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, Stephen Kellam.
Welcome, everybody, to ChannelWaves, StructuredWeb's
view into everything channel.
I'm your host, Stephen Kellam, and very excited
to have Tina Gravel joining me today.
Welcome, Tina.
Hi, Steven.
How are you?
I'm doing really well. How are you?
I'm good, thanks.
Do I have any lipstick on my teeth?
No, you don't have any lipstick, by the way.
We're going to leave that in, folks.
Tina and I, it's been a minute, but we've done this.
I think your teeth look great.
Tina and I have done several of these,
so hang on, this should be interesting.
It's no holds barred.
She'll say whatever she wants.
We'll make it...
So Tina Gravel, Vice President, Global
Head of Channel Sales at Quantexa.
That's it, that's the name.
Headquartered in the UK, not as well known
here in North America, but coming up fast.
We're a unicorn company.
With our recent round of funding, we are now
considered a unicorn, billion dollar high growth firm.
Our job and our lot in life and all of that.
We have a platform which enables decision making,
takes data and transforms decision making with data.
We wouldn't be anywhere without data, and in
this world, it just keeps proliferating and proliferating.
But the issue is the quality of
the data and the questions you ask.
And Quantexa is the best company I've ever
seen at being able to help with that, to
help customers protect and optimize and grow with their
information and then third party information, like from one
of our clients, like Moody's and so forth.
I asked her to join me for a couple of reasons.
One is she's in sales, and I interview a lot of people
or work with a lot of people that are in marketing.
You're in sales and there's this whole thing going on
between sales and marketing, so that was one thing.
And two, your company is very interesting
in what it does with data.
So sales and marketing, they have to work together.
I believe, everybody's talking about it in the channel.
From your perspective, why
is it so important that sales and marketing
work together in the channel today?
Well, in the olden days, five years ago, I was
about to say, you have to define that, don't you?
It used to be your funnel was your
funnel, and your silos were your silos, and
everything sort of worked that way.
Things would come into the funnel that marketing
would generate, you'd know, what to do, and
then sales would pick it up and sell. Right?
And you didn't have to be quite as aligned if you
weren't sharing themes of ideas and, well, bad on you.
But I look at it now, it's no longer the
funnel, it's what people call the lifecycle of a customer.
Some say flywheel.
I like lifecycle better than flywheel.
I do, too.
I'll start the flywheel.
I like lifecycle.
I do, too, because flywheel to me is like
it seems like it moves, and I'm not sure
it moves it quite as fast as that.
But without this continual discussion, shared goals,
you're going to have inconsistent responses, you're
going to have mistakes made, you're going
to have duplication of data, you're going
to have problems with customer handoffs.
It's just no ROI or bad ROI or downright fictional
ROI, as it could be said for many companies.
So with that, I would say that those
are the biggest challenges with being not aligned.
When I talk about what are the
biggest pitfalls or whatever, what can happen,
I can think back of a discussion.
And by the way, this wasn't at a company I was at.
So I don't want anybody that hears this running around
upset that I'm talking about somewhere I used to work.
I was at a meeting, a big meeting with
lots of companies and lots of heads of channels
and alliances, and the overriding sort of discussion and
the controversy that kept coming up was all about
attribution of leads, because if you're both support organizations,
I.e. Channel and Marketing, to me are the
support organizations of sales. Right.
You're both looking for who gets credit, right, and
when, and then you have the direct salespeople, many
of which have large egos that want to take
credit for the whole thing and don't want marketing
or channels to be represented at all.
It becomes a real nightmare and lots of fighting,
and some of these companies aren't that big.
Come on.
You should not be fighting with each other.
You've got the world to fight with.
Come on.
So that's on my mind today, is
that we only have so many leads.
We have to do all this work up front because we
know the customer is looking very early in the sales cycle.
Now on his own or her own.
They don't want to be talked to right away.
They're going to do 70% on their own. Right?
We know this.
There are facts that show this.
Well, if you're getting paid by the lead internally
or you're getting credit somehow by the lead internally,
how do you decide who gets credit for it?
Very interesting problem.
And by the way, I don't have an
answer for this as great as I am.
Well, here's my answer.
I run both sales and marketing where I
am, so I cannot think of a deal.
If I have done attribution correctly, and I take it
far back, we can talk about your sales cycle.
I'll talk about my sales six months easy, right? Right.
Probably years of building a relationship.
If I really dig into it, I can find
sales and marketing's footprints and handprints across almost.
Of course you can.
It's got to be able. Sure.
You have to have metrics, right?
What is an SQL?
It's so funny, right?
And how do we work it all back?
Maybe it's a maturation thing.
When I get older, as I've gotten older,
I'm more interested in being a point guard
and distributing and rising the tide versus just
what I assume that if something does well
that I've influenced, it's good for everything.
Maybe it's an ego thing, but actually, I don't know.
Is it?
Well, to be fair, it is.
To be fair, I think it goes well beyond
the ego when you're getting paid for it.
Yeah, and we have had that issue in
marketing and sales and channel in many places that I've
worked in, where we've had a comp plan like that.
I haven't always had a fight on
my hands, but that's what it is.
You and I coming from a different, let's say, generation
than the folks that are just coming in now.
Yeah, I think our egos are different at
this point in life, I really do.
And you're right about the rising tide.
If everybody benefits, everybody will rise
and it's better for the whole.
But when you have companies that are trying to
make sense out of how do we pay someone
in channel, how do we pay someone and how
do we give MDF, how do we apply that? Right.
Then you get into these issues.
And that's where I said I don't have an answer
because if I were very simplistic and I'm not saying
you're simplistic, but I could say yes, everybody's involved in
it and all over the place, right.
But when somebody doesn't pick up the phone anymore or
deletes your email and they're looking at you at a
white paper on an obscure site and you don't always
get the cookie or the tracking anymore. Right.
If they say no, I'm not willing to
be to let you know who I am.
How do you know that the salesperson didn't
send them to that website or the marketing
person didn't send them or it's very difficult.
And I would say one of the reasons that
I wanted to I was offered this job and
this company is fantastic and so I took it.
But my real desire was to do CRO work
because I think that marketing, sales and channels, if
done right together, could be game changing.
But I haven't seen a company do it right
yet and so I'm very desirous of trying and
it wouldn't be without difficulty to get them all
working together and to get them working together well.
But I think I've got two of them already
figured out and that is the alignment with channels
and channel sales and sales, direct sales. Okay.
To me, I think I know how to do that, right.
And then to be able to have the challenge of bringing
in marketing the same way and having them all be on
one team, that to me, sounds like fun and sounds like
a way you could really make the world a better place
if you could figure out how to do that better.
I don't know companies that do it really well.
You may because of what you're
doing but I haven't seen it.
So you tell me.
I think it's pretty broken but I
see it moving in that direction.
I think once again it starts at senior
leadership and to listen and being willing to
adapt but then also maintaining some consistency from
my perspective and then realizing if something's broke,
fix it, but give it some time.
I do see salespeople starting to
understand that marketing isn't a competitor.
It is in their hip pocket.
This is what they need and the easier a marketer makes it
to get to them to do that the better it is.
Look, I think it's not only the comp
plan but it's the culture of an organization
and how people are praised and rewarded.
It even goes down to recognition.
So many marketers that I know, look, they just
want to know that they got an assist.
This is like hockey, right?
Scoring a goal is great but Wayne Gretzky
is just as well known for his assist. Right?
As a matter of fact, if you took all of Wayne
Gretzky's goals away he would still be the greatest scorer in
the history of the NHL just on his assist.
And he's the greatest hockey player ever.
I'm sure somebody listening might disagree.
I'd argue with that all day long
and I'm not even a hockey fan.
So to me that assist is becoming so important.
I think the issue is we all have this
technology out there and we've been able to track
it so that you can get that marketing assist. Right.
And I think it's all starting to get there so
you can start to do that a little bit better.
Absolutely.
It's one system by the way
for PRM, for sales forecasting.
And I think Salesforce wants to be the system.
I'm not sure it is.
I'm not going to get into that controversy.
But that's the other issue. Okay.
If your systems are in silos,
I don't care about your organization.
If you can't share information easily then
to me there's a lot missing.
If you don't have the automation and the right process.
You got to have the right process before
you automate or yeah, before you automate.
Some would say that's backward.
Let's automate and then fix the process.
I suppose you could do it that way.
But I don't know.
I've always been process first.
I'm an automation guy.
I've been selling some form of automation for 15 years.
Me too.
And I totally agree with you. Right.
Don't automate for automate sake.
Automation sake.
I think you can do it on the same time.
But if you got a bad program and a bad
system or what I've seen is you have automation over
here in sales, you have automation over here in marketing.
You have sales operations here.
And once it's siloed, I got to tell you, in
today's world with APIs and integrations, it's getting better.
But there's really not much excuse for not sharing.
The only reason not to share is internal conflict
and lack of alignment from an internal perspective.
And that would go to senior leadership on what are
we measuring and rewarding and what are our KPIs and OKRs, right?
Right.
Well, come on.
Let's also remember one thing and I don't
have my direct sales hat on right now.
I have my channel hat on now and this isn't about
Quantexa or the company that I just left after seven years.
But if you do not have at the
top recognition that the indirect channel is critical
to the business, force-multiplier, leverage, all of
that, you'll never get it either.
It's a constant struggle.
I am on a number of groups where women and it's
mostly women's groups now at this point in my career.
But I hear them talking about the disrespect that
their channel is facing and their channel team faces
and it's because and by the way, I was
there for 15 years because all I did was
direct and I thought the channel was a joke.
I thought they were ambulance chasers.
And I think marketing has a
similar disrespect in many cases.
Because if you aren't giving leads on a regular
basis to the kings of the company direct sellers,
you don't matter who are the first people to
get laid off, by the way, in companies?
Okay, there's redundancy, but then when they have
to cut hard, where do they go?
They go to marketing and channel and channel. Okay.
Do you think they're doing in channel right now? Yes.
Well, yeah, I've seen it.
I have seen it with my own worse than the other side?
Yes, worse than the direct.
Because when you get bare bones, you still need some
sellers, close business, but the rest of them are just
sort of nice to have in companies minds.
And that has to change.
That has to change.
That whole idea at the top has to change because
if you are a business, a going concern and you
don't have that indirect channel wired down and you don't
have marketing wired properly, you're going to suffer and you
will never get beyond the crisis you're in, right.
It's just never going to work.
So get yourself recapitalized.
Put your organizations back in place.
They don't have to be big.
They could be one, two people, but you've
got to have them because if you don't,
you're going to suffer later on.
You may not suffer today.
You're already suffering.
You have to lay all these people off, right?
You're suffering. I get it.
But it is a very short term
fix and then you'll be in trouble. You won't grow.
You just won't grow.
So there you have it.
That's my advice for those in crisis is that I understand
you have to cut off the arm in order to save
the body, but you better get a prosthesis pretty quickly.
Okay, I was going to ask you to wrap this up with
one last thought, but is that going to be your last?
That sounds very boring.
I'm going to give you an opportunity to
do a different analogy on that one, but
I'm going to leave that one in.
Okay, let's see.
Get yourself annual, regular cadence with marketing
if you're in sales and whether if
you're in a regional sales role.
Get yourself with the regional a field marketing
team, but also meet with the head of
marketing so that you're all in sync.
And if you can do it in person, all the better.
I was just at an SKO this week and I will
tell you that COVID did us a disservice for so long,
it felt like you're breathing again because you're in person again.
It's just so different.
Yes, we do it on Zoom, but we don't do it the same way.
There's just something important about seeing and
being with the person and not just
the head on a video. Get together.
If you do it in person, great.
Start talking.
Share your goals.
Make sure your goals are in sync.
Try to beat those silos down.
All right, Tina, thanks for joining us today.
Listeners, thanks for joining us.
We are going to do a part two and we're
going to get deeper into technology and we are going
to chat about chat GPT and AI, AI in general.
And then we're going to talk about
what it really means for the channel.
Thank you for joining us again.
What's the best way for people to reach you?
I'm on LinkedIn and my email address is Tinagravel.
All one continuous word there, Tinagravel@quantexa.com.
I also have a website, Tinagravel.com, if you're just looking
for me and nothing to do with my business.
All right, thank you once again. Thank you.
Thank you, listeners.
Viewers, have a great day.
Thank you.