Sophy Gray (00:01)
so thank you, Jay, for joining us on what is our first ever Channel Meetup podcast and what a way to start. I'm sure everybody that comes to Channel Meetup and follows us on social media knows you and knows who you are, but for the benefit of anybody that has been hiding under that rock, please go ahead and introduce yourself.

Jay McBain (00:21)
Yeah, sure. My name is Jay McBain, Chief Analyst for Canalys. Canalys is Latin for channel. We're an analyst and research firm that wake up every day thinking about partners and partner marketing, pretty much from end to end. I've spent 30 years doing channel marketing and partner ecosystem alliance marketing in different aspects. So great to be here on show number one. It only goes uphill from here.

Sophy Gray (00:43)
It does indeed and hopefully we'll be seeing you in our Channel Meetup London event, trying to stream you in to do our closing keynote which will be fun as well.

Jay McBain (00:52)
That's great.

Sophy Gray (00:53)
Okay, so what we're talking about with the theme of channel meetup really is unpicking the key trends that are facing channel at the moment. And what we wanted to talk to you specifically about today was the role of partner marketing and...

What's going on in the world of channel and partnering that is having an impact on partner marketing organisations and you know what some top tips are to help people overcome some of those challenges and think about how they might be doing their jobs a little bit differently in the changing landscape of 2025 versus 2024. So why don't we start with just chatting through some of the things that are going on in the world. What are the kinds of things that you're seeing and talking to people

about.

Jay McBain (01:39)
Yeah, well, let's start with the numbers, which are good. 2025, businesses and governments around the world will spend $5.4 trillion on hardware, software, and services, about a trillion dollars in hardware, about a trillion dollars in software, and $3 trillion in services, pretty evenly split between tech and telco.

Sophy Gray (01:43)
Okay.

Jay McBain (02:02)
The good news in most markets is that services are outgrowing products. Our partners are outgrowing their vendors. So it's a very healthy market. looking at this, over 70 % of that market is driven to, through, and with partners. And what's more interesting is we're starting to measure upwards of 96 % of that big $5 trillion number. Is partner assisted in some way or another? So partners couldn't be more front and center.

And just to give one example, Salesforce puts out their annual state of sales report and they talked to 5,500 CROs, VPs of sales out there. And we're at a point now where 89 % of the world's salespeople in every industry, every country are working with partners every day. For the 11 % who aren't, 58 % plan to within a year. And so that gets us up to that 96 % number. And then it was a tough year in 2024 for salespeople. Over half of them didn't make their numbers.

But for those who did, 84 % point to partners as the reason why. So I would say we're at a stage now where we can maybe stop shouting from the mountaintops how important partners are and start turning into better operational and better.

know, execution in terms of how we work with our marketing and our sales and our customer success teams, our product teams, and become more integral into the companies we're in and more strategic as opposed to that department that used to just be over there that no one understood.

Sophy Gray (03:35)
Yeah, and they're huge numbers there. So I wonder if you've got any data or insights in what that means for

partner marketing and the budgets flowing through to partners, just to put some context and to scale into all of that because we've got DF funds, we've got MDF funds, we've got BDF funds, we've got co-operator cruels, we've got rebates. There are so many different types of programmatic ways and discretionary funds to fuel marketing. Do you have any kind of insight on...

the scale of the budgets that are being given to partner marketing people to manage because believe it or not, that's a huge headache for some organisations. How on earth do I spend this money that I'm earning with my partners?

Jay McBain (04:17)
Yeah, absolutely. So if we look at kind of the money changing hands, first of all, the technology industry that I just mentioned, the trillions of dollars, it's growing at 8.3 % in 2025. The world economy is growing at 2.6. So it's the fastest growing industry. We're in a really good cycle here. vendors are being told at the very senior levels and obviously partners at the very senior levels want to lean into this growth.

This is an area where you can go and build a double digit or faster growing business with the right investments, but it's not the time to sit on your heels and let the world develop around you. So when I look at budgets, one of the biggest changes that are happening, one of the biggest trends is moving from these linear gold, silver, bronze programs, which many of them funded, for example, MDF at 1%, but that was only a select group of gold partners who got that.

but they're disconnecting from that precious metals and moving into point systems. So vendors in the most recent a month ago was Cisco, which is a legendary program. It ranks number two from partners globally and the best program ever. They've dumped that traditional Cisco gold program and going full in points starting next February. And it replicates kind of what Microsoft did two and a half years ago.

when they dumped their resell-based program. And all they did is basically took a lot of that resell front and back end margin and spread it out like peanut butter across all 28 moments before the customer makes a decision. And then in a subscription consumption world, every 30 days forever.

upsell, cross-sell, enriching that contract. So you've elongated this funding for the channel, which has actually increased the amount of money available for co-selling, co-marketing, and through channel marketing in all the stages in those moments, not just before the transaction, but during and after as well. So we're starting to see at scale now, big vendors come to us and these point systems, not a question of if anymore we should do it, it's a question of when.

And so this is a very different economics. Now it's not just the top partners going after some MDF dollars. It's this idea of co-funding, co-selling, co-marketing, co-innovation, co-development, co-keeping, plus reselling and earning much more recognition for the work that partners do that surround the customer through every stage of the journey. And this is good news, I think, for this industry overall.

Sophy Gray (06:40)
We've seen that with some of our clients and we've seen it with some of the conversations we've had and it's enabled partner marketing people to give budgets and give funding support to partners that weren't in their traditional model before.

But the challenge that can sometimes come with that is understanding which partners to work with and which partners are marketing ready, which partners are loyal. So it's having to rethink the programme in that way a little bit. So I guess that's where the point side of things come in. Do you see any programmes coming in with points attributed to marketing skills or marketing certifications? Because that's something that has been talked about at CMU events for years, but I don't know how.

well adopted that's been.

Jay McBain (07:23)
Yeah, so all the new programs that we're seeing and developing are, you know, have that element. Not only is it product skills and certifications and competencies, but it's competencies across the customer journey. You know, very early on, it's a competency to do great campaigns around.

digital, physical, events, social media, search, syndicated content, email, all the traditional marketing elements, because early and often, you want to get in front of that customer. And now we're at an end of cookie, which we'll talk about later, but we're now at a moment that your CMO can no longer go buy this third party data.

So partnering early in the journey, and it could be with a referral agent. could be with, you know, somebody that's an affiliate, an affinity partner, an advocate of some type, an ambassador of some type, very different models. Like we're talking almost consumer influencer type of trends early in the journey. But later on in the 28 moments, those are doing consulting, design, architecture, configuration, pricing, quoting. We're getting better as an industry of measuring each of these moments and then quantifying those moments.

to the point of sale and then later on every 30 days to what a customer for life. And so if I get to that single partner that does these things really, really well and doesn't, for example, resell, they don't have any resell revenue, but it seems like every time somebody reads that ebook, they buy our product, we're getting much better at quantifying that.

where that partner in the old sense would never earn any co-marketing, any MDF or any kind of program dollars. Now it's, well, if they read that PDF, they read that ebook, let's go and pay them to write three more ebooks and just keep measuring. And this is the multiplication. So we're getting much better. And now partners are asking for this. When we went and pulled the global partner channel in total.

They came back and now the number one thing they're asking for vendors is to measure us in all the moments outside of the transaction. We're not cash registers anymore. So we need you to do a better job. And then, you know, they're showing us how much they're doing outside of the transaction. 44 % of them are building software. Over half of them are charging for consulting and design architecture work now where they would have given it away for free in the past when the resale margins were there.

Now, a third of them look like system integrators, implementing, integrating after the fact. Two thirds of them are doing the managed services. So every partner in the world now is doing 3.2 things. So it's not just putting your logo on a brochure in the old sense 20 years ago. It's helping them check their 3.2 boxes, serve the customer through the entire journey that never ends.

and walk in with that better together one plus one equals three messaging through thousands of different marketing vehicles and things like that. It's more complex than ever before, but it takes the investment to do it right.

Sophy Gray (10:23)
And it means a massive evolution needed for lot of partner marketing organisations, especially that kind of second tier bunch of vendors that

don't have the infrastructure or the resources or the skills to build that kind of model to support partners in that way. But before we get into that, let's pick up on something you mentioned there in a chat we had last time we spoke, which is about the changing buyer and what the buyer looks like now, because we know from stats, buying groups are getting bigger and it's getting more complicated, but what updates have you got for us on how people are buying these days?

Jay McBain (10:57)
Yeah, we're going through a major demographic shift on top of everything else. On top of AI and new programs and people and processes and technology, we happen to have a new buyer. So starting in January of 2025, the majority buyer of that 5.4 trillion of hardware software services is now born after 1982. And so you'd think...

Sophy Gray (10:57)
it all starts with customer, right?

makes me feel old, that

makes me feel old Jay.

Jay McBain (11:22)
Some

of us lived through, you know, baby boomers moving into Gen X. But there wasn't a lot of changes that went on. The demographic shift wasn't that profound. But I'll say moving from that into millennials is profound. We just had a big survey done by Gartner that says 75 % of this cohort don't want to talk to a human. Very different. They're very subscription and consumption friendly. Grew up with Netflix and Spotify.

okay with a dollar a month for a toothbrush for the rest of their lives. Very marketplace friendly, which is growing exponentially at this point, digital marketplaces. But the biggest change with this buyer is a new criteria.

Every time you saw an RFP from a Baby Boomer or a Gen X, it would be your service levels, your support levels, your price, your brand reputation. All of these would be somewhat ranked and scored and you you win or lose the RFP. Nowadays, the number one criteria is tech integrations. So they'll buy a product 80 % as good as the next product if it works better in their environment.

I remember Tim Cook at Apple getting up on one of the iPhone launches and saying, 79 % of people today won't buy a car unless it has Apple CarPlay. I'm sure he meant Android Auto as well. But this is an industry that's outside of tech showing this new psychology.

Like I don't want to buy a car if it doesn't integrate with my personal life. If my messages, if my music, everything doesn't, my GPS, everything doesn't connect when I'm sitting in that car a couple hours a day. I'm just not buying it. I don't care how good the engine is or battery. I don't care how good the lines are. It's just nothing matters anymore but integrations.

how do you sell to an integration first buyer? Well, you yourself have to become a platform and have the whole list of tens of thousands, perhaps, of tech integrations. You have to have that list of hundreds of thousands of services integrations and co-marketing integrations and all these other integrations to drive this platform economy, which this new buyer is accelerating. This is going to throw

many vendors for a loop that have done it in very linear ways in the past. We know that 20 years ago, 52 % of the Fortune 500 no longer exist. 20 years from now, over half of the Fortune 500 aren't gonna exist. This new buyer is gonna be one of the major chapters in the book when we look back at the failures that didn't change their sales and marketing to this new digital first or digital only buyer.

Sophy Gray (13:55)
That's interesting because when you look back in the day when we were doing product marketing, all of the messaging was about the products and the speeds and the feeds and how reliable the product was. And the trust message that you needed to convey in your marketing was that the product works. So I guess what you're saying is these days we need to convey.

that the product works with other products and the integrations will work and if there's a failure we can identify where the failure is and how it's going to be fixed. So that again feeds really well into the whole partner model and partners having to convey that trust through their services which is interesting because we're seeing more and more

demand for joint value propositions and joint value propositions going beyond products but into the true value of the partner wrapping around different products and things. So I guess that's another evolution of partner marketing that you start with those foundations. You get your message right and etc early on because the buyer needs to hear that trust.

Jay McBain (14:53)
Yeah, so here's the world.

Now here's the platform world where the average customer deal, the average customer outcome will be seven layers. So when you look at cloud, like AWS, Microsoft, Google, their average deal is seven different layers. You look at the SaaS market, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot, their average deal is seven layers. You go to cybersecurity for Zero Trust or SASE.

the average deal is seven layers. And we're even hearing from TD Cynics and Ingram today that their average invoice has seven layers on it. So this is a layered stack. When I grew up, I first worked at IBM out of college. It was in the early 90s where you couldn't get fired for buying IBM. And we were selling you maybe all seven products in a bundle, supported by this service that you couldn't get fired for.

But some of the products might have been B or C level products, but you bought them because it was kind of in that protection. The buyer today is the opposite, where they'll go buy best of breed across all seven, but it's best of breed in terms of integration. The other thing is you're not buying a million dollars worth of products. Every sale we make today in a subscription consumption or now an AI micro consumption world is really the first 30 days with the client. If that integration you mentioned failure, if that integration doesn't work,

you're gonna be dumped at day 30. If you don't, if your marketing, if your promise to the customer isn't realized quickly, implementation, integration, that's why those partner skills are so important, they're going to dump you and choose another because every buyer has thousands of choices. A CMO in many mid-sized companies spends more money on technology than the CIO.

And not only do they have the platform, it could be a Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot platform, but they've got 14,106 SaaS companies, ISVs on top of that to build their seven layer stack. They've got a lot of choice. And even in the channel tech stack over my shoulder, you've got 261 choices in terms of how to build a seven layer stack to better measure partners, to better co-market, co-sell.

and work with partners at scale. So this is a world where you might only get 30 days. And if you are being dishonest in your marketing, or if you don't have the right partnerships connected to it to make it work in that integration work, you might be forgotten forever.

Sophy Gray (17:18)
So let's talk about that if we may. If we think about it from the partner's perspective, partners need to really improve their customer marketing. They need to be customer obsessed in the way they're marketing. They need to talk values. They need to talk services. They need to talk all of those things. But often what they're being provided by vendors to do that

is some good old-fashioned campaign kits and put your logo here and pay-to-play programs and product-leg marketing.

Where's the, you know, where will, when will that change come in where we're truly enabling partners to be good customer marketers because it's difficult for them. The partners I speak to don't necessarily have the resources to focus on all of those different technologies, the marketing skills, just managing the MDF for so many vendors is a problem because it's all contractual. It's got to be.

process in a certain way. When do you see that kind of enablement coming through the channel and who's doing a good job of doing that within Vendorland? You don't need to name names if you don't want to.

Jay McBain (18:22)
I always

name names. So here's, we've actually been measuring this over the course of last 20 years. And it's actually interesting. It's not a technology problem. know, franchisees have the same problem and pharmacies have the same problem and gas stations have the same problem and agents and brokers and dealers, all kinds of industry, all 27 industries have this exact same problem. And the problem is this, when you said that they may not have the skills in marketing, especially digital marketing.

But it could be other things. They may not have the time. Now, the average business out there has seven employees. So the owner principles, the CFO, the CIO, the head of sales, head of marketing, they're doing everything. So they may only get 10 minutes a week to think about marketing. So they may not have the resources. And some of them don't have the belief, because they might have taken over the business from their parents or grandparents. They might have grown up in a world where word of mouth was everything.

They didn't need to go in the yellow pages back then. They didn't need to go, you know, today on social media or anything else because that just gets, you know, I do such great work that the word of mouth and that doesn't work anymore. Cause guess what? Millennials are, you know, kind of isolated and they don't talk to a lot of people. So they're not the first ones to go out there and brag about the great plumber, the great HVAC person that just came to your house. So you can't rely on that anymore. So in this kind of new world,

you start to think, okay, what percentage of partners are in the categories of do it for me or do it on behalf of me? Two slightly different things. And the answer is 66 % of every partner-based business in all 27 industries are in that category, two thirds. When you have a whole group of resellers, you have a thousand of them, just assume that 667 of them are not going to be proactive.

Sophy Gray (20:02)
Mm-hmm.

Jay McBain (20:12)
And whether they don't have a belief, whether they don't have the time, whether they don't have the skills, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Just assume that your campaigns and your market development funds and all your strategies around co-marketing are going to fail two thirds of the time. And one way we measured this was TCMA through channel marketing automation. There's about 40 platforms in the world that compete on that island. And one of the surprises was every year they had trouble renewing.

Sophy Gray (20:33)
Mm-hmm.

Jay McBain (20:38)
It was just the hardest SaaS category, because the CFO got good at looking at every SaaS. Okay, our CRM has this much usage, this many active users. I understand why we need our CRM. Okay, here's your money. Our HR platform, okay, I get it. Our services platform, you all these different platforms, you know, kind of got through it, but then you walk in with your TCMA platform, it's like got 17 % usage. And the CFO is like, okay, this is the one I'm gonna cut.

Sophy Gray (21:01)
Yeah.

Jay McBain (21:05)
But then you've got to explain that it's only one third of our partners are in the model of ever logging in and doing self-service. And we've got 50 % of those, which makes 17. It's actually a good number. And by the way, we're getting great results from it. But then the question is, well, what are we doing for the other 66? And today, there's no other answer really before AI solves this problem five or 10 years from now. There's no way else than concierge services.

Sophy Gray (21:16)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jay McBain (21:33)
whether

you employ the people internally to help build those campaigns and execute those campaigns and do that at scale or hire an external agency or consultancy to go do that. Because if you can get 50 % of the 66 and get 50 % of the 33, now you've got 50 % and all those great numbers that you're running on through channel marketing, it just went up by another three X.

Sophy Gray (22:00)
Mm-hmm.

Jay McBain (22:00)
And

that's the story. If you're not invested in services around the true channel marketing, you're going to miss two thirds of your audience.

Sophy Gray (22:08)
And what are you seeing the PRM vendors doing to address this? You know, one of the ways we use TCMA is instead of using it as a outreach campaign with partners, is using it as a nurture campaign. So we generate leads for partners, put those leads into the TCMA and run a TCMA campaign to those leads to nurture them. So it's flipping the use of TCMA.

on its head a little bit. And then, you know, we've got great relationships with some TCMA and PRM providers and the advances they're making in AI to make their platforms easier for partners to use. Where do you think that's all headed? I realise we're going off topic a little bit, it's just interesting to follow this thread and see where it goes.

Jay McBain (22:48)
It's seven.

It's a huge

trend. mean, AI just triggered March of 2023 as a new 20 year cycle in our tech industry. We had 20 years of client server, we had 20 years of cloud. Now we're into our next 20 year cycle, which uses client server and cloud. It's edge to cloud, which is fantastic. The fact of the matter though, it's revolutionized this marketing in the longer term.

But in the shorter term, you know, it just makes it a little bit easier to use. But if somebody doesn't believe in it, doesn't have the time, doesn't have, making it easier doesn't solve all your problems. Maybe you get that 33 % to 37 or something. You know, you're not gonna change the game overall, but here's where AI does change the game. It's this idea that every vendor needs a data lake. Every vendor needs to understand what's happening early and often in front of their clients.

Surrounding the client with the seven partners they trust today. It's another millennial psychology. It's not a single throat to choke. It's not a trusted advisor. It's seven people that help you along the way. They don't compete with each other. It's not seven MSPs or seven, you know, bars. It's a selection of, you know, 20 different partner types helping you along the journey. And so when you're surrounding the customer now and at the end of the cookie where I can't just go buy early buyer intent data, guess what?

It's this competition for how do I absorb that data from the market and get buyer intent signals through my partners who are delivering them. And so there's like four or five ways that's going to replace the MarTech and AdTech stack today that relies on Google or Facebook, Cambridge Analytical type of data. And it's going to be second party data. TCMA is going to be one of those layers. The best case scenario possible is that the partner is actually doing their marketing on your platform.

whether you're assisting them in two-thirds of the cases or they're doing it themselves service. But if all the marketing can be through your platform, you see the opens, the clicks, the engagement immediately. It's first party data.

If that doesn't happen, then you need to go to a data sharing platform and both sides have to agree to kind of share their CRM systems and see if there's any matches. That's an emerging category that layers on top of that. There's a category of attribution, which came out of the consumer world. The Kim Kardashian world is coming into business where you can attribute certain things, but your deal reg, your opportunity management, your lead passing, all these things build layers now.

of how partner marketing is gonna replace traditional buyer intent data. And you've got to build maybe a five layer stack to see it all. But always the best case scenario is first party data and the partner executing on a platform that you own. So they do not use in a HubSpot, a Marketo themselves, they're using your platform to execute. And if your MDF and other stuff are tied to that, that's gonna be good for you. So this is breathing new life into marketing platforms.

Sophy Gray (25:36)
Yeah.

Jay McBain (25:45)
and it's breathing new life into this data lake.

So it's not just marketing data. You're trying to collect data from all parts of the customer journey. And you're collecting them from maybe 261 different tools that are kicking out this data. The future are going to be these data lakes that need to be cleansed, inferred, indexed, but then trained and tuned into models where you can have virtual channel account managers or bots running, agents running, and you can triple-creduple the size of your coverage.

via AI, but that AI needs to gobble up every piece of data. And this new data lake is where PRMs are gonna compete for, to be kind of the owner of that data lake and serving these bigger models. And so that's a really exciting kind of 10 year view of where we go as partner marketers.

Sophy Gray (26:32)
Wow.

It's

mind boggling really because if you think, you know, if you put yourself in the mindset of a CMO and CMOs, you know, over the last five or 10 years have gone digital and the information they've managed to gather on tracking and performance and, you know, where their buyers are coming from and intent and, you know, the specificity that they're able to get in their targeting of campaigns from that data. But they're just looking through the lens of what they're doing to be able to roll that out across the partner ecosystem.

and

get feedback from the data as to how buyers are interacting through partners on different things. It's almost with AI to help them understand it. It's almost mind boggling how tight that...

programming and campaign planning can really get. And guess that's when you will really start to see the gap bridging between CMOs and partner marketing leaders, because it's still a little bit of a chasm in a lot of organizations.

Jay McBain (27:32)
there's a double trigger here, which is one is that end of the cookie because Google tried to go sell version two of the cookie to Europe, the European Union and failed. And then a week later, they lost an antitrust suit in the US. So other than yesterday at the inauguration, the CEO of Google standing beside Donald Trump, trying to play this extension of the cookie.

45 % of the world's population went to elections last year and 90 % of the incumbents lost, we're pretty clear with our governments that we're done being the product on the internet. Now having a conversation in the kitchen, having Alexa over here and then Facebook serving you up an ad two minutes later, 25 years later, we're kind of done with it. given that, given that, it's gonna be very difficult.

for those third party data companies to continue to fill up these CMOs, buyer intent funnels. And they're gonna come over hard to partner marketing to say, the data that I'm losing over here, I need it. So there might be 10 X the partners, which is actually the right number. So if you have a thousand partners today in your program, if you have a hundred partners in your program today, you're gonna need 10 X more of non transactional.

partners that surround your market team who want to be measured, want to be incentivized outside of the transaction. That's now number one on Canela surveys. And they're showing us all this wonderful things they're doing. And it's back to vendors to be able to calculate that and quantify that.

and show that they're saving SG &A costs. They're lowering the cost to acquire a customer. They're increasing the deal size. They're increasing the deal velocity. They're creating customers for life that are sticky forever because it's in a seven layer sticky stack. They're doing all these wonderful things. And if you can't go back and explain to your CFO what these micro moments mean and spread the of the broader gross dinettes like peanut butter,

Now this is the future partner marketing executive. Hand in hand with the CMO, perhaps the future CMO is going to come more out of partner marketing than where it does today, which is demand gin and growth hackers. And yeah, it's going to be a very partner friendly world.

Sophy Gray (29:49)
That's an interesting transition thinking about a partner marketing person taking a CMO role because a lot of partner marketing leaders haven't come from a marketing campaign background, haven't come from a digital marketing background, they've come from a partner programme background and the mechanics and the levers of relationships and behaviours within partners. So we can see a massive education

scurry of within partner marketing to learn this digital world and then again to try and teach partners this digital world because you know there are still the people that say well where are the leads we just want leads you know we just want leads and then we want to phone those leads up and they haven't turned into opportunities so the leads aren't any good and it's that whole education of as you're talking about the new buyer the different types of programming the digital the length the size

that that kind of education needs to happen and we're starting to see more and vendors educating partners in that area now. been some great academies and universities and courses released.

Jay McBain (30:47)
mentioned there's a big change in partners. The partners that would say to a vendor during a QBR, know, we want leads, we want leads, we want leads, have been going sideways for kind of a decade, growth-wise. The partners that lead that QBR and say, what's your multiplier effect? You how can I win $6.19 of services for every dollar you sell? What are your co-selling and co-marketing? I don't even want to be a cash register.

The partners that go to the vendor and say, you know, what is the economics of partnering? What are your measurements of the partner of the year type of thing? I want to attain that status. And how do the points play out? How can you measure all the work that I'm doing? Which is basically outsourcing your sales, marketing, customer success, even some of your product expenses. I'm doing the engineering, I'm doing the marketing, I'm doing the selling. And until you recognize that, I might move over to a competitor who does.

So this all about leads thing is seeming very old in the era of AI, the era of millennials being our lead buyer in the era of platforms, which credit all these other things, the era and the changing economics of partnering. All these things come together to make this inflection point.

Sophy Gray (31:46)
Mmm.

Mm.

So what I was going to ask you next, if you you I know we kind of we kind of rattling through the subjects here, but so if you were to give some advice to a vendor that's not a Cisco.

that's got the infrastructure and the resources and have started making these changes, if you were to give some advice to a smaller size vendor, where would they start? How do they start thinking about this?

Jay McBain (32:30)
Yeah, I think every vendor, you we talked about cybersecurity, for example, there's 6,500 cybersecurity vendors. And while there is Cisco Splunk, there is Microsoft Security and Palo Alto and CrowdStrike, you know, 99 % of those companies are not, you know, at size or scale. But in a platform economy, they're gonna have to work with the big players. So gone are the days where a customer wants to hear from 6,500, you know,

versions of a mousetrap listening to why every single company has figured it all out. They're in the mode, for example, of Zero Trust or SASE or some type of bigger model, understanding that there's a seven layer stack to solve it. So they're gonna start to look at the layer one of the platform to vet some of the ones up the scale.

So it's not up to the customer to do all the quality assurance and to do all the integration work and make sure it all works. They're going to trust more the platform. Partners that are educated and skilled and certified within those platforms that have done this a number of times before. So you're not the guinea pig, but can carry in these pretty complicated stats. And the vetting is done kind of within the platform.

So vendors are gonna move from a marketing perspective a little bit away from just direct customer interaction and customer interaction saying, hey, we've got the best mouse trap to better together or one plus one equals three marketing. It's a changing language. It's a changing personality, but in the way you generate the marketing is gonna be through the platform itself.

So you're going to choose, are we partnering with Microsoft security? Are we partnering with Palo Alto or CrowdStrike or Sentinel One or Trend Micro or, know, kind of which of the top 10 cybersecurity inventors in the world are we going to kind of bank our integrations with and then use their events, use their media and use their communities that are wrapped around. I've got a huge community slide over my shoulder here. You all thousand things in Microsoft's community.

Sophy Gray (34:31)
Mm-hmm.

Jay McBain (34:34)
we're gonna generate our marketing to through those communities. And we're gonna work within the half a million partners that are already engaged in that community and explain why we're not replacing in this case, Microsoft, we're adding. We'll be layer two and maybe layer five of the deal. And this is why we're better together. And for those partners, and by the way, Microsoft has 400 new partners that join every day.

You know, for all of them and the half million others, it's this, my goodness, this, you know, vendor over here, you know, this startup out of Israel combined with these other six layers drives, you know, better outcomes for my customer, better economics, better outcomes, better protection, whatever it is, that's the new marketing. So I urge everyone in partner marketing, channel marketing, alliance marketing roles today to really understand what platform marketing.

looks like and who's being successful today with those messages at scale and re- know kind of diverting because we don't have the budget to run a Super Bowl ad or a World Cup ad but going and getting that messaging through the right channels has an exponential effect.

Sophy Gray (35:48)
Mm-hmm.

I love that partnering through marketing as well as partnering through sales. that helps the sales and marketing alignment within the partner as well. Because if it starts with a message and it rolls into the content and it rolls into the website and it rolls through the sales enablement, it helps that single message all the way through the organisation.

I think we've covered a lot, What else haven't I asked you?

Jay McBain (36:14)
Looking into 2025, mean, on top of AI, which is kind of covering and platforms, which are kind of covering everything, double clicking on the new buyer and what that means from a psychology, behavior, journey perspective, double clicking on this platform economy and what it takes to be better together and run marketing through these very specific channels. Number three, understanding the new economics of partnering.

Not just quantifying these different moments, but make sure you can take that back in your own organization and educate not just your C-suite, but the board on how this is changing and how your competitors are going to try to get a leg up on you by getting there faster.

That's the economics of partnering, recognizing we're going through major marketing changes like the end of the cookie and things like that that are driving excitement back to us. And then understanding that kind of in this broader sense that AI is going to be moving from our co-pilot to more central in terms of how we do things at scale. So we've got to think about how we're isolating our data today and how we need to bring it together.

And we need to be the first firm within our competitive set that can get this data lake, get it over to the engineers to start training and tuning. Because we want to be first, you know, to be able to do this at scale with our partners. So all these things happening once, it's no shortage of activity and no shortage of kind of career inflection points happening all at once.

Sophy Gray (37:48)
It's an exciting time to be in marketing, that's for sure, and I think partner marketing and channel marketing is definitely the most exciting place to be because it's changing in so many different ways and it's opening up so many different new types of career opportunities for people. It's interesting to be on the journey.

Jay McBain (38:04)
I

wanna see the surge of partner marketers getting that seven figure CMO job.

Sophy Gray (38:10)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And see more partner marketing job titles being lauded around and give partner marketing the seat at that big boys table that they've not necessarily had all these years. That's great. Thanks ever so much, Jay. Really enjoyed chatting to you as always. Thank you very much indeed for your time. I really appreciate it.

Jay McBain (38:32)
Thank you so much, take care.

Sophy Gray (38:33)
Now, so anyone that wants to follow you, how do we find you? What's the best place to follow you to make sure we're up to date with your content?

Jay McBain (38:40)
Yeah, I'm absolutely all over the place, but Canalys shares so much data outside the firewall on LinkedIn. I have a newsletter there and probably a daily post, you know, touching on different marketing elements in our industry. but I'm pretty much everywhere. I think I got 50 windows open on three different screens here. So you send me a message. I do go to sleep every night with a zero inbox and that includes every little red circle on my phone.

Sophy Gray (38:55)
Ha ha.

Do you really? Indeed.

my goodness. Wow.

Jay McBain (39:04)
I will respond

if you get to me in any which way and if I can help you with a number, help you with a point to someone else who's doing great work, happy to do it.

Sophy Gray (39:11)
Yeah,

well, I'm going to circle back one day and do a session just talking about how you manage to do that because staying staying on top of all the different modes of communication is something I know I struggle with, that's for sure. OK, we'll make sure we link to your to your newsletter and everything when we do posts and things. And thank you so much.

Jay McBain (39:30)
Thank you.