself get distracted by all the new shiny things out there. Frankly, I don't care. If somebody surfaces something to me in my network that says this is absolutely awesome and I know you care Alex, I'll pay attention then, but I don't distract myself with the news of all the hottest latest AI things that are coming out. And so I still don't distract myself with that stuff. And we don't do it not only for our service delivery operations, but I mentioned we have SaaS behind us as well. We're a tech-enabled services company. And I don't distract our engineering team with that either. It's like there are a million, because there are new technologies coming out all the time. What we end up doing both in the tech and on the services delivery side is we prove everything we do out manually first. And so like, well, there's a new shiny object that comes out and says it can do things. I'm like, no, let's go build that process manually first. Let's feel the pain of not having AI involved in our lives while we go deliver this outcome. And once we can deliver the outcome that we want consistently, then and only then will I then seek an automation product or some type of AI solution that is focused on one or two very specific things that we need to solve for as a business. And that really answers the second question, too. Like, staying on top of it is we are very in tune with the needs of the business. Like, our head of operations is always looking for where we experience pain, what is taking us, you know, too long and she makes a list. And then we go through it together and start figuring out where we need to introduce new technologies that can solve for those pains. Fantastic. Appreciate the answer. I'll make sure that Margaret knows that you answered it in this episode. I'm sure she will appreciate it as well. So thank you for that. And in a similar way, after this episode goes live, we're going to have a next guest. And what question would you like to ask of them? I didn't think about this one, but I feel like after our entire conversation today around co-selling, I feel like we should be around co-sell. And I'd love to ask the next person to share, you know, where do they have the most co-sell success? An example of the most successful co-sell program, what was the output and results from that. And then I would love for them to describe co-sell failures. What have they tried to start and where were the breaking points when they tried to go stand up co-sell motions with partners that just maybe never really took off. And what were the reasons behind that if they know? Excellent. We'll make sure to ask that one of our next guests. Appreciate that Alex. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for having me today, Matri. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Channel Voices. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation and gained valuable insights. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Every bit helps us grow and reach more future channel leaders like you. Thanks again and we'll catch you in the next episode. [Music]