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How do I implement my go-to-market strategy with my Cloud Partners? How do I get buy-in from my executives, sales team, and others in my organization? How can I get the right attention from the Cloud Providers?
Questions like these, and many more, arise when you’re trying to build relationships with the Cloud Providers and accelerate your revenue journey through the cloud. Welcome to ‘Unlock Cloud Go-to-Market,’ the series where hosts Erin Figer and Patrick Riley share the essential stages of the Cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize, and grow your company’s revenue through the cloud. They’ve helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs of their Cloud GTM motion, and in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the people who have put them into place. Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future. And the future is now.
Joe Henderson [00:00:00]:
FinOps is essentially how you can get visibility on your cloud costs and figure out how to spend more efficiently to grow your business. So yeah, I've been at a few FinOps companies as the first partner person scaling it from zero to something. So marketplaces have always been a part of that, especially in the past, like five or so years when they become more mainstream. So work deeply within the AWS Marketplace community as well as the Google Marketplace community.
Patrick Riley [00:00:31]:
Welcome to Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market, the podcast where we deliver actionable insights from ISVs, partners, thought leaders and cloud providers to help you launch, scale and succeed in your cloud go-to-market journey. Whether you're building your first motion, fine tuning your strategy, or aiming to maximize revenue, this show brings you the stories, strategies and lessons learned from the people driving innovation in the cloud ecosystem. Each episode cuts through the noise with candid conversations and proven tactics that you can apply right away, because the future of cloud B2B success is here and the time to unlock it is now.
Patrick Riley [00:01:08]:
Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market. I am your host, Patrick Riley, and today I'm joined by my friend, a wonderful customer, a former colleague, just a rock star in the space, Joe Henderson.
Joe Henderson [00:01:24]:
Thank you. Great to be here.
Patrick Riley [00:01:26]:
Joe, you're now with Vantage. Can you tell everybody just a little bit about your background, how you got there, and then maybe just a quick commercial on what Vantage does?
Joe Henderson [00:01:37]:
Absolutely. So I've been in partnerships for probably over a decade, kind of fell backwards into it. I worked for a company called Puppet way back in the day where we did it was kind of like one of the first DevOps companies, one of my first sales gigs. And we started to get a lot of inquiries from around the world. And so I put my hand up, and said, hey, can I start responding to some of these inquiries in the Asia Pacific region? Because I lived in Portland at the time and those time zones sort of aligned and so started becoming the Asia Pacific person and then got a random inbound from a partner in Australia who was managing a large bank, and they said, hey, this bank needs to buy a premium version of your software immediately for compliance reasons. Can you sell it to us?
Joe Henderson [00:02:20]:
So I had to completely figure out what a partner was, create a reseller agreement and sell them. Sold my big deal in about two weeks. And so completely random. And so we started flying back and forth from Australia and then enough business came about that they moved my wife and I there for two years. So there I was basically the head of partnerships. We hired someone, Rob, who was Basically the direct seller leader. And so I spent two years learning partnerships on the fly, literally going around from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan and back.
Joe Henderson [00:02:51]:
And so I got to basically learn the world of partnerships there. So I did that for a couple years, moved back to the States and then I was in Portland at the time, was running the west coast channel there. And then a friend of mine worked at this company called Cloudability, which is one of the first FinOps companies that sort of ever existed, and they were exploring the idea of building a partner program. So I went over there, built their partner program up. That's how I got into FinOps. And so besides the, the time that I did at Tackle, which is fantastic, I've been at FinOps for like eight years. So FinOps is essentially cloud cost management, cloud financial management, people have called it many different things, but essentially it's bringing engineering and finance together.
Joe Henderson [00:03:31]:
FinOps is essentially how you can get visibility on your cloud costs and figure out how to spend more efficiently, grow your business. So yeah, I've been at a few FinOps companies as the first partner person scaling it from zero to something. So marketplaces have always been a part of that, especially in the past like five or so years when they become more mainstream. So work deeply within the AWS marketplace community as well as the Google Marketplace community. Vantage, same story. There's a lot of companies I work for, Series A company funded by Scale Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, super great developer, sort of built and focused product that turned into this enterprise FinOps tool. And so I was brought in to create the partner ecosystem. So partner ecosystem consists of, we work with distributors, resellers, MSPs, work with Cloud consultants, we work with cloud alliances and the technologies that we integrate with. We have a sort of friends and family, you know, former colleague, referral network, but within that alliances bucket. AWS is our primary cloud that we work with and so we have a go-to-market and obviously do a ton of marketplace activity there.
Patrick Riley [00:04:43]:
Thank you. That's awesome. The FinOps area or industry as a whole has grown so much with all these cloud partners and it just becomes, it's becoming more and more of a increasingly important aspect not just for software sellers to be aware of, but especially ISVs that are buying software on Marketplace because like we're not always seeing, hey, when I buy this, it's going to create a ton of activity, data and costs for me over here within this particular cloud bucket or this particular cloud. A lot of customers aren't thinking about that and I Think that's going to change soon as people start to look at, hey, I can't just dump everything onto my cloud bill. I have to pay attention to what that's going to do to my cloud bill because essentially I could be buying something twice.
Joe Henderson [00:05:32]:
Absolutely. So if we think back to like the brief history of FinOps, like if you think about 2006 ish, EC2 comes out and cloud becomes like this thing. Google and Microsoft follow suit a couple of years later. But then like I would say 2000, probably 10ish. Like, it's like cloud is really rare and it's going. And all of a sudden people are like, I don't know how to manage this. I just migrated over because everyone else was doing it. It's the right thing to do or the cool thing to do at the time, but then I just overspent by a million bucks.
Joe Henderson [00:05:59]:
I forecasted $10 million this year. The forecast is now telling me it's gonna be 20. So there was like this huge, huge sort of problem where people just didn't have visibility into what they were spending at all. And that's why cloudability, cloud checker, cloud health, the OGs of FinOps started. That's why they existed, just to give visibility. And then as that grew, those became mainstream. It was like, how do we get a little bit deeper in FinOps? And so it was like, yes, you want to see what you're spending, you want to build some cool dashboards, you want to report back up to your executives of who's spending what and why, but then you want to get recommendations on actually how to be more efficient.
Joe Henderson [00:06:35]:
So these tools also were starting to give recommendations on, you know, turn this instance off at night, use this different size. And then they were also getting into like the unit economics of their clouds they all wanted to start to understand, how much does it cost in AWS per this or per that, or per click or per purchase, whatever their business does. And so it started to get really in depth. And then you go to like 2019, 2020-ish. The FinOps foundation started. And so this is a sort of nonprofit community of people that share best practices on how to do cloud cost management or FinOps management.
Joe Henderson [00:07:09]:
And so all these vendors jumped on board to be members of that service providers, all the big clouds. So it was like this FinOps gold rush. And now there's like probably 80 companies or services that are doing finop stuff out there. And it's really, really intense. People now are way more educated. The problem is different. We're not seeing as much like, oh my, I mistakenly overspent by 5 million bucks. People kind of have that under control for the most part. But now it's like, how do we get into the details and get into the weeds, because if people are making these anywhere from a million to five, $50 million commit to these clouds, they need to make sure that they're spending efficiently. And so all that to say it's like, that's sort of the evolution of FinOps. And so I've just been noticing in my world where it's like, now there's This convergence of the cloud go-to-market and FinOps where I'm seeing the same sort of patterns where people are like, oh, I need to do marketplace, or like, I might be wasting this opportunity to. Now they're getting like super detailed in how they're analyzing their cloud go-to-market, which is, which makes sense.
Patrick Riley [00:08:09]:
That's funny. That brings back some fun memories of my last job when I'd get an email saying, you have a bill for like $1.2 million and everybody's trying to figure out who accidentally bought what.
Joe Henderson [00:08:20]:
And so people are starting to. And more people are going to have to start thinking about it, like, all right, if you're a business and your biggest expense is people, and if you're a cloud native company, your second biggest expense might be it's not really real estate anymore, it's probably cloud, right? If you're spending this much from it. Let's say you have a maniacal focus on FinOps. You got a FinOps team, you got multiple tools, great tools like Vantage or other tools in there where you're like, analyzing it. You can prove that you're getting the most out of the cloud usage of what you're doing and what you're building on. But then you have to look at the cloud go-to-market side. You have this entire sales channel that you can sort of unlock and it's not easy to. And no one's figured it out, like, right, right away it takes time to sort of build. And so they're going to have to start to analyze, like if I'm not, you know, in marketplace or I'm not selling in marketplace to get to be a part of these programs that can get me funding, that can get sellers to sell faster, that can get my deals bigger.
Joe Henderson [00:09:18]:
That's the same thing of like wasting or overspending in the cloud. Like, you're completely wasting the opportunity to actually turn this cloud into a revenue generation engine. That's where A lot of people, like, they think of these things in completely different buckets because within their company they are completely different buckets. You have finance, engineering, you got sales. And so we're starting to see that converge a little bit and encouraging people to start looking at their cloud, go-to-market with the same laser focus that they are the FinOps.
Patrick Riley [00:09:44]:
It'll be interesting to see that collaboration come to life too. Even we're looking at different tools here, here and there for sales and for cx and we don't even know some of the stuff products got. So that collaboration's coming together because now we're all spending across, hey, what are we doing on AWS? What do we got with Google? What do we have? Microsoft. So that's interesting. So, Joe, let's talk a little bit about your partnership ecosystem. You just launched, I think recently, the Vantage partner ecosystem. Like, obviously that was what you were hired to go do. But talk us through your thought process.
Patrick Riley [00:10:16]:
If somebody's building out a partner ecosystem from scratch, you've done this many times. You're right in the middle of the early launch of, of your ecosystem. Like, what's that look like? How did that come about and where is it headed?
Joe Henderson [00:10:30]:
So I think it all starts with like, identifying like, what types of partners might want to partner with whatever company you're working for. So at Vantage, it's like there's those cloud resellers and distributors where it's like they're, selling cloud to their customers. They need a tool that can increase the value of their service that they're providing and also manage their business. That's obviously like a bucket we would go after. And then you have to think about other areas of like, where it might fit. So if you look at our ecosystem, it is that sort of the standard cloud consultants that obviously makes sense. The MSPs and resellers obviously make sense. The integrations that we pull in obviously make sense. But then there's also areas of like private equity and venture capital where it's like people sometimes maybe have like a little relationships here or there. But if you think about, like what those companies like care about, a VC Is giving these companies a bunch of money. So they want to make sure that they're not spending, you know, irresponsibly. They want to make sure that they're holding on to runway. So it's not just trying to like get an introduction here or there. It's about going to these VCs and saying, hey, help your portfolios and how can we like sort of report back how they're doing and then you go to private equity and it's like these are the companies that acquire these companies.
Joe Henderson [00:11:38]:
And their entire goal is to make them as slim and as an efficient as possible because they're going to sell them in five years to somebody else. So like the idea of FinOps is like, obviously it's, it's massively important there. So in summary, it's like really thinking about who is starting with the customer or the prospect, who is surrounding them in their sphere of influence is the companies that are investing in them or who own them. It's the companies that have done their cloud migration. Is there companies that are already doing cloud services for them and then, and the other tools that they already use within their, their tech stack. And so it's assessing like who are a part of these customers sort of sphere of influence and then going after them, but then also figuring out are they going to care, like what are they going to get from our tool. So is it going to help build or enhance their FinOps, you know, services practice? Is it just going to deliver them referral or resale revenue? Like what do they care about? And then building from there? And actually instead of just the old school way of, well, a partner program is a bunch of resellers and distees and you just sign them up, take them to lunch and buy them some beers and then you know, you just like pass paper through. It's like that world is, it's crazy. It's still sort of out there. There's still a lot of those people that are still out there operating that way. And maybe some companies out there, they're having success with it, but I don't see that as, as like the future of it. And then obviously like what we care about.
Joe Henderson [00:12:59]:
I want to feed our sales team with net new quality leads. So I don't really care about companies that are just passing paper because I'm not going to invest my time into that. I'm going to invest my time in the companies that are already talking to our best type of prospects or ICP.
Patrick Riley [00:13:13]:
Yeah. So Joe, when you're looking at, when you're doing the data analysis on your customers.
Joe Henderson [00:13:18]:
Yeah.
Patrick Riley [00:13:19]:
How big or how small? Like what's the consideration for the clouds when you're looking at, hey, we're already working with this partner, this cloud provider or this cloud provider, or maybe we're looking to add another cloud provider. When you look at your customer base and you're thinking about building that ecosystem, does that calculate in the formula somewhere Is, hey, a majority of our customers are here, there, or does that not matter so much until you look at, hey, outside of our partner ecosystem, these are the clouds we're going to go work with. How do you separate or put those together?
Joe Henderson [00:13:49]:
So the cloud is the epicenter of all things FinOps. And so are they on one cloud or are they on multiple clouds and which clouds are they and how are they using those clouds? And it kind of all comes down to spend, if I'm being honest. Because if you think about a company, if they're spending $3,000 a month, even if they're paying on demand to the cloud, and they're a very lean company. They're probably not going to need a FinOp service or a tool, right? The companies that are spending, you know, ,maybe $50,000 or more, obviously like millions of dollars or more, the more spend, sort of like the more complex their Infrastructure is, those are the ICP for us. And the more that they care about other usage based, you know, software companies that they're using. So with Vantage we have like a unique sort of value proposition where it's not just the big cloud providers, it's Snowflake, it's Databricks, it's Datadog, it's Temporal. We have like 17 integrations that are These usage-based types of softwares that operate and affect how their cloud spend goes. So people need to pull in all these things into one place and start to manage them that way.
Patrick Riley [00:14:54]:
Now I know a lot of putting this partner program together is not easy. You're having to juggle not only figuring out which ISV or which companies that you sell to partner with, which partners, which partners can you get relationships with, who makes sense to prioritize and setting all that up. But now you're also having to figure out working with the cloud providers on top of that. And a key part of both of those is figuring out how am I going to get my sellers to understand who our partners are, how we're working with the cloud providers, and then for the cloud providers and the partners, how do they know the Vantages in Marketplace? The Vantages good for X, Y and Z. So there's this huge other piece of your duties related to that. Talk us through, like how are you approaching that? What does that look like?
Joe Henderson [00:15:47]:
First thing is the internal piece. Then it's like working with the clouds, and I'm going to add a third challenge because and it's not just unique to us, but it's with all FinOps tools because our tools potentially or likely will make their customers cloud consumption go down. So if anybody listening knows who has signed up for a marketplace or some specific marketplaces, they want your architectural diagrams. Not only that, they want to see how much cloud this is going to increase if they use your tool. So that's. Or drag or which. I forget which cloud uses that. That term, but they want to see that. So we're a tool that is obviously helping customers.
Joe Henderson [00:16:29]:
They need this. They want to be, you know, as efficient as possible. But there's a challenge where some cloud sellers get it and some cloud sellers are resistant. So that's something I get to in a second, so there's the three areas. So first the internal sort of enablements, the awareness, and then coaching folks to work with the cloud providers. So what I've learned in my time, now that I'm a the old guy doing this is that roughly this is not unique to Vantage. This is, this is just across the board. Just use round numbers. If you have ten sellers in your organization, you're building a partner program. You got 10 sellers who are just normally selling directly. You're going to have two sellers that are going to be all about it, like, love partners, ready to do this, Jumping on with you. Let's go. You're going to have two that have some past trauma from working with partners that think partners screw them over or whatever, and they're going to be resistant. And then you're going to have the other six that are going to sit there and frozen and they're just going to wait and see if this works or not.
Joe Henderson [00:17:26]:
And then once it works, then they're going to jump on very, very quickly. So what I've learned is I used to, like, be, you know, way more sensitive and be like, oh, I want everybody to like me and work with partners. Why is this person being resistant? Focus my time on that. I don't really care. I'm not going to focus on those two. They're never going to really be on board anyway. I know the other six that are frozen, they're going to jump on board as soon as this works with the other two. So I'm going to find those at 1 or 2 and I'm going to lean into them and I'm going to really just focus on them.
Joe Henderson [00:17:52]:
I'm going to be their hype man. So whenever, even if they have a good call with a partner and they did a really good call, I'm going to hype it up in Slack and I'm going to talk about it in the weekly meetings and start to showcase it. And so quickly people kind of jump on board with that. And honestly, like trying to do it with six people is hard anyway. So you want one or two to kind of start with. So yeah, you have one or two that are starting to register deals. You know, an ace, you're an AWS. And the other clouds, you're starting to help coach them in preparing for those calls so they know who they're talking to. It's like know your audience when you're talking to that cloud seller. Don't talk about how we're going to cut their bill by, you know, $100,000, which may or may not happen, but like we're going to make them real efficient on their cloud so that they can invest in other cloud projects this year. So take one step back. That takes, you know, four steps forward. So just. And it's like that with every product. You got to understand your better together story.
Joe Henderson [00:18:39]:
And FinOps, it's kind of unique because you got to make sure that their customers are as efficient as possible and the sellers get that. And it's also a retention thing for them as well. So if they're the cloud sellers, their customers believe and know and a third party data can back up that they're spending efficiently when they're getting hit up by, if It's AWS, if they're getting hit up by Azure and Google Cloud, they're probably, you know, more likely going to stay with the cloud if they know that they're efficient. If they have even the perception that they're wasting money and they, you know, maybe signed a commit that they're never going to get to, they're going to take those calls with the other cloud providers. So we can be very helpful. But it's all about the positioning. It's that better together story like it is with every other ISV.
Patrick Riley [00:19:20]:
Yeah, that's an interesting conundrum, especially for co sell because as you all are having to go and sell a different message around, we're gonna maybe make this a smaller bill, but we can help them onboard more customers and be more efficient, just like you said. So that's super interesting.
Joe Henderson [00:19:38]:
Yeah. And for every seller, for every cloud, It's like slightly different. And AWS does a really good job. I just want to make sure I like clear that they did, I think it was 2022, you know, their CEOs like this is the year of cost optimization. So like they understand the concepts, they get it, they are like taking care of it. Yeah, it's not all people are resistant, but yeah, they get it. You just gotta make sure you position it correctly.
Patrick Riley [00:19:58]:
You talked about internally and then talk selling to the cloud providers. How about to your partners? Like what kind of enablement does that look like? What's that message look like? You're probably in the middle of doing this rollout with some folks. Tell us about that.
Joe Henderson [00:20:11]:
Yeah, so when you're building it from scratch, you kind of have to do a lot on the fly with the first partners, but usually you're bringing your sort of, partners from past gigs or people that you know anyway, so they, they're okay with it. So I think being upfront, hey, let's run an enablement session. But this is going to be the first one we're doing right. We want to get like, what do you want to know? We're going to build it, we're going to deliver this to you and then you can take that, what worked, what didn't, and then start to create the actual enablement playbook, what actually works, what doesn't.
Joe Henderson [00:20:39]:
And then you can take some of the stuff from your internal sales enablement. Obviously not the internal, you know, documents that are confidential, but like a lot of the stuff that's some basic FinOps, you know, education, some basic AWS type education on the cloud, cost piece there. In our case, and then start to build that out. I usually like to separate it. There's the sales focus one and then there's the engineering focus one. So the sales is all about how do they talk about our product in a way that is the same there. How do they go out to their prospects and customers and deliver message that aligns with us. And then how do they work deals, how do POCs work, how do they register the deals and run the sales cycle with us?
Joe Henderson [00:21:19]:
And obviously on the engineering side is like, how do demos work, how does the product actually work, what is the supporting documentation? But for the first phase, we're just riding along on all of it. So it's just full white glove, full hands on for the first five or six partners that you onboard. You learn everything from there and then you turn that into the playbook. That's going to come that second half of the year when you're building that, that's going to get given to all the new partners you hire.
Patrick Riley [00:21:45]:
Similar question to back earlier, I asked about when you're looking at your customer base and trying to figure out what cloud they're on, when you're enabling your partners, is it helpful to know which clouds they've participated in and kind of where their experience lies with Marketplace specifically.
Joe Henderson [00:22:03]:
Yeah. And usually you can find all that out from their website or like their designations or their certifications. They're a Premier AWS partner, That's a CPPO partner. You know, you got one that's going good fit at least for like a vantage type company. And so, yeah, you know all that going into it. And then the cool thing is they know what their customers are already doing. So us as the third party ISV, we need to do some research and make some best guesses,but if we start working with a premier AWS CPPO partner who's been working with this customer for three years, they know exactly the clouds that they're on, they know their software that they're on, they know their, their range of spend. And so they know that they're going to be a good fit to talk to us and not kind of waste time on somebody that's not. That's one of the main benefits. Again, it goes back to finding quality prospective customers that fit our ICP.
Patrick Riley [00:22:47]:
The marketplaces have come such a long way with enablement and just general operational readiness for partner deals. So it sounds like if somebody's considering building out their ecosystem or investing heavily in kind of the direct sales motion when it comes to marketplace. How do you feel about the partner programs that have come out to support CPPO type transactions, MPO, et cetera? Do you feel like that's going to be an avenue to help you offload some of the work that normally your role would do in a company of your size from creating private offers and dealing with all that? Are you going to try to push that to the, to your partners and let them manage that through the CPPO processes?
Joe Henderson [00:23:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a couple of CPO partners we're doing deals with right now, and it's definitely, that's the easier way to do it. A lot of them have like signed up for cpo, they're authorized and they can do it, but maybe they're still figuring out if that's the way they want to like actually do transactions at their company. If they're like an old school reseller that has transformed into like a cloud partner. You know, it may not be their, their sweet spot, but it's something I encourage. I've talked about this maybe with you, like, you know, back in the day when all this stuff was starting to come out, when CPPO and then they were like teasing that you could do, services in the marketplace, which you can now. It's like if you are a 2025 Cloud Partner, I'm going to be a CPPO partner for every single ISV that I touch or might touch. I already have services.
Joe Henderson [00:24:19]:
All those are going to be listed in the marketplace and I'm just going to try to sell bundles of everything. I'm going to do services, I'm going to have my toolkit of my favorite five or six ISVs and then I'm going to have services that support all those things. So when I do my CPPO partner, I can sell them my services and these third party ISV products in the marketplace because it's obviously it's better for them. They don't be the collections agent, clouds the bank, but also like the sellers from these cloud providers. Like they get all these, I don't know their exact, you know, comp plans right now, but it's like they get bonus store tracked on obviously marketplace deals and then multiple partners and deals as well.
Joe Henderson [00:24:57]:
That's a huge part of it. So if you show up to the conversation, you're registering a deal and you're like, hey, I'm actually bringing in a partner who's an AWS Premier partner. They're a CPPO partner and they actually have all their services in the marketplace. That's how they do business. That seller is going to be like, wow, you ticked every box. Let's go. This is the team or the group of companies that I'm bringing in my customer, not somebody who barely understands Marketplace or maybe has some other services and MSAs I got to sign outside of it. I'm going with the company that's, that's building and selling through the marketplace.
Patrick Riley [00:25:27]:
Yeah, it's been neat to watch and you've got to experience this firsthand. But just the transformation of the clouds from this procurement vehicle to now like an embedded partner in a buyer's journey and bringing everybody together. Google's working really hard right now to kind of reverse process how they rolled out their partner program decades ago and they're looking at now, okay, well we set that up to help manage commitments and offset having to hire a bunch of direct sellers. But now we've got Marketplace and so now they're kind of walking back. Because if you try to go do a Google partner deal today and you don't know who the partner is or if there is a partner working with your customer, you've got to go back and create a relationship and get them to help. So they're doing a ton of work to fix that. AWS and Microsoft already have their partner programs laid out pretty nicely. AWS has by with AWS now, which doesn't have CPPO on it yet, but soon will.
Patrick Riley [00:26:25]:
So it's going to be cool to see, you know, Vantage in 2026 can offer on your website or on your partner's websites a button to go buy this bundle of Partner A services plus Vantage FinOps. You just get money from somebody clicking on your partner's website. Obviously you're doing a bunch of work enableming, but that's just a neat journey evolution that wasn't there before.
Joe Henderson [00:26:49]:
Let's be sort of real and honest. Hopefully I don't get in trouble for this but it's like this is Amazon, right? This is like arguably the most powerful company in the world. They want to make the AWS marketplace like Amazon.com but for commercial software. That's what they've been pushing this all along. This is where this is all going. And Google, Microsoft trying to catch up. They're somewhat caught up and they're doing the same thing. They want everyone to live and breathe in this. So like everything that they're doing is pushing towards that way, which is like the buy with AWS having partners be able to do marketplace. So they're transforming this. It's going probably fast in the grand scheme of things, but it's all going in that direction of like how quickly you can procure things through the marketplace and not just like how can you help sellers. But also like how do buyers more easily discover things and actually, like figure out what tools to sort of switch from this, you know, reseller or direct to the marketplace because it's going to benefit them. So I think we're going to see a lot more rapid transformation of that. If you want to fight against, you know, Amazon, you can try to resist it or you can sort of ride along with it and probably going to ride along with it, so.
Patrick Riley [00:27:53]:
Yeah, it's cool. Shameless Plug. We're working on a couple projects with a few customers right now on storefronts. We built Tackle Pay right now. It enables the CPPO buy with process to happen in kind of a roundabout way. It's going to be cool to see those the evolution of the storefront in partners specifically for ISVs like yourself, so that'd be cool.
Joe Henderson [00:28:14]:
Awesome.
Joe Henderson [00:28:14]:
Yeah, that's really cool.
Patrick Riley [00:28:15]:
So how do you measure success, Joe? Well, you did roll out your partner program. You're continuing to evolve and build it. What's your CRO, what's your CEO? What are they looking at for like this is Success, Joe, or are you telling them, hey, this is what I know to be successful? Is it inbound leads? I hope not. Is it something more meaningful? Like, what's that look like?
Joe Henderson [00:28:35]:
It's quality leads from partners. So essentially like how many, how many leads we're getting from partners and then are those turning into like opportunities? Then obviously you're measuring the opportunities that are in pipeline that were partner sourced and then there's obviously the deals that close that were partner sourced as well. So those are like the basics. When you're sort of like building this, where you know, some people have metrics on like, how many partners did you sign? Which is maybe it's okay to put that out at first, but it's not really that important. It's really all about how many leads you're getting. And then are they quality leads and then those turn in opportunities and then are those actually closing.
Joe Henderson [00:29:08]:
And what percentage of the revenue of the overall company can come from partnerships? That's sort of how the goals typically get set. And then once you're up and running, and you're like, all right, we got a decent percentage of the revenue that's coming opportunities and revenue that's coming from partners, then it's all about speed. Then you need to like verify all the bullshit that you sell. When you're like talking about the partner stuff where it's like, partners bring in better quality leads that are bigger deals and close faster, then you gotta start to analyze that and make sure that's true. So making sure that like a partner lead is gonna move faster through the sales cycle than a direct lead or you know, an inquiry from the website, which they usually do, you gotta start to measure that stuff.
Joe Henderson [00:29:45]:
How much did they sort of increase upon renewal and like all these other stats on how you can improve the quality of the opportunities in them once they're customers. And then it's just, it gets really interesting how deep you can get into increasing that speed of leads to opportunities.
Patrick Riley [00:30:01]:
It's funny, the metrics to track traditional partnerships versus the cloud provider partnerships. And tell me if how you're doing this, but to me, it's kind of the inverse that I see a lot of ISVs have is they want to go track net new leads right off the bat with the clouds, but oftentimes that's not a successful way to go about it. Oftentimes they have to look at, hey, is it faster, are the deals larger, et cetera. And then it turns into the inbound leads. But how do you look at that?
Joe Henderson [00:30:31]:
I always try to set the expectation that you're going to get zero leads from the cloud providers. Because a lot of people have this misconception like, oh, I'm spending $100,000 a month or a million dollars a month in this cloud, where are my deals? It's like, that's not going to happen. It's not because the clouds are like against you by any means. Just like there's a lot going on and you got to figure out how to like tell your story within that channel or that that cloud alliance. So I always start off with like having zero expectations and also obviously zero metrics on leads you're going to get from them.
Joe Henderson [00:30:59]:
What the first thing you're going to get is influence, so you want to start to measure like the influence. So when you register a deal, Amazon didn't source it, but like you brought them in at your certain stage. And then did co-selling with them actually help move this along? Yes, it did. So you're going to measure that influence, that they were a part of that deal and that's going to lead to the net new deals. Once you tell that story, you build the wind wires and you start to work with those teams, but right off the bat it's like, Hey, what's going to come from the clouds? Nothing. Just nothing. Nothing's going to come. Something will come, but like setting the expectation, like, we have to do a lot of work first before we can expect anything. And so really making sure leadership understands.
Joe Henderson [00:31:37]:
We have to roll up our sleeves for at least six months and start to like, register deals, start to co sell, start to get our positioning right with them. And then we'll start to get some new stuff. So that's sort of how I think about it. At least when you're building it fresh, zero expectations, roll up your sleeves, then you can get net new.
Patrick Riley [00:31:53]:
You get it because you've done this. But a lot of folks who are newer to adding the cloud providers to their partnership stack or as an alliance leader, it's just something thrown on my hat. I've always been looking at, hey, it's inbound. And that's what my CEO sees and that's what my CRO sees. And so oftentimes, you know, from a Tackle perspective, we start talking to prospective customers and they're like, I need to get some leads and I need them tomorrow. Like, what can you do for me? And we're like, hold on, it's going to take you a little while.
Joe Henderson [00:32:22]:
Yes. And I think it's like, that's, it's also because a lot of the content that's out there, which should be out there because they're great stories, but there's a lot of, we did a billion dollars through the marketplace and all these startup CEOs are like, I want that. I want to do a billion. Well, you think those companies just like snap their fingers and it turned into that. They invested for years and years, and years, and they have a huge, huge, huge commit with that cloud as well. So as a startup spending 50k a month, I'm not saying it's pay to play by any means, but like when you start to make these giant commits and strategic collaboration agreements that unlocks more interest and help from the cloud providers. So people read the content that's out there, they think they can do it themselves just like that. And it just takes more time. So I would encourage anybody who's applying for a job as like an alliance person in that interview process, just ensure that your leadership and ensure it like 10 times before you sign the offer letter that they understand that this is going to take time because most executives perception is like, we just need to hire an alliance person, then the leads show up. Doesn't work like that.
Patrick Riley [00:33:29]:
Joe, when you talk about measuring this stuff, how are you doing that? Are you using your CRM system? Are you adding fields to the sales process to track both partner and cloud provider metrics? How do you track that in a meaningful manner?
Joe Henderson [00:33:42]:
Yeah, in the CRM, you know, if it's HubSpot or if it's Salesforce, whatever that is, you make your most basic partner dashboard and that's going to track things like. Yeah, the partners that you're tracking, assign, the partners that the new opportunities you're getting from partners, the deals that are in flight that are sourced by partners and obviously the close one or close loss that are partner deals, so like the most basic. So like your dashboard will be like three things to start and you report that up every Friday or whenever your weekly or monthly call is and you just stick with that. And then when you progress to getting more and more action in the different buckets, then that dashboard starts to get more detailed and maybe there's five different, you know, pieces to that dashboard and maybe it's like now we're going to separate what are we getting from disrespect and MSPS versus the cloud alliance versus private equity and venture capital. Whatever that is, and you start to separate them, and do that analysis. And so you fast forward a year or two and that dashboard went from three to five to like 15 different metrics that you're monitoring. And then you're just sort of like sitting back and kind of like running this, you know, just like watching this ecosystem kind of do its thing thing. You're not sitting back and doing nothing. But usually you have a team at that point. And then you can really get analytical.
Joe Henderson [00:34:52]:
And figure out what knobs you can crank up or crank down to of what's working. Because and all, you know, every company is different. They're going to have all their different partner buckets and they're going to see who's, you know, which ones are working and which ones are moving faster. And then you just can kind of keep investing in the ones that are working.
Patrick Riley [00:35:11]:
It's interesting to see the iterations of the CRMs that folks are making because of partnerships and specifically the cloud providers. I try not to give too many shameless plugs here. We have created this propensity to purchase this Tackle Prospect tool that helps you look at data. We're going to be adding some new data points in there. You mentioned in the beginning of the call, like, you got to look at data to figure out who your partner should be, where your customers are. We talked a little bit about co sell. We talked about, you know, CPPO offers transactions. We talked about reporting.
Patrick Riley [00:35:49]:
How does Tackle help support ISVs in your mind on doing these things that you're now doing today at Vantage? And like, how will you use the tool? How have you used it? What's the takeaway there?
Joe Henderson [00:36:02]:
Obviously the tool's great for just like kind of running your, your internal deal desk of like doing the deals, tracking the data. But like I mentioned before, you've got those 10 sellers and there's two that are sort of into it, the others that are kind of waiting and seeing. You need to start to like, force value on the sellers. And so having like Tackle Prospect connected to Salesforce, where they can go in and look and see that the targets or the leads that they're going after, which ones have propensity to buy on their specific clouds, like, that's another data point that they want. Especially in our car business, we want to know, are they a big spender in the cloud? So if they have a high propensity to buy-in the marketplace, they probably are. So it's probably a good target and they can use that as one of the many data points that they're using and all these other tools or, you know, research that they're doing. So having that where they live and breathe in the CRM will showcase, oh, I got some value from this marketplace thing already.
Joe Henderson [00:36:55]:
So that's like the first taste. We have a sort of a crawl, walk, run approach that we're implementing here. And so then they have the option to register that deal. And so once they cross from one stage to the next, they can register. And if they register it, you know, then they start that co-sell process. They can learn from that and then eventually this evolves into it's just a part of their every day go to prospects, the propensity to buy. I automatically register it, it's automated. And I know my sort of playbook on how to co sell with that partner all the way up until like closing the deal and sending that win wire to that team that you worked with at AWS. So yeah, it's giving them that upfront data that they can say, oh, all right, this is value I get from this marketplace conversation. And then that helps them start the co sell process and then it'll go from there.
Patrick Riley [00:37:44]:
Yeah. And something cool coming out this year that we're working on. We haven't put it out in a press release or anything, but we are talking to customers. So hopefully this, this doesn't go against our marketing principles. So we're looking at also exposing the channel partner data as well. So when you go to look at, hey, who am I supposed to sell to this quarter? I look at my pipeline this quarter, next quarter, etc. I can help prioritize that. But I also know which partners I should go engage with and find out, hey, do they have this initiative coming up? I have them on my pipeline for renewal and Tackle says they're likely to buy through Google.
Patrick Riley [00:38:22]:
I also see that you're the partner and I know when I get to checkout, I'm going to need you on board so we can start that process early. So something cool to watch. I know that's on the shelf.
Joe Henderson [00:38:32]:
Yeah.
Patrick Riley [00:38:32]:
And we're walking at exposing that soon.
Joe Henderson [00:38:34]:
I mean, that's huge. We're sitting at what, March 28th. So it's the end of Q1 for us and a lot of folks. So everyone's scrambling to get deals across. And so if you knew that information, you know, a month ago or beginning of your sales cycle, it's huge. Then you're not going to be sweating these deals as much because you already know the path to transacting that deal and then hopefully doing more deals with that partner. So that's, that's a huge bonus and something we're looking forward to.
Patrick Riley [00:38:57]:
All right, Joe, we're at the next conference, the next like Cloud Marketplace conference. You're back at the elevator now. You just presented on stage because of course you're getting asked to do these things. You've great experience. Now somebody says, joe, this was great. I love hearing your success story, but here's where I'm at and I really need to know, like, what I don't know, what's an obstacle I should be aware of? Or what's the biggest mistake a lot of alliances or just ISVs in generals make when they're trying to scale their partner program with the cloud providers?
Joe Henderson [00:39:28]:
The biggest mistake may have already happened, because I think you can kind of repair this. So I wrote this down. It's funny, like behind my desk here, like, I guess I was talking about this to somebody else because it's like it's on, it's taped to my wall behind the computer here and there's three E's and so one's exact buy-in. And so basically like making sure this is but like during your interview process and it's fine if it's not. So like getting exec buy-in, ensuring that the execs actually like care about partnerships as a overall company strategy as opposed to like, hey, go figure this out in the corner, see if it works or doesn't work, we'll just bail on it, right? Which is sometimes like the expectation. Is this the actual strategy, and show them why it should be, of course. Say the exact buy-in and then what goes along with that is those expectations. So setting those expectations, you might not get anything the first six months or a year, but you're going to get some influence and you're going to get different types of expectations.
Joe Henderson [00:40:20]:
And how long is this going to take? Because like setting that and ensuring that they give you that Runway to sort of like build this, because it will build what I always say. And like this kind of goes with maybe like even like an enterprise sales rep where the first six months you're doing this or a sales rep is doing this, you're figuring it out, you're talking to a bunch of folks, maybe You'll get a deal or two here. You get a partner deal or two. That third quarter that you're in the role, you're going to get some more deals, right? You're going to start to validate. Oh, this is starting to work. The fourth quarter you actually have like some legit business that you have closed, and now you see the light.
Joe Henderson [00:40:55]:
And then year two, that's when you're cruising that's when you're scaling and so that expectation of like the timeline of actually if you want to build it properly, if you want to churn and burn a bunch of partners, it's probably not going to be successful. Then the third E is enablement. And the one big mistake that I've made, I probably continue to make. I don't think people can do this enough. But think of as you're a partner leader, alliance person, whatever, thinking of enablement, you just think of partner enablement.
Joe Henderson [00:41:20]:
I would say it's arguably more important to do consistent internal enablement of partner stuff, making sure everyone from sales to marketing to engineering know what your partner ecosystem is, know what these partner types are and then how do you properly work for that, like what to do, what not to do. So I think that's like a big mistake that I've made and I guess I continue to make because it's like you just have to continuously enable your internal folks and it's not like patting yourself on the back and saying, hey, look at all these stats, look at all the partner stuff we're doing. But it's just like, just keep talking about it publicly in weekly monthly meeting, and in the sales meetings.
Joe Henderson [00:41:58]:
Make sure you carve out a partner time, make sure you have office hours internally. I think it's probably even more important than external enablement because these partners are smart and they can figure out a lot on their own, right?
Patrick Riley [00:42:08]:
Nobody really talks about that. But you're competing with product, you're competing with a competitive team. Maybe you're competing with hr, marketing, everybody else for all these other messages and mind share for your sellers, for your leaders and you're doing it by yourself. Usually you don't have an enablement person just for alliances. So yeah, great. Joe. Well, thanks for, for joining me today. I know you're a super busy guy, so we'll let you get back to it, but if people want to reach out and find out more about you. Joe Henderson, Head of Partnerships, Vantage. You're on east coast. Can they LinkedIn message you?
Joe Henderson [00:42:41]:
Absolutely. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I always like talking shop. Even seasoned folks or newer folks always learn something from everybody. It's just like I think it's, it's important that we all talk to each other as much as possible so we can help each other out.
Patrick Riley [00:42:54]:
Well, thank you. I appreciate your time. This was another episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market. Join us next time and we'll see you soon.
Joe Henderson [00:43:03]:
Awesome. Thanks Patrick.
Patrick Riley [00:43:05]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market. For more resources on executing your cloud go-to-market strategy, you can visit our website at Tackle.io.